Pakistan’s Sheedis Try to Stake Out Their Place

The country’s most visible minority — descended from African slaves, traders, and mercenaries — has been living in Pakistan for centuries, but still remains relegated to the margins.

This May, Pakistani politician Tanzeela Qambrani gained prominence when she announced that she was putting forward a resolution in the Sindh Assembly denouncing the murder of George Floyd. As Pakistan’s first female politician of African descent, Qambrani’s resolution drew praise and support from other communities, including Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, many of whom felt that oppression abroad warranted condemnation at home.

For Qambrani, it was imperative to link the struggle of Black Americans and South Asia’s Sheedis — an indigenous group deriving ancestry from Africa and spread across Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka. Despite the Black American experience being far removed from the subcontinent, Qambrani said that there were common threads: both Black American and Sheedi boys suffered high rates of joblessness, encountered structural racism in school and at work, and failed to win recognition as equal citizens.

Pakistan is home to the largest community of Sheedis in South Asia — up to a quarter million compared to India’s 50,000 — but that does not mean the group sits comfortably in the narrow, limited space accorded to them. Known by a variety of names — Siddis, Makranis, and Habeshis, among others — the minority has lived in South Asia for centuries but continues to wrestle with an uncertain footing in a South Asian milieu where colorism and classism are deeply entrenched. In the decades since decolonization, Sheedis have made great strides in the fields of entertainment, sports, and politics, and — during the Mughal Empire — prominent Sheedis have even occupied the titles of rulers and military generals.

But despite Sheedi presence in South Asia predating the creation of India or Pakistan itself, the group’s long history in the subcontinent often goes unacknowledged. Concentrated in the coastal belt of southern Pakistan and the Indian states of Karnataka, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh, Sheedis today are still struggling to stake out a place for themselves and overcome discrimination.

“In an Islamic country, where Muslims are taught that all humans are equal before God, Pakistanis should know they are not superior to Blacks,” Qambrani said. “If Pakistanis simply followed this rule, we would be treated equally, and we would have a better position in society — we would be considered human beings.”

Up until recently, Qambrani’s compatriots glanced at her and assumed she was from Sudan, unaware that one of Pakistan’s most famous minority politicians was born on the same soil. Qambrani, a fourth-generation Pakistani, has struggled with discrimination for most of her life, with some Pakistanis even using the term Sheedi pejoratively for those with curly hair or a dark complexion. Often wearing a trademark dhuku — or headdress — as a visible emblem of her African roots, Qambrani refuses to allow her ethnic identity to be misused as a racial epithet in Pakistan, her birthplace.

Qambrani said the term Sheedi is a loaded one, with some employing the term like a curse word and calling her group ‘out-castes,’ or worse, slaves. In defiance of this, she asked to be called Sheedi when joining the Sindh Assembly, knowing full well that Pakistanis looked down upon the term.

Qambrani says that Sheedis do not need to run away from their name or history; reclaiming it is the first step to community empowerment. But undoing stereotypes requires addressing the lack of historical attention paid to how Sheedis entered South Asia and the diversity of Sheedi identities existing today. For example, not all Sheedis come from slave backgrounds — many Sheedis were traders, pearl divers, and rulers of kingdoms; for nearly 300 years, Sheedis had control over Janjira, an island in southern Mumbai. And the group has become so indigenized that Sheedis boast their own shrines in Sindh province and carry out the well-known Sheedi Mela — an annual crocodile festival — in Karachi, drawing thousands each year.

Despite their visibility in Pakistan’s diverse cultural mosaic, however, Sheedis are barely recognized by other South Asian groups — many of whom betray only a dim awareness of the group’s history, language, and culture.

Tania Saeed, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences studying the exclusion of minorities from textbooks, said that this lack of awareness is partly because Sheedi history has largely been ignored. “They are not mentioned in school textbooks,” she said.

Sheedis have a complicated history in South Asia — some Africans were brought to the Indian subcontinent as slaves by the Arabs, Ottomans, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and the British, while others came independently as mercenaries and traders. Even among the enslaved class, there was some degree of social mobility not found in the American slavery experience. For example, African slaves like Malik Ambar rose to elevated positions in 16th-century India, coming to lead the Deccan sultanate’s army and repelling Mughal incursions. But these stories have hardly been well-represented in Pakistan’s national curriculum.

At the dawn of Pakistan’s creation, founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed that freedom would await every Muslim at Pakistan’s birth — a particularly alluring cry for those Sheedis who were former slaves. Pakistan’s founders built the state with the notion that all of South Asia’s Muslims qualified for entry on religious credentials alone. In giving primacy to religion over ethnic identity, some Sheedis say that Pakistan is allowing Sheedis to claim a new space for themselves on religious terms. Many Pakistani Sheedis even use religion to shield themselves from differences in skin color or geographic origins that might otherwise invite discrimination.

In the community center in Karachi’s Machar Colony, Muhammad Hashim, a 35-year-old cook, waved his hand and said, "Yahan to saray Musalman hain.” Here all of us are Muslim. Implicit in this statement is the question: How can anyone discriminate against us if we’re all Muslims? Having lost much of their links to Africa, some Pakistani Sheedis have even recast their origin story in Islamic terms, with some referring to themselves as “Bilali” — a reference to a belief that Sheedis share lineage with a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Hazrat Bilal.

But although Sheedi names adorn parks and street names across Pakistan’s Sindh province, their absence from textbooks still draws concern. “I was expecting to find at least a chapter on historical figures like Hoshu Sheedi [a prominent Sheedi military general who fought the British] under the Sindh Textbook Board, but in the latest school textbooks, such narratives are missing,” Saeed said.

Part of the problem may be that Sheedis have not been in a position to bring greater awareness to their identity or culture, and there remains a deep shame around a history rooted in slavery. On the one hand, Anwar Sheedi, a Karachi-based activist in his 50s, said that the younger generation has been taught “not to think about racial differences,” but he added that the community has been reluctant to go back in history to relearn the discrimination that it’s endured. And with the community languishing in poverty, there are few Sheedis to take up the issue.

Qambrani, a member of the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, is one of the few Sheedis fighting the erasure and exclusion of Sheedi identity. The path, however, has been a bumpy one. Qambrani leapt to power on a political seat allocated for women, but she was still assailed for being an ethnic minority by her own party members. “My party lost a municipal committee seat in Matli — which was confidently ours — just because it stood with a Black woman,” Qambrani explained. “Only I know the struggles I had to go through to rise above this and become a politician.”

“It’s not like the party thought one day that a Sheedi woman should be made a parliamentarian, and the next day, I was in the assembly,” she added. Qambrani had toiled at the local level for years before her party trusted her with electoral politics on the provincial stage. Detractors swarmed around her, reproaching her for every misstep. She became the target of vitriol, with opponents derisively labeling her as unqualified: “They ran a smear campaign against me on social media saying that voting for a Sheedi was useless, because Sheedis only know how to be slaves to those in power,” Qambrani said. “They said I would behave like a slave if elected.”

Worse, when nominated for a seat by the Pakistan People’s Party, Qambrani’s fellow party members openly mocked her African appearance, taking jabs at her features and disparaging her “slave background.” Qambrani remembers when one member compared her to the domestic staff that cleaned “the shit of our children.” The words stung, piercing the miasma of tolerance Qambrani expected to find when ascending to the top politically.

Qambrani uses the contentious phrase “white Pakistanis” to characterize Pakistanis who keep Sheedis down by invoking misplaced delusions of racial superiority. While the term has not entered Pakistan’s mainstream discourse, it is emblematic of the links South Asian Sheedis are increasingly drawing to the Black American experience — recognizing a common vocabulary for their encounters with discrimination and connecting incidents of anti-Black prejudice across the African diaspora.

“Even if we were to get lighter skin, we can’t change our facial features — we’re defined by and identified by them,” she told The Juggernaut. At the end of the day, Qambrani is not willing to look at herself the way others do, weighed down by feelings of inferiority or shame. “It wasn’t our choice to look this way or to be here, but we are here now and we want to stay here,” she said.

Ali Muhammad, 79, still remembers boarding a packed bus in Karachi to travel two hours by road to Hyderabad to celebrate Qambrani’s election victory. Muhammad, a Sheedi who had never seen himself represented by a politician before, was swelling with pride to see Qambrani’s rise. His neighborhood in Karachi — Machar Colony — was home to a large Sheedi community beset by urban poverty, a lack of education, and inequality. Furthermore, municipal authorities were apathetic toward the Sheedis, with little hope for a better outcome.

In 1962, he and his wife sailed by boat from Kutch, India to Pakistan and settled in Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood. At the time, India had canceled his national ID after noting he had family in Pakistan, effectively forcing him to seek life elsewhere. Despite Karachi’s oppressive humidity, he took to the new city in Sindh province immediately. “Our native language here is Sindhi — we don’t know Swahili or other African languages,” he said. “We came to Sindh and became Sindhi Sheedis. Those who went to India became Indian Sheedis. Some became Baloch Sheedis and so on. But at the heart of it, we are still Sheedis.”

For Muhammad, rallying around Qambrani was important because the community finally had a political representative to fight on their behalf. For decades in post-colonial Pakistan, Sheedis had lacked political power, their economic marginality reinforced by their very lack of social capital.

Qambrani is aware that Sheedi political dreams are intertwined with economic uplift, and that Sheedis will be the first to express disappointment if she fails to look out for the welfare of the marginalized community. “We have to prove ourselves everywhere,” Qambrani said.

“Even in Pakistan, when there’s conflict between Sheedis and non-Sheedis, people support non-Sheedis because of their prejudice against Blacks and Black skin,” Qambrani said. Furthermore, the lack of anti-discrimination legislation in Pakistan hinders any attempt to fight racism and anti-Black prejudice has been the status quo for so long that challenging it can be an uphill battle. Pakistani Sheedis do not even have legal minority status, in contrast to some Indian Sheedis, who appear on a list of Scheduled Tribes — eligible for affirmative action programs — in states like Karnataka.

Working as a cook in Karachi, 39-year-old Rajab Sheedi argued that Pakistani Sheedis are effectively blocked from white-collar jobs. Unlike other minorities like Christians or Hindus, there are no reserved seats in parliament or government jobs allotted to them. “Out of our entire population in Karachi, not even two or four people have government jobs,” Sheedi told me. “We are mostly doing masonry work or working as office boys or waiters at restaurants,” he said. Historically, the community took up every type of work possible — Sheedi men had been sailors, pearl divers, merchants, and soldiers throughout South Asian history — so it was a mark of shame that they were now on the lowest rung, without a ladder to climb up.

“We endured cruel and brutal conditions as slaves,” said Anwar Sheedi. “They abused us, underpaid us, and presented us as trophies to their rich friends and waderas [landlords] in Sindh,” he said. In the 1940s, landlords would categorically deny their equal humanity, refusing to allow Sheedi children to study in schools. “Back in the day, people would think of us as slaves brought here by powerful people,” added Hashim.

Although both Pakistan and India ratified an international convention to eliminate racial discrimination in the 1960s, neither country has acknowledged discrimination against Sheedis or offered redress to the community. The Pakistani government has regularly submitted reports to the United Nations claiming that “racism is a rare phenomenon in Pakistan and, therefore, has little or no impact on the lives of the peoples of Pakistan.” Prejudice based on skin color, or colorism, is ubiquitous in South Asian societies, and the popularity of skin bleaching creams points to the discrimination Sheedis face everywhere from classrooms to the wider marriage market.

In classrooms, Qambrani said teachers bully male Sheedis and associate them with drugs and criminality — assumptions that fuel poor educational outcomes and engender a higher school dropout rate. Qambrani describes school as a particularly fraught time for young Sheedi children. “Teachers often talk down to them, saying, ‘These are Sheedi kids, what are they doing trying to have an education?’” Qambrani said.

Anwar Sheedi said female students have been able to prosper, in part due to a stronger parental push to succeed: “Every Sheedi household is investing in their girls by making them study.” But male children have academic underperformance instilled from such a young age that it’s hard to reverse, Qambrani said. “When their self-respect is beaten to dust and society makes them believe they’re worthless, male Sheedis eventually give up and take the wrong turn,” she said. “Rather than helping our people out of misery, society is further pushing us down.”

Nonetheless, Qambrani still believes the main instrument to uplift her community is education. Without it, she said, “People will judge our character before getting to know us. We will be chastised for sins we didn’t even commit.” Education has long loomed as a vehicle out of indigence, but not all Sheedis have grasped it.

Since arriving in South Asia, Sheedis have sought to cast off some of the negative stereotypes linked to the community by intermarrying with other groups. But this comes with other challenges — intermarriage has played a role in diluting, or even erasing, their distinct culture. More perniciously, Qambrani said that the Sheedi experience with discrimination has also produced self- discrimination. Sheedi men don’t want to marry Sheedi women, and some see marriage with other ethnic groups as a way to move away from their position of sitting on the lowest social stratum.

Others still try to maintain reminders of their African origins. In Karachi’s Sheedi community centers, it’s common to see a family tree with roots in Africa flowering outwards to Asia. Their trees usually mention how Sheedis have been enslaved by landlords in rural Sindh, where they were engaged in sharecropping, elephant and horse husbandry, and household chores. This kind of life kept Sheedis in abject poverty for generations.

Muhammad said the fortunes of Sheedis only turned with the arrival of a man named Muhammad Siddique Musafir in the 1800s, who trumpeted the importance of education. He exhorted the community to move away from the legacy of slavery and to pursue education to achieve an upward economic trajectory. Siddique laid the groundwork for the community’s transformation. “He helped our community and enlightened our kids,” said Muhammad.

Musafir is not the only role model. Before him, in the 19th century, General Hosh Muhammad Sheedi was a pehalwan or wrestler from the Sheedi community who resisted British imperialism and coined the popular Sindhi nationalist slogan, “Mar wesun, Sindh na desun,” which translates to “We'll die, but will not give Sindh up.” In 2014, Bilawal Bhutto, son of the late Benazir Bhutto, donned a Sindhi ajrak — a traditional block-printed shawl — and visited Sheedi’s grave in a village near Hyderabad. “He was the one who threw down the gauntlet to Sindh’s enemies,” said Bhutto during his visit, acclaiming the valor of the general.

Even in neighboring India, Sheedis have struggled to gain political power or recognition. This July, Shantaram Siddi became the first Sheedi politician in the Indian legislature after being nominated to the Karnataka Legislative Council. Indian Sheedis, however, rose to prominence only in the 1980s when the Sports Authority of India began recruiting Sheedis for athletic contests. In Pakistan, too, the group is noted for its sporting excellence, with Pakistan sending the noted boxer Abdul Qambrani to the 1996 Summer Olympics. Today, Karachi’s famous boxing club, Pak Shaheen, is headed by a Sheedi trainer, Younus Qambrani (no relation). Girls regularly flock to the Sheedi sportsman to train in the combat sport. In a country where women are still discouraged from taking part in the game, his boxing club has been popular with young Pakistani women whose parents otherwise deem the sport “too masculine.”

The Sheedi penchant for boxing and athleticism is connected to the group's underprivileged status in society. According to Qambrani, Sheedis took to boxing as a way to break out of stereotypes that they were prone to criminality. Their athletic prowess earned the community the respect of non-Sheedis, as did their musical prowess — two parts of their identity that other South Asians have embraced instead of shunned. Their creativity in music has particularly gained mainstream attention: In recent years, MTV Sound Trippin’s song “Yere” turned into a sleeper hit in India, and Abid Brohi’s “The Sibbi Song” exploded onto Pakistan’s music scene. The success of Sheedi artists has led Anwar Sheedi to say: “Our communities have finally begun to progress in terms of education and professional choices.”

“It's getting better for the next generation,” he added. “I’d like Sheedis to start over and not think about the past when the future is seemingly so bright for us.”