Our Family Heritage Tour
An East African holiday
By: Burjor Avari
It was a long time ago that we came to settle and work in Britain from East Africa. Zarin arrived here almost as a refugee from the turmoils of the Zanzibar revolution in 1964. She had never intended to migrate, but was forced to by the sort of fears and pressures a revolution engenders in one who is deemed to be part of a community comfortable within the old regime. I had studied in Britain for seven long years from 1955 to 1962, had a decent job as a teacher in Kenya, had become a citizen of Kenya after its independence in December 1963, and there had been no revolution there. All that, however, did not stop me from succumbing to the same fears that many Kenya Asians felt at that time about their long term future in a country where Africanisation in employment and other areas of public life was going to be the natural order of things. I too returned to Britain in 1966, ostensibly to pursue a master’s degree, but without having any firm conviction about the rightness of my decision, and causing much agony to my parents who had hoped for their son to become a well established member of the educated class in Kenya society. Alas, it was not to be! My decision had killed their hopes and aspirations for me: but they never ever complained.
More than 40 years had gone by for both me and Zarin in the hustle and bustle of full time teaching and family and social life in Britain: but after Zarin’s retirement in 2004 both of us felt a strong urge to re-visit the places of our childhood and youth and, in the process, capture some of the emotions from the past. Memory and nostalgia were the driving forces. But there was also another compelling reason. Rushna and Anahita were born in Manchester, feel thoroughly Mancunian, but have always shown great interest in listening to the stories of our families both in India and East Africa. Like so many young British Asians, they possess a sharp awareness of their multiple social and cultural identities. East Africa had also been, for them, an intimate part of that fabric of identities. We all therefore felt that a visit to East Africa would consolidate their understanding of their parents’ roots. It is my firm belief that Britishness would mean nothing for young people from multicultural, multifaith and multi-lingual origins if it is not coupled with providing them with a historical perspective of their roots too. Britishness cannot just be taught; it has to be felt; and that can only happen when you are aware of where you have come from.
The Nunes family in Arusha, Tanzania, are an epitome of how minorities have succeeded and established themselves in the heart of Africa. Pervin Nunes is Zarin’s first cousin. She and her husband, Merwyn, have built up a large safari business in Tanzania; and for years they had been requesting us and Zarin’s brother Sam’s family to visit them. Our wish was to turn into a firm decision one evening at our home when Sam’s son Kevin and his soon-to-be wife, Agathe, talked about having a holiday in Africa. Both families thereafter charted out their itineraries with the help of the Nunes. Our own plan was for a 3-week visit without any safari. We decided to spend the first ten nights in Zanzibar, followed by four nights in Mombasa, three nights at Arusha and the last two nights in Nairobi. Zanzibar got the lion’s share of our holiday time, partly because Zarin had been separated longest from the place of her birth and childhood and partly because I too have fond memories of my three years there in the 1940s. Part of the holiday for Sam, Kevin and Agathe coincided with ours in Zanzibar.
Whenever we undertake any journey involving air travel Zarin insists that, under no circumstances, she would want to be anywhere near that nightmarish place called London Heathrow. That presents some difficulties, since Heathrow is the airport from where most flights to Africa depart. A travel company, Trailfinders, found the perfect answer for us. Take the Emirates flight from Manchester to Dar-es-Salaam via Dubai, but return to Manchester from Nairobi, again via Dubai – without incurring any extra charges. This suited us admirably. We had a night flight to Dubai; which, for me, is a most uncomfortable experience. Seven hours of being cooped up in a tiny space in economy class are a torture; and I feel envious of people who quietly while away the night watching a film on a tiny TV set attached to one’s seat with their earphones on. Early morning in the orient made me feel more cheerful, but there were five more hours of flying to do before we could reach Dar-es-Salaam. Boats of varied sophistication are used to ferry people by sea from Dar to Zanzibar Stone Town, the capital of the island of Zanzibar; but we opted for a 20 minute hop by air in one of the tiniest aircraft I have ever sat in. Our international flight had been so full that, if we had waited for our luggage to appear on the carousel, we would have missed our mini-flight to Zanzibar. We therefore left the dispatch of the luggage in the hands of a trusted agent of Pervin and made straight for the next flight. The luggage ultimately arrived, nearly two hours later. From a very low height that the aeroplane flies we get a wonderful bird’s eye view of the two towns and the ocean that separates the mainland from the island. The island of Zanzibar was all green and verdant.
We stayed for the first three nights in the Stone Town at the Tembo Hotel. It occupies, on a majestic site along the seaside and the nearby port, the premises that once belonged to a 19th century old Parsee trading firm of Cowasjee Dinshaw and Co. With its headquarters in Bombay/Mumbai, this company ran cargo ships to and from places on the Gulf, Aden and the East African coast from Mogadishu down to Beira in Mozambique. The firm lasted almost until the 1960s; and, during the eighty years of its heyday, Zanzibar was a trading port of prime importance. It was exhilarating to see some of the antique Indian and Arab furniture, photographs of the long gone Parsees and other artifacts of the old company lovingly restored and preserved in the hotel. The views of the sea, the sandy beach and the harbour with all sorts of small craft were stunning from the balcony of our room; and they brought back to me vivid memories of happy days playing in the sand as a small boy on that beach. While the Tembo’s standards in cuisine and plumbing are not of the highest rank, its site is the winner. It also has a most impressive indoor swimming pool.
The next three nights were spent at the beach resort of Bweju on the south east coast of Zanzibar island. It takes about 45 minutes to reach Bweju by a fairly good macadamized road, a road that one suspects has been specially built for the benefit of the tourists. Some of the best roads in Africa hardly carry any traffic, except for the tourists; while the worst roads are daily pounded by wagons and humans. At Bweju the Nunes were our hospitable hosts, and there was very little prospect of slimming in their household. The cheerful atmosphere of the tropical evening barbeque and the sweet and melodious Harry Belafonte songs sung by Merwyn and Sam will, I am sure, continue to cheer our spirits during the long winter months that are approaching. The shimmering, long and white sandy beach of Bweju, the round the clock rise and fall of the Indian Ocean tides and the balmy breezes and winds of that ocean, provided us with the atmosphere of perfect relaxation of body, mind and soul. During the daytime groups of local men and women can be seen collecting seaweeds from the shallow waters, a product much in demand throughout the world as part of the Chinese cuisine. The work they were doing, of wading in the water for hours, must ultimately affect their health adversely; and one wondered what sort of wages they were receiving for their labours! A walk on the beach in the night, with the tide extremely low, and the stars shining brightly in the sky, with not a soul in sight, had a heavenly feel to it: a perfect moment for contemplation!
Time soon passed away at Bweju, and we were back in the Stone Town for the last four nights, not at the Tembo but at one of the luxurious, small hotels of the world: the Zanzibar Serena Inn, owned by the Aga Khan, whose own bedroom Zarin and I had the honour to use (at a hefty price of course!). Occupying another prime site by the seaside, the Serena Inn building used to be the headquarters of the Zanzibar Electric and Telegraph Company in colonial times. The first electricity and the first electric lift in East Africa all started off in Zanzibar; and the various Parsee gentlemen who used to work for this British company were thought of as brown aristocrats by the locals. They lived comfortably in a small universe whose security was underwritten by the Union Jack and the long arm of the British navy. Entering into the Serena Inn Zarin at once remembered the corner where Manchershaw Bulsara, the uncle of Freddie Mercury, used to have his desk from where he supervised all the stores and stationery of the company. Comfort and elegance, coupled with lots of good food, are the business of the Serena Inn: and the substantial presence of, most probably, fairly well off Americans and Europeans, bore witness to the quality that was being offered at the hotel. There was only one particular irritation that niggled me. One of the chamberlains in the reception room always mentioned the words “bara bara?” to me particularly in an inquiring but a slightly mocking tone. Indian women, in old Zanzibar, knowing little Swahili, used to be re-assured by their servants on being asked with a single inquiring term “bara bara?”: is everything OK? I felt that the chamberlain was somehow reminding me of the past, of that clumsy Indian-African relationship. Then I thought of a suitable response. At the mention of “bara bara” I would say “sava sava”, which means the same but is generally used by the Swahilis. I am not sure whether he appreciated how I felt.
Zanzibar and its sister island of Pemba have been part of Tanzania since the revolution of 1964, but their history before then was part of the story of the Indian Ocean, its rulers and its traders. These islands were also the foundation stone of a great culture that grew along the entire eastern coast of Africa: the Swahili civilization. The Swahili people, speaking the Swahili language, are an African Bantu people much influenced by the Arabs from Muscat and Oman and the Hadhramaut coast of the Arabian peninsula and by the Persians. The vast majority of them are Muslims, and Islam provides the code of conduct in the Swahili lands. For many centuries the Swahilis managed to retain their autonomy while also absorbing Arab and Persian influences, but from the 16th century onwards they became the pawns in the great rivalry between the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs for power and trade on the Swahili coast. Acting as buccaneers and vandals, the Portuguese managed to destroy the model of trade in the Indian Ocean developed peacefully by the traders from many nations over a long period of time. The modest Portuguese fort in Zanzibar and the much more formidable Fort Jesus in Mombasa testify to the Portuguese military presence in the past. Portuguese influence in the Indian Ocean finally waned after the arrival of the British; and the latter helped to restore the Omani domination on the east coast. In 1840 the ruler of Oman, Seyyid Said, transferred his court from Muscat to Zanzibar. The Zanzibar sultanate remained in power until 1964.
The early sultans were a fairly headstrong people, but after they had had a taste of bombardment for 45 minutes from a British warship in 1896 they soon changed their ways. That 45 minute bombardment, resulting in damage to the Sultan’s palace on the seafront, is now regarded by historians as the shortest war in history with a clear cut outcome. From 1896 onwards the Sultan was to be just a puppet figure, with all the strings being pulled by the British Resident. With the added protection under the British Zanzibar became a key centre of trade and power in East Africa. Certain tangible benefits of colonialism followed, particularly in the Stone Town: eg, the closing down of open sewers and gutters, first gas and then electric lighting, a regular and clean water supply, a clear framework of administrative and legal rules, the paving of roads, fee-paying schools, museums and civic amenities. In other words, an infrastructure of a colonial town was established. Life was good for the Arabs who owned large tracts of land, the various Indian ethnic groups who busied themselves in trade or managed to get employed in the service of the colonial state, and a small local Swahili elite. The British had also ended the slave trade. It is normally known as the Arab slave trade; and certainly the Arabs were the slavers for most of the 19th century; but it should not be forgotten that there was very little slave trade before the Portuguese arrival. It was they who had greatly stimulated the East African slave trade; and the Arabs then continued it. The Anglican Church built on the site of the Zanzibar slave market and the awful dungeons in which the slaves were incarcerated are a reminder of that dark past.
In the early 1960s Zanzibar experienced political turbulence similar to other colonial states in Africa. The movement for independence was gathering strength, and political parties emerged out of the different constituent groups in society. Now, one might say, two clear parties emerged: one consisting of those who had enjoyed a comfortable existence thus far and who simply wished to replace the British with their own people in power, and the other made up of people with a sense of grievance at not having had a share of the good life during the Sultanate and the British times. The former consisted of the Arabs, the Indians and some Swahilis; while the latter were made up of mostly the poor Swahilis and a great majority of the non-Swahili Africans who had come to settle in Zanzibar from the inner African mainland. Put it most simply, it was a contest between the rich and the poor of that society. The rich were safe as long as there was British protection; but with the withdrawal of that protection at independence they lost everything. A brutal and conspiratorial revolt put the leaders of the poor in power; and the rich were in full retreat. The pent up anger against the Arab aristocracy in the countryside resulted in their massacre and the flight of the Sultan. The Indians, struck by extreme fear, also began to migrate out of Zanzibar. The situation would have been far more terrible were it not for the fact that the new rulers of Zanzibar and Pemba agreed to join up with the newly independent mainland country of Tanganyika whose ruler was Julius Nyerere. He was a humane socialist, but he found it difficult to control some of the more stupid excesses of his political colleagues on the two islands.
Rambling around the Zanzibar Stone Town today is, at one level, a dispiriting experience. All round are signs of what happens when a precipitate revolt of the poor is led by vengeful zealots with little understanding of the principles of how modern economies run. The state of the grand old Arab and Indian buildings of the old, built of pure stone, is an index of what has happened. The poor had simply moved into the homes of the rich and taken them over. They had not paid anything for their new possessions, and they also had no real understanding of how to maintain the buildings. Many of these buildings are in a state of collapse. We were extremely sad to see the state of the building on the sea front which used to be Zarin’s school, St. Joseph’s Convent School. It was an extremely well run Catholic school, and one can only imagine the strict standards that the German nuns must have maintained! Today the building appears to be in a ruinous condition. And inside, apart from the desks and the blackboards, on one of which there was something intelligent written, there was nothing that could resemble a modern school. Similar fate has befallen one of the most impressive buildings in all Africa, the Bet-al-Ajaib, or the House of Wonders, which used to house many administrative offices in the colonial era; it too is badly run down. Although it does house a good museum, most of its space is unutilized and locked up. The once white and gleaming palace of the Sultan also houses a museum but is in a bad shape too, with ceilings about to fall in some of the rooms. The poor state of the buildings is matched by an equally poor state of roads. It appears as if there has not been any road repair since colonial times. All pavements lie broken, and an unwary pedestrian can easily twist his/her foot negotiating the potholes and the mounds of sand. At night there is very little public lighting, because the drug addicts preferred darkness and had vandalized the lamps. Better to switch off the lights than to punish the addicts, it seems!
Nyerere had been a good ruler of Tanzania, and he had given Zanzibar a measure of political stability. After his voluntary resignation in 1985, however, the new rulers began to view more critically the socialist-communist economic practices that had failed to yield any gains for the country as a whole. Under the pressure of the IMF and the World Bank, more market-oriented policies began to be encouraged; and particular encouragement was offered to foreign investment. Many of the Arabs, who had fled to Muscat and Oman in 1964, brought back some of the oil riches of the Gulf, bought properties in Zanzibar and revived the old trade. A measure of prosperity has returned to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba also through the large scale expansion of the hotel trade. Where humans failed Mother Nature came to the rescue. The islands possess some of the finest beaches of East Africa; and a tropical beach holiday is now the passion of the rich all over the world. Many chains of hotels reap huge profits from the tourists; and some of this wealth is trickling down to the employees in the hotels and the various retail traders, artisans, artists, souvenir manufacturers, fishermen and farmers etc. It is doubtful whether enough of the tourist wealth is being transferred to the national economy. The multinational hotel companies and some of the richer locals receive the bulk of the financial benefits. On our visit to Bweju we observed that the most dilapidated of the villages lay only 50 yards behind a string of expensive hotels on the beach. The two worlds were completely apart. This would not be tolerated in a country like Spain, which has the world’s largest tourist industry. The excessive reliance on the hotel industry is also in danger of creating a class of servile and dependent hangers-on. It cannot be right that hordes of young men spend all their time trying to sell mostly useless things to tourists. There must be better ways to utilize their energies.
A few knowledgeable and historically-minded hoteliers are following the example set by the Aga Khan who has invested much money into the Zanzibar Conservation Plan. They too are repairing and renovating old houses of great grandeur and magnificence. The classic Zanzibar stone houses had rooms that were cool and airy with high ceilings. Each house had its distinguishing Indian or Arab door with well polished brass studs. We looked at a number of Parsee houses of old. Without maintenance they presented a sorry sight. During the colonial heyday the Parsee community numbered nearly 500 people, but today there is only one family left: Parviz and Bomi Darukhanawala and their daughter Diana. Zanzibar used to possess a fully consecrated Parsee-Zoroastrian Fire Temple, one of only two outside India and Iran (the other one being at Aden). Today the Temple exists no more and is merely a heap of rubble. The graveyard has been desecrated, with headstones dismantled for their marble; and without inscriptions it was difficult to identify the graves. The Parsee Social Club has become a military building; and when we drove inside the grounds the guard turned us back. There is, however, one iconic Parsee legacy in Zanzibar that has arisen quite accidentally in recent times. The world-renowned rock star and musician, Freddie Mercury, was a Parsee who had been brought up in Zanzibar, and studied at the same St. Joseph’s Convent School which Zarin also attended. Most of the Euro-American tourists are generally taken by the guides to the so-called Mercury’s house on the Main Road, while the house he and his family occupied in another part of the town for most of their years in Zanzibar has been forgotten. Zarin felt strongly that the tourists were fed wrong historical information. One suspects that the tourists do not care one way or the other which house of Mercury is going to be shown to them, as long as they have been somewhere near where Mercury lived.
Freddie Mercury left Zanzibar a long time ago; but some of the school friends of his and Zarin are still living in Zanzibar. Most of them are Goans. In colonial times the Catholic Goans sent their children to convent schools like St. Joseph’s; they were generally joined by Parsee children, along with some Arabs and Swahilis. The Hindus and the Muslims normally sent their children to government-run Asian schools where teachers from India were employed. In the private Catholic sector the Goans were in the majority. A large number of Goans left in 1964, after an innocent girl from their community was gunned down by crazed revolutionary soldiers. Some remained, and one of them Mr. Dourado even went on to become the Attorney general in the revolutionary government. Meeting Goan friends in Zanzibar is no problem, particularly on a Sunday, as the entire community attends the service in the early morning at the impressive Catholic cathedral. Most of the Goans live within five to ten minutes’ walking distance from the cathedral. We visited the cathedral on our very first Sunday; and, after the service, everyone met everyone. What was also interesting to observe was the high number of African Catholics at the service. Zanzibar is overwhelmingly a Muslim land, but there is no persecution of the Christians. The majority of African Christians come from the Tanzanian mainland; and Christian-Muslim relations in Tanzania are generally peaceful. According to Merwyn, however, the Cathedral has on occasions been subject to graffiti daubed by some fanatic Muslims.
A morning out of the Stonetown and into the countryside on a Spice Tour was a most exhilarating experience. Formerly, the agricultural fame of the islands of Zanzibar and Pemb rested on cloves which are a spice with certain dental usages. Today, cloves are only one of the great many spices and herbs grown there. A systematic horticultural project has been under way; and the great variety of spices and fruits owe much to the government’ encouragement of the policy of diversifying the products. Our guides were unfailingly courteous and kind. They were also extremely knowledgeable and articulate in explanation. They had facts at their fingertips, which impressed us greatly. The country people were most friendly, and they fed us many different types of exotic fruits. They also possessed great skill in weaving the palm tree leaves into extraordinary shapes like turbans, scarves and men’s ties.
……….
A tourist leaving Zanzibar has to pay a special departure levy of 30 dollars. This rule does not apply to other Tanzanian ports, and is therefore a testimony to a certain amount of financial autonomy that Zanzibar enjoys. We had to do the same at the airport check-out for our flight to Mombasa, Kenya. Within 45 minutes of our departure at 8.00 am we were sweating in the heat of Mombasa, the majestic island-city of Kenya. It has an impressive airport, with spacious and pleasant surroundings, which is officially known as Mombasa Moi International Airport, in the honour of President Arap Moi who ruled Kenya with an iron grip between 1977 and 2002. Our stay for four nights was at the Nyali Beach Hotel on the northern Kenyan coast, outside the island of Mombasa which is where the city is situated. This hotel was the first beach hotel in Kenya, established in 1946 by John and Eva Noon. Many splendid portraits of this enterprising couple adorn the galleries and corridors of this fine hotel; and, if for nothing else, they give an insight into the life of the rich white people in colonial Kenya. The hotel occupies a prime position on the coast; and the long sandy white beach is its biggest attraction. The guests who use the hotel today come from a wide cross-section of society. Tourists from Europe and North America come in big parties; but many local East African Asians and Africans can be seen in great numbers. The Euro-American tourists have little interest in getting to know Mombasa city itself. For most of the day they are lazing about, with very little clothing, on their deck chairs near the swimming pool, and tanning their bodies under the African sun. We had a different agenda: all I wanted to do was to go into the city and find my bearings from the time of 1966 when I left. A large retinue of taxi drivers hang around the hotel, taking the tourists from the hotel to the airport and back, while our taxi driver was always ferrying us to and from the city. He was one of the most courteous and punctual taxi drivers that I have ever met.
Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya, was always a bustling, busy place, as long as I can remember; but I was astonished to find how much it had expanded during the last four decades. The island appears very crowded, with all the vacant spaces that I knew having been taken up by buildings; but the really huge expansion has taken place on the north western mainland adjacent to the island. A new mix of suburbs and shanty towns is the normal pattern in expansion. Looking at it positively, what the expansion shows is that there is much economic activity among the people. Urban Kenya is a place that is moving fast, and people have expectations of upward mobility. The downside of it all is a great deal of noise, dust, pollution and environmental decay. If one wishes to avoid the mega urban sprawl and its bustle, then the place to go to is the historic heart of Mombasa, which is called the Old Town. Covering an area of roughly 2 square miles, the Old Town began to grow out of a small settlement at the foot of an enormous fort, called Fort Jesus, which the Portuguese built in the 16th century. The Old Town has seen mariners, traders and invaders come and go through its history, but it has retained a spectacular ambience and charm of it own, a mixture of cultures as varied as Bantu, Swahili, Arab, Persian, Gujarati, Portuguese and British. Here the pace of life is extremely unhurried, with no one particularly in a rush to get things done. This is the part of the town that I loved best as a young boy. Although I lived in the expanding new frontiers of Mombasa, every now and then I would walk or cycle through the maze of narrow streets of the Old Town, continually being fascinated by the varieties of people and their varied oriental dresses. Returning to it after such a long time, I found the place more or less as it was: and I doubt whether it will change even during the next hundred years. It is my earnest prayer that old Mombasa retains this particular antiquity amidst the ocean of sad modernity.
In contrast to the 1960s, today, there are hardly any Asians to be seen on the streets of new Mombasa: the Africans have taken over the streets. It is a different story in old Mombasa, where there are still many Asians left. There were always two types of Asians in colonial times: those who thought of Africa as a place to make money, live comfortably, and have minimal contact with the Africans; and those who thought of Africa as a place which was their home, full stop. The first group left the country, in gradual stages, between the 1960s and the 1980s. Many of them were professional people, and a large number of them were also traders and salesmen. Those who came to Britain have done well for themselves, as can be attested by their prosperity in the diverse boroughs of west and north-west London. The majority of those Indians, who had little inclination of leaving Africa, lived in old Mombasa; and they happened to be mostly Indian Muslims. These Muslims, made up of a large number of communities of Shia people from Gujarat, such as the Ithnashris, Ismailis, Bohras, Memons, Kutchis, Bhadalas, are involved in a variety of small trades and businesses, serving the needs of local people. Many of them have forged deep relations with the local Swahilis or Arabs through marriage; and their Islam too binds them together with the African Muslims. They have many ties with the Islamic world that stretches from the ports of Gujarat through Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, the Perso-Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia: and they continue the long Indian Ocean tradition of trade and migration. The sort of Sunni-Shia enmity that we notice in Iraq or Pakistan has no place in Mombasa. The tolerant traditions of the city go back many hundreds of years.
A hundred years ago most of the land in today’s new Mombasa was virgin. That was the time when many financially shrewd Indians bought out large tracts of land for building their own villas and bungalows. A few Parsees also invested in land; and until today our community holds an extensive area of land with properties. Unlike in Zanzibar, there are still 18 Parsee individuals left in Mombasa; and, between them, they hold 20 flats, a large hall, a big cemetery compound, about a hundred hutment-houses and much empty land. One would think that these individuals should feel comfortable and confident. The sad reality is that of increasing demoralization among them, along with a continual round of petty quarrels. Their fear of losing all this property to the Africans can be very real and worrisome! And that seems to act as a disincentive to improve things on their estate. I found that somewhat distressing to see and to listen to. My moment of greatest dismay was when I looked at the block of flats in which we had resided. It has become truly ugly and dilapidated over these years. I remember the time when, every two years, a new coat of paint and whitewash was applied on the building, on the orders of the Executive Committee of the community. That degree of maintenance has gone.
There were two institutions that I particularly wanted to visit: the school where I received my secondary education, and the school where I had taught. The Allidina Visram High School in Mombasa is a showcase of Indian benevolence from colonial times. Allidina Visram was an Indian trader who had made much money from the Indian Ocean commerce; and in 1923 he donated handsomely towards building a government secondary school for Asian boys in Mombasa town. That was the era of segregation, when European, Asian and African children went to separate schools. Highly competent Indian teachers, with fine qualifications from Indian colleges and universities, were employed to teach young Asian boys like me; and I had the greatest respect for all my teachers. Our medium of instruction was English, although we also studied as a separate subject our Indian mother tongue, such as Gujarati, Urdu or Punjabi. There were no Bengalis in those days in Kenya. Western education was inculcated into us, but by Indian teachers. This, I believe, influenced me for the better, because it gave me the facility of looking at the West and its civilization through Indian eyes. The Allidina Visram High School was the training ground of some of the ablest Asian professional people in colonial Kenya; and now it carries on with the tradition of training a new generation of African students who will form the educated class in Kenya. The school is now almost totally Africanised, but the academic standards are strict and appear reasonable. On our tour around the school, we noticed that there was pin-drop silence in the classrooms where, despite the holiday season, students were being taught. The Head Master, with whom we had an interesting discussion on the comparative wages of teachers in the UK and Kenya, appeared to me to be a scholar of broad and humane sympathies. What was sad to see was the decay of the fabric of the building itself. The stonework is all intact; but the woodwork is in a very bad shape. The lack of money for essential repairs has been due to the wholly inadequate government grants to schools for capital expenditure. The government of Kenya is only now waking up to the challenge of building and maintaining institutions such as schools, dispensaries and social centres.
The school where I had taught was 12 miles out on the northern coast. Shimo la Tewa High School was, and still is, an African boys’ boarding school. I taught there between 1964 and 1966; and I was the first, and possibly the last, Indian teacher in that school. I enjoyed my two years’ tenure there, teaching English and European History up to Cambridge School Certificate and Higher School Certificate levels. The colonial period had just ended; and there was no sustained campaign to start teaching local Kenya history during that early period of independence. Now things have much changed. The school still maintains good standards; and we had a lively talk with the Head Master and the Dean of Studies about the subjects being offered and the levels aspired to by students who come from all over Kenya from within all sections of society. Much greater informality was now noticeable, compared to my times when a majority of teachers from the UK provided good education but did not always find easy to let go of their Anglo-Saxon reserve. Many fine bungalows had been built for all the European teachers of the school in colonial times. One very large one had been given to me; and frankly I found it hard looking after it. We looked around the teachers’ quarters, and all the bungalows are still in use. Compared to the earlier era, however, the landscaping was rough. The British generally work hard at their domestic gardens. They took this habit to the colonies; with plenty of servants and gardeners no wonder the landscape always looked neat and trim. Despite the lack of funds, which must hinder schools like Shimo la Tewa, the commitment of head masters like that at Shimo la Tewa was inspiring; and we left the school much enthused by what was carried on where the others had left.
A building of the greatest historical significance for Mombasa and her people is the Fort Jesus. This is a huge fort, built in 1592, by the Portuguese sailors and soldiers who wished to control the entire Indian Ocean trade at that time. The Portuguese imperialists of that era had almost sealed off that ocean against all intruders; and they forced the local sailors and traders, whether they be Arab, Indian, African or Indonesian, to pay excessively penal taxes and levies on goods traded. They were the first of the European colonialists who did so much damage to the peaceful and tolerant ways of the native peoples of the Indian Ocean for their own commercial gain and greed. It was their guns that brought about the ruin of so many ports on the East African coast. Fort Jesus was built by them in order to deter particularly the Omani Arabs from attacking Mombasa. They held on to the Fort until 1698 when, after a 33 months’ sea and land siege by the Omanis, they were starved out. The Portuguese finally left Mombasa in 1729. In the early 19th century the Fort became a bone of contention between the Sultans of Oman and Zanzibar and the local armies of the Mazrui family. Eventually the British became the masters of Mombasa at the end of the 19th century, and from 1895 until 1958 they used it as a prison. Since 1958 it has become a major historic and tourist site, with a fine museum built within its precincts.
In the shadow of the mighty Fort Jesus, from where the two main streets of the Old Town branch out, we met my dear friend and peer, Mohammed Makka or, as I used to affectionately call him, Mamdu. Mamdu and I were together in Manchester in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. He was studying Accountancy, while I was doing History. A third dear friend was Ali Mazrui, now a world-renowned intellectual. In the company of Mamdu and Ali it was home to home for me. We had great times together, both studying and enjoying life. With his mischievous streak, Mamdu always teased me often for my eccentricities and naiveties. I never felt offended. I lost touch with him after I finished my studies in Manchester. Now, 46 years later, I finally met him. It is a wonderful feeling meeting someone you have been fond of after such a long time! Seeing Mamdu, visiting my old schools, walking through a small portion of the Old Town, meeting a few Parsees and, at last, paying respects to my father at his grave: all these events rounded off our Mombasa tour. I am very happy that both Rushna and Anahita have a positive feeling towards the place of my childhood and youth.
……….
One more internal flight takes us to Kilimanjaro Airport in northern Tanzania. Our destination was the town of Arusha, a forty minutes’ drive away. This is where Pervin and Merwyn and their son and daughter, along with their families, live and run a safari company, called Wildersun Safaris. Tanzania is only now entering the safari trade in a big way, something that the Kenyans have been good at for many years. There are spectacular nature reserves and animal parks in Tanzania, and nearly 140 different safari companies are competing for the tourist market. Wildersun Safaris have a head start, as they have been established over many years and have worked out clear and clever strategies for appealing to potential tourists from the richer countries. The most important of these strategies concerns the idea of service. Nothing is too difficult for them in the task of serving the customers and tourists, some of whom have extraordinary rich tastes. Wildersun Safaris aim to guarantee every creature comfort that a safari tourist may desire. One cannot but succeed with that attitude of mind. We were originally asked by Pervin whether we would like to go on a six day safari. Not being the most animal-friendly people, we gave thumbs down to Pervin’s suggestion. Nevertheless, when we arrived at Arusha, our hosts had arranged a complimentary whole day safari for us in the Terengere National Park. We enjoyed a great day out, and saw many different herds of animals, including a bloodied lioness which must have had a zebra as her lunch. I was very glad that we had a taste of the African wild for a whole day, but a six day safari might have been a bit too much for us.
Besides being an important starting point for many of the Tanzanian safaris, there are three other interesting things to know about Arusha. It is exactly half way in Africa between Cape and Cairo; and a clock tower marks the point. It was the place where the first President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, laid out his visionary programme of self-help for his people, the Ujamaa concept, which was reviled and hounded by the leaders of the Western capitalist powers who made life difficult for him and his country. This was known as the Arusha Declaration. And today, it is the place where a United Nations tribunal has been set up to try those charged with culpability for the Rwanda genocide of 1994. I was very keen to attend one of the trial sessions; but unfortunately it was the weekend when we were there.
Our hosts Pervin and Merwyn made us extremely comfortable in their palatial bungalow; and we were very glad to meet their son and daughter with their families. We also met more Goans at an afternoon party. While in Zanzibar many of the Goans had been Zarin’s school friends, in Arusha they were part of the Nunes circle. The reason is that Merwyn is not a Parsee but a Goan. A dynamic and hard working woman with a rebellious streak, Pervin demonstrated very early on a decisive independence of her own by marrying someone outside our Parsee-Zoroastrian community, a Goan school friend of hers. Today many young Parsees marry people from other communities; but forty years ago it was not very common, particularly in East Africa, where each Asian community kept itself to itself. It was very courageous of Pervin to break the taboo: and her reward was in having a most loving and big-hearted husband. I had interesting conversations with Merwyn. At one point we were talking about corruption among the newly emerging elite in Africa, and I was wondering why the leaders were reluctant to share a small portion of their newly-acquired wealth with the ordinary people whose exploited labour was making them wealthy in the first place. I shall always remember Merwyn’s words: “And it will not take a lot to make the life of the poor more comfortable”.
……….
Our final destination on this heritage tour was Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Instead of flying there we had opted to travel by road. We left Arusha at seven in the morning and we were in Nairobi by noon. We passed through three different types of the East African landscape. A small portion of the land around Arusha is agricultural, with crops like coffee, sugar cane and pyrethrum being grown. There is quite a dense population in this area: and driving through it in the early morning we encounter on the road crowds of school children in uniforms with their satchels: a most pleasing sight. Just before the Kenya border we enter the classic, nomadic grazing country of the Masai people of Kenya and Tanzania. Now there is very little vegetation to be seen, and the countryside looks quite arid. We pass through the Masai Amboseli National Park, just after crossing the border at a small border town of Namanga. Small groups of Masais, with their herds of cattle and goats, are seen all along the road as we push deep into Kenya on its awful roads. As we enter the outskirts of Nairobi the countryside again changes dramatically. From the nomadic country we enter the high density commercial agriculture land that grows coffee, tea and sisal. All around and beyond Nairobi, towards the north and north east, the land is extremely rich, a land worth fighting for and dying for.
As we entered Kenya at the border town of Namanga I was pleased to notice the general friendliness of the immigration officials. Gone were the early post-colonial days when, as Indians, we felt a certain trepidation at the sight of African bureaucratic officers wearing dark glasses. Suspicion and mistrust were then our biggest enemies. There was always the fear of the Africans. How things have changed! We were greeted with nothing but great courtesy and respect at the border. Having their own independence and not being pushed around by foreigners have made the Africans of Kenya regain their natural poise and grace: and now the foreigner is welcome all round. Every people must be free to decide their own destiny; and it is my good luck that I have witnessed in my lifetime the emancipation of both the Indians and the Africans from colonialism and colonial humiliations. What also struck me as we entered Nairobi was how all the public space had been reclaimed by the Africans. At one time, in colonial Kenya, the Africans were basically unwelcome to linger in the best bits of the town after they had done their daily menial chores for the foreign elites. Now a sea of black faces have taken over the streets of the city: and that is a natural and desirable development of the post-colonial age.
Nairobi is on its way towards becoming an African megapolis. Its population is nearing two million and it covers a huge area, with only a fraction of which we were able to see while being driven around. At the beginning of the 20th century its geographical site was desired by the Europeans, although its land was always a bone of contention between the nomadic Masais and the agriculturist Kikuyus, one of the dominant ethnic groups in Kenya. By the end of the Second World War it was recognised as one of the most beautiful and well planned colonial cities of Africa. It has been expanding ever since: and there lies the paradox! As it has become the nation’s powerhouse and the principal base of both the elite and the newly emerging middle class, it is beset by both problems of consumerism and the poverty of those who are denied a share of its wealth. While the city centre is grid-locked by a ceaseless traffic of motor cars, buses and all forms of heavy goods vehicles, only a short distance away enormous slums house those who eke out a meager living for themselves. The wealth gap is also making Nairobi one of the most dangerous cities in the world, which is also a familiar urban story of our times. We stayed in the city for too short a period and in much too exclusive an hotel that we were not in any position to assess the danger. While we did not ventured out at night or went into the slums, Anahita and I never felt any sense of threat or fear during our brief foray into the city during the daytime.
Both Zarin and I had previous educational associations with Nairobi, and we were keen to re-visit the past. Zarin had been trained as a Domestic Science/Home Economics teacher at the newly established Royal College. For three years after gaining her Cambridge School Certificate she used to fly at the beginning and the end of every term regularly between Zanzibar and Nairobi. She had a most exhilarating educational experience, and her training was rigorous and thorough. As the Royal College was franchised by Manchester University to teach the course material planned by Manchester academics Zarin’s teaching certificate was that granted by Manchester University. This turned out to be fortuitous for her because, on her arrival in Britain in 1964, she secured a secondary school teaching post without any further questions asked. Her Manchester qualification allowed her to go on teaching in the British school system until her retirement in 2004. Today the Royal College is no more, having been absorbed into the massive Nairobi University, the extensive campus of which we were only able to glimpse at. My first teaching job was at Nairobi’s Duke of Gloucester School which was attended by highly academic Asian boys of the city. Asian girls joined them in the Higher School Certificate classes. In the 1960s Nairobi the schools were segregated; but every community’s children had elite schools to go to if they were academically good enough. The Duke of Gloucester’s standards were extremely high; and many of its students went on to achieve great things in life. All the ghosts of the past appeared in front of me as I toured the school, the ghosts of stern, benevolent and highly demanding Indian and European teachers who were my colleagues. I remembered how, as a young and rebellious teacher, I had myself to be disciplined and groomed by more experienced teachers around me. Of all the schools I visited I felt most emotional about the Duke of Gloucester, because now from the hindsight of retirement I go back to the past and wonder how things might have been if I had been more humble and more conventional in my very first teaching post. From our brief visit and a chat with the Head Master I had the distinct impression that the school proudly maintains the high standards of the past. It was also pleasing to note that the fabric of the building was in a good state. I also noticed that one or two Indians, who had been students in the past and who had done well financially, were donating towards the cost of repairing some of the classrooms. Even after such a short visit I went away with a great feeling of satisfaction that the school where I first started my educational career continues to produce the educated class of the future.
While we were in Nairobi the Aga Khan was in town too. All over East and Central Africa the Aga Khan is looked on with great respect and admiration for the way he has reposed his trust and confidence in these lands by investing vast sums of money for various public projects. The present Aga Khan IV, Prince Karim, succeeded his famous grandfather, Aga Khan III (1877-1957), as the 49th Imam of the Shia Ismaili sect of the Muslims. Originally migrating out of Persia/Iran, the Ismailis moved into India, from where many of whom went to Africa. Under Aga Khan III’s leadership they abandoned some of their older orthodoxies and adopted a more modern outlook. He also encouraged them to become more involved in the life and trade of the people among whom they lived. The Ismailis have followed this advice and, although many left Africa in the 1960s and the 1970s, they have followed their late leader’s advice wherever they have gone. A number of Ismailis stayed on in East and Central Africa; and they prosper by trade. The present Aga Khan is not just a religious leader; he is a mogul of great wealth, and very shrewd in his investments. He invests money into profitable concerns, such as hotels and useful micro industries; and he demonstrates his humanity by pouring great sums into building hospitals, schools, social centers, youth clubs, community halls and promoting skills training for local people. Every institution in East Africa which bears an imprint of the Aga Khan has a credible future built on sound business principles. Many Africans, along with other Third World people, rightly feel suspicious about aid from western countries, because many of these countries have been simultaneously pauperizing the poorer nations through various unfair trading practices. They welcome someone like the Aga Khan because, while he makes much money through his enterprises, he also ploughs it back into the treasuries of poor countries. He and his community are a credit to the Islamic world.
Our brief stay in Nairobi was enriched by a couple who had been introduced to me by my friend Ali Mazrui. Alice and Bill Mayaka hold very senior positions in the Government of Kenya. Extremely busy people, they nevertheless found time for us, which made us feel happy and grateful. Bill took us around the city and showed all the great landmarks, such as the resting place of Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya, and the important government buildings. We also drove in the countryside around Nairobi, on the road to Limuru, looking at the tea, coffee and sisal plantations, and talking about how and why the ownership of such rich land in this part of Kenya led to the great Mau Mau rebellion of the Africans against the European settlers. Alice told us about the sterling work being done at the Ministry for National Heritage where she is based as the Permanent Secretary: and it was most encouraging to learn that there was now a great desire among people at the highest level to conserve the great cultural and architectural heritage of Kenya. If the sophisticated elites of Kenya can learn to put aside the unnecessary greed for money, and instead concentrate on the task they are charged with, Kenya will emerge as a shining beacon of hope for all Africa. The future of Kenya lies in how its educated people set their priorities. Alice and Bill Mayaka are role models.
Long live Kenya! Long live Tanzania! Long live Africa!
An East African holiday
By: Burjor Avari
It was a long time ago that we came to settle and work in Britain from East Africa. Zarin arrived here almost as a refugee from the turmoils of the Zanzibar revolution in 1964. She had never intended to migrate, but was forced to by the sort of fears and pressures a revolution engenders in one who is deemed to be part of a community comfortable within the old regime. I had studied in Britain for seven long years from 1955 to 1962, had a decent job as a teacher in Kenya, had become a citizen of Kenya after its independence in December 1963, and there had been no revolution there. All that, however, did not stop me from succumbing to the same fears that many Kenya Asians felt at that time about their long term future in a country where Africanisation in employment and other areas of public life was going to be the natural order of things. I too returned to Britain in 1966, ostensibly to pursue a master’s degree, but without having any firm conviction about the rightness of my decision, and causing much agony to my parents who had hoped for their son to become a well established member of the educated class in Kenya society. Alas, it was not to be! My decision had killed their hopes and aspirations for me: but they never ever complained.
More than 40 years had gone by for both me and Zarin in the hustle and bustle of full time teaching and family and social life in Britain: but after Zarin’s retirement in 2004 both of us felt a strong urge to re-visit the places of our childhood and youth and, in the process, capture some of the emotions from the past. Memory and nostalgia were the driving forces. But there was also another compelling reason. Rushna and Anahita were born in Manchester, feel thoroughly Mancunian, but have always shown great interest in listening to the stories of our families both in India and East Africa. Like so many young British Asians, they possess a sharp awareness of their multiple social and cultural identities. East Africa had also been, for them, an intimate part of that fabric of identities. We all therefore felt that a visit to East Africa would consolidate their understanding of their parents’ roots. It is my firm belief that Britishness would mean nothing for young people from multicultural, multifaith and multi-lingual origins if it is not coupled with providing them with a historical perspective of their roots too. Britishness cannot just be taught; it has to be felt; and that can only happen when you are aware of where you have come from.
The Nunes family in Arusha, Tanzania, are an epitome of how minorities have succeeded and established themselves in the heart of Africa. Pervin Nunes is Zarin’s first cousin. She and her husband, Merwyn, have built up a large safari business in Tanzania; and for years they had been requesting us and Zarin’s brother Sam’s family to visit them. Our wish was to turn into a firm decision one evening at our home when Sam’s son Kevin and his soon-to-be wife, Agathe, talked about having a holiday in Africa. Both families thereafter charted out their itineraries with the help of the Nunes. Our own plan was for a 3-week visit without any safari. We decided to spend the first ten nights in Zanzibar, followed by four nights in Mombasa, three nights at Arusha and the last two nights in Nairobi. Zanzibar got the lion’s share of our holiday time, partly because Zarin had been separated longest from the place of her birth and childhood and partly because I too have fond memories of my three years there in the 1940s. Part of the holiday for Sam, Kevin and Agathe coincided with ours in Zanzibar.
Whenever we undertake any journey involving air travel Zarin insists that, under no circumstances, she would want to be anywhere near that nightmarish place called London Heathrow. That presents some difficulties, since Heathrow is the airport from where most flights to Africa depart. A travel company, Trailfinders, found the perfect answer for us. Take the Emirates flight from Manchester to Dar-es-Salaam via Dubai, but return to Manchester from Nairobi, again via Dubai – without incurring any extra charges. This suited us admirably. We had a night flight to Dubai; which, for me, is a most uncomfortable experience. Seven hours of being cooped up in a tiny space in economy class are a torture; and I feel envious of people who quietly while away the night watching a film on a tiny TV set attached to one’s seat with their earphones on. Early morning in the orient made me feel more cheerful, but there were five more hours of flying to do before we could reach Dar-es-Salaam. Boats of varied sophistication are used to ferry people by sea from Dar to Zanzibar Stone Town, the capital of the island of Zanzibar; but we opted for a 20 minute hop by air in one of the tiniest aircraft I have ever sat in. Our international flight had been so full that, if we had waited for our luggage to appear on the carousel, we would have missed our mini-flight to Zanzibar. We therefore left the dispatch of the luggage in the hands of a trusted agent of Pervin and made straight for the next flight. The luggage ultimately arrived, nearly two hours later. From a very low height that the aeroplane flies we get a wonderful bird’s eye view of the two towns and the ocean that separates the mainland from the island. The island of Zanzibar was all green and verdant.
We stayed for the first three nights in the Stone Town at the Tembo Hotel. It occupies, on a majestic site along the seaside and the nearby port, the premises that once belonged to a 19th century old Parsee trading firm of Cowasjee Dinshaw and Co. With its headquarters in Bombay/Mumbai, this company ran cargo ships to and from places on the Gulf, Aden and the East African coast from Mogadishu down to Beira in Mozambique. The firm lasted almost until the 1960s; and, during the eighty years of its heyday, Zanzibar was a trading port of prime importance. It was exhilarating to see some of the antique Indian and Arab furniture, photographs of the long gone Parsees and other artifacts of the old company lovingly restored and preserved in the hotel. The views of the sea, the sandy beach and the harbour with all sorts of small craft were stunning from the balcony of our room; and they brought back to me vivid memories of happy days playing in the sand as a small boy on that beach. While the Tembo’s standards in cuisine and plumbing are not of the highest rank, its site is the winner. It also has a most impressive indoor swimming pool.
The next three nights were spent at the beach resort of Bweju on the south east coast of Zanzibar island. It takes about 45 minutes to reach Bweju by a fairly good macadamized road, a road that one suspects has been specially built for the benefit of the tourists. Some of the best roads in Africa hardly carry any traffic, except for the tourists; while the worst roads are daily pounded by wagons and humans. At Bweju the Nunes were our hospitable hosts, and there was very little prospect of slimming in their household. The cheerful atmosphere of the tropical evening barbeque and the sweet and melodious Harry Belafonte songs sung by Merwyn and Sam will, I am sure, continue to cheer our spirits during the long winter months that are approaching. The shimmering, long and white sandy beach of Bweju, the round the clock rise and fall of the Indian Ocean tides and the balmy breezes and winds of that ocean, provided us with the atmosphere of perfect relaxation of body, mind and soul. During the daytime groups of local men and women can be seen collecting seaweeds from the shallow waters, a product much in demand throughout the world as part of the Chinese cuisine. The work they were doing, of wading in the water for hours, must ultimately affect their health adversely; and one wondered what sort of wages they were receiving for their labours! A walk on the beach in the night, with the tide extremely low, and the stars shining brightly in the sky, with not a soul in sight, had a heavenly feel to it: a perfect moment for contemplation!
Time soon passed away at Bweju, and we were back in the Stone Town for the last four nights, not at the Tembo but at one of the luxurious, small hotels of the world: the Zanzibar Serena Inn, owned by the Aga Khan, whose own bedroom Zarin and I had the honour to use (at a hefty price of course!). Occupying another prime site by the seaside, the Serena Inn building used to be the headquarters of the Zanzibar Electric and Telegraph Company in colonial times. The first electricity and the first electric lift in East Africa all started off in Zanzibar; and the various Parsee gentlemen who used to work for this British company were thought of as brown aristocrats by the locals. They lived comfortably in a small universe whose security was underwritten by the Union Jack and the long arm of the British navy. Entering into the Serena Inn Zarin at once remembered the corner where Manchershaw Bulsara, the uncle of Freddie Mercury, used to have his desk from where he supervised all the stores and stationery of the company. Comfort and elegance, coupled with lots of good food, are the business of the Serena Inn: and the substantial presence of, most probably, fairly well off Americans and Europeans, bore witness to the quality that was being offered at the hotel. There was only one particular irritation that niggled me. One of the chamberlains in the reception room always mentioned the words “bara bara?” to me particularly in an inquiring but a slightly mocking tone. Indian women, in old Zanzibar, knowing little Swahili, used to be re-assured by their servants on being asked with a single inquiring term “bara bara?”: is everything OK? I felt that the chamberlain was somehow reminding me of the past, of that clumsy Indian-African relationship. Then I thought of a suitable response. At the mention of “bara bara” I would say “sava sava”, which means the same but is generally used by the Swahilis. I am not sure whether he appreciated how I felt.
Zanzibar and its sister island of Pemba have been part of Tanzania since the revolution of 1964, but their history before then was part of the story of the Indian Ocean, its rulers and its traders. These islands were also the foundation stone of a great culture that grew along the entire eastern coast of Africa: the Swahili civilization. The Swahili people, speaking the Swahili language, are an African Bantu people much influenced by the Arabs from Muscat and Oman and the Hadhramaut coast of the Arabian peninsula and by the Persians. The vast majority of them are Muslims, and Islam provides the code of conduct in the Swahili lands. For many centuries the Swahilis managed to retain their autonomy while also absorbing Arab and Persian influences, but from the 16th century onwards they became the pawns in the great rivalry between the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs for power and trade on the Swahili coast. Acting as buccaneers and vandals, the Portuguese managed to destroy the model of trade in the Indian Ocean developed peacefully by the traders from many nations over a long period of time. The modest Portuguese fort in Zanzibar and the much more formidable Fort Jesus in Mombasa testify to the Portuguese military presence in the past. Portuguese influence in the Indian Ocean finally waned after the arrival of the British; and the latter helped to restore the Omani domination on the east coast. In 1840 the ruler of Oman, Seyyid Said, transferred his court from Muscat to Zanzibar. The Zanzibar sultanate remained in power until 1964.
The early sultans were a fairly headstrong people, but after they had had a taste of bombardment for 45 minutes from a British warship in 1896 they soon changed their ways. That 45 minute bombardment, resulting in damage to the Sultan’s palace on the seafront, is now regarded by historians as the shortest war in history with a clear cut outcome. From 1896 onwards the Sultan was to be just a puppet figure, with all the strings being pulled by the British Resident. With the added protection under the British Zanzibar became a key centre of trade and power in East Africa. Certain tangible benefits of colonialism followed, particularly in the Stone Town: eg, the closing down of open sewers and gutters, first gas and then electric lighting, a regular and clean water supply, a clear framework of administrative and legal rules, the paving of roads, fee-paying schools, museums and civic amenities. In other words, an infrastructure of a colonial town was established. Life was good for the Arabs who owned large tracts of land, the various Indian ethnic groups who busied themselves in trade or managed to get employed in the service of the colonial state, and a small local Swahili elite. The British had also ended the slave trade. It is normally known as the Arab slave trade; and certainly the Arabs were the slavers for most of the 19th century; but it should not be forgotten that there was very little slave trade before the Portuguese arrival. It was they who had greatly stimulated the East African slave trade; and the Arabs then continued it. The Anglican Church built on the site of the Zanzibar slave market and the awful dungeons in which the slaves were incarcerated are a reminder of that dark past.
In the early 1960s Zanzibar experienced political turbulence similar to other colonial states in Africa. The movement for independence was gathering strength, and political parties emerged out of the different constituent groups in society. Now, one might say, two clear parties emerged: one consisting of those who had enjoyed a comfortable existence thus far and who simply wished to replace the British with their own people in power, and the other made up of people with a sense of grievance at not having had a share of the good life during the Sultanate and the British times. The former consisted of the Arabs, the Indians and some Swahilis; while the latter were made up of mostly the poor Swahilis and a great majority of the non-Swahili Africans who had come to settle in Zanzibar from the inner African mainland. Put it most simply, it was a contest between the rich and the poor of that society. The rich were safe as long as there was British protection; but with the withdrawal of that protection at independence they lost everything. A brutal and conspiratorial revolt put the leaders of the poor in power; and the rich were in full retreat. The pent up anger against the Arab aristocracy in the countryside resulted in their massacre and the flight of the Sultan. The Indians, struck by extreme fear, also began to migrate out of Zanzibar. The situation would have been far more terrible were it not for the fact that the new rulers of Zanzibar and Pemba agreed to join up with the newly independent mainland country of Tanganyika whose ruler was Julius Nyerere. He was a humane socialist, but he found it difficult to control some of the more stupid excesses of his political colleagues on the two islands.
Rambling around the Zanzibar Stone Town today is, at one level, a dispiriting experience. All round are signs of what happens when a precipitate revolt of the poor is led by vengeful zealots with little understanding of the principles of how modern economies run. The state of the grand old Arab and Indian buildings of the old, built of pure stone, is an index of what has happened. The poor had simply moved into the homes of the rich and taken them over. They had not paid anything for their new possessions, and they also had no real understanding of how to maintain the buildings. Many of these buildings are in a state of collapse. We were extremely sad to see the state of the building on the sea front which used to be Zarin’s school, St. Joseph’s Convent School. It was an extremely well run Catholic school, and one can only imagine the strict standards that the German nuns must have maintained! Today the building appears to be in a ruinous condition. And inside, apart from the desks and the blackboards, on one of which there was something intelligent written, there was nothing that could resemble a modern school. Similar fate has befallen one of the most impressive buildings in all Africa, the Bet-al-Ajaib, or the House of Wonders, which used to house many administrative offices in the colonial era; it too is badly run down. Although it does house a good museum, most of its space is unutilized and locked up. The once white and gleaming palace of the Sultan also houses a museum but is in a bad shape too, with ceilings about to fall in some of the rooms. The poor state of the buildings is matched by an equally poor state of roads. It appears as if there has not been any road repair since colonial times. All pavements lie broken, and an unwary pedestrian can easily twist his/her foot negotiating the potholes and the mounds of sand. At night there is very little public lighting, because the drug addicts preferred darkness and had vandalized the lamps. Better to switch off the lights than to punish the addicts, it seems!
Nyerere had been a good ruler of Tanzania, and he had given Zanzibar a measure of political stability. After his voluntary resignation in 1985, however, the new rulers began to view more critically the socialist-communist economic practices that had failed to yield any gains for the country as a whole. Under the pressure of the IMF and the World Bank, more market-oriented policies began to be encouraged; and particular encouragement was offered to foreign investment. Many of the Arabs, who had fled to Muscat and Oman in 1964, brought back some of the oil riches of the Gulf, bought properties in Zanzibar and revived the old trade. A measure of prosperity has returned to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba also through the large scale expansion of the hotel trade. Where humans failed Mother Nature came to the rescue. The islands possess some of the finest beaches of East Africa; and a tropical beach holiday is now the passion of the rich all over the world. Many chains of hotels reap huge profits from the tourists; and some of this wealth is trickling down to the employees in the hotels and the various retail traders, artisans, artists, souvenir manufacturers, fishermen and farmers etc. It is doubtful whether enough of the tourist wealth is being transferred to the national economy. The multinational hotel companies and some of the richer locals receive the bulk of the financial benefits. On our visit to Bweju we observed that the most dilapidated of the villages lay only 50 yards behind a string of expensive hotels on the beach. The two worlds were completely apart. This would not be tolerated in a country like Spain, which has the world’s largest tourist industry. The excessive reliance on the hotel industry is also in danger of creating a class of servile and dependent hangers-on. It cannot be right that hordes of young men spend all their time trying to sell mostly useless things to tourists. There must be better ways to utilize their energies.
A few knowledgeable and historically-minded hoteliers are following the example set by the Aga Khan who has invested much money into the Zanzibar Conservation Plan. They too are repairing and renovating old houses of great grandeur and magnificence. The classic Zanzibar stone houses had rooms that were cool and airy with high ceilings. Each house had its distinguishing Indian or Arab door with well polished brass studs. We looked at a number of Parsee houses of old. Without maintenance they presented a sorry sight. During the colonial heyday the Parsee community numbered nearly 500 people, but today there is only one family left: Parviz and Bomi Darukhanawala and their daughter Diana. Zanzibar used to possess a fully consecrated Parsee-Zoroastrian Fire Temple, one of only two outside India and Iran (the other one being at Aden). Today the Temple exists no more and is merely a heap of rubble. The graveyard has been desecrated, with headstones dismantled for their marble; and without inscriptions it was difficult to identify the graves. The Parsee Social Club has become a military building; and when we drove inside the grounds the guard turned us back. There is, however, one iconic Parsee legacy in Zanzibar that has arisen quite accidentally in recent times. The world-renowned rock star and musician, Freddie Mercury, was a Parsee who had been brought up in Zanzibar, and studied at the same St. Joseph’s Convent School which Zarin also attended. Most of the Euro-American tourists are generally taken by the guides to the so-called Mercury’s house on the Main Road, while the house he and his family occupied in another part of the town for most of their years in Zanzibar has been forgotten. Zarin felt strongly that the tourists were fed wrong historical information. One suspects that the tourists do not care one way or the other which house of Mercury is going to be shown to them, as long as they have been somewhere near where Mercury lived.
Freddie Mercury left Zanzibar a long time ago; but some of the school friends of his and Zarin are still living in Zanzibar. Most of them are Goans. In colonial times the Catholic Goans sent their children to convent schools like St. Joseph’s; they were generally joined by Parsee children, along with some Arabs and Swahilis. The Hindus and the Muslims normally sent their children to government-run Asian schools where teachers from India were employed. In the private Catholic sector the Goans were in the majority. A large number of Goans left in 1964, after an innocent girl from their community was gunned down by crazed revolutionary soldiers. Some remained, and one of them Mr. Dourado even went on to become the Attorney general in the revolutionary government. Meeting Goan friends in Zanzibar is no problem, particularly on a Sunday, as the entire community attends the service in the early morning at the impressive Catholic cathedral. Most of the Goans live within five to ten minutes’ walking distance from the cathedral. We visited the cathedral on our very first Sunday; and, after the service, everyone met everyone. What was also interesting to observe was the high number of African Catholics at the service. Zanzibar is overwhelmingly a Muslim land, but there is no persecution of the Christians. The majority of African Christians come from the Tanzanian mainland; and Christian-Muslim relations in Tanzania are generally peaceful. According to Merwyn, however, the Cathedral has on occasions been subject to graffiti daubed by some fanatic Muslims.
A morning out of the Stonetown and into the countryside on a Spice Tour was a most exhilarating experience. Formerly, the agricultural fame of the islands of Zanzibar and Pemb rested on cloves which are a spice with certain dental usages. Today, cloves are only one of the great many spices and herbs grown there. A systematic horticultural project has been under way; and the great variety of spices and fruits owe much to the government’ encouragement of the policy of diversifying the products. Our guides were unfailingly courteous and kind. They were also extremely knowledgeable and articulate in explanation. They had facts at their fingertips, which impressed us greatly. The country people were most friendly, and they fed us many different types of exotic fruits. They also possessed great skill in weaving the palm tree leaves into extraordinary shapes like turbans, scarves and men’s ties.
……….
A tourist leaving Zanzibar has to pay a special departure levy of 30 dollars. This rule does not apply to other Tanzanian ports, and is therefore a testimony to a certain amount of financial autonomy that Zanzibar enjoys. We had to do the same at the airport check-out for our flight to Mombasa, Kenya. Within 45 minutes of our departure at 8.00 am we were sweating in the heat of Mombasa, the majestic island-city of Kenya. It has an impressive airport, with spacious and pleasant surroundings, which is officially known as Mombasa Moi International Airport, in the honour of President Arap Moi who ruled Kenya with an iron grip between 1977 and 2002. Our stay for four nights was at the Nyali Beach Hotel on the northern Kenyan coast, outside the island of Mombasa which is where the city is situated. This hotel was the first beach hotel in Kenya, established in 1946 by John and Eva Noon. Many splendid portraits of this enterprising couple adorn the galleries and corridors of this fine hotel; and, if for nothing else, they give an insight into the life of the rich white people in colonial Kenya. The hotel occupies a prime position on the coast; and the long sandy white beach is its biggest attraction. The guests who use the hotel today come from a wide cross-section of society. Tourists from Europe and North America come in big parties; but many local East African Asians and Africans can be seen in great numbers. The Euro-American tourists have little interest in getting to know Mombasa city itself. For most of the day they are lazing about, with very little clothing, on their deck chairs near the swimming pool, and tanning their bodies under the African sun. We had a different agenda: all I wanted to do was to go into the city and find my bearings from the time of 1966 when I left. A large retinue of taxi drivers hang around the hotel, taking the tourists from the hotel to the airport and back, while our taxi driver was always ferrying us to and from the city. He was one of the most courteous and punctual taxi drivers that I have ever met.
Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya, was always a bustling, busy place, as long as I can remember; but I was astonished to find how much it had expanded during the last four decades. The island appears very crowded, with all the vacant spaces that I knew having been taken up by buildings; but the really huge expansion has taken place on the north western mainland adjacent to the island. A new mix of suburbs and shanty towns is the normal pattern in expansion. Looking at it positively, what the expansion shows is that there is much economic activity among the people. Urban Kenya is a place that is moving fast, and people have expectations of upward mobility. The downside of it all is a great deal of noise, dust, pollution and environmental decay. If one wishes to avoid the mega urban sprawl and its bustle, then the place to go to is the historic heart of Mombasa, which is called the Old Town. Covering an area of roughly 2 square miles, the Old Town began to grow out of a small settlement at the foot of an enormous fort, called Fort Jesus, which the Portuguese built in the 16th century. The Old Town has seen mariners, traders and invaders come and go through its history, but it has retained a spectacular ambience and charm of it own, a mixture of cultures as varied as Bantu, Swahili, Arab, Persian, Gujarati, Portuguese and British. Here the pace of life is extremely unhurried, with no one particularly in a rush to get things done. This is the part of the town that I loved best as a young boy. Although I lived in the expanding new frontiers of Mombasa, every now and then I would walk or cycle through the maze of narrow streets of the Old Town, continually being fascinated by the varieties of people and their varied oriental dresses. Returning to it after such a long time, I found the place more or less as it was: and I doubt whether it will change even during the next hundred years. It is my earnest prayer that old Mombasa retains this particular antiquity amidst the ocean of sad modernity.
In contrast to the 1960s, today, there are hardly any Asians to be seen on the streets of new Mombasa: the Africans have taken over the streets. It is a different story in old Mombasa, where there are still many Asians left. There were always two types of Asians in colonial times: those who thought of Africa as a place to make money, live comfortably, and have minimal contact with the Africans; and those who thought of Africa as a place which was their home, full stop. The first group left the country, in gradual stages, between the 1960s and the 1980s. Many of them were professional people, and a large number of them were also traders and salesmen. Those who came to Britain have done well for themselves, as can be attested by their prosperity in the diverse boroughs of west and north-west London. The majority of those Indians, who had little inclination of leaving Africa, lived in old Mombasa; and they happened to be mostly Indian Muslims. These Muslims, made up of a large number of communities of Shia people from Gujarat, such as the Ithnashris, Ismailis, Bohras, Memons, Kutchis, Bhadalas, are involved in a variety of small trades and businesses, serving the needs of local people. Many of them have forged deep relations with the local Swahilis or Arabs through marriage; and their Islam too binds them together with the African Muslims. They have many ties with the Islamic world that stretches from the ports of Gujarat through Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, the Perso-Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia: and they continue the long Indian Ocean tradition of trade and migration. The sort of Sunni-Shia enmity that we notice in Iraq or Pakistan has no place in Mombasa. The tolerant traditions of the city go back many hundreds of years.
A hundred years ago most of the land in today’s new Mombasa was virgin. That was the time when many financially shrewd Indians bought out large tracts of land for building their own villas and bungalows. A few Parsees also invested in land; and until today our community holds an extensive area of land with properties. Unlike in Zanzibar, there are still 18 Parsee individuals left in Mombasa; and, between them, they hold 20 flats, a large hall, a big cemetery compound, about a hundred hutment-houses and much empty land. One would think that these individuals should feel comfortable and confident. The sad reality is that of increasing demoralization among them, along with a continual round of petty quarrels. Their fear of losing all this property to the Africans can be very real and worrisome! And that seems to act as a disincentive to improve things on their estate. I found that somewhat distressing to see and to listen to. My moment of greatest dismay was when I looked at the block of flats in which we had resided. It has become truly ugly and dilapidated over these years. I remember the time when, every two years, a new coat of paint and whitewash was applied on the building, on the orders of the Executive Committee of the community. That degree of maintenance has gone.
There were two institutions that I particularly wanted to visit: the school where I received my secondary education, and the school where I had taught. The Allidina Visram High School in Mombasa is a showcase of Indian benevolence from colonial times. Allidina Visram was an Indian trader who had made much money from the Indian Ocean commerce; and in 1923 he donated handsomely towards building a government secondary school for Asian boys in Mombasa town. That was the era of segregation, when European, Asian and African children went to separate schools. Highly competent Indian teachers, with fine qualifications from Indian colleges and universities, were employed to teach young Asian boys like me; and I had the greatest respect for all my teachers. Our medium of instruction was English, although we also studied as a separate subject our Indian mother tongue, such as Gujarati, Urdu or Punjabi. There were no Bengalis in those days in Kenya. Western education was inculcated into us, but by Indian teachers. This, I believe, influenced me for the better, because it gave me the facility of looking at the West and its civilization through Indian eyes. The Allidina Visram High School was the training ground of some of the ablest Asian professional people in colonial Kenya; and now it carries on with the tradition of training a new generation of African students who will form the educated class in Kenya. The school is now almost totally Africanised, but the academic standards are strict and appear reasonable. On our tour around the school, we noticed that there was pin-drop silence in the classrooms where, despite the holiday season, students were being taught. The Head Master, with whom we had an interesting discussion on the comparative wages of teachers in the UK and Kenya, appeared to me to be a scholar of broad and humane sympathies. What was sad to see was the decay of the fabric of the building itself. The stonework is all intact; but the woodwork is in a very bad shape. The lack of money for essential repairs has been due to the wholly inadequate government grants to schools for capital expenditure. The government of Kenya is only now waking up to the challenge of building and maintaining institutions such as schools, dispensaries and social centres.
The school where I had taught was 12 miles out on the northern coast. Shimo la Tewa High School was, and still is, an African boys’ boarding school. I taught there between 1964 and 1966; and I was the first, and possibly the last, Indian teacher in that school. I enjoyed my two years’ tenure there, teaching English and European History up to Cambridge School Certificate and Higher School Certificate levels. The colonial period had just ended; and there was no sustained campaign to start teaching local Kenya history during that early period of independence. Now things have much changed. The school still maintains good standards; and we had a lively talk with the Head Master and the Dean of Studies about the subjects being offered and the levels aspired to by students who come from all over Kenya from within all sections of society. Much greater informality was now noticeable, compared to my times when a majority of teachers from the UK provided good education but did not always find easy to let go of their Anglo-Saxon reserve. Many fine bungalows had been built for all the European teachers of the school in colonial times. One very large one had been given to me; and frankly I found it hard looking after it. We looked around the teachers’ quarters, and all the bungalows are still in use. Compared to the earlier era, however, the landscaping was rough. The British generally work hard at their domestic gardens. They took this habit to the colonies; with plenty of servants and gardeners no wonder the landscape always looked neat and trim. Despite the lack of funds, which must hinder schools like Shimo la Tewa, the commitment of head masters like that at Shimo la Tewa was inspiring; and we left the school much enthused by what was carried on where the others had left.
A building of the greatest historical significance for Mombasa and her people is the Fort Jesus. This is a huge fort, built in 1592, by the Portuguese sailors and soldiers who wished to control the entire Indian Ocean trade at that time. The Portuguese imperialists of that era had almost sealed off that ocean against all intruders; and they forced the local sailors and traders, whether they be Arab, Indian, African or Indonesian, to pay excessively penal taxes and levies on goods traded. They were the first of the European colonialists who did so much damage to the peaceful and tolerant ways of the native peoples of the Indian Ocean for their own commercial gain and greed. It was their guns that brought about the ruin of so many ports on the East African coast. Fort Jesus was built by them in order to deter particularly the Omani Arabs from attacking Mombasa. They held on to the Fort until 1698 when, after a 33 months’ sea and land siege by the Omanis, they were starved out. The Portuguese finally left Mombasa in 1729. In the early 19th century the Fort became a bone of contention between the Sultans of Oman and Zanzibar and the local armies of the Mazrui family. Eventually the British became the masters of Mombasa at the end of the 19th century, and from 1895 until 1958 they used it as a prison. Since 1958 it has become a major historic and tourist site, with a fine museum built within its precincts.
In the shadow of the mighty Fort Jesus, from where the two main streets of the Old Town branch out, we met my dear friend and peer, Mohammed Makka or, as I used to affectionately call him, Mamdu. Mamdu and I were together in Manchester in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. He was studying Accountancy, while I was doing History. A third dear friend was Ali Mazrui, now a world-renowned intellectual. In the company of Mamdu and Ali it was home to home for me. We had great times together, both studying and enjoying life. With his mischievous streak, Mamdu always teased me often for my eccentricities and naiveties. I never felt offended. I lost touch with him after I finished my studies in Manchester. Now, 46 years later, I finally met him. It is a wonderful feeling meeting someone you have been fond of after such a long time! Seeing Mamdu, visiting my old schools, walking through a small portion of the Old Town, meeting a few Parsees and, at last, paying respects to my father at his grave: all these events rounded off our Mombasa tour. I am very happy that both Rushna and Anahita have a positive feeling towards the place of my childhood and youth.
……….
One more internal flight takes us to Kilimanjaro Airport in northern Tanzania. Our destination was the town of Arusha, a forty minutes’ drive away. This is where Pervin and Merwyn and their son and daughter, along with their families, live and run a safari company, called Wildersun Safaris. Tanzania is only now entering the safari trade in a big way, something that the Kenyans have been good at for many years. There are spectacular nature reserves and animal parks in Tanzania, and nearly 140 different safari companies are competing for the tourist market. Wildersun Safaris have a head start, as they have been established over many years and have worked out clear and clever strategies for appealing to potential tourists from the richer countries. The most important of these strategies concerns the idea of service. Nothing is too difficult for them in the task of serving the customers and tourists, some of whom have extraordinary rich tastes. Wildersun Safaris aim to guarantee every creature comfort that a safari tourist may desire. One cannot but succeed with that attitude of mind. We were originally asked by Pervin whether we would like to go on a six day safari. Not being the most animal-friendly people, we gave thumbs down to Pervin’s suggestion. Nevertheless, when we arrived at Arusha, our hosts had arranged a complimentary whole day safari for us in the Terengere National Park. We enjoyed a great day out, and saw many different herds of animals, including a bloodied lioness which must have had a zebra as her lunch. I was very glad that we had a taste of the African wild for a whole day, but a six day safari might have been a bit too much for us.
Besides being an important starting point for many of the Tanzanian safaris, there are three other interesting things to know about Arusha. It is exactly half way in Africa between Cape and Cairo; and a clock tower marks the point. It was the place where the first President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, laid out his visionary programme of self-help for his people, the Ujamaa concept, which was reviled and hounded by the leaders of the Western capitalist powers who made life difficult for him and his country. This was known as the Arusha Declaration. And today, it is the place where a United Nations tribunal has been set up to try those charged with culpability for the Rwanda genocide of 1994. I was very keen to attend one of the trial sessions; but unfortunately it was the weekend when we were there.
Our hosts Pervin and Merwyn made us extremely comfortable in their palatial bungalow; and we were very glad to meet their son and daughter with their families. We also met more Goans at an afternoon party. While in Zanzibar many of the Goans had been Zarin’s school friends, in Arusha they were part of the Nunes circle. The reason is that Merwyn is not a Parsee but a Goan. A dynamic and hard working woman with a rebellious streak, Pervin demonstrated very early on a decisive independence of her own by marrying someone outside our Parsee-Zoroastrian community, a Goan school friend of hers. Today many young Parsees marry people from other communities; but forty years ago it was not very common, particularly in East Africa, where each Asian community kept itself to itself. It was very courageous of Pervin to break the taboo: and her reward was in having a most loving and big-hearted husband. I had interesting conversations with Merwyn. At one point we were talking about corruption among the newly emerging elite in Africa, and I was wondering why the leaders were reluctant to share a small portion of their newly-acquired wealth with the ordinary people whose exploited labour was making them wealthy in the first place. I shall always remember Merwyn’s words: “And it will not take a lot to make the life of the poor more comfortable”.
……….
Our final destination on this heritage tour was Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Instead of flying there we had opted to travel by road. We left Arusha at seven in the morning and we were in Nairobi by noon. We passed through three different types of the East African landscape. A small portion of the land around Arusha is agricultural, with crops like coffee, sugar cane and pyrethrum being grown. There is quite a dense population in this area: and driving through it in the early morning we encounter on the road crowds of school children in uniforms with their satchels: a most pleasing sight. Just before the Kenya border we enter the classic, nomadic grazing country of the Masai people of Kenya and Tanzania. Now there is very little vegetation to be seen, and the countryside looks quite arid. We pass through the Masai Amboseli National Park, just after crossing the border at a small border town of Namanga. Small groups of Masais, with their herds of cattle and goats, are seen all along the road as we push deep into Kenya on its awful roads. As we enter the outskirts of Nairobi the countryside again changes dramatically. From the nomadic country we enter the high density commercial agriculture land that grows coffee, tea and sisal. All around and beyond Nairobi, towards the north and north east, the land is extremely rich, a land worth fighting for and dying for.
As we entered Kenya at the border town of Namanga I was pleased to notice the general friendliness of the immigration officials. Gone were the early post-colonial days when, as Indians, we felt a certain trepidation at the sight of African bureaucratic officers wearing dark glasses. Suspicion and mistrust were then our biggest enemies. There was always the fear of the Africans. How things have changed! We were greeted with nothing but great courtesy and respect at the border. Having their own independence and not being pushed around by foreigners have made the Africans of Kenya regain their natural poise and grace: and now the foreigner is welcome all round. Every people must be free to decide their own destiny; and it is my good luck that I have witnessed in my lifetime the emancipation of both the Indians and the Africans from colonialism and colonial humiliations. What also struck me as we entered Nairobi was how all the public space had been reclaimed by the Africans. At one time, in colonial Kenya, the Africans were basically unwelcome to linger in the best bits of the town after they had done their daily menial chores for the foreign elites. Now a sea of black faces have taken over the streets of the city: and that is a natural and desirable development of the post-colonial age.
Nairobi is on its way towards becoming an African megapolis. Its population is nearing two million and it covers a huge area, with only a fraction of which we were able to see while being driven around. At the beginning of the 20th century its geographical site was desired by the Europeans, although its land was always a bone of contention between the nomadic Masais and the agriculturist Kikuyus, one of the dominant ethnic groups in Kenya. By the end of the Second World War it was recognised as one of the most beautiful and well planned colonial cities of Africa. It has been expanding ever since: and there lies the paradox! As it has become the nation’s powerhouse and the principal base of both the elite and the newly emerging middle class, it is beset by both problems of consumerism and the poverty of those who are denied a share of its wealth. While the city centre is grid-locked by a ceaseless traffic of motor cars, buses and all forms of heavy goods vehicles, only a short distance away enormous slums house those who eke out a meager living for themselves. The wealth gap is also making Nairobi one of the most dangerous cities in the world, which is also a familiar urban story of our times. We stayed in the city for too short a period and in much too exclusive an hotel that we were not in any position to assess the danger. While we did not ventured out at night or went into the slums, Anahita and I never felt any sense of threat or fear during our brief foray into the city during the daytime.
Both Zarin and I had previous educational associations with Nairobi, and we were keen to re-visit the past. Zarin had been trained as a Domestic Science/Home Economics teacher at the newly established Royal College. For three years after gaining her Cambridge School Certificate she used to fly at the beginning and the end of every term regularly between Zanzibar and Nairobi. She had a most exhilarating educational experience, and her training was rigorous and thorough. As the Royal College was franchised by Manchester University to teach the course material planned by Manchester academics Zarin’s teaching certificate was that granted by Manchester University. This turned out to be fortuitous for her because, on her arrival in Britain in 1964, she secured a secondary school teaching post without any further questions asked. Her Manchester qualification allowed her to go on teaching in the British school system until her retirement in 2004. Today the Royal College is no more, having been absorbed into the massive Nairobi University, the extensive campus of which we were only able to glimpse at. My first teaching job was at Nairobi’s Duke of Gloucester School which was attended by highly academic Asian boys of the city. Asian girls joined them in the Higher School Certificate classes. In the 1960s Nairobi the schools were segregated; but every community’s children had elite schools to go to if they were academically good enough. The Duke of Gloucester’s standards were extremely high; and many of its students went on to achieve great things in life. All the ghosts of the past appeared in front of me as I toured the school, the ghosts of stern, benevolent and highly demanding Indian and European teachers who were my colleagues. I remembered how, as a young and rebellious teacher, I had myself to be disciplined and groomed by more experienced teachers around me. Of all the schools I visited I felt most emotional about the Duke of Gloucester, because now from the hindsight of retirement I go back to the past and wonder how things might have been if I had been more humble and more conventional in my very first teaching post. From our brief visit and a chat with the Head Master I had the distinct impression that the school proudly maintains the high standards of the past. It was also pleasing to note that the fabric of the building was in a good state. I also noticed that one or two Indians, who had been students in the past and who had done well financially, were donating towards the cost of repairing some of the classrooms. Even after such a short visit I went away with a great feeling of satisfaction that the school where I first started my educational career continues to produce the educated class of the future.
While we were in Nairobi the Aga Khan was in town too. All over East and Central Africa the Aga Khan is looked on with great respect and admiration for the way he has reposed his trust and confidence in these lands by investing vast sums of money for various public projects. The present Aga Khan IV, Prince Karim, succeeded his famous grandfather, Aga Khan III (1877-1957), as the 49th Imam of the Shia Ismaili sect of the Muslims. Originally migrating out of Persia/Iran, the Ismailis moved into India, from where many of whom went to Africa. Under Aga Khan III’s leadership they abandoned some of their older orthodoxies and adopted a more modern outlook. He also encouraged them to become more involved in the life and trade of the people among whom they lived. The Ismailis have followed this advice and, although many left Africa in the 1960s and the 1970s, they have followed their late leader’s advice wherever they have gone. A number of Ismailis stayed on in East and Central Africa; and they prosper by trade. The present Aga Khan is not just a religious leader; he is a mogul of great wealth, and very shrewd in his investments. He invests money into profitable concerns, such as hotels and useful micro industries; and he demonstrates his humanity by pouring great sums into building hospitals, schools, social centers, youth clubs, community halls and promoting skills training for local people. Every institution in East Africa which bears an imprint of the Aga Khan has a credible future built on sound business principles. Many Africans, along with other Third World people, rightly feel suspicious about aid from western countries, because many of these countries have been simultaneously pauperizing the poorer nations through various unfair trading practices. They welcome someone like the Aga Khan because, while he makes much money through his enterprises, he also ploughs it back into the treasuries of poor countries. He and his community are a credit to the Islamic world.
Our brief stay in Nairobi was enriched by a couple who had been introduced to me by my friend Ali Mazrui. Alice and Bill Mayaka hold very senior positions in the Government of Kenya. Extremely busy people, they nevertheless found time for us, which made us feel happy and grateful. Bill took us around the city and showed all the great landmarks, such as the resting place of Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya, and the important government buildings. We also drove in the countryside around Nairobi, on the road to Limuru, looking at the tea, coffee and sisal plantations, and talking about how and why the ownership of such rich land in this part of Kenya led to the great Mau Mau rebellion of the Africans against the European settlers. Alice told us about the sterling work being done at the Ministry for National Heritage where she is based as the Permanent Secretary: and it was most encouraging to learn that there was now a great desire among people at the highest level to conserve the great cultural and architectural heritage of Kenya. If the sophisticated elites of Kenya can learn to put aside the unnecessary greed for money, and instead concentrate on the task they are charged with, Kenya will emerge as a shining beacon of hope for all Africa. The future of Kenya lies in how its educated people set their priorities. Alice and Bill Mayaka are role models.
Long live Kenya! Long live Tanzania! Long live Africa!
