But the ninety days had not been just a tragic event, they taught me a political lesson, a very simple lesson, but a lesson I would learn again in my next ninety days in Britain: unless you belong to the class that rules, a good argument will never be enough to safeguard your interests. Unless you are willing to sacrifice some of your immediate interests, and thus form a community with others, your future can never be secured.
—Mahmood Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee
Africa is for Africans—Black Africans.
—Okello in Mira Nair, dir., Mississippi Masala
Writing in the midst of the Kensington refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani recalls a particularly dramatic moment in Kampala prior to his arrival in England. Standing in a long line of Asians at the Uganda Immigration Office waiting to have documents processed, Mamdani overhears a fellow Asian ask a black Ugandan officer, “So you think we milked the cow but didn’t feed it?” The question is an echo of an accusation made by Amin in his public speeches denouncing the Asian community—accusations that included charges of social exclusivity, racial prejudice, and exploitative economic practices. As such, in the context of a queue full of frustrated and somewhat bitter Asians standing with the “tropical sun above and the scorched earth below,” the question addressed to an officer who symbolizes Amin’s regime can only be challenging. But let me allow Mamdani’s scene to unfold:
The fellow looked up and smiled.
“If you think that is the whole story, you are not only wrong but in trouble,” he continued.
The official looked up, a question on his face.
My neighbour persisted. “Do you know what an Asian would do if he were in your place?”
Silence.
“Do you see this queue of people?”
“Yes.”
“And the cruel sun?”
“Yes.”
“And how uncomfortable people are?”
“Yes.” But now the official was becoming a bit impatient.
“If I were in your place, I’d have a stand of Coca Cola out there, pay somebody to sell the cokes and maybe some groundnuts, and make myself some money.”
Everybody in the queue laughed. The official smiled good naturedly.1
The incident and the events leading up to it encapsulate in many ways the enigmatic position of the Asian in much of twentieth-century Africa. At once suspected of economic misdeeds, but also often admired for his business acumen, the Indian, or Asian, appears here in the most prevalent role cast for him in colonial and postcolonial Africa—that of the dukawallah. In this particular episode in Mamdani’s narrative, the Asian appears as a figure that is at once all too familiar and yet one that is susceptible to being misread. What we witness in the exchange is both the spectacular act of a self-consciously ethnicized performance and a warning that to believe in the plenitude of this stereotyped representation of Asian as quintessential moneymaker is to not get “the whole story” and to potentially risk “trouble.” If, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, the figure of the “unhomely” is a “paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition” this is so quite literally to those in that immigration line in the process of being unmoored from their Ugandan homes.2 The laughter of the crowd in the midst of such tragedy can only signal its experience of what Freud would have called the uncanny—a return, in this case, of repressed fears and doubts of postcolonial Ugandan futures that have hitherto been overshadowed by hopes and dreams of shared multiethnic and multiracial futures. Civil servants, schoolteachers, lawyers, academics (such as Mamdani himself), artisans, industrialists, and minor shopkeepers—all are at this moment, in this story of what an Asian would do under such circumstances, invited to recognize themselves in this insistent image of the Asian as moneymaker.
Even as the incident speaks to the anxiety of the Asians in line that day, it also speaks to the economic history of the emerging postcolonial state. As Mamdani meticulously shows in his account, the crisis of the Ugandan Asian was experienced in effect as a class conflict between, on the one hand, a community that had historically benefited from the colonial racial hierarchies that provided it with relative economic protections and, on the other, a newly emergent native Ugandan trading class that found itself at a competitive disadvantage to this more established economic entity.3 In the context of colonial Uganda, writes Mamdani, “Laws hindered Africans from entering trade and Asians from owning land. In the economy that emerged, Africans were primarily peasants and workers; Asians primarily shopkeepers, artisans and petty bureaucrats; and Europeans bankers, wholesalers and the administrative and political elite. Race coincided with class and became politicized. Thus, in November 1971, Amin produced a list of ‘Asian business malpractices,’ not just ‘business malpractices.’”4 And even though it could be shown that it was actually the British rather than the Asians who controlled the greatest economic assets in Uganda through the sector of commercial banking, it was ironically (despite the realities of racial segregation), the proximity of the Asian to the African either in the role of employer (both domestic and industrial) or trader or office bureaucrat that resulted in the scenes of greatest tension.5
While he is not himself the shopkeeper but rather a regular customer, Mamdani’s own encounter with such African hostility occurs in the contested space of a retail shop. A young man stares at him and asks, “Why are you still here?” (as in, “why haven’t you left Uganda yet?”). Mamdani chooses to avoid a confrontation and a crowd gathers. “For the first time I felt like a foreigner in this country, my home, and the whole weight of the events of the past few months suddenly sank into me. I looked into the faces around me. Staring into my face was the malice of class hatred. One single emotion gripped my whole being: fear.”6 And if the hostility around him evokes fear here, it is instructive to read this moment against an earlier moment in the narrative, when Mamdani relates how his friend John, a visiting British lecturer, manages to walk him right through the front doors of the British High Commission unannounced, while scores of British subjects of Asian origin seeking entry into Britain are made to wait in long lines under the scorching heat only to be slowly let in through a side door. Envious of such white racial privilege, Mamdani remembers, “As we came out, I said to John, ‘How does it feel to be white?’ He hadn’t heard me and I decided not to press the point. But I learned something that afternoon.”7
In the quotation that I have used as my first epigraph for this coda, Mamdani implies that the Asian community’s suffering could be traced to at least two factors—first, to their lack of political power and, second, to the mistaken choices the community had made in not sufficiently reaching out to its fellow black citizens. The life narratives that I have read, particularly those from the early half of the twentieth century, give credence to this claim, but we have also seen instances of Indian-African collaboration such as that between M. A. Desai and Harry Thuku or the later partnership of Mustafa, Kassum, and Chande with Julius Nyerere. While such individuals may not have been the norm, they did provide models of social and civic engagement that were not insular or limited to their own communities. One such individual makes an appearance in Mamdani’s narrative.
On one of the last days before his departure from Kampala, Mamdani goes out for a drink with two friends, Jagdish and Malik, who have jointly put money together to set up a multiracial school for the children of some farmers. Jagdish, Mamdani writes “was one of the few people I knew who was not trapped by the social conditions he was born into; who had successfully risen above his social environment to be able to see its limitations. He revolted against the perverse nature of the society around him, especially affluent Asian society, with its totally privatized experience and increasingly conspicuous consumption. His life, in contrast to that of others, knew no barriers of race or class.”8 Referring to the affluent classes of Asians, Jagdish expresses his disappointment to Mamdani: “Most of us have five senses. These people have only one—the sense of property. Come, let’s have a drink and forget about it all.”9
A little less than two decades after this incident, the scene, with a few notable revisions, made its way into the award-winning blockbuster that was for many in the United States an introduction to the Ugandan Asian experience. A Jagdish-like character, not a schoolteacher but a lawyer, is the protagonist. He too, like Jagdish, is seen to be an exceptional man, a man who risks social ostracism and rebuke because he defends the interests of his black African clients. I refer, of course, to the character of Jay, the lawyer father in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala.10 On the eve of his departure from Uganda, in a session over drinks with friends, Jay echoes the words of Jagdish. We Asians, he tells his friends, are responsible for the creation of Amin, we Asians, he says have lost all senses other than the sense of property. Nair’s Mississippi Masala is a text that warrants a much closer reading than I can offer here, but I want to register a few differences with the prevalent readings of this film.11 First, I think that the very legitimate and necessary critique of Indian racism toward African Americans and toward black people in general is too easily brought to bear on a reading of Jay’s resistance of his daughter’s relationship with the African American Demetrius. For the film makes it painfully clear that Jay’s doubts about this relationship are based not on some primordial racist element that erupts in a form of patriarchal control over his daughter’s sexuality (a reading that would be justifiable were it made in the context of almost any of the other Indian men in the film), but rather from a genuine personal anxiety about the possibility of interracial friendship in a racially divided and divisive world. Indeed, it bears remembering that other than this one issue, Jay is cast in the film as a liberal and loving father. Unlike his wife Kinnu, he is in no rush to see his daughter married off into a life of domesticity, even with the likes of the eligible Harry Patel. And, in a touching scene that points to the downward mobility of the family, he confesses to Mina that he thinks he has failed her as a father since he wants her to go off to college, an option that Mina foregoes, knowing full well that he does not have the financial means to support her.
Let me not be misunderstood here. There is plenty of evidence to show that Indian communities both in Africa as well as elsewhere are insistently endogamous, with marriages and relationships tightly controlled and often proscribed within the bounds not only of a larger sense of race but also of very particular ethnic identifications such as those of common language, region, or caste. When there is interracial marriage, it is more likely to be with white partners than with black. There is also plenty of evidence in Nair’s film to show that the Greenwood Indian community’s sense of scandal over the relationship is marked by a virulent racism. Nevertheless, Jay’s own response to the relationship is far more mediated through his own Ugandan past and particularly his loss of friendship with his childhood friend Okello. We are meant to put considerable weight on Jay’s statement to Demetrius when, responding to what he sees as idealism in the young couple, he says: “You know, once I was like both of you. I thought I could change the world, be different. But the world is not so quick to change.” As viewers of the film, we may not want to defend Jay’s disavowal of the possibilities of interracial alliances here, and, indeed, by the end of the film, after he has returned to Uganda, Jay himself acknowledges that Mina has been right all along about his questioning of Okello’s love and friendship toward him. “There is so little love in the world, and yet so much,” he says in a letter to Kinnu, recognizing that he was wrong to have shunned Okello on the family’s departure from Uganda. We miss the layered historicity of the film if we simply dismiss Jay’s resistance to the interracial relationship as predictably continuous with a demonstrable Indian racism.
Here again, a point needs to be made about the particular characterizations of Jay and Okello that have also seemed to some critics to come across as unrealistic. Equal friendships like these between black Africans and Asian Ugandans, it is alleged, just didn’t exist in Uganda, and the only possible relations were those that were hierarchically marked, such as between a client and a patron or a homeowner and a servant. The historical class divisions between most black Africans and most Ugandan Asians were, as Mamdani suggested earlier, very much a part of the colonial legacy of independent Uganda. But that doesn’t mean that interracial friendships on equal terms were impossible among a certain professional class of black and Asian Ugandans around the time of Ugandan independence. On the contrary, as I discussed in the last chapter, the multiracial atmosphere prevalent at Makerere University at the time suggests that such cross-racial friendships were indeed within the realm of possibility. When critics suggest that the film takes too long to let us know that Okello is not Jay’s servant, they overlook the progressive changes that were taking place in Uganda as the country gained its independence. Some readings of the film have noted that Okello’s mother was most likely a servant in Jay’s household, a reading the film neither endorses nor denies, but one that, it should be said, is entirely within the realm of possibility. But, if this were the case, it is all the more significant that the bond between Okello and Jay as they grow up has become an egalitarian one, not based on a sense of patronage. We must recognize here that the liberal Jay is not a typical member of the larger Ugandan Asian community, but rather, as Mamdani says of his friend Jagdish, an exception. Nair’s choice of such an exceptional character in the lead is a subtle reminder that in any general indictment, ethnonationalist or otherwise, there will always be those who disproportionately bear the wrath and share the blame. As individuals they may stand against the set of values and belief systems that are associated with others like them, but their reach beyond the parochialities of their communities may not be sufficient to protect them at moments when their communities as a whole are targeted.
Most readings of the film locate Jay’s disillusionment in what he sees as Okello’s acceptance of Amin’s edict. When Okello pleads with Jay to consider the deportation as an opportunity and not as a burden—he urges him to go and be king of London or of Bombay—Jay is exasperated and claims that Uganda is his home. “Not any more, Jay. Africa is for Africans—Black Africans,” retorts Okello, and it is this statement, more than Amin’s edict itself, that the film structures as the critical disavowal for Jay. But, as Adeleke Adeeko rightly notes in his nuanced reading of the film, there is no reason offered as to why Okello, who has always come across as a very good friend, getting Jay released from jail, helping him with his departure arrangements with the utmost sensitivity, being a good family friend much loved by both Jay’s wife and his daughter, would suddenly mouth Amin’s rhetoric. Given the lack of explanation, Adeeko suggests that “Okello, one is left to speculate, probably thinks—as do many of his countrymen and women—that Amin is right.”12 I am not sure that this particular speculation is entirely correct. There are clues in the film that even Jay doesn’t quite believe Okello’s parroting of the slogan to be a genuinely felt belief on his part.
There is a revelation that is made late in the film, on Jay’s brief return to Kampala, that I would like to turn to here. Hoping to reunite with Okello, the first place Jay visits on his way from the airport is the Norman Godinho Junior School where Okello taught at the time of the expulsion. He learns that Okello died around 1972 (soon after the Asian expulsion), and the evidence suggests that he was a victim of Amin’s violence. “I wrote him so many letters” (my emphasis), says Jay, indicating that, rather than being so upset with Okello’s disavowal that he stopped communicating with him, he has in fact, over the years, made several attempts at reconnection. Because the film so carefully presents an angry and disappointed Jay at the moment of the original expulsion from Kampala—with Jay refusing even to say a proper good-bye to Okello—this revelation at the end of the film comes as a complete surprise. Like Njoroge’s attempts at reconciliation with the anonymous Indian boy who has offered him a sweet in Ngugi’s Weep Not Child, Jay’s attempts at reconciliation with Okello also fail. In retrospect, however, we can recognize his eagerness and anticipation in Greenwood for any correspondence from Uganda as at least partially a hope for a return communication from Okello and not just a wait for the documents pertaining to the official legal case surrounding his property in Uganda. And, if this is the case, then perhaps what Jay is ultimately disappointed by is neither Amin’s edict nor his sense that Okello actually believes in it, but rather Okello’s (and for that matter anyone else’s) inability to do anything about the situation. In actuality, however, the risks that Okello has already taken in his publicly recognized friendship with Jay are considerable, and, while we are never told what it is that leads to his untimely death, it is not out of the question to assume that a resistance to Amin’s forces, real or perceived, may have something to do with it. Jay’s greatest moral failure is his inability to recognize at quite an early stage that while Amin’s expulsion of the Asians was undeniably a painful experience and an egregious act of injustice, his worst victims, as Madhvani acknowledges in his memoir, were the many black Ugandans who were killed during his regime.
A statement as innocuous as “I wrote him so many letters” makes us completely reconsider Jay’s years in exile. Despite appearances to the contrary, he, for one, has not lost all his senses other than the sense of property. In fact his clear renunciation of all his interests in his property and his unwillingness to pursue the legal case after he has learned that Okello is no more suggest that what has really motivated his return is not his lost property, but a longing for a reunion with his childhood friend. Corny as it sounds, his statement to Kinnu, when he says that “home is where the heart is and my heart is with you,” can, in fact, only be truthfully uttered after he has learned that Okello is dead. Until then his heart does not in fact belong fully to Kinnu. Seeing the film as no more than a heterosexual romance between the young lovers fails to register the equally strong interracial homosocial bond that makes Jay pine not only over a lost home but also over a part of his heart that he has left behind.
What Mamdani’s friend Jagdish, Ngugi’s characters Njoroge and Kamiti, and the film’s characters Jay, Okello, Demetrius, and Mina all share in common are their tendencies to challenge the political, racial, or sexual orders their communities have thrust upon them. They are not always guaranteed success—as we are reminded in the tragic case of Okello or in the Ugandan imprisonment of Jay. Their forms of engagement range from the most publicly political, such as Jay’s chastising of Idi Amin on the BBC, to the most intimate personal space of the bedroom. Standing up to the oftentimes restrictive mores and social codes of the societies they inhabit, they have to accept the risks of being ostracized, ridiculed, and even defeated in order to become agents of societal change. Their politics is not one that speaks the language of revolutions, but rather a biopolitics of affect, where interpersonal relationships take a significant center stage. Such a biopolitics will always seem suspect to those for whom political efficacy can only be measured in large-scale institutional and structural change. A bond such as that between Okello and Jay, or between Mina and Demetrius, can in this sense not be seen as any meaningful counterpoint to the racist legacies that surround them. But, even so, such bonds do help individuals make meaning in their lives and prepare the way for the less divisive future they hope is yet to come. As Jay feels about Okello’s comment on Africa being for black Africans, when such interpersonal bonds break, they oftentimes hurt even more than the edicts coming from a repressive state.13
Some viewers of the film have suggested that the price of Demetrius and Mina’s relationship is a radical break from their families and communities. The film leaves open, however, the possibility of reconciliation. Demetrius’s father Willy Ben has already given his blessings to the two, and Jay’s final epiphany in Uganda suggests that he will come to terms with the young couple as well. But perhaps there is a part of me that insists on a hopeful ending not only because of all the clues that the film itself offers, but because, in an uncanny kind of way, that fictional relationship is in a sense foreshadowed by a real-life relationship taking place off camera. Like the relationship between an Indian and an African American, this relationship too crosses over a divide—Hindu/Muslim—which, along with the specter of the Indian partition, has continued to haunt (as I have suggested in my readings of East African Asian texts) the South Asian imagination. Jay’s house in Kampala is in fact the house that the Hindu Mira Nair shares with her Muslim husband Mahmood Mamdani, whom she met in the process of researching and directing the film. Here, then, the imaginative possibilities of a fictional world intersect with real-life choices, inviting us to consider new alliances and new imaginaries that may well be our biggest leaps of faith.
I’d like to end on a personal note. While it was only around 2001 that I started actively working on this book, it is in many ways informed by my years in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as a teenager. My very first memory of arriving in Nairobi is of driving from the airport past the city center on a road called Harambee Avenue. I had already picked up by then that the word Harambee was coined at around the time of Kenyan independence to convey the momentum of nation building, the translation of which was “let’s build together in unity.” In a few days after the family had settled, we were told by an elderly Asian neighbor that the word had its origins in the praise songs sung by Indian indentured laborers who had been recruited by the British to build the railway. To my Hindu Maharashtrian ears, this explanation sounded very plausible—the word insistently ringing as Har-Ambe, a phrase praising the Goddess Ambabai, a diety worshipped as a family goddess by my own ancestors. As I passed by the railroad tracks in Nairobi for many months thereafter, I could visualize in my mind’s eye Indian indentured laborers working in a chain gang singing “Har Ambe” in unison, in the midst of their fellow Kenyan coworkers. There was something compelling and also reassuring (remember that we had arrived after the mass exodus of Asians from East Africa) in this image to a boy who had quite unwillingly been uprooted from his well-settled life in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay.
In the three decades that have passed since my first arrival in Nairobi, I have on occasion turned to scholars and scholarly resources to learn more about the etymology of the word Harambee. I had no inkling one way or the other whether the story about the origins of the word in the world of indentured labor had any historical substance. A colleague who has considerable expertise in historical linguistics and in East Africa informed me that it was unlikely that the word had an Asian origin. After the development of the Internet and the world of online forums and blogs, I continued the search intermittently, googling “Harambee” to see if anyone had further insight. At one point I found a lively debate that piqued my curiosity. A commentator on the forum suggested that the word may have had an Indian origin. There was a long list of angry responses from other commentators who faulted the Indian origin theory as being racist, as being in keeping with the long tradition of ethnocentric suggestions that anything that was good had come from out of Africa, and that such claims further attempted to alienate Africans from Asians. Given the blatant racism that has shaped discourses on Africa for centuries in the past, the reaction was completely understandable. And yet the original posting did resonate with the story I had been told.14
A few weeks later, as I was in the final stages of revising the manuscript of this book, I once again decided to look up the word. By now, thanks to the dubious wonders of Wikipedia, I learned that a controversy had emerged of late in Kenya around the origins of the word. Wikipedia is, of course, no objective lens on history, but it can indeed play a significant role in what David William Cohen has called the “production of history.” Hence, I quote:
Some conservative Christians in Kenya have opposed the use of the word “Harambee,” alleging that it is derived from an expression of praise to a Hindu deity: Ambee Mata (a reincarnation of Durga riding a Tiger). The railway linesmen carrying huge loads of iron rails and sleeper blocks would chant “har, har ambee!” (praise, praise to Ambee mother) when working. The first president, Jomo Kenyatta, has been said to have witnessed a railway line team as it worked in cohesion and harmony. It represented the metaphor he wanted to reflect: a nation working together and communicating and sharing its load. Others dismiss such objections, arguing that this explanation of the word’s origin, even if true, is irrelevant to its modern usage and meaning.15
Were he to provide a reading of this, Amitav Ghosh would no doubt suggest that much as in the case of Abu-Hasira and Bobbariya, the story of Ambee Mata was an instance of a spirit of the past “reveng(ing)” itself on the contemporary “enforcers of history.” More prosaically and tragically, however, we might note that if Harambee had now become a part of a recognizably ethnicized lexicon in a way in which it had not in the past, such a recognition ironically worked counter to the very proposition Harambee had meant to offer. Rather than coming together to work in unison, the ethnic particularity of the term, and especially its association with a historically immigrant community, threatened, at least in the minds of the few Christian objectors, to disrupt efforts to forge a society that was best fashioned in a (Christian) religious mode. Such are the dangers of ethnicity (and religion), and they have often encouraged ethnic communities, especially when they have felt themselves to be vulnerable, to willingly go under the radar, to not call controversial attention to their ethnic difference, to hope that their difference will not be meaningful in any socially significant way. As the historian Cynthia Salvadori noted when she conducted oral histories and interviews with a wide range of Asians in Kenya in the eighties and early nineties, oftentimes her interlocutors were circumspect, asking her to edit their comments for fear of being misread. And yet such a choice to remain relatively silent has often made the community appear isolated, insular, not engaged with the nation at large, and, as at least the Naipaul brothers suggested, uninterested in the life of the imagination. If this book has shed light on some of the imaginative projects undertaken by East African Asians in the twentieth century, it has done so, ultimately, not in the interests of advocating Asian difference, but rather in the hopes, along with Paul Gilroy, of “imagining political culture beyond the color line.”16