THE WORLDS IN-BETWEEN OF AN ASIAN AFRICAN WRITER:
A POSTCOLONIAL READING OF SELECTED NOVELS
OF MG VASSANJI
BY
JUSTUS KIZITO SIBOE LMAKOKHA
LITERATURE DEPARTMENT
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS OF KENYATTA UNIVERSITY
rvraxoxna. Justus
The world in between
. of an Asian African
•
, 1"~"I~IIII""IIIWiNI~"I~"", 07/302220
MAY 2006
KE ATTA UNIVER\)ITY li'BRARY'
11
DECLARATION
This thesis is my original research and has not been presented for a degree in
any other University or any other award.
SIGN: ---Ja~~~-~ DATE: aQftf ""It"'! 2.006.
.S.MAKOKHA
50/7803/2002
We acknowledge that the work reported in this thesis was carried out by the
candidate under our supervision.
SIGN: ~.l.cr'Jl.I'!A.Jrc.....
Dr. GARNETTE OLUOCH-OLUNYA
DATE: 30. oS' . :J.OO~
DATE: S7)-I()~-2.0~
III
DEDICATION
To the memory of my worthy grandparents:
David Wanjohi wa Muire and Leiticia Muthoni Wanjohi
Zakayo wa Makokha and Margaret Natnisi Makokha ...
•
IV
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Sincere appreciation goes to my godparents, Vincent and Elizabeth
Kawooya in whose home I found love and accommodation that enabled
me complete this degree. Dr. Fr. Lance, I appreciate your ceaseless
support. This work is the product of inspired supervision and inspiring
supervisors. Dr. Garnette Oluoch-Olunya and Dr. Michael Wainaina
thank you for directing this thesis.
For encouragement, I appreciate: Professor Oluoch Obura,
Professor Eric Aseka, Professor Peter Nazareth, Professor Chris
Wanjala, and Professor Augustine Nwoye, Nurjehan Aziz and MG
Vassanji, all my university teachers, the Mariescos, Mwalimu Bukenya,
Dr. SD Partington, Dr. Evan Mwangi, Mathes Mary Kamau and Martha,
Fr. Tom, Were, Hobby, Chand, Omotayo, Zahid and Zarina, Elizabeth,
Irene, Daisy, Ojwang, Kahyana, Simatei and my graduate-mates: Osoro,
Wambui, Ojiambo, Wahu and Maina.
I am indebted to Kenyatta University and Katholischer
Akademischer Auslander-Dienst (KAAD) for offering me timely
scholarships. Finally, I acknowledge my daughter, my inspiration,
Peninah Muthoni Makokha .
•
..
v
ABSTRACT
MGVassanji has written five novels tracing the movements of Asians
fromSouth Asia in the late nineteenth century to East Africa, and then
fromAfrica to North America in the 1960s and 1970s. The community
of Asians who came to East Africa before or at the time of British
imperialism has now given rise to several other generations that in
popular East African discourse are known simply as the "Asiarrs."
However,these so called Asians are actually Asian Africans, children of
a bicontinental heritage as is evident in the Asian African Trust
Heritage, a department of history at the National Museums of Kenya in
Nairobi.
In East Africa, this community inhabits a middle area, both in colour
and in status, between European whites and African blacks. The
attempt to make sense out of inhabiting "worlds in-between" the Black
and White has in fact become a congenital theme and leitmotif in
almost all genres of writings of Asian Africans from East Africa. The
imaginative writings of Asian African writers such as Peter Nazareth,
Jagjit Singh, and Kuldip Sondhi who wrote about the Asian African
experience in East Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s serve as
prominent examples. This literary agenda persists in the oeuvre of the
more contemporary Vassanji, especially in our two novels of focus, The
Gunny Sack and The Book oj Secrets. It is argued Vassanji's
community, historically and socio-politically,was strictly never a part of
the Black/White (post)colonialitybut a community in-between the two,
Vi
the Black/White (postjcoloniality but a community in-between the two,
an interstitial community. In the present work, an exegesis of the two
novels takes the form of a reading guided by postcolonial perspectives
drawn from Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture.
Being a conceptual study that relies entirely on library research, this
work is guided by a comprehensive research methodology as discussed
in chapter one. In chapter two the socio-historical and literary
experiences of Asian Africans of East Africa have been reviewed as part
of focussing the problematic of the study. This extra-literary
information depicts the unique experiences of Asian Africans as an
interstitial community in East Africa and provides useful perspectives
for reading Vassanji's novels, The Gunny Sack and the The Book of
Secrets. Chapter three argues that interstitiality is the central idea
around which the plots of The Gunny Sack are built. Setting or fictional
locations in this novel are viewed as part of Vassanji's strategy,
underscoring Asian African interstitiality. The Book of Secrets is treated
in chapter four. Nurmohammed Pipa, the quintessential Asian African,
is the subject. Through him, his community's racial stereotyping is
traced through historical lineage, and given both depth and meaning.
Chapter five, the conclusion, gives a summary of the study. It also
raises issues pertinent to future research in this area.
VII
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION ~.ii
DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .iv
ABSTRACT v
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
EPIGRAPH ix
CHAPTER ONE
CONCEPTUALISING THE WORLDS IN-BETWEEN:
1.1. Introduction 1
1.2. Definition of Terms 5
1.3. Literature Review 8
1.4. Statement of the Problem 26
1.5. Research Objectives 27
1.6. Rationale for the Study 28
1.7. Scope and Limitations 28
1.8. Theoretical Framework. 30
1.9. Research Methodology 35
CHAPTER TWO
IN(BETWEEN) BLACK AND WHITE:
2.1. Introduction 37
2.2. Experiential Locations of Culture 38
2.3. Of Genesis and Genealogy .42
2.3.1. Disavowing the Harsita Myth .44
2.4. Empowerment and Emasculation 50
2.5. Conclusion 75
CHAPTER THREE
IMAGINED (DIS)LOCATIONS:
3.1.Introduction 74
3.2. The Gunny Sack: A Synopsis 76
3.3. Mythical Locations 81
3.4. Setting as a Metaphor : 89
3.5. Setting as Motive 94
3.6. Conclusion l 00
CHAPTER FOUR
"DUKAWALLAH" AS A DISCURSIVE TROPE:
4.1. Introduction l 01
4.2. The Book of Secrets: A Synopsis l0l
4.3. Pieces ofWood 103
VIII
4.4. Mediating Interstitiality 109
4.5. Conclusion 131
CHAPTER FIVE
A RETROSPECTIVE CONCLUSION
5.1. Introduction 133
5.2. General Observations 134
5.3. Specific Findings 137
5.4. Recommendation for Future Research 137
NOTES 140
WORKS CONSULTED 150
APPENDICES 164
IX
EPIGRAPH
This is our home [Africa].Our social identity rests on our bi-continental
tradition. We are both Asian and African. We are Asian African.f
"Neti, neti" !l
~The words of the lawyer-poet Pheroze Nowrojee, Chairman of the Asian African
Heritage Trust, a Department of!: the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi. See his
interview with Shashi Tharoor, We're all Kenyans here'
http://www.shashitharoor.com/articles/hindu/kenyans.php.<Accessed zi« August
2005>
~ A saying from the holy scriptures, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that translates into
English as "not this, not that". Cf. Vassanji's In-between World of Vikram Lall
(Doubleday: Toronto, 2003).
CHAPTER ONE
CONCEPTUALISING THE WORLDS IN-BETWEEN: CAUSE AND COURSE
OF THE STUDY
[OJutside Eastern Africa, the Asian of East Africa were unknown. It was
-,S'Sumecioutside that the issue was a Black and White one - a straight
forward case of Africans versus Europeans. Asians in East Africa? Forming.
distinct, significant communities? The thought did not even cross the mind.
Outside Africa, Asians were the invisible people of Eastern Africa-
unnoticed, non-existent, irrelevant.
Peter Nazareth 1
Introduction
Most of the nation-states in Eastern and Southern Africa are testimonies of
multiracialism. In East Africa - Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania - besides the
White and Black races, there exists substantial populations of the "Brown"
race made up of migrant communities of South Asian origin and peoples of
Arabic heritage. An attempt to categorize, for academic purposes, East
Africans of Asiatic heritage, especially South Asian heritage, has given rise
to the name "Asian Africaris.t'aNeither indigenous Asians nor indigenous
Africans, the Asian African community in East Africa is the hybrid product
of cultural contact between Asia and Africaovermany centuries.
In this study, we should understand "AsianMricans" as descendants
of a racially-distinct, migrant community of South Asian heritage that
settled in East Africa long before and during twentieth-century European
colonisation of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Asian African, as a descriptive
label, is used to distinguish the descendants of pre-independence Asian
settlers in East Africa from a fresh wave of contemporary "investor Asians."3
The latter are part of the transnational, migrating labour / capital,
2characteristic of the present stage of globalisation, which made [and
continue to make] their maiden settlements in East Africa in the 1980s,
1990s and 2000s.
As a racially distinct socio-cultural community in Eastern Africa,
AsianAfricans have like many other diasporic communities across the world
had a com.plexpast when it com.esto m.atters of identity. An analysis of their
situation has focussed on the experience of the community as a set of
problems often referred to as the "Asian/Indian Question.v- These problem.s
include inter alia political em.asculation, socio-racial victimisation, social
dem.arcationand cultural m.arginalisation.The problems take place within a
com.plexmatrix of colonially-instigated ideas, attitudes, cultures, prejudices
and philosophies which stress or rationalize racialised cultural difference. It
is necessary to problematise cultural difference, indeed race with regards to
AsianAfricans in East Africanliterary scholarship.
In the nascent stages of East Africa's post-independence literary
experience, Ngugi did point out openly that race is perhaps the most
influential dynamic in East Africa's literary imagination.s His contemporary,
Taban Lo Liyong has gone a step farther to declare that East Africa is
distinguished from other literary regions of the continent due to its three-tier
racial society. This society comprises of indigenous Africa (Blacks),
Caucasoid (Whites) and Asiatic (Browns) roots,e Taban argues that these
three important aesthetic roots anchor corrtemporary East African literary
traditions: the Negroid, Caucasoid, and Asiatic cultural roots. The
indigenous Mrican roots, as 1S evident in the writings of Ngugi, and the
Caucasoid roots evident in the writings of Elspeth Huxley, are the most
widely acknowledged aspects of East African literature. The Asiatic roots of
3Asian Africans such as MG Vassanji constitute the rrussmg piece to the
mosaicof East African literature.
Strictly speaking, Asian Africans in East Africa, as a cultural
community were never really colonisers or the colonised in the distinct
manner definitive of Blacks and Whites respectively. They are, and have
been even in the colonial dispensation, an interstitial migrant community -
a grey-area in a tripartite racial society. From this in-between location,
writing, shaped as it is by identity politics and other realities, is a
challengingexercise to many an Asian Africanwriter.
An extensive review of postcolonial literature reveals that Asian
Africanwriters use Literature as a mode of representation through which
the (hi)story, cultural autonomy and need to resurrect colonially-suppressed
identities of the writers' community can be articulated. The novels of M. G.
Vassanji's, the sociologicalworks of MahmoodMamdani, the poetry of Jagjit
Singh, the plays of Kuldip SOl'lI:tI-Ji
j
the biographies of Zarina Patel or the
short-stories and autobiography of Rasna Warah for example are important
sites of engagement in postcolonial studies. The common denominator of all
these diverse writings is that they have sought to map, engage, interpret and
demystify the "in-betweeness" of the Asian African community in East
Africa.
The quest for identity has in fact become a congenital art form in all
genres of writings of Asian Mricans. Writing from the problematic location
identified in Nazareth's epigraph compels these authors to confront issues of
interstitial identity. The position of Moyez Gulam.hussein Vassanji, within
this general picture is singular. The writer was born in racially stratified,
4colonialKenya, to parents of South Asian heritage, belonging to the minority
Islamicsect ofKhoja Ishmailia.
In 1959, he relocated with his family to Tanzania [then Tanganyika].
Later in 1968 he joined the University College at Nairobi [later University of
Nairobi],before leaving for the United States for nearly a decade of higher
education in 1969. Finally, in 1978, Vassanji settled down in multicultural
Canada where he now extensively and intensively writes internationally
acclaimed lifestories of the experiences of Asian Africans of East Africa."
How,therefore, can one read Vassanji?
From in-between the many worlds that he occupies and writes about,
Vassanji has increasingly been identified as a vocal representative of the
ambivalent and transcultural experience of Asian Africans as a cultural
community in post-colonial East Africa.s Realising the complex nature and
facets of the largely untold stories of his community, he advocates that
Asian Africans "need to saturate the market with stories about our lives
since every problem can be traced to how people see themselves. If we don't
write about ourselves, we might as well consider ourselves buried."?
This open advocacy underscores his commitment and agency as a
postcolonial writer, whom as Bhabha notes is charged with the
responsibility of "interven[ing] in those ideological discourses ...that attempt
to give a hegemonic 'normality' to the uneven development and the
differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities,
peoples.lO Vassanji's own personal (hi)story as an Asian African (in)forms
• aspects of his novels. It is the influence of his experience on certain formal
aspects of two of his earliest novels, The Gunny Sack and the Book of Secrets
that is the subject of this thesis.
51.2 DEFINITION OF TERMS AND CONCEPTS
Ambivalence - The term originally developed in psychoanalysis to describe
a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its
opposite too. Bhabha has adapted the term into postcolonial theory to
describe the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that
characterises the relationship between the coloniser and the
colonised. The term is strictly employed in this work, to mean the
desire for both an alien and native world, by diasporic peoples such
as the Asian Africans of East Africa.
Colonialist ideology - The belief that the colonising force is culturally
superior to that of its colonised subject. "Ideology"by itself is a term
popularly used in literary criticism by Marxist critics such as
RaymondWilliams,Terry Eagleton and Emmanuel Ngara to mean the
content or manner of thinking characteristic of an individual (e.g.
Vassanji), group (e.g.colonialists) or culture [e.g.Asian Africans].
Colonial subject - All colonised peoples under European imperialism, ill
East Africa, this means both Asian Africans and indigenous Africans.
Contrapuntal reading - A strategy of reading texts popularised by the late
Edward Said. He suggests that in reading a text one must open it out
both to what went into it and to what its author excluded. In fact,
according to Said, postcolonial readers must connect the structures
of a narrative in a given text to the ideas, concepts and experiences
fromwhich it draws support.
6Cultural difference - The belief in racial superiority, inferiority and purity
based on the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics,
just like physical characteristics, are biologicalproperties
Diaspora - A location perceived as homeland and borderland at the same
time by a cultural community but is separate from an original
homeland where the community descended. For instance, East Africa
is a diasporia for the Asian Africanpeoples.
In-Betweeness/Interstitiality - A consciousness that arrses ill Asian
African subjects that is characterised by a division between two
antagonistic cultures while attempting to maintain one's ownwhich is
actually neither of the contesting two, but a third one altogether
Manicheanism - This is a term used in the field of post-colonial studies for
the binary structure of imperial ideology.
Post-colonial Reading - Acritical approach to a literary text that comprises
of a subversive reading and re-reading mostly applied to works
emanating from European colonising forces (but may be applied to
works by the colonised).
Racialism - The belief in racial superiority, inferiority, and purity based on
the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics, just like
physical characteristics, are biological properties that differentiate
race.
Subjectification - The formation of individual identity through an analysis
of the determining structures by and through which a given self-
image is articulated. This self-image, if perceived in its generic and
typical features usually says something, if not everything about the
I po
7being of the community from which the self-image draws its
socialization.
Subject-positions - The socio-economic, political, religious and cultural
niche assigned to different Selfs by historical forces in Vassanji's
narratives
Unhomeliness - This is a psychological expenence of not feeling at home
even in one's home because one is not at home in one-self. It is bred
by a cultural identity crisis brought about by in-betweeness of many
subjects of communities that exist as diaspora. E.g. The Asian
Mricans of Vassanji's texts such as Nurmohamed Pipa, the African
Americans of Richard Wright's texts such as BiggerThomas and the
AsianCaribbeans ofV.S.Naipaul's novels such Mr. Biswas.
81.3 LITERATURE REVIEW
In this review of literature, we offer non-exhaustive but critical insights,
whichmap the discursive trajectory through which the present study finds
its place among other previous but pertinent works. Many scholars across
the globe and across various disciplines have contributed to the ongoing
postcolonial discourse. Interestingly, Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhiku
Parekh in their illuminating essay, "Shifting Imaginaries: Decolonisation,
Internal Colonization, Post-coloniality"point out that postcolonial discourse
first focused on the question of representation. 11
The two scholars observe that the key areas of engagement with
tssues of cultural representation within postcolonial studies were
anthropologyand literature. They go ahead to point out that at the heart of
these studies lies an enduring interest in the role of (post)colonial literary
works. In the introductory section of this chapter, we argue that M. G.
Vassanji's selected novels read as modes of representing the diasporic
experienceofAsian Africans of East Africacan supply us with fresh insights
into the nature of the cultural identity of this community. Other scholars
have, indeed pointed out that there is a link between postcolonial literary
representation and questions of identity.
Madan Sarup, for instance, in his important book, Identity, Culture in
the Postmodem World offers a scrupulous discussion of amongst other
issues, the link mentioned above.is Writing on identity and narratives he
views the quest for cultural identity in the postcolonial worlds as a
deliberate and purposeful construction of our life-stories. This means that
fictionor novels such as Vassanji's The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets
9are both fictional stories and postcolonial projects that narrativise the
experiencesof given nations over a certain time and in a certain space. His
viewthat every identity has a history becomes crucial to our understanding
because of the way it explains why Vassanji structurally and thematically
draws from the personal, communal and national histories of his people in
the selected novels. Sarup is convinced that postcolonial narratives are
actually the constructions of our life histories as we attempt to negotiate or
carvefor ourselves a sense of being; a sense ofwho we are.
His point concerning the terms people use to describe themselves is
ofvalue to this study. Sarup calls this process, "labeling"and goes on to add
that "peoplealways attach certain labels to others, and labels often (but not
always)begin to have an effect."13We maintain that apart from Vassanji's
novels being modes of representing the Asian African cultural identity
through the life-stories of his fictional subjects, they also serve another
purpose; that of labeling. When read as (hi)stories of Asian Africans of East
Africa,The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets inform their readers ofwhat
it means being an Asian African; an inbetween people in a diasporic land.
It is worth noting that the decision to label, "Africans of Indian
descent" as Asian Africans needs explanation. Why not, for instance must
we reconsider the popular misnomers, "Kenyan Indians" or simply
"Indians?" This study is a conscious attempt to negotiate carefully away
from the misconception [or mislabeling] that obscures an accurate
conceptualization of this community in East Africa. Sarup rightly argues
that to label a people is not only to represent those people but also to define
them. As Nazareth in the epigraph states, Asian Africans in East Africa are
10
an "invisible community" because of how they are popularly labeled,
representedand defined in East Africa.
It is not epistemologically accurate to say that Vassanji is an Indian
fromEast Africa, at least in the descriptive sense of that label. He is not an
Indian in terms of his cultural identity for the obvious reason that Indians
are from India. Using his land of birth, Vassanji could more accurately be
labeled as an African of Indian ancestry, or an Asian African. Such a
labelingwill go a long way to point to his interstitial sense of being and the
interstitial nature of his community in East Africa. It will also go a long way
to explain, in his own words why many people, outside East Africa, find it
difficultto come to terms with his African origins. In an interview with this
researcher Vassanji says:
I do not like academic conferences [on African Writers]; and I find that most
of these are organized by Europeans and Americans; to them (this is my
feeling) an Asian just doesn't belong to the Africa they have conjured up;
they have their money and positions and their coteries of Africans. On the
other hand, I go to my Dar or Nairobi, identify with the landscape, be it dry
grass or a hut, enjoy speaking Kiswahili or simply drinking chai in a banda
and listening to banter; and no one there, especially in Dar, even asks me
where I corne from. And when I speak Kiswahili, the manner of my speech
identifies me immediately as someone of the land. What need do I have of a
conference P!+
Vassanji seems to imply that the labeling of a writer does affect how such a
writer is perceived and read. It is by approaching him as an African ofAsian
ancestry that we can access the most accurate interpretations of what he is
really out to do and say in such novels as The Gunny Sack and The Book of
Secrets.
If one were to read Vassanji's novels as postcolonial Indian novels as
of Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai or Khushwant Singh, it might
provide a general(ised) view of what it means to be an Indian in the post-
11
colonialworld. Such a reading might fail to give the specific perspective of
what it means to be an "Indian" in the postcolonial, African world today. The
argument here is that labels for identifying people are usually connected to
the locations of those people's societies. "AfricanAmerican" implies people
livingor born and raised in America although of African descent. Likewise,
"AsianAfrican"implies people living or born and raised in Africa although of
Asiandescent.
Postcolonial critics such as Edward Said have also been fascinated by
why and how people label others [or themselves]. In his influential book
Orientalism, he supplies a classic case of that line of thought.t" One of his
many well argued theses is that those representations (or the process of
labelling) as well as ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be
understood or studied without their force, their ,configurations of power, also
being studied. To believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of
the imagination is to be disingeneous.io He goes on to add, "each age and
societyre-creates its 'others.' Far from being a static thing, the categories of
'self' or of 'other' are a process that takes place' as a contest involving
individuals and institutions in all societies.vi" The fact that there are two
colonialOthers in East Africamakes the case even more complex.18 Indeed,
literary representation is ~ politicised and contestable domain of beingness.
To create our images, we must create oppositional images that
reflectivelyand reflexively rationalise our own sense of being. This raises
certain questions. Are the Asian Africans conjured as the Other by both the
ColonialWhite mind ala Huxley and the Postcolonial Black mind ala Ngugi
simply creative aspects of their works? Could it be that the images of Asian
Africansin White and Black literature from East Africa are nuanced with a
•
12
polemicaland political dimension? These are the questions that form the
basisofour extensive and illustrated discussions in Chapter 2.
Closerhome in Kenya, scholars such as H. R. Lung'aho and Mbugua
wa Mungai have recently contributed to the self/Other interplay of
postcolonialdiscourse which as I have argued is based on a Manichean logic
which Vassanji and Bhabha disavow.rv Their useful studies in Self and
Othering within a South African literary context demonstrate how Black
Africans and Whites, as tropological entities in certain African societies
raise, cause and deal with moral issues grounded on racism. Their focus, as
Bhabha's, is on the works of South Africa's Nobel laureate, Nadine
Gordimer.Much as Lung'aho and Wa Mungai lend important insights into
what Said calls the authority of 'Orientalism' in Africa, their studies fail to
look at the Asiatic factor which is a crucial and integral part of the South
Africanapartheid society that they treat.
Other studies and other more within the East African literary
tradition such as Micere Mugo's Visions of Africa, Eddah Gachukia's
'Cultural Conflict in East African Literature' and Chris Wanjala's For Home
and Freedom participate in a postcolonial projects critiques of racial
difference and polarize the issues of East African cultural (read racial)
identity into a Manichean Black-White axis which silences the Brown races
and communities of Eastern.20 Yet, from our forgoing arguments, the three
important studies occlude the presence of the Brown component that
pluralises East Africanracial identity.
It is important to also pay attention to the writings of Brown writers
within East African literary discourse. This concern arises from Said's
observation that "the relationship between Selves and Others is a
..
13
relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex
hegemony."21 In this case, to remain silent is to be emasculated or as Salim,
the Asian African narrator of V. S. Naipual's A Bend in the River seems to
imply,the world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to
becomenothing, have no place in it. This is because the Asian African is an
ethnic feature of the African landscape, geo-politically and historically as
well.For as Salim goes on to add of the Asian African:
Africawas my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we
came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not
truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who
lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our
back. Many miles of scrub or desert separated us from the up-country
people; we looked east to the lands, with which we traded- Arabia, India,
Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer
say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared
ourselves with these people, we felt like people ofAfrica.22
In spite of Salim's revelation of the presence of the Asian Africans in East
Africaover many centuries, the exclusive Black/White Othering remains a
popular methodological instrument for anatomising the imperial program in
East Africa'sliterary criticism or postcolonial discourses. Yet, we must point
out that in itself, Othering has implicit flaw, in fact it is a self-destructive
devicein colonial discourse analysis.
The main reason for this self-destruction lies in the VIewthat the
Other is a site of desire as of repudiation-well demonstrated in Andrew
Milner's chapter on cultural theory towards 2000 in Contemporary Cultural
Theory.23This means that works such as Wanjala's For Home and Freedom
while repudiating the authority of colonialist literature in East Africa are
reticent about the region's ambiguous postcolonial voice. This reticence
indicates a certain measure of desire for the colonialist authority even if
14
Wanjala supplies a systematic and impressive critique of what Abdul
JanMohamedhas called the "politicsof literary generation" in East Africa. 24
Ultimately, in our view, one of the most uncompromising arguments
lodgedagainst the Manichean aesthetics of the preliminary post-colonial
momentin African letters, is that by KwameAnthony Appiah. He says:
Africa's postcolonial novelists, novelists anxious to escape
neocolonialism, are no longer committed to the nation .... Postcolonialism has
become, I think, a condition of pessimism ... Postcoloniality is after all this:
and its post-, like that of postmodernism, is also a post that challenges
legitimating narratives ...If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this
circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by
each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African
culture awaiting salvage by our artists [just as there is, of course, no
American culture without African roots). And there is a clear sense in some
postcolonial writings that the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a
monolithic West-the binarism of Self and Other-is the last of the
shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without.25
This citation serves as a thought provoking disavowal of the Manichean
viewsof East African literature where White Self has been traditionally seen
as engaged in a conflictual intercourse with its Black Other or vice-versa.
Consequently, this study insists on the inclusion of the Asian African in the
racial interpretation of East African literature. It is interesting to find out
how a postcolonial critic can engage this third, interstitial voice, and also
howit resists such an engagement.
The practical problem in a Self/Other relationship appears to lie in
the organization around the idea that it is possible to have a spillage,
repulsion or attraction of the two polarities towards each other. In which
case, indigenous African writers m.aybe seen as desiring or m.imickingthe
oppressiveWhite, or vice versa. This is not a novel observation. As a matter
of fact, in the discourse of the self/ other relationship, negotiations can be
envisaged in which the other is granted limited recognition-as is the case
15
withNadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye-that
formsthe basis of a mediation for the possibility of integration
The methodology going beyond the Manichearr/Othering reading, to
includeVassanji may lie in Said's famous "contrapuntal reading." Sarup has
captured this reading strategy thus, "Said's contrapuntal reading suggests
that in reading a text one must open it out both to what went into it and to
what its author excluded. Moreover, we must connect the structures of a
narrative to the ideas, concepts and experiences from which it draws
support."26
In Culture and Imperialism, Said offers a contrapuntal method of
global cultural analysis, in which texts and contexts are seen as feeding
each other.>? Indeed Said has argued that imperialism and culture are
associated with affirmation of the location or physical contexts as well as
ideologyor mental contexts of the imperial project. He says "Wehave been
so used to thinking about temporality that we often overlook the function of
space,geography and location."28
In Said's view, territory or space is one of the arenas where cultural
conflictplays itself. In the imperial project, that space happened to be the
minds and lands of the colonised people. Arguing on these lines, Said
proposes that if the colonial mind was based on a dualistic split of the world
into Self/Other existence, then it is natural that even cultural economy
should be theorised on that plane. However,in our view, a third space, an
interstitial space is also an integral part of the East African colonial
equation. As such, we thus shift our critical focus away from the intricacies
and intrigues of Manichean politics in postcolonial literary debates,
especiallyin East Africa, to the possibilities of a non-Manichean worldview.
16
Weconceptualise this interstitial space as that diaspora that is East Africa,
seenfromthe viewpoint of the Asian Africancommunity.
This is because cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor
dualisticin the relation of Self and Other; there is always the margins or the
grey areas that destabilize simplistic conceptualisations of the plural
environment that is the post-colonial world. For instance, there is textual
evidencethat the awareness of being neither one nor another in terms of
cultural identity, a common phenomenon for Asian Africans of East Africa
can be traced in Rasna Warah's introductory words in the thought-
provoking autobiography, "I researched and wrote Triple Heritage out of
anger and grief Anger at the fact that despite being a fourth generation
immigrant to Kenya, my status lay somewhere between citizen and refugee,
of one not quite belonging anywhere. "29 If we take Warah as a metonym of
her community, the pervasive sense of "in-betweeness" or interstitiality in
her book may [f1actuailybe a distinctive and enduring theme of the cultural
and self identities of Asian Africans, at least of writers from the community
as articulate members.30
Postcolonial theorists are increasingly fascinated by the interstitial
nature of diasporic or migrant identities-e-such as that of Asian Africarrs-e-in
our postcolonial/postmodern world. Homi K.Bhabha arguably stands at the
fore of a wide range of these theorists. Beside him stand other authorities
such as Abdul R. JanMohamed, Llyod Davis, Partha Chaterjee, Kwame
Anthony Appiah, v. Y. Mudimbe and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to
mention but a few established names in the expanding intellectual project
popularly known as postcolonial theory.v!
17
At the forefront of the mentioned scholars stands Bhabha who in The
Location of Culture foregrounds interstitial peoples in the postcolonies, by
privilegingtheir specific racial and national identity. His neologistic critical
vocabulary such as "diasporic identities," "unhomeliness," "cultural
ambivalence,""re-membering" and "interstitiality," insistently remind other
postcolonial theorists, of the ambivalence that pervades colonial and
postcolonialsocieties. Location of Culture is considered an important text in
any theoretical engagement with issues of postcolonial racial or national
identities.
Tim Woods in his review of the book in the British Journal of
Aesthetics entitled, On The Location of Culture (1994)says:
This is in every respect a significant book, which will have a profound impact
upon the manner in which cultural practices are conceived. In a book which
must rate as one of the principal texts of recent post-colonial theory, Homi
Bhabha establishes the intellectual coherency and conceptual necessity for
such a project. Always entertaining, witty and astute, Bhabha brings
together a series of seminal and luminous essays in skilful and effortless
explorations of a diverse variety of writers and issues.32 [Emphasis added)
Indeed, the idea of in-between identities or entities 1S one that has for
sometime fascinated leading postcolonial intellectuals and theorists, most
notablyBhabha himself. He has argued persistently that the intervention of
the "in-between"or Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure
of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys the mirror of
representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an
-
oppositional code that facilitates an exclusive exchange and transfer
between two diametrically opposed discursive polarities, commonly known
as the Centre and its margins.
18
In Bhabha's view, such an intervention quite properly challenges our
sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force,
authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of
the People...we should remember that it is the 'inter' - the cutting edge of
translation and negotiation, the in-between space -that carries the burden of
meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national and
anti-nationalist histories of the 'people'. And by exploring this Third Space,
we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our
selves.33
His finest crystallisation and rumination on the nature of the in-
betweenlocation of cultures in the post-colonial world is evident all along in
all the essays within the book, The Location of Culture. In these essays,
Bhabha's arguments shift postcolonial reflections from preoccupations with
Manichaeism to the authority of the ambivalence inherent in emergent and
established interstitial identities such as Vassanji's. It 1S this
(pre)occupation with the interstice as a location of culture that justifies
lookingat Vassanji through Bhabha's prism and makes Sarup to say of the
former:
It seemsto me that he is interestedin livingand theorizingin the interstices,
;n and between cultures. In his view, these intervening spaces have a
strategic importance.Workingon the borderlines, he is very aware of the
cultural incommensurabilitythat has to be negotiated. He has drawn
attention to hybridization,the process whereby two cultures retain their
distinctcharacteristicsand yet formsomethingnew. Hehas also suggested
that whenwe think ofpower-knowledgewe should also considerthe role of
anxiety.Anxietycan be a sign of danger, but it can also be a sign that
somethingnewis emerging.P'
Bhabha indeed identifies one such "in-between" or Third Space as the
Diaspora. He talks of the Diaspora as an interstitial space between the
national centres and the metropolitan centres inhabited by the minorities,
19
ethnic,sexual, political and racial among others. Moreover, he argues that
beingin the Diaspora is being in the moment of transit where space and
time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and
present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. We have already
paraded such complex figures from the Asian African community in the case
ofNazareth's In a Brown Mantle and Vassanji himself. Wewill reviewshortly
a number of scholarly works that have also chosen to look at East Africa as .
a Diaspora where the Asian African community tries through the works of
writerslike Vassanji to define itself.
The argument so far has focussed on Manichaeism and the problem
ofOtheringwith the intention to establish a critical research space requisite
to an authoritative placement of the Asian African literatures in what
Bhabha calls "a postcolonial perspective." 35 The foregoing has therefore
supplied us with crucial contexts through which we can now zero in on
specific scholars who have in one way or another engaged with the
interstitial politics of Asian Africans in general and Vassanji's literary
practice in particular. We now proceed with Oluoch-Olunya's submission
that creative texts themselves are clearly more than just narrative; they are
alsoproducts of complex epistemological contexts.ev
Presenting a paper in 1998 on the inauguration of the Asian African
HeritageTrust in Nairobi, the respected social anthropologist, Sultan Somjee
proposed that the Asian [African]Question could be summarized in the
1990s as being concerned with: "Whoare you?" and ''Whyare you here?" 37
He further argued that it is important for descendants of pioneer Indian
settlers in East Africa to possess a strong sense of, and to be proud of their
AsianAfrican identity. Somjee's clarion call came in the wake of a conscious
20
endeavourby Asian Africans, especially from Kenya to engage with the fact
that they are a diasporic community that is in Africa to stay.
There have been a number of scholarly works on the Asian Africans
in East Africa. But its important to note that these works have mostly been
criticalhistorical accounts of the genesis and genealogy of this community
as migrant minority segment occupying an interstitial location of sorts in
East Africa. Historians of Asian African history in East Africa such as
LawrenceHollingsworth, Mahmood Mamdani, J. S. Mangat, Dharam Pal
Ghai and Yash Pal Ghai, Shanti Pandit, Agehenanda Bharati, Donald
Rothschild, E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, Daniel Don Nanjira, Robert Gregory,
Zarina Patel and Dana April Seidenberg, have written on various aspects of
the livesof the Asians in East Africa.38
Their bid to remember the Asian African past as a way of re-
membering it to the dominant historical account of national and regional
histories in the postcolonial dispensation is timely. However, as Bhabha
points out, remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or
retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense to the trauma of the preserit.es Such a
painful exercise can never fully be sustained without the collective sense of
responsibility from all the agents interested in the revisionist and archival
projects. Apart from historians, as Nedeverdeen and Parekh pointed out at
the beginning of this literature review, anthropologists such as Somjee and
writers such as Vassanji have also been active agents in the remembering
and re-membering projects within recent Asian African experience.
Vassanji always describes his literary practice as an archival venture
which aims to tell and store the (hi)stories of the Asian African peoples of
21
EastAfrica.t=In his various interviews, like the one with Ray Deonandan,
Vassanjihas underscored this issue in light of marginality as a descriptive
conditionof his Asian African community. He says, "I tell stories about
marginalizedpeople. All writers do, whether the people in question be a
familyof Jews in NewYork or a farming community in Saskatchewan ...I've
had peoplewho'vemoved from NovaScotia to Toronto tell me that they can
appreciatemy stories because it speaks to them of their experience. Again
its one ofmarginalization."40
Vassanji is driven by the desire to offer an alternative view of his
communityin all its ambivalence. NelouferDeMelnotes Vassanji's narrative
intervention on the origins of Asian Africans and their migrant identity in
the challenging location that is East Africa.v! De Mel posits further that
Vassanji's work is a dynamic site which lays bear the paradoxes,
incompatibilities and ambivalences that are the central paradigms of
migrant experience and discourse ...The value of Vassanji's works lies
precisely in the projections of how such hybridity, if at all, can never
comprisean equal mixing of the disparate strands. For identity is a site of
negotiationthat depends on the exigencies of situation, is always anchored
to political, economic and cultural hegemony and comes most unstuck at
moments of crisis.w It is for this crucial reason that we situate our study
within a discussion of Vassanji's The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets
that DeMelalso studies in her chapter.
A number of scholars from East Africa have commented on the East
Africanpostcolonial literary experience in East Africawith specific attention
on Asian African writings. These scholars include Dan Ojwang of the
University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, Peter Tirop Simatei of Moi
22
University in Eldoret, Kenya and Danson Kahyana at Makerere University in
Uganda. They have given insightful discussions of Asian African literatures
from East Africa. Before we review their informative work, let us first
appreciate one "early" commentator on the "Asian African Question" in East
Africa.
Traces of scholarly interest in the literary worlds of Asian Africans
can be found in Nyambura Mpesha's doctoral research, a brilliant
rumination on the genesis and genealogy of children's literature in Tanzania.
In a subsection entitled, 'Encounter with Asian Literature' Mpesha notes:
East Africa's contact with Asia, especially Arabia and India is longer than her
contact with Europe and interaction in this area of literature is also deeper. An
obvious exploration of the similarities between Asian and African stories
springs from the fact that European colonisers capitalised on some of the
common aspects in their civilising and educating missions in
Africa...43[Emphasis Added]
Mpesha's study is revealing especially when approached from a utilitarian
perspective. That is, she does not just stop at making the observation of the
synergies that exist between East Africa and other littoral lands on the
Indian Ocean; notably India and Arabia.
She goes on to assert what in her view is the central function of Asian
African literature in East Africa-to raise levels of awareness of these
community and others around them. In her words she says:
For the Tanzanian child [Asian African Literature] gives insights into the
religion and culture of the Indian people. Their relevance of such a book is
not just to make him worldly wise but to make him to get to know Indians
better. Moreover there are a good number of Indians who form part of the
Tanzanian nation and would have special interest in the [Iiteraturej+'
This view can help us recogruse that Asian African literature such as
Vassanji's The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets are indeed important
modes of representation as Nederveen and Parekh pointed out. Through the
23
twonovelswe can obtain insights "into the culture of the "Indian" people."
It is for this reason that Vassanji's anti-hero, Vikram Lall begins his
engrossingtale thus:
Mynameis VikramLall.I have the distinctionofhavingbeen numbered one
ofAfrica'smost corrupt men, a cheat ofmonstrous and reptilian cunning...I
simplycraveto tell mystory...I have evencomeupon a small revelation-and
as I proceeddaily to recall and reflect, and layout on page, it is with an
increasingconvictionof its truth, that if more of us told our stories to each
other,where I come from [East Africa],we would be a far happier and less
nervouspeople.s>
Mpesha'sfleeting interest in Asian African literature finds its precursors in
earlier views made by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Peter Nazareth, Charles Sarvan
and later Jameela Siddiqi.se All these scholars have been troubled by the
placeof the Asian African writer and writings within East Africa. They seem
to fmd a consensus in the views of Taban Lo Liyong that Asian Africans are
indeed a cultural root of East Africa's cultural experience.s? In other words,
much as they give conflictual and sometimes consensual personal opinions,
the general agreement appears to be that East Africari postcoloniality cannot
be conceivedminus its Asian African heritage, just as the American culture
carmotbe conceived without its African component.
After Mpesha, came the latter-day scholars, Kahyana, Simatei and
Ojwang who have actually commented on Asian African writings as part of
their conference participations as graduate students. It is argued elsewhere
that the contribution of these scholars is important because it gives an
insight into recent developments in postcolonial studies of East African
literature.w This concern in the works of Asian African writers as a
postcolonial constituency within African literary traditions can also be
24
tracedin the literary projects of various other critics who remain as of now
unknownto this researcher.
Kahyana, in his paper, 'Ugandan Asians, Identity and the Literacy
Medium,'addresses three important concerns.w He is concerned with firstly,
howdo indigenous Africans in Uganda view Ugandans of Asian origin?
Secondly,how is these intra-national chaos or cohesion manifested in
Ugandanpoetry and fiction? Lastly, he investigates whether Ugandans of
Asian origin fully identify themselves as Ugandans, and whether they
conduct themselves as such politically, economically, and socially. In this
paper which was presented at the Council for the Development of Social
ScienceResearch in Africa (CODESRIA)Tenth General Assembly under the
theme, 'Africa in the New Millennium,' in 2002, Kahyana presents a bold
attempt at analysing popular questions which keep coming up whenever
"AsianAfricanliteratures or community from East Africa"is mentioned.
He concludes by noting that Ugandan Asians identify themselves as
raciallydistinct and sometimes superior to indigenous Africans. He however
notes that their future in East Africa as a racially-distinct community looks
hopefulby citing the voting into sixth parliament in Uganda in 2001 of one
Jay Tana as the representative of the youth from Uganda's Eastern region.
He also cites the Kenyan lawyer-poet, Pheroze Nowrojee. Nowrojeewho is
also the Chairman of the Asian African Heritage Trust in Nairobi, concurs
withKahyana, "The times are changing, I think," he says, "I think there is a
sense that the stereotype [racial chauvinist] is not a fair acknowledgment of
the community's role. And conversely, I think the rejection of it is an
acknowledgmentthat the [AsianAfrican] community is as much Kenyan as
anyother tribe."50
25
In yet another conference paper, "Narrating National Identity: Fiction,
Citizenshipand the Asian Experience in East Africa," presented at the
CODESRIAthirtieth anniversary conference in Dakar in 2003, Kahyana
highlightsthe concept of National identity and attempts to analyse the way
this identity is narrated in East African Asian fiction, particularly in the
selectednovels of Vassanji, Yusuf K. Dawood and Peter Nazareth.51 He ably
designatesthe idea of 'National identity' as the "postcolonial identities" and
analysesthe way the writers employ different strategies to discuss the plural
identitiesofAsian Africans from East Africa through generations.
Another notable scholar who is interested with the literature of Asian
Africanwriters from East Africa and their treatment of postcolonial identities
is Peter Simatei. In his published doctoral dissertation, The Novel and
Politics of Nation-Building in East Africa, Simatei presents a brilliant
discussionof how East African writers, among them Vassanji and Nazareth,
seek to actively make history because of their self-perception as the
conscience of their various nations. 52 Simatei dwells on the different and
sometimescomplementary narrative perspectives in the novels of writers as
variedas Vassanji, Rubadiri, Ngugi,Nazareth among others.
The main thesis of Novel and the Politics of Nation-Building is that the
pluralityof perspectives demonstrated by East African novelists reflects the
complexityof our postcolonial condition. His most significant contribution is
the idea that novels by Asian African writers portray a consciousness of how
their communities have been oppressed by racist national mythologies in
the post-colonial era. In this outstanding book, Simatei has managed to
illuminate how writers from both Black and Brown races have constructed
27
and the reinterpretation of the popular Asian African stereotype of the
dukawallah to interpret the Asian African experience in East Africa. The
followingobjectiveswere useful in focusing our endeavour.
1.5 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
1. To discursively contextualise how Vassanji's consciousness of his
interstitiality as an Asian African writer emanates from within the
culture-racial experiences of his community through a historical lens.
2. To supply a critical interpretation of the textual manner in which
consciousness of occupying an in-between world influences howVassanji
treats his settings in the selected novels.
3. To further illustrate how the settings of Vassanji's selected novels affect
interpretations of major characters such as Nurmohamed Pipa, who is
modelledon the popular stereotype of the "dukawallah."
1.6 RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY
Writers from East Africa of South Asian descent, especially MG Vassanji
have been claimed by various critics for the African literary traditions,
despite the fact that most of them live in the African diaspora especially in
Europe and North America. For instance, a review of some of the recent
works of African literary criticism by established scholars of African
literatures such as Derek Wright, Bernth Lindfors and Gareth Griffith to
mention but a few, identify Vassanji as an important trans cultural and
postcolonial African novelist.55 The growing interest in the identities,
28
narratives,experience, politics and discourses of transcultural communities
suchas the Asian Africans of East Africawithin the postcolonial world is but
onewayof explaining the democratic spirit within African Literary Tradition
that relegates to the past the spirit of negrocentrism popular in the 1960s
and1970s.
This study is a critical contribution to the ongoing investigation on
theliterarypractice ofVassanji and other "second-generation, transcultural"
Africanwriters such as Ben Okri and Kojo Laing in West Africa and
AbdulrazakGurnah and Jamal Mahjoub from East Mrica.56 The study was
conceivedas a revisionist exercise within East African postcolonial studies.
It celebrates Bhabha's position above, that postcolonialism should be an
attempt to engage the ambivalence wrought by many colonialisms and not
just oneColonialism.
1.7 SCOPE AND LIMITATION
MG Vassanji is a prolific novelist who quit his flourishing career in Nuclear
Physicsto become a full-time writer. He has written fivenovels in just over a
decade (1989-2003).57Besides, he has also written a collection of short
stories entitled, Uhuru Street. Vassanji has also edited and co-edited a
number works on South Asian diasporic communities around the world,
such as A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature.w He owns a
publishing house that issues the Toronto-based quarterly, The Toronto
Reviewof Contemporary WritingAbroad that he edits.59
However,the present study focuses strictly on his two novels set in
East Africa, The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. The selected works
29
aboundwith locational cross-referencing through which the reader comes to
sharein the worlds of the characters. Areas such as Kichwele Street in Dar
esSalaamand some neighborhoods in both Kenya and Tanzania introduced
in The Gunny Sack recur in The Book of Secrets. Apart from setting, the
selected novels offer solid, reliable and well developed images of the
charactersand thus supply a good reason to leave out Uhuru Street which is
alsoset in East Africa and does feature characters and settings similar to
thoseof the selected texts.
Vassanji's other novels were left out because they are set in North
Americaand treat the Asian African experience in this setting, alien to the
researcher.These novels, No New Land and Amriika did not therefore qualify
foranalysis within the stated research aims of this study. They lacked the
contextual and target thematic relevance stipulated from our earlier
discussions at the outset of this study. There is one small but important
limitation.As this study was in progress, prolificVassanji published another
Giller-award-winning,East African-based novel The In-Between World of
VikramLall in 2003.60 Although it was reviewed and read, it was too late to
beincluded in the present study, which was already on course.
30
1.8 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study employs postcolonial literary theory also known as
postcolonialism.Historians, literary critics, and social scientists use the idea
ofpostcolonialismto examine the ways, both subtle and obvious, in which
colonizationaffects the colonized society. Notwithstanding different time
periods, different events and different effects that they consider, all
postcolonialtheorists and theory ad:mit that colonialis:mcontinues to affect
the former colonies after political independence. By addressing a culture's
colonialhistory, postcolonial theory empowers a society with the ability to
valueitself.
Accordingto Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, in The
Post-colonial Reader point out that postcolonialism deals with the effects of
colonisationon cultures and societies.v! From the late 1970s literary critics
haveused the term to discuss the various cultural effects of colonisation.
Postcolonialismas a literary theory can arguably be summed up as a
critiqueof dominant positions held by hegemonic, political, cultural, racial,
linguistic, ethnic, socio-economic, ideological and gender-derived centres
andforcesinherent or inherited from our colonial pasts. The theory operates
fromthe recognition that the present-day crises in the post-colonial states
are in one way or another rooted in our twentieth-century European
imperialism. The twentieth-century imperial age was experienced as an
intense crisis for the colonised people who had erstwhile been attached to
established~ays of life and :modesof thoughts.
The breaking up of once stable pre-colonial social orders and patterns
of thought such as in East Africa, frequently evoke a widespread sense of /
31
socialincoherence, fragmentation, chaos and disorder. Out of this stasis
which became most apparent by the late 1980s, various Third-World
scholars commenced working on fresh, post-colonial world-centred
strategies,methodologies and conceptual frameworks to analyse the colonial
discoursewith, as a way of rationalising the present state of their societies
and charting other ways forward. The theory increasingly makes clear the
nature and impact of inherited power relations, and their continuing effects
on modern global culture and politics. Political questions usually
approached from the standpoints of nation-state relations, race, class,
economicsand gender are made clearer when considered in the context of
theirrelationswith the past.
Louis Tyson argues "literary criticism is the application of critical
theoryto a literary text." 62 In this respect, the application of the interstitial
dimensionas articulated by HomiBhabha-a leading postcolonial theorist-
in the study of MGVassanji's The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets is a
viableexercise in postcolonial literary criticism. Tyson goes on to posit,
"[wjhen approaching a literary text, postcolonial literary theory focuses on
the experience and literary production of peoples whose history is
characterised by extreme political, social, and psychological oppression. "63
Fromour foregoingdiscussion, and in Chapter two of this work, the Asian
Africancommunity that Vassanji, Nazareth and Warah come from is an
appropriate example of one such people identified in Tyson's statement
above.
Indeed, postcolonialism as a theoretical framework seeks, "to
understand the operations politically, socially, culturally, and
psychologically- of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies...in relation to
32
thefollowingthemes of disillusionment and the struggle for individual and
collective cultural identity, of alienation, unhomeliness, double
consciousness,and hybridity..."64[emphasisadded].
Ideologyas a theoretical tool deserves further elaboration in light of
its differentialusage in Marxist thinking. The French Marxist-Structuralist
philosopher,Louis Althusser, for instance, whose ideas became popular in
the 1970sfor his break from some of the key features of traditional Marxism
focusedon the role played by ideology.According to him, it is ideologywhich
shapesour consciousness and social structures. Ideology allows people to
imaginethat they are making free choices and deciding the course of their
liveswhen, in fact, it is the ideologyitself which determines their life
Althusser's view is that we are constituted as subjects through
ideology.According to him, there is "a universal human essence and that
this essence is the attribute of each single individual who is its real
subject".65Ideology can be represented in a number of different forms:
myths,art, political ideas, and much more. This is another key aspect where
his thought differed from traditional Marxism. Whereas Marxism normally
postulated a one-to-one correspondence of cause (economics) and effect
(socialstructure), Althusser argued that the consequence was caused by a
numberof connected dynamics. His connection with postcolonial theory lies
in the fact that his ideas influenced the work of Michel Foucault who in turn
is a major influence on Homi Bhabha.
This clarification of "ideology"in its Marxist usage and its use in this
studywe can now delineate the main tenets of Postcolonial literary theory.
In fact these tenets have been identified by Tyson who says postcolonial
literarytheory:
33
1. Recognisesthe close relationship between psychology and ideology, or
more specifically, between individual identity and cultural beliefs.
2. Analyses the way in which a literary text, whatever its themes, is
colonialistor anticolonialist. The theory inspects the ways such a text
reinforcesor resists colonialism oppressive ideologies.
3. Possesses the ability to help one see the connections among all the
domains of human experience--the psychological, ideological, social,
political, intellectual, and aesthetic-in ways that show us how
inseparable these categories are in lived human experiences.
4. Focuses on the experience and literary production of peoples whose
history is characterised by extreme political, social and psychological
oppression.
5. Seeks to understand the operations - politically, socially, culturally,
and psychologically - of colonialist and anti-colonialist ideologies.
6. Addresses the problem of cultural identity as its represented in
postcolonial literature. This involves-as demonstrated by Said in his
seminal book Orientalism-moving the "margins" of the work (for
example, minor characters in peripheral geographical locations such
as diaporas) to the centre of critical analysis and studies.
Whilethe six tenets do capture the gist and agenda of postcolonial literary
theory,its trajectory since its recognition in the late 1980s seems somehow
ambivalent.The pioneer scholars of postcolonialism, as a literary theory,
Ashcroft,Tiffms and Griffith in their seminal text The Empire Writes Back:
Theoryand Practice in Postcolonial, have pointed out that the theory appears
tobe followingtwo major paths at pr'eserrt.sv
On one hand, via reading of specific post-colonial texts and the effects
oftheir production in and on specific social and historical contexts. On the
othervia 'revisioning' of received tropes and modes such as allegory, irony,
and metaphor and the re-reading of 'canonical' texts in the light of
postcolonialdiscursive practices. It is to this revisionist strand that Bhabha
belongsjust as Said belongs to the re-reading of the canonical texts-
strand. After all, as Ashcroft's and his colleague in The Post-Colonial Reader
34
published seven years after the Empire Writes Back demonstrate,
postcolonial theory is a heterogeneous ensemble of different-sometimes
differing-voices speaking on colonialism and its effects on their societies.
Though this study is located within post-colonial studies in general, it
is Homi Bhabha's line of thought as a prominent revisionist that addresses
best the concerns of this study. He has not only been at the forefront of
advocating for a discursive difference for diasporic and marginalised
identities within postcolonial and metropolitan spaces, but has also
articulated three most important concerns of the present study. The main
crux of Bhabha's thought evident in The Location of Culture is captured in
the following pronouncement:
The postcolonial perspective - as is being developed by cultural historians
and literary theorists - departs from the traditions of the sociology of
underdevelopment or 'dependency' theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts
to revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagcigies that set up the relation of
Third World and First World in a binary structure of Opposition. The
postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social
explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political
boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres.67
As Bhabha stipulates, postcolonial theory is employed in this study as a
mode of analysis that will enable us theorise the location of Asian African
writers such as M. G. Vassanji in East African cultural history, and secondly
enable us to explore the influence of M. G. Vassanji's interstitial identity as
a postcolonial novelist on his The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. 68
35
1.9 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Thisstudy is based on a library research mainly due to its textual nature. It
offersa contrapuntal reading of creative and critical works of literature. This
ismainlya conceptual study. One level of the study involves access and use
ofrelevantmaterial from the Kenya National Archives, the Asian African
TrustHeritage,Jomo Kenyatta Library at the University of Nairobi, the Moi
Libraryat Kenyatta University, and the DepartInents of Literature at
KenyattaUniversity, University of Nairobi and University of Dar es Salaam.
TheAfricanaservices of the Egerton University Library at Njoro and Laikipia
provided unmense relevant literature. This preliminary level was
fundamental to the collection, review, and assessment of secondary
material. Extensive Internet research, especially for theoretical and
literaturereviewswere conducted.
The other level of the study involved reading, analysis, and
interpretation of The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets as primary
sources.The two novels were subjected to a contrapuntal reading as is
explainedin the definition of terms section [see section 1.3 of this chapter].
This postcolonial reading strategy offered the relevant perspe~tive,
fundamental to applying Bhabha's interstitial dimension towards our
understandingthe social and artistic vision of MGVassanji as articulated in
theselectedtexts.
The study approaches the selected works as modes of representation
crafted by Vassanji as an Asian African writer within the East African
literarytradition ..This work is structurally divided into two general sections;
exploration and exegesis. The first section is made up of conceptual
36
chaptersone and two that stress the affiliations of Vassanji's writings, their
originin the socio-cultural and historical reality of East Africa. The second
sectioncomprises of Chapters three and four, each dealing with the three
researchobjectives stated above [See Section 1.5. above]. Chapter five is the
conclusion.
37
CHAPTER TWO
IN(BETWEEN)BLACK AND WHITE: CONTEXTUALISING INTERSTITIALITY
AS A CULTURAL LOGIC OF ASIAN AFRICANS
[F)orcnticrsmto give a true reflection of the work of art, the critic must
understandthoroughlynot onlythe languageofthe author but also the socio-.
culturalcircumstancessurrounding the work.
TaiwoOladele!
2.1 Introduction
TheGunny Sack and The Book of Secrets represent MGVassanji's works that
are set and developed against actual East African historical happenings,
eventsand sometimes, locations. His other works set in East Africa include
the collectionof short stories, Uhuru Street and his recent novel, The In-
Between World of Vikram Lall. Scholarly commentaries by critics as varied as
JacquelineBardolph, Arlene Elder, Chelva Kanaganayakam, John Ball, K.
G. Kirchoff, Neloufer de Me! and Amin Malak engage, in different
illuminatingways, Vassanji's treatment of East African postcolonial history,
AsianAfricanhistory and his own subjective hrstory.a These commentators
and others who have done researches on Vassanji such as Peter Simatei,
DansonKahyana and Dan OJwang' inform us on the relationship between
M. G. Vassanji and his East African contexts.
Pursuant to Oladele's conviction cited above, this study finds it
appropriate to proceed by appreciating the historical contexts from which
Vassanji,his community and texts under study emerge. Moreover, such an
approach is encouraged in literary scholarship of African literatures
especially in recent times, by scholars such as Anthony Gerard and
ElisabethMudimbe-Boyi.»Critics of East African postcolonial fiction such as
38
SimonGikandi, Muchugu Kiiru and more recently, Peter Simatei, give
illuminatinginsights how the genre and the region's historical experience
areindeed,inextricably linked. 4
This chapter teases out vital contextual information that enables us
understand the genesis and genealogy of the interstitial consciousness
evidentin the writings of Vassanji, and in the cultural experience of Asian
AfricansfromEast Africa as a migrant community. Arguing that the creative
impulsesin the works of postcolonial writers need to be located in the
historicalexperience of our postcolonial world, we maintain Vassanji's
selectednovels are creative responses to certain historical realities and
experiencesof the Asian African community.5
2.2 Experiential Locations of Culture: Imagining "Asian Africans"
It is indeed vital to recognise contextual influences that inform Vassanji's
literary practice. When Vassanji utilizes the history and experiences of his
communityto create his textual worlds, he enters into what H. H. Okam has
calledthe "pact between a writer and his community, sealing his status as a
committedartist.J>This pact between the writer and his community is often
acknowledgedby Vassanji himself in the various interviews that he has
given.
For instance, upon the publication of his first novel The Gunny Sack,
Vassanji did a homecoming tour of Nairobi and Dar in 1991. In a
subsequentinterviewwith the late Wahome Mutahi, he said, "I have tried to
definea certain kind of East African Asian, to create a mythology which
appliesnot to a nation as in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's case, but to a minority
39
whichdoes not know where it belongs."? While Vassanji seems to be clear
abouthis commitment and vision as an East African novelist, his view of the
AsianAfrican community as "a minority which does not know where it
belongsto" is worth attention. In our view, the Asian Africans, as we have
seen in the previous chapter, know just where they belong-in that
ambivalentinterstitial location of culture, between Whites and Blacks in
EastAfrica.
Accordingto Homi Bhabha, a "location" is a micropoint of intersecting
simultaneities,containing traces of wider issues.8 The locating of culture is
a processdependent on representation and enunciation, being recognisable
by what is said or written about a cultural experience or a cultural
community,as collective identities. Bhabha de-essentialises "location" by
underliningits constructed, invented nature. For our own purpose, we pin
downthe notion of location to colonial and postcolonial experiences in East
Africalived by the Asian African community. It is these experiences as
contextual influences that The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets
textualiseas Vassanji creatively imagines the collective interstitiality of his
community.
East African writers interested in colonial discourse analysis suggest _
that a postcolonial community's experiences and the creativity of writers
fromthat community complement each other. For instance, Ngugi posits:
[Fjor a full comprehension of the dynamics, dimensions and workings of a
society,the cultural aspects cannot be seen in total isolation from the
economicand political ones. The quantity and quality of wealth in a
community,the manner of its organizationfromproduction to sharing out,
affectand are affected by the way in which power is organized and
distributed.These in turn affect and are affected by the values of that
society.The wealth and power and self-image of a community are
inseparable."?[Emphasisadded]
40
Ifonereads Ngugi's VIewtogether with the revelations made by Vassanji
abovetwo important points become evident. Firstly, they concur over the
authorityof a peoples' location of culture within a given socio-political set-
up in determining the cultural logic of the given people. And both Vassanji
andNgugiappear convinced that a people's cultural logic is central to their
culturaland personal identities, indeed to how they are narrate their own
postcolonialidentities from different experiential locations of culture.
This is interesting because the two writers hail from different
locationsof a common colonial Otherhood; both their communities were
subjectsof British colonialism in East Africa. Both Ngugi and Vassanji hail
fromKenya; were born during the colonial times and had first hand
experiencesofBritish colonialism. However,whereas Ngugi's works speak of
theexperiencesof the dominant black/Indigenous masses, Vassanji's social
commitmentis mainly to the marginal Asiatic cultural community. The
Negroidpeoples and the Asiatic peoples in East Africa were both colonial
subjectsdespite the fact that the former enjoyed a third class citizenship
and the latter a second class citizenship under the British colonial
government.In his own words, Vassanji confesses, "...1 have dealt in
communal[AsianAfrican] history, which is more immediate to me, since it
dealswithquestions having to do with my life."10
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Ngugi and Vassanji as East
Africannovelists are related not through community but by association.
Whereasthey represent two different experiential locations of East Africa's
postcolonial culture, the two major Anglophone East African writers
associatethrough their ex-colonial subjecthood. It is this shared condition of
beingthe Other of the colonial Self that makes it possible for Ngugi and
41
Vassanjito admirably employ remarkable critiques of the imperial project in
EastAfricaand its aftermath. By employing critical per:spectives bound to
thecolonialNgugi and Vassanji, like other postcolonial novelists are able
throughtheir literary projects to re-member their communal and personal
memory to the present-day predicaments and experience. Their works such
asNgugi'sA Grain of Wheat and Vassanji's The Gunny Sack are important
contributions to the understanding of the complex psychology of
imperialism,especially cultural imperialism viewed from the perspective of
ex-colonisedpeoples.
One of Bhabha's key argum.ents is that colonial discourse analyses
shouldprivilegethe reading of literature from colonial subjects as revisions
of earlier representations which are described as skewed, insufficient or
narrowby the affected.11 In other words, the postcolonial novels of both
Ngugi and Vassanji have as their starting point the misJunder-
representation of their communal identities in the powerful colonising
narrativeof the Empire. It is such a revisionary and revisionist perspective,
celebratedby Bhabha that MicereMugo uses in her seminal book, Visions of
Africa.v» She conducts a Manichean reading of Ngugi's work, juxtaposing it
withthe works of Elspeth Huxley.
Ngugihas confirmed Mugo's thesis by stating that indeed he started
out his literary practice fully aware of the wanting representations of the
indigenousAfrican peopie in the works of earlier settlerist writers such as
Huxleyand Karen Blixeri.">In the same text, Ngugi advises that it is by
historicisingor contextualising the experiences of former colonial subjects
such as the Asian Africans that a writer can remain committed to the
aspirations of his people. This view brings us to reflect critically on why
42
Vassanjis keen on trying "to define a certain kind of East African Asian, to
createa mythology...for a minority."14
Whyshould Vassanji talk of various kinds of "East African Asian?"
Couldit be that there are other deficit kinds of East African Asians that he
seeksto revise just as Ngugi seeks to revise the deficit kinds of Africans
createdin the literary worlds of Huxley? What motivated him to quit an
illustriouscareer in the exclusive area of Nuclear Physics so that he can
fullydedicatehis time, resources and wit to the (re)creation of this kind of
mythologyfor his people?
The answers to these thought-provoking questions somehow lie
outside Vassanji's texts under study in this thesis. Paradoxically, these
answersperhaps lie inside Taiwo Oladele conviction that a writer's contexts
inter alia provide crucial background information that can help us
understandnovels such as The Gunny Sack and the Book oj Secrets better.
It appears that latter-day African scholars who have done comparative
literarystudies like Mugo's such as Garnette Oluoch-Olunya subscribe to
the idea of contextualising postcolonial texts to reveal a better
understanding of the issues being addressed by postcolonial writers.t»
Subsequently,we reiterate the significance of teasing out the contextual
literaryinfluences that [in]form Vassanji. This will help us understand
Vassanji'sself-confessed social vision cited above.
2.3. OfGenesis and Genealogy: A Polemical View
It is a popular but fallacious cosmogonic myth in East Africa that Asian
Africans,or descendants of former Indian subjects in East Africa are
descended in the main from the famous railway-building coolies of the
43
twentieth-centuryera. The bid to understand who the Asian African is and
wherethey came from is the impetus of this "coolie myth-fallacy." Such is
the pre-text that informs Tony Mochama's recent article, "The Changing
Faceof Kenyan Asians," published in a popular local daily.i« In this ill-
researchedpiece of investigative journalism, the coolie myth is yet again
broadcastedfor the media purpose of mass consumption by the Kenyan
public.Mochama with journalistic abandon that is the hallmark of his
writingsays:
At the turn of the 20th century, Asians descended on Kenya in their (sic)
thousands as part of the British "engineering effort" to construct the
"lunatic" rail line from Mombasa to Kisumu ...This gets supported by the
personal testimony [read authority) of a Mrs Harsita Waters who in the same
article 'explains,' The coolies, that is our babajis (grandfathers) and
marnachis (grandmothers) were the first generation of Asians to set foot in
this country.. .J7 [Emphasis added)
Thispopular perception provides this chapter with the trust from which we
makeour argument. It is a historical fact that a generation of Indians came
to East Africa to build the colonial railways. However, it is an enduring
popularfallacythat these coolies "were the first generation of Asians to set
footin this country." Mochama, an investigative journalist, was advancing a
well-establishedyet inaccurate myth that lacks historical validity. Let us
findout why that popular myth that invents for many of us the "Asians" in
EastAfricais erroneous and fallacious.
Colonial labour records show that roughly two-thirds of the Indian
coolieswho came to Kenya as part of British "engineering effort"went back
home,as a substantial population of the same succumbed to the inhuman
conditionsthey did face. Scholars such as David Apter have contested the
cooliethesis with solid historical evidence. Apter says:
44
Thenature of Indian social organization was dimly understood by Europeans
andAfricans; in addition, a folklore had grown up about them which readily
lent itself to prejudice. It was widely believed, for example, that the Indians
whocame to Uganda were actually indentured servants brought for work on
the railways. This was not the case. In an unpublished monograph, "why
Indians came to East Africa," Nigel Gram writes that approximately 31,983
Indians were imported to East Africa, of whom 16312 were time-expired
contract labourers and dismissed (the Indian Government permitting
emigrationfor a term of three years): 6454 were invalided and 2493 died.
Oram indicates, "This left 6274 who presumably stayed in East Africa
unaccounted. "Since the Uganda portion of the unaccounted would remain.
relatively small, the myth of Indian coolies as the basis of the Indian
populationis easily discounted ... 18
Thefigures above overtly challenge any populist conviction that Mochama's
KenyanAsians could have all descended from the British coolie labour. This
is especially so as the 6274 that chose to remain were distributed all over
East Africa, and not just Kenya. This in essence means that Kenya, Uganda,
Tanganyika, and Zanzibar shared the coolie labour that remained.
The central concern in the context of our arguments in this chapter
remains to try and establish how this fallacious coolie thesis or what we can
call "Harsita Myth" affects Asian African writers in general. Ultimately, we
shall also see how it also affects Vassanji's praxis as an Asian African writer
from,East Africa.
2.3.1. Disavowing the Harsita Myth
East African mythologists have argued how theoretical perspectives in vogue
shape or distort our understanding of folkloric materials.tv A false or
inaccurate mythical account telling of a people's genesis and genealogy,
which later becomes popular can be a dangerous epistemic weapon. This is
what the historical novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah has been saying throughout his
literary practice, a point he emphasised on his recent tour to Nairobi.20 His
general argument is that it is the responsibility of scholars to engage in an
( 45
accurateway the geneses of the African peoples, and factors that have given
riseto their present predicament.
There is need to re-learn our genesis and genealogy of ourselves and
that of our neighbours in order to understand the value of our cultural
differencesas an approach to locating solid avenues of cultural intercourse.
Nevertheless,this need should always be founded on accurate information
such as supplied by Apter and Orarn above, rather than fallacies
perpetuatedby the likes ofMoclrama and Waters.
The Harsita Myth is a potent tool in two ways. Firstly, for the basic
reasonthat it is inaccurate yet it does bear like all myths, an element of
truth.Secondly,because the perpetrator, Waters, is considered an authority
bystrengthof her Asian African identity. As we have earlier on stated, it is a
popularviewin East Africa that Asian Africans are descendants of colonial
Indianlabour. This fact can be attested to by the origins of writers such as
PeterNazareth and Bahdur Tejani, whose forbearers immigrated into the
regionas part of British labour moved from its Indian colony to establish
and run the just established colonial systems in East Africa. Nazareth has
fictionalisedthis personal account in his novel In a Brown Mantle.u And yet
colonialIndian labour took many forms. They served in such capacities as
the middle-level cadres of the civil service, the armed forces and police
systemsand also the legal-educational systems.
Themain epistemic danger posed by the Harsita Myth is that it is the
basis for the familiar question often posed to Asian Mricans by "informed"
IndigenousAfricans: If you Callle to serve the British colonial government,
and they left after independence, then why are you still here? It is also the
same bent of mind that informed Jomo Kenyatta's famous description of
46
"TheGuest Race" whenever he referred to the Asian Africans in Kenya.v-
Afterall,were they not a guest race as East Africawas not their home after
theirmasters had "departed"? There is no doubt that any claims to an
identityare intricately bound to the location or land from which such claims
are articulated. This can also be said about our explanations of how we
cameto be in our present locations in the firet place and when we did arrive
there.
Writers such as Jameela Siddiqi, a Ugandan born Asian African
expelledin the Amin purge of 1972/3 argues that Amin relied on populist
anti-Asiansentiments which were grounded on the perceived close ties
betweenAsian Africans with the imperialist British.23 Her views have been
elaboratedand recorded by historians such as J. S. Mangat, Dana April
Seidenbergand David Apter. To approach the genesis of the Asian African
peoplefrom the perspective of Harsita Waters is to reinforce the view that
the community is one of the last symbols, or reminders of British
imperialismin East Africa that we must do without.
Charles Sarvan has argued that indeed, self-images of Asians in East
Africanliterature tend to be of a stereotyped kind.> For instance, he cites
thelimitingviewof looking at such a diverse community as that of the Asian
Africansthrough the dukawallah image per se; an image that became
popular after the coolie population in East Africa settled down to do
businessupon the completion of the railway construction. This image of the
Asian African community as a dukawallah community rests on the
generalisation that all members of that community only engage in
commerce;corrupt commerce at that. The wretchedness of that perception
47
is aptlycaptured in the words of Keval, a fictional figure out of one of the
UgandanAsianAfrican poet-playwright, Jagjit Singh's plays:
[T]hewretchednessof being an Indian in Africa today...Alwaysbeing the
brownman out, the odd man, the foreigner, the Wahindi...little frightened
fishesswimmingfranticallyin water made dirty by our commerceand trade;
alwaysafraidthe big black minister willpull us out and throw us away, far,
farawayto diewithout our dear commerceand trade. Yes, I'll write stories
abouthowwretched and frightened we are today - always being bullied,
insulted everywhere - in parliament, on the radio, on T.V, on the'
roads...(pause)...Dirt carriers wewere ofthe British.25[Emphasisadded]
Thereason Kevalfeels passionately that he can rely on stories to inform the
world,as it were, about the predicament of being an "Indian in Africa today"
ispredicatedon the view that his people might have been misunderstood or
mistaken.
Wemust note Keval himself is a university student whose dukawallah
fatheris persuading to pursue a course in medicine, rather than groom him
to inherit the family enterprise. The emplacement of Keval in such an
informedsubject-position-a university student at Makerere of the sixties-
is a discursive strategy meant to offer a kind of mythology for his estranged
community in East Africa. The discursive strategy of authorising the
subject-position of the narrating voice or main characters away from the
HarsitaMyth is a common and conscious feature of most Asian African
writingsfrom East Africa. This is why D'Souza, is a government official in
Nazareth'sIn a Brown Mantle; Shamser is a teacher in Tejani's Day After
Tomorrow; Sunil is a motor mechanic in Sondhis's Sunil's Dilemma; Salim
Juma is a teacher [of History] in Vassanji's The Gunny Sack or Pius
Fernandes, is also a History teacher in Vassanji's The Book of Secrete=
The authority traditionally found, especially in the teacher subject-
positionis not just prevalent in Asian African writing but also disavows the
48
dominantpopulist perception of Asian Africans as coolie-originated,
conniving dukawallahs-a common trope that speaks of
imperialist/capitalist exploitation. Interestingly, we notice that whereas the
teachersubject-position is a preferred site of representational authority in
AsianAfricanliterature, the same does not apply to the works ofWhite and
Blackwriters.
Wehave in mind here the prevalence of the dukawallah stereotype,
whichappears in the form.of Ramlagoon Dharamashah in Ngugi's Petals of
Blood, Rhemtullah in Emmanuel Mbogo's Watoto wa Mamantilie, or Effendi
inRubadiri'sNo Bride Price, Choleirn Hussein in Blixen's Out of Africa and
thenamelessfactory owner in Okot's White Teeth27 The authority that the
dukawallah stereotype propagates is the same authority that the Harsina
Mythpropagates; a dehistoricised and prevaricated authority based on one
aspectof an otherwise culturally ambivalent, racially distinct minority in
EastAfrica.
It is for this reason that Sarvan argues with respect to the foregoing
thus, "although of a passing nature, the references in African literature to
Asiansare valuable, for they reveal attitudes naturally, whereas sustained,
self-consciousstudies may not succeed in doing so...These scattered
referencesnot only indicate the opinions of the writers but, what is more
important,may influence the non-Asian reader, and so perpetuate beliefs
andprejudices. "28 (Emphasis added) His argument finds support in Okumba
Miruka'sreflections in his book review of Vassanji's short stories collection
UhuruStreet. Miruka posits, "although the immigrant Asian community has
becomenaturalized to East Africa. (sic) It still remains an intriguing
phenomenonto many [native] Africans, who view all Asians as inherently
50
Although the Act was crucial to the mass emigration of colonial
subjects from India to East Africa, Mangat and Seidenberg argue
harmoniouscontact between the two lands existed long before even the
British came to East Africa, This in effect dismantles the popular
prevaricationthat Indians were a kind of "colonial baggage" that the British
broughtand forgot to collect as they were leaving in the tense days of
independencein East Africa.
Finally,Harsita Waters and Mochama's popular views seem blind to
the historical fact that early European visitors to East Africa, the
Portuguese, recorded Indian presence and "flourishing Afro-Asian
settlementsall along the East African coast as early as the 16th century."34
Therespectedscholar of East Africa's interracial history, Robert G. Gregory
inhismonumental book India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations
within the British Empire, 1890-1939 supports the idea of early Indian
settlementseven before the dawn of imperialism in East Africa.P''We now
embark on an argument that aspires to establish the origins and
developmentof the inter-racial discomfort between Asian Africans and
indigenousAfricans in East Africa as former British subjects. Ultimately, we
willbe tracing the itinerary of interstitiality as a cultural logic of Asian
Africansin East Africa through a historical lens.
2.4. Empowerment and Emasculation
Fromthe pre-colonial era in East Africa, "Indian" entrepreneurial proclivities
hadalreadybeen noted by amongst others, Seyyid Said. The famous Sultan
ofZanzibarupon moving his seat of power from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840
wasfollowedby a large community of Indian traders who had been living
51
andtradingin Muscat and other littoral towns of the Indian Ocean for many
centuries.
Mangatnotes that while Seyyid Said's Zanzibar (Jongbar to the early
Indianmerchants such as Dhanji Govindji in The Gunny Sack) became an
importantmarket and emporium in the Indian Ocean mercantile trade, the
Indianswereprospering and well settled in East African coastal townS.36 The
populationof the Indians at the coast stood at 1000 in 1840 and between
5000-6000 in 1860.37 The magnitude and patterns of Indian settlement led
to the assertion by the British slave-abolitionist C. P. Rigby around mid
nineteenth-century that "all shopkeepers and artisans in Zanzibar are
nativesofIndia."38
This era is captured vividly m the introductory chapters of
historically-informedThe Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. By 1870,
manyIndian families were living in Zanzibar. Most of Vassanji's community,
the Ishmailis [otherwise known as the Shamsis] had settled with their
familieson the East African coast from Lamu to Dar es Salaam and spoke
Swahilias a lingua franca.w In general, the success of Indian merchants
such as Tharya Topan, Nasser Lillani, Ibji Sewji, Damodar Jairam and
Jairam Sewji under the rule of Said gave this diasporic, trading Indian
communitysocio-economic and political eminence.
This was to later be the root of envy and resentment against Indian
merchantsin East Africa.wMangat notes that a series of critical comments
and popular conceptions and misconceptions about them gained
considerable currency from accounts of British observers. Stereotyping
descriptionssuch as, "crafty, moneymaking, cunning, intensely polite, local
Jews, cheats, thieves and unscrupulous" were not uricommon.s r
52
Commercialproclivities, thrifty living based on firm religious beliefs, coupled
withtheir cultural difference (epitomised by their closed-door way of life)
wereaspectsof typical Indian life at that time. This Indian culture aroused
aggressionand harassment by the anti-Indian, post- Seyyid Said Arab
leadership.
Wesubmit that the insecurity that ensued from this anti-Indian wave
ofresentmentcan be interpreted as one of the earliest indicators of their
shaky future as a diasporic community in East Africa; firstly under Arab
rule, then British im.perial rule, and thirdly under the postcolonial
governmentsof East Africa. In keeping with the foregoing submission, we
nowpresent a number of nodal points argued as having been crucial to the
formationof the Asian African community's interstitiality as is eschewed in
Vassanji'sfiction. These points are mainly based on crucial and influential
legislations,political and cultural manoeuvre in the second half of the
nineteenthand twentieth-centuries respectively. These were passed by the
British,and the Arab authorities of the East Coast of Africa that had far
reachingimplications affecting the Asian community in East Africa then and
now.
Around the time that Vassanji's ancestors was settling in East Africa,
that is between 1824 and 1826 a crucial policy was passed by the British
withArab approval. The policy was an expression of political support for
Indian merchants trading under the British flag.42 This policy can be
perceivedas an early trace of the British interest in Indians of East Africa
and the role that the British were going to make them play in latter day
powerwrestling with the Arabs. We suggest that the Indians might have
willinglypartnered with the British due to the insecurity that the community
53
experiencedfrom time to time under Arab rule. Lawrence Hollingsworth in
hispioneeringbook, Asians of East Africa in fact points out that indeed
therehad been the subordination of the Hindus (read Indians) in the
mercantileperiod.w
Withthe coming of the British to the East African coast in the first
halfof the nineteenth-century cam.e cracks and incitement within and
againsthe Indian-Arab socio-economic relations. The British needed an ally
inEastAfricawith whom they could cooperate in common struggle against
Arab-runSlave trade. Considering British imperial administrative policy of
divideand rule, the British naturally sought another community besides the
Arabsforpolitical and social support as they settled in East Africa.
Many of the Indian merchants on the littoral towns and trading
centresof East Africa had settled with their kith and kin under the reign of
theOmaniArabs. This observation was made by the slave abolitionist C. P.
Rigbyand Frederic Holmwood.v' The two noted that the Muslim Indians
seemto have come to stay while Hindus still had a strong attachment to
India, their motherland. Hollingsworth elaborates Rigby and Holmwood's
observationin his study of the history of the Asians of East Africa by
observingthat many Indians by mid and late nineteenth-century regarded
EastAfricaas home. This applied more to the Muslim element than to the
Hindus who often return to their homeland after they have made a
competenceabroad. 45
The Rigbyand Holmswood thesis was later challenged in 1875 by the
Britishagent, Sir Bartle Frere who saw and called the Indians of East Africa
"birdsofpassage." In essence, Frere argued East Africa was not a homeland
but a borderland or diaspora for the Indians who after exploiting the
54
resourcesavailable wait for an opportunity to go elsewhere. Frere's
argumentwas obviously based on a personal and subjective perspective of
an"alien"to East Africa. Such is the case if one argues that at the time of
makinghis utterance, Frere had just arrived in East Africa after a
tumultuous imperial service as the governor of Bombay. His VIew IS
.
contestedby Mangat who argues that on the contrary, the Indians had'
manycommercialinvestments in goods and real estate that anchored them
toEastAfrica and some had even lost/given up touch with their original
homelandson the Indian subcontinent. 46
Mangat's argument is in fact the basis on which the Nobel laureate
V.S. Naipaul's controversial A Bend tn. the River is written. 47 This
illuminatingnovel deals with the exploits and explorations of an Asian
Africanmerchant with a pre-colonial African heritage in an emergent East
Africannation-state. After Seyyid Said, the East African littoral region
graduallycame under British influence and in 1886 the British colonial
governmentpassed an Amendment to the 1883 Emigration Act. The
Amendmentlegalised and encouraged Indian immigration into East Africa,
especiallyas indentured labour on three-year contract terms. By this time
the relationship between the Indians and the British could be termed as
warmand based on cooperation and amity. After all, many of the Indians
emigresthen were already British subjects from another British colony-
India.
Manyof the legislations passed by the British around this time served
to empowerthe Indian communities in various ways. For instance, in the
1890s what came to be called the "Open up the Hinterland Policy" led to
increasedand significant penetration of the East African hinterland.48 This
55
mightexplainwhymany indigenous Africans from the hinterland regions of
East Africa met the Indians first before meeting the Whites. The
consequenceof the encounter was that after establishing the colonial link
betweenthe two immigrant communities, the Indians became a more
immediatesubject of anti-imperialist agenda. In other words, the natives of
EastAfricacould not understand the difference between the Whites and the
Asians,forboth being aliens, especially in the hinterlands, were considered
tobepartners in the colonisation of East Africa.
.There is little doubt that at the height of their technical cooperation
with the British in the early years of imperialism., Indians were an
empoweredEast African people. The role of the Indian immigrant in the
pacificationof the native East Africans and establishment of imperialism
has been significantly noted in the views of two important architects of
British imperialism m East Africa, Winston Churchill and Harry
Johnstone.wIn these early but crucial stages of British imperialism in East
Africa,most Indian labour participated at three levels: Semi-skilled and
skilledgovernmentlabourers (civilservants), Indian troops (that were mainly
used in punitive expeditions against native Africans who resisted British
encroachmentinto their lives) and Indian traders. All these different cadres
are represented by Vassanji's diverse characterisation in The Gunny Sack
andThe Book of Secrets.
Accordingto Mangat, by 1908, Churchill and Johnston affirmed the
role ofthe Indian immigrant as a "backbone" of the early colonial machinery
in East Africa.50 They supported government aided immigration of the
Indiansin East Africa with incentives such as employment and freedom of
enterprisewhile arguing that curtailing or checking the influx of Indians
56
intothis new British sphere of influence would make both the colony and
commerceto "collapse as a puff ball."
Bythe late 1900s, East Africa rapidly changed into a multi-cultural
andmulti-racialterritory. Scores of settlers from Germany, Britain, Greece
andIndiawere intensifying their immigration into this favourable region.
Vassanjicaptures this historical moment in The Book of Secrets, which
openswith the arrival of the fictional colonial administrator Alfred Corbin
[modelledon Harry Johnston] and later that of the narrator Pius Fernandes
asa teacher from Goa.51 This mass immigration notwithstanding, we must
rememberthat any point of confluence is of course a point of contestation.
Thesocio-culturaland political disharmonies that pit the Indian community
. againstheWhite settler community in East Africa clearly attest to this fact.
AsWhite settlers moved into East Africa, and the second wave of
Indianimmigrants, the one Harsita Waters points to at the outset of this
chapter,came into the British controlled colonial East Africa, there followed
a rise of political problems inextricably linked to the cultural differences of
thevarious races and issues to do with the colonial desire for space. The
problemsand tensions, mainly between the Indian community and the
whitesettler community arose from the clash of divergent interests and
aspirationsmainly within their shared locations of culture in Uganda and
Kenya.52This tumultuous moment marked the turning point in erstwhile
(af)filiativer lationship that had characterised Anglo-Indian relations in East
Africain general and especially in Kenya. The situation then, was an
interestingone.
On the one hand, the British settlerist campaign against the Indians
revolvedaround two nineteenth-century narrow definitions of the Indians.
57
Firstly,it hinged on Rigby's idea based on cultural difference of the Indians
as "crafty"trader, as an "undesirable" neighbour owing to his "sanitary
habits."Secondly, it hinged on the Frere's thesis based on cultural
ambivalenceof the Indians as disloyal to East Africa as a homeland, and
heavilylinked to their Indian motherlarid.se On the other hand, the Indians
inattemptsto assert themselves as "East Africans" against the bias of these
Anglocentricallegations insisted on the equality of all the subjects and saw
themselvesas a challenge to British imperialist and racist inclinations in
EastAfrica.54
Outof their cultural struggles as subject peoples in India, the Indians
strugglesin East Africa had an effect even on the indigenous Black majority.
,CarlG.RosbergJnr. and John Nottingham in their illuminating book, The
Myth of Mau Mau; Nationalism in Kenya, point out that leaders of the
Indiansand Africans formed working ties in a common challenge against
Anglocentrism.wUnder their political leaders notably, M. A.Desai and Harry
Thuku,Indians and Africans as colonial subjects appeared to have ignored
theirstark cultural differences. On the contrary, the political discourse of
the two communities, as advanced by their respective leaders then, was
concernedwith militating against colonial policies and politics that did
favourtheWhite-settler community.
Rosberg and Nottingham, as well as White writers such as Huxley
and Blixen point out that th~ Indians, under their leader Desai in his
capacityas the president of the then influential East African Indian National
Congress,were engaged in a bitter racialist struggle with the Europeans for
equalityof opportunity and rights which they later presented as grievances
to the colonial government.56 The British on their part argued their
58
supremacistcase on grounds of racial and cultural purism juxtaposed with
Indianorientalist exoticism.
Their position was unambiguously set out in 1919 in the fmal
racialistreport of an Economic Commission appointed by Sir Henry
Belfield.s?We should be alert that all these events revolved mainly around
mattersof cultural difference and contestations of racial representations
aimedat emasculation of the Indian community. The agitation by Indians
for equality suggests that the community had long lost their "equal"
partnershipwith the British, negotiated in the nineteenth-century, and was
actuallybeing emasculated socially, politically and ultimately economically.
Mangat argues the general character of the Indian role in East Africa
has largelybeen determined by the policies adopted towards them. 58 It is
such a consciousness that informs the thematic vision of Jagjit Singh's
famouspoem, "Portrait of an Asian as an East African." Especially when
Singhcontemplates:
Thepast has boileditselfover
andweare the stearn that must flee...
I shallsummonyou therefore,
Ancestralspirits ofmyrace,
Onthis great issue ofcitizenship,
andyouplead beforethe minister
forbeingborn so brown
and soonwe shall be flying,
unwelcomevultures allover the world,
onlyto unsheathe freshwrath
eachtimeweland59
Thecontradiction that lies deep within this tragic lamentation can be seen
whenwe remember that the early Black African responses to Indians, as is
portrayed by Rossberg and Nottingham and hinted at by Sarvan were
accommodative. Due to Indian political assertiveness, economic prowess,
KFNY4TT4 IINI\lJ:A~ITV II'DDAD\1
59
andstrongcultural identity, the British like the Omanis before had wanted
tomalignthe Indian settler, whom they now perceived as a competitor
ratherthan a colleaguewithin the colonial political equation. 60
Couldit be that the British, like the Omanis, had feared that the
Indianscould politicise their minds and bid for regional leadership? Or
couldit be that, having been under the British imperial crown, the Indians
wereseenas a negative political influence on the Black Mricans who were
stillbyand large unconscious to the very idea of colonialism?
These critical reflections were arguably the foundation of British
attemptsin 1921 to incite the indigenous Africans against Indians. Harry
Thuku,then an influential leader in Kenyan politics and the leader ofYoung
KikuyuAssociation thwarted the effort and on lOth July of the same year
declaredsolidarity with the Indian ca~se. Much "of the Afro-Indian
cooperationor associations against British colonial policy and supremacist
claimsremain occluded from mainstream East African politico-historic
discourseas Seidenberg, E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo and other historians have
argued.s!
The role of the Indians in African nationalism-political, cultural or
literary-in Kenya as metonym of East Africa is a feature that needs to be
appreciatedso as to accurately understand the cultural logic and locus of
the Asian Africans today. Although skilled but largely illiterate, Indian
peasants did offer supplementary aid in setting up the British imperial
projectin East Africa. However, Indian scholars such as M. A Desai, used
theirexpertise, political platforms such as the East African Indian National
Congressand radical Indian newspapers like East African Chronicle to
initiateand advocate for various indigenous African grievances over land,
60 ,
(
labourandwages policies.e?Desai also distributed Swahili articles by Harry
Thukuand other emergent Kenyan political voices such as Job Muchuchu.
This Indian support for the African cause in the early years of the
British colonial system in East Africa, especially in the Inter-War years
posedamajor challenge to the British colonial government. Ironically, it also
presenteda dilemma to the bulk of the Indian community-largely illiterate
andunpoliticised-who could not decide whether to support, the colonial
government,or the native Africans who were establishing the foundation of
their future political and national struggles. What IS crucial in this
argument1S the point that the authoritative voice of the colonial or
strugglingpeople has always been found in their leaders and not in the
populace.Just as the indigenous African people were divided in loyalty to
the British government, so too were the Indians, especially so because
diasporic.The Indian uncertainty could also have arisen partially from the
shiftingpositions of the colonial government with regards to the Asian
community.
Howeverleaders from the two subject constituencies, such as Desai
andThuku knew and utilised the benefits of cooperation and association.
Thisis illustrated in a historical and historic event in Kenyan national
history.The African Riot of November 1922 in Nairobi presented a test of
Afro-Indianties especially following Thuku's arrest. The then Governor of
India,an Indian, is quoted as having said:
TheIndiancommunityin East Africais betweentwofires [interstitial].If it is
:vrnpatheticwith native aspirations, it is said to be politicallydangerous. If
it keepsaloofit is said to be doing nothing for the people of the country.
Thisto me is the most crucial manifestation of the dilemma of the Asian
communityas a "caught-in-between-twocentres" community.s-
61
In keepingwith our argument, the Governor had at last found the cultural
logicofhis kinsmen in the East African Diaspora. Not only had he identified
interstitialityas the cultural logic of Indians in East Africa, he had also
classifiedit a kind of dilemma which ensued from occupation of an in-
between point in an antagonistic encounter between Britain and East
Africani digenouscommunity.
The struggles between the white settlers and the Indian community in
Kenyareached its (anti) climax in 1923. The Indian cultural struggles
againstBritish imperialism that had come to be known as the 'Indian
Question'found their resolution in the Devonshire White Paper entitled
Indians in Kenya, Cmd.1922 (1923).64This famous legislative paper denied
anypreferentialtreatment to either Indian or White community and asserted
theparamountcyof native African interests.
Devonshirewas a watershed for the Indian Question in East Africa,
andsubsequentlysupplies a suitable though theoretical point which, can be
arguedas the first conscious effort towards emasculating the Indian
communityin East Africa. It marked the zenith of the heightened inter-racial
conflictsbetween the Indian and British communities not just in colonial
Kenya,but also in Uganda and Tanzania.cs The Indian Question that had
beencharacterised by the need for tolerance towards cultural ambivalence
and cultural difference besides improved political representation in the
LegislativeCouncil (LegCo) succumbed to imperial force.66
It mainly facilitated the entrenchment of a segregationist policy in the
colonialadministration of British East Africa. In our view, these tense times
notunlikea state of emergency can plausibly be envisioned as the turning
pointforall race-relations in East Africa. This is because in the aftermath of
62
theDevonshireDeclaration, we can feel the implied emergentness (Bhabha's
term)and urgency with which the British purportedly had wanted to
safeguard indigenous African interests from exploitative migrant
populations.Bhabha succinctly posits, "a state of emergency is also a state
ofemergence."67But what was emerging from the state of emergency that
was thepre- and immediate post Devonshire East Africa?
To begin with, Britain's arbitration of the Indian Question in East
Africarepresented a political statement by the colonial government. It
confirmedthat the early policy of direct Indian association with imperial
effortin East Africa had finally been abandoned and substituted with a
policyof intolerance towards the community.68 The Whites [settlers] never
reallylost.Afterthe Devonshire Declaration the East African colonial society
wascompartmentalised into three broad racial types: Europeans (mainly
British),Asians (mainly Indians) and native Africans (sometimes the coastal
Arabswereclustered here) in that order of descendancy.
This arrangement not only made the Indian community to recognise
thattheywere colonial subjects. It also made them, literally, an interstitial
communityin East Africa caught in-between the worlds of the first-class
citizenry,the Whites and the third-class citizenry, the Blacks. From this
perspectiveit is possible to understand the future plight or situation of the
AsianAfricansin the post-independence nation-states in East Africa.
Some scholars have argued the colonial state was based on conflict
andcrisiscontrol, as was the case in Keriya.v? If this was the case, then one
ofthe crises that was never controlled was that of the in-betweeness of the
AsianAfricansin a racialist colonial experience that could only see the world
in termsofWhite and Black. Other scholars have gone further to posit that
63
thepostcolonialnation-states in Africawere just an inheritance of the states
andinstitutionsof the colonial states.vv In this case, the vicissitudes of the
colonialstate like that in Kenya were somehow carried over to the
postcolonialstates, racialist consciousness included. In brief, the general
effectof the Whitepaper, from the Indian angle of vision finds an apt
expressionin the words of Seidenberg. It was simply "an unmitigated
disaster."71
AsianAfricarisdescended from this community that had come to East
Africawithout any traceable or recorded political agenda, but now found
itselfthe victim of a political fiat orchestrated by erstwhile British
"comrades-in-the-Diaspora." A community whose main impetus of coming to
EastAfrica,typical to the migrant conscience, was to better their living
conditions.The same migrant conscience that drove the Bukusu from
"Misri"to Kenya and the Luo from Bahr el Ghazal to Kenya now made the
Indiansexist in a stratified existence, uncannily reminding them of the one
theyhad left behind, in India
The "sandwich" socio-cultural arrangement became not only a reality
ofthemulticultural colonial societies of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, but
alsoan enduring distinctive feature of the region's cultural experience
viewedfroma racial standpoint. The situation has not changed much in the
post-independenceperiod. Thus developed interstitiality as a cultural logic
with respect to the Asian African community in East Africa as we
understand it today. Has the community through its articulate members
suchas Warah, Sondhi, Nazareth, and Vassanji finally discovered that they
are heirs of a cultural logic with a history to it? This appears to be the
64
(un)consciouscase as is evident in the various pronouncements by these
writers,as wehave argued.
Steadily,post-Devonshire colonial policies and ordinances reflected
thatstratifiedsocial authority. For instance, the interstitial status of the
Indiancommunity was authoritatively entrenched through orchestrated
communalsystem of representation in political spaces, racialist policies of
landreservationand segregation and the government provision of separate
socialservices."?Perhaps, the most conscious British effort of what A1i
Mazruiin a different context called "cultural engineering," can be seen in the
craftingand enactment of the Control Immigration Ordinance of 1948.73
Seidenberg,notes that this ordinance based all immigration on whether the
new-comerwould contribute to the wealth of East Africa or compete with the
native.74
This legislation was very crucial in curtailing and barring the Indian
immigrationto East Africa in general and Kenya in particular.vs The
justificationby the colonial office was simple. It was based on inherited
traditionalviews of the Indians as "exploiters" and "birds of passage" who
wereamassingwealth and returning it to their originary homeland. Such a
tendencywas detrimental to the interests of the colonial government.
Althoughlet us not forget that the British too were locked in this economic-
migrantmentality or modus operandi. In fact, this contradiction and
hypocrisyfinds a vivid manifestation in the settlerist novels by the famous
colonistwriter, Elspeth Huxley.?»It is the distinctive feature of the economic
migranto plough back the amassed wealth to his/her originary point. This
featureis shed when the migrant is accommodated in or by the diaspora
andfindsin it a home as had Indians over the centuries.
65
The 1948 Ordinance by the British was a decisive moment for the fate
ofthe Indian community in East Africa. This is less because it came in the
twilightof the colonial power in this region, and more because it signified
the last overt discord between these two migrant communities. As if a
backdrop for these estrangements, East Africa was steadily but surely
movingtowards an uncertain future marked by the rise of Indian-instigated
Africannationalism.. This increasing political awakening of the indigenous
Africanswas fuelled by the pursuit for self-determination and in essence
meant a call for Black-majority rule and an unknown future for the
"interstitialised,"unhomely Indians-a feeling that ran deep across the Asian
Africancommunities on the night of Independence and is captured by
Vassanjithus:
Independencewas painless. A man's colour is no sin in Tanganyika, said
Nyerere.The hooligans who go about making wild statements that the
events of Congo would be repeated in Tanganyika should be severely
reprimanded, scolded the Herald. Tanganyika is not Congo, where nuns
wereraped, hundreds murdered and shops looted...there was some doubts
and speculations; Kakar the lecherous grocer in Mrs Daya building
stockpiled corned beef tins and rice and potatoes in his store ...and on
Independenceday, at midnight, zero hour, while the decorated street below
wasempty of a man or a motor vehicle, sitting silent, and neglected, like a
bridenot picked up on the fateful day upstairs, sitting around the ancient
Phillipsoracle, we [Asian Africans] saw in our minds eye the light turn off at
the stadium, the Union Jack quietly come down and the lights turn on
againto reveal the new green and black and gold national flag flying...77
In retrospect, the epitome of British empowerment and emasculation of the
Indian community seems to have [r]evolved around what Mangat terms "the
twinfoundation of their presence in East Africa.te This foundation rests on
the three main impetuses of Indian immigration into East Africa that have
already been discussed at the outset of this chapter. These are colonial
government employment in the civil service, government employment in
militarydepartments (Mangat merges the first two into one) and commercial
I 4'aTT&! • 'Ill.~ •••••. _
66
enterprise. Notice that (m)any allegations levelled against this community
[eventoday]are mainly premised on their allegedjperceived malpractices in
thethreeoriginalspheres of their East African social life.
Indigenous African politicians and intellectuals who profess anti-
Asiansentiments have juxtaposed the privileged place of the 'alien' Indians
inthegovernmentand commercial sectors of postcolonial governments with
the"underpriviledges"of their "true" African peoples in the three spheres.vv
Wehavein mind an observation made by Seidenberg concerning the veteran
Kenyanpolitician Martin Shikuku. In the post-independence political
dispensation,Shikuku and other "popular political demagogues with short
memoriescontinued to test the waters of racist political debates. Depicting
the Asian community as dangerously exploitative, they measured the
Africans'own declining economic status against the prospects of a world
dominatedby Asian capitalist megalomaniacs"80This racialist politicians
and their political agenda are also well captured in the poetic words of
Singh'spoem, "Portrait of an Asian as an East African,"when he says: black
surgeonsj too have prescribed new drugsj and wej malignant cellsj must
fadeawaysoon.e '
Apart from their traditional commercial success, the other issue that
has been brought up against the Asian Africans by politicians and
indigenousAfrican people alike is the lack ofmiscegenation between Indians
or Asian Africans and indigenous Africans. Remember that in traditional
Africansystems, the most common approach to cultural difference is
integration through marriage. Although Tejani treats this theme
sympathetically in his novel, Day After Tomorrow, Vassanji accurately
captures the complexity of the same in his first novel, The Gunny Sack. A
67
post-independence Tanzanian politician who has been invited to grace an
AsianAfrican function to give the keynote address as the Chief Guest roars,
"[t]heAsians are not integrating enoughl If you want to stay in Africa, you
must learn to live with Africans ... the days of your dukas are numbered!"
[Emphasisadded (Gunny Sack, 162)
All in all, the three colonially derived impetuses or (pre)occupations if
you like, remain important arenas where the interstitial logic of Asian
Africansis perpetually intellectualised and argued. Asian African writers in
general and Vassanji specifically construct their narratives and fictional
worldsaround these colonially engineered triple spheres of Asian African
experience.A remarkable effort to encapsulate all the three iInpetuses at ago
through a cleverly contextualised coolie-oriented, dukawallah account
resulted m the literary achievement that is Giller prize-winning, The In-
Between Worlds of Vikram Lall by Vassanji. In a brilliant sum up of his
deplored dukawallah self, Lall utters the following words at the very
beginningof the novel:
Myname is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one
ofAfrica'smost corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning.
To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled
country'streasury in recent years. I head my country's List of Shame. These
and other descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral
sensibility. But I do not intend here to defend myself or even to tell my
story...it is with an increasing conviction of its truth, that if more of us told
our stories to each other, where I come from, we would be a far happier and
lessnervous people. 82
Perhaps one of the stories that Vikram Lall would have [and did] narrated
about his people, the Asian Africans of East Africa is that their lives are
todaymainly the outcome of three impetuses mentioned above. This coming
back of the once marginal voices to claim a part in the narration of their
nation has interesting ramifications.
68
It doespoint out that the desires in postcolonial writers such as M.G.
Vassanjito write about the experiences of their people are born out of a
certainproblem.The problem is that the ambivalent identifications of love
andhatebetween the Blacks and the Browns occupying the same psychic
spaceofthe Colonial Other are haunted by paranoid projections out of the
twocommunitiesbent on understanding themselves and their neighbours.
Theseprojections "outwards" return to haunt and split the nation-space
fromwhich they are made. So long as a firm boundary is maintained
betweenthe two territories and the narcissistic wound evident in the two
ColonialOthers is contained, the aggression will be always be projected on
totheOtheror the Outside.
It is that desire to really make sense out of the colonised peoples'
experienceand that of Others around them that drives colonised
communitiestowards conflicts with each other. This might explain why the
colonialperception of the Asian African community as a conniving
dukawallah lot with an economic-migrant mentality deeply-rooted in India
seemsto be very popular among indigenous Africans like Shikuku.83 The
authorityof a racialist colonial legacy towards the Asian community is
indeeda colonial inheritance. The argument has always been that Asian
Africanswere fence sitters [read interstitial] in the anti-colonial, nationalist
campaigntowards self-determination and independence. This argument is
contestedand rendered as limited as the Harsita Myth by the facts and
statistics that the nationalist Chanan Singh [later High Court Judge]
suppliesin "LaterAsian Protest Movement."84
What should not be lost to the reader is our submission concerning
thegenesisand genealogy of xenophobic attitudes towards the Asian African
69
community. We have argued and illustrated how the British colonial
governmenthad also inherited the xenophobic attitudes towards the Asian
communityfrom the nineteenth-century Arab rulers of East African littoral
communities. In other words, anti-Asian sentiments inherited from the
British by indigenous African peoples in East Africa, seen contextually
through a historicised perspective have become a kind of racialist tradition
that is learned like all traditions are, and passed over from generation to
generation. Seidenberg puts it this way:
Apart from natural xenophobia that occurs almost everywhere, East Africa
notwithstanding, anti-Asian resentment was a continuation of a systematic
colour-coding of society which, as explained above, ran deep into the
foundationsof colonial society. With no strong ideological framework in place
to define an ecumenical state of diverse cultures, and no economic
programme to support it, Africans were dependent on their xenophobic
attitudes, these exacerbated by biases implanted by the colonial state. African
elitesand others began to express anti-Asian sentiments as Asians began to
becomesuccessful in a predominantly [postcolonial) African COUntry.8S
Herviewbecome crucial when we accurately remember Africans and Asians,
bothof whom were subject-peoples under British imperialism in Africa and
India had at one time cast their lot together against British settler
dominance in the 1920s.
As a matter of fact Sarvan argues "... there is hardly any evidence of
resentment of the Asians by (native) Africans in the years preceding Worid
War One."86 Pursuant to Seidenberg's view, we submit such xenophobic
resentment amongst the native African peoples is indeed a "learned
attitude." These are peddled in among other ways, through unathoritative
kinds of postcolonial and colonial literary presentations of the Asian African
community in East Africa with which Vassanji seems to differ.e?
It is not a far-fetched view to suggest that the failure to contextualise
the Asian African experience or community gives rise to what Seidenberg
70
terms"a fit of historical amnesia" implicit in stereotypical Views held by
indigenousand "White Africans" in East Africa.88 The racialist tendency to
conceptualisethe East African cultural experience, past and present as
beingfixedly"Black" or "White" is a kind of Manichaeism that we must
unlearn,as I have argued elsewhere.89 Stereotypes and xenophobic
attitudestowards Asian African community in general and Asian African
writersin particular, fail to appreciate the systematic and racist manner in
whichthepresent status and state of the community was made through the
racialistcolonial policies, machinations, and structures. Needless to say
thatthe community's own cultural difference and inherent social exclusivity
haveonlyserved to exacerbate their plight and position as a racially distinct
EastAfricanmigrant community.
Thelogic informing British cultural engineering in the colonial era in
EastAfricais interesting. They created a monadic, homogeneous White Self
anda Janus-like "two-faced"Asian African/indigenous African Other. Then,
atdifferentmoments and when it suited their needs, the British empowered
onefaceof this ambivalent Other, offered it authority over the other Other
thus distracting/ allaying critical attention from itself as the colonial Self
observingthe reign of one Other over another Other.
Firstly, it was the Asian African Other that had the upper hand, but
thiswasnot only transitional but also translational. This is because finally at
independence,the situation turned in favour of the indigenous African
Otherwith the White Self transferring authority permanently to the Black
Other.The consequence was the translation of Othering of the Brown Other
intowhat Shiva Naipaul has called "the eternal other" in the post-colonial
powerequation. 90 This sense of an eternal Otherness is what puzzles Majid
71
inoneof Kuldip Sondhi's plays when he asks, "I was a second-class citizen
underthe British. Am 1 to remain a second class citizen under the African
(readindigenous African) government as well?"91
The failure or refusal to comprehend the politics of interstitiality as
an emasculating colonial logic within East Africa's colonial discourse
analyses, indeed amounts to what Frantz Fanon classified as "intellectual
laziness" in the native and Black Africans. Ethnocentric and nativist
politiciansand writers who remain embroiled in the very Manichean logic
that they purport to be challenging. 92
From the foregoing discussion, it appears the limitations that militate
againstthe conceptualisation of the Asian African community as an integral
part of the East African culture can be surmounted. This may be done
through what Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean call, "Unlearning One's
Privilegeas One's Loss"-one of the major themes in postcolonial theory.
Theycite Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial theorist, who
argues:
Ifwe can learn racism, we can unlearn it, and unlearn it precisely because our
assumptions about race represent a closing down of creative possibility, a loss
of [OJther options, [O]ther knowledge ...Unlearning one's privilege by
consideringit one's own loss constitutes a double recognition. Our privileges,
whateverthey may be in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, and the like,
mayhave prevented us from gaining a certain kind of [Ojther knowledge that
we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social positions. To
unlearn one's privilege means, on the other one hand, to do our homework, to
work hard at gaining some knowledge of the others who occupy those spaces
most closed to our privileged view. On the other hand, it means attempting to
speak to others in such a way that they might take us seriously and most
important of all be able to answer back. Doing one's homework in the interest of
unlearning one's privilege marks the beginning of an ethical relation to the
Other.93(Emphasis added.)
This chapter specifically and indeed the entire study in general should be
read as such an unlearning process where we can learn the nature of East
Africa'sracially plural colonial past with respect to Asian African writers and
72
theirworks.Our argument above urge critics to desist from treating, East
Africa,what is probably an African region rife with racial heterogeneity as if
itisa regionformed out of a unity of racial homogeneity. There is a need for
areformulation.
2.5. Conclusion
Thediscussionsin this chapter, offer a plausible way out of our racialised
Otheringmindset. According to Bhabha, revisionary postcolonial voices
suchas MG Vassanji's will no longer need to address their strategies of
oppositionto a horizon of 'hegemony' that is envisaged as horizontal and
homogenous.e+ On the contrary, they will have to articulate their own
narrativeswell aware of the fact that there are many colonialisms and not
justoneColonialism.
The absence of ethnic prejudice, racialist aesthetic lenses and
postcolonialnativism should be the prerequisite for the right appraisal of
literaturesofEast Mricans of South Asian heritage as a cultural sequence in
the complexpattern that is the Asian African condition in East Africa
throughhistory. From such a post-colonial standpoint, not only can we view
thepostcolonialityin East African narratives by Asian African writers such
as Vassanjifrom Bhabha's postcolonial perspective, but we can also find
reasonedresponses to M. C. Finn's question, what happens "when the Other
isAnotherOther?"95
In the following chapter, we now narrow our focus to a contrapuntal
readingof Vassanji's The Gunny Sack. The focus of the next chapter is an
appreciation of how Vassanji's consciousness of the Asian African
experiencein East Africa affects the treatment of his fictional settings. We
73
areinterestedin appreciating how his imaginative settings in themselves as
aspectsof his novels can be interpreted by a postcolonial reader. The
discussionswill mainly centre on The Gunny Sack but also where need be;
referenceto The Book of Secrets will be made.
74
CHAPTER THREE
IMAGINED (DIS)LOCATIONS: VASSANJI AND THE POETICS OF INTERSTITIAL
SETTINGS
Idonotknowverymuch about the Asian community,but I think they are
alsoaffectedbythe land. It is more than material; it is not just because ofits.
economicpossibilities,it is somethingalmost akin to spiritual.
NgugiwaThiong'o!
3.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we focus on how MG Vassanji imaginatively treats his
settingsas aspects of the novels especially, The Gunny Sack.? Setting or
location,in this chapter has been taken to have a three-fold meaning.
Namely,locations as the landscapes of the novel, locations as descriptive
metaphors and locations as the motive or thematic backdrops. The
argumentof the chapter is that by appreciating the importance of setting a
finerappreciation of the unique interstitial situation of the Asian Africans of
EastAfricaas imagined by Vassanji can be achieved.
Before proceeding, let us try to understand how the idea of an
interstitialspace functions in serving the objective of this chapter. In terms
ofa geographicaldescription, an interstitial space is likely to manifest itself
asa borderland; a land which is neither here nor there but in-between. It is
in this sense that we will be using the terms 'interstitial space' and
'borderlands'synonymously. This designation of the interstitial locations or
settingsof Vassanji's novels as 'borderlands' is an important discursive
strategyin reading the selected novels, especially The Gunny Sack.
75
Neither quite homeland, nor a perpetuation of OTIgIll,borderlands
alludeto a productive location identified by its promises and problems,
especiallyto an economically motivated migrant community. The
borderland-conceptrefracts the multiplicity and dynamism of Asian African
experiencein East Africa. When seen as a borderland between South Asia
andlatter-day(re)locations such as North America and Europe, East Africa
totheAsianMricans is a diasporic terrain in which Asian African characters
livein-betweenin an ambivalent world comprising their own heritage, that
ofEastAfricaand that of the West. East Africa then stands as that region
thatis home and not home, the place where all the contradictions of living
amongand between worlds manifest itself in the lives and experience of the
Asian Africancommunity as Vassanji interprets it.3
Guidedby the idea of land, which Ngugi points out as being crucial to
alltheEast Africa peoples, we assert that most of the settings of Vassanji's
TheGunny Sack and the Book of Secret are interstitial locations. Actually, it
willbeargued here that locations that are usually not ones ancestral homes
almost always tend to be interstitial. Kikono, Matamu, Msimanzi,
precolonialZanzibar, Dar, Moshi, colonial Nairobi and generally-speaking
EastAfricaas a location all these specifically different but generically similar
andrelatedscenes inhabited by Asian Africans have a common denominator
theyare all interstitial locations or simply in-between spaces. Homi Bhabha
pointsout:
These'in-beween' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of
selfhood-singular or communal-that initiate new signs of identity, and
innovativesites of collaboration,and contestation, in the act of definingthe
ideaofsocietyitself...It is in the emergenceofthe interstices-the overlapand
displacementof domains of difference-that the intersubjectiveand collective
experiencesof nationness, community interest, or cultural values are
negotiated.e
76
Hencewecan interrogate various aspects of how Vassanji treats his settings
inTheGunny Sack as locations where Asian Africans negotiate their sense of
selfand belonging. But first, a brief outline of the novel as a way of
familiarisingthe reader.
3.2. The Gunny Sack: A Synopsis
TheGunny Sack., Vassanji's first novel, celebrates the spirit of early Asian
migrantsfrom India who moved to East Africa in the early 1900s. Living
under German colonial rule, the family of Dhanji Govindji become
permanentresidents of Africa while witnessing historical events that result
inthe birth of African nationalism. In this novel, Vassanji focuses on the
problematicunion of East Africa and South Asia. The tensions arising from
contact between the two lands is captured mostly in the characters who
migratedfromIndia to East Africa in search of Other homes. It is this quest
fornewhomes that we see most of the Asian African characters such as
DhanjiGovindjiand his descendant Salim Juma in this novel embark on.
The main story is told by Salim Juma who is bequeathed a gunny sack by his
mysticalgrand aunt, Ji Bhai. It is a sack full of mementos, each item revealing a
chapterin the story of his family. The novel is both the story of one extended family's
arrivaland existence in East Africa as well as a repository for the collective memory
andoral history of many other Asian Africans.
In the first section of the novel Dhanji Govindji arrives in Matamu in
present-dayTanzania- from Zanzibar, Porbander, and ultimately Junapur
in North-Western India- and has a son, Husein, with an African slave
78
homelandin Junapur and locating oneself in the East African coast is
significant.It was to be the initial step in the troublesome quest to belong
thatfuturegenerations of Govindji's family such as Salim Juma were to
face.
It is interesting that the same quest for new homelands that were
.
morepromisingin terms of prosperity was to be Govindji's downfall. There
areinsinuationsin the novel (TGS44) that he had used monies drawn from
publiccoffersfor personal needs without consulting other faithfuls. This
independenceof mind was the one that had enabled him to journey in a
dhowacross the Indian Ocean to Jongbar, or Zanzibar. It is the same
independenceof mind, characteristic of migrants and possessed by
Govindji'slater descendants, like the narrator Salim Juma as we shall see
lateronthis chapter.
TheSecondpart of the novel is named after Govindji's granddaughter,
Kulsum.She married Juma, Husein's son and is the mother of The Gunny
Sack's main narrator, Salim Juma. We learn of the older Juma's childhood
asa second-classmember of his stepmother's family after his mother, Moti,
dies.At this time, the family of Govindji has mushroomed into various
relatedfamilies of cousins, and siblings. The late Juma Husein's family has
emigratedagain from Tanzania to Kenya in colonial Nairobi.s After his
weddingto Kulsum there is a long wait ill the unloving bosom of his
stepfamilyfor their first child, Begum. It is the 1950s, and whispers are
beginningof the Mau Mau rebellion. A segment of the novel addresses itself
toa descriptionof these troubled times of rising African nationalism.
When Juma Husein dies in Nairobi, his family of Kulsum with her
childrenincluding young Salim Juma, the narrator, moves back to Dar es
79
Salaam.And gradually Kulsum's son Salim Juma, Govindji's grandchild,
takesoverThe Gunny Sack's narration from his mother, recalling his own
childhood.His life guides the narrative from here on.
He remembers his mother's store and neighbours' intrigues, the
beautyof his pristine English teacher, Miss Penny (later Mrs Gaunt) at
primaryschool in colonial Dar, cricket matches, and attempts to commune
withtheghost of his father. It is a vibrantly described, deeply felt childhood.
Tanzaniawhere the family lives, meanwhile, is racked by racialist political
tensionson its road to independence, which comes about as Salim Juma
reachesadolescence.With the surge in racial tension and nationalist rioting,
severalmembers of his close-knit community leave the country under
feelingsof rising unhomeliness and go in search of other new homes in
England,the United States, and Canada.
The third part of the novel is named after the African girl Amina;
SalimJuma's great unfulfilled love. He meets Amina while doing his
NationalService at Camp Uhuru, a place he feels he has been sent to in
error.This is so because the National Service was a prerequisite for joining
University.Due to their exclusivity and unpredictable future as a migrant
community,most Asian African families would go a long way to make their
childrengo to National Service Camps near Dar es Salaam where the core of
the community lived. But Salim's name Juma, an African name, and his
darkcomplexiondue to his ancestry from Binti Taratibu could not convince
therecruitment officers that he was not an indigenous African.
In spite of pleas from his family, he was sent to the farthest National
ServiceCamp in northern Tanzania where he was the only Asian African
amidstmany indigenous Mrican colleagues. This exposure was a blessing in
80
disguiseas it forged his African sense of self, only for it to be betrayed later
inthenovel,when he was persecuted on racial grounds by the Tanzanian
government...because he was of Asian extraction.
Whileat the Camp Uhuru, Salim develops an intimate relationship
withAroina. Amina is an indigenous African, and their relationship
inevitablycauses his family anxiety, until the increasingly militant Amina
leavesfor New York after the national youth training. Salim becomes a
teacherat his old school in independent Dar, and marries an Asian African,
butkeeps a place for Amina in his heart and in fact names his daughter
Amina.When the older Amina returns from the United States, where she
hadturned into a radical human rights activist, she is arrested by the
increasinglyrepressive independent Tanzanian government.
Due to his close acquaintance with Amina, Salim is hurriedly exiled
abroadon safety grounds. He leaves his Asian African wife and daughter
withthe promise that he will send for them, knowing that he will not. The
novelends with dejected Salim alone in a basement of a flat somewhere in
Canada,the last memories coming out of a gunny sack he inherits, hoping
thathe willbe his family-line's last migrant. His wish is captured in the last
paragraphof the last chapter of The Gunny Sack. It reads:
The running must stop now, Amina. The cycle of escape and rebirth,
uprooting and regeneration, must cease in me. Let this be the last runaway,
returned, with one last, quixotic dream. Yes, perhaps here lies redernption , a
faith in the future, even if it means for now to embrace the banal present, to
pickup the pieces of our wounded selves, our wounded dreams, and pretend
they're still intact, without splints, because from our wounded selves flowers
still grow. We had our dreams, Little One, we dreamt the world, which was
largeand beautiful and exciting, and it came to us this world, even though it
wasmore than we bargained for, it came in large soaking waves and wrecked
us, but we are thankful, for to have dreamt was enough. And so, dream, Little
Flower.. (TGS,268-269)
81
Thequestion that we should ask ourselves is: Is Vassanji's choice of this
imaginativescene as a concluding part of The Gunny Sack a matter of
chanceor is it a conscious discursive strategy that makes the reader reflect
on the dislocated experience of the Asian Africans of East Africa over
historicaltime? Is exiled Salim the product of the locations he occupied or
ratherhis community occupied as a migrant people in East Africa?
3.3. MythicalLocations, Sites of Interstitiality
Theanswer to the reflection above may arise out of a further sampling of
Govindji'soriginary story in the first part of the novel, in the very beginning
withthe story of Salim's progenitor, Dhanji Govindji. In one particular
instance,reminiscing about how he came to East Africa, Govindji tells his
African-borndaughter-in-law Ji Bhai:
Asyouapproachit [Africa]fromthe sea, as you enter the harbour, you see to
the right all those beautiful, white buildings of the Europeans...behind this
beautiful,whiteEuropean faceof the townis our modest Indian district, every
communityin its own separate area, and behind that the African quarters
goingrightinto the forest. (TGS, 29)
Onemight argue that the segregationist layout of the imagined nineteenth-
centuryDar owes much to the encroaching European imperial force in East
Africaof that time, but we should be aware of the politics that the writer is
advancingin this respect. Our view is that there is a way in which the
descriptionsand imaginings of locations influence the rest of the story or
storyline in Vassanji's texts. By demarcating the land into three and
situating the Asian in-between the African and the Whites, Vassanji is
playingout his commitment as a historical translator but is also doing other
thingsas well.
82
For instance, we could argue that the writer appears to be hinting
thatthe racialist consciousness adopted by many Asian Africans in his
novel,such as Govindji and his descendants emerged from an already
determinedsociety divided on racial grounds by the White imperialists.
ThroughGovindji's story, we note that the imagined geography or setting
hasan influence on the inner conscience of its inhabitants. In other words,
thedescriptionof the Asian Africans interstitial location in the Zanzibar that
Govindjiemigrated to sets pace to similar interstitiality in other locations
laterin the novel. When we view Vassanji' settings as modes for character-
development,or what we call subjectification in the subsequent chapter,
thenwe notice that most of Vassanji's Asian African characters such as
Govindjiand his great-grandson Salim are shaped by the settings that they
occupyand inhabit.
On one plane, settings as locations in the novels of M. G. Vassanji
providea narrative and descriptive background for the dramatic casting of
his social concerns. It also goes further to enable him develop his
characters,plot and storyline. To grasp this formal function of setting, we
must look beyond the individual cases of the various settings such as
Kikono,Dar, Tanga, Zanzibar, Matamu, and imagine them in their generic
senseas borderlands. In other words, the basic thread that runs through all
these varied settings appears to be their characteristic as interstitial
locationswhere Asian African subjects and their experiences render them
so.
Reading Vassanji's The Gunny Sack constantly alerts one to the
particularattention or alertness to detail that he offers in 'setting up' his
fictionalocations where the narration plays itself out. Although one can
83
arguethat this is a typical feature of any realistic novel, it should be noted
that the author in this case comes from a unique community as already
argued.Therefore, we find it logical to conclude that setting in the narratives
ofM.G. Vassanji are nuanced and carry nuances of the unique experiences
oftheAsian Africarrs as an interstitial community in East Africa, At the very
.
outsetof The Gunny Sack, an examination of the settings reveals that they
conveya certain sense of in-betweeness, especially when seen from the
perspectiveof the Asian Africans of East Africa.
Take the exam.ple of the place Matam.u, a fictional location
somewherein present-day Tanzania, especially as described in the following
passage:
Ma-tamu.The name always had a tart sound to it, an aftertaste to the
sweetness,a far off echo that spoke of a distant, primeval time, the year zero.
Anepochthat cast a dim but sombre shadow present. It is the town where my
forebearunloaded his donkey one day and made his home. Where Africa
openedits womb to India and produced a being who forever stalks the forest
in search of himself. (TGS, 39-40)
Wecan read the sense of ambivalence that is in the offing when the two
culturalworlds of Africa and India meet; the being formed from this union is
chargedwith the relentless quest of trying to find its own true meaning. The
fact that this mixture leads to the emergence of beingness is one that we
maywant to consider awhile.
It is possible to see the new being mentioned above as being one that
imbibesfrom both its Indianness and Africanness at the same time. This is
so especially when we recognise that Matamu is cast as a mythical
experience. Vassanji seems to suggest that when one exists in between
several cultures, it is necessary for him/her to have a distinguishing
identity; in this case an in-between sense of being. This sense of being can
84
be rationalised in form of setting as is the case with Dhanji Govindji's
description of the Africa he emigrated to (TGS 29) or on the basis of
racialism.
In The Gunny Sack, colour becomes important and the characters
seemto draw their identities on this basis. The following cosmogonic myth
offeredto Salim by his mother Kulsum attests to this face.
WhenGod was well and ready after all his exertions finally to create mankind,
he sat himself besides a red-hot oven with a plate of dough. From this he
fashioned three identical dolls. He put the first doll into the oven to finish it,
but, alas, brought it out too soon: it came out white and undone. In this way
was born the white race. With this lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second
doll into the oven, but this time he kept it in for too long. It came out burnt
and black. Thus the black race. Finally the One and Only put the last doll
inside the oven, and brought it out just the right time. It came out golden
brown, the Asian, simply perfect. (TGSPp. 73)
Mythologicalattempts at understanding the phenomenon of, and privileging
interstitiality such as the one cited above serve two functions in Vassanji's
novels.Firstly they can be seen as a justification and therefore recognition of
the implicit sense of interstitiality that characterises the Asian African
experience. Secondly, it can also point to the privilege and value of the
interstitial location bestowed upon the Asian African people by divine forces
soas to give them a sense of superiority. Whatever the case may be, the idea
of interstitiality is intertwined with all the politics of belonging that are
advanced in Vassanji's The Gunny Sack.
That is why Kulsum invokes the above-cited myth to explain the
politics of colour and belonging to her sons Salim and Sona. They are
reminded as individuals that they occupy the same space as their forefather
whomthey relate to in two ways. This is by way of skin colour and cultural
identity and by way of the interstitial location they occupy in-between the
Black and White races of their world. We pursue this line of thought further
85
inthenext chapter where we followthe plight of the community through the
personofone of the characters.
Apart from the subtleties of colonial fiat and segregationist policy,
racialisedspace is the signifyingmarker of the interstitial sense of the Asian
Africanswithin the African diaspora. This space and its discontinuities issue
the sense of being that is reflective of its origin therefore interstitial. A
terrain that refuses the classification of either/or and champions a new
spaceof re-articulation which may be called the "in-between-both" space as
occupiedby for instance Sona and Salim in The Gunny Sack.
This "idea of interstitiality" seems to be the basic idea around which
the whole novel revolves. Even the main characters such as the narrator
Salim get their names according to this theory. "Thus our nicknames: Sona
forthe golden boy, the youngest and favourite, my brother, Jamal; Kala for
the one who came between Salim, Salum in Swahili, the overdone..." (TGS
74).The sense of being that Vassanji portrays for all the characters comes
fromthis theory of discrimination.
Perhaps through this observation, Vassanji draws our attention not
only to circumstances under which Asian Africans developed their
interstitiality but also to the fact they have lost their sense of a secure
identity, theirs is now an identity of the in-between space, an identity that
does not make sense in a world interpreted in manichean terms of Black or
White. Salim.and his like now have to adopt and adapt to an atmosphere of
an unknown, unfamiliar environment that is East Africaafter independence.
It is in this imagined in-betweeness seen as a kind of landscape
inhabited by the unhomely selves of Asian Africans that setting becomes a
site of dislocation. As Ngugihas rightly pointed out, land questions not only
86
beguilewhites and blacks in East Africa but even the Asian Africans, Ngugi
saysthat settings do have spiritual values. This is credible if we look at the
waysin which land has been used as a site for the interstitial nature of
AsianAfricanexperience.
Take Zanzibar-the original Asian African settlement in East Mrica-
for instance. The notion of Zanzibar/Jongbar as a powerful site in
demystifying the Coolie-Myth discussed in the previous chapter is very
crucial.Without it the Asian Mrican experience in East Africa, is incomplete.
It is the presence of the ancestors of present-day Asian Mricans in Zanzibar
evenbefore the British set their foot on East African shores that justifies the
beingness of East Africans of Asian descent. In other words, by invoking a
pre-colonialmigration and settlement, Vassanji is able to articulate a certain
politics of belonging in that Asian Africans are seen as historically-rooted
peoples borne out of the historical antecedents of the region maybe just like
any other East African community.
Zanzibar is a primary location m the complete articulation of the
AsianAfrican experience as captured by Vassanji's novels. As a site of self-
definition and an interstitial space, Zanzibar represents the point of
convergencewhere migrant experience breeds ambivalent subjecthoods and
subject-positions as is evident in the experience of Salim Juma. It is a site of
tension and dispossession, a realm of discontinuities, as we see in te various
images of it at the beginning and end of The Gunny Sack. In the first
chapters, it is reified as that lost home where order and prosperity thrived.
In the last chapters of the same novel, Zanzibar is painted as an unhomely
interstitial space that was rocked by racialist upheavals of the post-
independence epoch. Again a particular scene from the novel attests to this
87
fact.This is in the last paragraph of the last chapter in The Gunny Sack
mentionedabove (TGS,268-269)
Salim Juma, the narrator who now lives as an exile in Canada, utters
these words. He is just one of the droves of Asian Africans who left East
Africa after independence for Britain, Canada and United States (rarely
India).After the migration of his forbearer, Dhanji Govindjifrom .Junapur in
India to Zanzibar; after the migration of his family from.Tanzania to Kenya
then back to Tanzania and finally after this migration to Canada, Salim is
tired and exhausted by the perpetual feelings of unhomeliness and
impossibilityofbelonging.
Salim's words touch on the points of rupture in the articulation of
AsianAfrican subjectivity and experience. It appears that the reclamation of
his subjectivity through his keen memory offers an agency or propulsion
into an empowered self-definition and self-knowledge,which is one of the
key areas of focus in postcolonial discourse. The exiled space fromwhere he
reminisces is actually a location of dislocation. In the sense that it is a space
that provides the situation and location of culture crucial to the articulation
and creation ofAsian African experience.
Sometimes, it takes exile for one to make judgements and
assessments of one's own homeland. Sa1i:m'sToronto basement from where
he narrates his story to the reader as a realm that resounds with the
pressures of dislocation such as want, discomfort and nostalgia. Yet,
interestingly, his story also speaks of certain pleasures of dislocation focus,
relief and the possibility of dreaming another future ...again. It is this line of
thought that Bhabha appears to be grappling with when he says, "the
recesses of the domestic space becom.e sites for histories most intricate
88
invasions.In that displacement, the borders between home and the world,
becomeconfused, and uncannily, the private and the public becomes part of
eachother, forcing upon us a vision that is divided and disorientating.">
East Africa, seen from the exile location from where Salim Juma
speaks, is not just a recess of the domestic space, but also an excess of that
same space. It is excess in the sense that much as Salim.and other Asian
Africanswho flee the region after independence may want to forget it and
forgeon they may never be able to do so. They, in one way or another carry
the regionwith them as an excess space within their minds that keeps being
visited in nostalgic or bitter moments of remembering. In this way, Salim
Juma is like Vassanji who says that no matter where he goes, he carries the
EastAfricanworld with him, indeed within him.
Narration therefore becomes an important avenue that links the exile
condition of the Asian Africans and the interstitial experiences of the
community that they left behind. When that re-membering is infused as a
narrative device as Vassanji does in The Gunny Sack, then this novel
becomes a setting for identity-formation. The novel becomes a space full of
instances of interstitiality and its attendant mentalities such as
unhomeliness. These instances are not only gestural but communicative
acts as well. They demonstrate how Vassanji relies on his removed position
as an East African writer from the Asian African community how living in
Canada, a space removed from the vicissitudes of the experienced sense of
in-betweeness.
It is in this sense that Salim Juma's remarkable memory can be seen
as a symbolic space where the re-membering of the dislocated Asian African
to his East African experience is performed. This re-membering includes
89
fmding the significance of ancestral genesis and genealogy. It also includes
constructing and reconstructing broken personal and communal historical
moments and memories. Such a reconstruction of one's story of belonging is
inevitably tied to the theatres of action that led to the dislocated status. In
that respect and as symbolic spaces, Zanzibar, Kikono and Msimbazi,
Matamu are fictional worlds of the beings that merge from them, the Asian
Africans. They also symbolise the existence of order before disruption and
the imagined, originary moment when fear and unhomeliness were imagined
as non-existent.
3.4. Setting as Metaphor or Dislocation
Under this section, we concern ourselves with seeing the figurative behind
the literal. We will see that Vassanji's settings normally have many
interpretations. This critical stance the realism in the works of the writer
because it creates a certain atmosphere that is supportive to the meta-
textual politics that he seeks to advance.
For instance, Vassanji argues throughout The Book of Secrets that
settings such as Kikono could also be locations where cultural difference or
politics are played out at a micro and macro level. Here is an illustration
drawn from Corbin's perception of Mombasa when he first arrived from
Europe, to take up a colonial administrative post:
A sight that even then he knew he would never forget. The coast ofAfrica, the
harbour of Mombasa. Its modesty, the composed exoticism of its orientalness,
stayed with you like the strong lines of a deceptively simple masterwork.
White houses shimmered on a hill rendered green with vegetation. A fringe of
palm trees decorated the shoreline, a white road came up to the beach where
a restless waving crowd awaited .., (TBS, 12)
90
NowVassanji may well be describing the colonial gaze on Africa and its
"orientalising"effect. But he could also be talking about something different
here that we need to pay attention to. It should not be lost to us that Corbin
is receivedat Mombasa, an African setting by an Indian guide, is checked at
the immigration by Indian officers and cleared by an Indian clerk. (TBS,14)
If we pay attention to this point without necessarily being carried
away by the metaphoricity implicit in The Book of Secrets opening scene
then a certain argument can be imagined. It seems more than the fact that
the writer satirises the British or colonial pre-occupation with the geography
ofAfricaor its geographical detail that in a way uncovers his colonial desires
to possess it. What is of interest is that it is the Asian Africanwho welcomes
Corbin-the embodiment of British colonialism or imperialism (TBS,7). The
idea of the Asian African as functionary in the colonisation of East Africa is
not hidden to the reader.
Vassanji says that much as we are aware of the whimsical Western
fascination with exotic geographies "South of the equator" we may also want
to be aware that next to the beauty captured in fine and picturesque
descriptions, which juries of the various prizes won by Vassanji seem to
hinge on, the gruesome fact that the Indian figure played an historical role
in the setting up of imperial order in East Africa is significant. This fact is
amplified further when we interrogate the Euro-Asian relationships of that
formative time through yet another illustration:
'I arn giving you advice, Bwana GuIarn, Take your family a few kilom.etres
inland, m.oveto some town there until the war is over, or danger from the sea
is past.'
'Will the British Manuari attack Matamu ?'
'They could attack Matamu from the sea, or they could land troops here and
march to Dar es Salaam, Tell the other Indians what I have said. If the British
attack, the Africans can run to the bushes, but where will you run? (TGS,48)
91
In this illustration, the German colonial official,Bwana Wasi (Weiss)meets
with the Mukhi of Matamu, Dhanji Govindji's son Gulam. He enlightens
Gulamas to the ambiguous position of his Asian African community.
While the Germans are at war with the British and the Africans are
dividedinto the two warring groups, the Asian Africans are the ones who 40
notbelong. In the sense that the African is at his own home and the White
menhave power at their disposal but the migrant Asian African community
has neither of the two. In which case, the setting that is Matarnu becomes a
metaphor for the community's inbetweeness. It becomes reflective of the
intricatemilieu that is occupied by this community, which though migrant
and economically stable lacks political power to control their own destiny.
This fact becomes clear as one sifts through the following chapters of The
Gunny Sack.
Vassanji employs interstitial settings such as Matamu as a formal
devicein the overall narrative structure of The Gunny Sack. It is with this
organising tool that he manages to make landscapes, character, and
framaticactions imbricated aspects of the Asian Africanworld. Having been
raised in such interstitial locations himself, first knowledge of these coastal
borderlands and their mythologies is something which lends his
descriptions and characters credibility as we shall see in the next chapter.
Description combines with image. The evocative nature help realise the
limitless choice of venue and power wielded with a detailed and keenly-felt
description. He has imbued in readers a sense of isolation, sorrow, and
violencesimply by choosing telling scenes/ settings; interstitial or borderland
settings.
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The tendency to create settings that are then described ill
metaphoricallanguage assists Vassanji to invoke the idea of dilemma in his
readers' mind. Although choice of setting normally depends on characters
and story, Vassanji's are effectivein themselves. Knowledgeof his setting is
part and parcel of knowledgeof his characters and thematic concerns, as we
shalldemonstrate in the next chapter.
It appears that the Asian African characters in Vassanji's novels are
in one way or the other locked in an intimate desire to find their own roots
out of and in Africa.This quest for a sense of belonging at the space that is
the interstice or interstitial setting leads a migratory self like Salim's
through space [and Govindji's through place] as they both seek to reconnect
with their African heritage. They sift through memory and, as Salim
confesses, history. Salim tells the better part of The Gunny Sack from his
dislocated location of exile by metaphorically acknowledging that, "in our
catalogue of names, where history moves in a noisy parade wearing faces
likemasks." (TGS,60)
It is interesting to notice that his great-grandfather before him had
also embarked on a physical journey in search for his African roots in the
formof his prodigal mixed-race son Huseni, who had special affiliationswith
indigenous Africans and had woken up one day and just disappeared into
the heart of Africa. What is of special note here, is that Vassanji makes
Govindji'squest to come to nought as he spends all his life savings together
with his community's resources and that under his trusteeship as the
Mukhi [headman] ofMatamu an act that leads to his cold-bloodedmurder.
Is Vassanji saying that the search for an originary past that can
reconnect us to our bases is a rather whimsical venture reminiscent of
93
Govinji'sunswerving yet belated attempts? Especially when we mark the
followingwords, "There is no sin greater, no shame deeper. But Dhanji
Govindji,for the sake of his half-African son, committed it; dipped into
community funds when his own savings run dry, to pay his numerous
informantsand agents, to finance his quest. "(TGS,54)
We should pay attention to the metatext of the weighty words above.
It is true that Govinji committed an atrocious deed all in quest for his son.
But it is also true that the half-Mrican son had become not just an
obsessionin his life but also a meaning. It is Husseni, his son by his own
slave-wifeBinti Taratibu who connected him or gave him roots in Africa.
Thispoint, Vassanji argues is the one that we should pay attention to most.
That the migrant goes to extraordinary levels to try and both justify and own
his roots to a given space or locale. The key to such an interpretation lies in
thepreliminary suggestion that we offered at the beginning of this study. We
argued that indeed space or location is intimately related or linked to the
character, and even sense of self of the migrant. It is gives him his raison d
etre.
Perhaps the most overt use of setting as metaphor comes out when
we consider the metaphoricity invested in the description of Kikono as the
colonialAdministrator AlfredCorbin feels it:
The nights were cold and dry, the blackness so absolute, so palpably dense he
:elt if he reached out a hand where he slept he could pull it aside and let in
the lighted world of London, Paris, and Hamburg. The mbuyu tree rustled
outside; in the distance was the cackle of hyenas, the grunt of a leopard or
hog, the constant crick-crick of insects. Sometimes there would be the
maddening, eerie pelting of rain on the roof, a sound which should have been
welcome in this semi-desert. He had heard of the spirits resident in mbuyu
trees and naturally had ridiculed the idea, but in this menace-filled darkness,
in this loneliness, all one's scientific objectivism seemed vulnerable. He knew
it to be four o'clock when the rich and rising cry of the brave rrru ezziri rallied
against the thick darkness. Such a desolate cry of the lrurnan soul in the vast
universe. (TBS,52)
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Themetaphoricity invoked by the descriptive language supplied in this
excerptis again a hall-mark of Vassanji's remarkable imagination which is
capable of painting vignettes of African landscapes as if they are
photographsbeing perceived through the visual sense. But apart from just
servingthe role of setting, this language is able to evoke in the reader the
imaginedharshness of the environment where a number of harsh things are
setto happen.
By so doing the writer is able to argue his case that before wejudge
the characters of the novels by the actions that they commit let us be keen
alsoto judge the environment that produces them. This remains one of the
keyconcerns of Vassanji's writings and indeed the writings of many Asian
Africanwriters who always argue a case for the situational influences on the
characters of the Asian Africanpeoples.
3.5. Setting as Motive
Whenthe setting in Vassanji's The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets are
seen as motives, they serve to advance and enhance Vassanji's thematic
concerns. In most cases, setting as a motive in Vassanji's fiction supplies
illustrations of the implication of interstitial locations or borderlands in the
experience of the Asian Africas. Experience points to acquisition of
knowledge through the experiential dimension of understanding and
interpreting the environment in which we live.
To talk of experiences is to talk of consciousness of reality. However,
we must remember that Asian African experiences are formed out of a
politics of difference. The Asian African characters in the two novels
95
articulateVassanji's own intuitive experience of the Asian African condition
inEast Africa as he experienced it and life through his sensibilities, his
imagination,so we experience in the two novels and live through them, to a
degree,as Pipa and Vassanji lived through them. On this plane, these works
ceaseto be an inscription of reality or a philosophical lesson drawn from
observationof a certain reality, and become an aspect of reality itself.
Such realisation means essentially coming into a consciousness of
realitythat transcends that consciousness given by the five senses and the
mind(rationalism and empiricism). It is therefore indescribable or attended
toat the experiential level. This reality is recognised as perm.anent while all
that senses experience passes away. One who has this realisation is surer
andmoreaware of that existence than of contents of sensory experience.
For instance, sometimes Vassanji employs setting as the climactic
environmentof the human psyche launched into a troubled journey of self-
definitionin the vast space of human lives. On such occasion, the space of
differencebecomes the site where the historical and aesthetic realities
converge.The real and the imaginary are intertwined in a creative process
and the sites of tension become the setting where the Asian African lives.
Thisis exactly seen when Salim is sent to the national Youth Service as a
prerequisiteto his joining the University of Dar es Salaam.
Salim, dark because of his links to his indigenous African
grandmother, Binti Taratibu, was sent away to a Tabora youth training
campwhere he was the only Tanzanian ofAsian origin. In this borderland in
theNorth of Tanzania, Salim is able to translate his life's misfortune into a
positivereality. He, for instance, discovers kinship ties and makes friends
with indigenous Africans whom he comes to understand through
96
interaction. He makes the following realisation:
Afewweeks later, with new insight gained, with the help of a metaphor: '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. Instead I came with ladoos, jelebis and chevdo. Toilet paper. A
woolen suit. And I carried them on my head like a fool...Thus began the
partingofways. (TGS,204)
Here, the narrator of The Gunny Sack is talking about his own baggage,
carriedto the training camp. Using his experience as an allegory to that of
AsianAfricans, Salim argues that he needed not to have carried all his
'Indianness" with him when going to the camp. Whereas his colleagues had
just carried a rucksack of necessities, knowing the harsh life they were
going to, Salim had been given a huge metallic barge carrying all Indian
artefacts, from eatables, clothes, mementoes, medicine et cetera.
Somewhere between Dar and Tabora, they could not use a vehicle
andwalk. Salim had to endure the pains and challenges of carrying his big,
blackbox on his head as his colleagues laughed at his predicament. Salim
then queries the rationale behind carrying boxes of Indian attitudes,
mentalities and prejudices from India to Africa that only serve to put Asian
Africansat odds with Africa.
Vassanji suggests borderlands or interstitial spaces, such as Salim's
transitional training between High School and University in the ancient
northern Tanzanian town of Tabora, as spaces where transformations in
worldview can take place. Cultures are seen not as static entities with a
certain fixity to them, but as cultures-in-transit. Asian African culture-in-
transit becomes the representation of the last forte of self-hood, the
embodiment of the absent homeland that allows a space of belonging
between India and Africa.
97
This is especially evident in Chapter Fifteen of The Gunny Sack
entitled"RedSkies and Western Eyes."This chapter is a vivid account of the
plightof Asian Africans immediately after Independence in East Africa. In
bothnovels the last chapters prefigure that climax and summary. Factors
leadingup to the slow and sure death of Pipa and the dispersal of the Asian
Africancomm.unitypoint to a natural climax for the two narratives. In that
deathis contained a motive for all deaths that Vassanji's community faces.
Infact,just as Vassanji informed us that Africa had extracted the price of
lifefromDhanji Govindji when he attempted to connect with her, so does
Africado with Nurm.ohamed Pipa. (TGS, 54) In his bid to belong to Africa,
Pipais rewarded with death in search of his African connection, his lost son
by anAfricanslave!
Vassanji is a tactful novelist. It could be possible by showing us that
Africais a "dark continent," a setting which has ill motives against its
migrantand racially-different communities he challenges the underlying
impetus of the so-called postcoloniality. This cynicism underlies the
narrativeflow of Vassanji's selected novels. For instance, his psychological
approachto the consciousness of his narrators emphasises the exteriority of
influencesthat make Asian Africans feel unhomely and interstitial more
thaninterior influence.
If we take Pipa as an example, he is driven to his death not by his
own biological or socio-cultural practices but by politically engineered
economicforces that he cannot challenge. We dwell on this matter in greater
detail in the next chapter. However one can argue that Vassanji's
preoccupationwith streams of consciousness may well be a strain of styles
98
usedby exiled psychological novelists such as Joseph Conrad and James
Joyce.7
His problematic representation of Africa as a cannibalistic space
revealsits role as a strategic location for a critique of the socio-political
contradictionsof the post-colonial moment in East Africa. Pipa becomes a
metaphorthat serves to illustrate the vicissitudes of being a racially different
minorityin postcolonial Africa.
It is by reading both characters and the settings they occupy as
indicativeof the motive set forth by Vassanji that we can unlock VarIOUS
socialconcerns that he is raising. Thus the characters and space become
intertwinedin a creative process and the site of this tension becomes the
"spaceof the characters". From this same stance, we can argue that it is not
Africa that eliminates Govindji and Pipa in self-defence. That the two
dukawallah-characters and their commercial proclivities could undermine
the project that is self-determination and Uhuru in East Africa.Yet this line
ofthought too can hold. And this is the beauty of Vassanji's novels, which
as Nelouferde Melnoticed:
Vassanji's work is a dynamic site which lays bare the paradoxes,
incompatibilities and ambivalences that are the central paradigms of migrant
experience and discourse ...The value of Vassanji's work lies precisely in the
projections of how such hybridity, if at all, can never comprise an equal
mixing of disparate strands. For identity is a site of negotiation which
depends on the exigencies of situation, is always anchored to political,
economic and cultural hegemony, and comes most unstuck at moments of
crisia.P
This insight amplifies the tension evoked in The Gunny Sack and The Book
of Secrets. The two novels of Vassanji are seen here as metaphors of the
ambivalent location of Asian Africans in East Africa, at least in a fictional
sense, arising from histories of unhomeliness and dislocation. This is
99
especiallythe case when, as de Mel does, we read them as a common body
or space that gestures to a disempowered history of a racially different
minorityAfricanpeople.
This common body is a category based upon the perceptions assigned
tothe disembodied Asian African subject, whose body is just a metaphorical
vehiclefor its interior consciousness. This explains why Vassanji usually
depictsinter-national migration, this type of movement across borders as
bipolar.Asian African characters leave one contained and defined spatial
territory,cross one or more borders, and arrive in another identifiable space.
Through the testimony of Salim Juma and Pius Fernandes, Vassanji
appears to argue that in analysing these trans-national journeys, we should
relyon the Asian Africans' motive for emigration. He seems to suggest that
we should analyse both the movement and the outcome of the migration
based on whether the migrant sees himself a "settler" or a "sojourner". In
the former view, which is most prevalent in real life situations, Asian
Africansdescend from migrants who brought their culture with them and,
aftertheir arrival, refused to be assimilated in the prevailing cultural norms
ofthe new nation [read African] territory. That is why we need to read his
workwith diaspora-specific frames of perceptions. These can make us make
sense out of those uniquely Vassanjian characters such as Pipa who cross
and question cultural, political, social, and national boundaries to explore
newterritories in-between.
100
3.6. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have attempted a poetics of settings within The Gunny
Sack with particular reference to the idea of interstitiality that Bhabha
arguesis a revealing angle of vision. If physical dislocation is one such angle
of vision, then we can appreciate the fact that narration from an exile
locationmakes the reader understand the Asian Africans' [in]ability to
survive oppreeeiori, fragm.entation and displacement as a migrant
communityin East Africa. For the Asian African as a community in-between
manyworlds borne out of the volatile union between East Africa and South
Asia,the question of belonging becomes an important one.
Interstitial locations such as Matamu and racially stratified Dar es
Salaam,as we have demonstrated, enable characters to move easily [fluidity
of dislocation) across the borders of various countries that they see as
composed of single geographical and cultural space. What underlies the
power,vitality and compulsion of The Gunny Sack is the manner in which
Vassanji innovatively makes it possible for his characters to be read as
victimsof the locations they occupy in East Africa over time. For instance,
as an imagined location, Matamu becomes a setting that is not only a
powerfulbackground for, but also a metaphor for the dislocations that are
experiencedby the migrant community in The Gunny Sack.
101
CHAPTER FOUR
"DUKAWALLAH"AS A DISCURSIVE TROPE: READING STEREOTYPICAL
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT VIA NURMOHAMED PIPA
My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention
should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an
understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible [and
plausible) through stereotypical discourse.
Horni Bhabha-
4.1. Introduction
Theprocess of subjectification is a central concern of any critic interested in
characters, their significance and/or character development in a
postcolonialnovel. In this chapter, we will invoke the term subjectification
asbeingsynonymous to character-development. We supply a critical reading
of the intertextuality between the interstitial settings and Asian African
subjectificationin The Book of Secrets.? The discussion goes beyond just a
reading of the "dukawallah" image of Nurmohamed Pipa as being either
negativeor positive and focuses on the development of Pipa as a character
in The Book of Secrets.
4.2. The Book of Secrets: A Synopsis
MGVassanji's novel, The Book of Secrets is yet another remarkable example
of an Asian African writer's attempts to engage the ambivalent sense of
beingcommon to his people. The novel is an eloquent story of the diary of a
colonialofficer in East Africa, and the unravelling of its many secrets. It is
the story of a stolen diary-a book of secrets-belonging to Alfred Corbin, a
British governor of a small fictitious town, Kikono, on the borderland
betweenTanzania and Kenya.
102
Entries into the diary commence at the dawn of the twentieth-century
asBritishimperialism was setting its roots in East Africa. Around the diary
iswoventhe captivating story of a young Asian African, Nurmohamed Pipa
andhismysterious wifeMariamu, as the forces of world history such as the
FirstWorldWar and African Nationalism break down their door. The effects
ofthese happenings subsequently haunt three generations of Tanzanian
AsianAfricansbeginning with Pipa's generation.
In The Book of Secrets, Vassanji tells a rich tale complete with
historicaldates and vivid descriptions of Asian African experience in East
Africafrom 1913 to 1988. He narrates from the perspective of a retired Dar
esSalaamHistory teacher, Pius Fernandes who finds the old diary with one
ofhis former students and reconstructs its story. The evolution of the Asian
Africancommunity as a migrant people settled in East Africa is an
importanttheme in The Book of Secret. The perseverance of Asian African
characterssuch as Pipa and the attempts at making sense out of the geo-
politicaltumult and social dynamics of change are also other narrative
strandsthat woven into Vassanji"s thematic web.
The storyline of this novel is actually allegorical of Asian African
personaland communal quests for success, stability and rootedness in the
faceof dramatic terrestrial machinations. Most of this narrative of The Book
of Secrets is about the life experiences of one main character, Nurmohamed
Pipa,on whomwe place our focus in this chapter.
In telling his tale of both physical and emotional displacement,
Vassanjidemonstrates an easy familiarity with East Africa's history from
1913 to 1988. Indeed he uses Pius Fernandes, himself a long-serving
Historyteacher in Dar es Salaam to narrate The Book of Secret. Whereas the
103
narrating voice is that of Fernandes, the main character of the novel is
actually Nurmohamed Pipa. Vassanji develops Pipa as a dukawallah
character. In other words, he is built around the colonial stereotype of the
AsianAfrican dukawallah, a conniving and popular figure in East African
discourse, as argued in Chapter two. However, Pipa as a character is not
developedin the way that Ngugi does Ramlagoon Dharamashah in Petals of
Blood or Karen Blixen does Choleim Hussein in Out of Africa. 3
Pipa is a dukawallah whose character development or subjectification
mustbe seen in light of his historical experiences as a member of a migrant,
racially-distinct Asian African community. We focus on Pipa not just
because The Book of Secrets mainly revolves around his life experiences but
alsobecause as Bhabha notes, within postcolonial studies "the stereotype,
which is [a] major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and
identification..."4 In keeping with Bhabha's view above we argue that the
process of subjectification is evident in the process through which Asian
Africans become interstitial peoples in East Africa. Consequently, we
embark on retracing the process of character-development through the life
and experiences of Nurmohammed Pipa, a metonym of the Asian African
characters of Vassanji's novels. 5
4.3. Pieces or Wood? On Fictional Stereotyping
In an early interview while a graduate student at the University of Leeds,
Ngugiwa Thiong'o had the following to say in relation to stereotypical
discourse in his literary practice:
I tellyou, this tendency is veryvery strong indeed, after being in that place in
your country, you know, you might feel to justify your position and your
104
people,and onlysay the odd things about them. Or necessarilytake the other
communitiesas mere illustrations of an attitude; when you take tnese
charactersfromthe Asiancommunity,or the European communityyoumight
[endtouse them as mere piecesofwood.«
As in the previous chapters, we reiterate the general presence of the
dukawallah-stereotype as the face of Asian Africans in East African nations
andnarrations. This presence, just as Ngugi admits, serves the purpo~ of
providinga kind of knowledge of the Asian African who, by and large, is an
enigmato the Blacks and Whites alike. This is what Shiva Naipaul really
meant when he observed the place of the Asian African in post-
independenceEast Africa. He said, "nowadays, the Asian is portrayed as
littlemore than a miserly duka-wallah who ceaselessly exploited and
cheatedinnocent Africans. His past distorted, he is in the process of being
eliminatedfrom the present. "7
However, it is a fact that Asian Africans are commonly or popularly
known in East Africa as an entrepreneurial people with well-known
commercialproclivities. These proclivities make the dukawallah figure the
emblemor the figure-head of the Asian African peoples of East Africa. M. G.
Vassanji appropriates and develops this popular mode of representation
subsequently creating perhaps one of the keenest portraits of the
dukawallah figures ill East African literatures ill the subject of
NurmohammedPipa.
Pipa, a character who straddles both the narrative worlds of The
Gunny Sack, The Book of Secrets and to some extent Uhuru Street is a typical
dukawallah figure but with a difference. He is not fixed stereotypical in the
sense of Blixen's Choleim or Ngugi's Ramlagoon. On the contrary, Pipa's
105
actionsand character cannot be isolated by the contexts and spaces that
makethem logicalhuman and meaningful ones.
Although it is impossible to ignore the widely acknowledged role of
AsianAfricans as a trading or entrepreneurial community in East Africa a
crucialpoint must be acknowledged. Not all sub-communities within the
largerAsian African community are traders, by tradition. The Goans,
especiallyunder the colonial governments in East Africa were known for
theirinclination towards civil service whereas the Khoja Ishmailis are well
knownfor their commerce and industry. Vassanji and Pipa-by adoption-
belongto the latter group whereas the narrator Pius Fernandes belongs to
theformer.
Interestingly, Vassanji's authority as a scribe of the dukawallah
experiencemay partially draw from the fact that as a member of a trading
communityhe understands the nature of the dukawallah in a very subtle
way.This claim has validity within postcolonial criticism as issues of
authorityand where a writer draws it in terms of creativity and narration
areimportant.e Otherwise how else can we argue that Vassanji's agency in
the treatment of the Dukawallah is more authoritative than that of either
Ngugior Blixen?
Wehave argued in chapter two of this study that it takes an informed
member of any com.munity to offer meaningful agency to his or her
community'sinterpretation of colonial experience in East Africa.This is one
of the central tenets of the revisionist philosophy that underscores the
creativeand critical works definitive of postcolonial discourse as Bhabha
has pointed out in his famous essay, "The Postcolonial and the Post-
modern:Questions ofAgency."9
106
In keeping with this line of postcolonial literary thought, Vassanji
doesnot present us with Pipa as a stock character out of his social matrix
andcontextual locations that render him meaningful. On the contrary, he
givesus a fuller and contextualised image of a human being with a life, a
family,an origin, passions, ambitions, nightmares and challenges. The main
differencebetween Pipa and other flat Dukawallah images in East African
literaturesis that he is cast in the ambivalence and ambiguity of the many
worldshe occupies.
In Pipa, Vassanji creates an Asian African character who is not just a
pieceofwood but a "living"being caught in the webs and vicissitudes of his
lifeas a colonial subject and a postcolonial citizen in East Africa. This is
whatVassanji meant in the chapter two when he talked about his attempt
tocreate a certain kind of East African Asian. His literary mission, seen in
the creation of Pipa, is a mission to examine and illustrate the complex
processthat [in]forms the dukawallah-stereotype as a discursive strategy
andas a form of knowing the Asian African as a shrewd and reptilian profit-
seeker.
In the arguments that follow in this chapter, Nurmohamed Pipa is
read as an authoritative symbolic vehicle that articulates the various
discoursesof power, marginality, diasporality, migrancy, and dispossession.
By invoking such a concrete and familiar subjecthood as that of the
dukawallah, Vassanji proceeds to implode the stereotype that has
contributed to misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the Asian
Africancommunity in East Africawell defined by Naipaul above.10
The strategy of using a familiar and popular East African stereotype
ofthe Asian African; the dukauiollah, to undermine previous erroneous or
107
insufficienttreatments of the same is crucial in two ways. Firstly, it
ascertainsthat indeed postcolonial writers normally develop their artistic
andsocialvision through re-casting known stereotypical subject-positions
occupiedby members of their communities. Secondly, it excites the
possibilitythat stereotyped subjects such as Pipa are not only narrative
agentsbut also politicised sites where crystallisations of the general cultur'al
experiencesof postcolonial writers occur.
This is why although the narrative worlds of The Book of Secrets is
populatedwith many familiar Asian African figures such as women and
men,children and adults, Muslim and Hindu, rich and poor, strong and
weak,interstitiality appears to be an enduring principle in all these
categoriesof being. Pipa is also a useful case in point because as Vassanji
pointsout below, this character attains his fullest meaning within his
communityof other Asian African characters. Vassanji acknowledges that,
"mystories are about individual characters, but they must be seen in the
contextof their community."ll
It is convenient, for discursive purposes, to delineate the trajectory of
Pipa'sadventurous yet tumultuous life. This will be a means of illustrating
the subjectification process by which Vassanji is able to create this
authoritative image of the Asian African community and the interstitial
sense with which it resonates. In which case we will recast, whilst
illustrating,episodes ofPipa's development as an interstitial character.
Such a discursive stance has a danger to it. The original complex
ways in which these episodes appear in Vassanji's novels will be
compromised. He employs a sophisticated array of narrative styles and
techniques ranging from foreshadowing, flashbacks, and narratives within
J08
narratorial consciousness, digression, and historical imagination. This
repertoireof narrative techniques is useful in his endeavour to capture the
complex,ambivalent Asian African experience across temporal and spatial
divides.However, there is a polemical benefit in our preferred approach. We
canbe able to read Pipa as a metonym of the rest of his community. We can
alsoapproach the experiences felt and lived by Pipa as coterminous to the
national and socio-historical situations facing all the characters of
Vassanji'sworlds.
For instance, it IS a deep sense of unhomeliness that makes the
forefathers of Asian Africans such as Dhanji Govindji in The Gunny Sack to
migrate from the borderlands of Cutch, Kathiawar and Punjabi. It is the
samedeep sense of unhomeliness that drives Pipa away from his borderland
birthplace of Moshi in a human search for comfort and security elsewhere. It
is still the same deep sense of unhomeliness that drives scores of post-Pipa
generations of Asian Africans from the borderland that is postcolonial East
Africa.East Africa is a borderland, a world in-between India and the new
'Asian African homelands' in North America and Western Europe. The
similitude of the unhomeliness of the characters in the novels and in the
actual circumstances that led Vassanji to self-exile out of East Africa is a
uniting bond. A bond which makes the narratives of his stories credible
accounts of the experience of his community.
Vassanji, in light of the foregoing, sees III his stereotype-characters
such as Pipa in The Book of Secrets and Dhanji Govindji in The Gunny Sack
more than pieces of wood which popularise attitudes to the majority Black
East Mrican societies and more. In these "pieces of wood" he perceives the
archetypal commercial impetus that made India and East Africa to ever
109
makehuman contact. He actually perceives in the dukawallah the historical
reasonas to why and how Asian Africans came to be in the borderland that
is East Africa in the first place. Vassanji pays attention to his subjects as
spacesthat disseminate certain knowledge. This is not simply the knowledge
ofthe Asian African community with its alien and yet native character but
alsoknowledge of the dynamics that inform human migration and migrant
identities.
4.4. Mediating Intersitiality: On Pipa's Subjectification
Apostcolonial reading of The Book of Secrets will no doubt be attentive to
the character-development of Nurmohammed Pipa in a rather sympathetic
way.Here is neither a disturbing East African subject like Ngugi'sMugo nor
a popular East African one like Okot's Lawino.is Here is an East African
subject that rises from pit latrine to palace then to "pariah status" in a
struggle that can only be best interpreted as the resilience of the human
spirit amidst perpetual adversity. Pipa's process of subjectificatiori,
development as a character is at the heart of The Book of Secrets and the
conclusive episode of The Gunny Sack. As Pipa grows up, dreams, achieves,
loses and dies, Vassanji treats us to a full account ofwhat it means to be an
AsianAfrican in East Africa; at least an Asian African dukauiallah:
The Gunny Sack was published in 1989, five years before The Book of
Secrets. It is here we first meet Nurmohammed Pipa through the narrator's
explanation that "Mzee Pipa, Old Barrel, was the oldest resident on the
corner of Kichweleand Viongozistreets. Also called Pipa corner ..." (TGS,99).
Interestingly, the Pipa we meet in The Book of Secrets is the young Pipa. This
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Pipais a character described in the diary of the colonial administrator,
AlfredCorbin being re-constructed by The Book of Secrets's narrator, Mr.
PiusFernandes.
The younger Pipa is a burly, quarrelsome youth travelling from the
border-townMoshi in Tanzania to Kikono on the Kenyan side to attend
Shamsicommunity celebrations in a bid to see a girl he intends to marry
(TBS, 46). We will discuss this young, then old Pipa as he traverses the
narrativelandscapes of the two novels. He is a typical case of a racially
differentmigrant born in East Mrica-though native, his alien origins make
himsimplyimpossible to belong to Africa. Pipa like his community in real
life,foreverfmds himself at a nexus between political discourse and identity-
formation.
In other words, he cannot define himself out with the racialised
politicaland socio-historical backgrounds that nurse him. He is born
without a father, as an economic nomad, a marginal but powerful
figurehead,a prisoner of fate, and all the lives of the other characters-
AsianAfrican or otherwise-revolve around him. Pipa's estranged sense of
beingstarts from the very early moments of his life as is evident through the
detaileddescription and empathetic tone that Vassanji employs in the
followingpassage:
His given name was Nurmohamed-Pipa was the nickname given to
the family by the neighbourhood, and had stuck. It made him feel a lack; of
respectability, of a place that was truly home ... He was simply an Indian, a
Mhindi, from Moshi, a town in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro whose masters were
Germans.
He did not know where he himself had been born and when, in any
calendar, German, Arabic, or Indian. Of his father, he remembered only a tall
thin man with a scraggly beard, a kindly grin on his face as he pulled the
boy's cheeks, saying "Dhaboo." His father had not died-Nurmohamed could
not recall grief, a graveyard. His father had gone away, and the boy carried
this knowledge within him like a hidden deformity. He remembered him as
Dhaboo, and for many years lived in the expectation that his father would
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return, that one day when he came home from play Dhaboo would be there
waJ.ung...
Of his mother, he remembered the long rains in the wet season falling
through the cracks in the thatch roof, himself standing with her, shivering in
a pool of water, his sister holding his hand. Another scene: squatting in the
latrine with his mother, watching a fast and furious stream hit the ground
under her and joining with his own wavering spurt. He looked in vain at her
darkness for a member corresponding to his own, had had his arm smacked
for pointing his finger at that mysterious shadow ... The boy was big and
thickset. and nicknamed Pipa, meaning, "barrel," described him so well that it
becameexclusively his. Boys teased him by running past and jeering "pip-pip-,
pipPipal" (TBS, 127-8)
In this rather rnau spiciou s way, we are ushered into the worlds of
Nurmohammed Pipa. From this excerpt, we can contrive two important
details, crucial to our concerns in this chapter.
Firstly, from the last description in the passage above we are invited
to denial of belonging that is to later emerge in the life of Pipa and other
AsianAfrican characters in a more apocalyptic manner at the end of both
novels. Secondly, the unfortunate origins of Pipa mark the difficult
preliminary environment that bred early Asian Africans and gave them the
stimulus to forever quest for development and security. In this sense it is
possible to read in this originary moment of Pipa's tragic life the general
conditions that inform the migratory sensibility in the Asian African psyche.
Pipa's origin crystallises the toughness of diasporic origins which is
one of the central concerns in Vassanji's social discourse. His thesis is that
the dukawallah and indeed the early Asian Africans did not rise from
positions of inherited or acquired familial affiuence but from conditions of
deprivation, unhomeliness and insecurity. These conditions are the ones
that, as we saw in chapter two, drove many an early migrant from India to
Africa. Little wonder these same conditions form the beginning point of self-
definition when Salim Juma's identity is questioned by Mrs Gaunt at the
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very beginning of Vassanji's first novel, The Gunny Sack. In the originary
momentof Pipa's life we thus read the beginnings of a narrative of location
and dislocations whose descriptions form the storylines of the selected
novels.The profound wretchedness of his early days and the hopelessness of
ayouth deprived of comfort develop that sense of estrangement.
.
Even as a child in Moshi. Pipa is regarded as an unfortunate child.
He had an inauspicious growingup without a father but with a prostituting
mother. His surly and burly nature marked him out for misfortune. It is
these childhood events that 100mlarge for him later in life and in the novel.
Everywherehe goes, unfortunate circumstances follow him like a shadow
andwhen he thinks he has broken free off them that are when he is hardest
hit. As a teenager, he almost beats up his immoral mother but on reflection
makes a personal decision to go away instead. He becomes a porter. Moshi
then becomes an imaginative location of origin; a site of dislocation. This
tiny border town that literally is an interstitial place between Kenya and
Tanzania gives its interstitial mark on the identity and life of Pipa from the
verymoment that he decides to move away.
Seen from this perspective, we can argue that the two selected novels
are not so much stories about the interstitial origins of Asian Africans as
they are about the results and experiences that obtain from such origins.
This explains why in the novels's own non-linear(ised) narrative sequence,
Vassanji does not begin The Gunny Sack or The Book of Secrets by givingus
the early days of Pipa. He does not giveus a straightforward account leading
us through the linear development of Pipa until his death as is typical of
postcolonial African novels by Black writers such as Ngugi's and Achebe's
Weep Not Child or Things Fall Apart respectively.13On the contrary, he
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beginsby giving us the intricate milieu and social players who are going to
affectPipa's life and that of other Asian African characters.
The most significant are Alfred Corbin and Dhanji Govindji in The
Book of Secrets and The Gunny Sack respectively. This textual strategy
necessarily,turns the reader to an inquiry of the reasons as to why the
.
narrators,who are in exile, came to be there in the first place. It also leads
oneto question why the exiled narrators think it important to begin their
narrationsfrom historical events and times past.
In the passage on Pipa's early life above, Vassanji prepares us for a
movingtale; the tragic tale of a man whose major sin was to be born a native
ofraciallyalien ancestry in East Africa. He does this by offering us the view
thatPipa is a man denied his place in the world or actually disowned by the
very world that he lives in. It is lack, acquisition, nature, and
destructivenessof power that are the subjects of tragedy. Pipa is not driven
awayfrom home due to his lack of and need for power-at least in its
politicalsense. His is a quest for stability and security and he naturally sees
trading as both the traditional communal and legitimate road to his
aspirationsthat is typical of his community.
By hatching him from the shell of poverty and near-destitution,
Vassanjicreates the prerequisite space or stage for the tragic account that is
Pipa'slife. Seen in this light, Pipa stands for something bigger than his own
subjectivity even as he is introduced to the reader. He is depicted as a
normalhuman with no control over his actions for he seems to emerge from
aworldwhich fatalistically has already set a destiny for him. Vassanji sums
himup thus, "...a burly youth with an angry glower for a world that did not
wanthim." (TBS,128)
KE YATTA UNIVERSITY ltBRARY'
114
Such an inability to effect action or chart ones own destiny; such a
lack of agency in the process of effecting viable self-constructive change
points to issues of marginality and emasculation. This is because action
breeds change and change does begin somewhere and end somewhere.
Subsequently, from the moment when we are introduced to Pipa's early life,
weare made alert to the fact that something is going to happen.
How is Pipa going to be affected by such precocious origins as
Vassanji amply describes such deprived origins? This wonder excites in the
reader a sense of expectation if not arousing a humanist sympathy with the
forsaken and vulnerable, burly Asian African. This pre-emptive arousal of
sympathy for this dukawallah urchin points to a crucial discursive politics
of reader-seduction. This is where Vassanji conspires cleverly to influence
the reader in a persuasive manner to judge Pipa not as a piece of wood that
is called a dukawallah, but as a man; in fact an underprivileged man. Pipa's
early life of want and insecurity just like that of Hassam Pirbhai, Hassam
Uncle or Dhanji Govindji in The Gunny Sack or real life Asian African
progenitors has a significant narrative function. In it, Pipa ceases to be a
singular subjectivity and becomes an extended metaphor that articulates
the origins of Asian African migrant status at the margins or at the
interstices of comfort and security.
His humble and common background demonstrates the potentialities
ofpain, gain, poverty, and power or loss of it that accrues from such spaces
of destitutional existence as the one he occupies as a youth. Considering
that the The Book of Secrets within this chapter is mainly approached as a
location of Asian African subjectification, it may not be generically tragic,
but the moods the novel evokes are essentially tragic, such as Pipa's tragic
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questfor a kind of belonging...or not belonging in East African colonial and
postcolonial dispensations. From this borderland town of Moshi, Pipa
plungesinto other interstitial settings such as the coastal towns of Tanga
andDar es Salaam in search of life's good fortunes rather than wallow in
self-pityand abject poverty. In this decisive action, we see the resolute spirit
that characterises the Asian African psyche leading them from spaces of
wantand discomfort in search of a better life.
Much as the positivist decision to move and its execution endears
Pipato the readers, Vassanji later contrives to make this seemingly worthy
decisionthe first step to a long process of fate-driven being. This leads one
towonder whether it is Pipa, Vassanji, society, or all, who are responsible
for his later character of conniving, thrifty but wealthy dukawallah who
loseshis fortunes to Nyerere's nativistic Africanisation programmes soon
afterIndependence.
Indeed, the failures of home life igniting a certain wanderlust within
the Asian African community in East Africa forms one of Vassanji's major
thematicconcerns. His characters are typically described as seeking upward
socio-economic mobility originally within legalistic and moralistic
frameworks that simply do not work. This accrues from the fact that the
spacesor home that Asian African characters like Pipa occupy defines them
as aliens despite the fact that they are natives of these same spaces or
homes.This is what the narrator Pius Fernandes means when he says:
I had returned to a country on the brink of independence, one that was
preparingto transmute. The date had been set for Decemberthat year, six
month away, and the laid-back Dar I had known was bubbling with
excitement.Therewas hope in the air, and a cheeryconfidence,symbolisedin
the promiseofa torch offreedomto be mountedon the summit ofKilimanjaro
forall to see, across the continent and beyond.If in later years, bush-shirted
demagogues waylaid those dreams with arid ideologies, and torpid
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bureaucrats drained our energies, at least we were spared the butchers ....But
Iamlosing perspective (TBS, 273)
UltimatelyVassanji appears to be philosophising about the vanity of human
questsfor a permanent sense of belonging when a migrant tries to fit into a
diasporicsituation. He argues that such quests are marked by a chain of
absurditiesespeciallywhen one is a racially different subject in another land
wherea different race is dominant and considers that land its exclusive
homeland.
As we have seen, the story of Pipa's early life is an all-too-common
EastAfrican tale of poverty and destitution. Without a present father, with
an errant mother and an unhomely neighbourhood, a perfect recipe for
migrationsand movement is inculcated almost naturally into Pipa's sense of
being. All these pent up feelings coupled with a harsh environment
cultivatedin the person of Pipa certain bitterness towards life and towards
hismother. This is especially the case when we assess his mother's moral
standingas a prostitute in the pious context of the Asian African culture.
Pipa is not born aggressive; but aggression is brought out from
withinhim by factors that lie outside him. Vassanji describes it this way:
Likemany of the boys in Moshi, he made a few hellers carrying at the railway
station, and like them became more adept and aggressive as he grew older,
jostling and shouting and crowding around the two weekly trains on the
Tanga-Moshi line. And like many a young man, one day he allowed a Tanga-
bound train to take him in its third-class carriage to wherever it would. (TBS,
129)
Youths who leave home without notice to make their way in the world
profess a trait of delinquency. They, like Pipa, illustrate how young people
will later enter relationships intended in someway to be substitutes for the
families.This is why, as we shall see, Pipa finds in the Shamsi at Tanga, a
community that he feels he belongs to. We must point out that although
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Pipa is against social authority his identification with the Shamsi of Tanga
paradoxically depict that he needs the same authority as a kind of security.
This sense of communal security even enables him to take account of
how his life had been in Moshi before he left and how he needs to break
away from that past and forge a new way forward for himself. Vassanji puts
that revision and re-vision this way:
If guilt, in subsequent months and years, came at all, it came not from
his having raised a hand against his mother-that blow became the single act
ofviolence that absolved her in his eyes, a punishment for her sin. Instead, he
felt a vague sense of guilt at his inadequacy, at not being able to do anything
with himself that would raise his mother and sister from degradation to
Indian respectability. (TBS, 129)
The expiatory value of that physical conformity with his originary locus of
security and provision made Pipa realise that he had the moral
responsibility to play the role of a typical family bread winner.
This realisation then became a formidable power that possessed him
throughout his adult years as he wandered from place to place trying to run
away from the conditions of want and insecurity from which he emerged.
Pipa's wanderlust leads to the cultivation of a development-conscious
orientation which in itself or inter alia other factors leads to migrations from
the original locations of one's culture to Other worlds. Pipa's industry can be
seen even at the start of his working life:
He found a job as a sweeper in the big hotel called Kaiserhof on the
promenade ...He would clean under the tables and chairs after they had gone,
sweeping away cigarettes stubs and crumbs, scraps of paper. On rare but not
impossible occasions, they left something behind. Once he returned a wallet-
not before removing one note from it, a modest one-and was rewarded. (TBS,
130)
It is this focus and industry that makes Pipa develop from a Moshi lay-about
to a Tanga sweeper and, "... from this sweeper's job he moved on to pulling a
rickshaw, rented from an Indian. ('rBS, 130)
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Later in pursuit of this upward socio-economicmobility, Pipa moves
toDar es Salaam that has a greater promise of expansion and growth than
Tanga.All the time, in whatever he did the 'orphaned' young man displayed
acumen for wise decisions and the ability to pursue success, no matter the
risk or uncertainties involved. Pipa cuts the image of a soul running away
from the initial discomforts of the early locations of his life. A soul that is
running towards more tolerant and beckoning comforts, "for a few months
he did a number of odd jobs, beginning at the harbour, where porters were
alwaysin demand. He lived in Swahili quarters then, in the African sector."
(TBS,131)
However, as he moves from one location to another in pursuit of his
initial goal-human comfort, Pipa is beguiled with many challenges. The
most important of them all is that he feels that although his material fortune
seems sure so long as he works hard and smart, his emotional or social
fortunes are not. He feels the need to belong, the need to identify with a
certain people, a certain place. Vassanji posits:
Dar es Salaam was all that he had been promised it would be ...Here, surely,
was opportunity; yet how was he to go about finding it? Who was he in this
town, who knew him? As he was to find out, you had to ...be somebody. Of his
savings only a little remained, and certainly not enough to go back home the
way he had come. (TBS, 151)
The tragedy of Pipa is that as a migrant he can never really belong.
Underlying every action, thought and dreams in the life of Pipa, there seem
to be ever-rising hurdles to be surmounted, making it really impossible for
him to ever achieve the measure of comfort which he seeks. The eruption of
such tensions or hurdles on the way to Pipa's goal offers the painful lesson
that his past cannot be shed. This insecure and unstable past characterised
by the need to belong.
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The need of having to be another person other than the nonentity that he
was rides high. These tragic difficulties gain more value when they are
envisioned as hints of the futility of Pipa's journey to success. This general
reflection finds its illustration in the following particularly meaningful
illustration:
Oftenin the afternoonhe would sit beforethe blindfoldedcamel that drove
the millas it walkedperpetuallyin circles-patient, doggedlypersistent in the
illusion that it had a destination-and he would feel a surge of pity for it.
Wherecould the beast think it was going-did it see rewardsat the end ofits
journey, did it hope to meet a mate, did it hope for happiness, children,old
age?(TBS,132)
Through this disturbing question, and allegory, Vassanji appears to suggest
that the construction of the human quest for comfort in postcolonial
narratives, and the exercise of human will and drive through hard work,
demands constant reflection and questioning. Vassanji seems to intimate
that the journey undertaken by a migrant or a migrant community in search
of belonging and security in foreign locations is normally marred by doubts
and never-ending feelings of despair. Pipa's dream of escape from the vicious
cycle of poverty is confounded by blasts of doubt and uncertainty that
cumulatively become signs of his experience or the experience of those who
belong nowhere.
If we consider the recurrence of this question or Pipa's reflection cited
above, in the two novels, then one can argue that these novels are an
assertion of self-inquiry and quests for self-definition. The questions become
important leitmotifs, seen in various aspects and shades capturing the
desire to belong and attain a stabilised subjectivity, a "somebodyness." The
preliminary effort at answering Pipa's question can be seen in the
philosophy of hard work that he chooses to embrace. Vassanji reveals:
120
[H]is customers, as for the rest of his life, were the poorer Africans and
Asians, those who could not stock their larders for more than a day-buying
a little of this and a little of that. But bit by bit, as Pipa would say, the ocean
gets filled. Haba haba hujaza kibaba. There are those who sit in their shops
twitching their legs or picking their noses, saying their rosaries or singing
hymns; I have my packets. A little bit of turmeric, chili, coriander, inside a
flat cone of paper-fold, fold, fold, and a packet in the basket that would
fetch an anna. It became a meditation for him, folding packets, an
unconscious act during which he could think, come to himself, watch the
world. (TBS,203)
This is a world that has been deliberately re-presented to signify the
ruptures and continuities that mark the Asian African experience across the
boundaries of the two novels just as it does across the boundaries of fiction
and reality. The idea of Pipa and his philosophical inquiry to the meaning of
life focuses on a politics of stability and chaos, which finds its expression in
the dukawallah notions of success, vividlycaptured above. There is a need
to consider the tragic end by death in light of his quest for "happiness,
children and old age."This is howwe can discover that Pipa, as he observes
the camel, is in a kind of limbo-an interstitial space between want and
prosperity. This space is made complex by the inquiry into self-definitions
and the need to belong/ to have a home. This interstitial space that later
becomes a benchmark in the lifeworldof Nurmohammed Pipa is a signifier
of displacement and disjunction that cumulatively does totalise his
experience of life.
The towns he stops by on his way to success such as Kikono and
Tanga become certain borderlands as argued in the previous chapter. They
become sites of the Asian African experience as articulated in the actual
subjectification embodied by Pipa. Where as Pipa's subjectivity becomes in
itself a location where the interstitial experiences of Asian Mricans become
generically speaking one entity. The consistent reiteration of the metonymic
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nature of Pipa as a figure of Vassanji's selected novels msures coherence
and continuity within the narratives of the two novels.
The metonymic joint between Pipa and his community enables an
imagination of the tensions that mark the lives of the other Asian African
characters in the two novels with Pipa's own and finally there is no
distinction between the two. This is what Abdulrazak Gurnah means when
he say, "Vassanji's story-telling is layered and complex ... at the same time as
these stories of love and its transformation into torture are narrated other
stories of migration and sacrifice, of imperial adventure and hubris, are
woven in with exemplary control.vi-
For instance, that moment of personal reflection that Pipa is locked in
as he observes the camel is a major and recurrent motif in The Book of
Secrets-in fact in Vassanji's entire literary oeuvre. This, in spite of the
young man's industry:
He had the industry of the spider. He hardly ever left the shop, until closing,
when he would go to the mosque. In a world in which he had neither family
nor prestige, he found a niche, and that's where he built. Business came to
him. Whole grain from the farmers, which he would send to the mills for flour
that he would sell; copra, from which he would extract oil to sell; cashews
roasted and raw; old newspapers; even screws and nuts, bolts and nails. For
everything there was a buyer ... (TBS,203)
The camel parable of the futility of human struggles against the
circumstances of their origins becomes a sort of mnemonic strategy. This
strategy constantly brings to the reader's mind the nullity of Pipa's struggle
even as we see him follow the right channels to wealth-acquisition.
The same futility repeats itself in the person of Dhanji Govindji in The
Gunny Sack. We see his quest for answers to Pipa's questions lead him. to a
tragic death when he is murdered leaving his search for his Afro-Asian son
incomplete and his desire for stability unsatisfied. We see the same
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questions beset the exiled narrator of The Gunny Sack, Govindji's great
grandson Salim Husseni as he wonders whether in Canada he has finally
found a home and a sense of belonging. The same applies to the gaps that
mark Fernandes quests for a lost history by Mr. Fernandes-the narrator of
The Book of Secrets.
It appears all these permutating motifs try to find their answers m
evocation of historical icons, historical events and history. Yet they are still
aware of the crucial connection between the present and the past point of
origin as is Pipa. In other words, any attempts at answering the questions
raised by the logicof the blindfolded camel are attempts in investigating the
logicof illusory destinies!
Indeed, when associative meanmgs of what Edward Said calls,
"imaginative geographies" or simply locations are transferred to the
character development of Asian Africans one point becomes clear. 15 The
otherwise normal stories of exile and migration can be translated into
important political texts questioning aspects of the writer's own milieu. The
conjecture of Pipa's body or even mind as a location resounds with the
discontinuities of cultural identification and the politics of belonging. These
tensions radiate from isolated historical events endured, and trajectories of
Self-growth as one enters the worlds of adulthood from the confines of
youth. Pipa and indeed the other Asian African characters in Vassanji's
novels are not only interpretative of the interstitial settings they occupy but
are also inter-penetrative of the same. That means they make the settings
they occupy be interstitial locations of a kind or another.
It is this clever and intricate intertextuality between subjectivity and
setting that forms something of a touchstone of Vassanji's writing. By
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understanding the politics and poetics of his settings, we understand his
characters and vice versa. Considering the voluminous nature of his
narrations, normally straddling a century and five generations of Asian
Africans scattered between Zanzibar and Nairobi, this intertextuality also
facilitates a certain masterful thematic and structural consistency in
Vassanji's work.We can get an idea of this intricate interweavingof setting,
community, individual and ambition in the followingexcerpt:
Dar es Salaam was an important place. It was the residence of the German
Governor. There were many Europeans, many officials, whom it was best to
avoid. Visitors poured in from the harbour. Within minutes, a street could be
cleared to make way for the dignitary---on horse, in a motorcar or rickshaw,
or even on foot. There were people-from the interior, mostly-who would go
on their knees, down on their knees in fear when a dignitary passed and
humbly touch the ground with their heads lest they offend. In a place like
this, there were many rules, and regulations, and a police force to see that
they were obeyed. It mattered who you were, where you belonged: you were
your tribe, caste, religion, community. There was rivalry among Indian
communities, jealousy and enmity from the old country. Many a lonely young
man had been compelled to change allegiance, many a willing young man
duly rewarded with a bride and a business ...
Whether he was Shamsi community or not, Pipa could not say with
certainty. But like many others before him, he accepted the Shamsis, and
the rewards that followed: a job and a place to stay; eminent men to vouch
for him; and if he wanted, a bride. So he could become the camel who at last
stopped his endless journey and found a home. (TBS, 133)
This passage also serves to elaborate yet another important point to the
reader of The Book of Secrets. From this supposed identification with the
Shamsi who are an interstitial community in Dar, Pipa's nature becomes by
proxy that of the Shamsi and the Shamsis' interstitiality becomes a quality
of Pipa. When Pipa later collapses into one single reality characterised by a
history of pain, struggle and damnation, his community, the Shamsis also
collapse and so does his last setting where he thought he had found a
home-Dar.
The collapse of Pipa and his world into one signals the unity of
Vassanji's narratives in spite of their colossal scope in terms of time and
124
space. We can also see that by shedding his individual identity and merging
himselfwith the Shamsi cultural or communal identity, Pipa and his private
space such as his memory enter into a new polity of negotiating the
diasporic experience. From that moment, whatever happens to the Shamsi
community and indeed to their racial community-the Asian Africans of
East Africa, also happens to Pipa. Despite his singular background and his
personal misfortunes, Pipa ceases to become just a character that we meet
at the outset of this chapter and becomes the embodiment of the Asian
Africanexperience in East Africa,
The equalising and levelling effect we have described as "collapse"
reflects a deracinating impulse that is the hallmark of Vassanji's fiction. It
gestures at a celebration of transgressing boundaries that cannot be
contained by radical discourses of African postcoloniality such as nativism
and/ or Afrocentrism.This is because these discourses thrive on and indeed
feed from creation of exclusionary boundaries akin to the Self and Other
logic.
The complication of this trans-boundary orientation is evident when a
moment of difficulty arises or in a moment when the identity of that
orientation is questioned and judged. This is what happened to Pipa when
he had to pay allegiance to the British/Kenyan side first and next to the
German/Tanzanian side during the First WorldWar (TBS,165-6). In Pipa's
world just as in the world of the Shamsi and many Asian Africans, the
boundaries between these two colonies [nowcountries] does not exist. There
are many relatives and friends on both sides of the Kenya/Ugandan
boundary. Vassanji himself talks of his family's fluid movement between
Tanzania and Kenya in manner likely to suggest that you do not have to be
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either a Tanzanian or a Kenyanper se. One can be both of this [and more] at
the same time.
No matter which side of the divide Pipa runs to his psychological
odyssey makes him intuitively apprehend the futility of his situation. He
tries to run from the duties assigned to him by fate and Vassanji but he
.
runs in a complete circle. The more he tries to lead his life and dreams as
represented by Vassanji, the more his Moshi past becomes a glaring part of
that run. The dense sense of connection between setting and character
development manifested in the drama that is Pipa's life underscores the
special nature ofVassanji's characters.
The connection between the settings of the past and the
contemporary character of people like Pipa is even more pervasive as is the
case in The Gunny Sack. Salim Juma, away in exile many generations from
his progenitor, Dhanji Govindji has to supply Mrs Gaunt with an
explanation of who he is and where he comes from. Such conditions of
communal rememory as a way of self-definitionare important. The concern
with contrasting, erasing, formulating, identifying,demarcating and crossing
boundaries and spaces-be they physical or mental-seem to be one of the
most central concerns of Vassanji's process of subjectification. This concern
informs the narrative attempt to construct the process of self-identification.
It involves the articulation of subjectivity based upon discredited forms of
knowledge like the dukawallah stereotype forged in sympathy with many
historical determinants and personal choices.
Pipa is usually shown to be operating outside the legal framework of
an oppressive law system but Vassanji insists that Pipa finds no pleasure in
doing so. He is considered by many a cheat and an artful dukawallah Yet,
126
Vassanji argues persuasively that there is a lot of hard work and industry
behind Pipa's wealth that we see being nationalised at the end of the novel.
In fact, there are some instances of the book that the reader gets to
appreciate the young man's industry and the way Vassanji creatively
describes it such as this one:
Pipa Store of Kikono was a small provision store. It was here that the legend
of the thrift and cunning of Nurmoharned Pipa first took hold. Sitting at his
shopfront all day, patiently wrapping packets, dealing with customers one by
one, taking in just a few heller or paisa at a time. And one couldn't help
noticing that the unfortunate young man seemed finally to have attracted
baraka, blessings. Business at his store was brisk. (TBS, 153)
In this instance, Vassanji gives the reader a portrait of an achiever, who is
struggling to create a distance between the poverty that he was raised in
and the affluence he is seeking. This sense of in-between want and
achievement is one of the most definitive experiential locations that
characterise Pipa's development as a character. The important point to note
is that Pipa had to move from the peripheral locations of Kikono,Tanga, and
Moshi to fmd himself literally livingin plenty on prosperous Uhuru Street in
downtown Dar es Salaam.
The literary value of The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets, the two
novels that Pipa appears in, is to be found in the manner in which Vassanji
analyses Pipa's mind below the level of consciousness. The sociological
conditions which we have offered in the previous chapters and argued as
crucial to the formation of the interstitial subject like Pipa is pursued mainly
through Pipa's desires, reflections and fears. In a revealing naturalistic
undertone, Vassanji stresses the impact of the environment/location on the
bizarre patterns of conduct to be found in Pipa as a metonym of the Asian
Africans of East Africa.
127
It is for this reason that, for instance, Pipa feels compelled to run
away from spaces that stand in the way of his desire for a homely life.This
is why Pius Fernandes tells us "Pipawas home now, yet lived in fear. Hewas
a marked man, known both to the agents of Maynard and the allies of
Germans; any of them could come to call on him as they had done in
Kikono"(TBS,200). The above illustrated feelingof unhomeliness that Pipa
feels after his interstitial experience of the First WorldWar later becomes the
hallm.arkof his state of being as well.16 Nomatter where he goes or what he
does Pipa never gets comfort or feels at home. It is for this reason that he
rents a house with a shop front in Dar and that's how the famous Pipa Store
begins a new. (TBS,203)
The quest for a comfortable economic status and life gave Pipa the
original impetus to leave his hometown of Moshi in the first place. This in
essence implies that economic determinism dictates an unequal distribution
of social wealth and by extension, social status, both of which contribute
immensely to the emergence of the Asian African dukawallahs of East
Africa, This view expands Vassanji's main thesis in the two novels. He
argues that it is the conditions in which Pipa operates ever since he left
Moshi as a burly teenager that have created Pipa-the despicable
dukawallah who's industry goes hand in hand with his connivingnature.
Vassanji appears to say that those in need are inclined to use any
means to fulfil their wants and needs, even if it means breaking the law.
Nevertheless, no matter how much he falls or faces challenges, Pipa's
nomadic sense that led him away from the poverty of Moshi in search of
both belonging and material affluence make him soldier on. A good
128
illustration of this resilience that 1S another definitive aspect of the
dukawallah can be seen below:
For Pipa, the closing of the wart brought a tragedy that marked the end of one
life and the beginning of a new one in a world that had changed ...The day
after he discovered his wife dead, Pipa and the community buried her in the
little graveyard of Kikono. There was no civil government to investigate her
murder; no witnesses were sought, no rewards offered, no evidence gathered.
The Shamsis assumed that a marauding soldier had violated and killed the
young wife, and -too conveniently in the eyes of the bereaved husband-had-
dropped the matter. They were a peace-loving people not iI] the habit of
seeking vengeance. They could take comfort in the thought that Mariamu had
moved on to a better life in the hereafter. (TBS, 199)
It appears that Vassanji is concerned with an exploration of how contexts
and pre-texts influence the text that is the Dukawallah subjectivity. He
reaches the conclusion that these extra-literary factors are integral to the
understanding of the nature and character of Asian Africans of East Africa,
especially if we chose to know them through the dukawallah image as a
formofknowledge.
Vassanji's line of thought articulates the conviction that Pipa's self-
positioning in the racial and social equations of both the colonial and
postcolonial eras give clues or is in fact the summation of all Asian African
dreams, fears, worries and prospects. The captivating point is that whereas
Pipa seeks only a home, belonging and progeny in his pursuits, his
tribulations and challenges arising from his interstitiality bred by his
location in the East African cultural world underscore the vanity of such
human pursuits.
It appears Vassanji is troubled by the parable of the blindfolded
camel (TBS 132). The more you try to make a life out of your humble
beginnings, the more you will suffer and even lose your life. This especially
applies to the Asian African peoples of East Africa as embodied in the life
and times of Nurmohamed Pipa. A consideration of the surreptitious and
129
exclusionary nature of the Asian African community leads us to conclude
that The Book of Secrets is actually a "books of secrets." The novel supplies a
postcolonial reader, illuminating insights into the colonial and post-colonial
worlds of the Asian Africans in East Africa, albeit in a fictional manner.
It is when we read The Book of Secret as a book of secrets that
Vassanji's Asian African characters like Nurmohamed Pipa become exciting
aspects of the novel. They become sites where the divergent, contradictory
and contesting discourses of cultural authority meet. Through these
characters and their development throughout the narration we are given
thought-provoking revelations. For instance that the need to always go back
to the point of origin is given key significance. To understand Pipa, we have
first to go back to the infant Pipa in Moshi. The same applies to Salim Juma
in Gunny Sack. For his exile to be more meaningful and his narration more
powerful, we first have to understand where he is coming from, and his
family history from Dhanji Govindji onwards.
That is why soon after the devastating war and the losses that he
incurs, Pipa finds it necessary to go back home and revise his life. But his
home like that of many other Asian Africans throughout the two novels is
quite unhomely and as soon as he reaches Moshi, Pipa is off again, in
search of a homely space:
Hehad grownto lovehis wife[beforeshe was raped then murderedby some
unknownassailants]. He felt cheated, felt her memorysomehowviolatedby
the quick resolution in the matter of her murder. But his elders had ruled;
and there was no other authority-save the military,which he feared-to
which he could turn. The town of Kikononow held for him the bitter
reminderofa happybeginningcut short. Withindays, as soon as the British
armies had finally broken into German East Africa, Pipa set off for his
hometownofMoshi.(TBS,200)
130
There is that deep feeling of tire and loss that is captured above. Weare
brought to share in the pains of searching for homes and the pains of losing
these homes. Pipa who only wanted to become a better person in life is
repeatedly reminded of his tragic identity that is the bedrock of his
experiences.
Pipa's tragic identity as a racially different migrant in a changing East
Africais beyond his control. So is his interstitial sense, which is interpreted
by the postcolonial governments as "fence-sitting"leads him to the abyss of
dispossession as he loses all his wealth in the nativist Africanisation
programmes of the 1960s. Finally, with all strength, youth and stamina
spent on a null and void journey, Pipa succumbs to the pressure of his
diasporic identity as an Asian Africanin East Africaand dies.
By accentuating Pipa's entanglement with Moshi and all the other
settings where his life is located and dislocated, Vassanji is able to capture
what we called in the previous chapter-the poetics of setting. His interest in
man and human destiny fashioned at and by the interstices coupled with
his desire to give this philosophy of life through his remarkable creative
imagination promotes Vassanji's prowess as a finewriter.
The Book of Secrets, is really a haunting tale of interstitial man
caught in-between whatever forces that translate his existence into an arena
on which other forces beyond our control, facilitate internal and external
stress on our identities. These overwhelmingforces are best embodiedby the
camel driver in the parable of the camel supplied by Vassanji above [see
page 110]. Pipa, alternately patronised and tormented by such invincible
forces embodied in the persons of Maynard, then Corbin, then Nyerere, is
tragically destined to be hounded and haunted into his fated dukawallah
131
subjectivity much as he attempts to run from it. He is a victim of his time
and space.
From the foregoing, we submit that the novel can be read as a writer's
exercise in the conjecture of the tragedy between the migrant, his fate and
his location within a borderland in so far as it concerns belonging and
survival. Pipa's death after dispossession in the Africanisation programmes
of the 1960s by the newly-independent Tanzania becomes a translational
experience. He becomes a microcosm of the "chaosmic" worlds that is the
interstitial worlds of Asian Africans in East Africa. It is in this sense that
words fail both Fernandes and Juma as they muse over the difficulty of
trying to intellectualise the tribulations of interstitiality as felt by Asian
Africans in post-independence East Africa thus:
How to recall a storm, the actual downpour, the continuous pelting, in this
case, of events that battered at the old world and brought down the shaky
structures that had lost their foundations? Wiped clean was one prevailing
image, exaggerated and too personal, applying perhaps to the bankbook, for
a storm wrought by human hands does not wipe clean but leaves debris
behind. Broken hopes, broken families, above all, broken faith washed away
by the torrents into time's flooding gutters replaced by a new cynicism: every
man for himself and God against all. (TGS,239)
4.5. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have engaged Vassanji on his characterisation in The
Book of Secrets, with special reference to the "enabling" stereotypical trope of
the dukawallah. We argue that of all the subject-positions or images of the
Asian Africans in East Africa and indeed in Vassanji's novels, the
dukaiuallah. as the quintessential image of the Asian African in East Africa is
a popular door through which to understand the community. Through
Nurmohammed Pipa Vassanji resurrects this trope, otherwise buried in the
minds of many East Africans by indigenous and White writers through thus
132
affording us fresh insights. He re-narrativises the stereotype from its
disavowedsubject-position of an "evil,conniving, segregationist Muindi' and
(as)signs it to multiple subject-positions evident in the trajectory of Pipa's
life so as to explore East Africa's (post)colonial ambiguities, conflicting and
intertwined histories.
133
CHAPTER FIVE
THE IN-BETWEEN WORLDS OF M. G. VASSANJI: A RETROSPECTIVE
CONCLUSION
5.1. Introduction
This study set out to look at the manner in which MGVassanji draws from
his experience as an Asian Africa writer to render certain aspects of his
novels, The Gunny Sack and the Book of Secrets. These aspects were setting,
and character development (subjectification). In doing this, the study drew
impetus from Homi Bhabha's view that postcolonial writers embrace writing
as a kind of agency. Vassanji was discussed as an Asian African writer
within East African literary discourse, and how he occupies an ambivalent
location when he is viewedcollectivelywith other East African novelists such
as Elspeth Huxleyand Ngugiwa Thiong'o.l
Such writers as Vassanji demonstrate through their literary works
how the specific experience of a racially-distinct diasporic community that
lived under twentieth-century European colonialism problematises their
post-independence predicament. This was our second submission. Thirdly,
we read M. G. Vassanji's selected novels, The Gunny Sack and The Book oj
Secrets. The reading was guided by the view that in terms of form the two
novels did display the influence of the ambivalent world occupied by Asian.:
Africanwriters, whose experiences in East Africathe novels reveal.
K _NYATTA U lVF.RSITY LtBRARY'
134
5.2. General Observations and Synthesis of the Findings
A brief background of the Asian African community and writer within the
East African situation was the focus of the first chapter. It mapped the
causes and course of the study, charting a way forward after reviewing
related and relevant work:
1. To critically read how Vassanji's consciousness of his interstitiality as an
Asian African writer emanates from within the cultural experiences of his
community through a historical lens.
2. To supply a critical interpretation of the textual manner in which
consciousness of occupying an in-between world influences how Vassanji
treats his settings in the selected novels.
3. To further illustrate how the settings of Vassanji's selected novels affect
interpretations of major characters such as Nurmohamed Pipa, who is
modelled on the popular stereotype of the "dukawallah."
Each objective was subsequently addressed in a chapter of its own.
Postcolonial literary theory underpinned the reading of Vassanji's novels,
The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets.
While historical setting has not been overlooked in discussions of
Vassanji's novels, it is usually detached from any aesthetic or literary
appreciation of its connection with aspects of the novels under study.s ThiS.
might be sufficient if Vassanji were an indigenous African postcolonial
writer, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, because much has been said about the
novels of such writers. But he is not. Vassanji is a member of a post-colonial
community in East Africa that is considered minority and diasporic. Chapter
two was thus an attempt to set Vassanji's practice as a writer in an
appropriate East African historical and aesthetic context. This was done so
135
that the quiddity of the form and themes of The Gunny Sack and The Book of
Secrets may be assessed more accurately.
After extensive reading in postcolonial literary criticism, it becomes
apparent that literary criticism cannot take place effectively in a vacuum, a
space of pure reason or absolute judgment. It takes place in a cultural and
.
political environment, where at a certain time certain problems need to be
addressed in new ways. It is for this reason that in this chapter we
contextualise the sense of in-betweeness of the Asian African community
evident in the works of various Asian African writers, especially Vassanji. By
understanding the specificities of the Asian African experience in East
Africa, a reader of Vassanji's novel attains a fuller aesthetic appreciation of
both the social vision and formal aspects.
Vassanji is as deliberate in his treatment of setting as he is of the
Asian African characters. Indeed his settings as formal aspects of the
selected novels are significant factors in the general view of the novels as
postcolonial modes of representation. The imagined settings of The Gunny
Sack for instance, are not always the actual environment occupied by his
community. There are also fictive locations, mythical locations such as
Matamu, which like the Dar and Zanzibar in The Gunny Sack bespeak the
demarcation of society into three major racial groups: Whites, Browns and
Blacks.
A consideration, therefore, of the actual location of Vassanji's
characters such as Dhanji Govindji and Salim Juma needs to be seen within
the racially and experientially fractured lens. This view serves to clarify the
moral position of lived experience. Seen from this perspective, Govindji and
Salim occupy different experiential locations of the East African colonial and
136
postcolonial culture from Black characters or White characters. This is the
subject of the third chapter.
One of the most interesting features of Vassanji's work is his anxiety
to re-interpret the popular East African stereotype of the dukawallah in the
East African literary tradition. Chapter four focuses on the story of Pipa in
The Book of Secrets - a story of futile negotiations in his attempts to find a
homely sense as an East African, both in the colonial and postcolonial
dispensation. Pipa's plight surreptitiously disavowed earlier stock portrayals
of the dukawallah as mysterious and conniving migrant in East African
literature. In The Book of Secrets, Vassanji presents Pipa from ambivalent
subject positions, as wretched offspring of a whore, as hardworking
labourer, as double agent, as prosperous but conniving dukawallah and as
loving father/husband.
Vassanji's preference for ambiguity rather than fixity in his treatment
of the dukawallah character in The Book of Secrets is an important exercise
within postcolonial literary criticism. It points to a shift in the process of
character development away from the constraints of limited perspectives of
the Other to a depiction of the Other from the Other's perspective. Rather
than depict Pipa as just a wily and cunning shopkeeper in post-
independence Tanzania, the readers of The Book of Secrets are treated to the
personal and communal historical contexts that make Pipa the dukawallah
that he is. This is what Bhabha's line of thinking within postcolonial studies
advocates for; a shift away from the limited view of the Other as either
negative or positive to a consideration of the process of subjectification that
makes the Other who he or she is.
137
5.3. Specific Findings from Reading the Two Novels
In The Gunny Sack, it appears that interstitiality is the basic leitmotif
around which the whole novel is constructed. Vassanji's imagined settings
in this novel appear to be constructive textual modes that help the writer
bring out his theme of interstitiality with respect to the Asian African
community in East Africa. Setting therefore is seen as metaphor of
dislocation and as thematic motive. Chapter two which focussed mainly on
this novel illustrates the implication of interstitial locations in the experience
and narration of Asian African cultural difference and identity.
In The Book of Secrets, the subject of the fourth chapter, however,
Vassanji cross-questions the (ab)uses of the dukawallah stereotype,
subsequently creating a complex and ambivalent character, Nurmohammed
Pipa. The novelist shows us how this quintessential image of the Asian
African in East Africa is at once bound to and yet not of the landscape that
he inhabits. He leads us to a re-examination of the reader's own subjectivity;
a re-examination of the standpoints from which misconceptions and
misinterpretations are formed. Ultimately, Vassanji provides no easy
answers to both findings stated above. He insists, nevertheless, that it is in
the fmer details of life that a full appreciation of the bigger picture is made
possible.
5.4. Recommendations for Future Research Directions
The study was conducted within its stated scope and limitations. M. G.
Vassanji's imagined and real experiences in-between the many worlds he
has lived in and writes about are far too complex to be wholly depicted in
138
any number of critical studies. We avoided making overgeneralisations by
narrowing focus to only two of the five novels of Vassanji, The Gunny Sack
and The Book of Secrets. And in our reading of these two novels, we
specifically focussed on the novelist's treatment of setting and character
development. Nevertheless, the following areas provide research directions
for further scholarship in line with the present study:
1. There is need to interrogate Vassanji's ambivalence or interstitiality from
the perspective of linguistic-based identity politics. This venture might
cross-question the poststructuralist [and indeed postcolonialist]
conviction that language is the bedrock of identity-negotiation,
construction and articulation.
2. Vassanji's fictional women such as Ji Bhai, Kulsum and Amina in The
Gunny Sack and Mariamu in The Book of Secrets appear to be prominent
structural, thematic and formal features. We suggest that an
examination of their nature, character, identities, textuality, relations
and meaning can be an original contribution to the study of Asian
African literatures and indeed postcolonial gender discourse.
This study is in dialogue with other critical work on Vassanji and on
other Asian African writers. Ultimately, literary works to be understood they
must be examined in such a way that the stated intentions of the writers are
at least considered. This is what we did with The Gunny Sack and The Book
of Secrets. From our readings of Vassanji we can join Bhabha in suggesting
that:
Counter-narratives of the nation that continually. evoke and erase its
totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological
manoeuvres through which imagined communities' are given essentialist
139
identities ... This narrative inversion or circulation-which is in the spirit of
my splitting of the people-makes untenable any supremacist, or nationalist
claims to cultural mastery, for the position of narrative control is neither
monocular nor monologic.>
Vassanji's counter-narratives in The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets
admittedly provoke tensions especially on the Asian African question that
certainly demand more critical attention from literary scholars and other
interested constituencies in East Africa. This reading is an attempt to open
up more avenues of reciprocal and intercultural enrichment, understanding
and knowledge.
140
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
I In a Brown Mantle (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1972).
2 To our knowledge, the term was first used in our definitive-classificatory sense by Sultan
Somjee. See www.museums.or.kefasian.html. Alternative references have been supplied and
although, infrequent in their usage, they also point to the cultural ambivalence inherent.in the
community in mind. These alternative references include: "Brown African," "African Asians,"
"Asians in East Africa," "South Asians in East Africa /Afro-Asians," "Kenyan South Asians"
among lesser known others. See John M Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country (New Delhi:
Tidings Publications, 1981); Charles Sarvan, 'Ethnicity and Alienation: The African Asian and
His Response to Africa,' The Journal of Commonwealth Llteratures.Net. XX 1(1985) 100; J. S.
Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886, to 1945 (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press,
1969); Lawrence Hollingsworth, The Asians of East Africa (London: New York: Macmillan,
1960).; Dana April Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers: The World of East African Asians,
1750-i985 (New Delhi: New Age International, 1996) and Zahid Rajan, ed. Awaaz: The
Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History Vol. 1-3 (Nairobi: Zand Publications,
2004) respectively. However, Somjee's designation, Asian African, is the preferred reference to
the community as a cultural community in East Africa. It shows greater appreciationiawareness
of the situational-Iocational reference of the community as it exists in postcolonial East Africa.
That is to say it draws attention to the interstitial being located in-between "Asianness" and
"Africanness" and finds its essence in the migrant nature of the Asian African community.
3 We discovered that these 'New Asians' in Kenya are normally referred to by the Asian Africans
as 'Rockets' alluding to their speedy acquisition of wealth from investment in the ever-growing
Export Processing Zones (EPZ) business. The rockets are mainly South Asian nationals or
representatives of South Asian multinationals with economic interests across the world, East
Africa included.
4 See for instance E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, 'The Political Economy of the Asian problem in Kenya
1883-1939,' Transafrica Journal of History 4, 1(1974): 135-149.
5 See Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London,
Nairobi, Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1972,) xix. See also his essay, The African
Writer and his Past,' in Christopher Heywood, ed. Perspectives on African Literature (New
York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971,) 8.
6 See Taban' s Another Last Word (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1990,) 39-42. Besides the
Blacks, Browns and the Whites, in East African culture there is also the Arabic component which
inhabits the coastal region. Most of this component though, due to its close miscegenation with
indginous African peoples are considered as being part of the Black Africans. Such a
consideration is contentious for it does not pay attention to the fact that the Arabs enjoyed a
somewhat second-class citizenship under the colonial government. For our puposes though, we
look at the Arabic component as being part of the Black African community. Our argument
hinges on the fact that writers such as Said Ahmed Mohamed and/orAli Mazrui, though by and
large of Arabic extraction are still considered mainstream literary voices in East Africa.
7 See appendix one for more details on Vassanji's biographical data.
8 This claim has been made with substantial arguments by Gareth Griffith, in his encylcopeadic
book African Literatures in English: East and West (Essex :Pearson Educational Publishers,
2000). Apart from writing both fiction and criticism, Vassanji has also published other Asian
African writers such as Peter Nazareth and Sophia Mustapha using his publishing house TSAR
Books based in Toronto, Canada.
9 See Wahome Mutahi, "Memories of Yesterday's Home," Lifestyle Magazine, Sunday Nation
[Nairobi] 27 Oct. 1991:13.
10 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London, New york: Routledge, 1994,) 171.
II See their edited book, Decolonisation of imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London:
Zed Books, 1995) 14.
141
12 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995,) 23.
13 16.
14 See my interview with him in Rajan, ed. Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South
Asian History Issue Jll (Nairobi: Zand Publishers, 2005,) 17-19.
15 Orientalism: Western Representation of the Orient (1978: New York: Vintage, 1994).
16 5.
17 338.
18 Recently, in an illumninating review of Vassanji's The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, the
critic Leela Jacinto has referred to the Asian African community in East Africa as the 'Other
Africans.' This labelling notifies other critics of the problematic nature of the category of
Otherness. See her article on www.thenation.com/doc.rnhtml ?I=20041227&c=3&c=jacinto
« Accessed on 22nd February, 2005 »
19 Lung'aho, 'The African Prescence in the Novel of Nadine Gordimer: 1960-1990,' M Phil.
Thesis, Moi University, Eldoret, 1993; Wa Mungai, 'Self and Other in Selected Novels of
Nadine Gordimer,' MA theis, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, 1998. See also Peter Tirop
Simatei's, 'Ethnicity and Otherness in Kenya Cultures,' in Bethwell Ogot ed. Ethnicity,
Nationalism and Democracy in Africa (Kisumu: Maseno University College, 1997,) 51-5.
20 Micere Mugo, Visions of Africa (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1973); Chris Wanjala, For
Home and Freedom (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1980); Eddah Gachukia, "Cultural
Contlict in East Africa," PhD. Diss, U of Nairobi, 1980.
21 Said, Orientalism, 5.
22 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979,) 17.
23 (London: UCL Press, 1994).
24 See JanMohamed doctoral dissertation, 'The Politics of Literary Generation in the African
Colonial Situation,' University of Brandeis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1977. The dissertation upon
revision was later published as the seminal book, Manichean Aesthetics. It is interesting to note
the different perspectives that Wanjala and JanMohamed take on the issue of literary criticism in
East African letters. They both come from Kenya but JanMohamed emigrated to and teaches in
Carlifornia, US. ".-
25 Appiah, 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism,' 353-4.
26 Sarup, Identity, Culture, 155.
27 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
28 , 153.
29 Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery (Nairobi: Colour Print, 1998,) 6.
30 This is the possible reason why Vassanji went a step ahead to capture this interstitial sense in the
title of his recent-most novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: New day, 2003).
Peter Nazareth also hinted to this interstitial dimension in the title and narration of his first
novel, In A Brown Mantle.
31 JanMohamed and Llyod Davis, eds., The Nature and Context of a Minority Discourse (New
York Oxford UP, 1990); Chartajee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton, New York: Princeton UP, 1993); Appiah, 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism
the Post- in Postcolonial,' Critical Inquiry (Winter, 1991) 337; Mudimbe, The invention of
Africa (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988); Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New
York: Methuen, 1987).
32 See http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabhalreviews.html(( Accessed on 15th August
2003 »
33 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37-9.
34 Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, 163.
35 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 173.
36 'Contextualising Anglophone African Fiction: Ngugi and Armah Compared,' Ph.D Diss. U of
Glasgow, 2000: 3.
37 See www.museums.or.ke/asian.html
38 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers: The World of East African Asians, I 750-i985 (New Delhi:
New Age international, 1996); Rothschild, Racial Bargaining in independent Kenya: A Study of
Minorities and Decolonisation (London: Oxford UP, 1973); Pandit, Asians in East and Central
Africa (Nairobi: Panco Publications, 1963); Nanjira, or-heStatus of Aliens in East Africa: Asians
142
and European in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1976); Mangat, A History
of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886, to 1945 (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1969);
Hollingsworth, The Asians of East Africa (London: New York: Macmillan, 1960) ; Gregory,
1ndia and East Africa; A History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890-1939
(Oxford: at the University Press, 1971) ; Bharati, The Asians in East Africa (Chicago: Nelson-
Hall and co., 1972) ; Atieno-Odhiambo, 'The Political Economy of the Asian problem in Kenya,'
Marndani, From Citizen to Refugee (London: Frances Pinter, 1973); Patel, Challenge to
Colonialism: The Struggle of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee for Equal Rights in Kenya (Nairobi:
Zand Graphics, 1997).
39 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 63.
55 See Susheila Nasta, 'Interview with M.G. Vassanji.' 3. Wasafiri (1996): 41-45.
40 See Deonandan's electronic magazine, www.deonandan.com
41 See her insightful chapter, 'Mediating Origins: Moyez Vassanji and the Discursivities of
Migrant Identity,' in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. Contemporary African Writing Vol.2 (London:
James Currey, 1995.)
42 63
43 See her doctoral dissertation, 'Children's Literature in Tanzania: A Literary Appreciation of its
Growth and Development,' Kenyatta University, 118.
44 120.
45 See the introduction ofVassanji's The 1n-Between.
46 Nazareth, <The Social Responsibility of the East African Writer,' in his The Third World Writer
and His Social Responsibility (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978) ; Sarvan, 'The Asians in
African Literature,' The Journal of Commonwealth Studies XI 2(1976) : 160-9. Siddiqi's view is
evident in her harrowing rerminisce, 'Uganda: A Personal Viewpoint on the Expulsion, 30
Years on.' It was published by the electronic journa11nfmmation for Social Science. The article
is available at http://libr.orglISC/articles/15-Siddiqi-l.html. and has been republished under the
title, 'Haunts of Uganda's 30 Year old Past,' in Rajan, ed. Awaaz : The Authoritative Journal of
Kenyan South Asian History Issue I, 6-8.
47 Liyong, Another Last Word
48 See my 'Tradition and Transition: The Tabanic Traditions and Asian African Writers from East
Africa,' in Ruth Bett, et.aL, eds, Across Borders: Benefiting From Cultural Differences
(nairobi : DAAD, 2005) 43-63.
49 This paper was presented at CODESRIA's 10thGeneral Assembly under the Theme 'Africa in
the New Millenium' held at the Nile International Conference Centre in Kampala, Uganda
between 8th_12thDecember, 2002. CODESRlA is the acronym of the established Council for
Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
50 12.
51 This paper was presented at CODESRIA's 30tl1 Anniversary Conference held in Dakar, Senegal
between 10th_12thDecember, 2003. It is available online at
www.coderia.org/LinkS/conferences/dakar/kahyana.pdf. «Downloaded on 17th June 2004 »
52 (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2001). This dissertation was submitted in the University of
Bayreuth, Germany. Simatei remains, at the moment, the most authoritative commentator on the
growing researches into Asian African literatures from East Africa.
53 Besides his doctoral research, he has made various conunentaries through journals on Asian
African literatures such as, 'Voyaging on the Mists of Memory: M. G. Vassanji and the Asian
Quest/ion' in: English Studies in Africa; 43. 1(2000):.29-42. It is interesting to note that he was
led into this direction of research by Prof. Chris L. Wanjala. This was revealed by Wanjala in a
personal interview by the present researcher on iz" February, 2004 in his office at Mokhtar
Dada street, Nairobi.
54 See Sue Kossew and Dianne Schwerdt, eds., Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives
(Huntington, N. Y: Nova Science Publishers, 2001). Ojwang's chapter is the fifth one in this
informative book.
55 Gumah, ed. Contemporary African Writing, Derek Wright, New Directions in African Fiction
(New York: , 1997); Lindfors, Black African Literatures in English 1992-1996 (Oxford: Hans
Zell Publishers; London: James Currey, 2000) and Gareth Griffith, African Literatures in
English: East and West (Essex: Pearson Education, 2000).
143
56 For a detailed discussion on these emerging writers and their works, see chapter on the
transcultural voices in African literature, in Griffith, African Literatures in English,
57 Other novels by M. G. Vassanj i', besdies the two under study in this work include, No New Land
(Toronto: Mc Clelland and Stewart Inc., 1991).; Amriika (Toronto: Mc Clelland and Stewart,
1999) and The Inbetween World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: New Day, 2003). He has also
published an anthology of short stories, Uhuru Street: A Collection of Short Stories (London:
Heinemann, 1992) .
58 The book was published in 1998 by Vassanji's own Toronto-based publishing house, TSAR
Books. See also Nurjehan Aziz ed. Floating Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism
(Toronto: TSAR Books, 2000). The book editor is Vassanji's wife and he wrote the thought-
provoking forward to it.
j9 See www.tsarbooks.com
60 We are aware that Vassanji is about to publish a second anthology of short stories based most
based in Kisumu, Kenya, where a significant population of Asian Africans dwell. The anthology
entitled, When She Was Queen (Toronto: Doubleday, October 2005.)
61 See Key-Concepts in Post-Colonial Theory (London, New York: Routledge, 2000).
62 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 139-141.
63 362
64 See Bhabha, 374.
65 See his For Marx. trans. Ben Brewster, (Hammondsworth : Penguin, 1966,) 228.
66 (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)
67 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 171.
68 Ashcroft et.al. Key Concepts, 193. The three scholars posit that from a postcolonial reading
perspective such unspoken subjects [as Asian Africans] may "(ell- become the crucial
announcements of the text.
CHAPTER 2: IN(BETWEEN) BLACK AND WHITE
I See the section subtitled, "Vital Issues in the Criticism of African Literature," in his insightful
book, The Social Experience in African Literature (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1985,) 2. For a
discussion of Oladele's view with respect to East African literature, see also Chris Wanjala, The
Season of Harvest: A Literary Discussion (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978,) 2-3.
2 See Malak's essay, "Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction ofM.
G. Vassanji,"_World Literature Today, 67 (1993): 277-82; Simatei, Novel and Politics of Nation-
Building in East Africa: Bayreuth African Studies, 55; Kanaganayakam, "Broadening the
Substrata: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji." World Literature Today, 67, 2(1991): 19-35;
Kirchoff, "Figuring that Words are the Way to Go: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji," Toronto
Globe and Mail. 4 March, 1991.Ball, "Interview with M. G. Vassanji," Paragraph: The Canadian
Fiction Review, Vol. 15, (Winter, 1993/Spring, 1994); Bardolph, "Negotiating Place/ Recreating
Home: Short Story Cycles by Naipaul, Mistry and Vassanji," in Jacqueline Bardolph, ed. Telling
Stories: Postcolonial Fiction in English (Amsterdam: Atlanta: Nell Publishers, 2001);Elder,
"Indian Writing in East and South Africa: Multiple Approaches to Colonialism and Apartheid,"
in Emmanuel S. Nelson ed., Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (New York:
Westport, London, 1992,) 115-39; Ball, "Locating M G Vassanji's The Book of Secrets:
Postmodem, Postcolonial, or Other-wise?" in Nurjehan Aziz, ed., Floating the Borders: New
Contexts in Canadian Criticism (Toronto: TSAR, 1999,) 89-105.
3 Anthony Gerard posits, "no work of literary art can be properly understood in total abstraction of
its context. It is imperative, therefore that the scholar should first gain real knowledge of the
writer's society and its culture." See his Contexts of African Literature (Amsterdam: Roldolpi,
1990), 162. The view is reiterated by Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe Boyi, the President of the
African Literature Association (ALA) in her Presidential Inaugural address of the African
Literature Association 28tl1 Conference at San Diego, March 3rd to 7th 2002 observed that "It is
interesting today to notice that interdisciplinarity (sic) is encouraged, and that in the study of
texts [literary], greater attention is paid to socio-cultural and historical contexts.'
144
4 See his excellent and illtuninating essay "The Growth of the East African Novel," in G. D.
Killam's The Writing of East and Central Africa. 231-246. Kiiru's paper, "Aspects of the Novel
in East Africa," in Eddah Gachukia and S. Kichamu Akivaga, eds, Teaching of African
Literature in Kenyan Schools (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978,) 91-101. Simatei, The
Novel and Politics of Nation-Building in East Africa (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University; London:
Global, 2001). Simetai has actually argued that East African literature, especially the novel,
seeks to actively make history because the novelists see themselves as their nations' conscience.
This is a fact that cannot be disputed by anyone widely familiar with East African novelists.
5 Notice the intertextuality between history and postcolonial literature in Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak's observation in an interview with Arnold Arteaga entitled "Bonding in Difference" in
Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean ed. Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York: Routledge, 1996,) 25-26. Spivak holds that 'history is after all storying." She also points
out that the French language has this very idea conveniently captured in the word histoire, which
means both 'history' and 'story.' Her interviewer, Alfred Arteaga concurs with her, pointing out
that it works the same in the Spanish word 'historia.' See also S. E. Ogude's, "African Literature
and the Burden of History: Some Reflections:' in Chidi Ikonne, Emelia Oko and Peter
Onwudinjo, ed., African Literature and African Historical Experiences. (Ibadan: Heinemann
Educational Books Nigeria PLC, 1991.) 1-6.
6 See the introduction of his essay "The Novelist as Historian: Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de
Violence Revisited.' In Chidi Ikonne, Emelia Oko and Peter Onwudinjo, ed. African Literature
and African Historical Experiences, 44. This pact between M. G. Vassanji as a writer and the
Asian African community is most evident in the sentiments of the renowned Kenyan Asian
African ethnographer Sultan Somjee. He says of Vassanji's recent most novel The In-Between
Worlds of Vikram Lall, "Reading the book, I felt I know all this; I have lived it; I feel it in my
veins," he goes on to remark that, "I feel 1 have met and worked with the variety of characters
among both Asian families and African friends, and breathed the fragrance of the landscapes but
Vassanji has put in touching words what a lesser writer cannot do with such mastery." See the
book review of this novel conducted by the eminent Kenyan scholar; Evan Mwangi entitled
"How New Novel Explores Kenya's Moving History." In Lifestyle Magazine, Sunday Nation, 22
Feb. 2004: 12
7 See Wahome Mutahi's article "Memories of Yesterday's Home," Lifestyle, Sunday Nation
[Nairobi] 27 Oct. 1991: 13. Vassanji is quoted having said, "Even when you go away, you take
your country with you."
8 See his title essay, 'Locations of Culture' in The Location of Culture (New York, London:
Routledge, 1994,) 1-18.
9 Moving The Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (Nairobi: East African Educational
Publishers, 1993,) xv.
10 See Wanjohi wa Makokha, "Worlds In-Between: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji," in Zahid
Rajan, ed. Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History, Issue III. (Nairobi:
Zand, 2005).
II The Location of Culture, 171.
12 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978).
13 See Ngugi waThiong'o, Homecoming (London: Heinemman, 1972, ) ix. Ngugi has consciously
admitted his lack of knowledge of the Asian way of life and even limited his commentary to the
WhitelBlack cultural discourse. In the same admission, he argues that this is why he uses
stereotypical representation of both European and Indians in his work as a way of
communicating his attiitudes towards the two communities. See Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis
Duerden, ed. Talking with African Writers (Heinemman, 1972.) 65.
14 This enunciation alerts us to the possibility that there may be 'other kinds of East African
Asians,' such as the prevalent stereotypical figures which Dana April Seidenberg decries in
selected works of Okot p' Bitek and Elspeth Huxley. See Seidenbeg's subsection entitled,
'Fanning the Flames of Racism,' in her, Mercantile Adventurers: The World of East African
Asians, 1750-1985 (New Delhi: New Age International, 1996,) 185-8.
15 See her inspirational, 'Contextualising Anglophone African Literature: Ngugi and Armah
Compared,' Ph.D Diss. University of Glasgow, 2000.
145
16 "Stepping Out of Segregation: The Changing face of Kenyan Asians," Society Magazine, Sunday
Standard, 4 Apr. 2004: 5-6.
17 6. Although this view finds its expression in a seemingly unacademic medium, a
newspaper, it is a widely held misebelief even in scholarly circles as is evident in Yash Tendon's
The Future of the Asians in East Africa (London: Rex Collings, 1973). See especially pp. 1-4.
However, scholars such as Kennedy Otsola argue indeed that Indians have been in East Africa
for many years before the coming of the British. He says, 'contrary to popular misconception,
the Asians did not all arrive in the British colony [East Africa] as cheap labour for building of the
Ugandan railway. Indian ships were calling in at East African ports centuries before the British
even knew East Afrcia existed, long before the railway was built.' See also 'The Basic Tenets of
the Arya Samaj and its Establishment in Nairobi,' in J.N.K. Mugambi and Mary N. Getui ~ds.
Religions in East Africa under Globalization (Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 2004,) 228.
18 Apter's The Political Kingdom in Ugaanda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1961,) 164. This view isalso reiterated in Tandon, The Future of Asians, 1.
19 For instance in his recent insightful study, 'The Worlds of Gikuyu Mythology: A Structural
Analysis,' Ph.D Diss. Kenyatta University, 2001, Michael Wainaina points out that past
experiences shows that understanding of folkloric material is hampered or facilitated by
theoretical approaches in vogue. On his part, the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani [himself
an Asian African] observes that 'A myth is not a lie. It is based on truth. Only, its tendency is to
decontextualize the truth, and to present a version of truth as the truth.' 177. See his ar ticle,
'The Truth According to the TRC,' in Ifi Amadiume and Abdullah An-Naim, The Politics of
Memory: Truth, Healing and SociaLJustice (London, New York: Zed Books, 2000,) 176-183.
20 Armah gave a lecture at Taifa Hall in University of Nairobi on 17th February, 2005. He later
held interactive sessions with students, scholars and literati at the Department of Literature,
Kenyatta University and Kenya National Theatre Concert Hall on 22nd February, 2002. For a
critical overview of Armah's itinerary, see my article,"Tradition and Transition: The Tabanic
Traditions and Asian African Writers from East Africa," in Ruth Bett, et.al. eds. Across Borders:
Benefiting from Cultural Difference (Nairobi: DAAD, 2005) 43-63.
21 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1972).
22 See Rasna Warah, Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery (Nairobi: Colour Print, 1998,)
26.
23 "Uganda: A Personal Viewpoint on the Expulsion, 30 Years on." The illuminating though tragic
recollection is available at http://libr.org/ISC/articlesI15-Siddiqi-l.html. « Accessed on 30th
April, 2005»
24 'Asians in African Literature,' The Journal of Commonwealth Studies XI 2(1976): 160-9.
25 See Singh's Sweet Scum of Freedom," in Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. Nine
African plays for Radio (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973,) 42.
26 Vassanji (Nairobi, London, Ibadan: Heinemann, 1989); (Toronto: Mc Clelland and Stewart,
1994; London: Macmillan, 1995); Tejani's (Nairobi: EAEP, 1971); Nazareth (Nairobi, EAEP,
1972); Sondhi, in Cosmo Pieterse, ed. Short African Plays (Nairobi, London, Ibadan: HEB,
1973,) 1-24.
27 Ngugi, (Nairobi: EAEP, 1977); Mbogo, (Dar es Salaam: Heko Publishers, 2002); Rubadiri,
(Nairobi: EAPH, 1967); Blixen, (London: Penguin, 1937); Okot, (l953:Nairobi: Heinemann
Kenya, 1989).
28 'Ethnicity and Alienation: The African Asian and His Response to Africa,' The Journal of
Commonwealth Literatures,_Vo!. XX 1(1985) 100.
29 "An Insight into Asian Conservatism," The Weekly Review, INov. 1991:31.
30 See Makokha, "The Worlds In-Between,"
31 See Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886 to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969.)
32 It must be pointed out that of the many historical accounts of the 'Indian community' in East
Africa that we have reviewed (see Chapter One), we find Mangat's study a reliable and valuable
in-depth study of the immigration and settlement of the community. While the others, only serve
as important surveys or introduction to the subject, Mangat, by relying on a combination of data
collection techniques and methods to harness primary data succeeds in producing one of the few
146
serious attempts at a historical study of the 'Indians of East Africa.' The reader will find the
preface to Mangat's book useful as a critical review of literature on East Africa.
33 (New Delhi: New Age International Publishers, 1997.)
34 See Mangat, A History of the Asians, 2.
3~ (London: Oxford UP, 1971.)
36 He points out that by the eve of Partition [under the Berlin Conference of 1884], the Indians were
an important element in the economic and political situation." 5.
37 For a fuller account of statistical data see, Samuel G. Ayany, A History of Zanzibar: A Study in
Constitutional Development 1934-1964 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1970).
38 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 25.
39 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 19-20.
40 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 22.
41 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 25. We must emphasis here that Mangat sees these Anti-Asian
sentiments as having been the formative elements for later aggression and racist harassment of
Indians in East Africa. He says "In the final analysis, however, the adverse criticisms of the
Indian community were to provide a precedent for the future and the tendency to use the Indians
as a 'scapegoat' was to continue." We discuss this view in more details later in this chapter
under the sub-titles "Empowerment and Emasculation."
42 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 3.
43 See Lawrence Hollingworth, Asians in East Africa (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960,) 16-7. We call it a
pioneering book, because we are yet to come across a historical study of the Asians in East
Africa that precedes it.
44 Mangat, A History if the Asians, 22.
45 For an interesting discussion of this view see Mangat, 22.
46 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 22-3.
47 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979).
48 See a discussion on this policy in Seidenberg, 20-25. Also see Mangat's chapter two entitled"
Beginnings in the Interior, c. 1886 to c. 1902." 27-62.
49 See Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, Chapter two.
50 In fact Churchill is quoted as having said, "It was the Sikh (and Punjabi Muslim) soldier who
bore an honourable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It is the
Indian trader who, penetrated and maintained himself in all sorts of places to which no white
man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anyone else
developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of
communications. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else
depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies the larger part of the capital yet
available .... " (cf.) Mangat, 61-62. For a full account of Churchill's account ofIndians of East
Africa see W. S. Churchill, My African Journey (London, 1908).
51 Vassanji, The Book of Secrets, 1-65.
52 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 98.
53 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 98-111.
~4 Mangat A History of the Asians, III.
55 See (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.) See also A. S. Kala, 'The Role of 'Asians" in
Kenya's Nationalist Movement,' in R. R. Ramchandani, ed. India and Africa (New Delhi.
Radiant, 1980,) 204-221.
56 Rosberg and Nottingham, 39.
57 Rosberg and Nottingham, 39.
58 See Mangat III. See also R. T. Mc Cormack, "Asians in Kenya: Conflict and Politics," Ph.d
diss., University ofFribourg, New York. He offers a more detailed analysis of the role of British
policy in fuelling Anti-Asian resentment.
59 See David Cook and David Rubadiri, eds, Poems from East Africa (Nairobi, London, Ibadan:
Heinemarm EB, 1971,) 156-7.
60 For a discussion of this intriguing politics see Zarina, Patel's insightful Challenge to
Colonialism: The Struggle of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee for Equal Rights in Kenya (Nairobi:
Zand Graphics, 1997). The speech made by Jeevanjee on his inaguration as the presdient of the
147
East African Indian National Congress especially highlights the issues that were being contested
between the Asians and the Europeans.
61 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 129.
62 The role of the Indian printing presses and magazines in the early/formative period of anti
colonial politics in early last century has been extensively studied. See for instance, Rosberg Jnr.
and Nottingham, Mau Mau and Nationalism in Kenya, and also Dana April Seidenberg, Uhuru
and the Kenyan Indians: The Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics, 1939-1963 (New
Delhi: Vikas Press, 1983.)
63 Cf. Mangat A History of the Asians, 129.
64
65 But I am informed and guided by a view held by Barbara Neale in her informative essay, "Asi~
in Nairobi: A Preliminary Survey," In W. H. Whiteley, Language Use and Social Change:
Problems of Multilingualism with Special Reference to Eastern Africa (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1971,) 334-336. She says "Any study of the Indian community [with reference to East Africa] is
an exercise in componential analysis, where language, caste, religion, and other cultural
characteristics are used to define the individual, or subgroup, in much the same way as
distinctive features are used in phonological studies to define the phoneme ... Asians in Nairobi
[and the same can be said of Asians in Kenya and Tanzania] are all, or almost all, North Indians
and the population is therefore homogeneous than for example, the Asian population of Southern
Africa where North Indians speaking Indo-Aryan languages and South Indians speaking in
Dravidian languages are found in roughly equal numbers." 334. It is clear thus that although, of
different castes and ethnic groupings, the Asians of East African and indeed their descendants
whom I term Asian Africans, are more than less a 'homogenous' community that mainly orginate
from NorthINorth-western of the former undivided India. Hollingsworth is supportive of such a
configuration of the Asians of East Africa as a 'whole' for purposes of academic discourse. See
Hollingsworth, Asians of East Africa, 5.
66 See Elspeth Huxley, White Man's Country: Lord DeLamere and the Making of Kenya 1914-1931
Vol.2 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935). See especially chapter five which, is a subjective
racialist perspective on the matter and see Mangat, A History of the Asians for an objective view.
67 In Uganda. the Indian question was precipitated by administrative measures that introduced
restrictions in trade and segregation of Indians to urban centers exclusively. In German East
Africa, wher even the Germans before the First World war had started to adopt an anti-Asian
approach to their race relations, the issue of economic rivalry found itself mounting us the
colonial government sought to place stricter restrictions to inunigrations of Indians from British
India to Tanganyika. (I am indebted to J. S. Mangat for these views.) In fact his comment "the
Indian Question in Kenya had wider repercussions throughout East Africa" summarily
underscores the commonality of problems that beset the Indian community in East Africa as a
whole.
68 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 124.
69 I am thinking of Bruce Berman's study, Control and Crisis in CoLonial Kenya: The Dialectic of
Domination (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; London: James Currey; Athens:
1992). Berman's thesis is that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between
maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable
articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies.
70 I have in mind here Mahmood Mamdani and his authoritative work, Citizen and Subject:
Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Capitalism (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 19%).
11 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 131.
72 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 124.
73 Mangat, A History of the Asians, 126:
74 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 182.
75 Seidenberg Mercantile Adventurers, 183.
76 See for instance, The Red Rock Wilderness: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 1957).
77 The nervous conditions that characterize the coming of Independence in East Africa have been
ably captured in Ngugi's rightly celebrated novel A Grain of Wheat. Vassanji has also talked
about this condition from the perspective of his community. See The Gunny, Sack, 156-7.
78 See Mangat, A History of the Asians, 131.
148
79 For a more critical insight into this issue see Seidenberg, 187.
80 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 187.
81 In Cook and Rubadiri, eds, Poems from East Africa, 157.
82 See the introduction of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.
83 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 187.
84 See Bethwel Ogot ed., Politics and Nationalism in Colonial Kenya (Nairobi: Historical
Association of Kenya, 1972,) 44-67). This is one of the most convincing arguments of what
nationalism really means when viewed indeed as an "ethno-clasifficatory" imaginary.
85 Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, 188.
86 Sarvan makes this observation in his essay, "Ethnicity and Alienation," 102.
87 In his influential study of configurations of the Orient in Western literature, the [late]
postcolonial critic Edward Said posits correctly that "Modem thought and experience have
taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying, the Other; in racial
thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the
socio-political role of intellectuals, in the great value of a skeptical critical consciousness."
(Emphasis added.) See Orientalism (1978: New York: Vintage Book, 1994,) 327.
88 See Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers, vi. The term "White Africans" is used in the way L. S.
B. Leakey uses it in his autobiography, White African: An Early Autobiography (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishers, 1966).
89 See J. K. S. Makokha, 'Black Intellectualism: The Postcolonial Perspective and Politics of
Colour in East African Literature' in John C. Hawley, ed. India in Africa, Africa in India:
Critical Perspectives (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, forthcoming 2005/6)
90 A general and obvious case in point here is the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians in 1972/1973,
their explusion in the Congo that had taken place earlier. But a more specific case is the case of
nationalist Apa Bala Pant who was declared persona non grata and forced to leave East Africa in
May 1953. Pant, the son of an Indian prince had renounced his kingdom to the state, was sent by
the "Afrophilia" Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru in 1948 to Kenya. His duty was "to work
behind the scenes to spur on the African resistance movement and to marshal Asian support for
it." See Deidenberg 162-168.
91 Majid in Kuldip Sondhi's "The Undesignated," in Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse, ed.
Nine African Plays for Radio (Nairobi, London, Ibadan: Heinemann, 1973).
92 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Groove,
1961.)
93 Selected Works ofGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: London: Routledge, 1996) 4-5.
94 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 150.
95 This interesting paper is a good read for one interested in the subject of Asian African writings.
M. C Finn, "When the Other is Another Other: British Orientalism in an East African Context,"
Halle Institute Occasional Paper, Department of History, Emory University, 1998.
CHAPTER 3: IMAGINED (DIS)LOCA TIONS
1 Ngugi, in an interview with the Nigerian scholar, Aminu Abdullahi in Dennis Duerden and Cosmo
Pieterse eds., African Writers Talking (London, Ibadan, Nairobi: Heinemarm, 1972).
2 (London: Heinemann, 1989).
3 I owe this view to Rafael Perez Torres in, Against Margins, Against Myths: Movements in
Chicano/a Poetry (New York: Routledge, 1995) 95.
4 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1-2.
5 There is an uncarmy similitude between this event and that one mentioned in the interview with M.
G. Vassanji attached as appendix to this study.
6 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 9.
7 Both Joyce and Conrad experimented with the stream of consciousness technique which, forms the
technique shared by Salim Juma's narration in Vassanji's The Gunny Sack
149
CHAPTER 4: DUKAWALLAH AS A DISCURSIVE TROPE
1 See his essay, 'The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of
Colonialism,' in The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994,) 67.
2 (Toronto: Mc Clelland and Stewart, 1994; London: Macmillan, 1995).
3 Ngugi, Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1975) ; Blixen, Out of Africa (London: Putnam,
1937; New York: Random House, 1938; London: Jonathan Cape, 1964).
4 See Bhabha, 'The Other Question,' 66.
5 Bhabha has been clear about the importance of metonymic readings within postcolonial studies.
6 Ngugi, in an interview with the Nigerian scholar, Aminu Abdullahi in Dennis Duerden and Cosmo
Pieterse eds., African Writers Talking (London, Ibadan, Nairobi: Heinemann, 1972). •
7 See North of South (London: Andre Deustch, 1978,) Ill.
8 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 171-197
9
10 See Naipaul, North of South, Ill.
11 See interview with Ray Deonandan at www.deonandan.com «Accessed on 3rd September 2003 »
12 Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1967); Okot, Song ofLawino (Nairobi: EAPH,
1966).
13 Ngugi ,Weep Not Child (1964 :London: Heinemann, 1987); Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958 :
London: Heinemann, 1996).
14 See the blurb on The Book of Secrets cited from Gurnah's review of the novel in the Times
Literary Supplement.
15 In Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994,) 49.
16 It is important to point out that part of Pipa's sense of in-betweeness can be accounted by the
double-agent role he played in the colonial days, especially during the First World War as is
captured in The Book of Secrets.
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
1 These two writers are invoked essentially as prominent writers of the East African colonial and
postcolonial experiences from the perspectives of the Whites and Blacks respectively. We are
aware that the conceptualisation of Huxley as an East African novelist is contentious.
Nevertheless, the fact that she writes about a particular and crucial historical epoch in East
African can afford her to be conceptualised thus, at least for academic purposes. Suffice to say
that bothe Ngugi and Huxley do not write frrom fixed or stable locations of experience. Their
constituencies have also becomes radically ambivalent as it becomes clear that there is no
homogenous Black or White community in East Africa today.
2 See for instance Lung' aho, 'The African Prescence in the Novel of Nadine Gordimer: 1960-
1990,' M Phil. Thesis, Moi University, Eldoret, 1993; Wa Mungai, 'Self and Other in Selected
Novels of Nadine Gordimer,' MA thesis, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, 1998. See also Peter
Tirop Simatei's, 'Ethnicity and Otherness in Kenya Cultures,' in Bethwel1 Ogot ed. Ethnicity,
Nationalism and Democracy in Africa (Kisumu: Maseno University College, 1997,) 51-5. ~
Arlene Elder, "Indian Writing in East and South Africa: Multiple Approaches to Colonialism and
Apartheid," in Emmanuel S. Nelson ed., Rewarlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora
(New York: Westport, London, 1992) 115-39; or Amin Malak's essay, "Ambivalent Affiliation
and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji," World Literature Today,
(1993): 277-82.
3 Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 1994) 149-50.
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f) Secondary Sources: Regularly Consulted Internet Sources
www.awaazmag.com/home.asp
www.u-bourgogne.fr/ITL/postcol.htm #]
www.deonandan.com
www.gezen.de
www.colorq.org/Me1tingPoint/Africa/Indians.htm
www.wairua.co.nz/ruth/culture/africa.html
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/Biblio/biblio-sasiadiaspora.html
www.lib.duke.edu/libguide/cite/works-cited.htm
www.lib.washington.edu/southasia/guides/diaspora.html
www.museums.or.ke/asian.html
www.nybooks/ articles/ 10423
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/biblio.html
www.rudyfoto.com/IndiansofAfrica.html
www.tsarbooks.com.
f) Others
Mazrui, Ali ill "The Africans," a documentary series produced by the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and WETA
(Public Broadcasting Service) in 1986. Recently serialised
on Nation Television, Kenya (2005).
164
APPENDIX I
BIO-BmLIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
MG Vassanji 1S the pen name of Toronto-based writer Moyez
Gulamhussein Vassanji. He was born ill 30th May 1950 in Ngara,
Nairobi in the then Kenya Colony. His family is part of a community of
Indians-the Shamsi (KhojaIsmaili)who immigrated to Africain pursuit
of commerce in the early 1800s. Vassanji lost his father, Gulamhussein
Vassanji at the tender age of five.The loss made his family to relocate to
Dar es Salaam, in Tanganyika Territory (present-day Tanzania) where
his maternal relatives lived. In Dar, he completed his elementary and
high school education in various Aga Khan Schools. His mother,
Daulatkhanu Nanji ran a clothing store in downtown Dar to support him
and his four siblings.
M.G.Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenyawhere he liveduntil the
death of his father. His family then moved to Tanzania where he
attended his primary and high school education. In 1969, Vassanji was
admitted to study mechanical engineering at the University of Nairobi-
then a constituent college of the now defunct University of East Africa.
Vassanji's journey to the West has a more dramatic edge. As a young
man, Vassanji managed to purchase a passport under the table in
Julius Nyerere's socialist Tanzania and left the country illegally,taking a
bus to Kenya before flying on to the United States to study nuclear
physics on a scholarship. After many years of hard work he obtained a
165
graduate and a doctorate degree in physics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (M.LT.) and the University of Pennsylvania
respectively. In 1978 he crossed the border to Canada and began work
at the Chalk River Atomic Power station. He invested eleven years in
pursuing his scientific career in line with his training.
Besides, in 1980, he became a research associate and lecturer of
physics at the University ofToronto. In the same year, he began to write
fiction, having loved storytelling since his childhood in Dar es Salaam.
Writing was a way of exploring his own past. 1980 proved an annus
mirabilus when jointly with his wifeNutjehan Aziz,Vassanji founded The
Toronto South Asian Review (TSAR)-a non-profit organization that
supports South Asian Canadian writers. He is the current editor of the
journal, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad and
contributes his short stories to anthologies and other collections on
behalf of the organization. After the important publication of The Gunny
Sack in 1989, Vassanji began writing full time and ended his career in
physics. He had also been studying Sanskrit and Indian philology,which
were influential in prompting his decisive career change.
Interestingly, Vassanji is not a writer by literary training and was
reluctant to take his passion for writing as a serious career alternative
until he published his first novel, The Gunny Sack, in 1989. The book
won him the 1990 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book in
the African region. His writing career was to be devoted to telling in
neapolitan detail the (hi)story of his people--Kenyans, Tanzanians and
Ugandans of South Asian origin, lately referred to as AsianAfricans.
166
The Gunny Sack, is an enchanting, classic chronicle about a
young Tanzanian Asian African's search for identity. With his unusual
inheritance, a gunia full of multifarious ambiguous mementoes, as
guide, he seeks his community's past. Although he does not find an
ultimate truth, the quest reveals that the legacy of the Asian population
is today an interactive and evolvingcultural and spiritual reality that
invokes a sense of wholeness for its individual members. This profound
commitment and interest in his community has been the running theme
that unites all his creative works into powerful (re)presentations of his
community as an Africanethnic group.
Vassanji has published four other novels and a short-story
collection: No New Land (1991), Uhuru Street (1991, short stories), The
Book of Secrets (1994), Amriika (1999) and The Inbetween Worlds of
Vikram Lall (2003).He is an accomplished and established international
literary voice who has been recognised by among others, the Bressani
LiteraryPrize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize.
His novels set in East Africa, namely The Gunny Sack (1989),
Uhuru Streets (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994) and The Inbetween
World of Vikram Lall (2003) draw on his experiences and sense of
community.These powerful multicultural novels are a rich kaleidoscope
of trends from postmodernism to postcolonialism; from episodes of
magical realism to a bold fusion of realism and naturalism. Vassanji's
houses of fiction are peopled with the old and young, traditional and
modern, the assimilated and displaced members of the Asian African
community in East Africa.Thematically, his fiction attempts to connect
the past and the present, assimilate traditional and contemporary
167
values, and balance a sense of community with an individual's struggle
to belong.
The Book of Secrets (1994), winner of the inaugural and
prestigious Giller Prize, views the history of the Asian African community
in East Africa from new perspectives-the perspective of a migrant eye.
The narrative revolves around a British colonial administrator's 1913
diary, found in Dar es Salaam in 1988. The retired schoolteacher who
attempts to explore its entries is overwhelmed by the way, in which the
past connects with the present.
The sam.e truth catches up with Nurddin Lalani of No New Land
(1991). The setting of No New Land is Canada, a latter-day destination
for Asian Africans of East African who found it "unhomely" to stay and
continue being the odd-citizen; the muhindi-though-born-bred in Africa.
The short-story collection Uhuru Street (1992) deals with specific aspects
of the Asian African community's life in Dar es Salaam during the period
between the 1950s and the 1980s.
His other overseas-based work Amriika (1999) details the
psychological and physical chaos that a young Tanzanian Asian African
emigre finds himself in while adjusting in the US as a new home. In all
his novels, Vassanji appears to be creating important questions
regarding the nature of the post-colonial voice in East Africa that any
serious critic or colonial discourse analyst must address. He seems to be
reacting to the oft-asked questions posed by many an indigenous East
Africans to his community, "Are you Indian or African? What are you
still doing here in Africaafter building the railway?"
168
On the sixth of November 2003 (the day of my departmental
presentation of the research proposal that culminated to this study) The
Daily Nation reported that Vassanji had won yet again the GillerPrize for
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003).This makes him to date the
only writer to have won this prestigious prize more than once. This new
.
novel is primarily set in East Africaand deal with the complex interstitial
situation of Kenyans of South Asian heritage in East Africa who are
neither indigenous Africans nor European colonizers-settlers. Many of
them cannot find a familiar refuge on the Indian sub-continent nor in
the colonial "home country."
In the attached interview with me, Vassanji pointed out that
many Asian Africans couldn't find roots in South Asia-India, Pakistan,
or Bangladesh. This is because, like himself, some of them are fourth
generation Africans after their great grandfathers settled in East Africa
as early as l800~before even certain sections of the Luhya community
had moved into their present-day homelands!
Vassanji joins other great diasporic Indian writers such as the
Naipaul brothers, Neil Bisoondath, and Michael Ondaatje in displaying
the complex sense of identity of their communities. Asian Africans are
seen as alienated from their African homelands regardless of their
emotional attachments and legal status resulting to endless quests for
Other homelands abroad; mainly in UK, Canada and the US. No other
East African writer of Asian descent fused with an African heritage has
taken it upon himself to sytematically give the Muindis a literary voice
exuding both intensity and precision as has Vassanji.
169
There have been several novels on the plight of Asian Africansin
East Africa.But few attempt to shed any incisive light on just what this
multicultural, multiracial hotpot actually amounts to on the sense of
identity of East Africans of South Asian descent. Writers such as
Bahadur Tejani and Peter Nazareth have inevitably addressed the plight
of the community in Uganda of the 1960s leading to Amin's expulsion.
Idi Amin is actually no more, and no less, than a singular aspect of the
eventfullifehistory of the Asian African community in East Africa from
its beginnings in early 1800s to the present.
M. G. Vassanji has gone a step further to imaginatively
'transcreate' the worlds of this interstitial community by tracing
historical antecedents of the so-called "Asian Question" from a literary
perspective. His novels have helped inspire the understanding that
Asian Africans have roots in East Africa that date beyond British
colonialism and the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway in the 1900s.
In this way, he has helped demystify the connection between
Asians in East Africaand British imperialism. This connection being the
root of prejudice against his community which many indigenous East
Africans see as a product and residue of British imperialism. It is no
wonder that his fiction seen as an 'ethnopaedia' is indeed valuable to
scholars from literature, history, cultural anthropology and linguistics
who are interested in the complex, cultural milieus of Asian Africans as
a diasporic community. He gives a [me account of lives and experiences
of his community not as a racial or class stereotype a la local print and
electronic media but as an offspring of a combination of intriguing
political, historical and cultural factors.
170
Vassanji currently appears as an East African novelist in various
literary encyclopaedias of distinguished world writers such as Ian
Ousby's Cambridge Guide to Fiction in English This guide is a
comprehensive survey of fiction from the classics of English Literature to
the best of modern fiction. He is also featured in bibliographies on
influential African writers such as Bernth Lindfor's Black African
Literature in English volumes. Pundits arguably define M. G. Vassanji as
the most versatile Anglophone East African novelist after Zanzibari-born
Abdulrazhak Gurnah, Nurrudin Farah, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. In
October, 2005, Vassanji's latest offering, a collection of ten short stories
set in Kenya, Tanzania and Canada entitled When She was Queen was
published hot on the heels of the Giller Prize-winning The Inbetween
World of Vikram Lall.
There are several researches on his works that have recently come
out of respected universities such as University of Trier in Germany,
Makerere University in Uganda and University of Witwaterand in South
Africa.Most ofVassanji's books are available in Bookstop-Yaya Centre,
and Bookpoint on Moi Avenue in Nairobi or on Vassanji's own website
www.tsarbooks.com
171
APPENDIX II
MG VASSANJI READING FROM ONE OF HIS NOVELS
Photo courtesy of www.gezen.de
· .. in college, I
kept ajournal. I
suppose there was
a need to express
myself, also to
write something
beautiful . . .
172
APPENDIX III AWAAZ I ISSUE II. 2005/
.? 3f tJ_:)~'~: acu i
-' .
e wor s
in etween.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MOYEl GUlAMHUSSEIN VASSANJI
BY WANJOHI WA MAKOKHA
Makokha: Briefly. give an account of
your early life, education, and your
family.
Vassanji: These can be found, I think,
on the web and on my book. To add a bit
more, my great grandfather on my
father's side settled in Kibwezi, Kenya in
the 1800s;my mother's parents settled in
Zanzibar in early 1900s; they later
moved to Mombasa, then to Dar es
Salaam. I went to the various Aga Khan
schools in Dar es Salaam.
Makokha: Did you have a childhood
writing experience? In other words, is
writing a childhood ambition you have
always had?
Vassanji: Only compositions in class,.
which I loved to do.
Makokha: What literature did you do at
school? Does it have any significance to
your writing and life as an Asian African
writer?
Vassanji: Not much after primary school,
because I was in the science stream;
however I read a lot; I was at the library
every other day.
Makokha: Why and when did you start
writing? In other words, did you take a
conscious decision to be a writer or was
it a gradual development of the
childhood attempts?
Vassanji: I always wrote a little bit; in
college, I kept a journal. I suppose there
was a need. t<! express myself, also to
write something beautiful. Later, I felt
that the experiences I had grown up with
needed expression; everything I had
read was about people in other places. I
started writing short stories in the 1980s;
I also began writing a novel. At the same
time I was working. When my novel [The
Gunrry Sack] was published in 1989, I
decided I would make writing my career,
as much as possible.
Makokha: Would you consider yourself
a Kenyan writer [by birth], a Tanzanian
writer [by nationality], a .Canadian
writer [by emigration] or an Asian
African/Indian writer in the Diaspora?
Vassanji: Obviously all of the above.
When we mo~ed to Tanzania (late
1950s], we considered ourselves
Kenyans and missed Nairobi a lot.
When I was ill the US, I considered
myself Tanzanian. By this time, my
family had moved back to Nairobi, and I
would visit every two years, I was
AWAAZ IS SUE II. 2005
brought up in an Indian community with
Indian values in transition. I do not defme
myself but consider myself a product of
everything ,that went into me. One doesn't
have to be one thing or the other;. one can
be both.
Makokha: Can you comment on the phrase
"The In-between Worlds of Moyez
Gulamhussein Vassanji?"
Vassanji: You could say that it describes me
a bit!
Makokha: Multilingualism is a marked
feature of your novels set in East Africa: The
Gunny Sack (1989), The Book of Secrets (1994),
and The In-Between Wirlds of Vzkram Lall
(2003). In these works, a critic notices that
you draw from Indic, littoral East Africa's
coastal culture, Shamsi-islamic mythos and
lore to create your literary idiom and to
articulate an ambiguous sense of
multiculturalism. Briefly, explain this
postulation.
Vassanji: There is nothing more to say; I do
find that 'multiculturalism' has become
somewhat of a cliche nowadays, especially
after governments and academics started
using it.
Makokha: What African writers in general
and East African writers in particular do
you feel close to? Writers whose writings you
would say have influenced you as an Asian
African writer?
Vassanji: I don't think of influences but of
writers I feel close to or those whose works
have brought me "comfort". I have liked
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad (although I
know many African writers don't like him); I
also like Faulkner, Philip Roth; more
recently, Jose Saramago, Coetzee (I have
reservations but still think he is a great
writer), and the author of My Name is Red
(the name escapes me); Naipaul's
autobiographical essays and his A House for
Mr. Bistoas I found wonderful. I like some of
Meja Mwangi, for his vivid descriptions of a
real Nairobi; and Ngugi has been a great
,I
I
173
comfort to me.
Makokha: How do you identify with other
African writers? For example, do you attend
conferences on or by African writers such as
those annual ones organised by African
Literature Associations?
Vassanji: do not like academic
conferences; and I fmd that most of these
are organized by Europeans and Americans;
to them (this is my feeling) an .Asian just
doesn't belong to the Africa they have
conjured up; they have their money and
positions and their coteries of Africans. On
the other hand, I go to my Dar or Nairobi,
identify with the landscape, be it dry grass
or a hut, enjoy speaking Kiswahili or simply
drinking chai in a banda and listening to
banter; and no one there, especially in Dar,
even asks me where I come from. And when
I speak Kiswahili, the manner of my speech
identifies me immediately as someone of the
land. What need do I have of a conference?
. instead of
thinking
abstractly, I prifer
to write ...Makokha: That IS interesting ... very
interesting. As a critic, I notice heavy
reliance on your. ethno-religious epos in
your writing. Is this your aesthetic "core"?
Vassanji: There is no "reliance." These are
stories about people. Would you as a critic,
have me write about John Smith in London
or New York? This is the problem with the
colonies, so much are we used to reading
about other people, that when writers use
their own experiences, colonial critics and
readers think the writer has not developed
fully. And how about Ngugi-does he rely
too much on Kikuyu material? Who else
had the courage to give us the Kikuyu
experience?
Makokha: In your webpage you say,
"Writing has allowed me to keep several
worlds inside me without letting go ... " How
do your "multiple-worlds" or interstitial
experience between them influence your
identity as a writer and as a subject?
Vassanji: I am not sure; instead of thinking
abstractly, I prefer to write. You could say,
174
however, that from my multiple experiences I can
show the complexity of life, people, and places.
Makokha: The Gun'!)' Sack (1989), Uhuru Street
(1992) are set in East Africa, No New Land (1992)
is set abroad. Then The Book oj Secrets (1994) is set
in East Africa, Amriika (1999) which follows is set
abroad, then interestingly your most recent
novel, The In-Betuieen Worlds oj VLb-amLIlLi (2003)
is set in East Africa. My critical eye discerns a
certain alternating pattern in terms of the
settings of your novels. Please make a comment
on this; in fact, will it not be accurate to project
that your next novel will be based away from
home? (You know whatever "home" I mean!)
I think the reason
was 'that Asians
were brought up
in such insular
Vassanji: I don't know what to say. After
Amriika, I felt I would "go home." Also
there was the Mau Mau experience that
was brewing in me for a decade at least that
I wanted to write about.
communities that Makokha: There are a number of Asian
African writers who have made [and some
those who wanted still continue to do so) significant
to unite if their contribution to what the established critic
Chris L. Wanjala in 2003 christened, "The
East African Literary Tradition". These
writers who include among others: Peter
Nazareth, Jagjit Singh, the late Rajat
know how to do Neogy, Bahadur Tejani, Jameela Siddiqi
from Uganda; Kuldip Sondhi, Zarina
•••••••••"""'••.•••••••"""'''''''••••' Patel, Amin Kassam, K. O. Kassam,
Sadruddin Kassam, Rasnah Warah,
. Pheroze Nowrojee and Dipesh Pabari from
Kenya; and Noel Zogre from Tanzania apart
from yourself, have through their pen
contributed to Wanjala's idea of our regional
tradition sui generis. Would you argue for, or
imagine the being of 'an Asian African literary
tradition in East Africa [or even in Eastern and
Southern Africa?)
experiences
creatiuely did not
it.
Vassanji: I always thought that much more could
have been done creatively, the way Africans did.
There was nothing comparable to Ngugi. I think
the reason was that Asians were brought up in
such insular communities that those who wanted
to write of their experiences creatively did not
know how to do it. I liked Amin Kassam's poetry
when I read it some years ago; but what
A'flU! ISSUE II.
happened to him (or the others)? Could Afric,
completely wash off them, so easily?
Makokha: Food for thought ...What IS YOU!
interest in history with special attention to thr
historicity of your narrations? In fact, it seem
that you purposefully appropriate East Africa':
history in the narrative construction of youi
novels with an East African setting...
Vassanji: This is difficult; I have dealt ir.
communal [Asian African] history,whichismore
immediate to me, since it deals with questioru
having to do with my life. I have found that then
is very little sense of history in East Africa,in the
way it exists in the West. Where is the intimate
biography of Nyerere or Kenyatta, giants among
us? I don't mean political biographies, whichare
trivial to write for anyone who has time to
research .at the PRO [public Relations Office).
Where are the detailed portraits of the Maji
Maji war? In my own case, I didn't knowwhat
village my great grandfather came from until this
year (I was able to visit it), or where he settled
(which I found out in 1983 when I met an old
woman in a shop behind the Khoja Mosque in
Nairobi).
Makokha: fu an East African writer of
interstitial origins, do you believe in national or
racial categorization of African literature?
Vassanji: No, except, of course, for academic
reasons; but categorizations should not be cast in
stone and there can be different categorizations
of the same work or author, depending on what
one wants to point out.
Makokha: Finally, what consensual aesthetic
criterion would you say, the judges of the
Commonwealth Prize, The Bressani Literary
Prize, Harbourcourt Prize and the Giller Prize
apply when they decorate your literary
achievements, besides the obvious. one that an
East African reader applies?
Vassanji: I would like to think it is the writing,
the execution of the novel, the way history and
individuals [subjectivity] intersect, the way life's
complexities [such as interstitial dimensions] are
dealt with without easy answers.
KENYATTA UNIVERS!T\' r IA!lllD