Merchant-kings and Everymen: Narratives of the South Asian Diaspora of East Africa

Abstract

The building of the Uganda railway at the turn of the nineteenth century brought about radical shifts in the notion of territory and the conception of time within East Africa. A sense of Indian Ocean continuity and cosmopolitanism signified by the pace of the dhow and the seaward perspective of coastal communities was substantially replaced by a new sense of time and territory determined by the speed of the train and the inland focus of colonial ambition. This paper explores this long moment of transition through a number of texts: the first year of the East African Standard (1902–03), the journal of Ebrahimji Noorbhai Adamji (1902–05) and three recent novels. These texts delineate the role of the South Asian diaspora in both the expansion of the colonial economy and the maintenance of an older sensibility. The founder of the African Standard, Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, held the contract for the recruitment of indentured labourers for the building of the railway and financed the establishment of Nairobi. While his newspaper displays complicity with colonial projects, it also reveals the disparity between the overtly expansive ideals and the narrowly national/racial aims of the empire. In Adamji's journal, the oscillation between the use of British time and Arbi – the Arabic Swahili system of time – is a notable imprecision that signifies the writer's position on a cusp between the world of coastal trade and life under colonial rule. Beneath the biographies of businessmen like Jeevanjee and Adamji, the history of the Asian presence in East Africa figures labourers, discarded wives, unsuccessful traders and children of mixed racial parentage: people whose position in the racial hierarchy of colonial East Africa becomes ever more obscure. The paper concludes by tracing the way in which three writers use the novel form to tell the relationship between class complicity and racial hierarchy which defined the Asian East African position during the period of British colonial rule.

Notes

1. Gregory, India and East Africa, 5–7.

2. Periplus, 27; Coupland, East Africa and its Invaders, 15–18.

3. Gregory, India and East Africa, 9.

4. Following common usage, the paper refers to ‘Indians’ when discussing the South Asian diasporas of East Africa before 1947 and ‘Asian’ when discussing the diaspora after Partition. In East Africa today, the term ‘Asian’ is most often and unselfconsciously used as a term by and for communities and individuals whose ancestry traces back to South Asia. The change in terminology began in 1947 with the partition of the sub-continent into the independent nations of India and Pakistan (See, Delf, Asians in East Africa, xi). The trade winds traditionally brought merchants from Gujarat, Kathiawar and Sindh. These – along with the Punjab – are also the areas from which the British recruited labourers and settlers. Located between Bombay and Karachi, these places were and continue to be particularly fraught by partition. The change in colloquialism indicates a desire within the diasporic communities to limit the ramifications of these national tensions. But in deliberately eliding alliances with distant national identities, the vaguer term also points up the importance of smaller community affiliations.

5. Coupland, East Africa, 302–03.

6. Gregory, India and East Africa, 19.

7. Coupland, East Africa, 302.

8. Gregory, India and East Africa, 47; Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 15–16

9. Gregory, India and East Africa, 51; Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture’, 168.

10. Gregory, India and East Africa, 55.

11. Gregory, India and East Africa, 61. Ghai and Ghai, Portrait of a Minority, quote figures from the final report of the Uganda Railway Committee stating that of 32,000 indentured, 16,312 returned, 2,493 died, 6,454 invalided home, 6,724 stayed on.

12. Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 8.

13. Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture’, 168.

14. Lovegrove, ‘Asians and the Building of the Uganda Railway’, 36.

15. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, 490.

16. Gregory, India and East Africa, 51.

17. Gregory, India and East Africa, 62.

18. Churchill, My African Journey, 32.

19. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 1’, 292.

20. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 1’. 295.

21. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 2’, 5.

22. Jeevanjee, An Appeal, 13.

23. Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 19–21.

24. Gregory, India and East Africa, 177–98.

25. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2; 23 June 1903, 2.

26. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2; 8 January 1903, 5.

27. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 15 November 1902, 2.

28. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4; 5 March 1903,1.

29. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 30 June 1903, 2.

30. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 1 August, 1903, 8.

31. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 7 November 1903, 4.

32. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 19 September 1903, 6.

33. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 86.

34. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 93–111.

35. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 93, fn. 23.

36. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81.

37. Standard, 10 March 1903, 1.

38. Standard, 11 July 1903, 1.

39. Standard, 18 April 1903, 2. Bohras are a Gujarati based sect of Shi'a Muslims and a powerful community of traders in East Africa (Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 256).

40. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 91.

41. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 86.

42. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–36.

43. Standard, 22 November 1902, 3.

44. Bhabha, ‘Dissemination’. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 244–255.

45. Gregory, India and East Africa, 69.

46. Gregory, India and East Africa, 69–71.

47. Vassanji, ‘The Post-Colonial Writer’, 64.

48. Visram, Allidina Visram.

49. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow.

50. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81; Preston, Oriental Nairobi, 66; Oza, A Rift in the Empire's Lute, 123.

51. Gregory, India and East Africa, 114.

52. Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 41.

53. Gregory, India and East Africa, 80.

54. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81; Visram, Allidina Visram, 84.

55. Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.

56. Visram, Allidina Visram, 74.

57. Visram, Allidina Visram, 131.

58. Visram was born in 1851 and in fact left at age 12 (Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 225).

59. Visram himself is Ithnasheri. He is not a descendant of Allidina Visram. (Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.)

60. Visram, Allidina Visram, 12.

61. Visram, Allidina Visram, 133.

62. Said, Culture, 84.

63. Said, Culture, 82.

64. The scene is set in 1907 but Jackson didn't become Governor until 1910.

65. Visram, Red Soils of Tsavo, 7.

66. Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.

67. Mahmood Mamdani's From Citizen to Refugee which documents his time in a Kensington refugee camp, was written with a similar agenda. Excerpts were first published as ‘a novel in progress’ in an anthology of writing by Asian Ugandan refugees, Merely a Matter of Colour (1973). The full text retains some fictional aspects, particularly dialogue, but it progressed into a more autobiographical and documentary style of work than this earlier description indicates.

68. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 10–11.

69. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 44–45.

70. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 62.

71. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 54.

72. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, i.

73. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 2.

74. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper.

75. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 9.

76. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 25.

77. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 55.

78. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 54.

79. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 54.

80. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 107.

81. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 109.

82. Vassanji, ‘Life at the Margins’, 116.

83. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 7.

84. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 8.

85. Vassanji, ‘Life at the Margins’, 119.

86. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 7.

87. Parameswaran, SACLIT, 196.

88. Vassanji, ‘Broadening the Substrata’, 25.

89. Vassanji, ‘Broadening the Substrata’, 24, 22.

90. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 23.

91. The Mau Mau was an insurgent organisation of mainly Kikuyu. The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–56) was a violent uprising, attracting brutal reprisals from the colonial government.

92. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 10.

93. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 7.