The Third and Final Continent

‘Surely a returnee has some claim to the land which formed him—which is not in some godforsaken corner of the globe but in the centre of his imagination. And surely distance lends objectivity.’ Fierce words for a gentle writer, but on the subject of reappropriating true homes, he cannot be dissuaded. Canadian MG Vassanji—acclaimed author of six novels, two collections of short stories and a memoir of travels in India—is one of the more reticent writers the Indian diaspora lays claim to, and in this keenly-observed travelogue-cum-memoir, he makes his own claims, not on India but on the land which raised him and which is often misrepresented. East Africa and the lives of its people is his particular province as a writer, and here, as he has previously attempted, he speaks for Indian or Asian Africans, who are sometimes dispossessed twice over in a confusion of countries. African literature has claimed him, but he must still defend his identity, it is evident.

Thus, even if ‘the ancestral South Asian homeland is a reality that looms closer today’, as he admits, Africa is where Vassanji grew up and it is where his heart belongs, even if his community has historically had problems accepting their part in Africa. He was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, and the two countries tug at him. Between the first Indian settlement of Dar es Salaam, Gaam (town; in Swahili ‘mjini’)—the heart of Dar for 70 years, at its pinnacle—and Kariakoo, the African area, Vassanji was raised in the classic immigrant fashion, moving ‘fatherless from Nairobi to Dar’, where his mother opened up a ‘fancy goods store’ and he and his siblings fought ‘for the chance to press [her] aching feet’. It might all sound a bit old-fashioned, including the antiquated quality of some of his prose, but this might be excused by the many eras and divides he crosses to bring us his fine writing; Swahili is one of the languages the 64-year- old Ismaili Muslim of Gujarati heritage thinks in.

The Dar of his childhood is an achingly colonial place, where Indians and Europeans play cricket, full of schools and proud of a local tradition of theatre; only their version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India is enacted with Africans playing Englishmen and Indians playing themselves wonderfully. The Arusha Declaration upset this comfortable existence in 1971, announcing the confiscation of properties belonging to penniless Indians arrived in Africa generations ago; they decided to emigrate, wary of the potential contagion of the doctrine of Uganda’s bilious dictator Idi Amin, who had just expelled many Asians. Vassanji describes how upcountry Indians moved in, with ‘the aggression and all the scruples of the pioneer’, their former towns abandoned.

He is terribly familiar with the area upon his return, the tops of its ‘mansions’ bearing very Indian signs in a very Indian manner, each cramped residence housing five to eight people in three-room flats . Of those who left for Toronto, Los Angeles or elsewhere, Vassanji remarks on what the increased space must have felt like: ‘It’s almost as if one were transported from the rowdy wooden front seats of the Empire Cinema onto Sunset Boulevard itself’. Moments of fun, amidst the ruins. For, the old buildings have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing; more often, they have given way to new high-rises which are collapsing. It is into this modern and ancient decline that Vassanji arrives, eating kebabs at KT Shop with a nostalgia only second-generation immigrants may truly understand.

From this beginning, bitter-sweet, Vassanji launches his laidback adventure through Tanga, Kilwa, the Southern Highlands, Zanzibar and Nairobi, into the heartland of East Africa. Yet, this is no retirement trip. Like a true adventurer, he shares rooms with strangers at cheap guesthouses called Flamingo, hops on buses, accepts candy from young Masai and stops for the Shadhiliyya Sufis, in a rewarding chapter.

In Moshi, a small town with an ‘English-village feel’ at the foot of the Kilimanjaro, Vassanji reminds us of the great campaign fought here as part of World War I; wherein Indians fought against Africans, Africans against Africans. Indians were brought over from the Subcontinent, he reminds us, to fight the odd little Battle of Tanga, named after the port town which 8,000 Indian troops sought to conquer.

Kilwa, which he has written about in his old-fashioned novel The Magic of Saida (2012), is another wonderfully atmospheric old city, full of the ghosts of old visitors; this book is just as much about the colonisers as it is about the colonised. So we learn of Captain James Frederic Elton, who rode from Zanzibar to the coast to enforce the slave ban on Indian subjects, and members of the German East Africa company who were beheaded by the local resistance. Vassanji calls Kilwa Kivinje’s decline ‘poetic justice’ because of its awful slave history, but takes a hard if not long look at the realities of politics as well. So, the town is ‘idyllic, postcard- perfect; the journey in, long and nightmarish, hot and muggy, a thing of the past’. Yet, the market is empty of meat and grain, redeemed by a few heaps of mangoes. Those early beginnings were the beginning of a kind of end; even English writer Evelyn Waugh’s flying visit, via a ship called the Rhodesia Castle, was time enough to glean Kilwa’s truth (‘picturesque, decaying’), Vassanji recounts in one of his fun bits of trivia.

Vassanji, who has won the Giller Prize for fiction in Canada and the Commonwealth Regional Prize (Africa), among other accolades, is a member of the Order of Canada. He first found literary attention with The Gunny Sack (1989), and more than a decade later with The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), and then The Assassin’s Song (2007)— substantial novels about Tanzanian exiles, post-colonial Kenya and a Sufi shrine in Gujarat respectively, earning him a steady readership. He lacks the notoriety and perhaps the prowess of Naipaul and Graham Greene, who the blurb reminds us he is compared to, yet he is a valuable voice from an unpeopled corner of the world. In the way that Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon’s seminal works may be forgotten by some and remembered by others, his line of enquiry persists.

Has he found his bearings, in this book, a more confident account than A Place Within: Rediscovering India, but arguably a more emotional one? Vassanji looks at the ‘New (Asian) African’ in a chapter that deals with the ‘choice of loyalties’ on the part of Asian shopkeepers and small-time businessmen who stayed on and survived, many of their friends making that return trip to Gujarat which had been so difficult to make in the reverse. He quotes Bahadur Tejani’s Day After Tomorrow, whose dealings with Asian ‘inadequacy’ are telling; there is a pull for a single racial identity as ‘Asian African’, he sees. This can get a little repetitive, even sentimental—he spends some time asking why the usual ideas prevail toward Africa, where he might have best avoided a discussion we have heard before—yet he also asks the questions no one asks. For example, on a budding East Asian literary consciousness: ‘Was that creative spark, that hope, doomed from the beginning? A cultural magazine [ill- fated Transition]… a broker, a provider of sorts… a deliverer of goods—that typical, stereotypical role of the Asian in Africa?’

Some of this solemn account may seem obvious; as when Vassanji thinks, ‘so much of the country lies in total darkness at night’. But he is adept in taking the time to help the reader feel the darkness too. These historical details, some of them long-forgotten, lying in some dusty annal, might not have been taken up by many; it is the more glamorous front of contemporary battles which foreign correspondents like to decry. As the writer remarks at the end, ‘I have been reclaimed, partly, as I always seem to be.’ Until he does not have to ask the age-old questions about identity, the patient reader should enjoy the quirks of the journey, even if it is sometimes sedate, for the panorama.

About The Author

Rajni George

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