This chapter and the two that follow are interested in individual narratives and the local knowledges that they produce. Reading lives at this scale considerably muddies the general categories within which we think and narrate histories. It also muddies the political and ethical stakes that often, implicitly if not explicitly, frame our historical narratives—the closer we examine individual lives, the harder it often gets to sort out those that might seem to us to be ethically exemplary from those that seem less so. In the texts I examine, we will encounter individuals who were allied with the British colonial enterprise but were also, at the same time, social activists; we will meet individuals who became fabulously rich, but who also engaged in social welfare and philanthropy; and, finally, we will meet individuals whose personal economic interests were jeopardized by the nationalization of their enterprises, but who nevertheless lent support to the socialist ideals of their time.
My concern with these narratives is twofold. I am interested, of course, in what light they may shed on the diversity of the Indian experience in twentieth-century East Africa, but I am also keen on reading these texts as narratives, as stories that the authors have told not only to their potential readers but also to themselves. In his magisterial study Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor has reminded us that “one is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it.”1 If so, I am interested in examining the nature and extent to which Indians enacted “relational selves” in East African contexts.2 How did they imagine themselves vis-à-vis the others that surrounded them? How do relational identities emerge in these texts, and what are the moral and ethical stakes attached to them? How do individuals negotiate the multiple layers of possible identification in any given context—when, for example, does one identify as a Parsi as opposed to an Indian, as an Indian as opposed to a British subject, as a Brahmin as opposed to a Hindu, as a younger brother as opposed to a sibling, as an Indian migrant in East Africa as opposed to a settled Kenyan?
In this chapter I focus on two early twentieth-century travelers, Ebrahimji Adamji and Sorabji Darookhanawala, who both undertook journeys into the East African interior. My reading of their narratives attempts to foreground the ways in which ethnicity is configured through a performance of identity that is structured both through social norms as well as through willful personal determination.3 Adamji’s narrative mediates between the ethical imperatives of a Muslim upbringing and the learned environment of a Christian schooling. It also negotiates between the relatively less empowered position of a young adult in the Bohra community and the aspirational desires of a businessman whose family is at risk of losing social standing. Social and family etiquette demands from Adamji a certain respect for his elder brothers, but his own impatience with their incompetence surfaces at several points in the narrative and ultimately, I suggest, results in it remaining unpublished in his lifetime. Adamji’s text provides a glimpse of the Indian community’s expectations of hospitality in early twentieth-century East Africa and it also showcases the widening circles of ethnic affiliations that sometimes inform the ways in which people decide on the company they keep. In the context of later accusations of exclusivity that were made against the community, Adamji’s text allows for a more intimate understanding of how early travelers to the interior negotiated a sense of belonging in spaces that were alien to them. The text is of significance as well because it is written by a failed merchant. While the dominant trope associated with Asian enterprise is indeed one of commerce as romance, here, in Adamji’s case, commerce is the distinct site of depression and potential failure.
Sorabji Darookhanawala’s text is noteworthy for the ways in which it performs an exceptionalist ethnic identity, presenting the Parsi community as “not-quite” Indian even though it is commonly read as such. The text anticipates by several decades Homi Bhabha’s late-twentieth-century reflection on the colonized subject “as almost the same but not quite,” while engaging in acts of racial passing meant at once to impress darker subjects (both Indian and African) incapable of such passing and to point to the ultimate futility of the political possibilities of such passing.4 At the same time that it cultivates an assimilationist space in the project of British colonialism, the text also registers an Indian exceptionalism—modernity in Africa, Darookhanawala argues, might best be delivered not by the British colonizers but by Indian commercial men. As we will see in the chapters that follow, this protectionism of the British state and its reluctance to allow the economy to be run on the principles of the free market was echoed in many ways by the postcolonial states as well—in the case of Kenya, for instance, through import restrictions and in Tanzania through a managed economy. While a few entrepreneurs found themselves benefiting from such an economy (because they worked in industries that were protected from import competition), many found the restrictions of the market a challenge.
TWO INDIAN TRAVELLERS, EAST AFRICA, 1902–1905
In 1997 the Friends of Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa published an important volume entitled Two Indian Travellers, East Africa, 1902–1905, edited by Cynthia Salvadori and Judy Aldrick. The volume included two narratives by Indian men, one traveling from Mombasa to Uganda in 1902 and the other making five journeys to the East African interior between 1902 and 1905. As such, they are the earliest known travel accounts by Indians into the interior and an invaluable lens for our reimagining of the Indian encounter with Africa and Africans. Remarkably though, despite their narrative interest, the accounts have received little to no commentary by critics, save the rich editorial documentation by Salvadori and Aldrick that accompanied their publication.5 A comparative reading of these two texts allows for a closer look at the ways in which religious orientation, class standing, age, and ethnic identification can influence the experience of travel, so that two individuals who may otherwise seem to share a common national identity (“Indian” or “Hindustani”) may nevertheless experience their journeys in remarkably different ways.
The journeys undertaken by the two travelers followed the same route on the train and similar routes from the Kisumu terminal. To the best of our knowledge, their accounts were written almost contemporaneously. Africa in Darkness by Sorabji M. Darookhanawala, was published in Bombay in Gujarati in 1905. By the time the text was published, Darookhanawala, who was in his late fifties, had already died. While Darookhanawala actively edited his text for publication before his death, what efforts the author of the second text, Ebrahimji Noorbhai Adamji, made to publish his account remain unclear. Adamji’s My Journeys to the Interior saw its first publication as an English translation (from Gujarati) in the collection edited by Salvadori and Aldrick. In the meantime, from the period during which it was penned—most likely around 1905—until it was published in translation, it lay among the family papers of Adamji’s son Abdulhussein in its original manuscript form, written in a ledger. The single surviving copies of each of these texts are in the private possession of family heirs, thus they are only available to us mediated by translation. Furthermore, in the case of Darookhanawala’s text in particular, we are told the editors took the liberty of reorganizing its contents, making it into “a more cohesive account” (106). Fortunately, the editors were meticulous in reprinting the table of contents from the original version, enabling us to reconstruct the narrative as the author first presented it.
Let us begin with the preliminaries. Who were these individuals—Adamji and Darookhanawala? Ebrahimji Adamji was the youngest of four brothers of a prominent Muslim Bohra merchant family in Mombasa. Having made their fortune by supplying British troops with rations during their war against the Nandi in 1897–98, Adamji’s family had begun trading in ivory and financing the transportation of goods to and from the interior.6 Following the general practice of Indian merchants at the time, the family partnered with two Baluchi men to conduct the actual trade into the interior, financing their travels and equipping them with trade goods to be later remunerated in the form of ivory.7 The immediate context of Adamji’s travel to the interior was the family’s fear that the two Baluchis had absconded with their assets, leaving them with a significant financial loss of around forty-five thousand rupees. As the narrative indicates, while his first visit was in search of the potentially lost family assets, Adamji’s return trips to the interior were engendered by a newly acquired desire for travel itself. Adamji, it is important to note, was a young man of about eighteen when he undertook his first expedition to the interior, and by the time he writes his narrative, after four more trips to the interior, he is no more than twenty-one years old. Clearly immersed in the everyday prayers and rituals of his Muslim upbringing, as one of the first generation of Indian schoolboys in Mombasa to attend the secondary school set up for Arab and Indian boys by the Church Missionary Society in 1894, at key junctures in his narrative Adamji inserts moral codes that he has picked up from his Christian teachers. Thus, for instance, he notes at the outset of his narrative the “saying in English” that “Occupation brings enjoyments” (13), a conception of self that pervades the entire trajectory of his narrative. Adamji, a fully incorporated member of his Bohra community, is also marked, then, by his Christian education. According to the editors, he is most likely the only member of his immediate family to be fluent in English (5). While he is of Indian heritage, we must remember that he is Mombasa born, and at the time he writes this narrative he has never been to India. When he refers to “home,” then, it most resolutely means the coastal city of Mombasa and not any place in India.
In contrast, Sorabji Darookhanawala was almost fifty-five when he undertook his journey to the interior; unlike Adamji, he was by then a well-traveled man. References to the English Channel suggest that he may have taken at least one trip to Europe, but he most certainly has his feet in both Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Born in India and trained as an engineer, Darookhanawala appears to have moved to Zanzibar in the 1870s to work on one of the sultan’s steamers. He was later promoted to become the first Health Department officer in the sultanate and was responsible for monitoring the sanitation conditions in Zanzibar (185–186). Darookhanawala was a member of the Parsi community, and, as his narrative suggests, this was an identity that was dear to him. Followers of Zoroastrianism, and originally a diasporic community from Persia, the Parsi community had settled in western India in the tenth century. Presenting themselves as cosmopolitan subjects of empire, Parsis embraced a Western sense of modernity during the British Raj and were often regarded by both the British and other Indians as more Westernized.8 In Zanzibar Darookhanawala (hereafter referred to as Sorabji) rose to become a community leader, involving himself in religious affairs and social welfare.9 He soon managed to secure the patronage of the legendary Ismaili entrepreneur Allidina Visram, who was then establishing his empire of trading stores all over the interior. It was Visram who sponsored Sorabji’s 1902 visit, securing help and accommodation for him at various stores along the journey and subscribing in advance to purchase 150 copies of the book that Sorabji pledged to write about his expedition. Thus, unlike Adamji’s narrative, we note that Sorabji’s text comes with an audience already inscribed even before it is written—the audience consists not only of Visram, the main sponsor, but also seventy-five other subscribers in Zanzibar and forty more in Mombasa, all members of an already established or aspiring merchant or professional class. An important aim of Sorabji’s narrative, then, is to report on the conditions of the interior and their conduciveness to further enterprise and trade.
Ebrahimji Adamji writes that his first journey to the interior was made not to “admire nature’s beauty” (13), but rather one borne out of desperation. His elder brother Mohammedali’s failure to recover the family’s assets from the two Baluchi men means that they are faced with a serious financial crisis. Despite his best efforts at persuading his elder brothers to let him undertake the journey into the interior, he is unable to gain their sanction. Adamji is “deeply depressed” by his brothers’ intransigence (15). After Mohammedali undertakes a second trip that is aborted midway because of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Nairobi, Adamji decides to take matters in his own hands and leaves for the interior without telling his family. The narrative of his five trips is certainly one of discovery of new places and experiences, but most importantly it is, as is so often the case with texts about travel, a journey of self-discovery. “Travelling,” writes Adamji in the very first sentence of his narrative, “is like a school and the traveller is like a student” (13). Furthermore, traveling is therapeutic: “During his travels on this earth he learns so much and it brings him so much happiness that he forgets his sorrows during this time. In this happy state he wants to proceed farther and farther and is eager to learn more and more about new and wonderful things” (13).
The relationship that Adamji draws between travel and happiness is a curious one since the tone of the text is overwhelmingly melancholic. Adamji is often prone to depression. At the opening of his narrative his depression is as much rooted in what he perceives as his elder brothers’ lack of confidence in him as it is rooted in his family’s distress over financial matters. An important narratorial imperative, then, is to tell the story of how the author Ebrahimji, the youngest of four brothers, managed to secure the respect and admiration of his elder brothers as well as of his larger community.10 It is, in this sense, a story of coming to maturity and of gaining family and societal respect. Returning to Mombasa after having secured the ivory that earlier eluded the family in the interior, Adamji writes of his brothers, “Their attitude towards me changed. From that day onwards my brothers respected me” (30). Likewise, in the larger community, “my name was spoken with respect. … They regarded me as definitely clever and courageous to have undertaken such a dangerous journey on my own” (30). But, if there is a sense of accomplishment at this moment in the text, Adamji remains till the end of his narrative insecure about the leverage he has with his brothers and continues to remain sensitive to the larger community’s reading of his family enterprise. He cannot, for instance, persuade his brothers to stop engaging in the ivory trade, and his many warnings that the trade was becoming increasingly risky land on deaf ears. We know from both textual as well as extratextual sources that the Adamji ivory trading enterprise did indeed fail and that the family had to find other means of livelihood. In the text the scene of failure is present but understated. Returning to Mombasa from one of his trips to Kisumu, Ebrahimji is accompanied by his brother Mohammedali to the offices of Messrs. Hansing and Co. where he is instructed by his brother to sign any documents that he is given without bothering to read them. The dutiful younger brother does as instructed and notes, “As we were returning home, my brother Mohammedali told me that they were the official documents of all our property. I felt very sad about it but nothing could be done”(58). The family firm is here being liquidated and Ebrahimji Adamji will, we know from extratextual sources, use his knowledge of English to go on to become the Mombasa representative for the British firm Whiteaways, the John White Shoe Company, and other English firms (77).
From the beginning of the narrative to its end, the family’s financial woes have a profound effect on Adamji. At one point he claims that he “can’t write any more about this subject because I find it painful” (16). He claims that “there is no disease as bad as depression” (13) and adds that when he contemplates the vicissitudes of life he feels so bitter that “even my pen stops writing” (13). It is through travel that Adamji seeks a cure, a more hopeful take on life, and, if the various triumphs in securing ivory bring cheer and light to his otherwise anxious persona, it is the company he keeps on his various journeys that sustains him. The narrative presents a fascinating array of both personal choices on the part of Adamji as well as socially accepted codes of association and obligation that are worth noting. In Adamji’s view, for travel to be pleasurable it must be conducted with fellow travelers, preferably those with whom one already shares a set of beliefs, dispositions, and tastes or those whose lives and careers one aspires to emulate. On his first journey, the one he has embarked on without telling his family, he is relieved to find two fellow Bohra men in the same train compartment and pleased that at least one of them will make the journey up to Kiu, a station almost three-quarters of the way to Nairobi. On the second journey he sets out with the Baluchi man Shambe bin Abdulla, who will act as his trading agent in the interior and who has been equipped for this role with a number of items for trade purchased by the Adamji family. They have each bought tickets for third-class travel, but, by the middle of the journey, Ebrahimji manages to secure for himself an “upgrade” to second class thanks to the invitation of an elderly Bohra man who, along with three other men, has a reserved a second-class compartment. The interpersonal performances of etiquette involved here, and the manner in which they evolve from station to station as the men journey onward, is a particularly engaging (and socially instructive) experience for the reader. Adamji, who has met the four gentlemen at the original point of departure at Mombasa, prearranges for some mangoes and tender coconuts to be delivered to Mazeras station. He is approached by one of the younger men in the party to see if the latter can purchase some coconuts. Adamji says that they are not for sale, but after keeping a couple for himself, he sends the rest with the young man for the “Seths” (a term of respect for elderly, usually wealthy, gentlemen). A few stations later, Adamji is summoned by one of the gentlemen, who invites him to sit with them in their compartment. When the train reaches Voi around dinnertime, a crucial decision must be made—should Adamji return to his compartment for his meal or should he stay? As the narrative suggests, this is no small matter given the symbolic role of communal meals in the society and the performative role they play in enacting social hierarchies. “These Seths,” writes Adamji, “urged me to eat with them, so I accepted and sat down to have my meal with them. The reason I did not make a fuss was that although I was young and alone, I was the son of a businessman too. I did not demur further out of courtesy, for had I protested further, they would have said ‘this Bohra boy is being arrogant.’ So I respectfully accepted their invitation to dinner” (34). Notice here the societal expectation that a young man such as Ebrahimji should demur from sharing a meal with such important men as the Seths. Notice, too, how by not refusing, Ebrahimji is enacting his privileged position of being the “son of a businessman,” a position unavailable to his Baluchi companion, who, we must remember, has been left behind in the third-class compartment (giving the lie, incidentally, to Adamji’s statement that he [Adamji] is “alone”). The saga of invitations and demure acceptance continues into the journey; Adamji returns to his third-class compartment after dinner and spends the night “sitting up, dozing on the hard bench” (34). However, once the train reaches Nairobi and one of the four travelers disembarks, Adamji is acutely aware of the potential of securing a spot in the second-class compartment: “So instead of four there were three in their compartment. So it was possible for them, if they wanted, to invite a fourth passenger into their compartment” (34). Will they or won’t they? The invitation does not come forth immediately, undoubtedly to Adamji’s disappointment, but after a suitable interval at the Kikuyu station he is summoned by Seth Mohammedali, who says: “‘My son, stay here with us.’ So, again, without demurring, I accepted his invitation and thanked him for looking after my well being” (34).
I have dwelt on this story at some length because it demonstrates the notions of hospitality and patronage that Indians in East Africa, and indeed elsewhere, had assimilated as part of their social upbringing, especially when Adamji lived, but also, in many cases, for generations after. Throughout the narrative there are instances where the obligations of hospitality come as foremost priorities, even when the guest (such as Adamji) may have come for the purpose of securing an outstanding debt from the host. Oftentimes, while business and trade are clearly on everyone’s mind, no mention is made of such matters until the guest has been served food (often on a communal plate to be shared with the host) and tea (preferably with a milk base rather than water) and has had a chance to bathe and rest. Business propositions and discussions can only take place afterward, and in Adamji’s narrative they often take place in the context of a walk to the local bazaar that is both social as well as trade related. Over and over again we are told of the number of shops in the area, the exact ownership details, and the current state of the business. Greetings from friends and news of other places and people is often the primary glue of conversations, but the stores also serve as protobanks, where advances of money can be sought on a credit note written to a branch of the store in Mombasa, or money can be handed over for safekeeping, which may be collected later from a store branch on the coast. In lieu of credit notes, immediate partnerships can also be made, as Adamji does on one occasion with the agent of Allidina Visram in Kisumu. Here Adamji invites the agent to purchase half a consignment of ivory that has arrived on a caravan led by Adamji’s Baluchi debtor, thus making available the cash needed to pay for the transportation permits and the porters (28–29).
Ethnic identifications are central to the orbit of hospitality and often (though not always) to the choice of companionship. The narrative demonstrates this quite well in the concentric circles of ethnic identification that Adamji and his fellow travelers inhabit. Thus, for instance, note this passage about a train journey from Mombasa to Kisumu: “There was a Lohana in my Compartment who had also boarded the train at Mombasa and was going to Kisumu. I did not know anyone so I went and sat with him at the station” (21). Or again, “Because there were no Bohras in Machakos, I went to stay at Khoja Dhalla Esmail’s place” (68). In both instances, the suggestion is that in the absence of the immediately proximate identity marker—in this case “Bohra”—the traveler will choose to associate with the next available order of ethnic identification. While the choice of traveling companionship may well be a matter of Adamji’s personal dispositions, the narrative suggests that the codes of hospitality that were expected of Indians wherever they found themselves in the East African landscape were socially structured. When a stranger came into town, he could expect to receive hospitality from either a close business associate or a member of his own immediate community (say a Bohra or a Lohana). If no such person could be found, then he would seek hospitality from the next order of identification—in most cases, religion. We see this in the case of Adamji’s first unannounced visit to Kisumu in the middle of the night when he runs into Khoja Ladha, an accountant working for the firm of Allidina Visram. Adamji writes that as soon as Ladha learns that he has no place to stay, “he at once ordered, in their Cutchi language, another Khoja young man to take this Bohra, that is me, to the shop” (22). In the context of a newly founded town such as Nairobi where the railhead had reached barely four years earlier, the narrative gives us a glimpse of a prototypical hotel on the premises of A. M. Jivanji’s godown and bungalow. There is no direct reference to a monetary transaction involved in such stays, but the language invites us to speculate on this possibility: “These rooms were a great convenience to travellers. There were always anywhere from five to eleven lodgers there from different places such as Kiu, Kitui, Muranga and Mombasa,” observes Adamji. “They took special pains to try to satisfy the needs of various types of travellers staying in their guest rooms” (41–42).
And what of travels to areas where there might be no Indians at all? Here we see Adamji taking refuge in “native” huts and trading with Africans for perishables such as “milk, carrots, maize and chickens” (38). At times he prefers staying in the African homes to putting up the canvas tent that he carries. Unlike the hospitality offered by business partners and fellow Indians in the more remote areas for which no money is directly exchanged, the use of the African homes often accompanies a trade transaction between Adamji and the host in question. With the exception of one incident with a man from Kavirondo who is suspicious and hostile toward him (his suspicion most likely rooted in the fact that Adamji and his party have approached him after dark in search of a caravan—nightfall being often associated in East African societies with nefarious activities), all the other exchanges that Adamji reports with Africans come across as relatively benign and friendly ones. This should not suggest that the exchanges are in any way unproblematic or that we can’t discern traces of Adamji’s relative position of privilege in them. After all, one need only point to the many porters that Adamji employs over his travels and remember the harsh conditions of labor this entailed.11 Nor is the conversation that Adamji reports between himself and one of his African hosts on the matter of clothing and nakedness devoid of a certain ethnocentrism on Adamji’s part (37). Nevertheless, remembering Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of European travel narratives in Africa as arising in the context of the “reconception of Africans as a market rather than as a commodity,”12 one might argue that the tenor of the conversation and Adamji’s own advocacy of clothing comes across more as a matter between a trader and a potential customer—of Adamji trying to create a new market for cloth among uninterested Africans, than it does of missionary zeal.13 Then again, it is entirely possible that, despite his conversation with his host, the single young Bohra man, arriving from a coastal society that has a very conservative dress code, is not too disturbed by the healthy nudity that surrounds him. The following narration certainly suggests so: “Many native men and women were bathing completely naked in this river which is called the Aswadera. One young healthy Kavirondo woman came and stood next to us. Alibhai Dalal asked her politely, ‘Maber?’ which means how are you? She replied, ‘Maber kende,’ which means, ‘very well’ and then she said he was very clever” (45).14
Adamji’s relations with most of the Africans he meets are cordial if not friendly, and his relations with Europeans are of a similar order. As we see in his meeting with Dr. MacDonald on the banks of the Wadera River, most of the conversation, which incidentally is conducted in Kiswahili, after the British doctor has offered him and his companion some milk, amounts to small talk. On one of his later train journeys, having repeatedly turned down an invitation from a couple of Bohra acquaintances to join them in their compartment so as not to be a burden on them, Adamji eventually gives in to his ethnic associational sensibilities: “In my compartment there were some Greeks and Europeans so I preferred to sleep in Ebrahimji’s compartment” (67). Adamji’s choice to sleep in the compartment with the Bohras rather than the Europeans is of note here, especially in the context of his prior exposure to Europeans—unlike many members of his community, Adamji, we recall, has had a European missionary schooling, and, as the liberal use of the English language in the text suggests, language itself would not have been a barrier. Nevertheless, unlike Sorabji Darookhanawala, who we will soon see, enjoys the company of Europeans, Adamji tends to be most comfortable in the midst of those he finds most familiar. Such familiarity of experience is most often religiously based, but not always so. The Swahili language offers an important point of commonality, and it is a language that we hear used in the narrative among traders of Indian origin who may or may not share a common Indian language. While his ethnicity is never specified, at one point in the narrative Adamji writes of securing as a travel companion a man born in Mombasa who can speak fluent Kiswahili. Adamji bonds with him immediately: “He was like a brother to me”(54), claims Adamji, suggesting that for him social identities are based not only on national or racial identities but on culturally shared codes of experience.
We cannot be certain as to why Ebrahimji Adamji’s narrative was never published, and whether or not this had to do with the author’s own sense of social propriety. One plausible reason may lie in Adamji’s conflicted feelings toward his elder brothers. Social propriety and accepted age hierarchies mean that the author remains a dutiful younger brother. Nevertheless, throughout the narrative Adamji’s displeasure and sometimes even contempt for his brothers does not escape the reader’s attention. For instance, referring to the Baluchi Hasham who has safeguarded some ivory belonging to the Adamji family, ivory that the elder brother Mohammedali had failed to secure, Adamji writes, “As he was talking he must have realized that I was not like my brother [Mohammedali]. There was no doubt that I was clever, generous and courageous” (24). Earlier, referring to the same failure on Mohammedali’s part, the author notes of his brother and his Baluchi companion, “They were so scared that neither of them even made any inquiries, they just ran away like children. They did not try to accomplish even a little of what they had been told to do”(15). At yet another point in the narrative, when his own path crosses his brother Abdulhussein’s during a trip, the tone is one of mild irritation. Here one can see the truth of the claim often made about the motivations for travel—even in the context of a socially needy individual such as Adamji—travel is at one level about getting away from family and all the strictures that family relations entail.15 In many ways the writing of the narrative is for Adamji a “working out” of his feelings toward his brothers, and, while he continues to follow the proper codes of respect toward his elder brothers, his narrative comes across as an “I told you so” statement to the brothers who have refused to follow his business advice. One can only speculate that the author, recognizing this tension, may have ultimately chosen to keep the account private.
That the book was not in fact published during the author’s lifetime does not mean that it wasn’t intended to be published or otherwise circulated when it was first written. There is sufficient textual evidence to make this claim. For instance, at one point in the narrative when Adamji discloses that he had regretted his purchase of unsatisfactory merchandise from a fellow Bohra merchant who had pushed a hard sell, he is careful not to name the merchant (31). In other instances, Adamji’s text often reads like a public acknowledgment and note of thanks to all the individuals who have lent him support on his travels. Here, too, the narrative is self-conscious about its framing—on the one hand Adamji wants to register his gratitude, on the other he is careful not to seem to indulge in flattery : “I am not flattering or praising anyone unduly when I say that Seth A. M. Jivanjee and Co. went out of their way to look after the best interests and comforts of all Bohra travellers” (41). If flattery of others is unbecoming in such a narrative, so is self-praise. Adamji’s text betrays a deep anxiety about seeming to be boastful even when the form and structure of the narrative—that of a triumphant return with a prize that others have sought and failed to obtain—are predicated on precisely such boastfulness. Thus, when on his first journey Adamji is accompanied by a gentleman who likes to talk about his own accomplishments, Adamji comes up with what we might consider to be a vernacular theory of autobiography. Reminding his readers that great men never boast about themselves, just as diamonds do not proclaim their value, Adamji notes that “it is wrong to boast and praise yourself all the time” (19).
Yet, the narrative is all about self-praise. Adamji’s way of mediating this tension is in keeping with the larger community’s assessment of the relationship between human agency and God’s will. In a telling discussion of the phenomenal success of a fellow businessman, a discussion one imagines must have been held with at least a twinge of envy, Adamji writes, “We started talking about Alibhai Mulji Jivanji Karachiwala who was known as A. M. Jivanji & Co. God had helped him make millions in a short time. It is not surprising because God has the power to do whatever he wishes to do. He made Alibhai a millionaire and there is nothing unbelievable or surprising about it because God’s powers belong to God” (17). Jivanji is the passive receptacle of divine benevolence here—he has little to no agency. How are we to read this?—if God was good to Jivanji, he may also decide to be good to us? Or, if Jivanji is so successful, don’t think that it is because he is smarter or better than us but rather because it is God’s will? Or, instead, if we ourselves don’t make it big, it isn’t because there is anything inherently wrong with us but because it is God’s will? Whatever the formulation, the undercurrents of each of them percolate at various points in Adamji’s narrative. In terms of his own successes from time to time, Adamji can at once point liberally to them and insist that they are really the will of God. “I thanked God again and again. You need God’s blessing in everything you do. … All that I have written about myself is nothing but the truth. I have not written this to praise myself. I have written truthfully, describing what actually happened. I know it is bad taste to praise oneself. I have written this [account] because it is the truth, not to boast about myself” (31). This then, is in keeping with the larger moral that Adamji’s narrative wants to make, a moral that welds together the work ethic that Adamji associates with his missionary schooling (with its emphasis on occupation and the dangers of idleness) and the emphasis on God’s will that he inherits from his Islamic background. Thus, “if things still go wrong after careful thinking and hard work, then you can blame fate. You can’t blame fate if you don’t work. It is true that you cannot fight fate but it is wrong to fold your arms and do nothing and then blame your destiny” (32).
In contrast to Adamji’s more personal and family-driven narrative, Sorabji Darookhanawala’s text reads as a manifesto for modernity. As such, it draws on the preexisting figuration of Africa that pervaded both the European as well as the Indian imagination of the time. Africa is seen as primitive, in need of civilization and light, and the text is an early instantiation of the struggle between European and Indian claims of modernity. In translating the original title Andarama Rahelo Africa as Africa in Darkness, the editors risk evacuating a significant rhetorical claim being made here—a more accurate translation would be In Darkness Remains Africa, a title that clearly points to what Sorabji Darookhanawala sees as the hitherto incomplete project of modernity engaged in by the British, a project that he claims may better be completed by his fellow Indians. While he remains a loyal subject of the British empire, gifting, for instance, new clothes to young Gikuyu children at the Roman Catholic Mission in celebration of King Edward VII’s coronation day (127), or approving the imperial project of Britain in the Transvaal and elsewhere (162), he is critical of what he sees as the inadequate development of East Africa on the part of the British. Everywhere he goes—from the small town of Jomvu near Mombasa where he finds high-quality clay that can be made into roof tiles and utensils, to the river banks in Nairobi where the land yields potatoes, vegetables, and barley, which could be further developed to cultivate wheat and cotton, to the highlands of Kenya where he finds the soil to be unmatched in its fertility—Sorabji sees missed opportunities and fortunes waiting to be made. He wants the colonial government to reduce the tariffs on the railway so more people can use it for commercial gain (129) and he insists that developing agricultural production and mining in Kenya could rocket the country to an enviable economic state. “This country,” writes Sorabji, “could supply enough cotton for England, and by so doing would give a great blow to the American cotton trade, and this place would prosper” (127). The greatest hurdles to such prosperity, Sorabji notes, are the “strict” and “backwards” rules that the state enforces. “The Government is to be blamed for that. Until a liberal attitude is adopted and experienced officials come to run the Government, the country will suffer. Brave people who want to be adventurous cannot do so until the Government becomes more liberal” (126). Hearkening back to a world of unfettered commerce, much as that outlined in Ghosh’s depiction of the early Indian Ocean trade, Sorabji reads colonialism as a distinct barrier to economic growth and prosperity.
In 1902 Sorabji would have counted himself among such “brave” people whose dreams of prosperity were being thwarted by the state. While, as Robert Gregory has suggested, the white settler claims for exclusivity in the highlands had not yet been fully realized, with Indians being permitted to purchase land as late as 1905, Sorabji nevertheless meets with resistance.16 His efforts at purchasing land near the highland property of a French missionary are frustrated by the commissioner who “was not willing to give that permission as he wished to keep that area reserved for the Europeans. I did not press for my claims. If I had forced him, I could have bought the land but at great expense” (129). Sorabji writes that he is “very much against this treatment of the Indians” (163), but, in keeping with his general disposition of wanting to maintain good relations with Europeans, he feels that it is a pill that for now he must swallow. Interestingly, what irks him more than the ill treatment is the lack of business sense—it is in the government’s interest, he claims, to open up the country for development. It is in the government’s interest to lower the tariff on the railway to a point where it yields a maximum gain: “The English have first right to profit from the railway but the Railway will be useless if there is no way of making a profit” (163), rues Sorabji, recognizing the racist policies that are in direct conflict with a liberal economy. Commenting on the underdevelopment of infrastructure and industry in Uganda, Sorabji angrily notes, “The English have not made any development in the area. They have not improved trade and they have not been able to provide tools for improved farming. The improvements and development depend on the Government which has hardly done its duty. The reason for that may be that the Government wants to improve the area for Europeans only” (149).
The major culprit in this scenario, writes Sorabji, is not British imperial will but rather the bureaucratic “narrow-minded old-fashioned officials” (149) who are sent to govern. In a revealing comment that combines class as well as gender prejudices, Sorabji refers to these officials as “effeminate” and goes on to note that “if the officials are from noble families they rule nobly and the development is greater.” (149) But, claims Sorabji, East Africa has received only commoners as officials, people who engage in petty discriminations based on race. “Their treatment of the natives because they are black and have a different lifestyle is unfair,” he complains, “The able natives are not given a chance to prove themselves because of their colour” (149).
As will become clear a little later, despite his claim on behalf of Africans here, Sorabji is not himself immune to racial prejudice. What I want to observe for the moment, however, is that, despite his resentment of European racism (and his critique of it in a book written in Gujarati and never meant to be translated), Sorabji chooses not to challenge white privilege while he is in East Africa. On the contrary, he often seeks the company of Europeans, and the role they play in his narrative is central to his sense of self. Before setting out on his journey, Sorabji equips himself with letters of introduction to “the Traffic Manager, the Sub-Commissioner, a Dr. French and the French Missionaries Reverend Father” (119), all Europeans who provide him with hospitality and assistance on his travels. Waiting for his luggage to arrive at Voi, he strikes up a conversation with a couple of Greeks and a German trader and arranges to travel with the German to Kilimanjaro. While the trip has to be abandoned because of a luggage delay, Sorabji takes the opportunity to inform his readers about his earlier friendship with a German civil engineer who, he writes, “became so friendly with me that he didn’t like any other companions, he liked my company” (124). This German, Sorabji tells us, believing the latter to be a prosperous man, had been so keen on entering into a business partnership with him that he resigned from his job only to find in Sorabji an uninterested player.17 Sorabji’s trips to the highlands near Kikuyu station are peppered by visits to the French priest Hemery who offers to sell him the land that the commissioner prevents him from buying. Later, when the marine superintendent in Kisumu does not allow Sorabji to travel first class on the government steamer since first-class travel is restricted to government officials, the deputy commissioner of Uganda sends him a message that he can travel the following day on a different government charter. On this voyage across Lake Victoria, Sorabji has the opportunity to befriend the European captain, who, we are told, “came to know that I was a skillful boatman” and thus “became very friendly with me and asked my advice now and then” (141).
Unlike Adamji, then, who, we remember, slips away from his train compartment rather than spend the night with European travelers, Sorabji actively solicits the companionship of Europeans who, for the most part, reciprocate. Situated in a colonially structured world when power was associated with Europe, the depiction of friendly relations with Europeans is meant in this narrative to render Sorabji with a higher authority and status than his less Westernized readers. And, if European companionship accords status, the possibility of passing as European gives the author further cultural capital. There are two spectacular instances in the text where the site of dining presents Sorabji with the opportunity for a European rather than an Indian affiliation. The first is at the train station of Kibos where Sorabji arrives in time for dinner. Tired by now of eating the English food served on the train, he approaches the Hindu stationmaster and asks if he could have some Indian food, for which he is willing to pay any price. “When he saw me in English clothes and speaking perfect English,” writes Sorabji, “he was completely flabbergasted. He did not know what to say. I told him I was a Parsi and would be very happy to eat whatever food he was cooking. After my explanation, he was relieved of his anxiety and gladly set about preparing a meal for me” (131). The element of passing as European in the eyes of the Hindu stationmaster is noteworthy here, but what is even more interesting is what follows. After three hours of cooking, the Hindu returns with “two thalis full of puris with one dollop of chutney on the side,” a meal that Sorabji finds too sweet for his palate. “How could I possibly swallow the stuff! I picked up just one puri, to please him, and then pushed the thali away with my other hand. I could see the distress on his face so I made some lame excuse” (131). If this moment speaks to class privilege (Sorabji the “passibly” European first-class passenger does not really have to be too concerned about offending the stationmaster), it also performs an ethnic distancing in the moment of culinary longing—Sorabji is tired of English food and wants an Indian meal. The Indian meal he is offered is nevertheless one that he finds alien. Sorabji has to take comfort in English food—tea and biscuits and later sardines, jam, and butter (131). What is being dramatized here is the Parsi’s distance from a normative Indianness, and at one point in the narrative Sorabji is quite explicit in articulating it: “The Parsis,” he writes “should not be considered as native Indians but because the Parsis have lived in India for hundreds of years they are taken as natives of India” (165).
A second scene of dining in the text replicates such distancing, except in this new context the immediate “other” is not Indian but African.18 In a description of a visit to an island in Lake Victoria, a description that indulges in the most primitivist stereotypes of “untouched” Africans, Sorabji describes the islanders showing great curiosity over the cooking of the rice and chicken that is being prepared for his meal. He proceeds to describe the scene: “When my food was ready my cook arranged my plate, glass, knife and fork, a bottle of sauce and salt on a mat. They watched all this carefully and were talking amongst themselves. I could not understand what they were saying but I guessed that they were wondering about all the things laid out for eating. When everything was ready, my food was brought to me on a plate. They were fascinated to see me eat with a knife and fork and spoon. About a hundred people assembled to watch me eat” (154). While Sorabji’s “civilized” dining is a spectacle for the islanders on the lake, it is no less a show that he puts on for his Indian readers. The use of a knife, fork, and spoon, not to mention the bottle of sauce on the side, is as alienating an experience for his non-fork-wielding Indian readership as it is for the Africans. Sorabji is calculatingly fashioning himself here in the image of a European rather than an Indian traveler.19
Sorabji’s embrace of Europeans and a Europeanized identity is not disconnected from his own sense of Parsi identity as an exceptional one. Suggesting a typology of ethnicity Sorabji often refers to an individual as a “true” or “typical” Parsi. We learn of the Parsi businessman Kamani who has died in shock and humiliation after his Zanzibar-based enterprise goes bankrupt. Sorabji is quick to assert that even in the midst of his great loss Kamani paid back his investors since, “like a true Parsi,” “he was an honest and admirable businessman who died because of his principles” (173). At another point we are told of a “typical” Parsi man in Nairobi who has come upon some hard financial times because he has been unable to save. “Because a Parsi lives in such a grand style even when he is not earning much, there is no possibility of his saving any money for lean days” (126). What might appear to be a censure here is, in fact, not such at all—for, in accord with the popular imagination of the time, the Parsi is seen here to approximate the European. Unlike the frugal Indian who will make do with less, the Parsi is a consummate spender. Lest there be any doubt about this valence, Sorabji spells it out in another discussion. Referring to the European prejudice against Indians, the author notes, “They have never met a true Parsi, who is always neat and tidy in his habits, who knows how and when to spend money. Some Parsis even surpass the English in the open-handed way they spend their money” (165). Such a manner is in direct contrast to the thrifty habits of even the richest non-Parsi Indian who, writes Sorabji, “is not at all conscious of his physical cleanliness and his clothes are such that if he stands for a short while near you, you do not need to take any medicine to induce vomiting because your stomach heaves with bile” (164–65). Culture, Sorabji suggests, rather than class, separates the Parsi from other Indians since “the life style and way of dressing are the same for the rich and poor Indians” (165). When he goes on to write that “Memons, Bhatias, Khojas and Banias are all alike in their unclean manners” (166), he clearly risks offending the sensibilities of some of his readers and sponsors. Nevertheless, the reformist agenda that drives his text overrides such concerns of patronage. He is unequivocal in his critique and goes to the point of arguing that Indians who do not change their “disgusting habits” (165) should not seek to travel by first- or second-class train compartments, for by doing so “they make life miserable for their [more polished and well groomed] companions” (166).
We do not know, regrettably, how Sorabji’s Gujarati readers took such reformist critique, but we do have some sense from the text as to how at least one African responded to a related reformist attempt on Sorabji’s part. Spending a period of twelve days on the shores of Lake Victoria, Sorabji engaged through interpreters with some local Kavirondo men:
When I was preaching about not going naked I felt that I was doing a very noble thing but as my interpreter was explaining to them what I was saying, one of the elderly men started shaking with rage. He told me that I was a very wicked man to have only seen the nakedness of sex. He said that God had created them naked and they remained naked to please God. He said that he hated people who looked at them with ignorant eyes. He said they were living in family groups and felt perfectly happy being naked, and it was because I was full of lust I covered myself. When the interpreter told me all this, I became pale with shock and shame. I was very embarrassed so I changed the subject. I asked them questions about their customs but they started walking away in anger.
(133)
Unlike Adamji’s casual discussions with Africans about clothing, Sorabji’s self-described “preaching” clearly works on an explicitly articulated and patronizing moral register. The elderly man’s angry response suggests that such conversations are not new to him but rather very familiar. Indeed, the hatred that the elder registers against people who look at his culture with “ignorant eyes” can only be read in the context of the increasing missionary presence and the demands of Western-styled modernity that were already making their mark on the cultures of the area. Despite his own tendency to read the Africans he encounters as living in relatively isolated and “untouched” societies, Sorabji’s engagement with the Kavirondo and other Africans in the interior should be more accurately read as part of a longer history of contact, trade, and cultural interaction.
The Africans we meet in Sorabji’s narrative can be divided into two broad categories—there are those he employs either as porters or as a boat captain and there are those he visits or otherwise attempts to describe in an ethnographic fashion. His relations with the former are often tense, with Sorabji often exceeding the bounds of humane treatment and his laborers responding with subtle or not so subtle resistance. So, for example, he writes at one point of poking the porters who carry him with the end of a stick and threatening to beat them (144). The porters, in turn seem to have a difficult time balancing him—“When they changed sides we were afraid of being toppled so we shouted, but they could not understand our language” (143). The result is that Sorabji—who has specially equipped himself with a bentwood rocking chair that would be perched high above the porters so as to enable him “to observe and enjoy the countryside” as he traveled—is reduced to walking much of the distance alongside the porters. Again, when he charters a dhow on his return trip from Uganda, he and his fellow passengers observe structures that look like minarets on a distant island. Despite the Swahili captain’s assurance that no such minarets exist, Sorabji commands the unwilling captain to sail the dhow to the island. After sailing for a good part of the day and reaching the island, the captain’s position is confirmed since no minarets are to be found. At a later point in the journey, when the captain wants to stay the night on an island rather than moving forward, Sorabji, aware of the fact that the crew may be “tired of rowing and of raising and lowering the sail of the boat” (152), nevertheless commands him to set forth. The tension that continues to develop between Sorabji and the captain and the ways in which the captain tries to outsmart his employer comprise, along with the story of the porters, a textbook case of what James Scott has memorably described as the “Weapons of the Weak.”20
If Sorabji’s relations with the Africans he employs are fraught with tension, his narrative framing of other Africans is in keeping with the split discourse on Africans that he inherits from the European colonial archive. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow identify this split in British writings on Africans as follows: “There are two sets of projections. In one, Africans represent the pejorative negation of all good traits of the British. In this set of images, the African is lewd, savage, instinctual, thoughtless, in short the ‘beastly savage,’ which is by far the most common projection. The other depicts a nostalgic view in which Africans represent the former, now lost, values of the British. Here, the African is the ‘noble savage,’ an image restricted to particular tribes or individuals. As ever, the ‘noble savage’ serves the writer as a critique of his or her own society.”21 Both of these representations make their way into Sorabji’s text.
Salvadori rightly suggests that Sorabji’s narrative is usefully read in the context of the existing European tradition of travel writing as “his writing seems to be loosely based on his familiarity with the books of famous African explorers such as Burton, Speke, Livingstone, and Stanley who had made Zanzibar their base” (101). Indeed, the very first European mentioned in the text is not a personal acquaintance but a colonial statesman and writer. In the preface the author acknowledges his debt to “Mr. Johnston, the Commissioner of Central Africa,” whose book he claims has provided him with useful information about East African wild animals (117–18).22 From Johnston Sorabji derives a classificatory system for distinguishing between various African ethnicities that is based on the racial (and racist) typologies of the day. Sorabji recognizes that the act of classification and distinction renders an authority to the text similar to the authority he claims for himself when he shows that he can appreciate the differences between various kinds of coffee.23
Readers of Africa in Darkness need to exercise some caution in interpreting the text since the valences Sorabji puts on his different depictions of Africans are unfortunately made more difficult by the editorial reordering of his original text when it was translated and published in English. Consider, for instance, his description of the “Manyema” as “man-eating demons” (179). An obsession with alleged cannibalism among the Manyema was a central component of European travel writing and was in keeping with the increasingly prevalent and sensational tales that Hammond and Jablow suggest began to circulate in the mid to late nineteenth century.24 Sorabji’s text clearly drew on this sensationalist archive and presented the Manyema to his readers even though his own travels brought him nowhere near Manyema territory. Why, we might ask, would a travel narrative that purports to tell of the author’s personal encounters include a description of people whose territory the author has never visited? Here, the placement of the discussion of the Manyema in the original text offers a clue since it differs quite significantly from that in the translated text. Whereas the translation groups the discussion along with other “General Impressions” at the end of the book, in the original, the Manyema are the opening salvo—they are our first glimpse of Africa—“There are many incredible and unbelievable events described in old books. Many of them have been exaggerated like stories in the ‘Arabian Nights’ but some of them I can verify from things I have seen with my own eyes in East Africa” (179). Thus begins the original Gujarati text, drawing the reader in, establishing the sense of both mystery and discovery, and soon, in the discussion of the Manyema—of danger. One cannot, as Hammond and Jablow point out, underestimate the “commercial value of literary sensationalism” especially in a travel book that is meant to titillate and seduce its audience. “So valuable an adjunct to the literary tradition was the theme of cannibalism,” write Hammond and Jablow, “that it remained one of the most persistent conventions.”25
Salvadori admits that “at first reading” the discussion of the Manyema “sounds bizarre” but then goes on to explain cannibalism as a product of the devastating violence of the slave trade which Sorabji’s text exposes. Sorabji does not himself make this causal connection, the only explicit connection made in the text between slavery and cannibalism being the story of a Manyema slave woman on the coast who has allegedly “cannibalized her master’s children” (180). Once again, it is important to note that in the original text, this discussion immediately proceeds from the book’s sensationalist opening and is, in fact, far removed from the later discussion of the horrors of slavery. The Gujarati text opens with Manyema cannibalism and closes with Arab brutality. As rendered in the English translation, however, the discussion of Manyema cannibalism (with its specter of the African as primitive and savage), placed toward the end of the narrative, seems at odds with the surrounding text that is concerned with depicting the plight of helpless (and innocent) African slaves brought from the interior.
Thus, just by virtue of their placement in the text, the Manyema end up playing different roles in the Gujarati original and the English translation. The same case may be made about the Masai and the Nandi, who are seen to be “dishonest,” and the Gikuyu whose assessment varies from page to page. But whatever we may make of the specific nature of the ethnic representations, the larger narrative trajectory is, I argue, a movement from what Hammond and Jablow label the “pejorative” projection of Africans to the “nostalgic,” “noble savage” one. Thus, while the Manyema are projected in the pejorative frame, the Kavirondo, despite their anger with him, are presented by Sorabji as “truthful, honest, and God-fearing” (133) Africans who have the utmost “integrity” (132) and a code of ethics that matches the highest principles of “Good Thoughts, Good Words and Good Deeds” (133) of his own Zoroastrian religion. In perhaps the first published commentary on Indian-African marriages in East Africa that is available to us, Sorabji relates a tale intended to showcase the superior virtues of the Kavirondo relative to the Punjabi. The section “A Punjabi’s Marriage with a Kavirondo girl and how it ended” narrates the story of a Punjabi settler who fell in love with a Kavirondo girl and secured permission from her father to marry her. But the Punjabi community finds the marriage unacceptable and threatens to excommunicate him. “Thoroughly intimidated” by his community, the Punjabi returns the young bride to her father who is angered by the Punjabi’s “heartlessness” and “low morals.” Despite the pleas of the Punjabi, who asks his father-in-law to retain the bride price of eight cows, he finds the cows returned outside his shop. Sorabji’s tale here is primarily intended to display the honor of the Kavirondo and, as he puts it, the “goodness of such a tribe” (136), but it also serves in retrospect as a symbolic marker of what was to become one of the major points of contention in the Indian-African cultural encounter—the endurance of endogamy among East African Indians.
If the text positions us to admire the Kavirondo despite their nakedness, by the end of the narrative it is the abject condition of African slaves that most captivates our attention. Here the narrative seeks to foreground the humanity of the slaves and draw attention to the inhumane treatment they have received in the hands of Zanzibari Arabs. The ideological work being done here should come as no surprise. While the author’s feelings toward the horrors of slavery are arguably genuine, they are not untouched by the imperial context that surrounds them. Thus, writes Sorabji of the slaves, “the late Queen Victoria saved them from their miserable life of slavery by making them free with the help of other European countries. The Queen should be blessed for abolishing slavery from this world” (171). The author’s own loyalist position may have interfered here with his ability to question whether factors other than the abolition of slavery may also have motivated British intervention, but what is even more striking in the discussion is the lack of any mention of Indian involvement. While the nature and extent of such involvement in the actual trade has been the subject of some debate, there is no question that Indians were, at the very least, slave owners.26 Even though slavery as an institution was not abolished in Zanzibar until 1897, the active sale of slaves was prohibited by law in 1873. Sorabji’s first arrival in Zanzibar around the late 1870s would have come in the wake of the closure of the Zanzibar Slave Market in 1873, the same year that the British began to enforce criminal charges against any Indians engaging in the trade. Earlier, in 1860, about six thousand slaves belonging to British-protected Zanzibari Indians had been emancipated by C. P. Rigby, the British consul in Zanzibar. In order to hold on to their slaves or to purchase new ones, some Indians gave up their British affiliation and became the sultan’s subjects. As subjects of the sultan, Indians continued to engage in slavery until 1870, when the British decided that under the treaties made by them with the sultan no Indians in Zanzibar could own slaves. But, as Robert Gregory suggests, despite their earlier involvement in financing the Arab slavers as well as being slaveholders themselves, many Indians helped with the abolition of slavery. The Khoja merchant Tharia Topan, for instance, was knighted in 1890 for his role in the abolition of slavery. Topan, himself a former slave owner, is said not only to have freed his slaves but to have given them land to farm at a nominal rent.27 One of the most prominent members of the Indian community, and likely the first Indian in Africa to have been knighted by the queen, it is inconceivable that Sorabji would not have known of his abolitionist activities. The fact that Topan gets no mention in Sorabji’s text is a curious one.
Two possibilities present themselves as reasons for this silence. The first is that Sorabji, while recognizing the horrors of slavery, is uncertain and ambivalent about the postabolitionist transition. In a book intended to attract more Indian businessmen and traders to East Africa, Sorabji has to admit to the labor shortage caused by emancipation. The economy of Zanzibar, he writes, has suffered of late because of colonial intervention and “the abolition of slavery. It is difficult to get labourers to work on the land which used to be tilled by the slaves. This has led to grass growing wild on the fertile land, turning it into jungle” (169). The solution he proposes is to induce Africans from the interior to come to Zanzibar as wage laborers. In keeping with the ethnocentric rhetoric of the time, Sorabji argues that such labor would be good not only for the economy of Zanzibar but also for the laborer who would be exposed to civilization and “a little culture” (170). By the time his book is published, the future of the labor supply is still uncertain, but while this uncertainty can be signaled in the text, it cannot be allowed to derail the primary interest of the narrative—to encourage prospective Indian entrepreneurs to look to East Africa as both a site of opportunity and a mission to complete the project of modernity that the British have hitherto promised but not delivered.
That Tharia Topan and his role in the curtailment of slavery receives no mention may also be due to a second reason, more personal, having to do with patronage. The book is dedicated to Seth Allidina Visram Lalji, who, we are told, “was the Leader of Zanzibar, Uganda and Mombasa; An Adventurous Trader” and “clever, generous, modern in his ideas” (112). At one point in the preface, Sorabji suggests that the book that follows will be as much about Visram as about his own travels (117). This turns out not to be the case, with Sorabji’s narrative centering more on his own journey and less on Visram, but nonetheless it seems that the book cannot, in this context of patronage, allow for a shadow to be cast on Visram by a competing and successful businessman. I will return to Allidina Visram in the next chapter, since he is indeed an important figure in the history of Indian commercial presence in East Africa, but, before doing so, I want to conclude my discussion of the two texts under consideration here with one final observation.
In my reading of these early twentieth-century travel narratives by Adamji and Sorabji, I have shown how the two authors, separated by age, prior travel history, ethnic/religious identity, and family position experienced and narrated their journeys in different ways. Despite the relative similarity of the infrastructure they depended on for their travels—they both took the newly built railway, employed porters to carry them and their supplies through difficult terrain, traveled on the steamers and smaller boats on Lake Victoria, and had recourse to varying degrees of Indian as well as African hospitality in the interior—they nevertheless framed their narratives, and indeed themselves, as narrators in ways that were marked by their own sense as ethical selves engaging with others. For Adamji, the primary sources of both identity and anxiety were his standing as a trader in the larger Bohra community as well as his conflicted feelings toward his elder brothers. For Sorabji, it was the project of modernity—styled most resolutely in the image of the British, but, significantly, being undertaken not by the British but by Indians—that most interested him. His impatience with settler racism, which he personally experienced in relation to the “white” highlands reservations, but also observed in the context of barriers to commerce, is spelled out in the text meant for Gujarati readers but not acted upon or made evident to any of his European companions. Rather, Sorabji reserves his most acerbic critique for the unclean habits of his fellow Indians who he thinks demean the image of the Indian in the eyes of fellow European travelers.
While, on first impression, the young Adamji who prefers the company of his Bohra community to Europeans may come across as more parochial in his dispositions than the well-traveled, Anglicized Sorabji, such an assumption, I suggest, must be made with caution. Both Adamji and Sorabji are cosmopolitan subjects in their own right, if by cosmopolitanism we mean an attitude that embraces the world of difference, cultural or otherwise.28 Indeed, by some measures, such as those of cultural tolerance, a healthy respect for the identities of others, an ability to easily and almost unself-consciously move between one or more cultural registers, Adamji’s text may be seen to be marked by a cosmopolitan ease that is, in fact, less evident in Sorabji’s narrative. Consider, for example, the actual linguistic heteroglossia of Adamji’s text—this is evident not only in the interspersing of English and Swahili words in a primarily Gujarati text but more significantly in Adamji’s transcription of an English or Swahili word in Gujarati script.29 The ease of the transitions between the languages and the randomness of the linguistic shifts suggest that Adamji is equally at ease in all three languages and that he does not necessarily associate one or the other with a particular aspect of his identity or activities. The same is true with the ease with which Adamji moves between the English time system and the Arabic-Swahili system of time in which the twelve-hour day starts with 1 (7 A.M. in English time). The editors err, I think, in trying to suggest that Adamji’s choice of time system depends on whether or not he means to record accuracy. Thus they suggest that when Adamji “wrote that the train left the station at 11:30, he means on the dot, whereas when he wrote the train arrived at Kisumu at Arbi 4, he implies about that time (10 o’clock)” (7). However, the text does not bear out this analysis, since there are several occasions when just the opposite is the case. Rather than attempting to make sense of Adamji’s choice of recording time in terms of precision versus approximation (with its unfortunate connotations of English time being seen as precise and Arabic-Swahili being approximate), it may be more useful to read it, along with his linguistic fluency, as a register of his multiple intimacies with the world of the Swahili and the English. Such a reading, along with other clues, both textual—such as his excitement when he meets a trader from Karachi who speaks Urdu and with whom, therefore, he can get “a good opportunity to speak that language” (23)—and extratextual—such as his eagerness to embrace the symbols of modernity (he was one of the first Indians in Mombasa to own a bicycle [77])—suggest that cosmopolitanism must not be judged solely by the company one keeps.
In other words, I am arguing that, even as he appears to favor the company of his own kind (however narrowly or broadly circumscribed), Adamji’s multiple intimacies with the world of the Gujarati Bohra, the Swahili, and the Europeans are to be read as continuous with the cosmopolitanisms long associated with the Indian Ocean.30 He is, to put it metaphorically, a direct descendant of the trader Ben Yiju and his Indian slave. Ironically, by these lights, the more extensively traveled Sorabji, despite his embrace of Europeans and European-styled modernity, or rather because he privileges them so much, seems to have lost out on the more vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism that mark Adamji’s text. To put it in the more contemporary lingo of postcolonial studies, Sorabji has yet to provincialize Europe.31 Secure in the long legacy of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, Adamji, on the other hand, has never felt the need for such provincializing.