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

the mukhi’s house who was all set to go to a wedding in arelated 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 interiorregions—“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 meansmedia 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