And Home Was Kariakoo : Memoir of an Indian-African;
MG Vassanji;
Hamish Hamilton;
400 pages;
Rs 599
And Home Was Kariakoo crosses genres as deftly as its author and his Gujarati forefathers crossed continents. An East African yatra packed tight with swathes of history and autobiography and freewheeling critiques of African politics, current affairs, religion, cultural practices and whatnot, M.G. Vassanji’s latest book is a ghar wapsi in the best possible sense.
Having been brought up with only the vaguest sense of his own heritage as an Asian-African, and irked in no small measure by how the Western world still tars Africa with the old broad-brush of Dark Continent, Vassanji (who holds a Canadian passport) returns to Dar-es-Salaam—not so much to write about his hometown as to rediscover his own moorings in it. Sure, the face and ethos of the Indian quarter, Gaam and the African area, Kariakoo, have both changed irrevocably; the sleepy small-town Dar of Vassanji’s boyhood is now a gleaming megalopolis whose Indian footprint has been all but wiped out. An entire generation fled Gaam for the West in the wake of the socialist takeover of Tanzania in the 1960s; in any case, the diasporic Gujaratis (unflatteringly known as the Jews of Africa) had always been the kabab mein haddi, as Vassanji puts it, in the eyes of European and African alike. Not all is lost, though: the KT Shop of Gaam still thrives, a little six-tabled stronghold, and its chai and camaraderie are as unsurpassed as ever.
Disheartened but determined, Vassanji sets out to retrace the routes (and roots) of the Gujarati in the rest of East Africa. This pilgrimage into the past, to places that seem to have fallen off the map and the history textbook alike, is full of surprises. Along the way, we discover the quaint coastal town of Tanga where a World War was waged by Indian soldiers on behalf of the British sahibs, only to be defeated by a cloud of bees; we learn that the East African Expedition of 1857 led by Richard Burton and John Speke in their quest for the source of the Nile was “brokered” by a Gujarati merchant; and that, in fact, the first Gujaratis had arrived at the east coast of Africa from the west coast of India, long before either had been a gleam in the Empire’s eye.
Vassanji is as fluent in Swahili—which he says “comes to the tongue as readily as the taste of a much-loved mango”—as he is in Gujarati; and the fact that he chose to title the book And Home Was Kariakoo rather than “And Home Was Gaam” is proof enough of his deep attachment and commitment to both. His is an Africa of warmth and many-splendoured exuberance, not merely “wars, HIV and hunger” (And he can’t resist cocking a snook at Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari here either.).
Vassanji delights equally in the raucous open-air TV screening of an English Premier League soccer game, as he does in the discovery of Africa’s own brand of Sufism, the Shadhiliyya sect whose “oddball nonconformism” has him in momentary mystical thrall. His travels on rickety buses over rough roads, marked by the familiar impedimenta of too-frequent police check-posts, are invariably enlivened by much chai pe charcha (“Where there are a few Asians, there is a chai place”) and generous helpings of the legendary Indian hospitality.
Written with the insight of the insider and the emotion of the returnee, this is both a celebration of the sheer diversity of Africa and a heartfelt paean to the spirit of the unsung Gujarati vania who believed that “home is where the trade winds take you.”
Sriram is a writer in Chennai
courtesy : http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/home-is-where-the-trade-winds-take-you/99/ : February 21, 2015 4:50 am
