Looking at Africa from the Indian Ocean offers a cartography of SouthSouth exchanges and encounters, a diasporic field in which Africans have been agents and actors of history and culture for centuries. Long before the arrival of Europeans on its shores, the Indian Ocean was a site of cultural and commercial interactions between the peoples of Africa and Asia, tracing a corridor of port cities around the ocean, a world of connected histories, contact zones, processes of 'Indian-Oceanic' creolization and hybridity, routes and itineraries across continents, the ocean and its seas. In the twenty-first century, regional powers are seeking to revive the memories of past circuits and are vying to reactivate the routes of the past or create new ones. Current scholarship on relations between Africa and India and Africa and China aims to look beyond the idealized construction of historical relations or present-day declarations of continued solidarity (Mawdsley and McCann, 2011; Bräutigam, 1998; Manji and Marks, 2010) and to look at African agency, at group behaviour (whether elite or not), at globalization from below (the small traders who have taken advantage of new connections and hubs, the migrants, refugees, musicians and pilgrims), at the new contact zones that are emerging, and at the flows of musical and poetic forms, ideas, images, rituals and beliefs. The Indian-Oceanic world as a cultural field is still understudied. There is still much to explore in the fields of musicology, religions, languages and literary forms.