And Home Was Kariakoo (43 page)

For Tejani, then, as for Sophia Mustafa, a mere racial coexistence was unacceptable. There had to be a single identity.

A new East African literary consciousness had thus emerged. The Asian writers were part of it and spoke confidently of a collective “we” and a collective future. “What is our East African culture?” Neogy asked, for example, in his editorial for the first issue of
Transition
.

And then suddenly everything changed. Africa, it seemed, had stepped out of its early, idealistic phase. Neogy was put into detention in 1968 for criticizing the Uganda government, after which he left Uganda. He died in San Franciso. Idi Amin appeared and expelled the Asians of Uganda (“the engineers of corruption”). Tejani ended
up teaching in New York, where he would write fantasy and comic fiction and poetry. Amin Kassam and Yusuf O. Kassam disappeared from the literary scene, and Peter Nazareth, after two novels, became a literary critic in Iowa.

That creative spark, inspired by the promise of a new dawn, a new Africa, with all its excitement and uncertainty, was gone.

Was that creative spark, that hope, doomed from the beginning? A cultural magazine is a broker, a provider of sorts—was Neogy and his
Transition
a mere broker, a deliverer of goods—that typical, stereotypical role of the Asian in Africa?

Peter Nazareth’s novel
In a Brown Mantle
, written just before Idi Amin had his dream, presents an extremely pessimistic portrayal of the Asian’s fate in Uganda. (The country is actually given a fictitious name, and the Asian home and family are hardly portrayed.) In the novel, Deo D’Souza is an idealistic young Goan who leaves his civil service job to work for the political party that brings the country its independence. He is assertive about his African-ness. But he is never fully accepted—“When will you return home?” is a taunt he often hears. Fed up with the racism, and the cynicism, political corruption, and betrayal that had set in, he leaves the country, saying, “Goodbye Mother Africa—your bastard son loved you.”

A tough, moving testament. But one has to pause here:
loved
you? No longer
loves
you? What then does it mean to belong? There were Asians who never left Uganda even after Idi Amin’s dictat—and were never heard of again. I met an Asian woman in Vancouver who told me, after visiting her Ugandan homeland more than twenty years after Idi Amin, “I did not mind seeing that Africans had taken over my father’s business. At least that way they could come up.” That’s belonging, from the gut.

For three decades Peter Nazareth championed African literature. Dozens of writers passed through his department in Iowa City. But he never visited his native Uganda. I have given this phenomenon much thought, and have convinced myself finally that the turning-away from Africa by many Asians was not from bitterness, entirely, but also from pain and grief.

Those Africans—in East Africa and elsewhere—who cheered Amin’s decision could not have imagined that their boxer hero would end up killing thousands of Africans within a few years, turning the Nile red, and would cause a war that would cripple the area economically for many years; and that that mild ethnic cleansing in Uganda was but a foreshadowing of the genocide of Rwanda. Indeed, the goading racist stereotypes, so manifest in the pages of the
Uganda Argus
at the time, were reminiscent of the antisemitism of Europe of three decades before. (On their way to India, many Asians left Kampala for Mombasa in sealed trains.)

In a 2012 article in the electronic African magazine
Pambazuka
, Ngũgĩ paid a tribute to the Asians of East Africa, pointing out their contributions. In particular he mentions his days at Makerere:

He adds:

If only he—or someone—had said this thirty years earlier. In an issue of
Transition
in 1967, Wole Soyinka had issued a scathing warning to African writers: “…  would a stranger to the literary creations of African writers find a discrepancy between subject matter and environment?” There was a “lack of vital relevance” in the writing, he charged. “Reality, the ever present fertile reality was ignored by the writer and resigned to the new visionary—the politicians.”

A
S
I
RECALL IT, ON THE ROAD FROM
D
AR
, Nairobi would always first appear in a distant haze, a mere suggestion—and the heart thrilled. After a journey of a full day or more, having left the coast for the grassland, and stopped at the junctions Morogoro, Korogwe, Mombo, Moshi, and Arusha, past the border post at Namanga, having sighted giraffes and zebra in abundance, the bus would take a final turn and there it would suddenly be, the city rising from the plains. Perhaps the mystique was due to the long expectation—each arrival was, after all, a return to native soil. Nairobi was my family’s original original home. We left it when I was four and a half, soon after my father died. We went from temperate suburbia to sweltering Kariakoo, from wearing shoes and sandals even at home to mostly barefoot on the pavements. For many years Dar remained our exile. My brother treasured his Nairobi school blazer and tie, my sisters their green cardigans. As we trudged over rough road and over mud, and waded through pools of rainwater to get to school, our former schoolbus was vivid on our minds. We had owned a car in Nairobi, the licence plate number never to be forgotten, tee-eight-oh-one-six. In Dar our neighbours often placed us as Nairobi people, and
even now sometimes I have to explain that I am originally from Nairobi. We never had a family presence in Dar.

My earliest memory of Nairobi is of my father opening the front door of our Desai Road home at night and with his pistol shooting at the dark emptiness outside, while my mother fretted behind him. It was the Mau Mau period, when many Asians and Europeans were expected to keep guns for safety. We had left class and cool weather behind but also the dark fearsome nights of Nairobi. That perhaps contributed to my mother’s decision to leave the city. One day her two older sisters arrived from Dar, they all sat down on a mat on the floor, had tea and had a good ritual cry over my good father’s untimely demise, and convinced my mother to pack and leave to join her mother and nine brothers and sisters. She was never sure she made the right decision.

Nairobi began its existence in 1899 as a railway supply depot in the masai plains.

As the “scramble for Africa” began, following the Berlin conference of 1884-85, which portioned off Africa among European powers, the British claimed the territory today known as Kenya, which became known as British East Africa. To develop the interior, construction of a railway began, to go from Mombasa to Uganda; completed in 1903, it was called the Uganda Railway. From a bare waystation on the Masai plains, Nairobi became a metropolis and the capital of the colony, its cultural and economic life dominated by the Europeans and the Asians. The two races (and the Africans) lived separately, of course, in a kind of semi-apartheid, but Nairobi had the caché of being the most westernized and modern city in East Africa.

I returned to Nairobi for the first time with my mother and older brother when I was ten, brought along partly as a reward for
doing well in school, and also—I now realize—because on the way back my brother would be left behind in Mombasa, and she had to have someone to travel back to Dar with her. In Nairobi she had family business to attend to, and things to buy for her own shop (much as women now head off to Guangzhou in China for the same purpose). From Nairobi she brought selections of cloth and toys to sell, and new ideas and fashions—we believe she introduced the “sunsuit” to Kariakoo. For that visit, I had formed great expectations of Nairobi, sometimes called “Little London.” By all the nostalgic accounts in the home, it lived up to that nickname, a fantastic place, clean and beautiful, with handsome houses and parks with fountains and band stands. There were buildings into which cars drove up, and drive-ins where you could watch movies from your car, and splendid new cinema houses; there were shops selling goods undreamed of in Dar. There was our old home in Desai Road, and the khano where I was registered at birth and whose askari—the security guard—a short, brown, wrinkled man in a khaki uniform, we remembered fondly. Lest we forget this paradise, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation’s “Hindustani Service” was a daily reminder.

During that visit, we stayed in Ngara, an Indian suburb behind the museum and the city centre, where one of my aunts ran Windsor Hotel. It catered to Europeans, and consisted of several bungalows spread out on a lot, the main one with long corridors, terrazo floors, a large dining hall, and a bar with slot machines. Like most of residential Nairobi, this area evoked in you silence and awe. Every morning my little cousin would be driven to a nearby kindergarten, my uncle singing to her a ditty in English about the
abc
s. I recall breakfast on a table with white cloth, the silver tea service, the smell of toast and butter, and sitting down to eat a crisply fried egg with a fork and knife. After a useless struggle, the egg goes flying, the waiter looks on in silence before stooping to pick it up. His look tells all. We
had truly come down in our lot. During this visit I met an old woman, my grandmother’s sister, who had brought my father up. The family owned a high-class safari-outfitting company, where—I guess—the famous “white hunters” would have shopped for gear.

Subsequently I visited Nairobi every few years. One of my sisters came to survey secretarial colleges here and ended up getting married. And when socialism put the crunch on Tanzania’s Asians, my mother—even though she was in no position to be affected—succumbed to panic and moved with my two brothers back to Nairobi. I was at the time studying in Boston, and the abandonment of my Dar home that I had now come to love caused me considerable grief. It was to Nairobi that I would go to visit my family, now living on 5th Parklands Avenue. The flat came with a dog called Foxy, whose diet consisted of throwaway stale chapatis from the neighbourhood. The prayer house was across the road, and at four in the morning when people went to meditate there, the dogs from the neighbourhood would gather on its cricket ground and howl together as though in their own prayer. Compared with Dar, Nairobi was a dog city, reflecting partly the influence of white settlers, and partly the fact that its quiet, dark suburbs were prone to robberies. But you would not see a dog being walked in these neighbourhoods, they all remained behind the fences. What dogs those were who gathered outside the prayer house would always remain a mystery; but at a little past 5 a.m., when people began to emerge from their meditations, the dogs would trot off in their own different directions. Foxy was one of them.

Now as we arrive by bus from Arusha, Nairobi doesn’t appear all of a sudden, the enigma in the distant mist or haze, a fantasy beckoning from the grassland; it’s simply there, suddenly, following a spate of
Masai villages, a couple of cement factories, and—with increasing traffic—shops and guest houses that all merge into a great urban sprawl. Evening has fallen and the highway is lit up. And as we proceed, a strange panic seizes me: isn’t there any familiar landmark left, has it changed so dramatically in the six years since I was last here? Is Nairobi lost to me now? But then comes the clock tower on Uhuru Highway, the Parliament building and the old downtown to the right—there is Kenyatta Avenue, we turn into Koinange Street near Karimjee Gardens and there’s the chicken place across, at which corner we drop off some passengers, and this is Nairobi. That old thrill returns.

Nairobi used to be an Indian and “European” town, its city centre defined by the backbone of Government Road with its suiting stores, safari outfitters, sports shops, chemists, book shops, and the Kenya and Twentieth Century cinemas. For Asians, the heart of Nairobi city centre was the Khoja Ismaili khano at the head of Government Road, a grey-stone two-storey structure with a clock tower. Indian Bazaar came off here in one direction, with a string of clothing stores followed by spice and grain merchants. Farther up, Government Road met the rather posh Delamere Avenue, where a policeman in white uniform and helmet stood on a pedestal smartly directing traffic. To one side of him was the New Stanley Hotel, the watering hall for the whites.

Opposite the New Stanley, occupying a corner, was a child’s version of heaven: Woolworths, in a burst of light and colour, displaying in its windows and on its shelves and counters heaps of exciting stuff bidding for the heart, especially if you were from humble Dar. Toys and games, cricket bats and balls, chocolates and candies, story books and comic books, imported from England, of course; and pencils and pens, paint boxes and compass boxes, school satchels and school bags. Mostly unaffordable, but you could not
return to Dar without coming away with some mementos from here—tall pencils with a plastic toy or a crook and a frill at the top were an affordable favourite.