## Formation of the diasporic communities known as the Bombay Africans  
The ethnic origins of the people that became known as the Bombay Africans covered a wide area of eastern Africa, from southern Ethiopia southwards to Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique. Speakers of Bantu languages appear to make up the majority, with origins recorded among the Banyoro, Wazaramo, Makua,  
![img-33.jpeg](img_ref_34)
figure 1. The History of Bombay Africans  
Nyanja and particularly the Yao. Many women were from the Cushitic-speaking Oromo people of the Horn of Africa (Harris, 1977, p. 52), known in India as 'Habshi', after the country of Abyssinia (Burton, 1855, p. 644).  
As early as the 1830s, enslaved Africans liberated by the British Royal Navy from slave-trading dhows in the Indian Ocean were taken to British India (Figure 1). In 1835, 200 liberated African children were taken to Karachi, which was then part of Bombay Presidency in British India. These children were forwarded to the police commissioner in Bombay (Mumbai) and placed in the care of local families, local businesses and charitable institutions (Harris, 1977, p. 18). There are further references to 'Abyssinians' arriving in Bombay in the 1840s after liberation by a French vessel off the island of Mauritius (Pereira, 2006, p. 235). By the second half of the nineteenth century, half of the liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean were given a temporary sanctuary on the decks of British ships and then delivered to the Seychelles, Aden or Bombay (Colomb, 1968, p. 24). According to the memoirs of Captain G.L. Sullivan of HMS Daphne, a total of 322 Africans were liberated from 15 dhows and placed ashore in the Seychelles, where they were placed in quarantine following a smallpox outbreak. These Africans were subsequently taken to Bombay (Sullivan, 1967, p. 170).