FOR many readers of South Asian writing in English, particularly literature which seeks to trace the experiences and histories of immigrant and diasporic Indians in colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary global contexts, M.G. Vassanji may need little introduction. For those less familiar, the esteemed author (he twice won Canada’s prestigious Giller prize for fiction, amongst other awards) of several novels and short-story collections, and two previous works of non-fiction, Vassanji has set his books in East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), North America (Toronto, Los Angeles, the Midwest), and India (Gujarat) — the places in which he has lived, and to and from which he has journeyed, over the course of 65 years.

Vassanji’s latest non-fiction work, And Home Was Kariakoo, which bears the subtitle of ‘memoir’, is not loosely centred “about the country [of his birth and youth] per se but about myself in it”, in the author’s own words. And it is Vassanji’s affiliations to East Africa’s migrant Khoja Ismaili community; to the language of Swahili over and above his other ‘mother’ tongues of Gujarati and Kutchi, or indeed English; and to Dar-es-Salaam, the city of his childhood, adolescence and wistful returns — as opposed to his Nairobi birthplace or long-adopted Toronto — which inspire, facilitate and steer the perambulations and associated reflections which comprise this discursive book.

And Home Was Kariakoo’s 25 chapters are constructed around journeys undertaken by the author and various companions (some are named and some, oddly, are anonymous) departing from and returning to the dusty streets and chai shops of Gaam, the Indian quarter, and its adjacent African area of Kariakoo, in the city familiarly and affectionately dubbed ‘Dar’. Vassanji’s travels take him up and down the Tanzanian coast to the neglected town of Tanga and the ancient city of Kilwa; inland over long and often rough roads to Mwanza at Lake Victoria and towards Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika; and across the sea to the seemingly somnolent island cosmopolis of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. They also lead him back to his family’s original home in Nairobi, retracing memories of earlier and more painful returns.

Each place has its own particular history of trade and commerce (including that disturbingly “multicultural enterprise”, the slave trade), ancient caravans and more recent European explorations and missionary expeditions, colonial domination and anti-colonial intrigue, postcolonial insurrection and exodus, and neocolonial development. Each is also connected by networks of African Asians still in existence today, if in dwindling numbers. Vassanji frequently interrupts the not-quite-narrative of his present-day travels to mull in considerable detail (aided by a liberal quantity of quotations) over the various intriguing themes the silent monuments, modest local museums, and towns he passes seem to prompt. These include in particular the captivating, intermediary figure of the local facilitator in East African history, whose progress he follows through earlier accounts. Vassanji observes that, whether in the chronicles of European explorers, official colonial records, or Swahili poetry, these other characters — from the 15th-century ‘Moor’, Davane of Cambay (probably a Gujarati, possibly a Muslim), who advised the voyaging Vasco da Gama, to the 19th-century vania (merchant) Ladha Damji, a Bhatia caste Indian from Kutch, who supplied the Burton-Speke expedition — “remain a cypher”.

Although the stories only provided “bare glimpses of these [Asian] men, [they nevertheless became] part of [his] projected completion as a person”: central to his understanding of his “own history as an Asian African”, and vital to the anchoring of his sense of self abroad. Vassanji is grateful to “these men who wrote”, despite their ignorance, racisms and other insufficiencies. The importance of Indians from Africa producing and “telling [their] own stories” in order to record their place in its history, and trace the genealogy of their sense of identity, is a refrain to which the author returns throughout And Home Was Kariakoo, in present as well as past contexts.

As he goes from quiet towns and through busy way stations to the sites of historical interest marked on the map of his travels (helpfully included in the book’s front pages), pausing where possible for simple meals of Khoja chai, roti and bhajias along the way, Vassanji admits to being powerfully moved by his “own tribal connection”, discovered in such unlikely-seeming spaces as “a dark little Swahili gulley in a little town in Tanzania”. “That modesty and simplicity, that mutuality”, he admits, “it’s my inspiration”. Yet, conscious of the potential divisiveness of distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’, he remains attentive to the moments when this Asian mutuality may become exclusive, and is distracted by this creeping realisation: when invited into one Indian lady’s Tabora home, his companion, an African of Bantu heritage, is left outside.

Towards the end of the book Vassanji also expresses his discomfort with the assuredness of a young woman whom he encounters at the University of Nairobi. She approaches him following his delivery of a lecture on Asian politicians in post-independence East Africa who have sought “to define themselves as Africans”. For her, Asians in Africa are a collective ‘we’, in need of redress in terms of their representation in Kenya’s national narrative. Conscious of the importance of works that seek to ‘correct’ this story, and to replace Asians in it, Vassanji — who remembers the horrors of the Zanzibar Revolution and related backlash against Asians — still cautions: “otherness can become a debilitating marker, a permanent self-identity”, detrimental to the unity of postcolonial nations. His preference is to relax with “the realisation that I am always in a minority” — whether in Kenya, Canada or Tanzania — and to enjoy the intimacies brought by his East African connection, content with being received there “as a man from Nairobi who lives abroad”.

In its construction, Vassanji’s memoir can seem unwieldy, its eclectic choice of topics ranging from the Burton-Speke expedition to Lake Tanganyika, to beliefs in sorcery (in particular the talents of “a young African Jesus”) still extant in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the ventures of “old leftists” such as Walter Bgoya, an independent Swahili book publisher “in a sliver-thin market”.

The book provides little by way of narrative, save for the trajectories provided by the author’s return from Canada to Dar and his excursions within and beyond it; and a sense of progressing in time from the East Africa of the Portuguese and Omani Arab eras to the postcolonial present, where tiny children of African, Asian and mixed-race descent stand before Vassanji as the ambitious inheritors of the “new Tanzania”.

Nor does it offer much of the personal; it does not recall that very intimate kind of personal history, but more a certain positionality. Vassanji’s prose in certain instances, too, is frustratingly elliptical, its precise meanings obscure. However, there are moments and visions in And Home Was Kariakoo, of great immediacy and poignancy, which are highly personal. For example when, in the midst of a rare recollection of his schooldays, the writer recalls his embarrassment at being approached in the present by an Asian beggar-woman who had perhaps gifted sweets to his classmates in childhood. Or, on passing from the postcolonial nation’s new capital to another way station, he cannot help but notice the men from the once formidable Masai and Gogo peoples having been reduced to begging at a town bus station.

Because of his “ties and empathy to and love for” the places of his birth and youth, Vassanji maintains his right to criticise both Tanzania’s current regression from a culture of jitegemee (‘help yourself’) to one of reliance on foreign aid, and the Western media’s propagation of overwhelmingly negative images of Africa (wars, HIV, and hunger) even as he acknowledges the comfort from which he has benefitted since making his home in Canada. Some readers might take issue with this — with Vassanji’s claim to offer an insider’s perspective. Yet one cannot help but conclude, to borrow from the author’s own words, that “the world from here looks different. CNN is far away”, and hope that the stories of Asian-African lives such as those described here — lived beyond its unflattering spotlight — may have a space to emerge.

And Home Was Kariakoo: Memoir of an Indian African

(MEMOIR)

By M.G. Vassanji

Penguin Books, India

ISBN: 978-0670088096

400pp.