Greetings from Nairobi. Many thanks to Abhi and the gang for letting me guest-blog, so here begins a short series (illustrated!) about Indo-Africa.
Amardeep’s recent post about Indo-African writers brought up the big question about Indians (East Asians, as they are called here) and the other communities:
And indeed, anecdotally, one hears that the Asians in Africa tended to hold themselves aloof from native Africans, at least before Idi Amin.
That question is a good place for me to start since, quite coincidentally, it’s where I started.
Visiting a place for the first time, especially one defined by a confluence of cultures, requires peeling back the layers of the onion, at least rhetorically. What is said or not said, and how it’s said, can reveal a great deal about a place, and it’s important for a journalist to get a handle on the terms of the discussion if he wants to engage it in any meaningful way.
Best way to orient yourself to the local situation? Ask a cab driver.
Daniel, a black cabbie in his forties attached to my hotel, took me to Diamond Plaza, a shopping center in Parklands, the Indian section of Nairobi. He said he had grown up nearby. I told him why I wanted to go there.
”Indians are rich,” he said. ”They don’t come from farms. They are in business.” It’s always a little dicey when a person of one race makes comments about another to someone who belongs to neither. But I thought he sounded admiring. ”They are good employers,” he said. ”They hire cooks, housekeepers, drivers, guards, lots of staff.”
And then we reached something close to the center of the onion: “They don’t hire their own people. They hire Kenyans.”
Daniel’s tone mattered little at this point. Here was a statement about race relations in Kenya that clearly identified the power structure and the economic arrangement. It hinted at the past and looked to the future.
Daniel then mentioned Idi Amin’s purges in Uganda. “We were very sad when that happened,” he said.
”A lot of Indians came to Kenya then?” I asked.
”Yes,” he said. “That type of thing would never happen here.”
By this point, we had arrived at the destination.
I toured the shopping center briefly—imagine the shops in Jackson Heights, New York, all piled on top of one another inside a guarded compound with a big parking lot. But it was early on a Sunday morning and not much was going on.
Walking around the neighborhood, I discovered the City Park Traders’ Market, a covered plaza of fruit and vegetable stalls, set up by the Aga Khan Foundation as a way for informal growers and middlemen to sell their wares (the Aga Khan Development Network is one of the big cultural and development engines in Kenya). The space is quite large, a muddy warren of piled mangoes and bananas, cucumbers and tomatoes, plus many unfamiliar fruits whose names in Swahili meant nothing to me. There were some Indians shopping, older couples or large families spreading out among the stalls (men in one direction, women in another). A typical Indian Sunday morning.
The traders’ market seemed like one of the few places for Indians and blacks in Nairobi to meet outside the employer-employee relationship. It wasn’t a public park, and there was no socializing, but commerce is good for community relationships if people come together regularly and negotiate terms.
Daniel later told me that the original plan for the market had been to sell low-cost produce to poor people. But now rich people shop there.
I didn’t debate with him about how the flow of capital from the haves to the have-nots is invariably a good thing or that anyone could shop in the market or that nothing could stand between an Indian auntie and a bargain on groceries, but I took his point. Perception is all.
Aloofness or, better said, the political and cultural status of diaspora Indians in their home countries is always an issue. Indians form the core of Kenya’s middle class (especially in Nairobi) and contribute significantly to the economy, but they are a market-dominant minority, possessing greater wealth than the native majority population. But at some point, these terms are useless. Meet the Indians in Nairobi, and you will find that most speak Swahili. Many families have been in East Africa for four generations or more and have no contact with the subcontinent. Some families have relatives in India, Britain, Canada, or the US, but they see themselves as Africans, not non-resident Indians or PIOs.
The identity question is more than just fodder for a cultural-studies seminar. The Amin purges in the 1970s still resonate. Racially charged political instability is a hallmark of life in Africa. Zimbabwe’s expropriation of white-owned farms has shaken minorities throughout the continent, especially in nominally stable and prosperous countries like South Africa and Kenya, which haven’t been as strident as one might hope in their denunciation of the practice. Lives and property, long family histories, and unique ways of life are bound up in questions of identity.
But Daniel was probably right. Amin-style purges would never happen here. Blacks and Indians have too much invested in each other to start tearing things apart. But no one takes anything for granted.
The aloofness question comes down to whether or not Indians are perceived to have a stake in the future of the country and are not a foreign population siphoning wealth and keeping it for themselves.
One recent event went a long way toward showing that Indians are as Kenyan as any black in the country.
In 1998 when the US embassies were bombed by al-Qaeda in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, the victims were almost entirely black civilians who worked at the embassies or in nearby buildings or who just happened to be passing by at the wrong moment. The initial relief efforts were haphazard and mostly by hand—individuals picking through the rubble looking for survivors. Indians, who dominate the construction industry, quickly brought in bulldozers and backhoes, the heavy machinery vital for the rescue operation. Indians were credited with saving many lives through their initiative and organization. That gesture has not been forgotten.
Scenes from the traders’ market:
all photos by Preston Merchant
