This article discusses the micropolitics behind the murder of an ANC councillor in a KwaZulu-Natal slum area in 1999, and the forms of violence which have continued in the aftermath of apartheid.

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The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

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Islam in KwaZulu-Natal has typically been seen as an Indian preserve and as closely linked with contestations around South African Indian identities. Against this background, dedication to Islam among Africans has appeared as exceptional, represented by groupings with particular histories of immigration from Mozambique, Malawi or Zambia. Since the 1970s, strong efforts have been made to extend the call of Islam to Africans in the province, as demonstrated in the mobilization efforts of the Islamic Propagation Centre International and the Muslim Youth Movement, and in the dawah projects of transnational Islamic NGOs like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. Following the transition to democracy in 1994, Islam played an important role in establishing contacts between South Africans and the thousands of immigrants from other African countries – many of them with an Islamic background – who have been coming into KwaZulu-Natal. The essay discusses two different examples of Islamic practice in an African informal settlement on the outskirts of Durban, and demonstrates their different understandings of the relationship between Islam and African cultural ‘custom’. It places these differences of local theology and politics in the context of propagations of Islam as manifested in the writings of Ahmed Deedat and recent examples of pamphlet literature by African Muslims. It argues that understandings of Islam in KwaZulu-Natal as an African religion relate the area to the Indian Ocean world not only though links across the sea to South Asia, but also along the coast – bridging the gap between the Swahili continuum to the north and transnational Islam in the Cape.