And Home Was Kariakoo (41 page)

It can only be laudable for individuals and organizations to provide services where there are no alternatives. Relief organizations help the diseased and the disabled, orphans and victims; church, mosque, and temple bodies run decent schools. The human instinct for pity and kindness, for charity, can hardly be denied or dismissed. Even in the advanced economies there are charities running soup kitchens, sheltering the homeless and the abused, assisting immigrants, providing safe needles to addicts, promoting culture. What is unsettling in a place like Tanzania is the scale of dependence and expectation; it’s as if the majority of the population, from the university graduate to the subsistence farmer, exists with its hand perpetually outstretched, in expectation of assistance, a job, a handout. When the social sector is run by foreigners, and the urban cost of living is pushed up to accommodate their lifestyles, which are vastly beyond those of the great majority; when a total dependence is created on the “donor”—what does this do to the self-image and the dignity of a dependent population that not long ago celebrated its
independence
from Europe? When in order to raise funds, the donor resorts to the slick strategies of the consumer market in its home country to promote its “product,” portraying a nation at its weakest—pathetic faces, distended bellies, running noses stuck with flies, bony buttocks again—how does the world see Africa? How do Africans living abroad face their world?

An entire nation wearing castoffs, clothes designed and manufactured elsewhere, worn before by others, only enhances the local perception and feeling of privilege versus underprivilege, giver and receiver, there and here. It is true that with the castoffs, the so-called mitumba, the people at least dress well; what disturbs is the scale, and the price paid is self-respect. Theroux, who came out with such a negative and disturbing view of Africa in
Dark Star Safari
, observed, “The foreign clothes were like proofs of this shadow existence … and I imagined the wearers to be the doppelgängers of the folks in that other world.”

Social services, roads, schools, vocational training are all due to foreign benefactors. Every schoolchild in the West wants to throw a quarter at Africa. Africa, in that very pathetic sense, is sexy. A family goes to Tanzania and donates a bunch of pencils. A Toronto broker donates a writing prize, a Vancouver doctor donates a school prize. A Los Angeles businessman installs a solar plant. In Zanzibar a foreign NGO wants to teach culture to the locals; another, how to cope with emergencies. A girl in England gets some money from a project and provides free lunch at a school in Malawi. Of course she is received well. I can imagine myself a schoolboy in Dar and well-wrapped beautiful packages arriving by air to give us a free lunch. We’d have been delighted, our eager hands stretching out to receive these lovely goodies. But what does all this constant foreign charity tell a child about its own society? And while one can hardly deny or denigrate the motives, the good purpose in the giving—at the end of the day Africa seems to be there to make people in the western world feel better, more moral.

The Kony episode of March 2012 was a signal lesson in the media manipulation of Africa’s problems and at the same time all the complexities involved in what seems to be the simple idea of giving.

The Kony YouTube video, describing the mass atrocities of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa, was made by an American NGO called Invisible Children; it went immediately viral, taking the world—at least that portion connected by the social media—by storm. The LRA stands accused of brutal killings, sexual slavery, and kidnapping children. Celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Mia Farrow, and Rihanna began Tweeting their support after the video came out, and within a few days it had attracted tens of millions of views on YouTube and garnered hundreds of thousands of dollars in donation. This was the kind of world event that makes people feel good. But which people, in this instance, and why?

There were immediate objections to the video—its manipulative inaccuracy and timing; its open call to yet another American intervention; its simple-mindedness—it was “pitched to a five-year-old’s sense of right and wrong,” according to a
New York Times
article. When I read a report on selected African criticisms of “Kony 2012,” I couldn’t help saying, At last—though not without an unnerving sense of irony. Suddenly—to interpret these African responses—their part of the world was in the news; millions in the West talked and read about it, pitied it, and blogged and Tweeted about saving it. But where, in this narrative, was Africa itself? Where were the
Africans
themselves in it? Africa had become a public-relations opportunity; a plug for the social media and the wonders of technology; an opportunity for those with a few dollars to spare to feel good about themselves. A blackface comic, except that the comedy was tragic.

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger, observed, “…  this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia,
celebrities coming in Somalia.…” The video only furthers “that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves and needing outside help all the time.” Another blogger, T.M.S. Ruge, wrote, “Africa is our problem, we hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters.… If you really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us determine our destiny.” And novelist Teju Cole Tweeted provocatively about “the banality of sentimentality” and the “White Saviour Industrial Complex.” Others saw a “White man’s burden” message repropagated. Showings of the film in Uganda met with anger and even a riot.

More Africans should rise to voice such sentiments. Depictions such as Kony 2012 are humiliating and offensive. It is outsiders who write these narratives of hunger, disease, and war, in the process making careers for themselves. Reporters have dedicated themselves to hopping from one trouble spot to another wearing earnest faces and seeing nothing in between. And yet, having said this, who would deny that the realities they depict actually exist? How to reconcile “Africa is our problem” with the sad truth that much of Africa depends on foreign aid like a patient permanently hooked to life sustenance? In Dar es Salaam it’s difficult to come across anyone who lives comfortably and does not depend for their living on some foreign connection.

Some years ago I was invited to a meeting of publishers held in Tanzania, at an expensive new resort in one of the smaller national parks. The meeting was called to brainstorm the problems faced by the African publishers, and I had been invited as a writer. Among the problems discussed were the small book markets, distribution, the payment of royalties, and lack of funds. I must admit
to my naïveté at the time. It surprised me to discover that this worthy meeting had been organized by a foreign donor, whose representatives were also present. To add to my discomfort, in one private moment at the coffee urn, a senior foreign representative, a publisher in his home country, said to me what he honestly believed, that African novelists couldn’t write. I could have named a dozen good, and some great, African novelists from different parts of the continent, but I named a few. Perhaps he did not consider Gordimer or Coetzee as African, because they are white; or Tayeb Salih, a Sudanese; perhaps he thought Achebe and Soyinka were mere hacks. Obviously the man had given me his confidence having taken me for a foreigner. On the final day of the meeting, a Tanzanian government minister arrived to give blessings. I asked him then why the government would not assist publishing and cultural enterprises the way many western governments, such as
Canada, regularly did. I was not being entirely naive at this point, I also wanted to provoke. My question was met with such a silence in the room (besides a grin from the minister) that I realized then how alien and misplaced I was at that meeting. Some African publishers stared at me as at a madman. I have always wondered if they understood me at all.

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Photo Caption 22.2
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O
NE AFTERNOON AT A TEA
following a seminar on Gandhi, in Shimla, India, to my utter astonishment I was approached by a woman who spoke to me in Swahili. Veena Sharma—small, soft-spoken, and sari-clad—was not from Africa but she had spent some years in Dar es Salaam in the 1970s, reporting for All India Radio. She seemed to know all the important people in Dar, people whom I, a student from modest Kariakoo and Upanga, had only read about. Her interest in Africa remained. Four weeks later, at the tea lounge of the India International Centre in Delhi, Veena introduced me to a woman called Urmila Jhaveri.

Coincidences happen; this one seemed miraculous. As I stood chatting with Mrs. Jhaveri in a Gujarati as formal as I could muster, I couldn’t help but wonder at the improbability of this meeting. We both came from Dar es Salaam, she was a fellow mhindi from Africa—that was enough to be excited about. It was also one more demonstration of the fact that East African Asian identity is real, and becomes evident especially outside of that milieu. But there was more to our meeting, and this my new acquaintance could never have guessed.

The name Jhaveri takes me to one of my earliest memories: I was eight, my family had moved to Dar from Nairobi, and my mother had opened a shop in a new building on Uhuru Street, on the second floor of which we now lived. Independence was around the corner, and the first-ever general election in the country was about to take place for representatives to the Legislative Council. White-and-black posters with photos of the candidates had been pasted on the buildings of Gaam and Kariakoo, exhorting, “Vote for Jhaveri!” or “Vote for Daya!” Young Asian men came around to the shops to canvas, saying, “Ma, are you going to vote?” Daya was the doctor who treated my grandmother, and he had my mother’s vote. He was from our own community, moreover, and that was the extent of our politics. K.L. Jhaveri, a criminal lawyer, however, had the backing of Nyerere—leader of the African TANU party—and won the seat. Years later he wrote a book about his political life,
Marching with Nyerere: Africanisation of Asians
. The subtitle is significant. It is a bold assertion, it is unequivocal, it speaks to the time.

K.L. was from Dar, Urmila from Pemba. That afternoon in the tea lounge in Delhi she sounded wistful about Dar, where she had spent her adult years, and missed its familiarity, having left only the previous year because K.L. needed constant medical attention. Their daughter was settled in Delhi.

When I visited them at their suburban home a few days later, K.L. was seated on a sofa, an extremely frail-looking man, literally skin and bones, shorn of all flesh. He was lively, however, and complained about the Indian production of his book. In Delhi he was keeping himself busy writing—though you wondered how in his fragile state he managed even to finger the keys. Urmila and I had bhajias and tea. She said she was writing her own memoir. It would
be a valuable contribution to East African history, though I wondered if it would be allowed to see the light of day.

As the call for African freedom rose in the 1950s, and in the years thereafter for real freedom—from “neocolonialism”—the Asians faced a choice of loyalties. The shopkeepers and small-business people, in the manner of their class everywhere, were nervous about change. Most of them merely eked out a living; they had been protected by the colonial administration, and the only nation they knew was their small and exclusive community. Our long-time barber, Madhu Bhai—who passed by our shop every month to cut my brothers’ and my hair outside on the patio in full view of the public—was one of those who succumbed to his fears and left for Gujarat, much to my sorrow.

Among the professionals and the educated, however, there was an elite that responded positively to the call for freedom. The Jhaveris reflected the optimism of that class—educated abroad, still in their thirties, and savvy about the world. Well aware of India’s own struggles and excited about African independence, they moved in the enlightened and secular circles of the Asian Association (founded in 1950). The questions they posed themselves, often expressed in their bulletin,
The Tanganyikan
, concerned the future of Tanganyika—which they saw as democratic and nonracial—and the role of the Asians in it. In a report to the Association, for example, K.L. Jhaveri opposed the proposal of the government-supported Capricorn Society, which would restrict the role of the Africans using economic and other criteria and called for a federation with Kenya and Rhodesia. And in an eloquent article, Amir Jamal, the future minister for finance, said, “The Asians of Tanganyika … have a great opportunity of making a significant contribution to build up a strong and
stable society. What is needed is a complete change in their outlook towards the realities.”

Sophia Mustafa, of Qadiyani (Ahmadi) background and wife of a judge, ran for the Legislative Council in the Moshi area. Soon after that election, she wrote a book titled
The Tanganyika Way
, and it quite catches the excitement, the freshness, and perhaps the naive idealism of the period. Wearing a sari and not very fluent in Swahili (she was born in India), she enthusiastically embraced the idea of citizenship above race, and exhorted fellow Asians to think beyond communal and racial identities. In a speech she gave to the Asian Association, she said,