The upcoming issue of London Review of Books will be remembered for its landmark essay by Mahmood Mamdani, in which the highly regarded 76-year-old Indian-Ugandan academic – he was at Columbia University in New York and is now the Chancellor at Kampala International University – directly addresses some of the myths and blind spots that continue to prevail about the rollercoaster history of migrants from the subcontinent to colonial states in Africa. The Asian Question begins with the paradox he encountered during research amongst people like himself, who had been abruptly expelled from Uganda in November 1972.
“I made a point of
asking most of the Ugandans I met to share their thoughts about the expulsion,”
says Mamdani. “For most of them, it wasn’t the decision to expel the Asian
population that was troubling, but the way the expulsion had been carried out:
this was the beginning of wisdom for me. Ten years later, whether we met in
Uganda or in Britain, I put the same question to friends, former neighbours and
schoolmates of Asian heritage from the pre-1972 period. To my surprise, more
than 90 per cent of them said they would not want to return to the years before
Amin ordered them out: whatever they experienced at the time, they – like the
‘indigenous’ Ugandans I’d been questioning since 1980 – had nothing against the
expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in
Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?”
Mamdani explains: “At the heart of the problem were Uganda’s
citizenship laws, drawn up when Britain relinquished its protectorate. A clause
in the Independence Constitution of 1962 restricted citizenship by birth to
those born of Ugandan parents, one of whose grandparents must also have been
born in Uganda. My guess is that no more than 10 per cent of Ugandan Asians
would have qualified for citizenship under this clause at the time of
independence. Six years later, Britain added an ‘indigenous’ ingredient to its
own citizenship laws, and another layer to the complexities facing Uganda’s
Asians. As Ian Sanjay Patel argues in We’re Here because You Were There, the
1968 Commonwealth Immigrant Act ‘was the first immigration law specifically
designed to target non-white British citizens not resident or born in Britain.”
This, then, is the nitty gritty of why so many Indians –
including tens of thousands of Goans – bounced far from Africa in waves of
exodus that are still reverberating. It wasn’t any fanciful “winds of change”.
Instead, as Mamdani expounds in his 2020 Neither Settler nor Native: The
Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press) “the
political effect of colonialism was not limited to the loss of external
independence, to the drawing of external borders that demarcated the colony
from the outside. More importantly colonial governance drew borders inside the
colony.” Thus, “two sets of citizenship laws, in Uganda and Britain, were a
vice in which tens of thousands of Asians were squeezed. After 1968, no British
passport-holding Asian in Uganda could obtain a work permit or trading licence
in Uganda, or gain entry into the United Kingdom.”
Trapped in that way, the substantial majority of Indians in East
Africa tried to decamp wherever they were accepted. The UK turned hostile –
remember Enoch Powell’s noxious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech – but some thousands
(including Mamdani) did get refugee status there. Canada also took in
thousands, and many others went to India. Others scattered widely, including
one tiny cohort in Norway, which is how Thomas Pereira (born in Sarpsborg in
1973) became one of the first Indian-origin players in top-flight European
football, including eight caps for his country. And it also explains why the
first really great literary achievement to come out of the Goan-Indian-African
experience was first published in Norwegian (Ivo de Figueiredo’s Em fremmed
ved mit bord was launched in its excellent English translation as The
Stranger at My Table at the Goa Arts + Literature Festival in Dona Paula in
2019).
Figueiredo puts it most pithily, about an inconvenient history
that you will never glean from history books in the West, or Africa either:
“The harsh truth was that now my family became redundant people, mere slag from
the grinding wheel of history. They were a people with origins, history, but no
territory of their own. The empires that had created them had gone and now they
were left standing among the colonial ruins under the scorching sun.” He
writes, “Goans seem in many ways to be one people no matter where in the world
you meet them [but] there will always be a difference between those who went
away, and those who stayed. For many families, this separation happened twice
over. First in their departure from Goa, then, a generation later, in their
departure from East Africa. In both cases those who stayed had to live under a
new set of rules that threatened their culture and way of life.”
Clarice Vaz’s vivid, delightful new Romalina: Goodbye Africa,
Adeus Portugal, Namaste Goa! is another in the steady trickle of memoirs
and other kinds of writings by and about African Goans since The Stranger at
My Table earned such acclaim. The nurse-turned-artist based in Saligao
first drew attention for her intense, unique paintings – some are even made
using syringes – that seem to erupt from deep psychic pain and healing. This is
classic ‘art brut’ or ‘outsider art’ as outlined by Jean Dubuffet: “Those works
created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the
worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are,
because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of
professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an
exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we
cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its
entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.”
Understanding this context is vital, because Romalina –
in my view – is best classified as outsider literature, falling distinctly
outside the standard conventions of the art, writing, and publishing worlds. It
makes for unusual reading: by turns playful, polemical or poignant, and
sometimes all those things at once. It’s a memoir, but also history, with an
astonishing range of images. Especially fascinating is the chronological table,
which has separate columns for what happened at the same time in Europe,
Portugal, Goa, Clarice Vaz’s family, and the rest of the subcontinent. Starting
from 1415 – the dawn of “the age of exploration” – and stretching right to
1987, it’s an appreciably heartfelt effort that is greatly enhanced by the
writer/illustrator Bina Nayak’s lush interventions on virtually every page.
There’s no other book like this, which is exactly as it should be.
Here’s how our Clarice begins her
Acknowledgements (which are typically idiosyncratically the first thing in her
book): “I am an artist who writes and in a moment during this pandemic, I began
digging into the laterite stone quarries of a ‘Goan mine’ of a different kind.
Trying to free myself of an old label refusing to get unstuck: the
Africander-Goan. Each time I tried to rip it, it crumbled like tambdi mati in
my hands. But I don’t give up easily, and after a struggle, I triumphantly
succeeded in extracting a whole chunk. This boulder was precious for it
contained my personal history and the experiences of every Africander-Goan
before me.” In its physical form, that reshaped raw material is an
exceptionally handsome. In its physical form, that chunk has been shaped into
an exceptionally handsome and weighty volume that is well worth its (not at all
inconsequential) price, but, happily, Romalina is also freely available
for download at claricevaz.com.