Free And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji Page A

they are readily distinguished by red conical fools’ caps, and by their Indian Dhotis, or loincloths.… We determined him to be an exceptional man, but afterwards, on the coast, we received the same civilitiesfrom all Hindu and almost all the Hindi (Moslem) merchants … Pisu … seated us on cots, and served upon a wooden tray sliced mango and pineapple, rice, ghee.…
    With the advent of British and German colonialism towards the end of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar’s commercial power waned and businesses began to flourish on the mainland. Sewa Haji Paroo, also a Kutchi, dispatched his caravans from Bagamoyo and they went all the way to Taveta near Kilimanjaro. His apprentice, Alidina Visram, topped him to become “the uncrowned king of Mombasa,” supplying the dukas (shops) that were springing up on the routes from Mombasa to Uganda, eastern Congo, and southern Sudan. In 1890, A.M. Jeevanjee, a Bohra from Karachi, arrived in Mombasa and, an astute and driven businessman of a new generation, soon made his presence felt. He began his fortune by supplying goods (and even workers) to the Uganda Railway, which had begun construction. Much of early Nairobi, a railway town of wood and iron, was built by his firm.
    These great merchants remain largely unknown even in East Africa. They collaborated with the colonial governments because they needed them; they were also philanthropists and ardent supporters of their own communities. Tharia Topan and Sewa Haji donated hospitals in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam; Alidina Visram founded a school in Mombasa, and has a statue there. A.M. Jeevanjee founded the
Standard
, forerunner of the
East African Standard
, still in existence, and he donated the Jeevanjee Gardens in downtown Nairobi.
    By the early twentieth century, Indians could be seen everywhere in East Africa, in every town, large and small, where their distinctive business strips are still in evidence—often a short row of brick buildings, each with a wide storefront and a residence above.In the even smaller village settlements outside the towns, often a single Indian family might subsist by providing essential supplies locally. But these “Jews” of Africa, as they were sometimes called, were rarely appreciated. To the poor Africans they were the ones raking in the cash. To the white colonials they were often an irksome, alien presence, the bone in the kabab—to use an Indian metaphor—spoiling their pure black-and-white picture of Africa—the whites the superior race out to convert and civilize the blacks; and later the benefactors bringing aid, the blacks the beneficiaries. In their writings and nostalgic musings about East Africa, the white settlers seem to have simply wished the brown man away. The “White mischief” television romances set in Kenya, for example, rarely figured the Asians.
    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