Africa's In-Betweeners

 

If we belong somewhere ´in-between´ all of them, does this make for a fluid and cosmopolitan outlook, or an odd system of inclusion and exclusion? The observations I offer here are partly autobiographical and, if they have a wider currency, refer to people who could be part of a South Asian diaspora or an African diaspora (or both), rather than to those who still live in Africa. I do not claim to speak for the experience of a particular community or diaspora, but I hope there is some connection to other people´s experience – and I welcome views.

 

 

 

To be called or to regard oneself as being an ´East African Asian´ is to be part of an inconsistent category. While it is relatively grounded in relation to a part (that is, the East) of one continent, it is vague and loose in relation to the other continent, when the more specific ´South Asian´ would be more appropriate. Indeed, ´South Asian´ is the term commonly used in the US and elsewhere, though ´Asian´ continues to function as the umbrella word in the UK. Yet, as far as I know, no one ever refers to a group of people who could be called ´East African South Asians´.

 

 

The converse - being called South Asian East Africans - seems even more unlikely, as it seems harder to assert a primarily African rather than Asian identity. What East African Asians have in common - being born in Africa but possessing a South Asian ethnic appearance (for want of a better term) - has made the dual identity hard to sustain in some respects. Perhaps that is why the idea of being ´in-between´ is both accurate and useful, though it may also create some difficulties.

 

 

 

Even the category East African Asian encompasses various diverse and heterogeneous communities in terms of religion, class, geography, and culture. In spite of such obvious differences, the blanket description persists. For example it is still used in a general way in Britain to distinguish the educational performance of Asians of East African, from those of South Asian descent. However, in other respects it is a category that does not lend itself to easy identification with official ethnic categories, such as the ones in the UK Census. In completing the form in 2001 I found myself unable to tick any of the ethnicity boxes offered, since I do not think I can identify myself as Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, which are the South Asian categories available. It is equally impossible to tick the African/Black African category since that seems to be reserved for Africans who are black. Thus the only choice left to me, and to several thousand other people, is to tick the ´any other ethnic group´ box.

 

 

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There are other, subtler, ways that African Asians are excluded from Africa. During ´Africa year´ in Britain in 2005, a host of African events were showcased across the arts and major cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the BBC. Yet the Africa represented there contained no trace, as far as I could see, of an ´Asian Africa´. The apparent paradox of looking Asian but feeling some greater sense of connection to Africa is not just personal to me but evident in novels and biographies by East African Asian writers, as well as in other media.

 

 

In Britain the popular BBC TV series, Who do you think you are?  invites celebrities to trace their family genealogy. An episode from 2006 featured the film director Gurinder Chada, director of Bend it like Beckham  and Bride and Prejudice. After tracing her immediate family to Kenya she travelled on to India to look for earlier generations. Revealingly, during that India trip, she describes it as a foreign country or culture, an observation that is never made of her time in Kenya. In other words, it is possible for ´Asians´ to feel more at home or comfortable in a continent with which they are associated much less than the one from which their/our identification is commonly derived.

 

 

 

In spite of feeling this connection to Africa - and seeing its evidence in cultural terms such as cuisine and the mixture of languages - the ability to claim some kind of African identity remains in question. Perhaps that is how it should be, given the role that some Asians played in the colonial order, and the common designation of Asians in an interstitial position between the dominant white Europeans and the subordinate black Africans. That there was and is resentment towards Asians is not in doubt, as the expulsion from Uganda in the 1970s and events in Kenya in the past decade demonstrate.

 

 

Elements of suspicion and distrust are evident on both the African and Asian sides, for instance in Vassanji’s book in an exchange involving Vikram´s mother and her daughter, Deepa. Fearing that Deepa might marry a black African man, the mother says, ´There´s nothing wrong with being an African or Asian or European. But they can´t mix. It doesn´t work´. Deepa´s assertion that ´I too am an African´ falls on stony ground.

 

 

In a conversation between Vikram and a government minister who suggests that Asians could ´return´ to India. Vikram retorts ´"we people", as you call us, don´t have a place anywhere, not even where we call home´. As a stream of biographies of prominent Asians illustrate, there are many Asians who invested in Africa in both an emotional and physical sense, yet as Vassanji´s narrator notes, our presence there is still regarded as an enigma or a mystery.

 

 

 

My own experience of being excluded from Africa occurred in a different context. When I met some Afro-centric activists, I said that I too was from Africa. I think I meant this primarily as a matter of fact, not a statement of political or cultural identity. Yet the reaction I got to this was that I could not possibly be African (or ´Afrikan´ as some prefer to spell it to demonstrate their political ideology). An ´Asian´ appearance could not be accommodated within a transnational African identity because, for these people, being part of an African diaspora is a state of mind linked to a memory of slavery. I learnt from this experience that some of those proclaiming African identities and roots had never been to Africa. Equally, at that time, I had never set foot in Asia yet I could be ´placed´ there.

 

 

If I cannot be seen or accepted as African, is an Asian identity the only choice available? On my first visit to India, I was taken aback when a shopkeeper asked me, ´Are you Indian?´ My immediate reaction - saying that I was British - felt odd given the ways in which racist movements in Britain have tried to exclude people like me from claiming a British identity, even though that is my legal nationality. A friend I was with said that the questioner probably meant where in India my family or I were from originally.

 

 

Yet this also feels odd. Although my family speaks a dialect of Gujerati, I can recall almost no sense of us ever thinking of ourselves as ´Indian´ or hailing from India ´originally´. In the 1970s when we went to places like Southall, the so-called ´little India´ neighbourhood of west London, there certainly was pleasure in discovering some foods that had been familiar back in East Africa. But I do not recall there ever being a time akin to the moment of recognition expressed by Vikram Lall´s (Indian) mother, who feels that she is back in India the first time they visit Mombasa. Yet for the Kenyan-born Vikram himself, ´India was always fantasyland to me. To this day, I have never visited my dada´s birthplace.´

 

 

The ´identity anecdotes´ that I have drawn on suggest that being seen as Asian is a way of being excluded from an African identity, even when the latter might feel more realistic. How we are seen and how we feel internally may or may not coincide, and it is possible to affirm multiple rather than singular identities, as well as to feel and be seen in an in-between state. Indeed there are people who declare that the multiple migrations of East Africa Asians means that our identities are formed ´on the road´, rather than in any one place.  In this view, belonging does not operate on a national scale but a transnational one. However, battles for legal citizenship of particular nation states - and the rights associated with that - mark out a firmer idea of the boundaries of who belongs and who does not. In the space in-between the fluidity of the former and the fixity of the latter exists the enigma of how ‘felt’ and’ attributed’ identities are tangled and unravelled in different times and places.