There's a scene in Americanah in which the main character, Ifemelu, is getting her hair braided in a US-set African hairdresser's, and a white woman comes in, looking for "the Bo Derek". As this Kelsey natters on about her love for all things African, she mentions that reading A Bend in the River really opened her eyes to life in modern Africa. Ifemelu snorts and explains that that book, written from the perspective of an Indian born in Africa, couldn't possibly explain the real Africa as it wasn't from the point of view of an African. Until that point, A Bend in the River had been on my own to-read list but I swallowed Ifemelu's logic and dismissed the book as inauthentic. And then along comes M. G. Vassanji, an Indian born in Africa (to parents who were Indian, born in Africa), and his memoir And Home Was Kariakoo confronts this notion of who is a real African and why aren't there more stories from their points of view.
Vassanji was born in Nairobi, but after his father died, his mother moved the family to Dar es Salaam, in modern day Tanzania. Dar, as he calls it, had a large community of people from Indian heritage, as they were the traditional mercantile class; initially, the traders brought in cotton and silk to exchange for ivory, gold, and wax, and in the process, built up all of the port towns along Eastern Africa (one mosque dates from 1050, so the Indian presence has long-established roots). When Tanganyika gained independence in 1962, Vassanji was as proud as any African, but when the socialist government began to nationalise industry in the 1970s -- and those of Indian descent were disproportionately affected through the loss of their investments , businesses, and homes -- the Vassanji family joined the Indian exodus. Although the author himself was away at university at the time, he never returned to live in Africa, settling in Canada instead. And yet…in his heart, Vassanji is an African, and in this book, he recounts the many trips he's taken around Tanzania as an ex-pat, looking for the lost stories of Africa.
And Home Was Kariakoo is a rather tedious read: it skips around, with Vassanji primarily travelling via slow bus rides over terrible roads; often accompanied by an acquaintance; usually another ex-pat of Indian descent. They search until they find biriyani and chai in every small town (to prove, I suppose, an Indian presence), look for evidence of early Indian settlers, and lament that only Europeans thought to leave markers to commemorate their own achievements. Vassanji was forced to follow in the footsteps of Stanley and Livingstone or visit the site where Burton and Speke split up in their quest to discover the source of the Nile (even though, apparently, local Africans always knew it was Lake Nyanza, which Speke promptly named after Queen Victoria). The history Vassanji shares is, by necessity, taken from European accounts, and it can be a little dry (and I get the feeling that Vassanji wasn't interested in making the European perspective interesting; their's wasn't the story he was looking for). And, I must confess, my brain turns off when I'm confronted with lists of names and places I don't identify with:
Already in 1925 it was observed that the Kumbhads of Makunduchi, called Mukumbaro, spoke Kihadimu, the local Swahili dialect, as fluently as the local Africans, called the Hadimu and considered indigenous. The Makumbaro were from Kutch and Kathiawad, in Gujarat, and were the only people on the island who used the camel for transportation. Kihadimu is very different from Kiswahili (Swahili) and for an outsider took some effort to understand, as we find even now as we ask if there are any Mukumbaro around.And that might seem like a petty complaint to make about a book that is part African travelogue, but there is very little exciting, or even personal, written in this book to have engaged my interest and pull me past the dull bits. In addition to finding his own history, Vassanji's other stated purpose is to confront and correct the West's notion of life in Africa, and particularly the East Africa of his roots:
I often find myself protesting that, media images to the contrary, Africa is not simply wars, HIV, and hunger: people don't simply drop dead on the streets out of sickness and hunger…Despite hardships, there is life there; people sing and laugh and play music; they go to school, they get married. In many towns, the markets are abundantly full; life is teeming, so much so that Toronto, upon my return, often feels rather moribund.When he spoke with South African children, explaining that allowing non-Africans to tell all the stories about Africa has painted a picture of war, hunger, and disease, the children were "aghast"; that's not their lives as they know it. And yet…as Vassanji travelled by rickety bus over unpaved roads -- often accompanied by twice the passengers the bus should carry and the occasional chicken -- as they were pulled over by police officers looking for bribes, as the bus stopped to allow passengers to relieve themselves behind bushes, as the towns were full of the idle and the occasional beggar, he did little to dispel this Western image. (Okay, he did take a trip into Nairobi, which he described as a modern metropolis with efficient services and excellent tourist amenities, but he also pointed out that "Nairobi was always violent, and has become progressively moreso".) Of more interest to me, Vassanji also explains the culture of dependence that Western aid has created (calling it the new colonialism, with NGOs using the veneer of good works to enslave the Africans all over again, "Africa gives and is exploited as it receives") and how there's a movement in Africa to disrupt the flow of aid; to allow Africans to solve the problems of Africa.
For the most part, Vassanji's old friends are making a comeback in Dar es Salaam -- they are still from the traditional mercantile class, after all -- and accepting that "corruption is necessary for development", it's the returning Indian-Africans who are paying the baksheesh and putting up the ugly high rises on the sites of historical buildings. And this seems to be a metaphor for the Indian-African presence all along: always looking forward, looking for the next deal, Vassanji's community didn't preserve its history, or even revere it. As a result, there's very little that Vassanji finds on these journeys into the past. Speaking at the University in Dar, he sees few "brown" faces as the wealthy Indians prefer to send their children abroad to school, and as even the author no longer lives in Africa, I am confused about the point he makes about the strength of African roots: Even if the Indian traders had a presence for a thousand years, if their descendants mostly left in the 1970s, and the current residents send their children away, and there's little remnant of the culture besides a chai stand here or a crumbling mosque there, just how African is this community? To put it another way: Was Ifemelu and her prejudices in Americanah on the mark after all?
I respect that Vassanji went in search of the stories that his community (and all Africans) left behind and this book is very detailed with what he was able to discover. Unfortunately, it wasn't of much interest to me, and that's likely because the author didn't process the information through his own experiences; I found this mostly dull and sterile.
