Two-time Giller winner MG Vassanji’s latest book And Home Was Kariakoo gives an insider’s view into a complex world, and offers great insight into the overlapping histories of Africa, writes GAUTAM CHINTAMANI
And Home Was Kariakoo
Author:MG VASSANJI
Publisher :Penguin, `599
There is a certain kind of boundlessness to Africa and yet a handful of words such as ‘dark continent’, ‘war-ravaged’, ‘diseased’ and ‘hunger’ tend to sum it up for us. Usually, these words are the offerings of present day outsider literary authorities who are often critical without being equipped to be so and this is exactly the kind of superficiality that MG Vassanji wants to do away with. The two-time Giller winner’s latest book And Home Was Kariakoo — an account of his travels through East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) where he grew up — explores the idea of home and juxtaposes it with the sense of place that resides within him. Having grown up in this part of Africa, Vassanji, whose two and half decades long body of work has an inescapable impression of these places, believes that unlike VS Naipaul or Paul Theroux, he gets the local nuances and in that aspect is better qualified to tell the tale.
Right at the onset of And Home Was Kariakoo, Vassanji cities an example of not just the tone of the book — an insider’s view of a world that is both loved and cherished — but also why being an insider makes all the difference. During a visit to Tanzania, an airport official at Dar es Salaam was surprised to hear Vassanji, a Canadian passport holder, speak Swahili that was the dominant language of East Africa. When the writer answered ‘Uhuru Street’, the place where he grew up, as the reason why he could speak proper Swahili, the impressed official stamped the passport. Giving an insider’s view into a complex world, this book offers a great insight into the complex and overlapping histories of Africa and Vassanji’s words make the journey come alive. Starting with Dar es Salaam as his base, Vassanji begins his journey on a personal note taking us to the part of the city that his forefathers migrated to from Gujarat. The first Indian settlement in Dar was called ‘Gaam’ or ‘Town’ and referred to as mjini in Swahili; today it’s called Uhindini, the Indian area.
It was here that Indians set up stores and homes and a single long street called Kichwle, which was later called Uhuru, went past Gaam all the way to the African area that was called Kariakoo. Even though this may be the tale of a personal journey across the world that Vassanji grew up in, the story is far from autobiographical and while it does also look at history of a familiar cosmos, it’s more about the places that had no choice but imbibe whatever legends people who came or passed along left behind.
Breaking from the usual perception of Africa, Vassanji’s narrative goes beyond the exotic or nostalgic and tries to look at places such as Zanzibar, Tanga, Moshi, and, of course, Dar es Salaam in a wider context. He looks at lives that were largely seen from a colonial perspective for what they are such as discovering a monument dedicated to the Indian soldiers who fought the First World War, the remnants of German occupation of an obscure Swahili port called Tanga, the bustling modernism of Kenya, seeing the Kilimanjaro from the lush hilly countryside of Moshi, discovering the Sufis of the old city of Kilwa and offers the readers, some of whom might never come close to visiting these places, a chance to see them without the prejudice of a foreigner.
Sometimes one grows up living in a world that one isn’t fully aware of even after spending a lifetime within its confines and the discovery of many such worlds is the thread that binds And Home Was Kariakoo. One of the fascinating accounts of Vassanji’s travels is the discovery of an important destination for Sufis in Africa a mere stone’s throw away from where he grew up. Similarly peppered throughout the tale are anecdotes about Indians who found a new home in this part of Africa and even while talking about his own lineage Vassanji barely romanticises anything. While the detailed travelogue isn’t high on adventure unless you count insufferable bus rides or taxis that break down without warning but the author, who is in his mid-sixties and has now lived almost half his life in Canada, not only thoroughly enjoys them but, in fact, makes it seem like the only way to make it real.
The one thing that And Home Was Kariakoo seems to miss out is making a new connection with the past. In Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, VS Naipaul finds the walls of cities that he travels coming alive thanks to this interpreter who translates the graffiti and bills plastered on them and in that manner tries to understand the mind of someone who belongs to that place. Although Naipaul’s travels needed a local view to better understand the modern attempts of cultures with a pre-Islamic history to establish a religious state, Vassanji opts to look at the journey till now and doesn’t worry about the future as much
. Most of the stops that he makes are in some way connected to his memory of the past and more importantly his definition of ‘home’ but while the travels are exhaustive (Vassanji’s passion for East Africa seemed ceaseless and had his companions not urged him to stop he could have gone on ‘forever’) and a lot of the past shrouded by a foreigner’s perspective is unearthed, there is no voice truly talking about what all this might mean to contemporary life in these places.
Intriguingly even Vassanji’s own experiences in the light of new discoveries or rediscovery of the past or the past he thought he knew are barely mentioned. Perhaps And Home Was Kariakoo might proffer some new insight on his own journey from East Africa to the world that he now calls home, Canada. Irrespective, And Home Was Kariakoo is worth the trails of any good self-undertaken journey or even the fables surrounding the ones embarked upon by others.The reviewer is the author of the best-sellingDark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (HarperCollins, 2014) | Tweet him @gchintamani