by David Lamb
“I’d never even seen a black president before we arrived,” Sharp said. “I found it hard to believe there really was such a thing. But just after we got to Conakry, we were ushered into President Touré’s chambers. They were beautiful chambers, and he rose to receive my wife and me. A president of a republic rose to receive us!
“He extended his hand and said ‘Bon jour’—we had a translator with us who said that meant ‘good day’—and when we left after about ten minutes, President Touré rose again and led us to the door and opened it for us. Can you imagine how proud we felt as black people.”
Sharp said he had no interest in politics or revolution and he had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with another American living in Conakry, black activist Stokely Carmichael, who moved to Guinea in 1968. Was there anything Sharp missed in the United States? Sharp thought for a moment as he climbed into his battered 1971 Peugeot. “Chicken,” he finally said. “A good succulent chicken, not the scrawny little ones we got here. How much does a good succulent fried chicken cost in America now?”
By late March the monsoon winds along the Kenyan coast have started to die, leaving the air breathless and heavy with humidity, and on the piers of the Old Port in Mombasa bare-chested stevedores sweat and strain, their backs piled high with cases of dried fish. They struggle up the slippery gangplanks and onto the decks while the captains of the great wooden dhows look anxiously out to sea, hoping to detect even the softest breeze that would carry them home to India on their last journey of the season.
The dhows have plied the waters of the northern Indian Ocean for two thousand years, connecting Africa with Asia and the Persian Gulf states as trading partners. In the early years the dhows brought glass bottles and iron tools to Africa and returned to Arabia with slaves, ivory, animal skins and timber. The single-masted, lateen-rigged ships would slip by Fort Jesus, the fourteenth-century Portuguese bastion that guards the entrance to Mombasa’s port, with drums beating and flags flying. The crews would throw up their hands in thanksgiving and shout their greetings to friends who had arrived earlier on other vessels. The port would be so packed with dhows that you could hardly see the water.
As recently as 1945, more than four hundred dhows used to call every year at Mombasa and Zanzibar. But trade routes and markets changed, transportation moved into the age of jetliners and supertankers, and today the long-distance dhows, like the monsoon winds in March, are dying. No more than a dozen now make the treacherous five-week journey from Kuwait or Bombay to Mombasa in any given year, and they glide quietly into the empty port with no pounding music or cheering crews. Their time is past, though their role in history is not. For the dhows remain a symbol of another foreign people who affected the character of Africa—the Asians. (The term “Asian” in Africa refers to all brown-skinned people, usually Indians, Pakistanis and Goans.)
For more than a century the Asians in Africa have lived in a twilight zone: half citizen, half refugee, not quite belonging anywhere. They came as traders and sailors and indentured servants, and although the Europeans treated them with contempt and the Africans with suspicion and disdain, they did not succumb to the discrimination and hostility of their new world. Instead they did what the African had been unable to do. They scaled or sidestepped the barriers and emerged as Africa’s first nonwhite entrepreneurial class of money brokers and professionals.
The Indians arrived in their dhows in the 1700s, setting up trading posts along the coast, and before long they were the dominant commercial presence in Mombasa and Zanzibar. Many trafficked in slaves. Others pushed into the interior on foot and in ox carts. They established small shops—an important factor in the development of East Africa—that catered to the African and later to the white settler. In many cases the Indian merchant was the first permanent commercial or foreign contact the African villager had with the outside world. The Asian considered the African slothful and did not hesitate to exploit his ignorance for personal profit.
When slavery was abolished and Africans refused to continue to work on the plantations, even for wages, thousands of Indians were brought in as indentured workers. Nearly 32,000 were imported in 1896 to build the railroad from Mombasa to Uganda that opened up East Africa for the European settler. Others went to Mozambique to build a rail line from Beira to Southern Rhodesia. Disease, insects, heat and wild animals killed thousands of them.
After the two world wars, new waves of immigration, encouraged by the British, brought thousands more Asians to East Africa. They were dubbed “passenger” Indians, and they came for the same reasons that their forefathers had stayed—a better standard of living. Colonial governors argued that their segregation in residential and commercial zones was essential for sanitary reasons until they learned the “European way of life.”
The Asians were industrious and economically aggressive and they soon controlled a large part of the East African economy.* They became the merchants, the artisans, the financiers and they garnered large fortunes. To the African, the Asian was an exploiter; to the Asian, the African was culturally inferior and lazy.
“I could start out from scratch tomorrow and I’d be rich again in three years,” an Asian jeweler in Somalia said. “The competition of the Africans is negligible. They don’t know how to work like we do. Even if I had to work twelve or fourteen hours a day, Saturdays and Sundays, I wouldn’t mind.”
In the 1950s, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru urged the Asians in Africa to give their active support to the black nationalist movements that were sweeping the continent. Few did. They had every reason to hate colonialism, but they had learned how to prosper within the system and they feared that independence would threaten the limited privileges they had won.
The Asians’ hesitancy to accept local citizenship after independence—the same wait-and-see attitude that many white settlers had—seemed to confirm what the Africans believed, that the Asians were unwilling to throw in their lot with the national inspirations of newly emerging black countries.
By the early 1970s, with governments trying to “Africanize” their economies and job markets, the Asians were under pressure almost everywhere. To many black Africans their presence became known simply as “the Asian problem.” In 1971 Uganda ordered a special census of Asians. They were lined up at counting centers throughout the country and made to sign documents with an inked thumb-print. The ink signing was deliberately intended to humiliate them because most, unlike their African census takers, were quite capable of writing their names.
Ten months later President Idi Amin began an address to his nation with the words: “My government believes that one of its primary duties is to ensure the welfare of all members of the community.” He went on to say that all Asians had ninety days to leave Uganda, so that control of the economy could be given to “indigenous people.” Seventy thousand people, one third of them Ugandan citizens, were suddenly homeless.
President Nyerere of Tanzania drew parallels between the expulsion of the Asians and Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia said the action was “terrible, horrible and abominable.” But they were in the minority. Most black Africans enjoyed the spectacle of watching disenfranchised Asians searching for refuge in other African countries and in India, Canada, Britain and the United States. The Asians, many felt, were only getting what they deserved.
Malawi in the 1970s canceled Asians’ licenses to grow tobacco. Tanzania nationalized their businesses and their sisal plantations. South Africa officially bestowed second-class citizenship on its 1 million Asians. Kenya confiscated thousands of shops owned by Asians who had not taken Kenyan citizenship and forbade them from doing business in the rural areas. Kenya’s assistant minister for home affairs, Martin Shikuku, echoed the popular sentiment when he said in the early 1970s: “The Asians should go home.”
What seemed clear in those days was that the Asian had no future in Africa. He was an alien in a land he had helped build with sweat and ingenuity, and he
lived with his bags packed, his money banked abroad, his destiny squarely in the hands of the new black authorities. He was a conspicuous, vulnerable minority that numbered nearly 1.5 million.
The last few years have seen a significant mellowing in the African’s hostile attitude toward the Asians. Though he is still discriminated against, far more than whites or any other minority in black Africa, the Asian today seems to have earned a permanent and fairly secure role in the future of the continent. His presence has quietly ceased to be an issue. There are two likely reasons: the indigenous African feels less threatened today than he did a decade ago; and national economies have suffered greatly—and in Uganda’s case, collapsed—when Asian participation was eliminated.
“I’m convinced there couldn’t be another repeat of what happened in Uganda, although I wouldn’t have told you that a couple of years ago,” an Asian friend, Abdul Hamid, told me over lunch one day in Nairobi’s Red Bull restaurant, where the hundred or so predominantly male customers were about evenly divided between Africans, Asians and Europeans. Hamid, who was forty and ran one of the biggest printing companies in East Africa, was a Sunni Moslem, one of the 200,000 members of Kenya’s Asian community, the largest and most economically and politically influential in black Africa.
“I mean, my kids’ generation can’t identify with India anymore. They don’t even care about learning the language. All our ties are to Kenya, not India. My family’s been here over a hundred years. The Asian is a tribe of Africa now.”
Hamid was raised in Mombasa in a house with sixty relatives. The men, women and children ate in shifts. His marriage was arranged. His grandfather was an uneducated dhow repairman. But like almost all Asians in Africa, Hamid escaped the mire of poverty, insufficient education and tradition that his ancestors had known. Economically and socially, he outdistanced his African counterpart.
“When I moved to Nairobi from Mombasa eight years ago,” Hamid said, “I came with nothing. Absolutely nothing. I lived on bananas and a pint of milk a day for two years, putting every shilling into my business. An African wouldn’t do that. But I wasn’t afraid to work and I wanted to make money for my children. I will admit the Asians collect money almost as a hobby. We are the Jews of Africa and that’s why the Africans resent us.”
In the colonial era when Hamid grew up, the Asian in East Africa was the man in the middle, caught between white and black, with neither the privileges of the former nor the burdens of the latter. He lived in special Asian residential zones and was not allowed to send his children to European or African schools. In the mid-1950s the British administration in Kenya spent an average of $180 a year for the education of each white child, $65 for each Asian and $5 for each African. In the Ugandan public service, according to government records, the Asian earned six times more than the African and a third less than the European.
“People forget what this place was like twenty-five or thirty years ago,” said John Karmali, an Asian who is chairman of the Nairobi Rotary Club and a graduate of the University of London. “When I came back to Nairobi from London in 1946 with an English wife, it was one of the first mixed marriages Kenya had ever seen. There were only a few places where I could buy land, and no hotel in Nairobi or up-country would serve you a meal or a drink. If you went out for a drive with your children, you couldn’t stop anywhere for a cup of tea. Apartheid was very strong, much like South Africa’s.”
Karmali was one of the original agitators for Asian rights. In 1950 he and his wife, Joan, founded the first multiracial school in Kenya, and in 1958 he became the first Asian member of the all-white Rotary Club. He had been blackballed twice previously, and his acceptance prompted two white members to resign on the spot. In 1980, when he was elected chairman, there wasn’t even a ripple of protest.
“I wouldn’t deny that substantial discrimination still exists against the Asian,” Karmali said, “but I honestly think the tensions that we used to know between European, African and Asian have pretty much disappeared. As far as the discrimination goes, there are a number of reasons. One, the element of jealousy—the Asian community as a whole is rich. Two, the Asians tend to keep to themselves and don’t mix, something I fault us for. And three, the Asians and Africans are strangers to each other’s way of life.
“The African is in the position of strength now and he is using that position to pay back some old scores. That’s human enough. I can appreciate the fact that he was downtrodden for so long he finds some pleasure on trodding down a bit on someone else now. It’s hardly unusual.”
The discrimination he mentioned takes many forms, subtle and overt. At Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, African and European travelers are waved through customs and immigration formalities in a flash, but Asians are shaken down like petty criminals. Their suitcases are opened and each garment is unfolded and waved about. Their wallets are searched and their pockets frisked. The African customs official gloats as he carries out this ritual and the Asian stands patiently by his luggage, stoic and polite, doing exactly as he is told.
If an African and an Asian with similar credentials apply for a public service job or for entrance to a university, the African will be given preference, even though both are citizens of the country. The handful of Asian officers in the Kenyan army have little hope of being promoted beyond the rank of a major, and when a nineteen-year-old Asian student applied for architecture school at the University of Nairobi, she was told quite bluntly by the dean that she was the wrong color. Kenya wanted black architects, not brown ones.
“Sure it makes you bitter,” said the girl, who is now a secretary, “but if you’re an Asian in Africa, you don’t rock the boat. If there are no waves, there’s no controversy. We’re pretty good at not rocking the boat, you know. We’ve had a hundred years here to practice.”
But unlike the Africans, the Asian today shows no visible wounds from the colonial experience—or from the postcolonial discrimination. For the most part, he mastered the same system that defeated the African. When many of his shops were looted and burned by rioting mobs during Kenya’s attempted coup in 1982, the Asian simply shrugged and started rebuilding.
“I suppose the reason we don’t feel as bitter about the colonial period as the Africans do,” an Asian jeweler in Kenya said, “goes back to one basic thing: we made a lot of money off the Europeans.”
The political fortunes of independent African nations were not discernibly dependent upon which European country colonized them. The number of wars, coups d’état and military governments that former French Africa has experienced since independence are almost exactly the same as former British Africa has seen. Both colonial powers produced presidents who became distinguished statesmen and others who became savage madmen. Both produced nations that did well economically (Ivory Coast and Kenya), that failed economically (Guinea and Tanzania), that disintegrated into tribal mini-nations (Chad and Uganda), that enjoyed political stability (Senegal and the Malawi), that broke down in constant political turmoil (Benin and Ghana). It is, I think, fair to conclude that colonialism did nothing for Africa that Africa could not have done for itself.
What is apparent, though, is that the legacy of French colonialism is much stronger in Africa today than that of Britain. France, in fact, retains an extraordinary influence in its former colonies and in many cases remains the paramount economic and cultural force dominating their affairs.
In the West African country of Senegal, former President Léopold Sédar Senghor makes no bones about his love for what, one suspects, he still considers the motherland, and that love for France has withstood the pressures of nationalism and the vicissitudes of independence. Across from his palace is a towering statue honoring one of the previous French colonial rulers of Senegal. And Senghor himself, who was educated in Paris and spends his holidays in France, is one of the world’s leading authorities on French grammar. He is an eminent poet, a former minister in the French government, and an unabashed admirer of anything bearing
a French label.*
Such an affinity would be inconceivable in a former British, Belgian or Portuguese colony. But France’s method of colonial administration was designed to pay long-range dividends, and today ties between Paris and France’s old colonies are so strong that when an African says he is going home, he is as apt to mean France as he is Senegal or the Ivory Coast.
Unlike other colonial powers, France governed through a policy of assimilation or, as some have called it, cultural imperialism. Its rule was direct, authoritarian and centralized, with limited powers invested in appointed chiefs. More significantly, while Britain trained bureaucrats, France trained leaders. The British came to settle the land—one third of the English expatriates in Kenya were farmers—but the French came to administer. The British farmers spoke Swahili; the French administrators spoke French. The British dealt with traditional chiefs through a series of treaties; the French created a new elitist class whose members were educated in Paris, imbued with the culture of France and had all the rights of a Frenchman, including citizenship.
If France’s emphasis in its colonies was cultural, Britain’s was economic. In the course of exploiting those interests, Britain built—and later bequeathed to its colonies—a superior infrastructure: better roads, schools and communications, a more efficient civil service. Those, however, did not represent emotional ties, and the former British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies have gone out of their way to sever all visible links to their European past. One of the first things Zairians did after independence was to pull down the statue of King Leopold II in Kinshasa. In Nairobi, Livingstone Drive, named for the British explorer, long ago was renamed Gen. Mathenge Drive to honor a Mau Mau leader. But visit almost any capital in the old French West Africa and you’ll find statues honoring Frenchmen, and bridges, squares and streets named for Frenchmen. When Jean-Bédel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic in 1966, his first words were “Vive la France!” And when he attended Charles de Gaulle’s funeral, he sobbed “Papa, Papa” and had to be helped from the grave site.