Sightseeing in game parks featuring the rolling savannah landscapes of Kenya and Tanzania apart, the prime agenda of the 12-day excursion was to retrace the entrepreneurial journey of my late India-born father, reports Dilip Thakore As people get on in years and approach the biblically ordained lifespan of three score and ten, it’s natural to become incrementally nostalgic about the water-colour days of childhood and early youth in simpler, halcyon, and arguably more joyful times when the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the proud man’s contumely were less ubiquitous. This was the impulse that prompted your correspondent to gather his siblings and others near and dear, to chart a brief excursion to two territories of former British East Africa — latter-day Kenya and Tanzania — where we had spent our early years and vacations from boarding schools in India. Sightseeing in game parks featuring the rolling Savannah landscapes surrounded by blue hills in the distance, and the region’s fabled animal species carefully conserved in free and natural environments apart, the prime agenda of the 12-day excursion was to retrace the footsteps and entrepreneurial journey of my late India-born father Vinoo Thakore (1906-95), who arrived steerage in Mombasa in 1920 with a working capital of 14 annas (Rs.0.85) to seek adventure and fortune in the Dark Continent. Half a century later after many adventures, including an unusual for those times ‘love marriage’ with my Zanzibar-born mother Malati Sule, 20 years younger, he returned to India having rescued most of his considerable fortune from the frying pan of African socialism, only to run into the fire of Nehruvian socialism and 20 percent per annum inflation of the 1970s, which considerably diminished his capital. Nevertheless, he had left his stamp and imprint on Africa, having established several businesses including the first milk pasteurisation plant in North Tanganyika (as it then was); purchasing a 5,000-acre sisal (a cactus-like plant which produces heavy-duty ropes manufacturing fibre) estate; and later restoring to health a languishing timber sawmill business with a 3,000-acre forest concession in Molo, Kenya. Simultaneously, our parents discharged their familial obligation to the full by educating us children in boarding schools in India and later in universities in Britain, enabling us to make our way in the world despite their considerably diminished fortune in their latter years. Forty years later, when we could afford it, my London-based sister Shyama, Bengaluru-based brother Anil and your correspondent in Bengaluru planned a 12-day sentimental journey to trace the extraordinary life and times of one of the many unsung Indian entrepreneurs who modernised the nations of British East Africa. In the process, we rekindled our association with forgotten landscapes of great natural charm and carefully preserved game parks, inhabited by cheerful, friendly people struggling — like our own citizens back home — to rise out of poverty despite the self-serving machinations of greedy politicians and an unjust global order. Day 1, Nairobi After enduring a six-hour no-frills, poor service flight by Kenya Airways from Mumbai, we…
