From Kenya's Daily Nation, Monday Feb 19

THE TRICKY IN-BETWEEN WORLD OF ASIAN AFRICANS

BY RASNA WARAH


There is something unique and different about growing up Asian in East Africa than growing up Asian in Europe or North America. The critical differences, in my view, are, one, that most Asians living legally in Europe or North America went there as bona fide immigrants with the requisite papers in hand – visas, permits, stamps, passports – whereas most of the ones who are settled in this part of the world (excluding those traders and merchants who settled on the East African coast centuries ago) came here as subjects of a colonising power.

In essence, they came as slaves (call it indentured labour if you like) who came to assist a coloniser to enslave another group of people. This puts them in a precarious position, of that of a colluder, a fact that all the Makhan Singhs and Pio Gama Pintos could not successfully erase from the Kenyan consciousness.

Two, when Asians living in Europe or North America experience discrimination, they use their numbers and organisational capacities to fight back either through political activism or the ballot box. In this part of the world, Asians put up, shut up, and plan their next move – which often means transporting themselves or their money to countries where they can put down new roots.

Besides, they suffer an added burden and contradiction, which makes their case hard to defend. Who would empathise with a group of people who show signs of “racism” themselves by keeping to themselves and mixing only with people of their own caste, religion or linguistic group? And who would believe that Africans – once colonised, enslaved and victims of racism themselves – could be racists too, Idi Amin notwithstanding?

Asians in this part of the world have always remained “outsiders”. This “outsider status” is one of the themes of the one-woman show Migritude, written, performed and produced by Shailja Patel, a Kenya-born woman who describes herself as “an Asian African poet and spoken word theatre artist”.

The beauty about Migritude, which was performed to a packed audience in Nairobi’s Godown Centre during the recently-concluded World Social Forum, is that it captures the East African Asian dilemma with honesty, clarity and empathy. The script is emotional without being self-pitying, it is political without being dogmatic, it carries a social message without being preachy.

Shailja, who now resides in San Francisco, California, speaks to every Asian who was born in the region and who left, either because they felt that they would be “safer” emigrating to the West or because they were forced to leave by dictators such as Idi Amin. In a piece entitled “Idi Amin”, she recites and explains a Gujarati proverb that defines the wanderlust and fear that defines the Asian African experience:

Rath thodi ne vesh ja ja, the proverb I grew up on. The night is short and our garments change. Meaning: Don’t put down roots. Don’t get too comfortable. By dawn, we may be on the move, forced to reinvent ourselves in order to survive. Invest only in what we can carry: passports, education, jewellery.

But for some, even their jewellery is not enough protection. Here she talks of the trauma experienced by expelled Ugandan Asians arriving in Nairobi from Kampala on the same railway line that their ancestors had helped build seven decades before.

I grew up on tales of the last trains coming out of Uganda. Laden with traumatised Asians, stripped of all they possessed. The grown ups whispered: They took even the wedding rings, the earrings off the women. They searched their hair.

She speaks of the mixed emotions Asians like her feel when leaving a country they love to live in a country where they are barely tolerated and discriminated against:

I learn like a stone in my gut that/third generation Asian Kenyan will never/be Kenyan enough/all my patriotic fervour/will not turn my skin black/as yet another western country/drops a portcullis/of immigration spikes…

At dinner at my house, Shailja informs me that she is reaching a critical stage in her life. This year will mark a turning point – she will have lived abroad for more years than she has lived in Kenya. It worries her. What claim can she assert on her homeland if most of her memories are of experiences in other lands? Which place can she call home? What is her true identity?

Beatrice Verchot, a private practitioner based in Kenya with an interest in Jungian psychology and Sufism, provides some answers in the latest edition of Wajibu. Ultimately, she writes, she is a unique person created over time by the deposit of memory layers whose content was brewed from various amounts of her genetic make up, the emotional milieu in which she grew up, the religious and cultural conditioning to which she has been exposed, the socio-economic and geo-political environment she lives in.

As to the question: Where is home? Shailja answers it herself.

Home is where I can work and love.