And Home Was Kariakoo (42 page)

A dramatic and bold statement. Sophia Mustafa came not only from a racial minority in Tanganyika, but also from a small and oppressed minority among Muslims; the Partition of India was recent memory. It is not surprising then that she spoke for dissolving differences among Asians. She envisioned a future in which Asians did not only run shops or work as white-collar professionals but also farmed and worked with their hands. (The Gujarati trading class did not traditionally dirty their hands.) In a moving passage she describes the moment when the constitutional conference of March 1961 concluded in Dar es Salaam, and a garlanded Julius Nyerere emerged from the hall to be driven slowly in a motorcade, holding up a
placard that said, “Independence 1961.” The governor of Tanganyika turned to her and said, “Was this not the day we were all waiting for, Mrs. Mustafa?”

Her book ends with a collective rallying call for the new Tanganyika. But the politics of the time were tumultuous. In a short time would come the revolution of Zanzibar, the attempted coup in Tanganyika, the union with Zanzibar, and a policy of socialism that lasted two decades. She herself left politics, and like Urmila Jhaveri much later, she had to leave the country for the sake of the health of her ailing husband. I met her in Toronto in the 2000s, and she died soon afterwards, shortly after her husband. She had written two novels, one of them set in Kenya, where she had spent some time.

The most powerful, admired, and enigmatic Asian in politics, however, was Amir Jamal. Educated in India, where in 1942 he happened to attend a Congress meeting in which Gandhi gave notice to the British to “Quit India,” Jamal kept his distance from communal affiliations. From 1961 to 1980 he held various ministerial positions in government, including that of minister of finance. The website of the Brandt21 Forum (of the Centre for Global Negotiations) writes,

He died in 1995 in a Vancouver hospital after a year of illness. According to Sophia Mustafa, Nyerere made a call to Vancouver
begging that the body of his friend be returned to Tanzania to receive full honours. The plea was rebuffed by those concerned. If this story is true, it encapsulates completely the straitjacket that the Asian had to escape in order to join mainstream society.

Because of the violence of the freedom struggle in Kenya and, since early colonial days, the presence of white settlers, whose ideas about the country’s future leaned towards the models of South Africa and Rhodesia, Kenyan politics was always more colourful and louder than that of Tanzania. Kenyan Asian demography was also quite different from that of Tanzania, a fact often not realized or simply ignored; it comprised not only the Gujarati shopkeeper class but also the descendants of the Punjabi indentured workers who had come to build the railway in the early twentieth century, and a sizable professional elite—doctors, lawyers, teachers—who arrived much later. The presence of the white settlers meant that business was more profitable. They spent more freely.

And yet Kenya had—perhaps because of better education and better economic status—produced some remarkable Asian activism, since as far back as the 1920s, in the form of legal and publishing services for African activists (including Jomo Kenyatta), opposition to apartheid, and promoting labour relations. In her book
Challenge to Colonialism
, Zarina Patel writes passionately of the contributions to modern Kenya by the businessman A.M. Jeevanjee (AMJ), who was also her grandfather, and other Asians:

After independence, however, the potent brew of Kenyan politics, with its corruption, tribalism, and violent vendettas, made it impossible for the Asian minority to raise its voice. They were too small in number, they were a soft touch—traders and white-collar workers mostly—and they were uncertain and nervous. In the clamour for new opportunities, amidst all the tribal and personal rivalries, the Asians were too easily shoved aside. Makhan Singh, who had spent ten years in colonial detention, was ignored by the new leaders. Pio Gama Pinto, the journalist who spent four years in detention for his support of the Mau Mau and whose activism continued, was assassinated. In a climate of increasing corruption and state violence, it was far too easy to intimidate the Asians, blame them all for exploitation and racism—to call them the Jews of Africa who bred uncontrollably and dangerously. On their part the Asians remained insular: it was in their character. They could join in the nation-building—donating blood, helping to build a school or distribute food, et cetera—but at the end of the day they reported to family and community. Their predicament was put succinctly and with some bitterness by a Sikh gentleman, who was quoted in the papers: “The problem with us Asians is that we are not white enough to be white nor black enough to be black.” The white man who had been top dog during colonialism now came as a benefactor and
representative of Europe. He was cool. The Asian “Jew” moved into the background.

In December 1995, in
The New York Times
there appeared an obituary of a Ugandan Asian. London’s
Independent
carried his obituary the following month. This in itself is remarkable. Uganda, except for war or disease, is hardly of global interest, and the Asian from there even less so. But the deceased, aged fifty-seven, was Rajat Neogy, someone very special. He was founder and editor of the hugely influential literary magazine
Transition
that came out of Makerere University in Kampala in the 1960s. Neogy was born in Kampala in 1938 and had studied in London. There’s not much known about him that’s published, but he had come blazing onto the African literary scene.
Transition’
s pages gathered a remarkable array of literary and political luminaries—James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Kofi Awoonor, a young Paul Theroux, Christopher Okigbo, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Okot p’Bitek, Tom Mboya, and Kenneth Kaunda. Benjamin Mkapa, the future president of Tanzania, was associate editor. Ali Mazrui followed him. Said Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard about Neogy after his death, “This man created an African-based journal of letters that everybody in the intellectual world, it seemed, was excited about. He fought fascism in blackface, and that was rare and courageous.” Ngũgĩ would credit the publication of a story in
Transition
as a turning point in his life.

The post-independence 1960s was a particularly thrilling and creatively fertile period for Africa; so much seemed possible and within reach. Reflecting the intellectual fervor and political idealism of these years, Makerere University had became a literary hub. A new literature was in the making, and the young people were busy defining their role in it. In 1962 the first African Writers Conference took
place at Makerere, a milestone that is still remembered. Soyinka, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Nkosi, Taban were present, Soyinka later saying of it, “We went to join a convocation of writers and intellectuals from every corner of the continent.… We were on safari on African soil: the signs along the way all showed the same slogan: Destination Kampala! Africa’s postcolonial renaissance.” There would have been few other places in the world where there was such an excitement about new literature, new ideas, and new politics. The inspiration arrived at this conference for a new publishing imprint of literary titles called the African Writers Series, which was soon launched by Heinemann in the U.K., with Achebe as the series editor. The excitement reached as far as my high school in Dar, where literary competitions were held, new drama was produced, and a parade of literary luminaries passed through, including Chinua Achebe. When many years later my first novel was published in this series, it was for me a moment of arrival. The headmaster who brought Achebe to our school, Peter K. Palangyo, himself turned out to be a novelist.

Besides Neogy, the editor of
Transition
, several Asian writers were a part of this emerging East African literary consciousness centred in Kampala: Bahadur Tejani (b. 1942 Uganda), Peter Nazareth (b. 1940 Uganda), Amin Kassam (b. 1948 Kenya), and Yusuf O. Kassam (b. 1943 Tanzania). All were near-contemporaries of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938 Kenya), who was already claiming attention as J.T. Ngũgĩ. Here was an opportunity for forming an Asian African identity through literature.

It was typical of those times that Wole Soyinka in his anthology
Poems of Black Africa
(1975) includes the poetry of Amin Kassam, Yusuf O. Kassam, and Bahadur Tejani. “Black” in the title denotes southern Africa, embracing while not denying ethnic or racial particularities. It is a generous anthology, as is evident from Soyinka’s
introduction. But—one imagines, from this distance in time—for these young Asian writers the exuberance and power of the African literary consciousness around them must have been intimidating. Theirs was not an easy place to be. There was first the whole historical baggage of India to confront; education demands an honest appreciation of identity and history, and India surely had to be confronted—it could not be dismissed simply as poor and out there. But more than that was the all-consuming presence and pull of community and family—by which, in fact, India manifested its presence in most of us, through religion and language, customs, foods, and traditions. (Nazareth was a Goan; Amin Kassam, Yusuf O. Kassam, and Bahadur Tejani, Khoja Ismailis.) And finally there was the consciousness, all the time, especially in Kenya, of being the Other, an insecurity enhanced by frequent discussions of the “Asian question,” and frequent racist provocations by African demagogues.

To write meant to write with your whole being, and that was hard to do, with family looking on, the community watching nervously, and presumably the father wondering what the future was in all that scribbling, why not marry and settle down in the age-old fashion? And so, whereas the poetry of Okot p’Bitek, for example, is firmly grounded on African soil and fully confident of its intent, and Taban Lo Liyong writes an essay with provocative gusto about the barenness of East African writing, while the black African poets struggle with their gods and tangle with their native languages and speech rhythms, their village life and urban squalor, all the three Asian poets mentioned above, and several others who wrote occasionally, seemed largely to prefer the safety of the universal, the minimal, the casual observation—and even the obscure and abstract, shying away from their gods and languages, their traditions and personal lives. To ground their creative output in Africa, it would have
to be grounded in Asian Africa, their own lives and experiences as Asians from their respective communities, which could not have been easy—on one hand to produce a genuine aesthetic and make yourself understood and accepted; on the other, not to offend the home gallery. The result was a nervous uncertainty to the writing, a wavering aesthetic.

In some of his poetry, however, Tejani directly confronts his dilemma of being different, an Indian in Africa, revealing a personal anguish that is a consistent thread. Tejani in particular is deeply attracted to the physicality of the African, compared to the bloodless reserve and interiority of the Asian. In one poem, “Lines for a Hindi Poet,” he uses a scene witnessed in a New Delhi park—two dogs freely mating—to call for a loosening of Asian attitudes to love and sex. The result is an incantation:

In “On Top of Africa,” Tejani again laments the difference,

Fiction gave greater scope for in-depth and honest portrayals of Asian life. In his novel
Day After Tomorrow
(1971), Bahadur Tejani pursues his theme of Asian inadequacy. His protagonist Shamsher, who grew up in the countryside, is in love with Africa—its simplicity and honesty, its majesty and grace; he dislikes the Indians around him. He observes, “The estrangement with their environment and with the people around him made him feel that all Indians were the remnants of a decaying civilization.” (One detects echoes of V.S. Naipaul.) Elsewhere, at the Kampala football stadium, he observes:

And of an African woman he sees there he writes:

The novel is sketchy and schematic, simple and romantic, forgiveable in a young man’s first effort; there is no complexity of characters or even ideas; it examines Asian life very perfunctorily (compare Ngũgĩ’s treatments of Kikuyu life, which are so grounded in the earth of Kenya). The Asian woman is hardly observed. In a sari, one might argue, she would look as elegant as Tejani’s Muganda female, with a “back-swing” as well. Is a taboo at work here or simply disinterest? The novel however has some beautiful descriptions of Asians in a rural setting, and the awesome, looming greatness of the African continent. And it does explore the idea of what a new Asian African might be. In his Epilogue, in which the author pessimistically addresses the reader directly, he rejects the idea of the separation of races, very much as Sophia Mustafa had suggested: