A Good Story to Tell: Popular Memory and Public History Across the Former Dutch Empire

The Indian Ocean world, as a domain of research, comes alive with stories of peripatetic figures: seafarers navigating trade routes, convicts banished to far away islands, pilgrims in search of divine blessing and more. The histories of some of these figures are best known to their communities of origin, while others have entered the public imagination across the oceans. How do such stories circulate? And how far is their reach across locations and publics? In this paper, I focus on the story of 17^th century Sufi scholar and political exile, Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar, to explore the versions of his life story that have emerged across multiple publics in Indonesia and South Africa over three centuries. In so doing, I highlight the processes of preservation, translation, and negotiation involved in attempts at transregional public history.