And Home Was Kariakoo

by M G Vassanji

  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:

  Lord! Lord!

  Let the brown blood

  rediscover the animal

  in itself,

  and have free limbs

  and laughing eyes of

  love-play.

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

  I shall remember

  the dogged voice of conscience

  self-pity warring with [the] will

  of the brown body

  to keep up

  with the black flesh

  forging ahead

  on the way

  to Kilimanjaro

  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:

  The African people, full of physical vigour and joy of life, flocked in large crowds to watch their players perform. The whole place rang with ululations and joyous shouts so that the very walls of the stadium trembled with it. As if lusting to participate in the struggle.

  And of an African woman he sees there he writes:

  He was captivated by the graceful movement of the Muganda female. Her elegant dress that exaggerated her back-swing. The sharp delicate features and the glow of the fresh skin reminded him of the sun dying in a clash of hot sympathy for the earth.

  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:

  We in East Africa, numbed by our pluralities, have decided to erect the one firm ideal of multi-racialism: that is, to keep quiet. To display a deliberate sense of graceful relaxation which is meant to show the non-existence of tension.

  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:

  The lead role of an African woman in my drama, The Black Hermit, the first major play ever in English by an East African black native, was an Indian. No make up, just a headscarf and a kanga shawl on her long dress but Suzie Wooman played the African mother to perfection, her act generating a standing ovation lasting into minutes. I dedicated my first novel, Weep Not Child, to my Indian classmate, Jasbir Kalsi.… Ghulsa [Gulzar?] Nensi led a multi-ethnic team that made the costumes for the play while Bahadur Tejani led the team that raised money for the production.

  He adds:

  It was not simply at the personal realm. Commerce, arts, crafts, medical and legal professions in Kenya have the marks of the Indian genius all over them. Politics too, and it should never be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi started and honed his political and organizing skills in South Africa.…

  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.”

  24.

  Nairobi, Lost and Regained?

  AS I RECALL IT, ON THE ROAD FROM DAR, 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 abcs. 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.