Touching scenes: African–Indian intimacy imagined in the contested Ahmadiyya Muslim mission

The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, founded in British India in 1889, has many followers in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other West African countries, and has fostered cultural transformations that have rarely been discussed in scholarship on African–South Asian interactions. Through a history of media produced by and about the Ahmadiyya, this article shows how black and white photographs shaped a vibrant visual economy that constructed West African–South Asian interconnectedness in the midst of difference and discord. While Indian Ahmadiyya missionaries first deployed images as evidence for their controversial beliefs and to prove their success at conversion, the absorption of these personnel and their productions into emerging West African media infrastructures – educational publishing and journalism among them – created a wider visual repertoire that evoked complex emotional registers, including fear and mistrust as well as familiarity and fondness. West African and South Asian media makers interwove dreams, religious and journalistic communications, and digital archives of photographs to reveal religious, racial and gendered differences that played out in print and circulated well beyond any single audience. Visual and print media worked to diminish the Ahmadiyya’s foreignness and accommodate their differences as familiar, and thus played a critical role in cultivating cultural pluralism in new postcolonial West African nations.