M.G. Vassanji: My world in between

‘I should come back to this land of mine and say to it: “Embrace me without fear … If all I can do is speak, at least I shall speak for you.”’

These words, culled from Aime Cesaire’s world famous poem, ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land,’ are part of the epigraph with which MG Vassanji begins his latest work, And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014).

This memoir, described by a critic as “a splendid and poignant love-letter to his homeland of East Africa”, somewhat follows up on his earlier one, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), in which Vassanji narrates his experiences with a subcontinent that was home to the ancestors of many East Africans of South Asian extraction.

Both works are interesting partly because they transcend generic boundaries – fitting neatly in the categories of autobiography, memoir or travel writing – and partly for the way they establish the literary thread linking Vassanji’s oeuvre from The Gunny Sack through to The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and The Magic of Saida, all of which situate themselves in the historical and geographical contexts of the author’s creative imagination.

INDIAN OCEAN WORLDS

The two memoirs should also fascinate readers with an interest in the Indian Ocean Worlds, a concept that captures the diverse developments in human knowledge and cultures due to the maritime contacts and exchanges that were made possible and mediated by the Indian Ocean since Christopher Columbus discovered the sea route to India.

As an area of scholarly inquiry, the Indian Ocean World has, for the past decade or so, attracted researchers from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, leading to a growing body of knowledge that documents the different ways in which the Indian Ocean has cumulatively augmented notions of our current modernities, noted in food and cloth cultures, political and moral economies, the arts and the everyday interactions with questions of identities and belonging.

These issues are extensively, and in a nuanced way, dealt with in both memoirs but for reasons of proximity in time and place, I focus on And Home Was Kariakoo.

The centrality of histories in this memoir is captured right at the level of the title, where the Kariakoo — a Kiswahili adaptation of Carrier Corps — simultaneously points to the vagaries of the world wars in which Africans and Indians fought unnecessarily, besides the race-based residential planning in urban Dar es Salaam — and Nairobi — where Asians and Africans, respectively, were assigned estates in the poorer parts of the cities.

ASIAN CONTRIBUTION

Vassanji revisits these places and others to tell a tale punctuated by anecdotes, intertextual references, allusions and musings in order to highlight histories that predate and postdate colonialism because they provide the framing devices in which the embedded narratives of Asian contribution to the region’s current state can be anchored.

Hence, some of the journeys that he makes in mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar, as well as in coastal Kenya, retrace the pre-colonial caravan routes used by slave traders and their human cargo, European missionaries and travellers, the Portuguese, Indian and Omani Arab merchants, all of who made the coastal region a vibrant economic and cultural centre dotted with towns that, even in slavery times, attracted adventurous souls from the Indian subcontinent, Europe, Iran and the Middle East.

An important contribution this memoir makes is in its subtle documentation of different histories and their impact on current notions of cultures, identities and belonging within and beyond the region.

Old towns like Kilwa and Bagamoyo, monuments of the world wars, statues and cemeteries are all presented as pointers to different strands of histories, mostly forgotten, of parts of East Africa. Even the living greenery, for Vassanji, points to histories.

The mango, which he repeatedly mentions, for instance, subtly reminds us of the slavery and migrations that completely altered the human and ecological landscape of the Caribbean Islands, where the mango fruit — as opposed to the apple — occupies a key place in the discourses on the crisis of racial identities.

In the East African context, however, Vassanji’s insistence on naming fruits and other foodstuffs — chai, bhajia — and where they are found; indeed his determination to look for tea wherever he takes a break in his travels, is partly a hankering that demonstrates the force of nostalgia, a sentimental and even emotional indicator of what is lost never to be recovered, even if it is the mere beauty or carefree excitements of childhood.

SYMBOLIC APPROPRIATION

The naming, therefore, is a symbolic appropriation of the places identified and so named, a demonstration of spatial literacy that enables him, in speaking for us, or the ‘you’ in the epigraph, to claim his and our space in the histories and geographies that had been subsumed in the political histories of the pan-Africanist nationalist strand.

In ways that neither uncritically valorize the role of Indians in the region, nor unfairly condemn the rest, Vassanji illuminates the historical and cultural blind spots ignored by earlier commentators. He celebrates the role that Indian traders played to build the economies of Tanzania, but points out that some of them were implicated in slave trade, just as he praises the role of Englishmen and Germans in laying the roads and other infrastructural networks in the region even as they sustained a rather shallow understanding of the humanity of the African peoples that they encountered and worked with.

It is this rejection of linear and truncated readings of histories, this preference for multiple perspectives on issues, that enables Vassanji to note the progressive decline in the infrastructural network of his childhood homelands, Kenya and Tanzania, besides the famed Zanzibar, without falling for the simplistic ‘heart of darkness’ trope that informs other travel writers like Burton, Waugh and Shiva Naipaul, all who were propelled by their preconceptions when travelling through East Africa.

By simultaneously pointing out what is going wrong in the region while noting the vibrancy of the human spirit around, Vassanji redeems the entire region from the clutches of pessimism that have informed the continued obsession with ‘donor aid’ from the ‘donor community’ that even contemporary political leaders seem to have few problems with.

NGUGI'S TRIBUTE

Even intellectual leaders, also come under Vassanji’s focus. Ngugi’s recent celebration of the role of Asians in East Africa’s current standing attracts ambivalent approval from Vassanji, who, in evaluating East African Asians’ role in the politics and literary creativity of the 60s, wonders whether Ngugi’s glowing tribute to Asians in the region does not come a bit late. Vassanji asks: Could Ngugi’s tribute have made a difference in shaping racial perceptions in East Africa had he given it earlier? For Vassanji, Asian writers in East African region have largely been on their own, not even intellectual leaders in the region saw the need to fraternize with them when it mattered most.

Now, would it have been accurate use the subtitle “a memoir of Tanzania and Kenya” rather than East Africa? Certainly, the memoir leaves out Uganda and rather strangely advances an idea of ‘East Africa’ that is simply Kenya and Uganda. In current times when East Africa goes beyond the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania notion, the title would have sufficed without the ‘of East Africa’ appendage. 

Dr Godwin Siundu teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi.