Crocodiles guard secrets of Pakistan’s lost African past

For many Sheedis, the swampy crocodile shrine to Sufi saint Haji Syed Shaikh Sultan – more popularly known as Mangho Pir – is the most potent symbol of their shared African past, as they struggle to uncover the trail that led their ancestors to Pakistan.
Many, like 75-year-old Mohammad Akbar, have simply given up the search for their family’s origins.
The descendants of Africans who have been arriving on the shores of the subcontinent for centuries, the Sheedis rose to lofty positions as generals and leaders during the Mughal Empire, which ruled swathes of South Asia.
But, actively discriminated against during British rule, their traditions began to fade, and they found themselves wholly shunned when Pakistan was created in 1947, absent from the country’s elite political and military circles.
Pakistan holds the highest number of Sheedis on the subcontinent, at around 50,000 people.
But their history has been scantily written, making it difficult if not impossible for Sheedis – including even those like Akbar whose ancestors arrived in Pakistan relatively recently – to trace their antecedents. 
“I came to know in the 1960s that my grandfather belonged to Zanzibar, and we contacted the Tanzania embassy to find our extended family,” Akbar says outside his home in Karachi.
“We were told that we can never reach them until we can identify our tribe, which we don’t know,” he adds. “I never tried again.”
What little scholarship is available suggests many arrived as part of the African slave trade to the east – a controversial notion for many Sheedis.
“We don’t subscribe to the theories that someone brought us as slaves to this region because Sheedis as a nation have never been slaves,” argues Yaqoob Qanbarani, the chairman of Pakistan Sheedi Ittehad, a community group. 
Others say the community’s origins can be traced back to the genesis of Islam, claiming a shared lineage with Bilal – one of Prophet Muhammad’s closest companions.
As the knowledge of their origins has faded, so too have many of their traditions, including the vestiges of Swahili once spoken in parts of Karachi.
“Swahili has been an abandoned language for some generations now,” says Ghulam Akbar Sheedi, a 75-year-old community leader.
“I remember that my grandmother would extensively use Swahili phrases in our daily conversation,” says 50-year-old Atta Mohammad, who now struggles to remember even a few sayings.
    With so many traditions lost to the past, the Sheedi mela, or festival, at the Mangho Pir shrine has assumed rich significance and been the epicentre of the community in Sindh for centuries.
“It attracts the Sheedi community from all over Pakistan,” Qanbarani explains. “We celebrate Mangho Pir mela more than Eid,” he adds.
The celebration features a dancing procession known as the Dhamal, with both men and women in trance-like states – a rare sight in male-dominated Pakistan.
“The Dhamal dance is done with great devotion and much delicacy,” says Atta Mohammad at the festival. “Some of us are captured by holy spirits.” 
Mangho Pir is also home to over 100 lumbering crocodiles that stalk between the devotees near a swampy green pond where they have lived for generations. 

The oldest crocodile – known as More Sawab, and believed to be anywhere between 70 and 100 years old – is feted at the festival’s climax with garlands and decorative powder while being fed chunks of raw meat. 
    Even this tenuous link to the community’s past is in danger of being severed, however.
The celebrations this March were the first time the festival has been held in nine years, after rising extremism saw Sufi shrines come under threat across Pakistan, with repeated gun and suicide bomb attacks.
“The situation was not suitable for us as children and women also participate in the mela,” says Qanbarani, as heavily armed police commandos flanked the crowd.