Notes Introduction 1. Christian Konjra Alloo, Otieno Achach (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966), 40. 2. Okot p’Bitek, White Teeth (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1989), 95. 3. Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-l’Ouverture, 1969), 33–34. The replication of European attitudes by Africans made Dent Ocaya- Lakidi to conclude that “a great deal of the so-called African attitudes to Asians are in fact European attitudes assimilated and internalized by the Africans.” Dent Ocaya-Lakidi, “Black Attitudes to the Brown and White Colonizers of East Africa,” in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on the Ugandan Asians (London: The Athlone Press, 1975), 81. 4. Mahmood Mamdani, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1983), 10. 5. For a provocation in this regard, see Dan Ojwang, “ ‘The Bad Baniani Sports Good Shoes’: ‘Asian’ Stereotypes and the Problem of Modernity in East Africa,” Africa Insight 35, 2 (2005), 4–14. 6. “Contact zones” is borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). She character- izes them as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4). 7. Sofia Mustafa, “Racial and Communal Tensions in East Africa,” in East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs (ed.), Racial and Communal Tensions in East Africa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966), 53. 8. Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 9. 9. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 1. 10. Rosemary George, The Politics of Home,9. 11. Robert Gregory and Gaurav Desai each provide a detailed sense of East African Asian literary history, one which reaches back into the colonial period. Robert Gregory, “Literary Development in East Africa: The Asian Contribution, 1955– 1975,” Research in African Literatures 12, 4 (1981), 440–459; and Gaurav Desai, “Asian African Literatures: Genealogies in the Making,” Research in African Literatures 42, 3 (2011), v–xxx. 12. Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imagi- nary (London: Routledge, 2007), 4. 13. Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 5–8. 14. L. W. Hollingsworth approximates the date of the Periplus to CE 60. The Asians of East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1960), 11. 15. Hollingsworth, The Asians of East Africa, 12. 207 208 Notes 16. George Delf, Asians in East Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1. 17. Delf, Asians in East Africa,1. 18. Reginald Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 301. 19. J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa—c. 1886–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 14, 22. 20. Daniel D.C. Don Nanjira, The Status of Aliens in East Africa (New York: Praeger, 1976), 6. 21. H. S. Morris, The Indians in Uganda: Caste and Sect in a Plural Society (London: Weidenfield& Nicolson, 1968), 11. 22. Quoted in Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 293. 23. Winston S. Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), 49. Churchill observed that “It was the Sikh (and Punjabi Muslim) soldier who bore an honorable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anybody else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communications” (49). 24. Quoted in Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 110. 25. George Delf, Asians in East Africa, 18. This was the phrase a group of European- settler women used in a telegram to Queen Mary, imploring her to stop further Indian immigration into Kenya. 26. Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country. Huxley recalls white fears of the time: “White civilization would be swamped in a brown enfranchised flood and the white settlers, not to mention the indigenous native, politically butchered to make an Indian holiday” (116). 27. John Maximian Nazareth, Brown Man Black Country: A Peep into Kenya’s Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings Publications, 1981), 71. 28. Hollingsworth, The Asians of East Africa, 99–107. 29. J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa, 111. 30. J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa, 114. 31. For a discussion of the link between Christian mission school culture and anti- Indian attitudes, see Michael Twaddle, “Z. K Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa,” History in Africa, 24 (1997), 309–336. 32. For more information on the relationship between the Indian press and Kenyan nationalist movements, see Felice Carter, “The Asian Press in Kenya,” East Africa Journal, 6, 10 (October 1969), 30–34. 33. Examples include Jacqueline Bardolph, “East Africa: The Novel Since the Eight- ies,” in André Viola, Jacqueline Bardolph and Denise Coussy (eds.), New Fiction in English From Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 77–107; Amin Malak, “Ambiva- lent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji,” World Literature Today 67, 2 (1993), 277–282; Anne Koshi, “The Afro-Asian and American Dreams of Race Relations in Bahadur Tejani’s Day After Tomorrow,” Wasafiri 13 (1991), 11–13; John Scheckter, “Peter Nazareth and the Ugandan Expulsion: Pain, Distance, Narration,” Research in African Literatures 27, 2 (1996), 83–93; and several articles that appear in the special issue, “Asian African Literatures,” Research in African Literatures 42, 3 (2011), edited by Gaurav Desai. Notes 209 34. Pallavi Rastogi, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race and National Desire in South Africa (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010), 18. 35. Rasna Warah, Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery (Nairobi: R. Warah, 1998), 12. 36. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). 37. Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, 17. 38. Ronit Frenkel, Reconsiderations: South African Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). 39. Devarakshanam Govinden, ‘Sister Outsiders’: The Representation of Identity and Dif- ference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008), 32. 40. M. G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989), 145. All subsequent references are in the text. 41. Chinua Achebe and Nurrudin Farah, Writers in Conversation: Chinua Achebe with Nurrudin Farah, videocassette, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986. Frederick Buell notes, in a discussion of identity, that “the search for the uninfected—primordial, bounded, perhaps the essentialized—kernel of ‘native’ culture becomes more like unwrapping an onion: one finds relationships (global, regional) beneath relationships, not a hard, definite, genuinely local core.” National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1994), 40. 42. Ronita Torcato, “The Eyes of the Peacock,” Sunday Herald (Bangalore, 12 April 1998). 43. Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora,2–3. 44. Bahadur Tejani, “Farewell Uganda,” Transition, 75/76 (The Anniversary Issue), 262. Originally published in Transition 42 (1974). 45. “You are a paper citizen and will run away” is the accusation that Kenyan parliamentarian Martin Shikuku leveled at his Asian compatriot, Krishna Guatama, during a parliamentary debate in 1982. “Debate Over the Role of Kenya Asians,” The Weekly Review, November 12 (1982), 3. Donald Rothchild reports about a black Kenyan respondent who, “describing Asians ...as ‘blood- suckers and parasites,’ maintained that such people, even if citizens, should not be given equal chances with Africans because ‘they’ve exploited us enough and this is now our chance.’ ” Racial Bargaining in Independent Kenya: A Study of Minorities and Decolonization (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 174. 46. Agehananda Bharati, The Asians in East Africa: Jayhind and Uhuru (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972), 5. 47. The phrase “triple heritage,” in reference to the historical experience of East African Asians, is Rasna Warah’s. Triple Heritage. 48. Arun Mukherjee, Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR, 1994), 169. Admittedly, Mukherjee’s observation was made before Vassanji won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, for The Book of Secrets (London: Picador, 1994) and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: Doubleday, 2003). 49. M. G. Vassanji (ed.), “Introduction,” in A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Fiction (Toronto: TSAR, 1985), 2–3. 50. M. G. Vassanji, personal communication, e-mail, February 9, 2000. 210 Notes 51. Simon Gikandi, “Reading the Referent: Postcolonialism and the Writing of Modernity,” in Susheila Nasta (ed.), Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era (London: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 88–89. 52. Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration Between India and Trinidad (Durham and London: Duke University