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

2. My reading here resonates with the observations of scholars who have written on the cultures of consumption, in particular the cultures of Hindi movie consumption, in Africa. Thus, for instance, reading together the form of romance offered by Hindi films along with the Hausa genre of littatafan soyayya (love stories), Brian Larkin has traced the common structures of feeling in these two genres. Hindi films, suggests Larkin, “offer Hausa viewers a way of imaginatively engaging with forms of tradition different from their own at the same time as conceiving of modernity that comes without the political and ideological significance of that of the West.” Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers,” 407. See Brian Larkin, “Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood and Global Media,” in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 170–92, for a further discussion of the intertextual relation between Hindi films and Hausa video production. See Heike Behrend, “Love à la Hollywood and Bombay in Kenyan Studio Photography,” Paideuma 44 (1998): 139–53, for an account of how images of Hindi film actresses were incorporated in studio photos in Lamu; See also Laura Fair, “Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences, and the Construction of Romance in the 1950s and 1960s” in Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 58–82, for an account of the reception of the 1951 film Awara by Zanzibari audiences across generations. Fair makes an astute case for the film’s role in gendered identification among Zanzibari women and proceeds to show how the space of the cinema hall also figured as a clandestine space for romantic encounters. See Haseenah Ebrahim, “From ‘Ghetto’ to Mainstream: Bollywood in South Africa,” Scrutiny2 (2008): 63–76, for a discussion of the historical consumption of Bollywood films in South Africa. Ebrahim shows that increasingly Bollywood films are reaching audiences beyond those of the South African Indian diaspora, and she also shows the recent growth of partnerships between South African production companies and Bollywood studios so that an increasing number of contemporary Bollywood films are being shot in South Africa. For the influence of Indian iconography on West African Vodun art, see Dana Rush, “The Idea of ‘India’ in West African Vodun Art and Thought,” in John C. Hawley, ed., India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008): 149–80; For an account of Senegalese dance groups that embrace Indian identities, see Gwenda Vander Steene, “‘Hindu’ Dance Groups and Indophilie in Senegal: The Imagination of the Exotic Other,” in Hawley, India in Africa, Africa in India, 117–47.

3. Gatheru, Child of Two Worlds.

4. After his studies in India, Gatheru did indeed receive a U.S. visa and pursued further studies in both the U.S. as well as Britain.

5. The Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah is also exceptional here. His works are populated with Arab, African, Indian, and mixed-race characters. While I do not engage with his work in this book, Gurnah’s interest in older forms of cultural hybridities and cosmopolitanisms along with their more modern ruptures shares much in common with the work of M. G. Vassanji and Amitav Ghosh.

6. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 65–82.

7. All the novels listed here with the exception of David Maillu’s The Untouchable were published in the Heinemann African Writers Series. Maillu’s novel was published by Maillu Publishing House. While the figure of the Indian may only get a passing reference in the greater majority of African literature, Indian commodities—film and magic in particular—do appear in various literary texts. For references to Indian cinema, see, for instance, Kole Omotoso’s The Edifice (1971), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Beautiful Feathers (1971), Obinkaram Echewa’s The Crippled Dancer (1986), Biyi Bandele Thomas’s The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1992) and The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (1993), and Benjamin Kwakye’s The Clothes of Nakedness (1998); for references to Indian magic, see T. M. Aluko’s One Man, One Matchet (1966), Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda (1970) and My Mercedes Is Bigger Than Yours (1975).

8. Ngugi’s novel does not entirely escape the negative stereotypes of Indians in East Africa. Nevertheless, Ngugi is as interested in the circulation of those stereotypes and what they may have to say about the legacy of race relations in colonial Kenya as he is in the stereotypes themselves. Consider the stereotype of the exploitative trader. We are told at an early point in the narrative that “some people said that black people should stick together and take trade only to their black brethen” (8). Though he does not criticize this view directly, the narrator proceeds to report the sentiment of an elderly Gikuyu woman who takes issue with those advocating such economic nationalism by pointing out that the African traders do not currently provide the marketplace with the low-cost pricing as do the Indians: “Why grudge a poor woman the chance to buy from someone, be he white or red, who charges less money for his things?” (9). If what is being subtly expressed here are the strains of a Gikuyu economic nationalism in the marketplace and the logic of an economic rationality which has no regard for ethnicity or race, a later episode suggests that race can indeed play a role that defies logic in marketplace behavior. I refer here to the plight of Njoroge, toward the end of the novel, when he finds himself working in the shop of an Indian “out of sheer necessity” (143). A customer who has tried to bargain hard with him over the price of cloth accuses him of treating her like an Indian would, a statement that Njoroge rightly reads as the insult that it is meant to be. But, though he retains his cool, what irks him most is the fact that the Indian owner eventually persuades the woman into buying a different piece of cloth of the exact same quality for even more than what Njoroge had himself quoted for the original one (143). There are two ways of reading this episode. One, of course, is in keeping with the image of the cunning Indian who can sweet-talk a customer into making a purchase, even if the purchase may not make the best economic sense. The other, and perhaps equally important to Ngugi’s narrative, is the fragility of ethnic solidarity—intent on striking the best bargain, the African woman ends up being more suspicious of the African employee than the Indian owner (143). My reading of the novel differs from a compelling critique of the novel’s representation of Indians in general, and Gandhi in particular, offered by Robert Muponde. Both our readings are marked by similar political sympathies, but while Muponde faults Ngugi’s narrative for engaging in a form of Orientalism and for not fully dismantling negative stereotypes of Indians, I emphasize the ways in which the narrative might be seen to gesture toward such dismantling. See Robert Muponde, “Ngugi’s Gandhi: Resisting India,” Scrutiny2 13, no. 2 (2008): 36–46.

9. Tajirika, Kamiti’s potential employer, is not convinced of this positive take on India and Indians. But it is Kamiti’s and not Tajirika’s position that the narrative sanctions, and there are other references to historical and cultural events and artifacts from India offered on a positive note. For instance, there are complimentary references by the character Nyawira to Indian women’s writing such as that of Arundhati Roy, Meena Alexander, and Susie Tharu (83) and there is the didactic telling of the story of the Mahabharata by Kamiti, the Wizard of the Crow, to Tajirika in his prison cell (382–83). Of biographical interest is the fact that Susie Tharu and Ngugi were students together at Makerere, and she acted in the staging of Ngugi’s play The Black Hermit when it was first performed.

10. Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 256.

11. Ibid., 264. An unfortunate display of such essentializing rhetoric in which Africanness is reduced to blackness is evident in the argument made by Wole Soyinka against Ali Mazrui when he suggested that Mazrui, a descendant of Omani Arabs, was not an authentic black African. So while my primary focus in this book is on South Asians in Africa, the Swahili-Arab community of which Mazrui is a part is also one that has from time to time been seen as a “foreign” element in Africa. The most violent ramifications of such thought were manifested in the Zanzibar revolution of 1964. For the Soyinka-Mazrui exchange, see Wole Soyinka, “Triple Tropes of Trickery,” Transition 54 (1991): 178–83; Ali Mazrui, “Wole Soyinka as a Television Critic: A Parable of Deception,” Transition 57 (1992): 134–46; Wole Soyinka, “Footnote to a Satanic Trilogy,” Transition 57 (1992): 148–49.

12. See Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. While Mamdani’s discussion of the ways in which colonial authorities manufactured and utilized ethnic and racial identities is relevant to our discussions here, one should not assume that such identities were solely the product of colonial intervention. For a compelling argument about the nature of racialized identities both within and beyond the colonial frame in Zanzibar, see Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones.

13. Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 258.

14. Here, too, the work of Achille Mbembe is useful in rethinking the ways in which African space and borders have been conceptualized in African studies. See Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World.” See also Gilroy, Against Race, for an argument for a more expansive reading of African identities not based on “the sedentary poetics of either soil or blood” (111). A recent article by Moradewun Adejunmobi argues that the politics of autochtony should be thought of as a battle over territories and not as a reversion to nativism. As such, Adejunmobi writes, “The challenge for African intellectuals and policy makers today is to propose productive ways of engaging with territoriality that do not involve embracing xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, and racism, etc. There must be a concerted effort to reclaim current practices of territoriality from diverse demagogues, and this effort I propose as a new ethics of locality.” Adejunmobi, “Urgent Tasks for African Scholars in the Humanities,” 86.

15. This question was poignantly asked by Francoise Verges in her article, “Looking East, Heading South.” While I do not follow her lead by looking at Africa from the specific location of the islands in the Indian Ocean, my project shares the appeal of the cognitive map that Verges offers.

16. John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (London: Blackwood, 1863), 13.

17. For an account of the rise of an Africa-centered paradigm in writing about African history and the corollary search for what Terence Ranger dubbed “a usable past,” see Vansina, Living With Africa. See, in particular, chapter 6, “The Roaring Sixties,” 111–36. One of the trickiest challenges for Africanist researchers in opening up new arenas in Indian Ocean studies has been to differentiate this scholarship from earlier diffusionist models that sought to “explain” African cultural innovations in terms of non-African arrivals and imports. What seems clear in retrospect is that, while rejecting the racism that underwrote such work, nationalist histories tended in turn to inadvertently foreclosing any discussion of hybridities, exchanges, and movements that might shift the focus from discussions of African agency. Abdul Sheriff puts it more bluntly: “Africa’s exclusion may have been inspired by the myopic nationalist Africanist historiography in the immediate post-independence period in the 1960s, which was preoccupied with ‘discovering African initiative’ in African history, and deliberately turned its back on the ocean, which was seen as a source of distraction.” Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean. See also Michael Pearson, who offers a highly readable and thoughtful account of how political concerns have underwritten the writing of history in both East Africa and India and how these have shifted over time. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, 1–29.

18. D. R. Banaji, Bombay and the Siddis (Bombay, 1933); Harris, The African Presence in Asia; Shanti Sadiq Ali, The African Dispersal in the Deccan: From Medieval to Modern Times (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1995); See also Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds., The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2003); Amy Caitlin-Jairazbhoy and Edward A. Alpers, eds., Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (Noida: Rainbow, 2003); Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod, eds., African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2006); Pashington Obeng, Shaping Membership, Defining Nation: The Cultural Politics of African Indians in South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007). See also the recently produced Web site on the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africansindianocean/index2.php; accessed June 29, 2012).

19. Senghor wrote two important pieces on the relationship between Negritude and Dravidian India. See Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Why Create a Department of Indo-African Studies at Dakar,” Journal of Tamil Studies 5 (1974): 1–11; “Negritude and Dravidian Culture,” Journal of Tamil Studies 10 (1974): 4; See also Ka Aravanam, Dravidians and Africans (Madras: Tamil Koottam, 1977). For a treatment of the commonalities between various African culinary cultures and those of Dravidian India, see Diane Spivey, The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). Note here that in both cases—linguistic and culinary—the claim being made is of an outward dispersal from the African continent and not, as in the case of Hindi cinema, a movement from India to Africa.

20. These themes are outlined on the center’s Web site: http://www.cisa-wits.org.za/ (accessed August 1, 2011).

21. I cite much of this literature in other notes in this chapter and throughout the book. However, two recently published edited volumes are good examples of such scholarship. See Ghosh and Muecke, Cultures of Trade; Moorthy and Jamal, Indian Ocean Studies.

22. See, for instance, Piot, “Atlantic Aporias.” See also the special issue of Research in African Literatures guest-edited by Simon Gikandi. Gikandi’s introduction to the issue and the essay by Ntongela Masilela in particular speak to the absence of Africa in Gilroy’s framework. See Gikandi, “Introduction”; Ntongela Masilela, “The ‘Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity in South Africa,” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (1996): 88–96.

23. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36.

24. See Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders.

25. Mahmood Mamdani notes, “The trans-Atlantic slave trade racialized notions of Africa. It fueled the conceptual tendency to divide Africa in two: that above the Sahara and that below it. From a bridge that had for centuries facilitated a regular flow of trading camel caravans between civilizations to its north and south, the Sahara was now seen as the opposite: a great civilizational barrier below which lay a land perpetually quarantined, ‘Negro Africa.’” Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 78.

26. As has now become conventional in academic writing on the subject, I use the terms Asian and Indian relatively interchangeably in this book, the choice often based on the historical time period being discussed. For the most part, in East Africa Asian as a term began to be substituted for the earlier term Indian at around the time of the partition of India. Nonetheless, I should note that the term Asian is by no means universally embraced by the different communities in Africa that trace their origins to the subcontinent. In the South African context, for instance, the favored term is South African Indian, but Indian South African also makes an occasional appearance, and, more recently, Pallavi Rastogi has argued for the term Afrindian to mark the fact that “Indianness exists in South Africa in an Africanized state.” Rastogi, Afrindian Fictions, 18. In the long and varied history of Indian presence in Africa, a number of different terms, some pejorative and others not, have been associated with them: coolie, Arab (for Muslim traders), passenger Indian, Sammy and Mary (in South Africa), and baniani, muhindi, mugoa (for Goans), kalasinga (for Sikhs), chotara (for mixed-race children in East Africa) are all part of the historical record. The connotation of the term Asian in East Africa as referring mainly to immigrants from the Indian subcontinent cannot be easily transported to the South African context, where Asian immigration included, in addition to Indians, Chinese indentured laborers recruited in the nineteenth century and Asian slaves brought to the Cape Colony by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century from various Asian locales. Separated by a colonial and apartheid ideology, the categorization of individuals under markers such as Chinese, Coloreds, Indians, and Malays has meant that the term Asian in this context has had less purchase. And yet, even in postapartheid times, such separations continue to belie the often syncretic traditions and historical trajectories between communities. So, for instance, Loren Kruger has argued, in a seminal essay on reading the continuities between Cape Colored and South African Indian identities, that for too long the narrative of the Indian presence in South Africa has begun with the arrival of the indentured laborers in 1860, thereby erasing an earlier history of Indian arrival in the context of slavery in the Cape. There is, she writes, “almost a willful ignorance of the fact that the majority of the first-generation slaves brought by the Dutch to the seventeenth-century Cape Colony were from Bengal and Madras rather than from Malaya as is still commonly supposed.” Kruger, “Black Atlantics, White Indians and Jews,” 112. See also Nigel Worden, “VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port,” in Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward Alpers, eds., Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 142–62. Recent South African scholarship has increasingly begun to engage with mixed inheritances. See, for instance, Mohamed Adhikari, Not Black Enough, Not White Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); Zimitri Erasmus, ed., Coloured by History: Shaped by Place (Roggebai: Kwela, 2001).

27. While the term Afrasian echoes the term Afrindian offered by Pallavi Rastogi, my usage is meant to reflect not the naming of a particular ethnic community—such as Indians in South Africa—but rather the entire nexus of individuals who have historically crossed (and continue to cross) the Afrasian sea. Thus, in my usage of the term, the Tunisian Jew Ben Yiju is as much an Afrasian as the twentieth-century merchant Nanji Kalidas Mehta. Pearson’s interest, incidentally, is in carving out a geographical zone out of the much larger space of the Indian Ocean for the purposes of his particular study. This zone “at least heuristically, has some unity, beginning at Sofala and extending right around the coast down to the southern tip of India, Kanya Kumari, Once the Portuguese arrive, the African southern limit goes right down to what they called the Cape of Good Hope. Both the Gulf and the Red Sea are included, and of course this area has intricate links with much further areas” (36–37). In search of a name for this area, Pearson discards the term Indian Ocean as a “little ethnocentric” and finds that the concept of an “‘Asian’ sea excludes East Africa” (36). He offers instead the term Afrasian Sea, which I adapt for the subtitle of my book. I am also indebted to Barbara Herrnstein Smith who first introduced me to the phrase “Commerce with the Universe,” which I have adopted as the title of this book.

28. See Bose, A Hundred Horizons; Metcalf, Imperial Connections; Hofmeyr, “The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian Nationalism”; Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); John Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). An excellent recent volume on these connections is Bose and Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones. See also Mark Ravinder Frost, “‘That Great Ocean of Idealism’: Calcutta, the Tagore Circle, and the Idea of Asia, 1900–1920,” in Moorthy and Jamal, Indian Ocean Studies, 251–79.

29. Here it is useful to track the ways in which Indians abroad mediated between a sense of imperial citizenship and increasingly over time, towards a more national orientation. See Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

30. McGregor Ross reports, for instance, that in 1908 the Nairobi Indian Association sent a “cablegram to the Secretary of State in London in support of the grievances of the Indians in the Transvaal, and another to Mr. Gandhi in Johannesburg supporting his action in challenging the legality of the Registration act there.” They reported these acts in the local press, thus annoying the local white settlers. Ross, Kenya From Within, 310. Zarina Patel notes that there were ties between Marxist groups in India and South Africa in the forties: “Y. Dadoo and G. M. Naicker of the South African Communist Party would stop over in Kenya and meet with the group. Their visits were always shrouded in secrecy and on one occasion when Piyo, Rawak, Sharda, Sheth and Indu Desai met Dadoo, Piyo remembers Makhan Singh asking Dadoo a lot of detailed questions and following up on news of several individuals.” Patel, Unquiet, 143.

31. This book was written in 1914 and published in 1916 in India. For a biography of Bhawani Dayal, see Prem Narain Agrawal, Bhawani Dayal Sannyasi: A Public Worker of South Africa (Ajitmal: Indian Colonial Association, 1939). Agrawal notes that Dayal was a prolific writer in Hindi and lists among his books titles such as History of Passive Resistance in South Africa; My Experiences of South Africa; Story of My Prison Life; Biography of Mahatma Gandhi; Indians in Transvaal; Natalian Hindu; Vedic Religion and Aryan Culture; Educator and Cultivator; The Vedic Prayer; and several other booklets in Hindi and English (ibid., app. 1:i). Dayal also served as editor of the Hindi section of the Indian Opinion for a short period (ibid., 37–38).

32. The April 6th, 1912, edition of the Indian Opinion listed among its subscriptions readers in “India, Rangoon, London, Zanzibar, Mozambique, Mombasa, Delagoa Bay, Tamakan, Naivasha, Chinde, Chaichai, Blantyre and Local, including the whole of South Africa.” Reprinted in Fatima Meer, The South African Gandhi: An Abstract of the Speeches and Writings of M. K. Gandhi, 1893–1914 (Durban: Madiba, 1996), 895. For a recent account of Indian politics and nationalism in Indian newspapers in colonial Tanganyika, see James Brennan, “Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika,” Africa 81, no. 1 (2011): 42–67.

33. In his survey of Indian newspapers, Robert Gregory notes that all the papers published in India around the turn of the century were sympathetic and supportive of the predicament of Indians in Africa. However, there was a divide when it came to discussions of black African rights and interests—Anglo-Indian newspapers such as the Pioneer showed little interest in the rights of Africans, whereas newspapers edited by Indians such as Native Opinion were often more sympathetic to African interests and “tended to equate the problems of Africans under imperialist domination with those of Indians in India.” See Gregory, India and East Africa, 137–38. See also Hofmeyr, “The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian Nationalism.”

34. Addressing his fellow settlers in Nakuru, Kenya, on January 30, 1923, Lord Delamere welcomed in their midst the South African Trade Commission, noting that it “will bring us into closer touch with the Union of South Africa, the only unit in Africa, which is consolidating a civilization on Western lines.” In Waiz, Indians Abroad, 58.

35. Quoted ibid., 509.

36. Quoted in Andrews, The Indian Question in East Africa, 61.

37. Waiz, Indians Abroad, 258.

39. In the interests of having a manageable project, I have left out of this book some of my own current writing on Gandhi in South Africa. However, there is an extensive literature that examines Gandhi’s South African career and its implications for both South Africa as well as for the struggle for Indian nationalism. See, for instance, Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985); Surendra Bhana, Gandhi’s Legacy: The Natal Indian Congress, 1894–1994 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1997); Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005); Judith Brown and Martin Prozesky, eds., Gandhi and South Africa: Principles and Politics (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996); David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2003); James Hunt, Gandhi and the Non-Conformists: Encounters in South Africa (New Delhi: Promolla, 1986); J. N. Uppal, Gandhi: Ordained in South Africa (New Delhi: Ministry of Information, Government of India, 1996); E. S. Reddy, Gandhiji’s Vision of a Free South Africa (New Delhi: Sanchar, 1995); T. G. Ramamurthi, Nonviolence and Nationalism: A Study of Gandhian Mass Resistance in South Africa (New Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1992); Nagindas Sanghavi, The Agony of Arrival: Gandhi, The South Africa Years (New Delhi: Rupa, 2006). An excellent sourcebook and collection of contemporary tributes to Gandhi in South Africa may be found in Meer, The South African Gandhi.

40. See Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography (Bombay: Asia, 1966), 174–78; 249–52.

41. “Letter from Sarojini Naidu to Gandhiji, February 29, 1924” in Mrinalini Sarabhai, ed., The Mahatma and the Poetess: Being a Selection of Letters Exchanged Between Gandhiji and Sarojini Naidu (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1998), 37 (37–39).

42. Sarojini Naidu to Gandhiji, February 13, 1924, ibid., 35 (34–36).

43. Extract printed ibid., 169. Along with the case of Sarojini Naidu, the later history of Indian women who joined the struggle against colonialism—leaders such as Urmilaben Ramabhai Patel, and Saraswati Manubhai Patel in Kenya and Dr. Goonam, Amina Chachalia, Zainab Asvat, P. K. Naidoo, and Suriakala Patel, among others, in South Africa—suggests that Indian women were not merely passive observers in a male political game. In some cases, as Aili Mari Trip has shown in the context of Uganda, they actively sought to form multiracial coalitions with African and European women in the interests of resisting colonial patriarchy. See Aili Mari Tripp, “Women’s Mobilization in Uganda: Non-racial Ideologies in European-Asian-African Encounters, 1945–1962,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 543–64. On the Kenyan women, see Ambu H. Patel, comp., N. S. Thakur and Vanshi Dhar, eds., Struggle for Release: Jomo and His Colleagues (Nairobi: New Kenya, 1963). U. R. Patel is quoted as saying, “The man who kindled the Fire of Independence in Africa, as Mahatma Gandhi did in India, is Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. The Asians and Africans alike as well as many great leaders of other nations have full faith in him” (170); S. M. Patel is quoted as saying, “Asian women have full trust in Kenyatta’s leadership. They believe that Kenyatta’s long years in Europe will make him understand women’s role in nation’s affairs and expect of him that he will afford full protection to all women as is done in all the civilized countries of the world” (170). Both women were active in getting other Asian women to sign petitions asking for the release of Kenyatta and were involved in gathering donations from the Asian community for poor and unemployed Africans. On activism by Indian women in South Africa, see Cheryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London: Onyx, 1982), 105–12; See also Dr. [Kasavello] Goonam, Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography (Durban: Madiba, 1991).

44. On this, Stephen Muecke writes,

45. See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; see also the exchange between Ghosh and Chakrabarty, “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe.”

46. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 11.

47. Ghosh’s book allows us to imagine a dialogue between Africa and Asia, that, as Ashis Nandy once put it sarcastically, has become hard to imagine:

Such a conversation [between Africa and Asia] has become doubly dangerous. Because, during the last two hundred years, we have obediently learnt to converse with our neighbours under the auspices of—and with the help of “correct” categories popularized by—our distant, benevelont, wise mentors, usually located in the respectable universities and think tanks of North America and West Europe. These mentors are obviously the partisans of sane, rational, transparent exchanges in the global market place of ideas. As a result, these conversations do not have to be translated for the global cosmopolis; they have to be merely translated for the benefit of the hoi polloi of Africa and Asia.”

48. Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 258.

49. See Scott, Refashioning Futures.

50. I have attempted a brief answer to this particular question in a recent essay. See Gaurav Desai, “Between Indigeneity and Diaspora: Questions from a Scholar Tourist,” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011): 53–66.

51. This last question is, of course, an echo of the question raised by Mahmood Mamdani in his inaugural lecture, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa,” University of Cape Town, Department of Communication, 1998.

52. See Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 3 (2001): 3–8. See also Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991).

53. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1–40.

54. Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean.

55. See Frank, ReOrient; Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 73. David Washbrook reminds us that “the world system and world capitalism were not simply imposed from the outside on an innocent and unsuspecting non-European world.” Rather, he argues that the experience of South Asia (and by extension that of the Indian Ocean), “calls for a serious reappraisal of what ‘capitalism’ and ‘Modernity’ might mean. Some start in demystifying them may be made by turning to history and, first, by seeking to abandon, or at least to modify, purely Euro-centred theories of them.” David Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism,” in Sugata Bose, ed., South Asia and World Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 78, 77 (40–84).

56. Julius Nyerere, quoted in Annar Cassam, “Nyerere talks to El Pais” in Chachage and Cassam, Africa’s Liberation, 72–76.

57. Francis Fukuyama, “U.S. Democracy Has Little to Teach China,” Financial Times, January 17, 2011 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cb6af6e8-2272-11e0-b6a2-00144feab49a.html#axzz2DSD1kONy; accessed June 29, 2012). This new assessment is a departure from his earlier position articulated in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

58. Kaplan, “Center Stage for the Twenty-first Century.” On the commercial potential of Africa, see Vijay Mahajan, Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More than You Think (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton, 2009). There is a growing amount of literature on the role of China and India in Africa. See, for instance, Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Chris Alden, China in Africa (London: Zed, 2007); Axel Harneit-Sievers, Stephen Marks, and Sanusha Naidu, eds., Chinese and African Perspectives on China in India (Cape Town: Pambazuka, 2010); Emma Mawdsley and Gerald McCann, eds., India in Africa: Changing Geographies of Power (Cape Town: Pambazuka, 2011); V. S. Sheth, ed., India-Africa Relations: Emerging Policy and Development Perspective (Delhi: Academic Excellence, 2008); Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, “India and South Africa as Partners for Development in Africa?” (London: Chatham House, 2011), www.chathamhouse.org.uk (accessed August 1, 2011); Renu Modi, “India and South Sudan: Potential Areas of Co-operation,” Gateway House, Indian Council on Global Relations, August 23, 2011, http://www.gatewayhouse.in/publication/analysis-amp-background/articles/india-and-south-sudan-potential-areas-cooperation (accessed August 27, 2011).

59. I refer here to the anti-Asian rhetoric circulated at the time not only in South Africa and Kenya but also in other white settler colonies such as the United States. I discuss some of this rhetoric in chapter 3. A good book to read on this is Neame, The Asiatic Danger in the Colonies. The book garnered a review in the New York Times when it was first published. The byline of the review reads “Student of Oriental Character Points Out How Insidiously the Patient East Is Undermining Western Supremacy,” June 29, 1907 (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0B17F9385A15738DDDA00A94DE405B878CF1D3; accessed June 29, 2012). I am not suggesting that Africanists remain silent about any unequal or exploitative relations between Africa and the East. I am only cautioning against the echoes of that earlier discourse that I increasingly hear in the U.S. national media in discussions of the alleged rise of China or that of India.

60. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi.

61. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 257.

62. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 201.

1. Ghosh, In an Antique Land. All citations in this chapter are from the Vintage paperback edition. Page references to this edition are provided parenthetically.

2. Clifford Geertz, “A Passage to India,” New Republic, August 23–30, 1993, 38 (38, 40–41); Ahdaf Soueif, “Intimately Egyptian,” Times Literary Supplement, January 15, 1993, 7; Anton Shammas, “The Once and Future Egypt,” New York Times Book Review, August 1, 1993, 26; Jonathan M. Elukin, “Cairene Treasures,” American Scholar 63 (1994): 137–40.

3. Amitav Ghosh, “The Imam and the Indian,” Granta 20 (1986): 135–46. This piece was reprinted in a volume of critical essays in cultural studies, Angelika Bammer, ed., Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 47–55; Ghosh, “The Slave of MS. H.6.” In addition to these two previews of what was to come in In An Antique Land, we should also note that, although it was not disseminated to a large public readership, Ghosh’s dissertation was produced in 1982. Written in the formal style of an ethnography, the dissertation is of great interest to those pursuing a comparative study of the scholarly and popular modalities of “writing culture.” See Ghosh, “Kinship in Relation to Economic and Social Organization.”

4. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies, 96–116 (New York: Routledge, 1992); See also Clifford, Routes, 1–15.

5. There are, of course, a number of scholars of Asian descent in Africa—Mahmood Mamdani, Abdul Sheriff, and Issa Shivji to name only three from the East African context. The point I make, recalling Kamiti (in Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow) is that one often has to be reminded that “An Indian is not all dukawallah and nothing else” (54). If this is a point about popular representations of Indians in Africa, a related point also needs to be made about the academic standing of Eastern scholarship on Africa. There has been a long tradition of South Asian academic engagement with Africa and African studies, including the important journal Africa Quarterly published by the Indian Council on Cultural Relations. Very little of this work has reached scholars in the West, who have had a regrettably parochial sense of the paradigms of area studies. A case in point is the work of Ramkrishna Mukherjee, whose study Uganda: An Historical Accident? Class, Nation and State Formation was first published under a different title in 1956. This book, republished in 1985 by Africa World Press, anticipated in significant detail many of the discussions of the “invention of ethnicity” and “tribalism” that later became common parlance in African studies. Yet, if citations are to be a measure, there seems to be little to no historical memory of this particular book. See Mukherjee, The Problem of Uganda; Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Uganda: An Historical Accident? Class, Nation and State Formation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1985).

6. The Vintage paperback edition subtitles the book “History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale.”

7. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 1–17.

8. The name Ifriqiya, from which the word Africa is derived, refers to the area in North Africa that roughly corresponds to present-day Tunisia.

9. See Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, 185–206, for biographical details on Ben Yiju and for letters addressed to and sent by him to business colleagues and relatives.

10. S. D. Goitein explains that, while the majority of documents in the Geniza were written in the Hebrew script, the languages used were various forms of Arabic vernaculars used in Spain, Sicily, and different parts of Northern Africa and Western Asia. A few documents written in the Arabic script are also present in the Geniza material, indicating the close connections between the Jewish and Islamic public spheres. See Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:14–17.

11. The latest document Goitein records noting is a 1879 divorce bill from Bombay (A Mediterranean Society, 1:9).

12. Goitein takes pains to distinguish the materials in the Geniza from a proper historical archive. Archival materials are usually those that are consciously preserved for later referral, and care is taken to protect them from deterioration. Such documents are usually also of social, economic, or political import to the people concerned and not, as in the case of the documents discarded in the Geniza, those that have outlived their intended purpose. Compared to a proper archive, the documents found in the Geniza retain a decisively chaotic element about them. But it is precisely this chaos that allows one to reconstruct scenes of everyday life and to get an unadulterated flavor of a bygone society. See Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:7–28.

13. This brief biography is drawn from Abraham Udovitch’s foreword to volume 5 of A Mediterranean Society (ix–xviii).

14. On the notion of the “production of history,” see Cohen, The Combing of History.

15. Paul Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” in Clifford and Marcus Writing Culture, 234–61.

16. See Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

17. Fieldwork has always been the major initiation ritual in the discipline of anthropology. It is the fact that the anthropologist has “been there” and lived among the “natives” that is presumed to give the scholar the necessary scientific authority. For a critique of the presuppositions of this tradition, see the essays in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, in particular, Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” 27–50.

18. Ghosh, “Slave of MS. H.6,” 176–77.

19. See, for instance, Samir Dayal, “The Emergence of the Fragile Subject: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land,” in Monika Fludernik, ed., Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth Century Indian Literature (Germany: Stauffenburg, 1998), 103–33; Hind Wassef, “Beyond the Divide: History and National Boundaries in the Work of Amitav Ghosh,” Journal of Comparative Poetics 18 (1998): 75–95; Javed Majeed, “Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: The Ethnographer-Historian and the Limits of Irony,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 45–55; and Indira Bhatt and Indira Nityanandam, eds., The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Creative, 2001).

20. It should be noted that such amusement signals an implicit primitivism rather like the humor created around the Coca Cola bottle in the popular movie The Gods Must Be Crazy.

21. Thus, for instance, when he proposes joining the villagers in their fast for Ramadan, he is told not to do so since he is not a Muslim. The villagers, despite their ridicule of his religious background, respect the boundaries of religious difference itself, while at the same time, as Nabeel’s comment implies, putting less of a premium on the following of custom by those outside the fold. It is this that allows them to take Ghosh in even though he professes a religion other than their own.

22. The Milch Cow in Ancient Egypt, worshiped in the form of the Goddess Hathor, was said to be both the mother and the wife of the Sun. Likewise, in the Hindu pantheon, Brahma is said to have had two wives, Savitri and Gayatri. Savitri is said to be the mother of the Sun, while her co-wife Gayatri is often worshiped in the incarnation of a cow.

23. The relevance of the Pharaonic past to contemporary Egyptian identities has been the subject of much debate over the twentieth century. In this sense the invocation of Antique in the title of the book appears odd—Egyptian antiquity is almost completely absent in Ghosh’s frame. For a concise account of the debates on Egyptian identity and its pan-Arab, Islamist, and Pharaonic dimensions, see Ahmed Abdalla, “The Egyptian National Identity and Pan-Arabism: Variations and Generations,” in Roel Meijer, ed., Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East (Surrey: Curzon), 171–81.

24. Ghosh’s vision of the tolerance of Jews on the Malabar Coast during this period is confirmed by most of the scholarship. See Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 389–415, and Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). However, the nature of the relations between Hindus and Muslims is open to debate. The fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta notes the following about the Malabar Coast: “at every half-mile there is a wooden shed with benches on which all travellers, whether Muslims or infidels (read Hindu), may sit. At each shed there is a well for drinking and an infidel who is in charge of it. If the traveller is an infidel he gives him water in vessels; if he is a Muslim he pours water into his hands, continuing to do so until he signs him to stop. It is the custom of the infidels in the Mulaybar lands that no Muslim may enter their houses or eat from their vessels; if he does so they break the vessels or give them to the Muslims.” Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 231. Citing other scholars who have written on the period, Aditya Bhattacharjea argues that Ghosh’s evocation of a “culture of accommodation and compromise” is a sanitized view of India’s past. See Aditya Bhattacharjea, “Privileged Fiction: The Stephanian Novelists and (Their) Others,” in Aditya Bhattacharjea and Lola Chatterjee, eds., The Fiction of St. Stephen’s (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2000), 184–85 and n13 (167–206).

25. It is somewhat curious that the Imam does not bring up circumcision, especially since the imam, who in this community is also a barber, would by common practice also be the one who helped with the circumcision of young boys.

26. Ghosh, “The Imam and the Indian,” 145.

27. In a volume of essays on the fiction of Indian writers such as Ghosh who were products of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, several contributors note that the representation of women and gender issues is often stilted in these narratives. An all-male college until 1975, these critics claim that St. Stephen’s seems to have produced writers who were most comfortable in depicting scenarios of male bonding. There is much truth to this claim vis-à-vis In an Antique Land. The majority of the text revolves around male society, and no female character, with the possible exception of Busiana, gets sustained narrative space. Yet what is important is that we do learn about the Egyptian women who resist patriarchy even if we do not fully enter their point of view. The depiction of Ashu in the historical narrative is considerably more complicated, and we will turn to it later in the chapter. On the gendered aspects of the fiction of St. Stephen’s writers, see the essays by Salim Yusufji and Brinda Bose in Bhattacharjea and Chatterjee, The Fiction of St. Stephen’s: Salim Yusufji, “On Reading the Entrails,” 71–78; Brinda Bose, “Of Voids and Speculums; Or, Where Is the Woman in This Text?” 135–50.

28. The Eurocentrism of the term medieval and the Middle Ages is evident when one remembers that, in its normative formulation, the period so designated is that between the Classical world of Greek/Roman antiquity and the early modern and Renaissance world of Christian Europe. What were allegedly the “Dark Ages” for Europe were in fact the Glorious or Golden Age of Islam. For an articulation of how Eurocentric scholarship on the so-called medieval period might benefit from a recognition of this aporia and a consequent, alternative contrapuntal analysis of the Islamic world, see Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial.” In a similar vein, for a consideration of the “middleness” of the Middle Ages, see Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 (June 1998): 677–704; and Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). For a discussion of how Christians in the Middle Ages themselves “read” Islam, see, R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

29. On the rapid changes in the countryside resulting from the forces of globalization, see Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians: Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000).

30. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and the British Nation, 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6.

32. In the modern frame, the “cosmopolitanism” of Nabeel and his compatriots who travel to Iraq in search of employment is characterized by a similar melancholy.

33. For the anthropological literature on cultural “survivals,” see Melville Herskovits, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (New York: Knopf, 1928); William Bascom and Melville Herskovits, eds., Continuity and Change in African Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

34. For an excellent account of how different religious communities may participate in the “same” ritual, see Peter van der Veer, “Syncretism, Multiculturalism, and the Discourse of Tolerance,” in Stewart and Shaw, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism, 196–211. I am much indebted to this article and to this collection as a whole in my thinking through of the issues presented here. Van der Veer’s article is also cited by Gauri Viswanathan in an important essay that advances a critique of Ghosh along lines similar to my own. However, in her case, the argument is drawn primarily on a theoretical register concerned with the “place of syncretism in the Post-Orientalist” project. Viswanathan’s essay works best when it interrogates what she sees as the homologous nature of syncretism and “culture” in the sense given to it by Matthew Arnold. Discourses of “syncretism,” Viswanathan rightly reminds us, are themselves inventions of the colonial imaginary and thus need to be used with caution in a postcolonial project. While I share her unease with the category, I have nonetheless found it to be indispensable in reading Ghosh’s text on its own terms. The “syncretic” refers here to the cultural mixing and exchange that become for Ghosh a defining condition of the precolonial era. In my own reading of Ghosh, I point to the limits of such mixings and exchanges, but I do not wish to disregard entirely their presence either. How we read these syncretisms is, I suggest, key to understanding Ghosh’s construction of history as nostalgia. As will become clearer later, Viswanathan and I part company on our evaluation of the use of nostalgia in Ghosh. She sees this as a failure (“mere nostalgia”), whereas I find it redeeming. Readers who are interested in pursuing these issues further should benefit, as have I, from her analysis. See Viswanathan, “Beyond Orientalism.”

35. An account of this episode is found in Goitein, Jews and Arabs, 182–84. The verdict, incidentally, was in favor of the worshipers.

36. Goitein dates the letter as having been written sometime between 1355 and 1367, thus at a later date than during Ben Yiju’s own lifetime. Yet, given the fact that for Ghosh the division between the world of Ben Yiju and our own really only takes place in the late fifteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, the letter still speaks to a time that he includes in his utopian frame. See Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 5:471–74.

37. Ibid., 5:473–74. For ease of reading, I have omitted the internal notations that Goitein uses in his transcriptions of the letter.

38. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 5:472.

39. There are other examples of the limits of the syncretic in the Geniza world. Thus, for instance, Goitein’s work suggests that while the influence of Islamic Sufism on Judaism was definitely a reality, the form of that borrowing was very much in keeping with the fundamental tenets of Judaism. Goitein writes, “Despite the great dependence of medieval Jewish piety on Sufism, there was one point on which it parted company. Judaism never consented to blur the distinction between the Creator and the created. Love of God, emulation of God, nearness to him, longing for Him—yes; but union or identification with Him, this idea meant to Jews—at least to Jews living inside the Muslim civilization—nothing but blasphemy and self-deification.” Goitein, Jews and Arabs, 153. In his notes, Ghosh cites Paul Fenton’s translation of Obadyah Maimonides’ text “The Treatise of the Pool.” “Fenton’s introduction,” writes Ghosh, “provides an outline of Sufi influences on Jewish mysticism.” Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 379. The introduction is indeed very good, however, it demonstrates not only the influences of Islam but also the antisyncretic and purist reactions to it on the part of some members of the Jewish community. See ‘Obadyah Maimonides, The Treatise of the Pool, trans. Paul Fenton (London: Octagon, 1981), 1–71.

40. “Egypt Cancels Jewish Festival After Protests (Reuters),” Jerusalem Post, December 26, 2000, 5.

41. In other words, the rule of the Almohads in North Africa or the Egyptian Mamluks, who ruled subsequently, would present a different picture—a rather negative one—of interfaith relations between Jews and Muslims in the medieval world. The most readable and concise account of such variations is found in S. D. Goitein, “Interfaith Relations in Medieval Islam,” Yaacov Herzog Memorial Lecture, delivered at Columbia University, New York, October 1973.

42. Cohen, “Islam and the Jews.” The book in which this essay is included contains other essays in addition to Cohen’s that would be of interest to Ghosh’s readers.

43. By “performative” specificity I mean the ways in which religious beliefs are actually practiced, enforced, or, alternatively, ignored.

44. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 7:273–311.

45. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, 214.

46. In his writings on his travels throughout the Mediterranean world, Benjamin of Tudela noted the cosmopolitan nature of the city of Alexandria. It was a point of convergence for merchants from all corners of the Indian and Mediterranean regions. In the notes to this section of his text, A. Asher discusses the fact that the trade was so important that religious warfare was, in its context, irrelevant:

The enterprises of the Crusaders were directed against the powers of the sovereigns of this country, who consequently might be said to be at war with the whole of Europe; and it might have been reasonably supposed that all commercial and other intercourse should have ceased, but mutual interests and political considerations produced different results. The importation of asiatic goods had become a source of so much profit to the inhabitants and of revenue to the government, that the Sultans never contemplated the idea of closing their ports to the Europeans, who not only purchased, but also imported and paid duty upon those articles, which were made available objects of exchange in Arabia and India. Thus do we see religious prejudices waived in consideration of pecuniary profit, by the most inveterate enemies, by two sects, who took up arms in defence of the religions they professed!

47. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:ix (my emphasis).

48. Indeed, Goitein reads the intrusion of the state in trade as a prime cause of the breakdown of the Islamic Golden Age in the thirteenth century. “The conquest of Southwest Asia by the central-Asian Seldjuks ushered in a new period in Islamic history which was characterized by the oppressive rule of foreign mercenaries, propped up by closest cooperation with a well paid orthodox clergy and replacing free enterprise by a government-controlled state economy. In Egypt this state was reached by the middle of the thirteenth century, which was, according to the definition given before, the end of the classical period of Islam.” Goitein, “Interfaith Relations in Medieval Islam,” 27–28.

49. And it is carried over in much of the subsequent research undertaken by other scholars. Stefan C. Reif, for instance, echoes the sentiment in his book, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo. He writes,

50. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:66.

51. Thus, for instance, the early history of the “Commerce clause,” which barred any disruption of interstate commerce, resulted in a desegregation of hotels and other facilities.

52. Usually transcribed as Qais, the island is in the Persian Gulf.

53. See Wink, Al-Hind, 1:56. See, also, S. D. Goitein, “Two Eyewitness Reports on an Expedition of the King of Kish (Qais) against Aden,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16, no. 2 (1954): 247–57.

54. Goitein, “Two Eyewitness Reports,” 247 (my emphasis). At a later point in the article, Goitein refers to the Persian Gulf as “the sea controlled by the King of Kish” (252, my emphasis).

55. Unfortunately, the research on Indian Ocean pirates in this period is still minimal, but comparative studies of piracy and privateering (that alliance established between a state and pirates) in later periods and other contexts are informative. For the Indian Ocean, I have found most useful Charles Davies, The Blood-Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy, 1797–1820 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). I cannot claim sufficient expertise in the area to judge the merits of its rebuttals of earlier scholarship on the Qasimi, but the book is an excellent staging ground for precisely the kinds of definitional and indeed conceptual differences that arise in discussions surrounding “piracy.” Thus we can see that, depending on their ideological or historical orientations, one commentator’s “pirate” is another commentator’s “privateer” who is yet another commentator’s “warrior.” For scholarship on piracy in other contexts, see, in particular, Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); David Starkey, Jap de Moor, and E. S. van Eyck van Heslinga, Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997); C. R. Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

56. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 60.

57. On the cartazes, see Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, 139–40.

58. Wink, Al-Hind, 1:92.

59. Goitein’s article on the subject, “Two Eyewitness Accounts,” suggests that one of the other reasons for the attack on Aden by the ruler of Qais “may have been the fact that owing to the rapacious character of his rule, much of the Indian Ocean trade had been diverted from the sea of Oman to Aden.” Goitein, “Two Eyewitness Accounts,” 248. I quote this because it once again points to Goitein’s implicit understanding of the mutual dependence of trade and state power. Let all future rulers beware—this sentence at one level says—if the character of your rule is “rapacious,” you too will lose your commerce to other rulers.

60. Subject to some debate has been the role of Sudanese gold in the prosperity of North African rulers. While he himself takes the position that the role of gold—and particularly of the disruption of its northwards flow in the eleventh century—has been overplayed, Michael Brett’s article on Ifriqiya and its Saharan trade is a useful reminder that the Indian Ocean trade was integrated not only with a Mediterranean economy looking toward Europe but also with an African economy looking to the south. See Michael Brett, “Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, a.d.,” Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 347–64.

61. A. Paul, A History of the Beja Tribes of the Sudan (London: Frank Cass, 1971 [1954]), 71. For a discussion of the importance of Sudanese slaves to the Egyptian rulers, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 9, 14, 66–69.

62. For a visual documentary on the Zar ritual, see Hani Fakhouri, dir. and prod., The Zar (1988, videocassette).

63. Goitein, Jews and Arabs, 100–6.

64. The phrase “structures of feeling” is from Raymond Williams. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.

65. An early comprehensive study of the institution as well as a critique of prevalent modes of discussing it is found in Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World. In recent years, the subject has received careful treatment by scholars interested in Indian Ocean studies. See in particular, Campbell, The Structure of Slavery and Abolition and Its Aftermath.

66. Goitein notes at one point that, in Ben Yiju’s time, the word “‘abd,’ or slave, was increasingly considered improper and was often replaced with euphemisms such as ‘boy’ or ‘young man.’ Since these terms could be equally applied to free persons as well as slaves, it is often difficult to establish the legal status of a given individual.” See Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:131.

67. Rosenthal, The Muslim Concept of Freedom, 92, 30n71.

68. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

69. Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq; see also Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

70. Isaac Klein, ed. and trans., The Code of Maimonides, Book Twelve: The Book of Acquisition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 266.

71. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:133. See also Goitein’s transcription of a letter detailing the event in Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, 335–38.

72. I use the masculine pronoun here because the slaves who did acquire some social status were business agents who were male. Female slaves were primarily domestic servants or concubines.

73. In his presentation of the relationship between Ben Yiju and Ashu, Ghosh seems to be aware that his reading it as a sign of an interracial romance is probably a stretch of the imagination. Referring to the union, he writes, “If I hesitate to call it love, it is only because the documents offer no certain proof.” Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 230.

74. In other words, despite their subaltern status, both the fictional Taratibu and the historical Ashu enter the pages of Vassanji and Ghosh’s texts respectively. In so doing the texts at least set up a number of possible scenarios for readers to contemplate in terms of their lives. In contrast, the twelfth-century slave woman (and perhaps her child) abandoned on the coast of Somalia by Ibn Jumahir receives no mention in Ghosh’s text, thus remaining absent to modern readers.

1. See Edmund Burke, “Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” in Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair, eds., Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 34 (25–34).

2. Bartle Frere, “Memorandum Regarding Banians or Natives of India in East Africa,” March 31, 1873, quoted in Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 166. Metcalf’s book is an excellent companion piece to this chapter. There are numerous historical studies and surveys of Asians in East Africa. I list some of the more useful ones. For a history of Indian presence over the centuries, the most comprehensive is “Introduction: Historical Perspective” in S. A. I. Tirmizi, Indian Sources for African History, vol. 1. (New Delhi: UNESCO and Indian Writers Emporium, 1988), 1–42. For Indians in East Africa, see Gregory, India and East Africa; Dharam P. Ghai and Yash P. Ghai, eds., Portrait of a Minority: Asians in East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Gregory, Quest for Equality; Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa; Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers; R. Nagar, “The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East: A Journal of Politics, Culture, Economy 16, no. 2 (1996): 1–19; Savita Nair, “Shops and Stations: Rethinking Power and Privilege in British/Indian East Africa,” in Hawley, India in Africa, Africa in India, 77–93.

3. Burton, Zanzibar, 1:316.

4. Ibid., 1:327–39.

5. W. Cope Devereux, A Cruise in the “Gorgon,” or Eighteen Months on H.M.S. “Gorgon” Engaged in the Suppression of the Slave Trade on the East Coast of Africa (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 97.

7. Johnston, “The Asiatic Colonization of East Africa,” 170.

8. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, 1:489.

9. Lugard was yet to write his best-known work, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1922).

10. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, 1:488.

11. See Morison, “A Colony for India”; see also Sydenham of Combe, “The Future of India: India as a Colonising Power,” Nineteenth Century 84 (1918): 762–70; Lepper, “An America for the Hindu”; Aga Khan, India in Transition (London: Bennett, Coleman, 1918), 128. Claims for Indian colonization were to appear yet again in 1946 and 1951 when Tanganyika was proposed as a place to resettle South African Indians. On this see James Brennan, “South Asian Nationalism in an East African Context: The Case of Tanganyika, 1914–1956,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19, no. 2 (1999): 30–31 (24–38).

12. Churchill, My African Journey, 32.

13. However, when Churchill later became secretary of state in 1921, he was less friendly to Indian interests and proclaimed that he intended Kenya to become a “characteristically and distinctively British colony” (quoted in Gregory, India and East Africa, 213). For a discussion of what Robert Gregory calls “Churchill’s Vacillation,” see India and East Africa, 198–222.

14. Churchill, My African Journey, 36.

17. Traveller, “‘Muddling Through’ in British Tropical Africa,” Empire Review 18 (1910): 266 (258–268).

19. Hyde Clark, untitled response, Journal of the Society of Arts 37 (February 1, 1889): 173.

20. General Smuts noted,

I think that every thinking man is South Africa takes the attitude that an Indian is not inferior to us because of his colour or any other ground. He may be our superior. It is the case of a small [European] civilization, a small community finding itself in danger of being overwhelmed by a much older and more powerful civilization. … You cannot blame these pioneers, these very small communities in South Africa and Central Africa, if they put up every possible fight for the civilization which they started, their own European civilization. They are not there to foster Indian civilization. They are there to foster Western civilization and they regard as a very serious matter anything that menaces their position which is already endangered by the many difficulties which surround them in Africa.

21. Mangal Dass, “Defense to Allegation,” on behalf of the Indian Association, Nairobi, April 18, 1921, reprinted in East African Standard, The Indian Problem in Kenya, 15 (15–16).

22. Dass, “Defense to Allegation,” 16;

23. Letter from M. A. Desai to the editor of the East African Standard; Reprinted in East African Standard, The Indian Problem in Kenya, 21 (21–22).

24. Andrews, The Indian Question in East Africa.

25. Here Andrews quotes from the Kenyan settler Major Grogan who once wrote, “We have stolen the African’s lands. Now we must steal his limbs.” Ibid., 75–76.

26. Andrews, not surprisingly, was not received quite as warmly by the white settlers as he was by the Bugandans. McGregor Ross notes, “One brawny European fellow-passenger assaulted him at several successive stations on a journey on the Uganda railway when he was going up the line, and only the miscarriage of a telegram interfered with a concerted assault upon him by a troupe of patriots on his return journey.” Ross, Kenya from Within, 351.

27. Lord Delamere and Kenneth Archer, Memorandum on the Case Against the Claim of Indians in Kenya, in East African Standard, The Indian Problem in Kenya, 11 (5–13).

28. M. A. Desai to Prime Minister et al., telegram, July 21, 1921; quoted in Gregory, India and East Africa, 203.

29. “Resolutions of the East African Association” July 10, 1921, reprinted in Thuku, An Autobiography, 82.

30. See Gregory, India and East Africa, 205, 294.

31. Kyle, “Gandhi, Harry Thuku.” For a short biography of Desai, see Chanan Singh, “Manilal Ambalal Desai,” in Kenneth King and Ahmed Salim, eds., Kenya Historical Biographies (Nairobi: East African, 1971), 139–41.

32. So, for instance, the degrading system of the kipande (passes) for Africans is presented by Thuku right after he describes the racial insult suffered by M. A. Desai when his white employer castigates him for smoking in a European area (Thuku, An Autobiography, 18–19). The letters between Thuku and Desai included as appendixes in Thuku’s published autobiography suggest a warmth between them.

33. See Desai’s letter to Thuku dated May 7, 1922: “I told your mother that Abdullah and myself were to be regarded as just like her own son Harry (you) and she can come to us for news about you or for anything she wants and she was very pleased to hear that. I also told her that I will do my best to get you released at the earliest possible date. I gave her Florins 6 to meet her present requirements. She did not want more just now. She said she may require some help to pay Hut Tax and if so she would come when she wants it.” Thuku, An Autobiography, 94. See also Thuku’s own account of his jail experience:

But it was a difficult time for my Indian friends; the police raided the offices of Mr. Desai, and also of his paper, The East African Chronicle. You see, they wanted to arrest people like Desai, Shams-ud-deen, and Mangal Dass, but they could not find any proof against them unless they used me. That is why the first night in prison in Nairobi, I got word that if I said that those three men had really engineered my whole protest and my Association, then they would let me off. I saw that this was a bluff to put them in along with me. I told them, “If you want to arrest my ‘guilty’ friends, then start earlier with the Europeans—especially the dangerous ones who taught me English!’”

34. Both letters are reprinted in Waiz, Indians Abroad, 147–48.

35. Quoted in Kyle, “Gandhi, Harry Thuku,” 18.

36. Twaddle, “Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question.” For a contextualization of Sekanyolya, see James F. Scotton, “The First African Press in East Africa: Protest and Nationalism in Uganda in the 1920s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 211–28. See also Sana Aiyar, “Empire, Race and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere, 1919–1923,” Africa 81, no. 1 (2011): 132–54. In her discussion of Thuku, Aiyar further contextualizes Sentogo’s position as well as that of other Africans who resisted such an alliance with Indians.

37. I should note that even this formulation does not entirely capture the complexities, since it sidelines the often tense negotiations of identity surrounding the Arab community in Zanzibar and much of the coastal areas of East Africa. The Zanzibar revolution was cast in terms of the politics of race and indigeneity with the Afro-Shirazi party calling for the ouster of Arabs and South Asians who were both seen as privileged immigrant communities. For a compelling recent account of the production and circulation of racial identities in Zanzibar, see Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones.

38. This claim will be familiar to readers of the important collection edited by Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire.

39. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 41.

40. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 124.

41. Joseph, Nomadic Identities, 2.

42. There has been increasing interest in this history among Asians in East Africa as well Asian Africans in the diaspora, not least because of the work of Salvadori who is often cited as an inspiration. In terms of official recognition, one might note the special exhibit devoted to the “Asian African Heritage” by the National Museums of Kenya in 2000. See Nowrojee, The Asian African Heritage.

43. Salvadori writes, “(I tried very hard to get stories of con-men and crooks, but …).” Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 3:193.

44. Transition 34 (1968): 6.

45. Theroux, “Hating the Asians.”

46. Naipaul, North of South, 108.

47. In an important essay published in the wake of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, “Black Attitudes to the Brown and White Colonizers of East Africa,” the Ugandan political scientist Dent Ocaya-Lakidi asked, how did the Asians in East Africa end up getting the worst of black African ire when in fact it was the white British who were the true colonizers of East Africa? How did the whites, who were “culturally arrogant, politically dominating as well as patronizing and economically exploitative,” end up being more highly regarded than the Asians? (81). Ocaya-Lakidi suggested three factors to explain this historical development—first, he noted, “the so-called African attitudes to Asians are in fact European attitudes that were assimilated and internalized by the Africans” (82), second, the Asians “were manipulated to serve the colonizer’s economic interests by acting as middlemen between the white colonizers and the black Africans” (82) and third, the Asians’ own “social customs and ways of life” (82) which were exclusionary and insular led to African resentment. Ocaya-Lakidi goes on in the article to document how the relatively superior material culture of the West was backed by an explicit ideology of a “civilizing mission,” a mission to which Asians had little to no claim. The role of missionaries in this imperial project was by no means uncertain-Christianity provided not only the promise of a better life in the world to come, but also access to European style literacy and education that offered a better life in more immediate terms. Even if Asians had chosen to engage in a conscious civilizing mission, they would not have been likely to have many takers. The moral puritanism of the East, suggested Ocaya-Lakidi, would have repelled Africans. See Ocaya-Lakidi, “Black Attitudes to the Brown and White Colonizers of East Africa.”

48. Or, as Salim was to put it in A Bend in the River, “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.” Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 17.

49. Taban Lo Liyong, The Last Word, 34.

50. Simon Gikandi, “The Growth of the East African Novel,” in G. D. Killam, ed., The Writing of East and Central Africa (Nairobi: East African, 1984), 231 (231–46); Gregory, “Literary Development in East Africa.”

51. Gregory, “Literary Development in East Africa,” 442.

52. Kuldip Sondhi, Undesignated and Other Plays (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973); Kuldip Sondhi, With Strings in Cosmo Pieterse, ed., Ten One-Act Plays (London: Heinemann, 1968), 135–66; Jagjit Singh, Sweet Scum of Freedom in Gwyneth Henderson, ed., African Theatre: Eight Prize-Winning Plays for Radio (London: Heinemann, 1973), 156–59; Jagjit Singh, “Portrait of an Asian as an East African,” in David Cook and David Rudabiri, ed., Poems from East Africa (London: Heinemann, 1971), 156–59; Amin Kassam, “Metamorphosis,” in Wole Soyinka, ed., Poems from Black Africa (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 117; Bahadur Tejani, “Leaving the Country,” ibid., 190–91; Tejani, Day After Tomorrow; Nazareth, In a Brown Mantle; Kuldip Sondhi, Sunil’s Dilemma, in Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse, eds., Nine African Plays for Radio (London: Heinemann, 1973), 1–23. A more comprehensive bibliography of Asian writing in both East as well as South Africa can be found in the appendix to Gaurav Desai, “Asian African Literatures: Genealogies in the Making,” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 3 (2011), v–xxx.

53. “A Literary Organ,” Indian Voice (Nairobi, Kenya), May 15, 1912, n.p.

54. “Municipal Committee,” East African Standard, July 24, 1915, 22.

55. “Indian Drama: Monday Night’s Entertainment,” East African Standard, January 18, 1918, 8.

56. “Standard Notes,” East African Standard, March 7, 1914, 15.

57. “Indian Drama,” East African Standard, December 19, 1914, 19.

58. “Hindu Theatricals at Mombasa,” East African Standard, January 6, 1914, 4.

59. J. H. Patterson, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 185–90. This poem is the only document that I have come across that was definitely penned by Indian indentured laborers in East Africa. There may be others, but I don’t know of their existence. One of the regrets in framing this study has been the paucity of first-person narratives of indentured laborers in this region. For a comparative context, see the excellent study by Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants in the British Empire (New York: Leicester University Press, 1996); and Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora (London: Anthem, 2002).

60. A similar story can be told about the literary activities of Indians in South Africa. A brief discussion can be found in Desai, “Asian African Literatures.”

61. “Message from the Prince,” Supplement to the Indian Voice, 1912 (sometime after September 20), n.p.

62. “To Africa,” Indian Voice, April 19, 1911, 6.

63. “An Appreciation,” Indian Voice, April 26, 1911, n.p.

64. P. S. Joshi, “Literature of South African Indians,” in Ellen Hellman, ed., Handbook of Race Relations in South Africa (New York: Oxford, 1949), 614 (612–14).

65. For some of this history, see Peter Benson, Black Orpheus, Transition, and the Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

66. While Asian writing in East Africa has been on the literary radar since the sixties, it was the 1989 publication of M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, which received the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region, that prompted a renewed interest on the part of Asian writers of East African origin to narrate facets of that experience in both fictional as well as semi-autobiographical form. Many (though not all) of the newer authors write, as does Vassanji himself, from a base in the West, and their writings are informed by the politics of multiculturalism and citizenship they encounter in their new homes. There is also a noticeable gender shift with more women writers entering the scene, writers such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Jameela Siddiqi, Sikeena Karmali, Parita Mukta, Zarina Patel, Rasna Warah, and Neera Kapur-Dromson. The richly textured narratives that they each offer greatly enhance the palimpsest that is the Asian experience in East Africa and its diaspora. Likewise, writing by South African Indian writers has also mushroomed over the past few decades. The rapidly growing interest in South African Indian literature among critics is perhaps best marked by the publication of three monographs on the subject (Govinden, Rastogi, Frenkel) published within a span of two years. These books, along with works such as Rajendra Chetty’s South African Indian Writings in English (Durban: Madiba, 2002), which collects a number of literary works as well as interviews with authors, are significant contributions not only to our understanding of South African Indian literary production but also to the production of social identities in apartheid and postapartheid South Africa. See Devarakshnam Govinden, ‘Sister, Outsider’: The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (Pretoria: UNISA, 2008); Rastogi, Afrindian Fictions; Ronit Frenkel, Reconsiderations: South African Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture (Pretoria: UNISA, 2010).

67. Alidina Somjee Lilani, A Guide to the Swahili Language in Gujarati Characters (Bombay: Education Society, 1890), 7.

68. Sadru Kassam, Bones, in David Cook and Miles Lee, eds., Short East African Plays in English (London: Heinemann, 1968), 125–31.

69. Abdulaziz Lodhi, Oriental Influences in Swahili: A Study in Language and Culture Contacts (Goteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2000), 78.

70. Vanoo Jivraj Somia, A History of the Indians of East Africa (Derbyshire: Country, 2001), 159–60.

71. Cynthia Salvadori, Through Open Doors: A View of Asian Cultures in Kenya, ed. Andrew Fedders (Nairobi: Kenway, 1989 [1983]), 335.

72. Kapur-Dromson, From Jhelum to Tana, 292–94.

73. Patel, Unquiet, 32.

1. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 35.

2. The term relational selves appears as a chapter title in Moore-Gilbert’s recent study, Postcolonial Life-Writing, 17–33. In addition to Moore-Gilbert, I have also found useful Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography.

3. Here I adapt Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performative to consider the performance of ethnicity. Butler writes that gender performance is an act “which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again … just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.” Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitutions: An Essay in Phenomenology and Gender Constitution,” in Sue Ellen Case, ed., Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), 277 (270–82).

4. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85–92.

5. The only exception that I have come across is a brief paragraph on Adamji in an essay by Stephanie Jones. Jones finds the text to be a “monotonous and precise account of every transaction, meal and travel arrangement, with particular attention paid on the just-completed railway.” I hope to show that behind the tedious details one can read a fascinating performance of ethnic identity. See Stephanie Jones, “Merchant-Kings and Everymen: Narratives of the South Asian Diaspora of East Africa,” Journal of East African Studies 1, no.1 (2007): 22 (16–33).

6. The fact that Adamji’s family played a supporting role in British colonial atrocities is noteworthy here, since it validates the claims of critics who point to Indian complicity with British colonialism. But having noted such complicity, we should not remain inattentive to other aspects of Adamji’s life story. If we are to have a nuanced sense of history, we need to read all kinds of lives, even those marked by political choices that are, in retrospect, appalling. In addition to the editorial material in this edition, see the account of the Adamjee family entitled “150 Years of Trading in Mombasa,” by J. Aldrick (with Gulamali and Abdulhassan E. Noorbhai Adamjee), in Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 1:56–57.

7. Baluchis (or Balochs, as the text names them) were men from the Persian side of the Gulf of Oman, many of whom had first come to East Africa as soldiers employed by the sultan of Zanzibar.

8. In his early years in South Africa, Gandhi writes that he encouraged his wife and children to wear Parsi-style clothing: “The Parsis used then to be regarded as the most civilized people amongst Indians, and so, when the complete European style seemed to be unsuited, we adopted the Parsi style. Accordingly my wife wore the Parsi sari and the boys the Parsi coat and trousers.” Gandhi, Autobiography, 162.

9. Salvadori and Aldrick, Two Indian Travellers, 185–86.

10. Ebrahimji’s father, Noorbhai Alibhai, and his eldest brother Jivanji died in 1887 while on a pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving the eldest surviving son Alibhai as the head of the household. Salvadori and Aldrick, Two Indian Travellers, 76.

11. At one point, we learn, for instance, that Adamji’s porters carry him and his belongings from Kampala to Entebbe, a distance of approximately twenty miles, in eleven hours on one day. Even with breaks, given the fact that each man is carrying a heavy load of ivory, other equipment, or Adamji himself, that is a physically demanding day! For a nuanced history of caravan porterage in East Africa, see Stephen J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006).

12. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 69.

13. On the Indian trade in clothing in Kavirondo, Daniel Hall reported in 1930, “Ten years ago most of the Kavirondo natives went mother naked; now they are all clothed in cotton-prints bought from the Indian traders and made on Bombay looms. Manchester seems to be too much interested in the politics of the African native to care to clothe him.” Daniel Hall, “The Native Question in Kenya,” Nineteenth Century 107 (1930): 70–80 (75).

14. The term Kavirondo was used at the time to refer to ethnic groups in Kenya around Lake Victoria.

15. Steve Clark notes, “Travel writing … is founded upon an almost irresistible imperative to abandon home, wife and children.” Steve Clark, “Introduction,” in Clark, Travel Writing and Empire, 20 (1–28). We will see this again in the case of Nanji Kalidas Mehta’s narrative in the next chapter.

16. Gregory, India and East Africa, 68–69.

17. Sorabji takes a certain amount of pleasure in narrating the way in which he has led the German on: “I had never let him guess how much I was worth and he assumed I was a very wealthy man, and every time he talked about his great plans I used to encourage him … When he came back he again begged me to join him. At that time I told him that it was not possible for me to join him because I could not leave my family.” Salvadori and Aldrick, Two Indian Travellers, 124.

18. I use the term African in the pages that follow to refer to indigenous black Africans, just as I use the terms Indian and Asian in their colloquial usage. The larger point of my project is, of course, to rethink all of these terms—to think both of Africa as a multiracial space and to recognize that the Indian or Asian in Africa is best thought in Afrasian terms.

19. While Sorabji is a Parsi and not Goan, it is useful to compare his self-fashioning as a European with a note by Cynthia Salvadori on the reading of Goans in colonial Kenyan society. She writes: “Because Goans, who were mostly educated clerks, could not be called ‘coolies,’ they were sometimes classified as ‘white men’—even in the caption of a photograph of seven people who were the ‘first white men to settle in and around Nairobi’ in which one of the two Goans, da Silva, is con spicuously dark and the other, his cousin Elvira, a woman!” Cynthia Salvadori, “Introduction,” in Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 1:x.

20. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

21. Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, 11.

22. The book referred to is Sir Harry Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate.

23. Sorabji writes, “When I looked at the coffee he was growing, it was inferior to ‘Mocha,’ ‘Berbera’ and ‘Hodeida’ coffee but superior to the coffee of Hindustan. If you have not experienced the taste of the other three coffees I have mentioned, then you would find the ‘Uganda’ coffee to be a very good drink.” Salvadori and Aldrick, Two Indian Travellers, 128.

24. “They are humble and liberal to the strong armed Arab, savage and murderous and cannibalistic to small bands, and every slain man provides a banquet of meat for the forest natives of Manyema.” Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 2 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1978), 86. Hammond and Jablow write, “A new fillip was added to the beastly savage conventions by many sensational tales of cannibalism. There had been, earlier, minimal interest in the subject, though it had been occasionally reported. … Exploitation of the theme began in the mid-nineteenth century. Stanley was carried away in his zealous horror of anthropophagy and repeated every tale of cannibal tribes that he heard in addition to creating quite a number of his own.” Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, 94.

25. Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, 95.

26. For different positions in this debate, see, Mangat, A History of the Asians of East Africa, 23–25. See also, N. Benjamin, “Trading Activities of Indians in East Africa (with Special Reference to Slavery) in the Nineteenth Century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, no. 4 (1998): 405–19; Chizuko Tominaga, “Indian Immigrants and the East African Slave Trade,” Essays in Northeast African Studies 43 (1996): 295–317.

27. See Gregory, India and East Africa, 26; Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 63.

28. Of the many debates on the nature of cosmopolitanism that have emerged of late, I am most indebted to Bhabha, “Unsatisfied”; and Appiah, Cosmopolitanism.

29. Bart Moore-Gilbert notes that such linguistic heteroglossia is a relatively common feature of colonial and postcolonial life narratives. See Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, 91–94.

30. See Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean. See also Bose and Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones.

31. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

1. Mangat, “Was Allidina Visram a Robber Baron?”

2. Salvadori suggests an age of fifteen. For a slightly revised and updated biography of Visram see Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventures, 66 (65–69).

3. The list of charitable contributions is in Mangat, “Was Allidina Visram a Robber Baron?” 35; The estimated amount is from Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa, 51–52.

4. The Madhvani Group does not list total international assets on its corporate Web site. In addition to the Uganda enterprises, the group has business interests in several African countries, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.

5. Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventures, 69.

6. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002). For a brief rebuttal of Weber’s position as well as informative essays on Indian entrepreneurship from the seventeenth century, see Makrand Mehta, Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991).

7. Subrahmanyam, “Foreword,” vii (vi–ix).

8. And other Kenyans as well. I was told by a Kenyan friend that the inaugural issue of the in-flight magazine of Kenya Airways had a lead article on Allidina Visram as an inveterate traveler. I have not been able to verify this myself. Visram has also been memorialized in a biographical novel: M. G. Visram, Allidina Visram: The Trailblazer (Nairobi: Visram, 1990).

9. In the article, Oonk draws on the Zanzibar archives to relate stories of Asian bankruptcies and other business failures. Gijsbert Oonk, “South Asians in East Africa (1880–1920) with a Particular Focus on Zanzibar: Toward a Historical Explanation of Economic Success of a Middlemen Minority,” African and Asian Studies 5, no. 1 (2006): 57–89.

10. So, for instance, in V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, the character Nazruddin finds himself explaining to a Canadian businessman who has cheated him: “My family have been traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries, under every kind of government. There is a reason why we have lasted so long. We bargain hard, but we stick to our bargain. All our contracts are oral, but we deliver what we promise. It isn’t because we are saints. It is because the whole thing breaks down otherwise.” Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 236.

11. As in Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic, one form of the “culturalist” explanation focuses on alleged religious proclivities. An early warning against such readings in the East African context was made by Frederick Cooper in his seminal work, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. Addressing the relative success of Indians over the Omanis in mercantile matters, Cooper writes, “A full explanation for Indian predominance as merchants and money-lenders must await further study of the Indian Ocean Commercial system and the Indian communities.” To this he adds a footnote: “One explanation that is clearly incorrect is that the Islamic religion was the cause of the Omanis’ lack of entrepreneurial vigor. Many of the Indians in Zanzibar, Tharia Topan included, were Muslim, and Islamic jurists have developed numerous ways of avoiding the Koranic restrictions on usury” (143). Again, while emphasizing the “culturalist” traits of a group’s economic success can be inherently questionable, we must note that the identity of the group can also be an issue. While most discussions in the East African context focus on “Asian” commercial success, economic historians such as Claude Markovits remind us of further distinctions among Asian communities. So, for instance, noting the comparative success of merchant communities from Kutch as opposed to other regions, Markovits writes, “However, it remains to be understood why the different merchant communities from Kutch were so uniformly successful in their commercial and financial ventures abroad. … Further inquiries into the ‘Kutchi miracle’ are obviously needed.” Claude Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks Outside India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Preliminary Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 33 no. 4 (1999): 899 (883–911).

12. Chege, “Paradigms of Doom” and “Introducing Race as a Variable.” In addition to Chege’s essays, see Paul Vandenberg, The Asian-African Divide: Analyzing Institutions and Accumulation in Kenya (New York: Routledge, 2006), for a further analysis of this issue. See also, on Himbara’s book, Dickson Eyoh, “Review,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 28, no.3 (1994): 538–40.

13. Robert Gregory writes about this tension in colonial times: “Most Asians thrived in circumstances in which there was a maximum of free enterprise. The British colonial governments, in contrast, pursued policies that involved, at least for the Africans, a strict regulation of the economy. As a result, the Africans throughout the colonial period were subjected to two powerful stimuli of social and economic change. One was the contact with the Asians, which from the outset drew them into a capitalistic form of economic endeavour. The other was their association with the government, which ultimately channelled much of their production and distribution into a socialistic system based on public agencies, parastatal companies, and co-operative societies. The Asians and the government were thus almost perpetually in conflict.” Gregory, South Asians in East Africa, 2. On the effects of market legislation in colonial East Africa, J. S. Mangat notes, “Much of the restrictive marketing legislation introduced in the East African countries during the 1930s, apart from its immediate impact on Indian enterprise, in the long run prevented the rise of an African commercial class, and had in fact aroused considerable African opposition also, although the main justification for it, paradoxically enough, was the need to protect African interests.” Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa, 167. See also Vali Jamal, “Asians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion,” Economic History Review 29, no. 4 (1976): 602–16.

14. Kitching suggests that even those academics who may have believed that capitalist development would have a positive role to play in Kenya nevertheless recognized that such a belief would be unpalatable to progressive Kenyans at the time, and so they did not articulate such positions. See Gavin Kitching, “Politics, Method, and Evidence in the Kenya Debate,” in H. Bernstein and B. Campbell, eds., Contradictions of Accumulation in Africa: Studies in Economy and State (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1985), 115–51. See also Colin Leys, “Learning from the Kenya Debate,” in David E. Apter and Carl G. Rosberg, eds., Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 220–43.

15. Yash Tandon, “The Pragmatic Industrialist,” in Robert Becker and Nitin Jayant Madhvani, eds., Jayant Madhvani (London: Privately Printed, 1973), 10 (10–21).

16. Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed.

17. Nanji Kalidas Mehta, Mara Jivanani Anubhavakatha (Porbander: Snehimandala, 1955).

18. The unsigned acknowledgment to the English translation suggests that it is penned by Mehta’s children. The acknowledgment contains the following statement: “However, there was a little time gap between the publication of the original book in Gujarati and the present one in English. Therefore, the text had to be re-edited, revised and brought up-to-date under our personal guidance at Porbander, without however changing the basic pattern.” Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed, vii.

19. Mehta claims, “Money was not to be an end but a means to a better and kinder life. Commerce was the field where I could seek the means for this end and be charitable and helpful to my brethren whose love had blessed me so much” (ibid., 142).

20. In particular, Birla’s project aims to study the ways in which British colonial laws map the divide of the public/private in terms of a divide between economy/culture. Thus, for instance, she is concerned with the ways in which the “family firm” is read by such law in a culturalist frame (since the assumption is that capital accumulated remains under the private control of the family), while a publicly held firm is seen to be properly within the domain of economic development. See Birla, Stages of Capital, 6.

21. The vernacular aspect of his literacy is important. While the book includes quotations from the English literary and historiographic tradition, as is the case with the book’s epigraph from a poem by Kipling, it is most likely that these embellishments were added by the translators of the Gujarati original than by Mehta himself. The original epigraph of the book appears to be the one that is placed not before the preface and foreword to the English translation (Kipling’s poem), but before the opening chapter of the original text. This epigraph, derived from the Upanishads, and testifying to the importance of youths who are “firm in character, diligent, optimistic, determined and strong in body,” sets the tone for Mehta’s autobiographical narrative. Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed.

22. For Mehta in his old age, the commercial journey is now over and the emphasis is on the spiritual one. As Sudhir Kakar notes in his study of Hindu childhood and society in India, “The measure of a man’s work lies not only in what it enables him to achieve and maintain in the outside world, but also in how far it helps him towards the realization of his svadharma: how far it prepares him ‘inside’ and brings him nearer to that feeling of inner calm which is the dawning of wisdom and the prerequisite for moksha.” Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, 2d ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), 39.

23. Mehta’s life and career has been studied by the historian Savita Nair in her dissertation, which I cite in note 34 this chapter. Nair’s interest, however, is primarily historical and not on the text as a narrative. For brief discussions of Mehta’s text, see Mala Pandurang, “The East African Dukawallah and Narratives of Self-Discovery,” in Zbigniew Bialas and Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski, eds., Ebony, Ivory and Tea (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 2004), 180–93; and Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 97–100. See also Dan Ojwang, “In a Restless State: Mercantile Adventure and Citizenship in the Autobiography of Nanji Kalidas Mehta (1888–1969),” Africa Today 57 no. 3 (2011): 57–75.

24. Robert Gregory notes that the entry of such Indian capital in Uganda was not unique to Mehta’s enterprise: “A large number of ginning companies had financial backing from India.” Gregory, South Asians in East Africa, 277.

25. Mehta’s keen sense of land speculation is most explicit a little later in the text when he writes, “I had bought this land at twenty rupees per acre in those days. It would now be considered fifty times costlier. When land in Africa was thus cheaply available, I wrote to several wealthy Princes and merchant-magnates of India to invest Indian capital in East Africa and earn more and at the same time contribute their share indirectly to build up the economic life of this vast continent.” Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed, 169. Idi Amin was to have a different reading of Mehta’s acquisition of Ugandan land and British colonial complicity with such acquisitions. In a speech delivered on December 17, 1972, in the aftermath of his expulsion of Ugandan Asians, he stated: “Instead of promoting a policy of social and economic collaboration between the British Asians in Uganda and the indigenous Africans, the British preferred to cultivate and manure multi-nationalists like the Madhvanis and the Mehtas who exploited the Africans day-in and day-out and were hoping to do so to the end of the world. The two tycoons, for example, holding 99 year leases of thousands of acres of land on which they grew their sugar estates, were paying the African owners of the land a minimal two shillings per acre per year.” Amin, “Midnight Address to the Nation by His Excellency,” 24. See also Gregory’s discussion of Asian agriculture in East Africa in chapter 8 of South Asians in East Africa, 237–70. Concluding his discussion of Asian agricultural activities, he notes, “Whether the Asians’ agricultural involvement should be regarded more as a contribution to the economic development of East Africa or as an instance of colonial exploitation will always be a debatable subject, but the evidence seems to fall heavily on the side of contribution” (ibid., 264).

26. See “Uganda Forest Sparks Racial Violence,” Guardian, April 13, 2007 (accessed online at www.guardian.co.uk). Faced with anti-Indian riots and protestors carrying placards asking Asians to leave, many commentators were reminded of the 1972 expulsion. What no one seemed to note was the historical continuity of the pressures on land use from colonial times to the present. Environmental concerns over deforestation that circulated in 2007 around the encroachment on the Mabira forest were similar to the concerns of the colonial conservator of the forests. D .P. S. Ahluwalia has presented the most comprehensive account of the politics of land acquisition and sugarcane production in Uganda in general and Mehta’s factory in particular. Writing about a 1936 application by Mehta for a lease of land surrounding his sugar factory, Ahluwalia notes, “The application was referred to the Conservator of Forests who objected to the granting of the lease on three grounds; first, the statistical position of forests in the Protectorate generally and in Buganda in particular where all but some 480 square miles of forest had been destroyed, second, the wastage of the existing or potential supply of timber, and finally, the adverse effects on local rainfall by the removal of forest cover from this block of land. The sugar company, however, indicated a willingness to cooperate with the Conservator of Forests by undertaking certain conservation measures which would minimise the ill-effects feared by the latter.” The application was approved on the urging of the land officer and the director of agriculture. See Ahluwalia, Plantations and the Politics of Sugar in Uganda, 65–66; Ahluwalia also discusses tensions surrounding the rights of tenants on land leased to the sugar corporations (ibid., 70).

27. This may in part be explained by the fact that the original Gujarati version of the autobiography was published in 1955. While the English translation is no doubt “updated” to include the establishment of this factory and to include Mehta’s speeches to the Indian community in East Africa in 1961, such updating remains selective and not comprehensive.

28. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 76.

29. It should go without saying that Mehta’s aversion is not to profit making in itself, but rather to an excessive pursuit of profit. Ritu Birla reminds us that, unlike biblical traditions that condemn usury or equate money with sin, the rituals surrounding the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, around the time of Diwali suggest that Hinduism does not eschew the pursuit of wealth. Birla, Stages of Capital, 87. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown notes in a more tongue-in-cheek manner about the Diwali festivities: “There was a wonderful, if incomprehensible, marrying at this time of worldly and otherworldly interests, and I think the rich genuinely began to believe not only that God had ordained it that they should get even more prosperous but that they were actually sitting closer to the lap of the gods by having become richer than they were the year before. None of this guilt inducing or placating stuff about the poor entering the kingdom of heaven first.” Alibhai-Brown, No Place Like Home, 63.

30. Mehta reads the growth of commerce in East Africa as an integral part of Africa’s entry into modernity: “Slowly and wonderfully life in Africa has been changing since then and a great network of asphalt roads has once more accelerated the speed. A new vitality and vision have brought [Africans] their freedom earlier than expected. Such are the forces released with the advent of the modern age and if the resources of this newly awakened continent are utilized with wisdom and foresight by her astute statesmen, the continent has a bright future.” Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed, 85.

31. On the 1945 strikes, which incidentally included among other episodes looting and rioting at the Kakira Sugar Factory, owned and operated by the Vithaldas Haridas Company, see Ahluwalia, Plantations and the Politics of Sugar in Uganda, 122–24. On the 1949 protests, see Ramchandani, Uganda Asians, 139. The fourth chapter of Ramchandani’s book provides useful context on the development of the cotton industry in Uganda (ibid., 118–47).

32. Dana Seidenberg reveals, for instance, that at one point Mehta’s son Khimji, who was managing his Ugandan holdings, had to leave East Africa and go to Switzerland due to exchange control violations. Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventures, 85.

33. In his foreword to the English translation, S. K. Patil recognizes this commend able endeavor as a major political goal of the book: “No one but the writer of this book will be more happy to see if this book helps to build understanding, eliminate fears and disarm prejudices which are born of a long lasting struggle for freedom which the people of the country have rightly earned. May it help to build a new and united Africa, nationally strong, racially accommodating and internationally inclined towards a goal of one world which is the genuine desire and aspiration of all the common people of this planet.” S. K. Patil, foreword, in Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed, xiii.

34. The purificatory rites are related to a Hindu taboo of crossing the sea, sometimes referred to as Kala Pani. Savita Nair notes, “Mehta’s son Dhirendra told me that his paternal grandfather disliked overseas travel as a general principle. In fact, whenever Nanji Kalidas returned from Africa, his father would demand that he first go to Dwaraka to perform purification ceremonies before re-entering the family home.” Nair, “Moving Life Histories,” 128–29. Nair’s reading of Mehta rightly places him in the lineage of a long line of Gujarati merchants, and her discussion of the role of a Gujarati transregional identity in the makings of Indian nationalism is exemplary. See, in particular, ibid., 125–40.

35. Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 78.

36. Narsimbhai Ishwarbhai Patel (1874–1945) was a Baroda-based revolutionary who published literature on bomb making under the surreptitious guise of providing recipes for making herbal medicines. He was under the surveillance of the colonial Indian government and sought refuge in exile in East Africa. See Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed, 125–26, for more on Patel and Mehta’s involvement with Indian nationalism.

37. Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa, 192.

38. Preston, Oriental Nairobi, n.p.

39. Gregory notes that Mehta provided the largest single private contribution (of 20,000 pounds) to the fund. Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa, 137.

40. See, in addition to Gregory’s book on Asian philanthropy in East Africa, Ritu Birla’s discussion of the relationship between gifting, dharma, and the establishment of family trusts. Birla, Stages of Capital, chapters 2 and 3. Birla suggests that while the impact of charitable contributions on social welfare is undeniable, one should also understand the role such charity played in establishing the social standing of the philanthropists themselves. Her remarks on the Marwari community are applicable to other communities such as Mehta’s as well: “For mobile commercial groups like the Marwaris, making a gift for dharma, whether it be a local temple, a dharamsala or other form of social welfare, was a way to negotiate their entry as immigrants to a new social world, performing both ritual purity and material conquest” (ibid., 74). As Birla herself carefully points out in the introduction to her book, despite the invocation of the notion of dharma here, philanthropy was not limited to Hindu entrepreneurs alone. As the examples of Allidina Visram and Sewa Haji Paroo, among others, suggest, Muslims also engaged in considerable charitable work. Indeed what is remarkable is that both Visram and Paroo gave not only to Muslim causes but also to Christians. Paroo, Gregory tells us, “bequeathed all his property to a Catholic mission for benefit of the indigenous people.” Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa, 64. Matson notes that Sewa Haji also endowed a multiracial government school in Bagamoyo. See A. T. Matson, “Sewa Haji: A Note,” Tanzania Notes and Records, no.65 (1966): 93 (91–94).

41. Nair, “Moving Life Histories,” 134.

42. The joint family is the locus of the commercial “family concern.” For a nuanced discussion of the role of colonial governmentality on indigenous social reform projects involving women, see Birla, Stages of Capital, chapter 5. One should note here that Mehta’s position seems divided on the issues of social reform—he applauds the efforts of the Arya Samaj to curtail child marriages, but he remains in awe of the practice of sati (widow burning), noting at one point, “I paid a silent tribute to those brave and self-sacrificing women who held chastity and freedom more valuable than all earthly possessions and I realized that loyalty and character were the dominant notes of Hindu womanhood” (63).

43. While Mehta argues that ideally Hindus and Muslims should live peacefully together in an undivided India, his sense of India as a nation is a profoundly Hindu one.

44. More work remains to be done on the links between the rise of a right-wing Hindu nationalism in India and its diasporic networks in Africa. On this, see Agehananda Bharati, who provides a rare glimpse at the ideology and workings of the East African Bharat Seva Sangh, a religious organization modeled on the India Rashtriya Seva Sangh: Bharati, The Asians in East Africa, 231–41.

45. The ritual invocation of one or more gods is a common feature among Hindu believers when embarking on a new venture or project. Here the project is the narration of one’s own life history.

46. As a companion piece to this account of Manji’s commercial enterprise, see Zarwan, “Indian Businessmen in Kenya During the Twentieth Century.” See also Nicola Swainson, The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918–77 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 124–30.

47. For a parallel history of a different family firm that was involved in manufacturing spurred by the war, see Murray, “The Chandarias.”

48. Since women rarely get mentioned or credited for the role they have played in the entrepreneurial successes of their male kin, particularly important is Manji’s revelation that when he started the House of Manji in 1954, his wife “Fatima provided lunch for 20 members of the staff every day. She continued to provide meals to factory staff for more than 20 years afterwards.” Manji, Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron, ix.

49. Sir Evelyn Baring was the British colonial governor at the time. Perhaps it is to make up for such blatant flattery that Manji devotes a passage in his memoir to the more radical stance taken by his brother Hassanally: “During the Mau Mau struggle for Kenya’s independence in the 1950s, Hassanally was in the front line. He played an important role as a courier between people from Karatina who lived and worked in Nairobi and their rural folk. … His involvement in the Mau Mau struggle was in fact deeper than the colonial government knew or suspected. He frequently supplied foodstuffs and other requirements to Mau Mau fighters in the forests around Karatina.” Manji, Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron, 24–25.

50. Writing of his father’s early practices as a small trader, Madhvani notes, “Indeed, he very soon started taking an Allidina Visram-inflected approach to his life and work, running an open kitchen at the back of the Vithaldas Haridas office in Jinja.” Madhvani, Tide of Fortune, 31. At the height of its operations in the fifties and sixties, Madhvani’s industrial complex at Kakira had “12,000 employees; and 100 miles of internal railway system with steam-operated locomotives. There were also schools providing free primary, secondary and technical education, a 100-bed hospital offering free healthcare, and finally a welfare shop selling at cost to employees, who also had the benefit of sports facilities” (ibid., 67). The importance placed on the workers’ social welfare by the Madhvani Group in these years is confirmed by nonfamily observers such as Yash Tandon, in his essay “The Pragmatic Industrialist,” in Becker and Madhvani, Jayant Madhvani, 10–21, and Mathias Ngobi, “Nascent Uganda,” in Becker and Madhvani, Jayant Madhvani, 64–70. Tandon draws attention as well to the Madhvani family’s 1967 decision to open up shares in the company to workers so that they would have a greater sense of ownership in the enterprise (“The Pragmatic Industrialist,” 14). Ngobi focuses on Jayant Madhvani’s efforts at enabling the Africanization of the enterprise: “Jayant Madhvani was sincerely concerned about the training of Africans in various fields, especially in the fields of commerce and farming, as this would be the sure way of enabling them to develop” (“Nascent Uganda,” 64).

51. Ahluwalia’s Plantations and the Politics of Sugar in Uganda provides a useful context for the commercial narrative of Tide of Fortune. See especially 165–77. See also Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 79–83.

52. So, for instance, Seidenberg writes, “Despite their loyalty to East Africa, at the elder Madhvani’s insistence, for security, the Madhvanis began investing in properties abroad. They bought a tea estate from European farmers at Nilgiris in South India and in 1952 they started a sugar factory at Shimoga near Barg while two years later when Manu Madhvani returned to Uganda his first assignment was to buy a textile mill on auction in Bombay.” Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 81.

53. What Muljibhai’s daughters receive, if anything, we are not told.

54. As is often the case with such disputes, the reader is left with no real sense of Meenaben’s or her children’s perspectives on the matter, and their appearance in the narrative ultimately casts them in a negative light. That gender may have something to do with it is acknowledged even by the author: “Dealing with non-blood relations such as Jayantbhai’s widow Meenaben was another challenge. I must admit that I had not dealt with women in business and I wasn’t very good at it. In any case, we had developed quite an aggressive relationship.” Madhvani, Tide of Fortune, 162.

55. Mahmood Mamdani was among the first intellectuals to caution against readings of Amin that saw him as simply irrational or unpredictable. In his memoir From Citizen to Refugee, Mamdani offers a portrait of Amin as a savvy politician who knew how to play to the fears and desires of his followers. Mamdani’s book, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda attempts to understand the political and economic crisis that led to the predicaments of the Obote and Amin eras.

56. Citing the 1967 Labour Government Act of Parliament that restricted the migration of former British colonial subjects into Britain, Madhvani also highlights the British role in precipitating the citizenship crisis in Uganda. The act, he writes, “sparked an overnight exodus of Indians from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda before the Act came into effect. This action by the British government of barring its own nationals from entering the country, unprecedented in modern legal history, had the effect of marooning thousands of Indians with British nationality in East Africa. The seeds had been sown for a humanitarian disaster.” Madhvani, Tide of Fortune, 111–12.

57. Sometimes such resistance is only subtly noted, as in this sentence about Muljibhai’s acquisition of land for his sugar estate: “Others [African landowners] were reluctant to part with their property, but eventually Muljibhai succeeded in forming one unified block of land.” Madhvani, Tide of Fortune, 34.

58. Among these social goods, Madhvani certainly counts as important the training of local citizens. Curiously, the narrative does not describe the efforts made by the Madhvanis in the field of education. In addition to opening schools for the children of the workers of the sugar factory, the Madhvanis also founded a technical school and a commercial college. Robert Gregory notes, “The [commercial college] which opened in Kampala in 1950 as the Muljibhai College of Commerce, became eventually the Uganda College of Commerce. Jayant brought many of the graduates of this college and the technical school into high-level positions in the Madhvani companies. After his father’s death in 1958 he founded the Muljibhai Madhvani Foundation Trust, the income of which was distributed annually in scholarships and other educational grants. In 1971, following Jayant’s early death, the family, as explained, established the Jayant Madhvani Foundation. The new trust supported students in agriculture, commerce, economics, and science at the secondary and university levels, and Africans were the main beneficiaries.” Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa, 192–93.

59. Needless to say, this harmonious vision is not necessarily shared by the workers on the sugar plantations and factory. See Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth (Nairobi: East African Educational, 1989) for a more dystopian vision of African labor on Asian plantations.

1. Ahluwalia, Plantations and the Politics of Sugar in Uganda, 172–73.

2. Idi Amin, “Document: Speech by His Excellency the President of Uganda, General Amin, to the Asian Conference held on the 8th of December, 1971, in the Uganda International Conference Centre,” East Africa Journal (1972): 2 (2–5).

3. “Letter of Condolence Received from the President of Uganda, General Idi Amin Dada,” in Becker and Madhvani, Jayant Madhvani, frontmatter.

4. See “The Arusha Declaration: Socialism and Self-Reliance,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 230–50.

5. The primary difference being a willful engagement with the state and an optimistic sense of the possibilities of partnership. As yet another contrast, see the bitter memoir by J. M. Nazareth in the context of postcolonial Kenya in which he claims that leaders like Kenyatta and Tom Mboya prevented Asians from aspiring to political office. J. M. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country: A Peep into Kenya’s Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings, 1981).

6. Joseph, Nomadic Identities, 36.

7. See, for instance, Lionel Cliffe and John Saul, eds. Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Dar es Salaam: East African, 1972–73); Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania; William Redman Duggan and John R. Civille, Tanzania and Nyerere: A Study of Ujamaa and Nationhood (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976); Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Idrian Resnick, The Long Transition: Building Socialism in Tanzania (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981); Susan C. Crouch, Western Responses to Tanzanian Socialism, 1967–83 (Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1987); William Michael Jennings, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development and Ujamaa in Tanzania (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian, 2008). Nyerere’s own speeches and writings on Ujamaa are collected in two important volumes. See Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism and Freedom and Development.

8. A useful companion text to this chapter as well as the next on Vassanji is the PhD dissertation of Richa Nagar. See Nagar, “Making and Breaking Boundaries.” See also Brennan, “Nation, Race and Urbanization in Dar es Salaam.”

9. Mustafa, The Tanganyika Way; Kassum, Africa’s Winds of Change; Chande, A Knight in Africa.

10. “By ‘soul making’ I mean,” writes Appiah, “the project of intervening in the process of interpretation through which each citizen develops an identity—and doing so with the aim of increasing her chances of living an ethically successful life.” Appiah’s interest in the discussion from which this quote is taken is “on soul making as a political project, something done by the state.” Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 164. Likewise, my interest in this chapter is to foreground Nyerere’s engagement in soul making, in which the state attempted to create in the Tanzanian citizenry exemplary ethical selves.

11. After independence, Abdulla was called to the bench to serve on Tanzania’s High Court. From 1970 to 1977 he served on the East African Court of Appeal and later served on the Court of Appeal in Tanzania. He also served as president of the Court of Appeal of the Seychelles. Biographical details are in Fawzia Mustafa’s introduction to Mustafa, The Tanganyika Way, vi. See also the biographical tribute to Sophia Mustafa by the editors of the magazine Awaaz: “Sophia Mustafa, 1922–2005: Against the Shadows,” Awaaz: Voices from the South Asian Diaspora, no. 3 (2005): 14–25. I thank Fawzia Mustafa for bringing this article to my attention.

12. Geiger, TANU Women; Meena, “Crisis and Structural Adjustment”; Ruth Meena and Marjorie Mbilinyi, “Women’s Research and Documentation Project (Tanzania),” Signs 16, no. 4 (1991), 852–59; Mbilinyi, “Sophia Mustafa”; Susan Geiger, “Engendering and Gendering African Nationalism: Rethinking the Case of Tanganyika (Tanzania),” in Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin, eds., In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 278–89.

13. Fawzia Mustafa, “Re-Issuing The Tanganyika Way: 1961–2009,” in Mustafa, The Tanganyika Way, v (v–x).

14. And just as many Asians were willing to partner with Nyerere because of his firmly nonracialist ethic, so, suggests Susan Geiger’s research, did many women find TANU’s charter to be explicitly nonsexist. On this, see Susan Geiger, TANU Women, 126.

15. Mbilinyi, “Sophia Mustafa,” 157. K. L. Jhaveri also underscores the importance of nonracialism to Mustafa and points to her efforts in carrying this message to various members of the Asian community. See Jhaveri, Marching with Nyerere, 102–3.

16. For a recent discussion of the importance of the pedagogical role of postindependence leaders such as Nehru and Nyerere, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Lee, Making a World After Empire, 45–68.

17. See also Julius K. Nyerere, “Socialism Is Not Racialism,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 257–61. For a memoir of life under Nyerere and particularly for an account of how Nyerere attempted to fashion a nonracial public consciousness, see Mwakikagile, Life Under Nyerere. For a slightly different take on the legacies of Nyerere’s insistence on nonracialism, see Salma Maoulidi, “Racial and Religious Tolerance in Nyerere’s Political Thought and Practice,” in Chachage and Cassam, Africa’s Liberation, 134–48.

18. Another Asian text that I do not discuss here also supports this claim. See Jhaveri, Marching with Nyerere. Jhaveri’s book is an important window onto the internal politics of the Asian Association and its ongoing negotiations with TANU politics. What seems clear in the account is that rather than being removed or disinterested in civic or political affairs (as is often suggested in popular accounts of East African Asians), many Asians in the period of national transition were involved in political and public life. In her life history Bibi Titi Mohamed recollects the partnership between the Indian Association and Nyerere: “But the Rattensey people met and said ‘We of the Indian Association’—they used the name Asian Association at the time—‘we are ready and we want our independence. We have children, we have property, and this is where we belong. We don’t know anything about India. We want independence with these people. We have faith in independence.’” Bibi Titi Mohamed, quoted in Geiger, TANU Women, 56; While he did not publish an autobiography, Amir Jamal’s service to Tanzania and to Nyerere are also worth mentioning. In his eulogy at Jamal’s memorial service on June 22, 1995, in Dar es Salaam, Nyerere is quoted as saying: “I almost exploited Amir. You’ll find that at every point, I gave him the ministry I thought the most difficult, but not too dif ficult for him.” Quoted in Lois Lobo, They Came to Africa: 200 Years of the Asian Presence in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Sustainable Village, 2000), 87. Jamal was elected as a TANU representative from Morogoro and went on to hold several cabinet posts under Nyerere.

19. Berger, “States of the (Tanzanian) Nation,” 149.

20. Which is not to say that she was the only Asian woman of prominence in East African politics. In Uganda, Sugra Visram, married to a descendant of the legendary Allidina Visram, was elected to the Ugandan Parliament. But to my knowledge she left no memoir or other narrative of her experience. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in her own memoir, notes about her: “When Sugra Visram, an outstanding Asian woman, who, with the approval of her husband, stood in the first post-independence election and was elected by a huge majority of black women to parliament, my people could only question her motives and disapprove of her unconventional rise to prominence. They gossiped endlessly and mercilessly about how she might have got there, how her mixing with Africans and her friendship with the Bagandan king, the Kabaka was somehow improper, how this sort of thing was corrupting the purity which all Asian women were presumed to have.” See Alibhai-Brown, No Place Like Home, 115–16. See also Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 95–123.

21. A very useful point of comparison is the life history of Bibi Titi Mohamed, who also relates her unconventional entry into TANU politics spurred by the visit of John Hatch, a member of the British Labour Party inquiring about the lack of women’s participation in TANU. Bibi Titi’s narrative shares some of Mustafa’s initial anxieties about public speaking and about her role as a woman in politics. See Geiger, TANU Women, 45–63.

22. In this Mustafa’s narrative is in keeping with a long tradition of women’s autobiographies and life narratives. For a theoretical treatment of authority and women’s voice in life narratives, see the Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). See also Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

23. One is reminded, here, as a point of comparison, of the experience in Nairobi of the British Joan Karmali married to an Indian. She remembers that when she was seeking admission to the European Hospital in Nairobi during her pregnancy two European nurses attempted to prevent her since her child would be half Indian. Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 3:178–79.

24. Mbilinyi, “Sophia Mustafa,” 157–58.

25. Sophia Mustafa, “Preface,” in Mustafa, Broken Reed, vii (vi–ix). See also Tina Steiner, “Translating Between India and Tanzania: Sophia Mustafa’s Partial Cosmopolitanism,” Research in African Literatures 42 no. 3 (2011): 132–46.

26. As an aside, we might note that Nyerere too was engaged with imaginative literature around this time. He prepared a Kiswahili translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1963 and later, in 1969, a translation of The Merchant of Venice. Faisal Devji presents a fascinating reading of the historical context of these translations, including a brief discussion of the use of the Gujarati-origin word mabepari to translate the English word “merchants.” Devji shows how the image of the Asian trader and the Jewish Shylock get conflated in the text. See Faisal Devji, “Subject to Translation: Shakespeare, Swahili, Socialism,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2000): 181–89. See also Paulina Aroch Fugellie, “Migratory Cliches: Recognizing Nyerere’s The Capitalists of Venice,” in Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas, eds., Migratory Settings (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 101–18.

27. Madhvani, Tide of Fortune, 51, 56.

28. Kassum, Africa’s Winds of Change, 12; further citations appear in the text.

29. Chande, A Knight in Africa, 37; further citations appear in the text. In his book Marching with Nyerere, K. L. Jhaveri, who was at one point mayor of Dar es Salaam and a member of the Tanzanian judiciary, likewise reflects on his student days in India during the Indian freedom struggle and notes his own arrest in Rajkot for participating in anticolonial protests. See Jhaveri, Marching with Nyerere, 78–9.

30. This distinction was also felt in an early article penned by Mahmood Mamdani, who wrote of the distinction between Nyerere’s economic policies and the policies followed at the same time in Kenya: “The difference is that in Tanzania it is ‘economic privilege’ that is considered as being undermined, whereas in Kenya it is ‘Asian economic privilege’ that is seen as being attacked. The emphasis in the first case is on ‘privilege,’ in the second on ‘Asian.’” Mahmood Mamdani, “Asians in East Africa: Their Origin and Sociological Composition,” Pan-African Journal 2, no. 4 (1969): 391 (375–95).

31. Julius Nyerere, quoted in Kassum, Africa’s Winds of Change, 59.

32. On this, Godfrey Mwakikagile notes, as a point of contrast, President Mobuto, who “‘indigenized’ the economy by raiding national coffers for himself and giving property—seized from foreigners—to his cronies and family members who had also amassed great wealth by stealing from the masses.” See Mwakikagile, Life Under Nyerere, 88.

33. Much has been written on the villagization program in Tanzania. For a critique and overview, see David Scott, “Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization,” in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 223–61. See also Issa G. Shivji, “The Village in Mwalimu’s Thought and Political Practice,” in Chachage and Cassam, Africa’s Liberation, 120–33.

34. To note that villagization was a failure is not to cast doubt on other social aspects of state policies that did indeed succeed. Godfrey Mwakikagile points out, for instance, that even though the villagizations may have failed, they brought “the people together and closer to each other in order to provide them with vital social services.” Among these he lists medical services and free education, the latter being a high point of Nyerere’s government. “Tanzania, on a scale unprecedented anywhere else in the world, launched a massive adult education campaign to teach millions of people how to read and write. Within only a few years, almost the entire adult population of Tanzania—rural peasants, urban workers and others became literate.” Mwakikagile, Life Under Nyerere, 64. For another recent retro spective account of the relative successes and failures of Tanzanian socialism under Nyerere, see Chachage and Cassam, Africa’s Liberation.

35. The significance of the Amin overthrow on the Asian community is also highlighted by Chande: “In 1979, following the takeover of a part of the Kagera region of Tanzania by Idi Amin’s forces, the under-equipped Tanzanian army fought back like lions and pushed the Ugandans out of Tanzania. But Mwalimu did not stop there. Persuaded by the need for regime change in Uganda, he ordered his forces to press on all the way into Kampala, and they toppled Amin. There was great relief and joy when the news came of the overthrow of Amin. A small number of those Asians who had been expelled returned to repossess the properties that had been confiscated.” Chande, A Knight in Africa, 145.

36. The Tiger talks refer to the meeting in 1966 between British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Rhodesian Ian Smith, who had unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence. Nyerere was a vehement critic of the racism of the Smith regime both before and after these talks. See Julius Nyerere, “The Honour of Africa,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 115–33; see also Julius Nyerere, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” ibid., 143–56.

37. For a recent discussion of A. M. Babu and particularly his interest in Chinese Communism, see G. Thomas Burgess, “Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline, and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities,” in Lee, Making a World After Empire, 196–234. For an account of the role of China in the building of the TAZARA railway and the manner in which both Tanzanian and Chinese workers remember the project, see Jamie Monson, “Working Ahead of Time: Labor and Modernization During the Construction of the TAZARA Railway, 1968–86,” ibid., 235–65. See also Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu, The Future That Works: The Selected Writings of A. M. Babu, ed. Salma Babu and Amrit Wilson (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2002).

38. For a detailed account of the politics of race, citizenship, and the policies of Africanization in this period, see Ronald Aminzade, “The Politics of Race and Nation: Citizenship and Africanization in Tanganyika,” Political Power and Social Theory 14 (2000): 53–90.

39. Even though it was popular with the public, the Africanization policy went against the grain of Nyerere’s nonracialist agenda. At much cost to him, including a military coup that had to be thwarted with the help of British troops, Nyerere decided to put an end to it. Chande, A Knight in Africa, 79.

40. See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982); Taiwo, How Colonialism Pre-Empted Modernity in Africa.

41. There is by now a considerable literature on both the promises as well as ills of market liberalization in Tanzania as well as in other African countries. A good overview of the impact of the structural adjustment programs in Tanzania is offered in Paul J. Kaiser, “Structural Adjustment and the Fragile Nation: The Demise of Social Unity in Tanzania,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32, no. 2 (1996): 227–37. For a strong critique of the structural adjustment measures in the continent, see Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future. See also Horace Campbell and Howard Stein, eds., Tanzania and the IMF: The Dynamics of Liberalization (Boulder: Westview, 1992); Shivji, Let the People Speak. Perhaps the most philosophically engaged treatment of this issue is Achille Mbembe’s discussion of what he calls “Private Indirect Government.” See Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 66–101.

1. Originally from Dar es Salaam, Vassanji now lives in Toronto, to which he migrated several years ago. The Gunny Sack, published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series and winning the Commonwealth Prize for the Africa region, was, in fact, written by Vassanji in Canada.

2. See Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literatures 32, no.3 (2001): 3–8; see also Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991).

3. The character Salim comes up with the metaphor of excess baggage in the novel: “We Indians have barged into Africa with our big black trunk, and every time it comes in our way. Do we need it? I should have come with a small bag, a rucksack.” Vassanji, The Gunny Sack, 204.

4. See Vassanji, The Book of Secrets. Vassanji received the Giller Prize for this novel in 1994. See also his The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Vassanji received the Giller for this novel in 2003.

5. My reading of The Gunny Sack is informed by much of the previous scholarship on it, although I also depart from these readings. This includes, in addition to the scholars whose work I engage with directly in the text (and who are cited later), Brenda Cooper, “A Gunny Sack, Chants and Jingles, a Fan and a Black Trunk: The Coded Language of the Everyday in a Post-colonial African Novel,” Africa Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2004): 12–31; Tuomas Huttunen, “M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: Narrating the Migrant Identity,” in John Skinner, ed., Tales of Two Cities: Essays on New Anglophone Literature (Turku: Anglicana Turkuensia, 2000), 3–20; Tuomas Huttunen, “M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: Emplotting British, Asian and African Realities,” Atlantic Review 3, no. 2 (2002): 56–76; Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan, “M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: A Reflection on History and the Novel,” Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 3 (1991): 511–18; Ashok Mohapatra, “The Paradox of Return: Origins, Home, and Identity in M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack,” Postcolonial Text 2, no. 4 (2006): 1–21; Peter Kalliney, “East African Fiction and Globalization,” in Gaurav Desai, ed., Teaching the African Novel (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 259–73.

6. Here I am in agreement with Simatei, who has recently argued for a critical refocus on the ways in which East African Asian diasporic writers remain tied to a national project. See Peter Simatei, “Diasporic Memories and National Histories in East African Asian Writing,” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 3 (2011): 56–67.

7. Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.

9. Bahadur Tejani, “Modern African Literature and the Legacy of Cultural Colonialism,” World Literature Written in English 18, no. 1 (1979): 46 (37–54).

10. For an insight into Tejani the writer, see Annie Koshi, “An Interview with Bahadur Tejani,” Ufahamu 21, no. 3 (1993): 43–54. For Koshi’s reading of Tejani’s novel, see Annie Koshi, “The Afro-Asian and American Dreams of Race Relations in Bahadur Tejani’s Day After Tomorrow,” Wasafiri 13 (1991): 11–13.

11. I owe the term blood narrative to Chadwick Allen, although his use of it in Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) is considerably more nuanced than mine.

12. Charles Sarvan pays attention to Nazareth as a “historical witness” in his essay “The Writer as Historian.” See Charles Sarvan, “The Writer as Historian: With Reference to the Novels of Peter Nazareth,” Toronto South Asian Review 10, no. 1 (1991): 15–24. See also Simatei, The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa, 105–20.

13. Bernth Lindfors, “Interview with Peter Nazareth,” in Bernth Lindfors, Mazungumzo: Interviews with East African Writers, Publishers, Editors and Scholars (Athens: University Center for African Studies, 1980), 90 (80–97).

16. Peter Nazareth, “The Asian Presence in Two Decades of East African Literature,” Toronto Review 13, no. 1 (1994): 18 (17–32).

19. See Carol Sicherman, “Ngugi’s Colonial Education: The Subversion … of the African Mind,” African Studies Review 38, no. 3 (1995): 11–41. See also Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” in Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair, eds., Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 608–34.

20. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, No Place Like Home (London: Virago, 1995), 156.

21. See Gikandi, “Theory, Literature and Moral Considerations.” See also Kenneth Harrow, “Ethics and Difference: A Response to Simon Gikandi’s ‘Theory, Literature and Moral Considerations,’” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 154–60.

22. Ojwang, “The Pleasures of Knowing.” See also Christopher Miller, “Ethnicity and Ethics,” in Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 31–67.

23. Ojwang, “The Pleasures of Knowing,” 43.

24. R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Difference,” in Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 62 (62–79).

25. In his essay “The Postcolonial Writer,” Vassanji claims that the postcolonial writer is “a preserver of the collective tradition, a folk historian and myth maker. He gives himself a history; he recreates the past, which exists only in memory and is otherwise obliterated, so fast has his world transformed. He emerges from the oral, preliterate, and unrecorded, to the literate.” M. G. Vassanji, “The Postcolonial Writer: Myth Maker and Folk Historian,” in M. G. Vassanji, ed., A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature (Toronto: TSAR, 1985), 63 (63–68).

26. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 87.

27. A relation to film techniques and cinema would be appropriate as well. See, in this regard, Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (Yale University Press, 1979), which traces the influence of cinematic techniques on the modern novel. While Cohen discusses primarily European novels and cinema, his discussion of such techniques as montage, achronological narration and flashbacks, simultaneity, perspective mobility in point of view, and narrative discontinuities is very suggestive in a reading of Vassanji’s text. The Book of Secrets specifically invokes Hindi films as an important narrative element.

28. Dent Ocaya-Lakidi claims that East Africans did not necessarily associate Islam with India and hence Indian efforts at conversion would not have been successful. “And, although prominent Asian Muslims emerged on the Ugandan scene in later years, they were unable to secure for India the kind of allegiance the Christian religion had generated for England. … But even had the Asians sent Hindu teachers among the natives of East Africa, where was the impressive material culture in India or Pakistan to back up their teaching? Was the black man to abandon his native religion for a new one when those who preached this new religion could not even promise a better material life in this world?” Ocaya-Lakidi, “Black Attitudes,” 86.

29. See Shane Rhodes, “M. G. Vassanji: An Interview,” Studies in Canadian Literature 22, no. 2 (1997): 116 (105–17).

30. The collection of short stories Uhuru Street excepted, of course, since the stories are set in the same locale of Kariakoo and in many ways overlap or extend the portrayals in The Gunny Sack. See M. G. Vassanji, Uhuru Street (London: Heinemann, 1991).

31. It is at this historical moment that the likes of Kulsum, whose bowel troubles are legendary, “in an exact literal translation, (is) scared shitless” (153), when her head tailor, Omari, decides to challenge her on matters of back pay. The novel is quick to note that Kulsum’s fear is ultimately immaterial since the Labor Office sides with her in the dispute.

32. In other words, circumcised or not? Recall that this issue of male circumcision as a site of difference between Hindus and Muslims reappears in Ghosh’s conversations with the Egyptian villagers during his fieldwork.

33. This, of course, is not the case with all the Asians. Uncle Goa’s family decision to go to Lourenço Marques after independence because they cannot watch their “servants turning and throwing insults” at them (165) has often been read by critics as a metaphor for the Asian community’s response as a whole. But such a reading ignores the fact that this family, despite their own troubles, tends to think of themselves as different from, if not better than, the rest of the Asians. Why else would their son, the one with the “blue-green eyes,” not be allowed to play with the other Asian children like Salim? When Kulsum reminds Mrs. Goa that she can’t think of leaving because her family was born in East Africa, Uncle Goa is quick to acquiesce: “Yes, yes … for you it is different” (165). Vassanji, I suggest, is pointing to yet another difference within the Asian community here—not only one of Goan and Shamshi, but, further, one of new immigrant Asian and African-born Asian.

34. See George B. N. Ayittey and Ludovik Shirima, “Julius Nyerere: A Saint or a Knave?” http://www.freeafrica.org/articles/failedleadership/juliusnyere.html. For an overview of preventive detentions in Tanzania, see Chris Maina Peter, “Incarcerating the Innocent: Preventive Detention in Tanzania,” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1997): 113–35. See also Helen Kijo-Bisimba and Chris Maina Peter, “Mwalimu Nyerere and the Challenge of Human Rights,” in Chambi Chachage and Annar Cassam, eds., Africa’s Liberation: The Legacy of Nyerere (Nairobi: Pambazuka, 2010), 149–59; James Brennan, “The Short History of Political Opposition and Multi-Party Democracy in Tanganyika, 1958–64,” in Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin, eds., In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 250–76. While he is supportive of Nyerere’s presidency in general, K. L. Jhaveri, once mayor of Dar es Salaam and former member of the Tanzanian judiciary, expresses serious reservations about the preventive detentions. See Jhaveri, Marching with Nyerere, 186–91.

35. In this, Salim embodies some of Vassanji’s own frustrations as a youth. In an interview with Mark David Young, Vassanji remarks, “I remember when I was seventeen or eighteen what I resented was not being able to get away. When I was growing up, the government there basically put a restriction on who could leave. You felt like you were being held in. … When I was growing up, we always knew that there was a bigger world out there and we wanted to go and see it.” Mark David Young, “Delivering the Past: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji,” Blood and Aphorisms 27 (1997): 47 (46–50).

36. Vassanji’s lack of patience with academics is most explicit when he writes elsewhere about the “Calcutta Intellectuals.” Granting their brilliance and their ability to seamlessly shift from quoting Derrida and Foucault to engaging in deep conversations in Bengali, he notes, “And there is a genuine sympathy for the oppressed: after all, there exists a caste system, and the multitudes are poor beyond imagination. But with them there are no two ways. The world is divided neatly between the oppressed and the oppressors. There is right and there is wrong. They are on the side of the right.” M. G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2009), 32.

37. Here Vassanji’s position would resonate with Stuart Hall’s observation that “we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position as ‘ethnic artists’ or filmmakers. We are all, in that sense ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are.” Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Houston Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 169–70 (163–72).

38. Vassanji has often spoken on the loss of his father when he was a young boy, and his growing up in a female-headed household. See his interview with Chelva Kanaganayaka, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji,” World Literature Written in English 31, no. 2 (1991): 19–35. See also Gaurav Desai, “Ambiguity Is the Driving Force or the Nuclear Reaction Behind My Creativity: An E-Conversation with M. G. Vassanji,” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 187–197.

39. Likewise, Salim’s sister Begum has to elope to London with her English lover Mr. Harris since the city is not prepared for such a relationship.

40. Dent Ocaya-Lakidi suggests that, despite the general targeting of Asians for their reluctance to intermarry with Africans, such reluctance was in fact often registered on both sides. “Yet should (an African woman) go with an Asian, she can still create considerable revulsion among black African males. By going with an Asian she is seen to be sinking even lower than the lowest African can go. It follows that for a ‘clean’ or good African girl to want to marry an Asian is just unimaginable. As for the black males themselves, no doubt the idea of ‘testing’ a ‘brown skin’ is attractive but none would stoop to marry an Asian.” Ocaya-Lakidi, “Black Attitudes,” 96–97. Ocaya-Lakidi’s piece was published in 1975, but, regrettably, despite some notable exceptions, the dominant societal views on interracial marriages between Africans and Asians have not significantly changed in either community. However, as both historical records as well as The Gunny Sack suggest, interracial relationships between Indians and Africans were not uncommon in earlier periods, until at least the first few decades of the twentieth century.

41. Kanaganayaka, ‘“Broadening the Substrata,’” 20.

42. Ojwang, “The Pleasures of Knowing,” 48.

46. Furthermore, one must concur with Ojwang’s claim that it is too simple to suggest that Indian estimates of African capability were merely derivative of European racism. Rather, they were likely as much the result of “longstanding attitudes to colour within the Indian subcontinent” (ibid., 46, and, we might add, caste) as they were responses to European formulations. On this, see also Robert E. Washington, “Brown Racism and the Formation of a World System of Racial Stratification,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4, no. 2 (1990): 209–27.

47. Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” in Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 125 (111–41).

48. Ojwang, “The Pleasures of Knowing,” 44.

49. Ironically, one of the strategies that President Karume embarked on in the context of the Zanzibari revolution was forced marriages between Asian and Arab women and African men. He is quoted as saying: “In the colonial times Arabs took African concubines without bothering to marry them. Now that we are in power, the shoe is on the other foot.” Quoted in Richa Nagar, “The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 16, no. 2 (1996): 62–80 (68). To further complicate our understanding of the politics of gender, race, and concubinage in the era, we might also remember that slavery in the Indian Ocean context, even as late as the nineteenth century, was not a unidirectional trade. That female concubinage worked in multiple directions is evident in the Zanzibar archives where Cynthia Salvadori reports a court document dated June 18, 1890, that refers to an emancipated slave woman, Zafarani, who had married Mohamed bin Isa, a British Indian resident in Lamu. According to a witness in the case, Zafarani was “brought years ago to Lamu and sold, she then being a child and a native of Pathan in India.” Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 1:33.

50. Here I have to register a slight disagreement with Peter Simatei’s otherwise powerful reading of the text. Simatei argues that, because the liaison with Taratibu is what ultimately leads to Dhanji Govindji’s madness and death, “Govindji’s flirtations with Bibi Taratibu, and hence Africa is interpreted as having been the workings of a curse.” It is not the relationship with Taratibu, however problematic it may seem to us, that the text derides—it is clearly Dhanji’s abandonment of her and his racism toward his mixed-race son that is the subject of critique. See Simatei, The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa, 90.

51. At another point in the narrative Salim wonders, “From what ravaged tribe, gutted village, was she brought to the coast, and did she not also think of her home, her slaughtered father and uncles, her brother and sisters also taken away” (23).

52. Rosemary Marongoly George, “‘Traveling Light’: Home and the Immigrant Genre,” in The Politics of Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180 (171–97).

53. For a parallel reading of the possibilities of agency even in the midst of the most oppressive and brutal conditions, see Sara Salih, “Introduction,” in Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, ed. Sara Salih (New York: Penguin, 2000), vii–xxxiv.

54. Ojwang, “The Pleasures of Knowing,” 56.

55. Stephanie Jones, “Within and Without History: The Book of Secrets,” in Debjani Ganguly and Kavita Nandan, eds., Unfinished Journeys: India File from Canberra (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1998), 75 (71–89).

56. Clifford Geertz, “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 82, no. 2 (1984): 263–64 (263–78).

57. On this, Vassanji says, “I was of course very conscious of how ludicrous it was for Indians and Africans to be fighting a European war. That was a comment on the contradictions of colonial rule. But the fact is that the British administrators too were human and I don’t know if it is politically incorrect to say that.” “M. G. Vassanji,” in Chelva Kanaganayalam, Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (Toronto: TSAR), 134 (127–37).

58. It is also a turn that is in keeping with a preference for what Mahmood Mamdani has lately called survivor’s justice as opposed to the alternative form of victor’s justice based on a notion of revenge. See Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 270–82. On Gandhi and the intimacy of empire, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

1. Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee, 45–46.

2. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9.

3. Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee, 46–49. See also Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.

4. Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee, 15.

The overwhelming majority of Asian businessmen were merchants, operating in the commercial sector, heavily indebted to the banks. A study conducted in 1968 showed that approximately eighty percent of the total commercial bank assets in Uganda were controlled by three banks, Barclays Bank D.C.O., The National and Grindlays Bank and the Standard Bank Ltd.—all British. The other foreign banks, the Netherlands Bank, Ottoman Bank, Habib Bank, Bank of Baroda and Bank of India, controlled another ten percent. The remaining ten percent was controlled by the Bank of Uganda and the Uganda Commercial Bank. In October, when Asian businesses started closing down en masse, one could walk down the main streets of Kampala and see signs such as “Property of Barclays Bank D.C.O.” or “Property of the Standard Bank” on locked up Asian businesses.

7. Ibid., 29. While Mamdani received a firsthand education in the hierarchies of racial privilege and the ways in which class divisions can take racial overtones, one could plausibly argue that he also learned other important lessons that have continued to mark his subsequent work in political theory. Mamdani’s insights on the nature of colonial subjects and citizens, on the politics of indigeneity and its dangerous manifestations in the Rwandan genocide, and his more recent reflections on survivor’s justice are all, I would argue, marked by the memory of the Asian expulsion. But tracing those connections will have to remain a subject for a different occasion.

9. Ibid., From Citizen to Refugee, 41.

10. Nair, Mississippi Masala.

11. Many of the claims that I critique here are articulated in bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney, “Mississippi Masala,” Z Magazine (July-August 1992): 41–43. See also, for a variety of positions on the film, Brinda Mehta, “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala,” in Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, eds., Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 185–203; Purnima Bose and Linta Varghese, “Mississippi Masala, South Asian Activism and Agency,” in Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real” (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 137–68; Jigna Desai, “When Indians Play Cowboys: Diaspora and Postcoloniality in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala,” in Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), 71–100; Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Mira Nair: To Be Mixed Is the New World Order,” in Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 111–27; Adeleke Adeeko, “Mississippi Masala: Crossing Desire and Interest,” in Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds., Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender and Sexuality Through Film (Boulder: University of Colorado, 2003), 127–42; Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Beyond’ White and Other: Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse,” in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 36–66.