Abstract
For four decades, football teams representing each of the Arab Gulf states have competed for the coveted regional football championship title in the Arabian Gulf Cup of Nations (Kass al-Khalij), the Gulf’s premier athletic contest. Each fall, thousands of spectators in national dress crowd stadiums to cheer on their national teams. Foreign observers of the competition frequently express surprise at the notable African appearance of a large number of the spectators and players at the contest. These observers may justifiably wonder whether the presence of Africans in the Gulf, which is visible at events like the Kass al-Khalij, stems from recent migrations from Africa, from long-standing patterns of intermarriage between Arabs and Africans through trade and colonization, or from a deeper history involving the slave trade. Those who know something of the region’s medieval history may also wonder whether Africans in the Gulf today may be descendants of participants in the famous Zanj slave revolt of Basra in the ninth century CE.
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Notes
On marriage, patrilineal descent, and Arab genealogies see: Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 152–87
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See Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 64–69. Maria Theresa dollars (MT$ ) were a silver coin currency that circulated widely in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century as a major unit of exchange alongside the Indian rupee.
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The main exception can be found in Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 35–41 and 223–35, which suggests a declining curve for exports in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Abdul Sheriff, “The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York: Routledge, 2005), 106.
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© 2014 Lawrence G. Potter
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Hopper, M.S. (2014). The African Presence in Eastern Arabia. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in Modern Times. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_13
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