And Home Was Kariakoo

by M G Vassanji

  An entire nation wearing castoffs, clothes designed and manufactured elsewhere, worn before by others, only enhances the local perception and feeling of privilege versus underprivilege, giver and receiver, there and here. It is true that with the castoffs, the so-called mitumba, the people at least dress well; what disturbs is the scale, and the price paid is self-respect. Theroux, who came out with such a negative and disturbing view of Africa in Dark Star Safari, observed, “The foreign clothes were like proofs of this shadow existence … and I imagined the wearers to be the doppelgängers of the folks in that other world.”

  Social services, roads, schools, vocational training are all due to foreign benefactors. Every schoolchild in the West wants to throw a quarter at Africa. Africa, in that very pathetic sense, is sexy. A family goes to Tanzania and donates a bunch of pencils. A Toronto broker donates a writing prize, a Vancouver doctor donates a school prize. A Los Angeles businessman installs a solar plant. In Zanzibar a foreign NGO wants to teach culture to the locals; another, how to cope with emergencies. A girl in England gets some money from a project and provides free lunch at a school in Malawi. Of course she is received well. I can imagine myself a schoolboy in Dar and well-wrapped beautiful packages arriving by air to give us a free lunch. We’d have been delighted, our eager hands stretching out to receive these lovely goodies. But what does all this constant foreign charity tell a child about its own society? And while one can hardly deny or denigrate the motives, the good purpose in the giving—at the end of the day Africa seems to be there to make people in the western world feel better, more moral.

  The Kony episode of March 2012 was a signal lesson in the media manipulation of Africa’s problems and at the same time all the complexities involved in what seems to be the simple idea of giving.

  The Kony YouTube video, describing the mass atrocities of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa, was made by an American NGO called Invisible Children; it went immediately viral, taking the world—at least that portion connected by the social media—by storm. The LRA stands accused of brutal killings, sexual slavery, and kidnapping children. Celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Mia Farrow, and Rihanna began Tweeting their support after the video came out, and within a few days it had attracted tens of millions of views on YouTube and garnered hundreds of thousands of dollars in donation. This was the kind of world event that makes people feel good. But which people, in this instance, and why?

  There were immediate objections to the video—its manipulative inaccuracy and timing; its open call to yet another American intervention; its simple-mindedness—it was “pitched to a five-year-old’s sense of right and wrong,” according to a New York Times article. When I read a report on selected African criticisms of “Kony 2012,” I couldn’t help saying, At last—though not without an unnerving sense of irony. Suddenly—to interpret these African responses—their part of the world was in the news; millions in the West talked and read about it, pitied it, and blogged and Tweeted about saving it. But where, in this narrative, was Africa itself? Where were the Africans themselves in it? Africa had become a public-relations opportunity; a plug for the social media and the wonders of technology; an opportunity for those with a few dollars to spare to feel good about themselves. A blackface comic, except that the comedy was tragic.

  Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger, observed, “… this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia.…” The video only furthers “that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves and needing outside help all the time.” Another blogger, T.M.S. Ruge, wrote, “Africa is our problem, we hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters.… If you really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us determine our destiny.” And novelist Teju Cole Tweeted provocatively about “the banality of sentimentality” and the “White Saviour Industrial Complex.” Others saw a “White man’s burden” message repropagated. Showings of the film in Uganda met with anger and even a riot.

  More Africans should rise to voice such sentiments. Depictions such as Kony 2012 are humiliating and offensive. It is outsiders who write these narratives of hunger, disease, and war, in the process making careers for themselves. Reporters have dedicated themselves to hopping from one trouble spot to another wearing earnest faces and seeing nothing in between. And yet, having said this, who would deny that the realities they depict actually exist? How to reconcile “Africa is our problem” with the sad truth that much of Africa depends on foreign aid like a patient permanently hooked to life sustenance? In Dar es Salaam it’s difficult to come across anyone who lives comfortably and does not depend for their living on some foreign connection.

  Some years ago I was invited to a meeting of publishers held in Tanzania, at an expensive new resort in one of the smaller national parks. The meeting was called to brainstorm the problems faced by the African publishers, and I had been invited as a writer. Among the problems discussed were the small book markets, distribution, the payment of royalties, and lack of funds. I must admit to my naïveté at the time. It surprised me to discover that this worthy meeting had been organized by a foreign donor, whose representatives were also present. To add to my discomfort, in one private moment at the coffee urn, a senior foreign representative, a publisher in his home country, said to me what he honestly believed, that African novelists couldn’t write. I could have named a dozen good, and some great, African novelists from different parts of the continent, but I named a few. Perhaps he did not consider Gordimer or Coetzee as African, because they are white; or Tayeb Salih, a Sudanese; perhaps he thought Achebe and Soyinka were mere hacks. Obviously the man had given me his confidence having taken me for a foreigner. On the final day of the meeting, a Tanzanian government minister arrived to give blessings. I asked him then why the government would not assist publishing and cultural enterprises the way many western governments, such as Canada, regularly did. I was not being entirely naive at this point, I also wanted to provoke. My question was met with such a silence in the room (besides a grin from the minister) that I realized then how alien and misplaced I was at that meeting. Some African publishers stared at me as at a madman. I have always wondered if they understood me at all.

  (Photo Caption 22.2)

  23.

  The New (Asian) African: Politics and Creativity

  ONE AFTERNOON AT A TEA following a seminar on Gandhi, in Shimla, India, to my utter astonishment I was approached by a woman who spoke to me in Swahili. Veena Sharma—small, soft-spoken, and sari-clad—was not from Africa but she had spent some years in Dar es Salaam in the 1970s, reporting for All India Radio. She seemed to know all the important people in Dar, people whom I, a student from modest Kariakoo and Upanga, had only read about. Her interest in Africa remained. Four weeks later, at the tea lounge of the India International Centre in Delhi, Veena introduced me to a woman called Urmila Jhaveri.

  Coincidences happen; this one seemed miraculous. As I stood chatting with Mrs. Jhaveri in a Gujarati as formal as I could muster, I couldn’t help but wonder at the improbability of this meeting. We both came from Dar es Salaam, she was a fellow mhindi from Africa—that was enough to be excited about. It was also one more demonstration of the fact that East African Asian identity is real, and becomes evident especially outside of that milieu. But there was more to our meeting, and this my new acquaintance could never have guessed.

  The name Jhaveri takes me to one of my earliest memories: I was eight, my family had moved to Dar from Nairobi, and my mother had opened a shop in a new building on Uhuru Street, on the second floor of which we now lived. Independence was around the corner, and the first-ever general election in the country was about to take place for representatives to the Legislative Council. White-and-black posters with photos of the candidates had been pasted on the buildings of Gaam and Kariakoo, ex
horting, “Vote for Jhaveri!” or “Vote for Daya!” Young Asian men came around to the shops to canvas, saying, “Ma, are you going to vote?” Daya was the doctor who treated my grandmother, and he had my mother’s vote. He was from our own community, moreover, and that was the extent of our politics. K.L. Jhaveri, a criminal lawyer, however, had the backing of Nyerere—leader of the African TANU party—and won the seat. Years later he wrote a book about his political life, Marching with Nyerere: Africanisation of Asians. The subtitle is significant. It is a bold assertion, it is unequivocal, it speaks to the time.

  K.L. was from Dar, Urmila from Pemba. That afternoon in the tea lounge in Delhi she sounded wistful about Dar, where she had spent her adult years, and missed its familiarity, having left only the previous year because K.L. needed constant medical attention. Their daughter was settled in Delhi.

  When I visited them at their suburban home a few days later, K.L. was seated on a sofa, an extremely frail-looking man, literally skin and bones, shorn of all flesh. He was lively, however, and complained about the Indian production of his book. In Delhi he was keeping himself busy writing—though you wondered how in his fragile state he managed even to finger the keys. Urmila and I had bhajias and tea. She said she was writing her own memoir. It would be a valuable contribution to East African history, though I wondered if it would be allowed to see the light of day.

  As the call for African freedom rose in the 1950s, and in the years thereafter for real freedom—from “neocolonialism”—the Asians faced a choice of loyalties. The shopkeepers and small-business people, in the manner of their class everywhere, were nervous about change. Most of them merely eked out a living; they had been protected by the colonial administration, and the only nation they knew was their small and exclusive community. Our long-time barber, Madhu Bhai—who passed by our shop every month to cut my brothers’ and my hair outside on the patio in full view of the public—was one of those who succumbed to his fears and left for Gujarat, much to my sorrow.

  Among the professionals and the educated, however, there was an elite that responded positively to the call for freedom. The Jhaveris reflected the optimism of that class—educated abroad, still in their thirties, and savvy about the world. Well aware of India’s own struggles and excited about African independence, they moved in the enlightened and secular circles of the Asian Association (founded in 1950). The questions they posed themselves, often expressed in their bulletin, The Tanganyikan, concerned the future of Tanganyika—which they saw as democratic and nonracial—and the role of the Asians in it. In a report to the Association, for example, K.L. Jhaveri opposed the proposal of the government-supported Capricorn Society, which would restrict the role of the Africans using economic and other criteria and called for a federation with Kenya and Rhodesia. And in an eloquent article, Amir Jamal, the future minister for finance, said, “The Asians of Tanganyika … have a great opportunity of making a significant contribution to build up a strong and stable society. What is needed is a complete change in their outlook towards the realities.”

  Sophia Mustafa, of Qadiyani (Ahmadi) background and wife of a judge, ran for the Legislative Council in the Moshi area. Soon after that election, she wrote a book titled The Tanganyika Way, and it quite catches the excitement, the freshness, and perhaps the naive idealism of the period. Wearing a sari and not very fluent in Swahili (she was born in India), she enthusiastically embraced the idea of citizenship above race, and exhorted fellow Asians to think beyond communal and racial identities. In a speech she gave to the Asian Association, she said,

  I … appeal to you all here to forget your various sects or communities as such, and all consider yourselves as Asians. And, when you have succeeded in dissolving your mutual differences and antagonisms, you will go further and sink your race as a distinctive factor and consider yourselves as Tanganyikans.

  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,

  Jamal’s utter integrity, dedication and selfless service, along with his political ability, were recognized throughout Tanzania, and Jamal was repeatedly elected with ever-increasing majorities from predominantly African constituencies.

  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:

  Led by AMJ and Manilal Desai, [the Asians] put a halt to the settlers’ bid for self-government.… They enabled Harry Thuku to meet with Marcus Garvey, Mbiyu Koinange to travel overseas.… They established newspapers in Kenya and gave access to their presses to the African nationalist movement.… [They] were instrumental in founding the trade union movement, which was a leader in the struggle for independence. In fact, the first public demand for Kenya’s independence was made by Makhan Singh, an Asian.… [It was] Ambu and Lila Patel who spearheaded the Free Jomo Kenyatta movement.

  After independence, however, the pote
nt 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.