In February 1968, J. S. Mangat, then a lecturer in history at the University College in Nairobi published a provocatively titled article in the East Africa Journal: “Was Allidina Visram a Robber Baron, or a Skillful and Benevolent Commercial Pioneer?”1 The question, as posed, signaled the prevalent postindependence distrust of Asian traders as exploiters, and Mangat’s aim was to argue that early traders such as Visram may have contributed to the economic infrastructure of East Africa more than they had been given credit for. Born in Kutch, India, Visram arrived in Zanzibar at a very young age.2 He found employment with the merchant Sewa Haji Paroo, who was then involved with financing the caravan trade. After the death of his employer in 1897, Visram took over the business, expanding the reach of the trade to include further territories in Uganda, Kenya, the Congo, and Southern Sudan. While he operated independently as a trader with no partners, Visram relied, like many others who were to follow him, on a number of new arrivals both from within his Ismaili community as well as from other Indian communities to help set up dukas (shops) first along the traditional trade routes into the interior and then along the projected route of the Uganda railway. In 1898, well before the Uganda railway had reached the interior, Visram had set up a store in Kampala from which he proceeded to expand further into such rural outposts as Jinja, Masaka, Mbarara, Toro, Hoima, Nimule, and Gondokoro. At these various stores, Visram and his agents would sell products as varied as tables and chairs, rice, salt, beads, and textiles and would purchase local produce from African farmers. By 1909, Visram was reported to have “17 agents operating in the Congo with about Rs. 400,000 worth of trade goods advanced by him,” and he had already begun to diversify his commercial activities by opening “soda making factories and furniture-making shops in Kampala and Entebbe; oil mills at Kisumu and the Coast, obtaining oil from sesame and copra; a soap making factory at Mombasa in 1907; two small cotton ginning establishments in Mombasa and Entebbe; and saw mills in Uganda near Nyeri” (34). Visram also engaged in the transportation business, both cart based over land and the operation of boats and a steamer on Lake Victoria.
While Visram clearly did well for himself, in assessing his contribution, Mangat quotes from a report by the chief secretary in Entebbe, who noted: “‘He [Visram] was always ready to help the encouragement of local industries by buying native crops which no one else would touch, at prices which meant a loss for him. I remember myself that when natives on Elgon were encouraged in 1909 to make beeswax, and made it in large quantities, no buyer could be found except Allidina, who paid locally a higher price per lb. than the product would fetch delivered at Liverpool. The same thing happened in the early days of the cotton industry in the Eastern Province’” (34). Drawing on such colonial reports, Mangat claims that the activities of early Asian traders such as Visram “stimulated greater local production in various parts of East Africa and subsequently contributed to the transition from a barter to a money-based economy” (34). Their activities, writes Mangat, “had greater significance for economic development in the early years than the mere exploitation of the commercial potential of the interior for personal profit would suggest” (34). Furthermore, he notes, in addition to heralding agricultural and economic growth, entrepreneurs such as Visram often engaged in socially conscious philanthropy. The Namirembe Cathedral, local hospitals, the Red Cross in Kampala, and the local Indian school, built in Mombasa by his son Abdul Rasul in the name of his father, were only some of the beneficiaries of the estimated nine million rupees that the Visram family donated.3
I introduce this sketch of Allidina Visram, popularly known as the “uncrowned King of Uganda,” for a number of reasons. First, I hope it helps further contextualize Sorabji Darookhanawala’s narrative and his tribute to his patron. As we will soon see, Visram is a personal link not only back to Darookhanawala but also to two men who were to become, by all accounts, the two most successful Asian entrepreneurs in colonial Uganda, Nanji Kalidas Mehta, the founder of the multinational Mehta Group, which today controls assets of over 350 million dollars with over 15,000 employees worldwide, and Muljibhai Madhvani, the founder of the Madhvani Group, which reports its Uganda assets alone at over 200 million dollars with over 10,000 employees.4 By noting the connection between Visram, Mehta, and Madhvani, I underline the significance of information and business networks that have been much discussed by economic historians as important elements in the growth of capital and trade. At the same time, however, we must pay heed to the fact that networks alone cannot guarantee business success—Visram’s own family enterprise dissipated soon after his death, and by 1924 mismanagement by his successors led to a liquidation of the enterprise.5 In this chapter I present a reading of the autobiographies of Mehta, Madhvani, as well as the Kenyan entrepreneur Madatally Manji to show how commercial success is contingent upon a whole array of factors—structural, informational, economic, technical, managerial, and, often, just sheer luck. In so doing I hope to complement the already formidable scholarly literature in East African economic theory and history by providing a more personal, flesh-and-blood account of commercial behavior than is often called for by the more abstract and quantitative demands of the disciplines of economics and commercial history. However, as a student of literature and culture, my aim in this chapter is not merely to share with my colleagues in economics the power and insights of life narratives in understanding commercial behavior. Rather my interest is in debunking the all-too-common assumption, which we encountered earlier in Taban Lo Liyong’s plea to fellow East Africans, that men of commerce, being too devoted to the pursuit of economic gain, are disconnected from the life of the imagination. On the contrary, this chapter will highlight the role of the imagination—literary, religious, national, philanthropic, and cosmopolitan—in the making of commercial men. To be sure, some of the particular ways in which these authors imagine their relation to commerce, to the nation, to religious difference, to family, and in particular to gender relations will not appeal to many of us as readers, but the task of the cultural critic, it seems to me, is to draw attention to these conundrums rather than to ignore them.
Before turning to the autobiographies of Mehta, Madhvani, and Manji, it is important to sound some of the warnings that scholars who have spent considerable attention to such matters in other contexts have raised. There are three levels at work here. The first involves the reading of the individual entrepreneur as either a heroic figure or as an exploiter instead. (Or, in Mangat’s terms, “Skillful and Benevolent Commercial Pioneer” or “Robber Baron”). The second is in the reading of the “ethnic” character of the capitalist enterprise, a reading, it is well to recall, that harks back at least to Max Weber’s discussion of the relationship between Protestant values and capitalism.6 Finally, the third issue is the debate between the virtues of free markets and capitalist development, on the one hand, and those of managed economies, nationalized industries, and socialist development, on the other. Each of these issues has a long history of debate among historians of commerce, a history that is far too complex for me to reproduce here. Nevertheless, it may be useful to briefly signal the relevance of these issues to the life narratives under study.
On the first issue of hagiographical readings of successful entrepreneurs, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has righty cautioned that “there is a real danger … in entrepreneurial history: that of falling into the celebration of the great Captain of Industry.”7 Writing entrepreneurial history in a political context where that history has been ethnicized or racialized, as is the case with Asian entrepreneurship in East Africa, one is particularly susceptible to this danger. Situated within that context, the narratives of the Indian “pioneers,” whether those who ended up fairly successful and rich or those who had more modest ventures, often bear a family resemblance to each other. The plot commonly involves a relatively young boy (it is always only boys) arriving alone on the shores of Zanzibar or Mombasa, often driven there by poverty at home. The boy finds employment with an established trader and is seen to work long hours under demanding conditions. In a year or two, either at his own initiative or otherwise encouraged by his employer, the young man branches out on his own, setting up a similar store either in the same town or further in the interior, sometimes turning to his former employer for goods on credit. Having accumulated some capital on his own, the budding merchant sends off for a younger brother or cousin or some other relative or else forms a partnership with a newly made friend in the region of his current abode. With such help he is better positioned to expand his business, either by setting up more shops or diversifying his interests. He may become involved in transportation and distribution in addition to primary trade. If he is particularly adventurous, he may consider getting involved in small-scale processing such as, for example, the ginning of cotton in Uganda.
The fact that this mythical narrative resembles the story of Allidina Visram is not entirely accidental. Much like Mohandas Gandhi was to propel the nationalist imagination of Indians home and abroad, the story of Allidina Visram, emptied, of course, of the posthumous liquidation of the enterprise, was to stoke the interest of many an Indian entrepreneur and social historian.8 And as we will soon see, this particular form of the narrative—the rags to riches tale—structures each of the narratives that I turn to in this chapter. The task of our critique will be to be mindful of the seduction of this narrative even as we pay attention to its innermost logic. A significant part of the seduction, it bears remembering, is the erasure of business failure, which, as Gijsbert Oonk has recently pointed out in an important article, provides a corrective to the univocal myth of Asian commercial success.9
Closely related to such a mythical narrative, then, is the emphasis put on the ethnic aspect of such entrepreneurship, and it is here that we arrive at Subrahmanyam’s second caution—that against the “classic trap” of seeking “Oriental essences” in the nature of merchant-state relations or of cultural traits that seem to underwrite entrepreneurial success (viii). The keywords here are well circulated—hardworking, industrious, thrifty, trustworthy (and thereby, in economic terms, creditworthy), family based, honorable, generous, risk taking. Many of these values or traits will be invoked in the entrepreneurial narratives we will read, and many may well be intimately tied to entrepreneurial success. But to note these qualities among a group of entrepreneurs in East Africa is not to suggest that such qualities are either the exclusive attributes of a particular ethnic community or that they are in some ways essential qualities of those ethnicities. Rather they are to be understood as traits that are invoked, nurtured, and indeed developed historically through the actual performance of the commercial exchanges.10 Further, these are attributes that cannot properly be used to “explain” the relative success of ethnic communities—some of them may be necessary conditions for success, but, as many examples of failed entrepreneurs would show, they are hardly sufficient conditions for success. This cautionary point is even more significant when comparative claims are made in the evaluation of two or more ethnic groups. The “culturalist” position that would emphasize certain traits can all too easily be mobilized to “explain” the failure of a given group without sufficient attention to some of the other structural or institutional constraints that may in fact be more determinative of their relative failure.11
In the context of East African discourses on development, perhaps the most heated debate on the role of ethnicity in the growth of capitalism was generated with the publication of David Himbara’s 1994 book, Kenyan Capitalists, the State and Development. Studying commercial and industrial development in Kenya from colonial times to the early nineties, Himbara argued that “commercial and industrial development was largely pioneered by local capitalists of Indian descent since the founding, in the modern sense, of the countries of the region” and that, contrary to the expectations of projects of Africanization, black Kenyan capitalists had not been well served by the independent state (4–5). Further, Himbara argued that most scholars who had studied the Kenyan economy had, under the influence of dependency theory, misread local Asian capital as “foreign” capital, as opposed to seeing it as a homegrown development. This meant that they had paid insufficient attention to the ways in which local entrepreneurs of Indian ancestry had drawn upon their long history of commercial success in the area to further expand their enterprises after the Second World War (8). Himbara’s attention to local Indian enterprise was not in itself objectionable, but what bothered some readers was a tendency in his account to present the history of Indian commercial growth in what seemed to be a triumphalist tone while presenting what he saw as the relative commercial failure of black Kenyans in a disparaging manner. So, for instance, Himbara argued that the most prevalent reason attributed to the “poor performance” of black entrepreneurs—the “discriminatory barriers erected by the colonial state” did not take into account the fact that “the most successful commercial and industrial entrepreneurs did not emerge from within the white settler community—which was state protected—but from the Indian commercial community. … The success of the Indians had little to do with the favorable treatment by the state, and everything to do with their experience, accumulated over a number of centuries, in East African coastal merchant activity” (75). As opposed to such long-standing experience, Himbara posed the problems of the new companies established by black Kenyans in the mid forties as resulting from “a lack of basic understanding of business goals, lack of experience in management, and lack of control of company finances” (76).
The most incisive critique of Himbara’s position was made by Michael Chege in two important essays.12 Chege first faulted Himbara on methodological grounds, showing that the small sample of enterprises studied by Himbara skewed his analysis in favor of urban enterprises and the industrial sector. The most glaring absence was the contribution made by African agriculturalists, argued Chege, noting that “from 1964 to the mid-1980’s the engine of growth by all professional accounts lay not in immigrant groups but in African-run smallholder agriculture” amounting to 30–40 percent of the GDP as opposed to 10–13 percent of the GDP attributed to the multinational and Asian-controlled industrial sector (“Paradigms of Doom,” 560). On the particular matter of the discriminatory barriers of the colonial state as a factor in black African entrepreneurial achievement, Chege held that Himbara’s revisionist account dismissed the difficulties too easily: “In the eyes of the new revisionist history … obstruction of African business under colonial rule is portrayed as a carefully cultivated ‘myth,’ citing as evidence the limited credit and training opportunities open to Africans since the Mitchell years, and wholly oblivious to the impact of the systemic injustices of the era and the rebellion they provoked in Mau Mau” (“Introducing Race,” 223). Furthermore, Chege found Himbara’s account to be overly enamored by Asian success so that his analysis downplayed the successes of African-owned firms if they had Asian managers, but did not downplay the successes of Asian-owned firms that relied on African management and labour (“Introducing Race,” 225). Such a tendency also meant Himbara could not adequately account for those Asian enterprises that had failed, failure only being emphasized by Himbara on the African side. Thus, concluded Chege, “Asian capital has indeed played a key role in Kenya’s industrial growth, not to mention the outstanding professional and philanthropic work associated with Kenyans of Asian origin. … But if Himbara is to be believed the faults are all on one side. There have been no bankruptcies (or ‘total failures’) among Kenyan Asian entrepreneurs worth recalling or documenting. Unless propped up by political handouts, however, African businesses seem perennially prone to bankruptcy” (“Paradigms of Doom,” 564).
Noting sardonically that “ethnic adulation … is not a recognized method of explaining sources of high economic growth” (“Introducing Race,” 220), Chege reminded economic historians that “in the search for a new paradigm of capitalism in Africa especially, it should never be forgotten that this is not the first time that cultural stereotype has been called upon to explain the continent’s relative backwardness” (229). Chege’s concern was not only with the representations of the past but more urgently with the ways in which academic theories can fuel ongoing racial and ethnic antagonisms. With regard to the case of Himbara’s book, Chege noted, “In the acrimonious Kenyan race debates of 1996, Asian activists waived copies of it as proof that ‘the economy’ was fully dependent on their efforts not on the Africans … these are the exact words of Himbara. African racists in turn used it to demonstrate Asian chicanery, Asian trade ‘domination’ and ‘exploitation’; a vicious circle of two nonarguments was thus closed” (“Paradigms of Doom,” 563).
Chege’s critique of Himbara is not to be read, I think, as an endorsement of the Kenyan state or even of the commercial and economic climate for black African enterprises in postcolonial times. If he seemed to rise to the defense of black enterprises, it is because he believed them to be unduly slighted in Himbara’s account. Chege recognized that further commercial and economic growth for Kenya is vital to its future, and for this he proposed two solutions. First, an “‘enabling’ law-driven governance framework, deregulation and a stable macro-economic environment.” Second, a more robust form of ‘social capital’ and civic engagement across communities. “Social capital” argued Chege, “varies with community not ethnicity. Because it is premised on the intensity of voluntary civic engagement by private citizens, it is therefore a malleable human artifact; it makes for a rapid ‘supply response’ to new opportunities, and like physical capital it is subject to depreciation if not kept in good repair. The interface between a liberal economic environment and civic action may explain better the commercial differences between the various ‘Asian’ groups in Kenya as well as the variations in entrepreneurship within African communities” (Introducing Race, 230).
We will have occasion to get a closer look at the workings of “social capital” and the role of civil society in the lives of Asian entrepreneurs in East Africa, but before turning to them let us note that Chege’s advocacy of deregulation points to the third significant point of contention that has informed the debates on commerce and industry in East Africa—that of the relative role of the state in regulating and monitoring commerce. Here the two extremes are the ideologies of the free market, on the one hand, and the nationalization of industries, on the other—capitalist development or socialist development, in other words.13 Since the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet states, urged (some would say forced) by the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank, African countries have today greatly liberalized their economies, moving increasingly toward a free market–oriented capitalist economy. But this was not always the case in the immediate context of independent Africa, and, to varying degrees, both politicians and academics in the early years displayed an ideological leaning toward socialism, nationalization, and planned economies.14 In the following chapter I will turn to three narratives by Asians in Tanzania who worked with President Julius Nyerere—one of the most articulate proponents of African socialism or Ujamaa. For now, however, what is of immediate interest is the fact that while entrepreneurs such as Mehta, Madhvani, and Manji were, for the most part, firm advocates of capitalist development, they were also alert to the ways in which controlled economies could benefit those commercial enterprises that were based on import substitution. This, as we will see, was particularly the case with the enterprise of Madatally Manji, who benefited greatly from the disruptions to foreign trade brought about first by the Second World War and later, in newly independent times, by import controls. The autobiographies I examine in this chapter provide an excellent lens for understanding how these entrepreneurs and others like them negotiated through the policies of the colonial state and the newly independent state in ensuring their own economic success.
The tensions between nationalist intellectuals, capitalist entrepreneurs, and the economic policies of newly independent states was eloquently captured by the political economist Yash Tandon in his remembrance of Jayant Madhvani after the latter passed away in 1971. “Jayant and I had known each other for many years, although we were not friends in the ordinary sense of the word. I am naturally allergic to capitalists, particularly the tycoonic ones; and Jayant was similarly allergic to intellectuals, particularly of the leftist brand.”15 Tandon goes on to note that Madhvani and he were moving in
opposite streams of our national life. One stream was flowing from the colonial days. The powerful undercurrent of this stream was private enterprise. … Jayant as the foremost capitalist industrialist of Uganda, was rowing fast along this stream. The other was an upstream current destined to lead the country to a socialist port. It derived its force from the ship’s chief navigator at the time Milton Obote. If Madhvani was a tycoon, Obote could be likened to a typhoon. Obote had begun to destroy feudal ramparts, colonial chains and emerging capitalist tendencies with typhoonic gusto, especially after 1966.
(10)
There has been much water under the bridge (to continue Tandon’s acquatic metaphor) since those early days of nationalism, and Uganda since the 1990s has actively embraced, not without societal tensions and conflict, the ship of free enterprise. But while African states and many Africanist economists have moved to a position that is more sympathetic to capitalism and neoliberalism, this is not yet the case for the greater majority of Africanist historians and cultural critics. Thus the third and final caution (made as much to myself as to my readers): while there is, for some, as Subrahmanyam suggested, a danger in being seduced by the victorious narratives of the “Captains of Industry,” there is also, for others, the reverse danger of prejudging entrepreneurs and capitalists as intrinsically and solely exploitative. As we sail through these narratives, we must remain alert to both these undercurrents in our thoughts, since neither extreme seems to account fully for the complex ways in which we all inevitably commerce with our universe.
NATIONALISM, RELIGION, AND PHILANTHROPY: NANJI KALIDAS MEHTA’S DREAM HALF-EXPRESSED
Born in 1888 in the village of Gorana, Gujarat, Nanji Kalidas Mehta was raised in a family that ran a grocery shop, engaged in money lending, and bought, ginned, and sold cotton in the nearby town of Porbander (6).16 Schooled until the age of eleven, completing the fourth-form education that was the highest available to him in the village, Nanji apprenticed in his father’s shop—measuring cloth, weighing articles for sale, and delivering them to customers. Mehta’s uncle Gokaldas had already established himself as a trader in Zanzibar and, having returned to India after his five-year sojourn, later sailed to Madagascar, first to work under a Bohra trader and then to start his own business. Taking his sons with him to Madagascar, Gokaldas later summoned Mehta’s elder brother Gorkhandas and some of the other cousins in the household (17). Impatient with being left behind, “something invincible in me heard the call of the sea and I was mentally ready to go abroad,” writes Mehta, marking the onset of a long-lasting love of the sea and travel in general: “The sea had a great hold upon my imagination and I watched it with peculiar emotion that never got stale with the passing of years” (17). Like the twelfth-century trader Ben Yiju, and so many traders like him, the sea becomes for Mehta a symbol of “freedom and enterprise” (35). Over the years, Mehta would traverse this particular sea separating India from the East African coast at least forty-five times, and his travels would take him further on to South Africa, Europe, Japan, and many ports and cities in between.
Mehta’s Dream Half-Expressed is a remarkable account of the life and travels of a man who came of age in the era of colonially mediated mercantile expansion. The autobiography was dictated by Mehta in Gujarati and published in the original in 1955.17 Intent upon making it available to a wider audience, Mehta’s family and friends translated it into English, updated it to take into account events since its original publication, and put it in circulation in 1966, three years before the author’s demise.18 The tone of the narrative is reflective, at times nostalgic, and often explicitly didactic.
In reading Mehta’s account here, I want to signal a number of interrelated issues that may enhance our understanding of the advent of Indian merchant capital in East Africa. Most significantly, the narrative articulates the mythological charter that often accompanies Indian claims about the community’s contributions to East African modernity. The charter insists on reading commerce as romance rather than conflict, the latter a feature associated not with Indians but with the form of bureaucratic modernity introduced by the colonial state. Indeed, Mehta’s narrative echoes Sorabji’s earlier claim that the colonial state is a hindrance to Africa’s modernity, a modernity that they both suggest Indian commercial enterprise is only too eager to foster. Such commerce-driven modernity must, however, be tempered with a calibration of social responsibility and philanthropy. Thus one of the central concerns of Dream Half-Expressed is the responsibility of the rich toward the poor.19 Even though the narrative does not dwell upon the many monetary contributions that Mehta made toward charitable causes in both East Africa and India, it does foreground the establishment of a residential school for girls in Gujarat, and, as my reading will show, this school serves as an important axis that connects Mehta’s philanthropy with his developing sense of a gendered nationalism.
Mehta’s relationship to the Indian struggle for independence is yet another important aspect of his tale. The narrative proceeds from Mehta being a restless young boy interested in making a decent living to becoming a wealthy industrialist whose greatest passions are religion and Indian nationalism. Along the way, as my reading will show, he moves from a position of celebrating religious syncretism and tolerance to one that is more circumspect and skeptical about the possibilities of interreligious understanding between Hindus and Muslims in India. Whether or not this is in keeping with a general tendency toward a more conservative position associated with the acquisition of wealth and increasing age, it is clearly marked as well by his visits to, and fascination with, imperial Japan. The militarism of the Japanese, both in the actual theater of war as well as in the industrial workplace, makes, I suggest, an impact on Mehta that reverberates with his own sense of the appropriate development of a disciplined Hindu India. Mehta’s fascination with Japan as a counterpoint to Western colonialism and a Western-styled modernity is worth noting, since such non-Western, global affiliations have often escaped the attention of scholars, who, for the most part, characterize Indian nationalism as a binary opposition between the British colonizers and their Indian colonized subjects. Mehta’s narrative points urgently to the need to locate some of seeds of Indian nationalism in its diaspora, both in Africa as well as, in this case, Japan and the Far East. Indeed, the flows of peoples and ideas between these different regions of the world is a central thematic of the work, Mehta finding, for instance, long-lost Japanese friends whom he had first known in East Africa during his later travels to Burma (239).
Finally, just as travel is an important catalyst for Mehta’s financial and spiritual growth, the role of mythology, folklore, and literature in general is equally significant in his self-fashioning. In an important study of law, culture, and market governance in late-colonial India, Ritu Birla writes that the figure of the colonial subject “most often evokes a Shakespeare-quoting member of the English-educated native elite, as in Macaulay’s famous ‘Minute on Education.’” Birla suggests that, rather than focusing solely on such a figure, it may be of some interest to focus on “the colonial subject as an economic actor subject to new market disciplines” (6). Birla proposes in her book to pay attention to vernacular capitalists who are engaged in “key contests with colonial governance.” She suggests that addressing “the indigenous capitalist in this way, as a complicit figure ‘folded into’ new discourses of modernity, opens new ways of narrating the history of colonial capitalism” (6).20 While in my reading of Mehta’s Dream Half-Expressed he appears as one instance of such a figure of the vernacular capitalist negotiating with new discourses of modernity, I want to suggest, at the same time, that this particular economic actor also has a whole array of literary and mythological texts at his disposal. In other words, sharing Birla’s aim of decentering the Shakespeare-quoting elite from the center stage of colonial subjectivity, I want nevertheless to retain here a sense of a “vernacular” literacy that not only accompanies but also significantly informs the capitalist as economic man.21 Indeed, Mehta’s narrative insists on presenting Mehta as a man of literature: “Ever since childhood,” he writes, “I have been fond of reading. I used to buy books from three to four annas that I got as pocket expenses. I carried books with me during my travels. I owe my mental development to travels in India and foreign lands and to reading books” (316). Tending to an elderly father who suffers from weak eyesight, Mehta as a young boy reads religious narratives of Vaishnava saints aloud to him (24), and he continues to read religious texts such as the Shrimad Bhagavata (199) as he gets older. In Mombasa, Mehta’s introduction to the principles of the Arya Samaj are primarily through his reading of the Satyartha Prakash, a religious treatise written by the founder, Dayanand Saraswati, who, Mehta notes, was also an eager advocate of the Hindi language. At many points in the narrative, religious and other vernacular texts are the subject of recitation and performance. On his first voyage to Africa, for instance, his fellow passenger Vallabhdas Moola recites verses from the Ramayana and Mahabharata around mealtime, and the Maher youths on board recite dohas from folk literature. In Madagascar, Mehta notes that during the main festivities “young and old, met together, sang country ballads and devotional songs and acted different scenes from Indian plays” (52), and he mentions at least one occasion in Lugazi when he has arranged for a “Hari Katha” recital of religious stories to the accompaniment of music and songs (170). Similarly, on his trips to India Mehta is drawn to theatrical performances, and the most memorable ones for him are the productions of Kalidas’s plays Shakuntala and Kumara Sambhava performed at Shantiniketan under the auspices of Rabindranath Tagore (161). Even as Dream Half-Expressed foregrounds the centrality of vernacular literary traditions in the formation of modern colonial subjects, Mehta is also alert to the literariness of his own narrative project. Referring at times to his “imaginative self” (17), Mehta often reflects on the difficulties of autobiographical representation. “As I pen these words,” he writes, “the half-forgotten dreams of youth play hide and seek upon the canvas of my mind and produce indescribable emotions” (24). By the end of his narrative, his life is still a “dream half-expressed,” or to put it more prosaically, an imaginative project that is yet incomplete.22 While the commercial plot is of course central to Mehta’s narrative, the text invites us to pay attention to the author not as the narrowly circumscribed figure of homo economicus (as Ian Watt makes of Robinson Crusoe) but rather the more expansive one of a man of commerce who is also a nationalist, a traveler, a religious believer, and a reader of literature.
Since Dream Half-Expressed is the only available autobiographical account of the establishment of Indian trade and commerce in East Africa in the first half of the twentieth century, and since it remains, for the most part, unknown and unread by scholars, it may be of some use here to outline the highlights of Mehta’s commercial narrative.23 It begins with the young Mehta leaving for Majunga, Madagascar, in December 1900 (30). Working in his brother’s shop, he remains in his employ until an outbreak of the plague and returns to India as part of the mass exodus of Indians affected by the epidemic. By 1904, with one uncle in Jinja, Uganda, a brother in South Africa, and a cousin in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, Mehta steals some gold from the household and runs away in the hopes of returning to Africa. Planning to join his brother in South Africa, he is instead offered a job on the way in Zanzibar, which he accepts. Soon he is summoned to Uganda by his uncle in Jinja. His uncle sets him up as an assistant to a devout Muslim Baluchi man in the neighboring town of Kamuli, and Mehta forms a good working relationship with his employer. After conducting trade on behalf of the Baluchi for a couple of years, Mehta, with the former’s blessings, sets up a shop of his own. Soon he decides to expand his business and employs an assistant to take care of the shop while he goes on trading expeditions. He experiments with cotton growing and ginning, opens more shops, and informs his father in India that he will not “be sending back more than Rs 200/- every year for his personal use” because he has decided that “profits made from the business should be ploughed back in the country [Uganda] in new ventures” (98). He begins touring the country, purchasing cotton, and asks for his younger brother and, later, a cousin to join him (100). By 1913 the Ugandan colonial government had put restrictions on the purchase of cotton by middlemen, enacting a law that cotton could only be purchased by the ginners themselves (113). Mehta describes the formation of the “Association of Colonial Merchants” and their agitation in London with the secretary of state for the colonies. He soon acquires a license to work as a purchasing agent for the ginnery Hansing and Co., for which he earns a 5 percent commission. Mehta finds himself in India at the outset of the First World War in 1914 and surmises that, given the scarcity of goods caused by the war, if goods could be safely transported they would provide handsome dividends. Having accumulated some capital through such trade, by 1916 Mehta is well positioned to diversify his interests from being a trader of commodities and purchasing agent for cotton to becoming a cotton ginner himself. He sets up two ginneries, acquiring steam engines from Kenya and ginning machines from India, the latter of which he manages to import into Uganda after much resistance and bureaucratic wrangling on the part of the British agricultural commissioner (137). Mehta reports that in 1917 the two factories, along with his cloth trading business, had brought in a profit of 550,000 rupees. Adding more ginneries in 1918 and thereafter, Mehta also brings in more family members from India, offering them one-eighth shares of the business (138).
As the ginning business grows, so do Mehta’s ambitions. He finds, however, that the colonial bureaucracy in Uganda is set up to limit Indian entrepreneurial ambition and he overcomes this hurdle by entering into a partnership with the Bombay-based textile mill of Mathurdas Nanji and Co., which allows for a loan of ten million rupees (143). With this newfound Indian capital, Mehta purchases greater amounts of cotton for ginning and invests in land both in Uganda as well as in Tanganyika, where, after the First World War, the allied forces had acquired formerly German-controlled lands.24 In the Tanganyikan auction alone, Mehta acquires “twenty thousand acres of land with factories” at a cost of ten lakhs of rupees (154). Reflecting on his yearly visits to these sisal plantations between 1921 and 1934, the older Mehta writes of his emotional attachment to the land. When his nephew later sells off the land, Mehta writes, “my heart grew very restless and was overpowered with emotions which could only be said to be indescribable” (155). While one need not detract from Mehta’s nostalgia for the land, it is important to bear in mind the critical role the acquisition of land played in the entrepreneurial success not only of Mehta’s own enterprises but also in a parallel way of those of the competing Madhvani firm. Because the “land question” in East Africa has historically focused on the struggles over the white exclusivity of the highlands in Kenya, these other land acquisitions by Asian entrepreneurs in Uganda and colonial Tanganyika have escaped much critical scrutiny.25 And yet, even though the figure of the “exploitative” Asian dukawallah continues to fuel the popular imagination, especially during times of economic and political crisis, it is the question of Asian land acquisition and usage that has increasingly entered current discourse. It is no small irony that the anti-Asian protests and violence in Uganda in April 2007 were prompted by the Mehta Group’s plans to acquire land in the protected Mabira forest reserve in order to expand the production of sugar in the Lugazi sugar factory first set up by N. K. Mehta.26
The cotton crop fails in 1922, and added to this loss of two lakhs of rupees, Mehta encounters business difficulties with his Indian partners. The Bombay textile firm is liquidated, and, after settling his accounts with the now defunct firm, Mehta seeks capital and partnerships in a new market—Japan. Other Indian traders in Uganda join the trade with the Japanese as well and “one third of the season’s cotton crop was purchased by [Tokyo Menka Kaisha Cotton Company] from Japan” (167). Mehta’s position on the entry of the Japanese into the Ugandan market is consistent with his advocacy of free-market competition throughout the text. Now, in addition to the competition between Indians and Europeans (and internally among them), the Japanese entry further shifts the market share. But, suggests Mehta, while such increased competition may be hard on individual entrepreneurs, it is good for the development of Uganda.
The narrative outlines in great detail the growth of Mehta’s sugar factory, founded in Lugazi in 1924, and his subsequent venture in Gujarat, the Maharana Textile Mill that prompts him to visit Japan in search of technological innovation. While these two factories are central to Mehta’s text, as he grows older his later enterprises begin to have a lesser hold on his narratorial interests. Thus we learn little about Saurashtra Cement and Chemical Industries Ltd., Mehta’s first public venture, which began producing cement in 1961.27 The Uganda Tea Estate Ltd. gets barely a passing mention, as do the East African ventures in sisal production. While he retains a keen interest in discovering new business prospects, as is evident when he visits Burma, Mehta increasingly begins to rely on his sons and other family members to develop and grow the various enterprises. He devotes more time and energy to the pursuit of philanthropy, and his travels are more oriented toward sites of religious pilgrimage than lands of commercial opportunity.
In her persuasive reading of what she terms the “anti-conquest” narrative, Mary Louise Pratt has shown how in Mungo Park’s travel writings “expansionist commercial aspirations idealize themselves into a drama of reciprocity.”28 “Negotiating his way across Africa,” Pratt notes, “Park is the picture of the entrepreneur” (79). Recalling Marcel Mauss’s disquisition on gift exchange in precapitalist societies, Pratt reminds us of the centrality of reciprocity in precapitalist social relations, a centrality that with the advent of capitalism begins to be disrupted. Merchant trade finds itself literally at the cusp of this transition and, “while doing away with reciprocity as the basis of social interaction, capitalism retains it as one of the stories it tells of itself. The difference between equal and unequal exchange is suppressed” (82). Unlike Park, who is a traveler in the image of an entrepreneur, Mehta is the entrepreneur who must travel to trade. And, as such, his narrative offers a unique perspective on the transitional moment in East Africa when barter literally gives way to monetary exchange.
Remembering his own desire to go to Africa as a young boy, Mehta tellingly notes that he wanted to “go abroad and seek an opportunity to do something adventurous in the country of my choice, where I would not merely seek material gain but also try to serve the land and its people, winning their love and co-operation, till they helped themselves to rise to their stature, consciously or unconsciously” (59). This is an image of commerce that insists on seeing it as a form of romance. If the language of helping “themselves to rise to their stature” unmistakably carries a sense of what we might call the “brown man’s burden,” the words “love and co-operation” invoke the language of reciprocity signaled by Pratt. In this latter regard, Mehta’s descriptions of his early encounters with Africans are masterpieces of sentimental narration. On his very first voyage to Madagascar, after the ship has suffered significant damage in a storm, Mehta and his shipmates find themselves on Moyote Island, where the local inhabitants offer them hospitality. Mehta’s reflections betray his own antipathies toward both ruthless politicians and ruthless businessmen: “At one end of our voyage there was India and at the other end this French island. Both of them were hundreds of miles apart from each other. But the heart of man was full of love for his fellowmen. A natural bond of affection would grow if power-mad politicians and money-making merchants did not spoil and vitiate the love of men, the love which is the echo of God’s love on this unhappy earth” (48).29 A similar sentiment is echoed later in the text when Mehta describes what for the world of commerce is a foundational scene. It is 1907, and Mehta is in the village of Kalaki, Uganda, on a trading trip. The chiefs, he writes, bring him gifts to show their “gratitude for putting their territory on the crossroads of civilization and for bringing things which they would hardly expect to see, much less receive” (94). Mehta finds not only gratitude but also love among his client-hosts: “I could see a sparkle of love in their twinkling eyes as they talked about us. Love is God’s greatest gift to mankind, for no commerce can be had between men and men in whatever state of civilization until they possess it” (95). And, if love underwrites this consensual exchange of goods and commodities, such an exchange is to Mehta’s mercantilist imagination the motor of history: “Crowds visited us every morning from the neighboring villages and exchanged their products for things they wanted from us. It is the law of demand and supply that moves this world and out of the workings of this law civilizations rise and fall. Life gets its momentum, society progresses and culture rises. The thirst for freedom and the hunger for well-being crop up in men’s hearts. But as men’s desire loses its just limit and burns like an unrestricted bonfire, woes descend on mankind, cultures and civilizations perish and there is an end to all its finest possessions and values” (94).30 Echoing the earlier note on the material greed of “money-making merchants,” Mehta despairs at what he sees as the current state of excess where, as he puts it, “the natural bond of affection between the buyer and the seller seems to have disappeared with the passage of time and self-interest has taken the place of service” (95). What he calls for, instead, is love, “the elixir of life and cementing bond of humanity … to be re-created and men’s mind and spirit … to be rehabilitated with the values of a new humanistic culture” (96). Such a new humanism, Mehta writes with a Kantian proclivity, will necessitate a new form of political order: “No narrow nationalism or sheer anti-colonialism can serve the ultimate need of mankind. We require men and statesmen, who, though devoted to their soil, possess the vision of a World State, if we are ever to survive in this dangerous world of ours” (96).
This vision of a world state is not pursued at length in the narrative. But the impulse behind it, a vision of a cosmopolitanism that is open to difference as long as it is predicated on a healthy and not unequal give-andtake is one that permeates the text. For if extreme self-interest can corrupt what Mehta sees as the potentially benevolent contributions of commerce, then exchange that is predicated upon force is also corrosive. The best cross-cultural engagements, Mehta suggests, are those that are based on mutual gain, not ones based on unequal power. This is why, for Mehta, it is the Indian traders and not the Europeans who have a more ethical relation with Africans. While the Europeans did their part in modernizing Africa, they did so, claims Mehta, through force: “The Europeans did so, wherever they had gone and established their colonies but the Indian merchants have never dreamt of establishing their power anywhere; they rather chose to mix freely with the sons of the soil, sat and talked with them on the same carpet, carried their trade and remained for years to earn their livelihood. They thus indirectly contributed to the progress of the land and resided there with goodwill, co-operation and love of the inhabitants of the country they adopted” (146).
It would be easy enough to question the veracity of some of the claims being made here about the actualities of the exchange, the degree of Indian-African social intermingling “on the same carpet,” as well as the allegedly unequivocal embrace of Indians by East Africans. Indeed, there are several moments in the text where Mehta himself presents evidence to the contrary when he shows Africans who maintain a “reticence towards Indians” (80) or others who resist the encroachment of the railway by removing at night the rails that Indian laborers had laid during the day. We also encounter Africans who steal from Mehta’s caravans and those who threaten the security of his passage when they are slighted by his caravan’s headman (91). The fact that Mehta allows these acts of resistance to enter the text but simultaneously prevents them from interrupting the narrative of commerce as romance speaks volumes about the ideological work that Dream Half-Expressed performs. Written in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, at a time when African independence and the corollary discourses of nationalization were causing anxiety among Asian entrepreneurs in East Africa, Mehta’s text is clearly a response to the changing times, even when it chooses to downplay these concerns. The silences in the text are considerable—events that Mehta would surely have known about by the time he composed his narrative remain completely unmentioned in the text. These include the massive labor unrest and strikes of 1945 and the April 1949 protests in Buganda against the virtual monopoly of cotton processing and marketing by Asians.31 And, as might be expected in such an autobiographical narrative, Mehta also leaves out details that are personally more damaging to his family’s reputation.32 Instead, by repeatedly calling attention to the historical contribution of Indians in East Africa, and by casting that contribution as something that the Africans of the time both welcomed and appreciated, Mehta is eager to advocate for a peaceful transition and a multiracial future.33 Commenting upon the hard work and sacrifices, including the loss of life, of Indians building the Uganda railway, Mehta writes: “Such enormous human sacrifice at the altar of civilization bears testimony to the truth that no nation can stay alone and flourish in isolation. The great assembly of men and races which forces of history form, enables us to sacrifice for others and humanity gets richer by the mutual give and take. It also teaches us that the debts of the past must be recognized and should bear a just relation to the future” (73, my emphasis). While the implicit audiences of this statement are the leaders of postcolonial African states, they are also invited to overhear Mehta’s speeches, occasioned by the turn of events in the Congo to his Indian colleagues at a number of meetings in East Africa in July 1961. Mehta’s advice to his fellow Asians is to have faith in the East African leadership and to know that “there is no possibility that the events in the Congo [will] be repeated here where the leaders have been trained to observe and perpetuate the rule of law” (284). The inclusion of this speech in the text, as well as laudatory statements on postcolonial African leadership that follow, are in no small part performative utterances aimed at urging African leaders to stay the course and protect the interests of the Asian minority.
The commercial plot of Dream Half-Expressed is intertwined with a number of travel narratives that involve not only Mehta himself but also his family and business associates. Echoing the sentiment expressed earlier by Ebrahimji Adamji, Mehta notes that no education can be complete without travel (59), and like Adamji, he finds travel to be a means by which one can “make oneself free from the fetters of a humdrum life” (59). Married against his own wishes at the young age of thirteen, Mehta seeks an escape from marital obligations and travel offers him the opportunity for such an escape. His reading of literary and historical texts, which have a profound influence on his sense of self throughout his life, suggest to him that “a soft man wedded to the life of a householder cannot sail the high seas, scale the tallest mountains and take up hazards that draw the attention of the world” (29). But if the life of domesticity is what Mehta seeks to escape, it is precisely in the context of family life that Mehta first ponders the possibilities offered by travel. Mehta’s earliest encounters with travelers are the many sadhus and pilgrims on their way to Dwarika who are hosted by his father. Much influenced by the example of these pilgrims and also by the religious stories of traveling for penance that he has read, the young Mehta at one point even runs away from home along with a friend to worship at a Bhuvaneshwar temple in a neighboring village. At an early point in the narrative, when he is unsure as to what lies ahead, the young Mehta speculates, “During such moments of musing I said to myself that if I could not go to Africa, I would visit those sacred places of which I had heard from the pilgrims” (61). As his story unfolds, Mehta engages in both forms of travel—that primarily for commercial interest as well as that for religious and spiritual purposes. While in his older years Mehta seems to have developed an interest in visiting religious sites for their own intrinsic interest, in the early years the commercial travels are punctuated by religious trips made for purificatory purposes. His growing interest in religious pilgrimages, then, is not disconnected from his activities as a commercial man.34
In his religious travels Mehta becomes one of many fellow practitioners following long traditions of pilgrimage, but his commercial travels are more unique and exceptional. His youth is punctuated by trips to visit his family in India and commercial trips into the East African interior. As he grows older and wealthier, his travels take him further to Europe, South Africa, and Japan. In May 1929 Mehta embarks on a trip to Europe accompanied by his secretary Purushottamdas Dasani, who has prior travel experience in England. The trip is onboard an Italian liner where Mehta is first encumbered by the demands of European etiquette. The starched shirts and tight collars, Mehta complains, “fettered our free spirits. … A little freedom would have eased the situation, especially when we were travelling in a tropical country whose burning heat made such tight fitting clothes a torture” (185). Nevertheless, “manners are often like conventions and they are to be religiously observed, irrespective of the needs of time and place” (185), and so Mehta and his companion go on with the show. He bristles at other European conventions—the racism of the Kenyan settlers onboard in particular—and the attempts of the Italian cooks to make them a vegetarian-friendly meal leave him unsatisfied, but Mehta takes all of this in stride in anticipation of the experiences that await him. The first stop on the journey is at the Suez Canal, and Mehta and his companion visit the museum in Cairo and the pyramids. While his commercial eye remarks on the Egyptian production of the “finest species of cotton in the world” (187), his status as a colonial subject does not allow him to ignore British imperial power. The bridges over the Nile, he notes, “were guarded by British soldiers. Streets were properly watched lest excited mobs should rise in revolt against the foreign rule” (187). The next stop is Naples, where Mehta visits the volcano of Mount Vesuvius, and this begins a series of tourist-oriented excursions through Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and England. In almost all these countries, in addition to taking in the sites, Mehta visits a number of factories and meets with industrialists.
In his reading of nineteenth-century travel accounts by Indians visiting England, Javed Majeed has noted that while many Indian travelers “visited what might be called ‘tourist sites’ in London, for the majority of them by far the most important sights in their itinerary of travel to Britain are scenes of technological progress. These include extended descriptions of steam power, steam railways and boats, industrial manufacturing processes, the infrastructure of London and other European cities, and electricity.”35 Mehta’s narrative shares these tendencies, and, while he is impressed by Italian architecture and sculpture, it is a “technological marvel” such as the Eiffel Tower (193) or the “mechanised production” of Germany (192) or even the tube railway, “one of the wonders of the city life of London,” that most impress him (195). Visiting the first modern planetarium of the twentieth century only six years after it had opened in Munich, and remembering it as a “really wonderful experience,” Mehta must have been among a handful of Indians of his generation to have experienced this institution at a very early stage (191). Likewise, as someone conscious of the role of advertising in commerce, Mehta is impressed by “new and strange methods of advertising,” in particular the “novel method of advertising by the smoke-jet of an aeroplane” (194).
Mehta’s verdict on Europe is positive—he believes that Indians have a lot to gain by emulating the “courtesy and refinement” that to him characterize the people of Europe (184), but he cautions Indian youth against unnecessary material pursuits and indulgence in luxury in the name of a European-styled freedom. He is wary of the “exhibitionism” of European women who “are eager to look younger and use all sorts of devices to appear young” (189), but he nevertheless is impressed by their educational achievements and their natural sense of equality with men, which gives them more social freedom than their Indian counterparts. Mehta is impressed overall by the amount of money and labor that is spent on educating children in Europe, and while he doesn’t himself make an explicit connection, it is clear that his later charitable contributions toward schooling and education both in East Africa and India are influenced by this experience.
While Europe’s technological prowess commands Mehta’s attention, it is Japan that fills him with awe. His visit is in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937, and he sees in the Japanese nationalistic fervor and a desire for military success. Unlike his wary attentiveness to British imperialism in Egypt, Mehta seems to have no reservations about Japan’s imperial ambitions. On the contrary, war conditions seem to Mehta to bring out the best qualities of the Japanese. For instance, he notes that the war has further emphasized the generally thrifty nature of consumption, and Mehta contrasts this “admirable attitude” with the waste that he sees in India. Just as he classifies the various Europeans he meets according to what he perceives as their national traits, he finds the national character of Japan to be one of “neatness, restraint, humility, honesty and comeliness in personal and social life” (222). Mehta is not immune to the prevalent Orientalist characterizations of the “docility” of Japanese women, but he is even more impressed by the entry of Japanese women into the workplace. He finds that almost 80 percent of the workers in the factories he visits are female and they often participate in women’s organizations that have been set up to help disabled or otherwise suffering women. As workers, both Japanese men and women seem to Mehta’s managerial eyes the ideal type—they work hard and in an efficient way and seek no recourse to labor organizations. “In times of stress and consequent decrease in wages they keep quiet and work silently till better times prevail and never agitate for the sake of agitation” (228). As though the workers’ passive acceptance of labor conditions were not enough to please management interests, Mehta suggests that the Japanese collaboration of labor and capital is predicated on a commonly held belief that “industrial concerns are concerns of public utility and it is upon their progress that the economic uplift of the nation depends” (228). Such patriotism extends from the workplace out into the street, where women go to tie auspicious threads around the wrists of soldiers off to war. Mehta is impressed by the cultural codes of honor that dictate public service and finds as a businessman that honesty in trade transactions on the part of his Japanese suppliers is something that he can take for granted. Thus, while finding much to praise in Europe, it is ultimately to Japan that Mehta turns for a version of modernity that is more palatable to him: “The revival of Japan, even after the disaster of World War II, is due to this sincerity and hard working capacity of this wide awake nation that is Asia’s guiding star,” concludes Mehta, “Japan was the first to accept western science and industrial culture without losing its national identity. India must surely look up to it and imitate its good qualities if it wants to survive and compete in this difficult world of ours” (229).
An important element in Mehta’s travels is his ongoing engagement with the Indian independence struggle, and he is particularly appreciative of Japan’s grant of asylum to many Indian revolutionaries. At the Indian Association Club in Tokyo, Mehta meets one such nationalist, Raja Mahendra Pratap, who has been in exile in Japan, and in his speech at the association’s dinner Mehta calls for continued support on the part of the Japanese for the cause of Indian independence. Assured by a spokesperson for Japanese businessmen that he has their “heartfelt sympathy and moral support for [India’s] freedom” (231), Mehta can further endorse in his narrative the ideal of an India-Japan alliance. The Indian struggle for independence is clearly on Mehta’s mind even before he arrives in Japan. He has long supported the movement, providing a form of asylum earlier in East Africa to yet another Indian revolutionary in exile—N. I. Patel.36 He has also attended the Indian National Congress session of 1921 in Calcutta as a representative of Indians in East Africa. But it is his visit to South Africa just a year before he sets off for Japan that seems to have had the most profound impact on Mehta’s nationalist consciousness. Noting the humiliating conditions meted out to Indians and Africans under a rigid color bar, Mehta is outraged by the policies of the South African state, which passes laws “regardless of world opinion and the human urge for equality in these days of democracy” (200). He is hosted by Gandhi’s son Manilal during his visit to the Phoenix Ashram near Durban, and Manilal accompanies him on his visit to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Mehta is inspired by the spirit of satyagraha and civil disobedience that Gandhi nurtured in this place, and on his return journey to Uganda he himself engages in such noncooperation by refusing to be fingerprinted in the neighboring Portuguese territory of Lourenço Marques. It is this visit, more than any other, that impresses upon Mehta the need for private support of the project of nationalism. “It was quite unexpectedly here,” writes Mehta, “that the seeds of founding a Gurukul and Mahatma Gandhi’s Kirti Mandir were sown” (202).
The Arya Kanya Gurukul, a residential school for girls based on Vedic principles in Porbandar, and the Kirti Mandir, a monument built near Gandhi’s birthplace to celebrate his life, were central to Mehta’s own philanthropic projects, and he devotes significant space to them in his autobiography. Before looking more closely at the Gurukul and what it has to say about Mehta’s developing sense of nationalism, one must note that these were only two of the many projects he funded both in India and in East Africa. Robert Gregory claims that Mehta was one of the first Indian entrepreneurs to establish racially integrated preprimary, primary, and secondary schools on a large scale in Uganda. His schools in Lugazi had an annual enrollment of twelve to thirteen hundred African and Asian children. “In addition to forming and maintaining these schools, Mehta paid for approximately one dozen scholarships granted annually by the Ministry of Education for the secondary level. Each year, he sent several African students to India, primarily to the Porbandar Girls Institution he had founded in his home city, but also, beginning in 1957, to various Indian universities for higher education. In 1964, for instance, he gave scholarships to five Uganda girls for study in the Porbandar school. After matriculation one of the five returned to Uganda, but two began midwifery training in Bombay, and the other two entered universities in Baroda and Ahmedabad, all with continuing support.”37 R. O. Preston’s Oriental Nairobi: A Record of Some of the Leading Contributors to Its Development registers that by 1938, between India and East Africa, Mehta had already contributed over fifty thousand pounds to “various Government, Public, and Arya Samajic Funds.”38 Mehta’s autobiography does not dwell on these charitable contributions in East Africa, the one exception being his central role in funding the Gandhi Memorial Academy in Nairobi.39 Founded by a partnership between private interests, the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi in India, the incorporation of the Gandhi Memorial Academy into the Royal Technical College in Nairobi represents to Mehta “a silver link of inter-racial sympathy, understanding and international friendship … in the educational, cultural and social advancement of East Africa” (260).
Thus his many charitable contributions on both sides of the Indian Ocean suggest that while Mehta, on the one hand, remained an ardent spokesperson for the merits of commerce and later industrialization, he was, on the other hand, equally mindful of the social obligations of the wealthy.40 Having grown up in a village society where the less fortunate found support through socially established safety nets, Mehta remembers a time when “it was the bounden duty of the Patel, the headman of the village, to go over the village and see that nobody starved and went to bed without food at night. It was a sin to sell milk, curd or buttermilk. They considered it as sacred as the sunflower and these things could be had from anywhere for the mere asking” (15). But times had changed, and if in Africa Mehta found himself at the cusp of the transition between a system of barter and that of monetary exchange, in his Indian surroundings he had to negotiate the transition from a primarily feudal order of obligation to one that risked being compromised by a profit-driven ethic. His role model on these matters was none other than Allidina Visram, an elderly man in Jinja by the time Mehta had first arrived there as a young boy. Calling him a “noble-minded merchant whose munificence and charity knew no bounds,” Mehta writes, “he became my ideal as Uganda’s captain of commerce and man of charity. My youthful spirit sought inspiration from the legacy of fame and generosity that he left behind” (76–7).
Because the Gurukul in Porbandar played such a central role in Mehta’s own sense of self, and because it sheds light on his evolving sense of nationalism and religious identity, it merits more attention than some of his other charitable projects. The Gurukul, Mehta informs us, was founded on Vedic principles of religious devotion, and the girls were expected to adhere to a strict disciplinary code that emphasized prayer and religious ritual balanced with more modern educational concerns. The students, “live, breathe and drink Indian culture when they are at the Gurukul but at the same time they do not close their minds to the great cultural synthesis that is in the making in the international field” (208). Nevertheless, despite this gesture toward internationalism, as Mehta elaborates on the various attributes and virtues of Indian womanhood, his vision increasingly becomes a conservative one. Thus, for instance, he claims, “I am sure, so long as women stick to our mode of life and preserve our culture, a thousand winds of change shall not affect the accumulated samskaras of the Indian nation and a happy synthesis of the East and the West will enliven our homes and enrich our society through these sweeter, softer, yet brave ambassadors of our culture” (208). Savita Nair, a scholar who visited the Arya Kanya Gurukul in 1996, confirms the essentially conservative result of such a vision. Quoting Mehta’s belief that “it is the duty of Aryan women to preserve, defend and contribute to their rich culture,” Nair astutely notes that such sentiment results in “devout religious training,”41 based on a “very structured and disciplined life, almost militaristic in [its] marching and line-ups” (133). The strict discipline and religious underpinnings of the Gurukul lead Nair to suggest that this form of education is “as much, if not less, about creating skilled and literate women as it [is] about producing loyal and compliant citizens” (133–34). This model of female citizenship is usefully read as part of a larger historical context in which commercial families like Mehta’s were negotiating the modernizing demands of social reform (including, for instance, colonial attempts to curtail the practice of child marriages) with their desire to hold on to the traditional institution of the joint family.42
Despite the emphasis on the Vedic aspects of the Gurukul, Mehta suggests that “it can be called a secular school in a way, for all those who abide by the rules of discipline can be its inmates without distinction of caste, creed and colour” (205). To be sure, as the enrollment of some Muslim girls and Christian girls from Uganda suggests, the Gurukul had indeed opened its doors across faiths. Nevertheless, its fundamental orientation cannot properly be considered to be a secular one. This tension between the desire to embrace difference, on the one hand, and the need to articulate a religiously inscribed identity, on the other, is symptomatic of a fundamental tension in Mehta’s larger narrative. The central crisis involved here is the partition of India at independence and the painful history of Hindu-Muslim tensions. Mehta, the narrative suggests, is profoundly affected by this partition and, I would argue that there is a shift in Mehta’s negotiation of nationalism from a more secular to a more religiously inscribed order.43 We can trace this shift by first noting Mehta’s early delight in Mauritius where he finds that Hindus and Muslims have “stayed like brothers and mixed with one another in a dignified and brotherly way that befitted their great culture and common national heritage” (176). The celebration of each others’ religious festivals on the part of Muslims and Hindus reminds him of a visit that he has made thirty years earlier to the village of Raval in Gujarat where he encountered Hindus and Muslims both worshiping together at a local Shitala temple. At another point in the text, Mehta tells the story of the Hindu Pandit Jagannath who fell in love with a Muslim woman in the Mughal court and who was excommunicated by his coreligionists. Legend has it that when the two lovers were on the banks of the Ganga, the river rose to reach their feet thus sanctifying their union (295). He also refers to the mystic poet Kabir who preached Hindu-Muslim unity (293). Reflecting on such earlier religious tolerance and syncretism, he bemoans the partition of India “by her two warring children” and warns that “none of the two components of this divided Indian sub-continent could rest in peace, until they are made one by an alchemy of love and mutual choice, which is the only hope of this divided nation” (105). While Mehta repeatedly showcases the possibilities of Hindu-Muslim union, in an echo of the concerns over the modern failures of religious hybridities that we encountered in Ghosh (which we will revisit in Vassanji), the narrative is increasingly haunted by a sense of defeat both in terms of the possibility of a future religious compromise and that of overcoming the scars of past history. Mehta’s pilgrimages lead him to religious sites that suggest Mughal desecration of particular Hindu temples, and this leads him to increasingly articulate a disturbingly muscular religious nationalism. So, for instance, in a discussion of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Mehta notes, “Ayodhya, the great city of Shri Ramachandra, thus presented a sad sight to us and we were moved at the plight that it bore from [a] religious standpoint. It revealed that it was no part of religion to be meek. One must be strong enough to protect one’s religion and holy places and should not merely indulge in the outward acts of religion” (302). While Hindu-Muslim conflicts have erupted at several points in the subcontinent’s history, Mehta’s narrative composed in the late 1950s and the 1960s chillingly foreshadows the Ayodhya conflicts of 1992 and the Gujarat massacres of the following decade.44
I suggested earlier that the literary poetics of Dream Half-Expressed are at least as important as the commercial narrative it presents. Mehta’s focus on Rama and Ayodhya here allows us to return to the role of literary, historical, and religious narratives in Mehta’s own sense of self. The story of the Ramayana is not only a recurrent motif in Mehta’s text but a central part of Mehta’s personal trajectory. The text ends with a visit to Ayodhya and reflects on the attendant tensions among Hindus and Muslims, but it is also in Ayodhya, rather than Gujarat, that the text begins. The very first sentence of Mehta’s book—“Shri Ramachandra, king of Ayodhya, is the hero of the Ramayana, one of the sacred epics of India”—is at once a ritual invocation of the Hindu deity at the beginning of the text and a device for Mehta to insert himself into Rama’s legacy: “His descendants were known as Raghuvamshis. This Ayodhya of Ramachandra was our place of origin” (1).45 Readers familiar with the Ramayana will surely note that Mehta’s vision of the “purity” and “chastity” of the Hindu woman is not disconnected from the central trope of Sita’s chastity. Nor will they fail to note that Mehta’s own prescriptions of the regulated codes of Hindu womanhood (as evident in the disciplinary codes of the Gurukul) are directly connected to the epic’s vision of the “dangers” of women crossing over the thresholds laid out for them by their husbands. But perhaps what is most telling in the narrative is Mehta’s emplotment of his own return to India from Japan via Ceylon. Reminding his readers that Ceylon is held to be the land of Lanka where Rama has defeated Ravana, Sita’s abductor, Mehta registers his own return: “From Ceylon I went to Bombay happy, healthy and safe. The Diwali festivities were in full swing and Bombay had put on a glamorous appearance” (236). In case the reader has missed the affinity with Rama in the symbolism of Mehta’s return from Ceylon in the midst of the Diwali festivities, at another moment in the text Mehta alludes to the devotion of his business associate Vallabhdas as being “like that of Lakshman to Rama” (318). One of the issues that scholars have often raised about merchant communities in Africa and elsewhere is their relative connection to their original homeland and the choices that they made of remaining sojourners or becoming permanent residents in new lands. As we know, despite his earlier plans to settle permanently in Uganda, Mehta ultimately chose to return to Gujarat in his old age. Whatever the material conditions involved in making this choice may have been, one might ask whether, on the imaginative plane, the choice had not already been made. For the story to be complete, Rama, it seems, must return home.
TIDES OF FORTUNE: THE SECOND GENERATION AND AFTER
To turn from Mehta’s narrative to the autobiographies of Madatally Manji and Manubhai Madhvani is to turn from a vision of commerce as romance to that of commerce as a site of conflict. In the case of the Kenyan-born Manji, the greatest source of conflict is the racial tyranny of the colonial state and to a lesser extent the forces of competition in the marketplace. In the case of the Ugandan Madhvani, the tension is equally divided between the persecutions rendered by the politically unstable Ugandan state (personified for the most part in the narrative by the figure of Idi Amin) and the family disputes over the control of the firm that lead the narrator to publicly litigate. Despite the various challenges, however, both are stories of triumph over adversity and of personal survival and success. And, focused though they are on the growth of family-controlled firms, each narrative in its own way is also a story of interethnic, interracial, and international dependencies and collaborations.
Published in Nairobi in 1995, only two years after he was honored with the title of the “Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear” by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, Manji’s Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron is probably the best known and most widely read among the autobiographies of Asian entrepreneurs that I examine here. As such, it is all the more significant that its central motifs work against the grain of conventional wisdom on the nature of Asian enterprise in East Africa. Whereas Asian commercial and industrial development is often seen to be a handmaiden to the colonial state, receiving favorable treatment and protection, Manji’s story highlights the difficulties Asian entrepreneurs often faced in the context of settler racism; while the arrival of independence and partial nationalization of private companies is conventionally seen to have jeopardized Asian business interests, in Manji’s case Kenyan independence was of great advantage to his business success; unlike most Asian entrepreneurs who were, as Robert Gregory suggests, steadfast in their ideological leanings toward free-market economics and the absence of state controls, because of the particular nature of his own enterprise, Manji is a firm advocate of state protection of the market; finally, whereas Asian enterprises are often seen to be bolstered by the close-knit family networks in which they often originated, in Manji’s story family relations are as much a hindrance as a help.46
Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron tells the story of the establishment and growth of a bread, biscuit, confectionary, and pasta company in the years during and after the Second World War. Manji, who grew up in smaller Kenyan towns such as Nyeri, Muranga, and Karatina, arrived in Nairobi in 1938 to help his employer open a new branch of his provisions store. He later decided to set up a distribution business of his own along with a young business partner, and in 1941, urged by his father, he acquired a bakery up for sale. Spurred by the arrival of Italian prisoners of war from Somalia, Manji found a rapid growth in the demand for his bread and cakes. Nonetheless, he faced production difficulties caused by wartime rationing of wheat flour, sugar, and oil, which the narrative describes in considerable detail. Both Italian tastes and the needs of his own Ismaili community prompt him to expand into the vermicelli and pasta business, and he even ventures into the production of writing slates and exercise books for the children of newly arrived refugees from Poland and to metal products such as irons and hammers in short supply during the war. Thus Manji’s business growth is spurred not only by the arrival of Europeans and by the changing tastes for European food by Kenyans returning from the war but also by the difficulties in external trade that the war entails. Like other entrepreneurs in Kenya at the time, Manji made full use of the opportunities opened up by the wartime economy. “From a business point of view,” he confesses at one point in his text, “I could almost wish that the war would continue forever, but this would be rather cynical” (72).47
In the postwar period the House of Manji concentrated not only on manufacturing for the domestic Kenyan market but also expanded its export base to other regions in Africa and the Middle East. By the 1970s the company had signed franchise agreements with several European firms to produce food products under their brand names. Manji became, for instance, the Kenyan manufacturer for Buitoni pasta and Weetabix cereal. Under threat of an import restriction by the government of Tanzania, the company brought its manufacturing operations to the neighboring country where it received generous offers of bank loans and favorable land prices.
Despite building a company that, at least until he wrote his memoir in the 1990s, had been “an unqualified success,” Manji’s narrative is pervaded by “bitter memories” of colonial racism and the “competitive, and often cruel, world of business” (vi). Of these, the ones that haunt the narrative most are those of settler racism. Recalling the “poor, ill-equipped schools” (28) and the differential educational opportunities for Europeans, Asians, and Africans, Manji writes of the difficult decision that he and his wife make in sending their children, at the tender age of nine, to boarding school in the more liberal institutions of England. He writes of the segregated public coffeehouses in Nairobi’s town center where neither Asians nor Africans are allowed to enter (40–41) and tells of an ugly incident in the whites-only Blue Club to which he supplies buns, bread, cakes, and scones. On arriving at the club to claim a payment, he is told by the owner to come through the back entrance so as not to offend the sensibilities of the white patrons. “That incident,” writes Manji, was “deeply etched in my mind as the exemplification of the kind of bigotry and racial discrimination that we were subjected to during the colonial era” (145). While personal slights such as these pervade the narrative, it is the behind-the-scenes discrimination that most affects Manji’s business. Some barriers, such as the administration’s false claim that the Geneva Convention forbade Italian prisoners of war to work for non-Europeans, are handled through cosmetic tactics. Thus, in this particular instance, where Manji seeks to recruit the Italians who have expertise with the macaroni plant that he has acquired, he hires a Greek man to “supervise” them (64–65). In other instances, the discriminatory treatment has more adverse effects. Attempting to secure an export license to send sweets amounting to ten tons to the Congo, Manji is allowed an export limit of only one ton. Aware of his difficulties in acquiring the adequate export license, Manji is approached by a British multinational, BEAC, which offers to serve as his distribution agent. “To our surprise BEAC was granted a full license to export large quantities of sweets to the Belgian Congo. It was painful to realise that we had been denied the same license earlier, and that the export permit they were given for one month was more than we were permitted to export for ten months” (90). After the agreement between BEAC and Manji ends in six months, he applies for the export license, and is once again given only one-tenth of the desired quota. Manji’s narrative is unabashed about pointing fingers: “The difference between us and BEAC was that they were members of a ‘superior’ race. We were being treated badly and were underdogs in a field dominated by whites. The preferential treatment they got was a clear indication of white supremacy in Kenya at the time” (90).
While there are other instances in the text where Manji bristles against racial prejudice, perhaps the most dramatic is the unexpected visit of the chairman of the Commodity Distribution Board at the Ngara Bakery early in the narrative. Tipped off by Manji’s European competitors in the bakery business, who Manji argues are shocked and surprised to see an Asian competing successfully with them in what has traditionally been a European-owned sector of the economy, the chairman of the board arrives to investigate the allegedly illegal acquisition of wheat flour on the part of the bakery. This is a time of flour shortages, and, in order to maximize flour supply, the government has introduced a new type of flour, “National Flour,” that is a blend of wheat and maize. This blend is not conducive to the production of good quality bread, and all the bakers suffer because of this. Manji, however, has found a way to manufacture decent quality bread, and his competitors are convinced that he is illegally obtaining pure wheat flour. He persuades the chairman that his flour supplier is the same as everyone else’s and that as it is a flour mill owned and managed by Europeans “an Asian-owned bakery like (his) had a snowball’s chance in hell of receiving preferential treatment” (53). And yet, while on this occasion Manji’s enterprise has done nothing illegal to acquire the flour, at a later point Manji confesses that the severe rationing of wheat flour compels him to find “a way around the problem by buying wheat flour directly from a number of wholesalers. It was a black market if one may call it that, and of course, we had to pay higher than the government controlled price” (84).
Even though he is bitter about the racism, Manji takes a certain pleasure in narrating how he has overcome the various hurdles placed before him not only by Europeans but also by his Asian competitors, the latter underselling their competing products or attempting to make competing bids on land that he desires for building a factory. There is an element of the underdog in the narrative, an element that extends to the role of subaltern knowledges and agency coming to the rescue. Departing from the convention of narratives that render African innovation and expertise in the workplace invisible, Manji registers the critical role of “a new baker, an African named Joshua, who had considerable knowledge and experience baking bread, cakes, biscuits and other wheat products” (43) in the turnaround of an initially failing bakery. His staff is also instrumental in ascertaining why some Kenyans who were first introduced to the spaghetti manufactured by the company refuse to eat it—it resembles the tape worms from which many of them have suffered as children. Elbow-shaped macaroni, manufactured as a substitute, is an instant success (108–9). The acquisition of the pasta factory is itself connected to an act of resistance on the part of the Italian prisoners of war who refuse to operate the machines for their British captors but are willing to help Manji set them up (63). But the particular knowledge from which Manji derives not only market success but also personal pleasure is that derived from his wife’s making of chapatis. Faced, like other bakers, with the challenge of making bread of good quality from the inferior National Flour blend, Manji speculates, “If our ladies could make tasty chapatis from National Flour, why could we not bake good quality loaves out of the same flour?” (50). The trick, he learns from the women, is the addition of butter or ghee, and he uses this insight to develop a technique for successful bread manufacture.48
Despite the colonial racism, as an entrepreneur who needs the goodwill of the state Manji attempts to stay in the good graces of the British. At times he indulges in ingratiating flattery, as in choosing to name a brand of his biscuits Baring biscuits, after the British governor, and naming an arcade he has developed in Nairobi Baring Arcade.49 Nevertheless, while managing to get his ventures inaugurated by various British colonial governors, ultimately he finds that the economic policies of the colonial state do not help his enterprise. Thus he writes that after the war “we repeatedly asked the colonial government to provide us with some protection against the overseas competition, but the government not only turned down our requests but added insult to the injury by lowering the import duty on biscuits from 30 per cent to 20 per cent. It was as if government was determined to completely strangle our biscuit business. It seemed to have no interest whatsoever in promoting local industry” (86). In contrast, he writes, with Kenyan independence and the imposition of import bans on items like pasta, “things had changed dramatically for the better” (114). For a manufacturer in what is referred to in the economic literature as an “import-substitution” industry, market control of imports is integral to the domestic growth of his concern. This, of course, becomes a challenge when other countries such as Nigeria, to which the company has exported its products, also put such bans in place. With a population of nearly 100 million people, Manji notes, “the decision by its government [to ban imports] meant that we had lost the market, at least until trade liberalisation caught on in that country.” (120) Ironically, such trade liberalization in East Africa which came into greatest effect since the 1990s, may ultimately have led to the financial troubles of Manji’s company forcing its sale in 2002 to a larger multinational company. Manji’s story dramatizes, then, the contingent nature of the interplay of free-market policies and state regulations. While the free flow of goods may be an asset to trade, it may also pose a hindrance and threat to local manufacture.
In addition to showing how business practices had to be negotiated with the colonial state, Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron also sheds interesting light on the role of family and community networks. Often claimed to be central to the growth of Asian entrepreneurship in East Africa, family becomes both an asset as well as a source of anxiety. With his father having parted company from his own brother even before Madatally has come of age, the notion of a joint family enterprise is already a shaky one for Manji (22). Nevertheless, he decides to build a larger and more modern bakery than the one already established in Ngara and, in the interests of pooling capital, goes into a partnership with a close relative. Ultimately, not only does the partnership fail, with Manji claiming a net loss, but the competition between this relative and Manji’s own new company is intense and ugly. If the struggle with this relative is a difficult one, Manji is no less pained when at the end of 1973 his brothers all decide to opt out of the business, choosing to sell their shares in the House of Manji (162).
Community networks too are uncertain sources of support, Manji’s own Ismaili community treating him with a certain reserve. When he forms the 21 Club, which meets at the Mayfair Hotel, to introduce ballroom dancing in the Asian community, he soon becomes the “talk of the town attracting withering criticism from many religious zealots” (156). While community members such as Madatally Alibhai Shariff offer him support in the form of a loan in a time of business need (41–42), he writes that his philanthropic work conducted under the auspices of the Aga Khan Provincial Council is treated with “a great deal of jealously and suspicion” by some of the top leaders and soon, “in a swift and inexplicable move, the economic development responsibility” is removed from his hands (152). Indeed, Manji’s story provides an important caution to the communal emphasis often placed by scholars on merchant and trade networks. While he works to retain connections with business associates who are Ismailis, many of the individuals Manji mentions by name as being critical to his entrepreneurial success are those outside his immediate Ismaili community. Mulchandbhai Khimasia and Shankerprasad Bhatt, both of whom extend him credit facilities; V. S. Hukumchand, who provides a critical connection to a confirming house in London; Maghanbhai Mistry, who works with him to develop various machines and tools for his ventures; Joshua the baker, whose expertise is critical for the new bakery; H. V. Shah, the lawyer who helps first draft a purchase agreement of the Ngara bakery; and William George, the chairman of Weetabix with whom he sets up a franchise, are only a few such individuals.
It is tempting to read Manji’s Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron and Madhvani’s Tide of Fortune, to which I turn next, as part of the numerous CEO memoirs that have flooded the market over the past two decades. To varying degrees they share the genre’s depiction of the CEO as the leader of a large enterprise, the latter often cast as a family with the CEO as (in the still predominantly masculine world of business) patriarch enforcing the discipline of an established code and providing the vision for future growth. Such narratives are often read for their offerings of business advice, and Madhvani certainly harbors a hope that younger members of his family, among others, will turn to his book for such wisdom (74). My own interest in reading these texts, however, is not to scour them for lessons in business management but rather to read them as narrative expressions of second-generation Indians in East Africa who, despite their travels and investments abroad, identified deeply with their East African contexts. If, as Manji writes, the story of his life is also the story of the House of Manji, it is equally a story that reflects the role of colonial rule and the narrative of Kenyan nationalism on the commercial imagination (v–vi). Likewise, the Madhvani story (along with that of Mehta and his descendants) is intricately linked to the colonial and postcolonial narrative of Ugandan nationalism.
Subtitled “A Family Tale,” Madhvani’s narrative spans five generations, from the arrival in East Africa of Vithaldas Haridas, his great-uncle, in 1893 to the coming of age of his own grandchildren who now live in many different countries. It is, he insists, a story of the education of a family, “not only in the laws of commerce, absorbed over a long period by several generations, but also in the unpredictable brutalities of life” (14). The narrative begins with the apprenticeship of Vithaldas Haridas to the firm of Allidina Visram, who, in keeping with established lore, is venerated as an inspiration for many succeeding generations. It is from Visram that both Vithaldas Haridas and his nephew Muljibhai Madhvani learn the importance of tending to the social, physical, and educational welfare of those who work for them.50 When the author’s father Muljibhai arrives in Uganda to join his uncle’s ventures, he finds there the young Nanji Kalidas Mehta, with whom he will spend many an evening visiting their mentor Visram (86). Urging his readers to read Mehta’s Dream Half-Expressed, Madhvani notes, “Nanji Kalidas and Muljibhai would spend their whole days trading in fierce competition, but as the sun set they would happily sit down together and socialize. They managed to be both competitors and friends. But the competition was unrelenting” (30). Over time, Vithaldas Haridas and his relatives branched out into new ventures including cotton ginning and the manufacture of sugar, but ultimately due to a number of factors the partners decided to separate. Muljibhai acquired the sugar estate and soon engaged in a process of growth and modernization through acquisition of more land and equipment and the hiring of technical experts. His sons Jayant and Manubhai (the author) joined him as partners in the 1950s, and the narrative’s main focus is on the expansion and diversification of the Madhvani Group not only in terms of the products manufactured (sugar, cotton, beer, oil, steel) but also in terms of geography and finance.51 Thus, for instance, the narrative provides a close look at the group’s acquisition and development of enterprises in India in the 1950s and, most significantly, in light of Amin’s later accusations of the outflow of Asian money from Uganda, the group’s decision to restructure its finances by setting up offshore trusts in Bermuda. Set up at a time when there were no restrictions on foreign exchange transfers as were to later come in postcolonial Uganda, these trusts, writes Madhvani, “have protected the group during the bad years and gave it long-term international resilience” (99). They also show that unlike the less-established Asian traders, civil servants, and professionals who had little to no assets outside the country at the time of expulsion, families such as the Madhvanis and Mehtas had financial structures in place to see them through the crisis.52
The crisis itself is twofold, and both aspects hit almost simultaneously. The domestic crisis involves the death of the author’s elder brother Jayant, who has been a key partner in running the enterprise along with the author after the death of their father. Jayant has also been the public face of the corporation, being involved in Ugandan national politics including serving on the Legislative Council from 1954 to 1960 (110) and chairing, at Idi Amin’s request, the Export Import Corporation of Uganda. Jayant’s death in 1971 leads to a major fissure in the family, his widow Meenaben wanting her son Nitin to head the family firm. This fissure is to pervade the entire narrative, and its eventual results are the divisions of the family’s assets among the five male heirs (or their descendants) of Muljibhai.53 Even after the split, family disputes do not disappear, resulting, for instance, in the author’s litigation against his nephew Nitin for violating a family agreement surrounding the assets that have been left behind in Uganda after the expulsion and reappropriated following the Expropriated Properties Act of 1982 (181). Much of the family narrative past the 1970s is presented as a battle of epic proportions, and the numerous references to the Bhagavad Gita, the classical text concerned with the ethical and moral dilemmas of going to war with one’s cousins, suggest that, if the authorial Mehta turns to the Ramayana for a model and inspiration, it is the epic of the Mahabharata (of which the Bhagavad Gita is a part) that structures Madhvani’s family tale.54
The domestic crisis resulting from Jayant’s death percolates in the context of a larger political crisis, the one that lends the narrative its greatest claim to being exceptional. Written with the help of Giles Foden, the author of the Idi Amin–centered novel The Last King of Scotland, Madhvani’s book opens with a scene in the “Singapore Block,” the nickname given to Uganda’s infamous Makindye Prison. Madhvani writes of his terror at night when he hears the screams of his fellow prisoners and the thumping sounds that silence them in the prison compound: “Every few nights another prisoner would arrive, manacled and in leg irons and usually very badly beaten. Most of these prisoners were led away in the dead of night for execution. Their bodies were usually dumped in the River Nile, one of the guards told me, his face completely expressionless” (9). Noting that the imagination can be both a danger and a gift when one is a prisoner, Madhvani imagines the dead bodies disintegrate in the great river and wonders whether he will meet the same fate. While he fears for his life, he also knows that his arrest is a symbolic one. Imprisoning the “43 year old Asian head of Uganda’s biggest industrial combine, employing more than 15,000 people and manufacturing 19 products from steel to sugar” (8–9) is Amin’s way of showing both the Asians in Uganda as well as the British government that he is serious about the Asian expulsion order.
Written more than thirty years after the expulsion, at a time when Madhvani had returned home to Uganda under the auspices of a more receptive President Museveni, Tide of Fortune is marked by a more nuanced appreciation of Ugandan history than was articulated by many Ugandan exiles and their sympathizers around the time of the crisis. Even though the narrative indulges in pathologizing Amin as an unpredictable dictator, with references to him as an “ogre” (109) or a “ludicrous monster” (14) with a “malevolent scowl” (9), Madhvani recognizes that Amin had managed to garner a popular following by playing up existing anti-Asian sentiment in Uganda. Thus the narrative reads Amin as continuous with a larger political and economic crisis in Uganda that is not solely of the dictator’s making.55 In Madhvani’s judgment, British colonialism is to carry the main burden “of much of the discord that was to follow, including friction between races, ethnicities, and cultures to which [his] family and many others—African as well as Asian—fell victim” (27).56 As an example he points to the colonial policy of excluding Africans from the lucrative enterprise of cotton ginning throughout the twenties, thirties, and forties and shows how this led to African resentment of Indians. Unlike Mehta, whose narrative downplays any African resistance, Madhvani is interested in showing the evolution of such resistance and its legacy in later endorsing Amin’s expulsion order.57 He writes with some sympathy about the Bugandan riots of 1949 and the Freedom Fighters in the highlands of Kenya even as he recognizes growing signs of resentment on the part of indigenous Africans against his own family. Despite developing a sense of historicity about the expulsion, what most hurts Madhvani at the time are not Amin’s accusations, which are “simply insulting” to “those families that had built up Uganda’s trade and industry over several generations” (125), but rather the “unseemly joy” with which the announcement is received by a large majority of the Ugandan population (125).
While economic policy is the major factor driving the majority’s resentment, Madhvani is not blind to the “cases of outright prejudice” (28) against Africans in the Asian community that have also led to the tensions. Nor is the narrative shy in exposing some of the criminal elements among the Asians: “The most shocking thing I discovered,” writes Madhvani, remembering the expulsion period, “was that some Asian criminals had been helping Amin’s goons to kidnap fellow Asians in order to extort ransoms from their families” (135). And, while the Asians received international attention because of their effect on British immigration, Madhvani insists that the worst fate—that of death rather than exile—was often meted out to indigenous Ugandans: “Across the country the police and death squads from other parts of the security apparatus had been butchering people. Anyone suspected of opposition to the new regime might be killed, although prime targets were people of Acholi and Langi extraction” (9). When a bold voice such as that of the Ugandan chief justice Benedicto Kiwanuka ruled that Amin’s policies of arbitrary detention and the expulsion of Asians with Ugandan citizenship were illegal, such persons were disappeared by the regime without a trace (146).
In foregrounding the worse fate of many indigenous Ugandans under Amin’s rule, Tide of Fortune negotiates the tensions between particularistic and more general accounts of historical experience, a negotiation that pervades the entire narrative. The story being told is at once about the plight of a particular ethnic community, about a larger national tragedy, and about the eruptions of political turmoil in the world at large. As Madhvani puts it, “We Asians might have been in the spotlight just then, but before we hit the headlines the military police had been hounding indigenous Ugandans for months. … In that sense our case was not exceptional. We were just another tribe” (9). Thus the story is not just about Asians but about all Ugandans. Likewise, to read Tide of Fortune as only a narrative about the political turmoil in Amin’s Uganda would be to lose sight of its larger vision of ethnic and political strife in the world at large. The traumas of the Asian expulsion from Uganda are foreshadowed in the narrative by Madhvani’s own witnessing of the “sadness and devastation” of the partition of India in 1947, where as a young man he learns that independence can simultaneously bring “euphoria” as well as tragedy (54). Even after the Ugandan crisis has passed and the Madhvani family, despite its disputes and divisions, has managed to return to Uganda, the closing pages of the narrative tell the story of yet another strike against the enterprise—the conflict this time is not African but Middle Eastern. A glass factory owned by the family in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon is flattened by Israeli missiles, taking yet another turn in the family’s tide of fortune. Once again, political and ethnic strife interrupt the march of commerce.
Tide of Fortune is an elderly man’s remembrance of “farming, factories, family” (11), but it is an ardent love letter to the spirit of industry and the social goods that Madhvani clearly believes it delivers as well.58 Arguing passionately for the transfer of technology into Africa and the importation of specialized technical expertise to ensure the best production practices, the narrator devotes considerable space to detailing the operations of both his sugar as well as glass production facilities. As might be expected, the vision of the factory in this text is quite different from the more somber image in Marx of the worker being a cog in the machine. For Madhvani, the sugar factory and the farm that feed it are sources not only of pride but also of aesthetic pleasure: “I do feel proud when I walk around our farm and factory. I feel proud of the fields folding like a green sari into the hills that surround the emerald lake. … I even feel proud of the irrigation pipes protruding into the lake and carrying the pumped water all round the estate” (15). In this narrative presentation, not only are there no social or environmental ills associated with the enterprise, but, in Madhvani’s view, there are environmental gains: “In producing sugar here at Kakira,” writes Madhvani, “I suppose we are doing our bit for the environment, even taking into consideration our emissions. For every one tonne of sugar made, 1.45 tonnes of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere” (104–5). Later the industrial site begins to appear as a more compelling vision of community than the alternative of a potentially disruptive political state. Here, where the narrator is master, there is an explicit attempt to render industry and commerce back into the realm of romance rather than of conflict: “A sound I love to hear is the factory steam whistle or ‘factory clock,’ which sounds at specified times of the day. It can be heard all over the plantation relieving those who have just completed their shift and calling to the workers for the next shift to start their journey to work. The sound of this whistle make me happy—it is a connection with the past, it is also a sign that the factory is working and that thousands of people are coming together in a common enterprise” (108).59
Thousands of people coming together in a common enterprise—this is the dream of the entrepreneur, a dream that Madhvani shares with all his predecessors—Ebrahimji Adamji, Sorabji Darookhanawala, Nanji Kalidas Mehta, Madatally Manji, and many others. It is a dream of commerce with the universe, a romance with the workings of the marketplace, and one that insists on registering the fundamental complementarity rather than conflict between capital and labor. It is, at the same time, a dream that has, at best, an uneasy relationship with the stewards of the state, fearful that these stewards of power can easily turn a happy dream into a nightmare.