Peter Kimani. Dance of the Jakaranda

Peter Kimani. Dance of the Jakaranda.

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As Published https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz283

Publisher Oxford University Press (OUP)

Version Original manuscript

Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130291

Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Africanizing Kenya’s Indian History1

In July 2017, Uhuru Kenyatta approved the constitutional inclusion of Kenya’s South Asian citizens as the nation’s 44th tribe.2 This came on the eve of a tightly fought general election between Uhuru and Raila Odinga, both of whom lay a familial claim to the nation. Raila’s father, Oginga Odinga, briefly served as Vice President to Uhuru’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first President, before becoming his most ardent and vocal critic.

As “fathers of the nation” Odinga and Kenyatta were bitterly divided over the shape their nation would take, as the former posed a Leftist challenge to the government. Kenyatta deflected this opposition with populist politics that positioned Kenya’s Indian middle class as a colonial hangover that did not belong in the nation. In

1967 he deported large numbers of Indians and legislated Indian shopkeepers out of the country. Fifty years later, in stark contrast to his father’s disavowal, Uhuru’s presidential proclamation acknowledged “the Kenyan

Asians’ contribution to Kenya” that had “roots at the dawn of our Nation”.3 Just five months before this announcement, Peter Kimani published Dance of Jakaranda in which he not only revisits this contested period of history, but positions its central character, a Punjabi Muslim migrant, Babu Salim, as the father of the Kenyan nation. Kimani is the first African novelist to use historical fiction to claim Indian diasporic history and political belonging as one that is unquestionably Kenyan. After a brief summary of the plot, this essay discusses the three historiographical concerns Kimani takes up in making this assertion: state-building and resistance, narratives and archives, and intimacy and identity.

Dance of Jakaranda unfolds over four sections: House of Music, House of Silence, House of Light, and House of Darkness. The novel opens in June 1963 in the House of Music – the Jakaranda hotel in Nakuru – that was built in 1902 in by a colonial soldier-turned-administrator, Ian Edward McDonald. Rajan, Babu’s grandson, and his band play to an African and Indian audience at the recently deracialized hotel. Crooning in Swahili with his

1 I am very grateful to Kenda Mutongi and Leah Mirakhor their insightful comments on this essay, and the many conversations we have had about history, writing, and literature. 2 Many have criticized this move as opportunistic and divisive. See http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/06/05/asians-dont- seek-to-be-44th-tribe_c1571938 3 Daily Nation, 22 July 2017 bandmates, including a close Kikuyu friend, Era, Rajan represents a utopian vision of the young nation that gained independence in December 1963. Rajan’s social circle includes Era, unnamed Indian and African women he sleeps with, and Gathenji, the butcher at the hotel. A lust-fueled encounter with a mysterious woman sends the besotted Rajan on a journey that leads him to Mariam. Together they discover the messy entanglement of their shared history that is rooted and routed through the East African railways that was built by McDonald.

House of Silence dives into this thick history, as indentured labor, including Babu, arrived from India to build the railway line. The railway functions as a metaphor for Kenya’s colonization, as it facilitated the occupation of the territories and peoples living between Lake Victoria and the Indian Ocean, and laid the foundations of a racially divided and segregated colony. For the people over whose lands the line ran and whose hands were forced to produce crops for the colonial market, this “Iron snake” threatened to swallow them up. Kimani highlights the intimate ways in which colonization was experienced by individual men and women. These included Babu, Nyundo, a Kikuyu drummer employed by the railways, elders of local communities, and Seneiya, the daughter of a Maasai chief. Each of them was silenced by the colonial state, assisted by Christian missionary,

Reverend Turnball.

But they resisted and this resistance is explored in the House of Light. For example, after multiple run-ins with

McDonald and Turnball, Babu, who is suspected of impregnating Seneiya, quits the railways. Having witnessed the silencing of Kenya’s people and Babu’s challenges to McDonald, Nyundo also leaves government employ.

In so doing, both not only sever their relationship with the colonial state but together move to overturn it.

Wandering across the lands of Rift Valley, the occupation of which he had been complicit in as a railway engineer, Babu becomes the first settler in Nakuru township, establishing a hugely successful business enterprise with Fatima, his wife. He channels his wealth to fund anticolonial resistance in Kenya, including the Kiama kia

Rukungu (party of the dust) which is a direct invocation of the Land and Freedom Army, known as the Mau

Mau. Nyundo joins this armed struggle.

While light is shone on resistance, and the British withdraw, the nation enters the House of Darkness as Bwana

Mkubwa (Big Man, a reference to Jomo Kenyatta) becomes president.4 At the same time, Kimani uses a posthumous confession in which Turnball reveals himself to be the father of Seneiya’s child to remind us of the complicated legacy of colonial destruction that did not simply disappear with decolonization. The Kiama kia

Rukungu had fought for the return of their ancestral lands that the Europeans had stolen. Big Man had no intension of doing this. Instead he uses an opportunity presented by an arson attack on Jakaranda to outlaw them. Moreover, his government deployed colonial-era legalities and nationalist discourse to define belonging and citizenship racially to exclude Indians, not Europeans, from the nation. At the novel’s end, a failed attempt to deport Babu’s grandson catapults Rajan into a popular national hero, but not for long. Rajan is assassinated on the eve of general elections to prevent him from running for office before he had declared any intention of doing so.

Through McDonald, Turnball and Bwana Mkubwa, Kimani examines how the cycle of power, violence, and resistance was inextricably linked with projects of state-building, both colonial and national, in Kenya. The tensions of empire are evident in every scene where McDonald misinterprets and misunderstands the actions of local elders and his railway employees, reading into their every word the seeds of “rebellion” that he counters with violence. Kimani exposes the nervous condition of state-builders that triggers violence, making state power so absolute and destructive. Despite this silencing, the force and scale of the state’s violence serves to mobilize further resistance. Kimani highlights the illegitimacy of the state by turning our gaze to this resistance.

Significantly, he pulls back the veil not only from the colonial state but also Kenyatta’s to expose the fraudulence of statesmen who claim to represent the people. McDonald’s firepower, used to ruthlessly raze villages and shoot down rebels, was transferred to Big Man’s police and army to coerce Kenyans into public displays of loyalty and dispose of any challengers. Rajan’s assassination is a direct invocation of Pio Gama Pinto, a Goan

4 This is an obvious literary allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but Kimani argues that the heart of darkness of colonialism continues into the post-colonial state. politician and Oginga Odinga’s close ally, who was gunned down in broad daylight in 1965, a murder allegedly directed by Kenyatta himself.5

Big Man’s ultimate betrayal of his people is signaled by his anointment of McDonald as the father of the nation, whitewashing the violence he unleashed on the people of Kenya. This is juxtaposed in Dance of Jakaranda, to

Gathenji and Nyundo’s selection of Babu Salim as the father of the nation. In a climatic confrontation with

McDonald, Nyundo reveals that Kenyans owned their freedom to Babu, pronouncing that “when the history of this country is written, a chapter will be devoted to him.”6 But Indian fathers did not fit into Kenyatta’s nationalist discourse based on racialized majoritarianism espoused by his serikali ya Mwafrika (the black man’s government). Critical of this erasure, Kimani locates the people’s archive in the realm of subaltern oral traditions. While the protagonists in the novel are European and Indian, the main narrative voices belong to the Kikuyu storytellers, Nyundo and Gathenji. Through them, Kimani “reclaims people’s histories.”7

In her influential work, Gayatri Spivak has pointed to the limits of historians’ endeavors to recover such subaltern voices. She cautions against the propensity of scholarship to raise specters of hallowed signifiers that impose, from above, a wholeness to elusive archival voices.8 The genre of historical fiction allows Kimani to address this critique. Deliberately eschewing positivist accuracy, Nyundo and Gathenji’s stories are replete with rumor, contradiction, and possibilities since, “neither the victim nor the villain is willing to tell what truly happened”.9 It is by virtue of this incompleteness, Kimani argues, that fragmentary subaltern narratives destabilize racial and gendered identity.

The colonial project was premised on the racial segregation of white, black, and brown subjects in Kenya, a separation that was never complete in practice. Turnball’s confession of having impregnated Seneiya was

5 See, for instance, Daniel Branch, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir (New York: The New Press, 2018) 6 Dance of Jakaranda, p. 286 7 Peter Kimani interview, 4 December, 2017, https://africasacountry.com/2017/04/peter-kimani-reflects-on-the-work-of-historical- fiction/ 8 See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak” and “Rani of Simur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”, History and Theory, 24(3), 1985 9 Jakaranda, p. 246 accompanied by an admission that she was only one of many local girls he had sexual relations with, and a revelation that McDonald was Mariam’s father. At the same time, rumors of Indian railway workers’ intimate encounters with local girls enabled Europeans to maintain the fiction of racial distance and keep their own sexual trespassing hidden. Exposing the fallacy of public claims and hypocrisy of private secrets of the many fathers revealed in the novel, Kimani turns our attention to “the women behind the pioneers”, the mothers whom “no one remembers”.10

In an endeavor to recover these lost voices, Kimani highlights the gendered experience of colonial violence among women who bore the brunt of the “forcible entry” of the railways and the “raping” of Kenya’s land.11

In this framing Seneiya, standing in for unnamed and unheard African women, was sexually violated by

Turnball. Kimani is critical of the collusion of patriarchies as McDonald provides a line-up of Indians for

Seneiya to identify as the culprit simply to placate her father who had arranged her marriage with a chief’s son in the neighboring village. No one asked “how she felt about the whole thing… it was presumed she didn’t know his name”.12 The silencing of Seneiya’s voice leads her to point fingers at Babu because he had the

“kindest face”, choosing him as the father of her child who, when born, is given Babu’s last name. Accused, falsely, of being the father, while Babu awaits a decision on his fate, he imagines being asked to marry Seneiya.

Despite subjecting him to “public humiliation, he had no doubt in his heart that he could learn to love and care for her”.13 Kimani thus leaves open the possibility of consensual interracial relations between African women and Indian men.14 This ambiguity, however, is problematic because there is a strong element of coercion that

Kimani leaves unexamined. Seneiya “shuts her eyes... turned and lay prostrate” during Babu’s attempted sexual engagement with her. She remains silent, sobbing after, indicating her lack of consent.15 But this encounter and

10 Jakaranda, p. 342 11Jakaranda, p. 342 12 Jakaranda, p. 206 13 Jakaranda, p. 226 14 Marriages between Indian men (mostly Muslim) and African women took place in the early twentieth century. This history is mostly preserved in families through memory passed down several generations. Recently, the BBC traced the family history of actor Adil Ray whose great grandfather married a young Buganda girl. See “Who do you Think You Are?”, Season 14, episode 4. Several such relationships are also recounted in Cynthia Salvadori, We Came in Dhows (Nairobi: Paperchase, 1996) 15 Jakaranda, p. 342 the incompleteness of Seneiya’s voice mostly serves as a plot device to highlight Babu’s impotence, a central theme in the novel, that absolves him of the crime of penetration and impregnation despite his desire and attempt to do so. This is a double negation of Seneiya’s voice and agency.

Babu’s impotence and infertility allow Kimani to assert the legitimacy of South Asian belonging by highlighting the instability of racial identity. It is here that Kimani engages with a large body of historical scholarship and literary commentary on race, diaspora, and political belonging in East Africa. Histories of Indian politics written in the 1980s placed elite leaders within a narrative of anticolonial nationalism in works that ended in 1963, leaving unexamined Indian diasporic enclaves and colonialisms’ afterlives in Kenyatta’s state. In contrast, East

Africa’s South Asian writers eschew politics to examine diasporic consciousness and racial belonging. The recurring trope of miscegenation is used in this literature to critique and disrupt diasporic endogamy. It is in the intimate, domestic realm that the possibilities and limitations of interracial entanglements are revealed as secret familial genealogies in these novels. 16

More recently, from the vantage-point of the first decade of independence when Indians were deported out of

Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, historians have reexamined interracial anticolonial politics and dismissed the scope and scale of such collaborations. Pointing to the material inequality of diasporic Indians and indigenous

Africans, the experience of which was articulated in racializing tropes in politics and everyday interactions, they argue that these collaborations were unrepresentative of the larger diasporic and African communities. African writers, especially Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as Dan Ojwang has noted, used Indian shops and houses as sites of emasculation and humiliation for African protagonists in their novels in the 1960s and 70s. They raise the specter of the cheating Indian shopkeeper, implicated in the colonial project for preventing young Kikuyu boys

16 See Dana Seidenberg, Uhuru and the Kenya Indians: The Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics, 1939-1963 (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983), Rober Gregory, Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa 1900-1967 (Nairobi: Orient Longman, 1993). For an overview of Indian literature from East Africa see Stephanie Jones, “The First South Asian East African Novel”, Contemporary South Asia 17(1), 2009, “The Politics of Love and History”, Research in African Literatures 42(3), 2011, Antoinette Burton, Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation, 2012, Dan Ojwang, Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature (London: Palgrave, 2013) and Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) from accumulating enough wealth to marry and attain manhood. Furthermore, historians have cautioned against overstating the significance of Indo-African anticolonial politics as they risk negating African agency.

African resistance to the colonialism, they assert, was not only independent of Indian influence, but was resistant to the very presence of Indians – who represented colonial, capitalist modernity – in their country. 17

The illegitimacy of Indian claims to belonging in East Africa remains an underlying assertion in this scholarship and Ngugi’s literature, as it did for Kenyatta’s state. Indians remain outside the purview of anticolonial nationalist resistance for two reasons: their geographic and civilizational affinity with their Indian homeland; and the reproduction of this “Indianness” in in diasporic enclaves (in marriage and business, especially) that is assumed to prevent them from making a territorial or political claim in Kenya. Moving away from imposing a singularity of territorial belonging that always positions migrants outside their place of arrival, in my work, I have argued that Indian diasporic consciousness can be located in two homelands – India, their civilizational homeland, and Kenya, their political homeland. Diasporic, politics, I conclude, made an equal claim to belonging to both these homelands; a claim that was deployed at different historical conjunctures to establish proximity and distance from Africans.18

For Kimani, however, diasporic political belonging emerges not out of the archive of public claim-making and political alliances that has shaped this historiography, but from intimate interracial entanglements explored in the East African literary canon. With rich intertextual references, Kimani addresses the concerns of masculinity and endogamy raised by African and Indian writers to position Babu as the father of the nation. Being impotent, it is Babu, not Nyundo or Gathenji, who is quite literally emasculated. But this emasculation is liberating. First,

17 See, for instance, James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Ohio University Press, 2012), Ned Bertz, Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015). For an overview of this scholarship see Sana Aiyar, “Out of India: East Africa and its South Asian Diasporas” in Radha Hegde and Ajaya Sahoo (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2017). See also, Dan Ojwang, “’The Bad Baniani Sports Good Shoes’: ‘Asian’ Stereotypes and the Problem of Modernity in East Africa”, Africa Insight, 35(2), 2005 and Robert Muponde, “Ngugi’s Gandhi: Resisting India”, Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 13:2 (2008) 18 Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). See also Zarina Patel, Unquiet: The Life and Times of Makhan Singh, (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2006) and Manilal Ambalal Desai: The Stormy Petrel (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2010) Babu’s coital inaction with Seneiya, in fact, allows Kimani to distance Babu from the sexual violence of the colonial project. Second, Babu’s inability to reproduce enables him to break the biological shackles of diasporic endogamy. The incompleteness of Babu’s intimate life, then, frees him up to sire the nation and be held up as the legitimate father of the nation by Nyundo and Gathenji. Significantly, Babu never throws off the trappings of Indianness in Kenya. He builds a profitable career as a trader, remains married to Fatima, accepting as his own the son she had out of wedlock with another Punjabi Muslim, and promises his grandson, Rajan, in marriage to the family of a shipmate from India. Indeed, Babu’s claim to the nation does not require him to performativity or ideologically break out of his diasporic enclave. Far from being a public act of diasporic disavowal and nationalist claim-making, Babu’s anticolonial activism is private and intimate, and remains a secret, even from his family. In a radical departure from an earlier generation of African writers, including his mentor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Babu’s “Indian” identity does not pose an obstacle for him or Nyundo to express solidarity and share a common anticolonial politics.

Kimani thus demonstrates that Indians are racialized and positioned outside the nation by the state, not the people. The signifiers of racial difference, he argues, are historically contingent, making race an inherently unstable register for national belonging. Kimani then defines the Kenyan nation as a multiracial one to which

Indian migrants and indigenous people have an equal historical claim. By exposing the fraudulence of the many fathers who claim to have sired the nation, he urges his readers to abandon the search for “real” fathers of the nation and instead look at the intimate lives of people who build communities. Influenced by Benedict

Anderson’s Imagined Communities, it is within the realm of intimacy that Kimani visualizes his imagined nation in the effortless friendship of Rajan, Era, Gathenji and Mariam at independence.19 Friendship, in fact, emerges as a critical space of historical inquiry into the shared history of resistance and community-building. In Babu,

Kimani invokes the friendship of many Indian and African activists who joined hands against the colonial state.

These included trade unionists Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai; M.A. Desai and Kikuyu Harry Thuku who launched one of the first post-war political protests against the colonial state; and Pio Gama Pinto and Odinga

19 Kimani, https://africasacountry.com/2017/04/peter-kimani-reflects-on-the-work-of-historical-fiction/ Odinga whose joint opposition to Kenyatta dominated parliamentary politics in post-colonial Kenya. Although

Kimani takes poetic license in imagining a multiracial Kenya in which the wanainchi (the ordinary people) resisted Kenyatta’s orders to deport Indians, his literary imagination is grounded in the lived experiences of that generation. While the Indian trader is deployed as an exploitative figure in his fiction, Ngugi’s memoirs of the

1970s and 80s attest to the close interracial friendships of Indian and African intellectuals who used fiction to criticize Kenyatta’s state and mobilize politically.20 Dance of Jakaranda turns the historians’ gaze to these hidden histories of interracial communities of solidarity forged through bonds of friendships that did not require individuals to reject their communitarian roots.

In 2002, Achille Mbembe criticized modes of African self-writing that racialize geography and territorialize identity. This autochthony, he noted, makes “the idea of Africanity that is not black” simply unthinkable, closing off the possibility of locating an African South Asian identity that is “contingent and situated”.21 Peter Kimani belongs to a new generation of African writers and scholars based in South and East Africa, including Godwin

Siundu, Robert Muponde and Dan Ojwang, who have turned a critical eye to the majoritarian politics and racializing literature of the first decade of independence that produced this discourse of indigeneity. Kimani’s most radical contribution in writing Dance of Jakaranda has been his demonstration of how historians can recover this African South Asian identity. Flamingoes, Nakuru’s namesake and permanent migratory residents, raised as an allegory for diasporic Indians, serve to make precisely this assertion of territorial belonging. The constitutional recognition given to Indians 50 years after their deportation shifts popular discourse a hair’s breath away from the politics of indigeneity, giving the South Asian diasporic archive a small but significant opening to locate a thick, albeit contested, history of belonging in its Kenyan homeland. A history, as Kimani reminds us, that is replete with contradictions and rumor.

20 I am grateful to Kenda Mutongi for bringing my attention to this. See for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Asia in my Life,” https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/asia-my-life and Education for a National Culture. Gaurav Desai has read a gesture for friendship in Weep Not, Child”. Desai, Commerce, p.5 21 Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing”, Public Culture, 14(1), 2002