And Home Was Kariakoo (9 page)

One Sunday afternoon I read to an audience at Nairobi’s museum, during the opening there of the Asian Heritage Exhibit, a remarkably detailed memorial to the history of the Asian presence in East Africa. When I finished, a man in his fifties came over to me in tears. Who tells our stories, he said, who tells about what we have been through? This exhibit was an attempt to do just that. But there was a telling irony to it in the fact that more than half of the Asians had already gone away by the time it opened, taking their untold stories with them.

It seems incredible today to imagine Africa as the land of milk and honey that it was for Indians. Some of our grandfathers would return to Gujarat to visit, often to marry wives, and often they came bearing “attitude,” sporting western clothes (even hats) and looking conspicuously wealthy to the communities they had left behind. A small number of the returnees must have come to stay, however. The 1899 census of India reported some 100 Swahili-speakers. A Gujarali-Swahili dictionary was published in 1890.

During my visit to Droll in Gujarat, there was a woman present at the mukhi’s house who was all set to go to a wedding in a
related village. The groom, I was informed with a twinkle in the mukhi’s eye, was a recent immigrant to Africa who had returned to marry. But he had gone to Angola. New frontiers had opened up in Africa, obviously, after the ravages of the long wars, and boys were setting off there to open shops and bring supplies, the way previous generations had done. Farther into Gujarat, when I visited a community office in the city of Junagadh to inquire about the village from which my great-grandfather had set off, I was told—over a cup of tea, naturally—stories of boys in recent times going away to Africa, and returning home arrogantly flaunting their new wealth. In other words, bearing “attitude.” History repeating itself, and evidently the new prosperity of India had not reached these villages. But there was another side to these stories of glorious return. In Jamnagar, where my mother’s family came from, I once sat in the shack of a poor family who were marrying off their sixteen-year-old daughter to a middle-aged man from Africa.

During my childhood one heard of exotic places upcountry where our people had settled—Mbarara, Mengo, Masaka, Nyeri, Isiolo, Voi, Nakuru, Mpwapwa, Singida, Mbeya, Lindi, Musoma, Sumbawanga, Moyale, and so on, dotted across the vast reaches of British East Africa—from the border with Mozambique to that with Rwanda, from the Indian Ocean to lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, between Zambia and Somalia, often with only one or two families to a village, doing the same old business—buying produce, selling essential supplies. These were names to stir the imagination, places one might visit one day. My cousins who stayed with us in Uhuru Street would set off during holidays for a village called Bariadi near Lake Victoria to visit their parents, and their stories of exciting train rides and dog-swallowing pythons and mysterious grandmothers made us goggle-eyed and envious. Kids from those interior
regions—“bhurr” was the term for those places—would come to Dar for their high school education, and were treated as hicks; there was a naïveté to them, and yet, because they had stayed away from the watchful eyes of the larger, more fastidious religious community, they also seemed less inhibited. They would always carry the mark of their town; it identifies them often to this day—“Mehboob of Ifakara”—and some never completely blended into the rowdy familiarity that was Dar es Salaam.

Following the nationalizations of private properties in Tanzania in the 1970s heyday of socialism, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin soon after, and the Africanization policies in Kenya that we would now call racist, and the forced marriages of Asian girls in Zanzibar, the Asian population—frightened and uncertain—depleted, was welcomed to the cities of Canada. As a result there exist now entire ghost streets, shorn of their Asian populations, shops and homes not effectively occupied, in places like Tukuyu, Kilwa, Lindi, Kigoma. Coincidentally, in the village of my great-grandfather too, in Gujarat, following the widespread violence of 2002 the Khoja neighbourhood had been depleted, the prayer house padlocked. Thus the fate of minorities.

But in some, the indomitable mercantile spirit lives on; home is where the trade winds take you. The descendants of the merchants and pilots whom Vasco da Gama and Camõens and Duarte Barbosa met on the coast along the Indian Ocean will go to any corner of the world to do business, and still find East Africa a profitable place.

Property values are down, my friend Karim says, when we meet in Toronto for coffee. But don’t believe what they tell you. He means
media reports, I presume, soon after the 2008 recession. There is that perpetual smile on his soft, fair, baby face that makes you wonder sometimes if he’s not pulling your leg with his fantastic tales about making money. The phone in his hand, at this patio outside a Toronto Starbucks, is of the cheapest sort—consistent with the manner of the typical Gujarati vania, the business caste: wealth is not for show, but to make. He’s made and lost some millions in hotels and property in Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, and London. He’s currently developing a resort in Zanzibar. And he’s based in Dubai, where he and his partners have written off some twenty condominiums after the real-estate bubble there burst. Time was, he says, when you paid someone to stand in a queue to book a condo for you, and you turned a profit the next day. But now he’s in neutral gear.

Karim and I went to school together, his family running a produce shop opposite the Dar es Salaam market, next to the post office. Ever since we finished school and went overseas to university, we’ve run into each other by sheer accident in the oddest circumstances, but rarely in Toronto. (This current meeting is an exception, and by arrangement.) The first time was in London, where I was stranded once, a student on my way to or from the United States. It was the 1970s. Soon after finishing his chemical engineering degree, Karim, having grown up amidst the fish smells of the teeming market near his father’s Kariakoo shop, had the audacity to purchase a small supermarket in London. We had met at the Ismaili guest house on Gloucester Road where a bed could be had for five pounds and there was every likelihood of running into someone from back home, on a tourist visa but searching desperately for an accounting articleship, a secretary’s job, or a place in a college. London, after all, had been the centre of our colonial universe, a magnet at a distance; it would
take time to wean ourselves away from it. Come and visit me tomorrow, Karim said. I did so, taking the tube next day into Harrow and walking into a typical small English supermarket. That night he and another classmate, who had been a close buddy of his in Dar, took me to the Playboy Club. I was in a somewhat stunned state in that dark and glitzy hall, smiling white bunnies with bouncy breasts and long bare legs hovering around; none of us drank; all three of us were from simple families of the pious variety, and this was definitely not Karim’s beginning on a path of debauchery—he still is the pious, prayerful sort. We soon escaped from the scene. Why had they brought me there? It’s too late to ask, but I would guess it was to demonstrate their success in the world.

It seems to me that after he left Dar he’s never had a home—a single, permanent dwelling. He’s lived in many places, he’s lived in two places at the same time. The last few times I’ve simply run into him in the streets of Dar. One morning while making my way from my guest house, the depressingly essential and affordable Flamingo, to Uhuru Street and Msimbazi, where Walter Bgoya had his publishing offices, a 4 × 4 stopped ahead of me and gave two sharp hoots. A voice called out my name from the window. You here? It was Karim. Get in, he commanded with a grin. I obeyed and he drove me first to an outlet on Samora Avenue where he took two bundles that could have contained sugar or rice or even books, but they contained instead Tanzanian currency, which had become so devalued it had to be carried in packages and baskets and changed into dollars as quickly as possible. Without asking me, he next whisked me off to KT Shop, where we had vitumbua, kababs, and sweet chai.

What was he doing here in Dar? Didn’t he have property abroad? I’ve moved here, temporarily, he said. Business is good. In
Dar he owned oil mills and imported canned condensed milk; he had a partnership in a broadcasting company and a garbage collecting company; he brought in soap from Indonesia, packaging the same variety as detergent and body wash. He had had his life threatened by a competitor. Come, he said, and he drove me to the location of a new venture. To my utter amazement, it was on Uhuru Street right across from where my mother had had her shop. As I jumped out of the car, visions from the past assailed me; I gazed up fondly at Mehboob Mansion where I grew up; at Bhanji Daya Building, Salim Mansion. All two-storey buildings. The shop Karim took me to was in an old-style dwelling even in those days—a house with metal roof, a shop front, and living quarters at the back—where Baby Ndogo, famous as the fattest woman in town, had lived with her family. Karim’s business was run by a local relative. It sold “mitumba,” used clothing imported mainly from Canada. A large variety of fashions and sizes hung on racks, and bales marked “Babies,” “Men Shoes,” “Ladies Jeans,” etcetera stood waiting to be slit open. The long rows of shops and the numerous tailors that had supplied the clothing needs of the city for a good three-quarters of a century had been run out of business by this incoming tide of stylish, ready-mades of the sort that once upon a time only the rich could afford. Now the lowliest menial could wear denim, sport Reeboks. Do you see anyone in rags now? Karim asked me with a grin, and answered after a pause, No. These are good clothes, better than what you and I wear. But we don’t wear them, I said to myself.

Having shown me this latest enterprise, Karim drove me into an unpaved alley nearby, where at the back of a traditional and very modest African house, sitting on low wooden benches we ate bhajias made of ground pulse, a variety rare outside coastal East Africa, eaten
with coconut chutney. He knew I would like them—who wouldn’t, if only for old times’ sake? In our schooldays, a young man used to go around on a bicycle selling bhajias like these; my mother would buy them while I was in school and save them for me.

Many years later, here at the Starbucks patio in Toronto, he asks rhetorically, would we let our twelve-year-olds go anywhere far? We wouldn’t. When his father was twelve, his grandfather in India put the boy on a dhow and sent him off to Zanzibar, from where he went to Dar and opened a shop. The old man himself followed with another son and the three of them set up trading posts in three different coastal towns, importing cashews to Dar, exporting grain, copra, and oil. When Karim would return from school, his father would get him to sit in the shop and help. Never mind homework, first things first. And so in London when he went to the bank manager to ask for a loan to purchase the supermarket in Harrow, and the bank manager asked him why during a recession should he give him, a young nobody from the colonies, a loan, Karim replied: My father is a businessman; my brother runs a business in Congo; and I always helped out my father in his shop since I was yay high. I know business, it’s in my blood. He got the loan. Soon afterwards he invested in his first piece of real estate, in Calgary.

I am convinced that it is not greed that drives him and his like; he’s made and lost money, and made it again; real estate in Calgary crashed, but by that time he had property in New Mexico and London. He moved on, and kept moving. People like him don’t really lose money. Business drives him as chess does a grandmaster. It’s his passion. He thinks it, he talks of nothing else but. Opportunities lost, opportunities to gain; moves made; stories of success and tales of failure. He looks around and his mind calculates: rent, costs, profit.
Africa, he says, is full of opportunity. Believe me. There are millions to be made … though we are not young anymore.

Wary of my occupation and curiosity, still he cannot control himself. He looks at me earnestly, and his soft fair features light up with that smile which gives him the look of a simpleton. We’ve run into each other again in Dar, and we’re sitting in the evening outside the old Odeon Cinema on the sidewalk, which every evening is cleared of vendors and cleaned up to convert it into an open-air restaurant; tables have been set up under tube lights and barbecued chicken comes off the fire and is served with soggy chips, the way they like them here. A few other tables are occupied. The atmosphere is hushed, and at this time it’s mostly men who are about. On all sides of us, the normally noisy streets head off silently into residential darkness. And Karim talks.

He talks of the gold region of Tanzania, where a few years ago people might pick up gold pieces off the ground; if he were younger he would go south and clear acres of land, bought dirt cheap, and grow cashew. He runs off a quick budget for a cashew farm managed along western lines, efficiently. Millions to be made. He’s currently surveying property in Zanzibar. His mitumba business has moved to Zambia—a country, he says, whose business potential was never realized by “us.” Corruption is not as bad as reported. Don’t believe what they say. But then he tells a hair-raising yarn about a road trip from Zambia to the Congo in the midst of the civil war. For me the very idea of the Congo is a nightmare; for him, sitting here like Conrad’s Marlow turned into a businessman, that heart of darkness is just one more wrinkle in a life of commerce. There’s no mineral the Congo doesn’t possess, there’s immense wealth in that country. And Kenya? Don’t believe what they say, corruption’s not so bad there either …

I gape. My life’s taken an orthogonal turn to his, though I like to think that with my Gujarati heritage I understand business. I cannot but admire the sheer courage of men such as him, their spirit of adventure. Nothing fazes them, there’s no trouble they cannot, Houdini-like, walk out of. This, my classmate, who would sometimes give me a ride home on his scooter. He did not come from the more pretentious segment of our small society, whose children came every summer from London and put on airs with their Beatle haircuts and fashionably bare feet, the girls wearing miniskirts; his were the old Gujarati bania type, who had more money but never flaunted it, living across from the market, quietly going about their business.