Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination

A Banian is a very prominent and, I may add, a very picturesque person wherever found upon the east coast. He is a wonderfully sharp, shrewd, clever fellow, ever keeping an eye open for the main chance and grasping at whatever he sees, or fancies he sees it. He grasps at shadows often enough, but he had rather do this a thousand times than miss one real chance. See him at his books, and you see a man lost to all the world. Tailor-fashion he sits upon his low couch—a mattress spread upon the ground—and surrounded by a row of cash and other boxes; his only garments a thin cloth about his loins and a red peaked cap upon his head; a heavy moustache, twisted into points in a Napoleonic fashion, and coloured green, upon his lip; spectacles upon his nose; a paper in one hand and a reed-pen in another; his head bent forward, his eyes peering through his glasses at the paper below, he looks the personification of abstraction; he might be an alchemist on the verge of discovering the philosopher’s stone, or a divine about to seize upon the origin of moral evil. This man is one of the great powers in Eastern Africa.

This image of the Indian (and more particularly the banian) as a crafty and shrewd opportunist in the passage from Charles New’s Life, Wanderings and Labours in Eastern Africa is in keeping with a long tradition of English discourse on that figure. Recall the famous speech in 1788 by Edmund Burke in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, in which Burke declares not the Englishman but “the black banian, that is the master.”1 Burke suggests that the banian outsmarts the newly arrived young and inexperienced English officer in India, secures his employment, and then proceeds to use this position to tyrannize both his fellow subjects as well as the young officer. The Englishman, in Burke’s scenario, is left to be no more than a “melancholy spectator” witnessing the corruption but unable to stop it. Almost a century later, traveling to East Africa, Charles New expresses a similar note. In the chapter from which the epigraph to this chapter is taken, New sounds a note of helplessness: echoing David Livingstone’s claim that Indians along with Arabs were participants in the East African slave trade, New regretfully notes that no matter how much the British intervene, the slave trade is not easily curtailed. To this particular “melancholic spectator” in East Africa, the banian appears “picturesque,” that is, neither sublime nor beautiful but rather something naturalized into the larger canvas of the East African landscape. Much like a predatory animal, the banian is alert to any shadow that may be cast by potential prey and he will strike a hunt at every opportunity. But, if he is instinctual like a beast of prey, New’s banian is also speculative, “a personification of abstraction.” Here, the mystical elements of magic and divinity long associated with an Oriental metaphysics intervene to further enhance the banian’s mastery over his environment.

The figure of the Indian in East Africa in New’s 1874 account is at once one of awe and one of danger. Such an ambivalent reading of the Indian was also registered by Sir Bartle Frere who, sent to Zanzibar in 1873 to investigate and help curtail the slave trade, was surprised to find the economic prowess of the Indian traders and noted that “throughout the Zanzibar coastline … all banking and mortgage business passes through Indian hands. Hardly a loan can be negotiated, a mortgage effected, or a bill cashed without Indian agency.”2 A year before Frere’s visit, Richard Burton, in 1872, had published his two-volume work Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, where he mentioned not only the long-standing presence of Indians in Zanzibar but also their trading reach in areas such as Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Comoro Islands.³ Burton portrayed the Indian community as a tightly knit group of individuals who were protected by the Arab sultan, and he described at some length the habits and lifestyles of the various Indian communities, such as the Parsees; the Hindu Bhattias, Brahmins, Wanis, Lohars, and Khattris; and the Muslim Bohras, Menons, Khojas, and Ismailis.⁴ In 1869, three years before the publication of Burton’s majestic volumes, Cope Devereux, an English naval officer, noted the presence of about six thousand “natives of India, the wealthiest, the most persevering, energetic and trustworthy of the whole population.”⁵ Devereux suggested that “if it were not for these people, the trade of Zanzibar would entirely fail. Their system of credit and faith in one another is extraordinary; distance and time being little thought of. They take bills on their countrymen living at Bagdad and other distant places. They trade principally in ivory, gum copal and cloves, the former being brought from the interior of Africa in exchange for American cotton, Venetian beads and brass wire.”⁶

Noting such Indian initiative and enterprise in East Africa, some late nineteenth-century British administrators like Sir Harry Johnston and Frederick Lugard enthusiastically called for further Indian immigration to East Africa. Citing the long history of what he called “The Asiatic Colonization of East Africa” Johnston advocated for the establishment of an Indian agricultural colony, an “America for the Hindu” that would become, as he put it in a speech delivered to the Royal Society of the Arts in London on January 25, 1889, “the granary, the market for the manufactures and the home for the overflow populations of British India.”⁷ Echoing this sentiment, Frederick Lugard wrote, “It is not as imported Coolie labour that I advocate the introduction of the Indian, but as a colonist and settler.”⁸ Lugard’s claim was based, interestingly, on the as-yet-unnamed idea of the dual mandate—the idea that British colonialism was based on both economic gain and on the civilizing mission.⁹ Thus, wrote Lugard, the Indian in East Africa would serve a role beneficial to the African. “The African, too, is extremely imitative. The presence in his midst of a fully clothed people would be to him an example of decency which he would speedily imitate. His wants would become identical with theirs, and thus, while his status was improved, and a new encouragement given to trade, he would be compelled to exert himself and to labour in order to supply those wants. Moreover, the methods of agriculture, the simple instruments of the Indian ryot, the use of the bullock, the sinking of wells, the system of irrigation and the manuring of soil &c. &c. would soon be imitated by the African and the produce of his land would thus be vastly multiplied.”¹⁰ The Indian in Lugard’s scenario would serve not only as a role model for the “uplifting” of the African but would furthermore encourage the African to enter the labor force. Having developed suitable agricultural methods in India, the Indian would emerge as a “teacher” for the African agriculturalist.

The Indian colony proposed by Johnston and Lugard was not to materialize in the near future, even though such proposals were to reappear toward the end of the First World War when officials such as Theodore Morison and some Indians such as the Aga Khan were to advocate for an Indian colony in the territories formerly occupied by Germany.11 The positive tone in which Winston Churchill described the Indian presence in East Africa in his book of 1908, My African Journey, was in keeping with the larger narrative of British Indians as it was then articulated by British colonial officers, many of whom, like Lugard, had had extensive experience with Indians in British colonial India. But what Churchill witnessed in the “Highlands of East Africa” was not appreciation of Indian enterprise but rather growing resistance bordering on hostility toward Indians on the part of the white settlers. Indeed, Churchill noted that, at the turn of the century, settler colonialism in Kenya exhibited less concern with the resistance of the local African and more with that of the fellow Indian settler. “For observe it is not against the black aboriginal that the prejudices and interests of the white settler or trader are arrayed. … It is the brown man who is the rival.”¹²

Weighing the competing claims of the white settlers and the Indian migrants, Churchill suggests that there is room for both.¹³ “The mighty continent of tropical Africa,” writes Churchill, “lies open to the colonizing and organizing capacities of the East.”¹⁴ The white settler, the Indian, and the African all have their part to play in the development of the colony, as long as certain policies, or, as Churchill puts it, “matters of practical administration” are followed.¹⁵ Thus, while the Indian is to be rewarded for his past and continued contribution to the British Empire by a relatively nonrestrictive immigration policy to parts of the empire such as East Africa where there are no lower-class European populations, Indian migration to those colonies that are populated by Europeans of a wider class range is to be curtailed. Furthermore, even when the Indian is to be received in East African territories, he is to be encouraged to settle not in the highland areas, “which promise the white man a home and a career,” but rather in the “enormous regions of tropical fertility to which he is naturally adapted.”¹⁶

In retrospect, Churchill’s position may be read as a careful compromise between Indian demands for recognition and white settler demands for exclusive landholding in the highland areas. But its reception among the settlers and their allies was far from welcoming. Perhaps the most acerbic attack came in the form of an article published in the Empire Review in 1910 by an author only identified as “Traveller.” Arguing that the presence of the Indian in Kenya had resulted in cities that are full of dirt and squalor, the author further castigated the Indian as someone who is “exploiting the native but doing him no good, teaching him, no doubt, how to trade and barter, but also the vices and trickery of the East, without making any attempt to educate or elevate him.”17 Because of his willingness to live in meager surroundings and have an austere lifestyle, the presence of the Indian in any capacity other than that of unskilled laborer will result in a competition with the white settler in which the latter will be squeezed out. Thus, wrote Traveller, “We can draw a line beyond which no Asiatic can come into a white colony, by allowing him no political or commercial rights; grant him no licenses for any trade or profession, no title to land nor lease of land or house except to live in, and demand proof that he is employed as a labourer, and so on. With these restrictions he will do no harm, and occasionally he may be of much use.”¹⁸

If Traveller’s tone here seems to border on paranoia and hate, such anti-Asian rhetoric was not uncommon at the time. Indeed, even Sir Harry Johnston’s early endorsement of the Indian presence in Africa in 1889 had been met with a challenge. One member of the audience had remarked that Johnston had not paid sufficient attention to the encroachment of Indian shopkeepers in Natal and the threat they posed to white settlers. Not convinced by the laissez-faire “let the best man win” position offered by Johnston in response, the interlocutor felt compelled to write in his position to the journal editor. In an echo of Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” Traveller retorted, “Ten Englishmen, members of the English speaking community, are of more value for the civilisation and advancement of Africa than one thousand Indians, speaking Cutchi or Guzarati [sic].”¹⁹ Johnston’s interlocutor was raising here not only the issue of a competition between brown and white traders but also, as was to be later articulated by General Smuts at the Imperial Conference in London in 1923, the specter of a competition between two civilizations—one of the East and the other of the West.²⁰ This notion of a civilizational competition was to recur not only in many of the debates and arguments of the first three decades of the twentieth century, but, as we saw in the encounter between the Imam and Amitav Ghosh, it continues to underwrite contemporary anxieties.

Increasingly agitated over the denial of rights that they, as British subjects, felt they ought to irrevocably have, Indians countered with a critique of their own. For instance, in an April 1921 letter written by Mangal Dass addressed to the acting chief native commissioner, O. F. Watkins, the Indian Association in Nairobi responded to allegations of Indian traders “cheating” Africans by challenging the very premises of the notion of “cheating.” For one, they argued that it was historically not the Indian who cheated the African, but rather the European who “drank Eno’s Fruit Salt with the object of impressing the natives with his ability to swallow boiling water, or tried to convince them of his supernatural powers with the aid of a gramophone.”21 But more importantly, it was not the Indianness of the Indian that was at issue, but rather something that was intrinsic to the nature of trade: “It is the essence of all trade to take advantage of the other man’s needs or ignorance and where biased people call it cheating, the more reasonably inclined would term it the profits from the trader’s enterprise.” While the Indian Association would not condone any acts of deliberate fraud and cheating, the letter noted, it was not blind to the fact that such accusations came from a racially antagonistic settler community.²² In another letter that was critical of the missionaries’ collaboration with the settlers, the political leader M. A. Desai admonished the missionaries to “practice what you preach: is it too much to expect of you to preach and practice the ‘Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of human beings’?”²³ The letter, which referred to Jesus as an Asian, was published by the Indian newspaper East African Chronicle because its original recipient, the settler-run East African Standard, refused to publish it as blasphemous.

The responses of Mangal Dass and M. A. Desai encapsulate the two major foci of the debate between the white settlers and the Indians—the economic arguments and the cultural/religious/civilizational ones. Alert to both these aspects, C. F. Andrews, Mohandas Gandhi’s trusted friend and collaborator, also turned the table on white settler accusations of the Indian exploitation of the African.²⁴ Reading the statements of the Economic Commission and the Petition of the Convention of Associations as the “most sinister sign of the times” (71), Andrews was scandalized after his visit to East Africa in 1919–20 by what he saw as the unholy alliance between settlers and missionaries. Pointing to the history of religious toleration on the part of the British Empire in colonies such as India, Andrews wrote that the insistence of the white settlers on an exclusively Christian civilization was “the strangest travesty on the part of the British Commonwealth that I have ever met in any part of the world, not even excluding that strange phenomenon which I found in the Boer States. For in the Transvaal, the issue was kept strictly on political lines, however harsh and crude. Here, religion has entered politics, and a combination of forces has resulted which lends itself all too readily to cant and hypocrisy” (53).

Having criticized the missionary complicity with settlers, Andrews turned next to the settlers, who, he alleged, had been the greatest exploiters of the African, taking away lands and compelling the “African to work on those lands for his master’s profit” (72). By creating a system whereby the African laborer has been separated from his rural household, the European settler has been responsible for the disintegration of the African social order, and he has done so, wrote Andrews, with impunity.25 The Indian, noted Andrews, has certainly not been beyond reproach for trading practices that may be unscrupulous and opportunistic, but he has not reduced the African into servitude as has the European settler. On the contrary, the Indian has taken on the African as an apprentice and “trained more African workmen than all the industrial and technical schools put together” (78). This sense of the Indian contribution, wrote Andrews, he had gathered, during his trips to East Africa, not from Indians, but from European employers. Unlike the landed settlers, most “practical men” in Kenya, suggested Andrews, welcome the Indian immigrants for their contribution to the workforce. There was no question of competition between the Indian and African in this expansive stage of colonial development: “The Indian artisan, who would do steady and regular work, and had the intelligence to train the native under him, was in great demand and could always earn money” (80). Andrews noted that the Indian was welcomed not only by those responsible for projects such as public works but also by the Africans he had met. “Before I left Uganda, Sir Apollo Kagwa and the Baganda Chief Justice handed me a document signed by themselves, on behalf of the ‘Lukiko’ stating that the Baganda desired the Indians to remain because they did good to the country. They also wished more Indians to come out” (82). This sentiment of the elders, wrote Andrews, was echoed by the young Baganda leaders: “One of the young Bagandas said to me at the end of my visit, ‘We shall look more and more to India, in the future, to help us’” (82). Thus, Andrews concluded, the claim that the Indian has been more detrimental to the African than the European could not be persuasively made.²⁶

Such potential collaboration between Africans and Indians was the cause of much concern among the settlers. In their memo on the case against the Indians, Lord Delamere and Kenneth Archer accused Indians of “stirring up disaffection amongst the native tribes.”27 They were referring in particular to the relationship between the Gikuyu leader Harry Thuku and his friends in the Indian community, particularly the secretary of the Indian Association, M. A. Desai. Of great concern to the settlers were the series of resolutions passed both by Indian leaders and by the East Africa Association led by Thuku in separate meetings on July 10, 1921. Indians proclaimed the convergence of African and Indian interests: “The Indians have never expressed their desire, or ambition to rule the Native or to gain supremacy over them and further the British Indians fully endorse and support the policy of the rights and privileges asked by them being extended alike to all subjects of the British Government including the indigenous Natives of the Colony.”²⁸ For its part, Thuku’s organization put forth a well-publicized statement of support for Indians. The E.A.A. put on record “that in its opinion the presence of Indians in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya is not prejudicial to the advancement of the Natives, as has often been alleged by the Convention of Associations and some of the writers in the press, and is of further opinion that next to missionaries the Indians are their best friends.”²⁹ Furthermore, when, three days later, the Indian delegation went to represent Indian claims in London, Thuku authorized them to speak also on behalf of Africans. A telegram in support of the Indian delegation was sent by Thuku to several London officials as well.³⁰

The political solidarity between Thuku and Desai has been described by several historians, including Keith Kyle in an important early essay, and so most of that history does not warrant repetition here.³¹ What is important to note, however, is that Harry Thuku’s autobiography, published since Kyle’s article appeared, gives further evidence that, contrary to the settler claims that Thuku was used as a mere “tool” by Indians, there was in fact a genuine pact of mutual respect and trust between Thuku and his Indian friends and, moreover, that settler racism was something both constituencies experientially shared.³² Thus, for instance, in the autobiography we learn not only of the beginnings of a friendship between Thuku and Desai, who often socialized after work in the latter’s room, but also of the later supportive visits of Desai and his friend Acharyar to Thuku’s mother while he was imprisoned and of the colonial government’s failed attempts to get Thuku to indict his Indian supporters.³³

African opinion on the Indian presence was not, however, monolithic. The East African Standard published two letters, both in February 1923, by Africans who were critical of the Indian presence. The first, by Kip Rotich Bin Mabuwi, worried that if Indians gained control of the colony they would ruin the country by not providing free medicines as did the British, and this would lead to tremendous suffering. The second, by Jaluo Obner Oweyo, echoed the sense that the country would be ruined by Indians and that the Indian would not take care of a sick African as well as could a European.34 We do not know much about the authors of these letters, so it is difficult to fully contextualize them, but we do know more about Z. K. Sentogo, a leader of the Young Baganda Association, who, in Sekanyolya, a newspaper published in Luganda (with a translated version in Kiswahili and a special supplement published in English), chastised the Indian community. Referring to the same Indian delegation to London that Thuku’s organization supported, Sentogo wrote, “In the excitement caused by this situation, we the natives of this country are rendered inarticulate and our interests likely to be ignored. … The Indians have done nothing in the way of native education and, though the members of the delegation can be called educated, the mass of Indians are illiterate and inferior in education to the natives. What our fate would be under Indian rule we dare not contemplate. … Our education and training has been carried out on western lines as being best for our advancement. … Can this be possible under two opposing civilizations, one Eastern and the other Western leading to a confusion of ideas on conduct, morals, etc.?”³⁵

It is tempting to read Sentogo’s rhetoric of the clash of civilizations, and particularly the moral dangers of Eastern civilization, as continuous with the settler and missionary discourse of the time. But to see it merely as such is to make the same mistake the settlers did: erasing African agency, if only for an opposite political purpose. In other words, just as it was inaccurate (not to say insulting) for the settlers to read Thuku as a mere tool in Indian hands, it is equally problematic for us to see Sentogo as no more than a pawn in the struggle among immigrants. Rather, Sentogo’s rhetoric is best read, as Michael Twaddle has persuasively done, as a complex set of negotiations between the interests of a younger expatriate Baganda community in Nairobi and an older established Buganda kingdom back home. This negotiation, Twaddle shows, was further complicated by the Young Baganda Associations’ sense of the competing demands of loyalty to traditional authorities in Buganda on the one hand and the British colonial system on the other. When, as we noted earlier, Sir Apollo Kagwa welcomed the Indian representative C. F. Andrews with open arms, this, along with the feared rumors that Indians wished to establish an East African colony of their own, further disturbed the young Sentogo. Thus, Twaddle points out, if Sentogo’s anti-Indian rhetoric derived from an already available missionary discourse about the East, it was also rooted in the interests of an upwardly mobile educated class of Africans who sought security in the colonial civil service and was legitimately alarmed by the prospect of increasing Indian competition.³⁶

The different positions on Indians taken by Thuku and Sentogo remind us that one of the greatest challenges of any historical sketch is that of striking a balance between individual positions held by members of a given society and the aggregate or general position that encapsulates what might be considered the rhetorical norm of that society. Thus an account of the tensions between Europeans, Asians, and Africans in a racially divided colonial world risks eliding the internal divisions within these communities—divisions not only of class and gender but also of other hierarchical and nonhierarchical kinds. Factors such as religion, age, caste, the relative degree of incorporation into family networks and neighborhood communities, and inherited traditions and societal norms (to name only a few) have a profound effect on the ways in which individuals imagine themselves and their relations with others. Nonetheless, despite these various contingencies, what is clear is that the presence of Asians in East Africa since long before the beginning of formal European colonialism meant that, at least in British East Africa, colonialism was necessarily structured not through the simple binary division between the “settler” and the “native” proposed by Frantz Fanon, but through a rather more complex struggle between a variety of actors—the colonial authorities in England, the white settlers in East Africa (particularly Kenya), the “Asians” of East Africa, the colonial Indian government in India, and the so-called “natives” in the Fanonian framework, the black Africans of East Africa.37 Rather than insisting on a reading of colonialism as purely binary, it is more useful in this context to read it as a process that was more ideologically disjunctive and dispersed.³⁸ To be sure, the tropes of self and other that Fanon employed in his reading of the cultures of colonialism are overwhelmingly present in this expanded colonial archive, but the particular valences of good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, are not so easily mapped onto a white/black racial di-chotomy. And yet, because Fanon’s work was to have a profound impact on a whole generation of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers in Africa, we must pause now to revisit one of his most cited claims.

Fanon’s vision of a starkly Manichaean colonial world was to resonate with the experiences of a number of colonized intellectuals and writers who, in the Africa of the fifties and early sixties, fought against the oppressive restrictions of colonial society in the hopes of creating a socially just, independent future. While this battle against colonialism was fought, as I outlined earlier, on several fronts, an important terrain of the struggle was that of ideology and culture. It is in this latter domain that literary texts became crucial carriers of the ideologies of liberation, not only in their representational aspirations but also in their very act of entry into the “worldliness” of national politics. As a result, an integral aspect of the literary criticism that emerged in the postcolonial African context was an ideological analysis of the nature of literary “commitment” to anticolonialism, independence, and, particularly in the eyes of Marxist critics, to a classless future.

Of the many literary critics of this generation who were inspired by Fanon, perhaps the most influential was Abdul JanMohamed, who published his study Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa in 1983. Manichean Aesthetics sought to articulate a sociopolitical theory of literary production that took into account the binary divisions of the colonial world that Fanon had previously laid out. The European colonial writer, wrote JanMohamed “sought to rationalize the whole imperial endeavour” (2) and produced an ideology justifying colonialism. In response, the African writer sought to demystify that ideology and spoke instead of the traumas of colonialism. What was of interest to JanMohamed was not only the form in which colonial ideology took fictional shape but also its “negative influence” on African writing. “The dialectic of negative influence,” wrote JanMohamed “is in fact a literary manifestation of the Manichean sociopolitical relation between the colonizer and the colonized” (8).

This Manichaeism, JanMohamed was to insist (thereby distancing himself from a more orthodox Marxism), was a matter primarily of race rather than class. In colonial society, he writes, “the function of class is replaced by race” (7). “The major distinction in such a society is experienced in terms of race, which unlike the horizontal division that defines class relations, can function both horizontally and vertically: regardless of the native’s relation to modes of production or the amount of wealth he may accumulate, he will always be considered inferior by the colonialist” (7). In the colonial African contexts that interested him, JanMohamed would select for his study “three Europeans” and “three Africans” from three different parts of the continent. Such a choice would enable the presentation of the typology of the Manichaean aesthetic through a set of contrasts between white writers and black ones.

My interest in JanMohamed’s positioning of Gordimer and his subtle shift in this essay on reading colonial societies as starkly divided along the “conqueror/native” binary as opposed to the “settler/native” binary (79) is not unrelated to the curious biographical fact that JanMohamed himself is a Kenyan-born descendant of “Asian” heritage. His shift from the category of settler to that of conquerer was in keeping, then, with a larger narrative in which Asians in East Africa had resolutely cast themselves as immigrants, and perhaps even as “settlers,” but insistently differentiated themselves from the European “conquerors” of Africa. For all its emphasis on race and racial politics, Manichean Aesthetics maintained a curious silence on the non-black, nonwhite subjects of Africa. Indeed their only presence, in the introduction, is an afterthought: “Gordimer’s depiction of the effects of apartheid on the conscience of liberal white South Africans must be read in conjunction with La Guma’s representation of the more drastic consequences of apartheid for the blacks (as well as ‘Coloureds’ and Indians)” (10, my emphasis). JanMohamed’s bracketing is, I suggest, not accidental but rather symptomatic of a generation of East African Asians who came of age in a newly postcolonial context. Many Asians in East Africa, for right or wrong, felt uncertain about their political and economic futures in the newly independent states. A few left with the arrival of independence. Some held on to their British passports to hedge their bets. Others promptly took up (or attempted to take up) citizenship within the African countries of their residence. This array of individual and family choices about future residence was also accompanied by more personal ideological tendencies manifest on the political register. Liberal Asians, among them many Asian intellectuals, chose to identify with the newly independent nations and with their fellow black citizens. Hence the trauma associated with an uncertain future was accompanied by the performative insistence on shared histories and political alliances. It is in this context that a book that was explicitly about the racialized structure of the colonial encounter could retain a remarkable silence on the racial heritage of its author. The Manichaean framework of the settler/native lent itself to a liberal hope that Asians and black Africans could both see themselves as “native.” But the same Manichaeism on the streets often resulted in a reverse judgment. The question was too divisive to pose in a still developing academic analytic of colonial society.

Nonetheless, just a few years before Manichean Aesthetics was published, a fictional representation of the Asian African predicament was memorably offered by the Indo-Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul in his novel A Bend in the River. The novel deserves a considerably more detailed reading than I can offer here, but readers will remember that one of the greatest sources of anguish in the text is the character Salim’s sense that his Indian African heritage has no discursive space in the ongoing postcolonial discussions of African hopes and futures. In his conversations about Africa with his fellow Asian friend Indar, Salim notes, “I felt that between us lay some dishonesty, or just an omission, some blank, around which we both had to walk carefully. That omission was our own past, the smashed life of our community.”40 Indar, who has tried willfully to “trample on the past” to accommodate to a world “in movement” (141), finds that he cannot forget the pain associated not only with the loss of his family’s assets on the East African coast but also of its sense of security there. He is enraged with his community, which he says has given energy “but in every other way left us at the mercy of others” (142). His rage is shared by Salim, who claims that everything he knows about the history of the Indian Ocean he has learned from the book of Europeans. Indians in East Africa “were buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider the nature of their lives. They did what they had to do” (16) and, in the process, suggests the biting opening sentence of the novel, they “allowed themselves to become nothing” and found that they had no place in the world.

Naipaul’s rendering of the Asian predicament is arguably too acerbic in tone, but the central anxieties of his text resonate in a number of reflections by East African Asians in postcolonial times. In her 1999 book Nomadic Identities, May Joseph, a Tanzanian Asian who now resides in the United States, presents a moving account of being jarred by Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, which was released in 1991. The film set in the context of Amin’s Uganda brought back to her long-repressed memories of her own family’s anxieties about the anti-Asian sentiments in Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. Meditating on the performance of citizenship, Joseph recalls her desperate attempts to expressively stage her citizenship through renewed efforts at getting the ngoma dances just right, by deemphasizing the Asian accent in her Swahili, by making sure that her school assignment of maintaining the shamba (vegetable garden) would make the mark. “Despite the anti-Asian graffiti present in the streets on the route home,” she writes, “I was determined to prove that I had assimilated. But being defined inauthentic proved a more potent force than my expressive stances. Clearly, more was needed than speaking perfect Swahili—most important, a sense of historicity in relation to this transitioning place of Tanzanian socialist citizenship.”⁴¹

Joseph’s account of the postcolonial trauma of a community no longer at ease, of a community that over time recognized the need to investigate its own historicity, is one that resonates throughout a three-volume collection of interviews, essays, and published writings by Kenyan Asians compiled by Cynthia Salvadori. Published in 1996, the three volumes of We Came in Dhows provide a remarkable view both of the Asian presence in Kenya in colonial times as well as the more recent self-conscious attempts on the part of the different Asian communities to revitalize the memories of their multiple legacies. Salvadori’s editorial juxtaposition of Asian accounts with photographs and commentaries from private family collections, colonial newspapers, and British travel narratives not only enhances the aesthetic texture of the record, but, more importantly, records the unevenness of the political and economic status of the Asian presence. The various vignettes themselves are engaging and range from the hilarious to the depressing, from the poetic to the prosaic, from the triumphant to the defeatist. They are stories of intercultural connections and disappointments, of the possibilities of a world blind to racial animosities and one in which racism seems inescapable.

As though to remind us that not all Asians in colonial Kenya were traders or indentured laborers working on the railway, we read the tale of Shamsu Din, an Indian who came to Kenya as a young boy and found work on a white man’s ranch taming wild animals for eventual shipment to various animal parks and zoos worldwide. And the internal diversity of the Asian community is also seen in narratives of those who found themselves marginalized for reason of caste and class. One Cutchi Muslim has this to say about an alternative nonsegregated school his father set up in 1925. “Alaya’s School was very important to us because we Cutchis were very uneducated. We had come over, long, long ago, as artisans. We were suppressed by our Indian brothers here, for they treated us as labourers, without any respect. When the British came in they associated only with the prominent wealthy Indians, people who were of the Ismaili and Bohra and Ithnaseri communities, and some Hindus” (1:79).

Salvadori’s volumes are also tremendously useful for the light they shed on the lives of Indian women and on interracial marriages between Indians and Africans. There are sketches of Indian women who stand out as exceptional for their times. One such is the story of an elderly woman who had arrived in Mombasa in 1866 by dhow and walked all the way to her husband’s shop in Takaungu (1:44). Another is of the Goan Ezalda Zuzarte (better known as Nana), married to J. Dias, an owner of a timber mill in Eldama Ravine: “Nana took an active part in the wood-logging in the abundant forest there. She was a rather wild sort and the life suited her. They used a tractor for dragging logs, and Nana was one of the first women in Kenya to drive a tractor, certainly the first Asian woman to do so. Nana was also an excellent horsewoman, for the only way to get around in the forest was on foot or on horseback. Horses remained one of her main passions right to the end of her long life. She was a crack shot, too, and certainly killed at least one lion” (2:134). And, if the likes of Nana were exceptional, the volumes remind us of the many Indian women who were the primary managers and salespersons in their family dukas while their husbands were traveling to trade. These women, who have been, for the most part, completely written out of history, get their few moments in these communal life histories. So, for instance, Fidahussein Adamali says of his mother, “While [father] was off at Mungushu my mother looked after the shop in Kiu, as she did when he went up to Nairobi to buy goods. She was a very thrifty woman, a good businesswoman herself. She too understood Kikamba and also a bit of Maasai, although she was too shy to speak” (3:5).

In her “Notes on the Compilation,” Cynthia Salvadori makes clear that her aim in putting together the volumes was primarily to enable the efforts of a community that was only now (in the 1990s) beginning to publicly come to terms with its African history.42 As she puts it, “Europeans were writing their stories about Kenya as they saw it for over seventy years, the Africans have been at it for thirty years. This book is giving the Indians an opportunity to record their histories as they wish to” (3:193). While such a recording inevitably risks a nostalgic and perhaps triumphalist take on a community’s history, the effort, Salvadori suggests, is worth the risk.⁴³ What is most striking to Salvadori is not so much the nostalgia and the creation of a heroic past, but rather the deletions that she was asked to make by her interviewees. “A person from Lamu recalled how ‘the [colonial] DC used to walk all around town in the early morning making sure it was kept clean’ but later asked me to delete that in case the authorities took it as a criticism that the town is filthy today. … Another person told me proudly that Kenyatta and Koinange had spent three nights as guests at his father’s home, and then asked me to delete it because ‘the relatives of the said gentlemen might not like it’”(3:193). Such deletions, suggests Salvadori, “indicate the paranoia the Indians feel in Kenya’s present political atmosphere” (3:193).

Such paranoia and its corollary self-censorship is evident in a letter written to the Ugandan journal Transition in an early issue from 1968. Signed as the “Under Dog,” the letter is penned by a self-identified “third generation Asian in Kenya” who is bitter about the fact that “Kenyan” has become a “bankrupt nationality for an Asian.”44 The letter itself is in response to a much debated and controversial piece by Paul Theroux published in a previous issue of the journal.⁴⁵ Claiming that hatred toward Asians had become a fashion among both whites and blacks in East Africa, Theroux wrote, “I believe the Asians to be the most lied-about race in Africa” (47). While his most immediate locus of analysis were recent statements made by Kenya’s president, Kenyatta, and by other members of the KANU political party, Theroux suggested that such sentiments, which were an “infringement of individual rights, a thinly veiled threat of actual harm, and a gross neglect of … libertarian principles” (48), were part of a larger ideology of Asian disenfranchisement. Not wanting to associate himself with the few Indophiles who assert the “innate nobility of the Indian,” Theroux notes, “I am frankly as worried by the person who says the Asian is saintly as by the person who says the Asian is a bloodsucker. There is a remarkable similarity in the sentimental attachment the Indians and Africans have for place: both Asians and Africans speak with nostalgia and affection for the mangoes in Tabora, the meadows and gardens in Entebbe, the beaches in Dar es Salaam, and so forth. But this is probably not so remarkable when one considers that often the Asian in Africa is in the land of his birth. We all like to be home; in most circumstances it is the safest place to be” (51).

Theroux’s observation that anti-Asian sentiment is pervasive not only in the black citizenry but also in the white settler community is taken one step further by Shiva Naipaul in his travelogue North of South. For Naipaul, the racial predicament of East Africa’s Asians can only be explained by what is popularly known as the “divide and rule” strategy of colonial politics. “The African was taught—and eventually came to believe—that his destiny was inextricably linked with the destiny of the white man. Marginality was thrust upon the Asian. Both black and white could regard him as an outsider intruding into their special relationship.”⁴⁶ In this scenario the promise of a European-styled modernity and the possibilities of assimilation into its core values meant a greater identification on the part of the African with European culture. Not desirous of advocating for an alternative, Eastern form of modernity and thereby having no purchase on the African imagination, the Asian became an anomaly.

“The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible means for destroying the settler,” Fanon had written. But in this scheme at least, colonial ideology functioned to hold out the promise of modernity and eventual liberty to the African, while cathecting the source of African anger and resentment toward a clearly visible alien community. Thus, rather than following the Manichaean logic that Fanon had outlined, in which the theory of the “absolute evil of the native” was to be answered by the theory of the “absolute evil of the settler” (93), a triangulated process emerged in which both the white “settler” and the “native” could point to the intruding Asian as the source of that absolute evil.47 Like the characters Salim and Indar in his brother’s novel, Shiva Naipaul suggests that the blame lay in great part with the Asians themselves. Not ones to assimilate with Africans in their new surroundings, and insistent on retaining old world communal affinities (“In East Africa as in India, a Patel is a Patel before he is anything else” writes Naipaul [118]), the East African Asian “did not evolve a picture of himself in keeping with his changed circumstances” (118). The failure, in other words, was not so much a failure of acts of commission as of a critical act of omission. It was, to Shiva Naipaul, the failure of the imagination. “Few people are more prosaic than the East African bania (merchant) and have so fractional a perception of the world. Other men—and they have been few and far between—have had to sing on their behalf. But the European knew—and still knows—how to sing his own songs. More importantly, he knows what kind of songs he must sing. This near total absence of imagination has played no small part in the downfall of the East African Asian” (119).⁴⁸

Shiva Naipaul’s 1978 assessment of the “near total absence of imagination” on the part of East African Asians is, in retrospect, inaccurate, but it registers a still commonly held view that Asian literary production in Africa really only begins in the 1960s. As is widely known, well before Naipaul, the Ugandan writer Taban Lo Liyong had already made a plea in 1965 urging his fellow East Africans to help overcome what he felt was the literary barrenness of East Africa. What is less well remembered is that in his manifesto Liyong specifically took up the issue of Asian literary creativity: “Our citizens of Asian origin have been taking more care of family businesses than engaging in literary works.”⁴⁹ Liyong urged religious and community leaders such as the Aga Khan to play a role in fostering a cultural renaissance in East Africa. While his call indeed had its intended effect, provoking a whole generation of creative writers and artists into a flurry of activity, in retrospect, as Simon Gikandi has suggested with regard to East African literatures in indigenous languages, and as Robert Gregory has outlined with regard to Asian cultural production, Liyong’s critique seems to have missed out on a whole range of existing literary activity.⁵⁰ In the Asian context much of this activity was focused on theater, and, while some of the plays written and produced in English were subsequently published and are available to us today, many of the performances were in Indian languages such as Gujarati and Punjabi, and transcripts of those performances are not part of our scholarly records.

Gregory dates the serious organization of Asian dramatists, poets, and artists to 1948 with the inauguration of the Oriental Art Circle in Nairobi. This group, formed by the Indian high commissioner Apa Pant and his wife Dr. Nalini Devi, encouraged the fostering of cultural links between the various Asian communities as well as with Africans. Based at the Kenya Cultural Center, the group presented monthly plays, poetry readings, as well as music and dance performances. The plays often had multiracial casts, with Europeans and Africans playing roles that called for non-Indian characters. The Oriental Art Circle also extended itself into the realm of radio with a weekly program of music and poetry. Gregory notes that, while this group was the most active, a number of cultural organizations were established around this time in the various cities and towns of East Africa. Some of the more ambitious organizations relied on the patronage of the more successful members of the Asian community. Three years before Liyong’s plea to the Aga Khan, for instance, the religious leader, along with entrepreneurs like Nanji Kalidas Mehta (who will make a longer appearance in chapter 5), had contributed money to establish a National Cultural Center in Kampala that would hold “a national theatre, a language hall, and many offices for promotion of a variety of arts including film production.”⁵¹

The British Council’s annual drama competition, the Kenya Drama Festival, and the East Africa Drama Festival, which was inaugurated as an annual event in Kampala in 1950, all played an enormous role in fostering theatrical creativity in the Asian community. Kuldip Sondhi’s Undesignated won first prize at the Kenya Drama Festival in 1963; his 1965 play, With Strings, won as best original play of the year. Jagjit Singh’s Sweet Scum of Freedom won the third prize in 1971 in the BBC African Service Competition for radio plays. But, in addition to these award-winning titles, a number of plays both in English and in Indian languages were written and produced onstage as well as on radio in the late fifties through the early seventies. At the same time, authors such as Jagjit Singh, Amin Kassam, and Bahadur Tejani also wrote poems, and this period saw the publication of Bahadur Tejani’s novel Day After Tomorrow and Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle. While these plays and poems are rarely read or taught as a vital part of the African literary canon today, editors of the earliest anthologies tellingly considered them as an integral part of a developing multiracial African literary culture. Thus, for instance, Sondhi’s Sunil’s Dilemma was included by Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse in their collection Nine African Plays for Radio, and Pieterse’s Ten One-Act Plays included three scripts authored by Asian writers. Likewise, some of the most circulated poetry written by Asians in this period is available to us through editions such as David Cook and David Rudabiri’s Poems from East Africa and Wole Soyinka’s Poems of Black Africa.52 The point of noting such anthologizing is to recognize that, despite the then ongoing debates about who was or was not an “African” writer—anxieties that, as we have already noted, continued to haunt projects like JanMohamed’s well into the eighties—the incorporation of Asian writing within the larger category of “African literature” seems, at least in these cases, not to have posed any dilemmas. While white settler literature was clearly seen to be a part of the colonial other, Asian writers were read as being part of the African canon.

These developments in the fifties and sixties were departures in magnitude but not in kind from previous investments by East African Asians in the institutions of literature and culture. As early as 1912, a notice appeared in the Indian Voice stating that the Goan Institute of Nairobi had voted to embark on a literary magazine whose primary objective would be “to excite and stimulate [literary] composition amongst members.”⁵³ On July 22, 1915, the Nairobi Municipal Council entertained a petition from a Goan named A. R. Nazareth for the building of an Indian theater. It is unclear whether the theater as proposed was subsequently built, but Mr. Nazareth left the meeting equipped with the necessary building codes, including “the provision of satisfactory exits” that formed part of the licensing agreement.⁵⁴

Poetry and theater were, in those early decades of the twentieth century, central institutions in the cultural lives of the community. Newspaper accounts from the period provide details on a number of performances. A note in the East African Standard of January 18, 1918, mentions European attendance at a “Hindustani” play, The Serpent, performed at the Nairobi Indian Theatre. The moral of the play allegedly was that “no man should covet the wife of his neighbour unless under penalty of dire happenings.”⁵⁵ Such didacticism is also suggested in an East African Standard reporting of March 7, 1914, on a play performed at the Nairobi Indian Theatre with four hundred Indians in attendance. “The subject really took the form of a lecture on drink, and was staged as a drama.”⁵⁶ Theater was also used by the community as a fund-raiser. Multiple performances of the Urdu play The Silver King were staged in December 1914 at the Auctioneer’s Hall in Nairobi. Raising money for the Indian troops engaged in the war, it played to sold-out audiences.⁵⁷

An article in the June 6, 1914, issue of the East African Standard provides a rare glimpse of early twentieth-century Indian theater in Mombasa. A European critic, invited to a play to be performed by the New Indian Opera and Theatrical Company, showed up instead (because he couldn’t read the Gujarati language on the ticket) at a play put on the same night by a rival Indian group, the New Rising Star Company. The European’s assessment of the play is not uncharacteristic of the time, so that he notes, for instance, that “to the European ear these interminable Indian melodies become almost as monotonous as an African n’goma, though of course, it must be classed as music—music of an arrested development.” The Gujarati play performed that evening was The Binding Promise, or, Out of Evil Comes Good, a morality play about the sacrifices that a king must make in the interests of his subjects. By admission of his Indian interlocutors, this play, written by an unknown playwright, was not as well regarded as the upcoming performance the next Saturday, to which the reviewer was invited. That play, Khubsurat Bala (1910), was penned by the writer Agha Hashr Kashmiri, who had previously made his literary reputation on Urdu adaptations of plays by Sheridan and Shakespeare. The critic, having attended this performance as well, finds it a “travesty” and a “strange medley manufactured to give the comics a show.” But despite the reviewer’s biases, his recording of the performances is among the very few written documents available that give us a sense of Asian theatrical activity of the time. For instance, we learn that these performances were attended by an exclusively male audience (we don’t know whether special shows were staged for women, as later became common with film screenings) and that the crowd included both Indians as well as Swahilis. The women’s roles were played by boys. The performances were long—with the first evening’s show beginning at 9 P.M. and ending at nearly 3 A.M. The atmosphere was raucous, with much audience applause and engagement. Most importantly, the brief write-up in the newspaper underscores that, at least among the Indians in Mombasa of the time, theater performances were prevalent and not infrequent and isolated events.58

Literature, particularly poetry, was also recognized as a privileged site of recording the highest achievements of individuals, and it is thus no accident that the earliest Asian literary text on record in East Africa is a poem written by Roshan, a railway worker, in honor of Lt. Colonel J. H. Patterson, who is credited with having killed the man-eating lions at Tsavo. Dated January 29, 1899, around the time of Patterson’s resignation from the service and his departure, the Urdu poem sings his praises and bemoans the departure.59 Commemorative poems such as these played a significant role in the Indian community in East Africa.⁶⁰ For instance, the visit of Prince Gaikwad, the brother of the maharaja of Baroda, who came to Kenya on a hunting expedition in September 1912, called for such composition. The Indian community made much of this royal visit, the press reporting on the prince’s itinerary with extended coverage of the various social receptions held in his honor. A poem authored by “J.M.G.” appeared in a Supplement to the Indian Voice, and it gives some insight at the very least into the author’s if not the community’s take on the significance of the royal visit for East Africa. Billed as the first visit of Indian royalty to East Africa, the poet insists that the visit will promote interest in the region among other Indians and will result in more such visitations. Addressing East Africa, the poet writes, “Thus will thy fame be surely made, / The foundation of thy celebrity truly laid; / Rajahs and Princes from the Eastern clime, / Will honour thy shores from time to time.” For this to happen successfully, however, in a problematic trope that was to become familiar in subsequent Asian writing in East Africa, a slumbering Africa must wake up and play the role of seductress: “Awake, East Africa, now is thy time, / Bewitch thy tourists from the Eastern clime, / Gird up thy loins, stir up thy charms, / Provide amusement to the Prince’s arms” (“Advance East Africa”). Such African hospitality is taken to further sacrificial extremes in a verse drama, “Message from the Prince,” composed by the same author and published a few weeks later in another Supplement to the Indian Voice. Here the setting is Mombasa, and the occasion is the anxious wait for the prince’s return from the hunting expedition on which he had embarked over a month earlier. A messenger finally arrives from the interior with news that the prince and his party are alive and well and that their hunting has been bountiful. In no small part this success is because, the poem tells us, the Elephant King has declared to his subjects: “Throw open the gates of our Kingdom wide, / Not a single specie [sic] of our wealth thou shall hide, / It shall never be said that our Royal Guest, / Was treated by us as we treat all the rest.” In both these poems the vision of Africa as the ultimate playground for Indian male fantasies is left entirely unchecked, and it is perhaps in recognition of this that the newspaper’s editor, in publishing the verses, also warily notes, “For this ebullition the Editor is not responsible.”⁶¹

But, if poetry was the vehicle for exalted expressions, it was also the means to express pent-up anger and frustration on the part of Indians who felt that they had been cheated or exploited by the system of labor that had recruited them. A poem appearing in the Indian Voice on April 19, 1911, entitled “To Africa” and signed “by a disgusted Indian clerk on retiring from the service of the Railway,” is written either by or in the voice of someone who clearly had had a rough time in Africa. The harsh tone speaks to the labor conditions of Indians on the railways, ending on a parting note: “But I must surely leave and see thee no more, / As soon as my three years penance is o’er, / In my native home I would rather be, / a beggar, than here a Monarchy.”62 The poem seems to have generated at least passing interest among readers, since the following week a column, “An Appreciation,” on the poem appeared in the Indian Voice speaking to its merits. Unconcerned with the negative portrayal of Africa, the commentator noted that the “short piece of poetry is full of plays of irony, humour, wit, beauty and other merits that come under the head of versification.” Linking the poet to the long tradition of British poetry (Browning, Byron, Milton, Spencer, and Dryden are all cited), the major concern of the commentator was not the thematic particularities of the poem, but rather what he considered to be its stylistic excellence. And such literary excellence on the part of an Indian, suggested the commentator, deserves to be noticed in a world in which “ability beneath the dark skin is regarded as the height of presumption.”⁶³ In retrospect it seems clear that, at least among the readership of the Indian Voice, claims not only to literacy but, moreover, to literary ability were integral in making an argument for political recognition in a racially hierarchized colonial setting.

Even this brief glance at literary and theatrical activities in East Africa suggests that contrary to popular conceptions, Asians were not uninterested in the imaginative life in the first half of the twentieth century. What is true, however, is that most of the literary work was inward looking, oriented toward its own community, and not, as Naipaul would have it, a song sung for the attention of other communities in order to advocate for its pressing issues. Indeed, it was precisely such a shift in focus that the South African Indian author P. S. Joshi appealed for in a similar literary context, when, as conference chair of the first annual conference of the South African Non-European Arts Congress held in Johannesburg in 1945, he remarked: “What we really need at present is a literature by Non-Europeans endowed with a feeling for the sufferings of their people, we need authors to write about Indian, Cape Coloured, Malay, and Bantu life. We need artists who could faithfully and vividly depict the life of the suffering humanity in South Africa. We need intellectuals who could create an impression on the world by their literary achievements. We need a Booker T. Washington or a Rabindranath Tagore to focus world attention on our sufferings, aspirations and ideals.”⁶⁴

Such a focus on the sufferings, aspirations, and ideals of the newly emerging postcolonial African nations was central to mission of the Ugandan journal Transition. Founded by Rajat Neogy, a young Ugandan of Bengali origin in 1961, Transition by all accounts soon became one of the most vibrant cultural journals in Anglophone Africa. The journal staged some of the liveliest debates between authors who were often prodded by Neogy to be provocative and the all-too-often scandalized but nevertheless devoted readership. Including contributors of all races, writing from within Africa but also from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Transition flirted with controversy until it fell victim to its own political risk taking. On October 18, 1968, Neogy was arrested and charged with sedition for publishing in his journal an article by M.P. Abu Mayanja and an anonymous letter by a university student, both of which were critical of Uganda’s ongoing constitutional reforms. Acquitted by the court but continuing to be detained under emergency powers, Neogy was later stripped of his Ugandan citizenship, which the authorities claimed was found to be “irregular.” If Neogy’s statelessness was symptomatic of what would later happen to a number of other Asians under Idi Amin’s regime, he was unwittingly caught in a different global struggle between the superpowers. Without his own knowledge, Transition was financed for a number of years by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that was later found to be a front for the CIA. Despite his protests that he had no knowledge of this linkage, and despite the fact that there was no evidence that the CIA had any role in the editorial decisions or content of the journal, Neogy and Transition never fully recovered from these revelations. Rendered stateless and vulnerable to further arrests and detentions, Neogy left Uganda a broken man, and, after reestablishing Transition in Accra, he eventually handed over the editorship of the journal to Wole Soyinka.65

There have been many developments on the East African literary landscape since the early years of Transition, but, in our conceptions of the growth of Asian literary traditions in particular, we should remain alert to some of the gaps that exist even as we relate the post-1960s narrative.⁶⁶ For instance, while increasing scholarly attention has been paid to East African Asian fiction written in the English language, the literary production of Asians in both Swahili and Indian languages has received less scrutiny. It is worth remembering that the first published Swahili-Gujarati dictionary, Alidina Somjee Lilani’s 1890 A Guide to the Swahili Language in Gujarati Characters, was, as the subtitle suggested, “chiefly for the use of Indians having relations with Zanzibar,” but, the author hoped, would also be of value to the occasional “Englishman who cares to master the sounds of the Gujarati characters.”⁶⁷ The educational inspector in Kutch, Dalpatram Khakar, endorsed the publication as a sign of the growing commercial interest of Indians in East Africa, calling for further books on “the trade of Africa, and the way in which it can be carried on successfully by our people” (12). Explicitly utilitarian in its interests, the invocation of the image of the Englishman learning Gujarati through the mediation of this Swahili dictionary nevertheless suggests that Lilani harbored a more fertile communicative desire than sheer mechanical interest in a mercantile process.

Some East African Asians have also on occasion taken up the Swahili language for literary purposes. Sadru Kassam’s play Bones, for instance, appeared in an edited collection entitled Short East African Plays in English, but was in fact originally written in Swahili and translated for the collection by the playwright.68 Again, in his overview of Indian contributions to Swahili literature, Abdulaziz Lodhi notes that Poems from Kenya by Ahmed Nassir was originally composed in Swahili. Other Asians who have published in Swahili include Farouk Topan, who, in addition to editing two collections of Swahili poetry, wrote two satirical plays, Mfalme Juha in 1971 and Aliyeonja Pepo in 1973. Lodhi himself published a book of Kiswahili poems in 1986 entitled Tafkira.⁶⁹

Writing and performance in Indian languages has also, for the most part, remained under the radar. Vanoo Jivraj Somia’s A History of the Indians in East Africa is a work of an organic intellectual writing a communal history that at times risks overt flattery. Nevertheless, Somia’s position as an active member of the community allows him to share details of the literary accomplishments of some of his peers that have been completely overlooked by literary historians. For instance, he writes of Tulsidas Purushottam Suchak, who wrote a well-received Gujarati play, Somnathne Khole (“On the lap of Somnath”), first published in 1967 and reprinted in 1999; Jagdish Dave, “an expert in Gujarati language and literature,” who published a number of books and poems; Vinay Jivanlal Brahmabhatt, the son of the Gujarati section editor of the Kenya Daily Mail, who wrote award-winning short stories in Gujarati; Shantshila Keshubhai Gajjar, author of a number of short stories, who, after moving to Britain, was “the first Indian woman to edit and publish a women’s quarterly in Gujarati under the title of ‘Sangna’ (meaning companion or female friend), in the Western world.” Among the other women writers mentioned by Somia are Kamala Chunilal Nathwani, Kusumben Ishwarlal Popat, Nirmalaben Bhatt, and Gulsham Ahmed.⁷⁰