In the Shadow of Kirinyaga by Sophia Mustafa; Tsar Publications; Price: Rs.850; 238 pp The general consensus is that people of the Indian subcontinent attach little value to history. A put-down commonly employed in drawing room arguments across Indian society with telling effect, is ‘don’t talk about the past’. Yet contrary to popular global belief that the past is over and done with (Henry Ford famously remarked that history is bunk), study of the past — i.e history — is important because nations, societies and people are shaped and contoured by it. They are indeed the sum of their past. Therefore contrary to what some of the high and mighty in Indian education who cavalierly shape and bend history to suit their whims and prejudices believe, historical narratives written in good faith are important because with the benefit of hindsight they sort out victors and villains and unsung heroes ignored by motivated or prejudiced historians. This is the outstanding virtue of Canada-based writer and novelist Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga. Though presented as a novel, in effect this is a painstakingly crafted social history of the pioneer Indians who not only built East Africa’s railway network, but subsequently monetised and played a stellar role in the socio-economic development of the once high-potential nation states of former British East Africa — i.e Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania — which became independent in the 1960s. With the mainly mercantile East African Indians ignorant of the importance of recording their great contribution to the development of this region, and Indian intellectuals from the subcontinent under the influence of confused socialism disdainful of the remarkable entrepreneurial drive of their compatriots in Africa, the story of this enterprising, nation-building community was in danger of remaining untold. “East African Asians have always been a peripheral people working for the railways and at petty trading and business,” in the racially-prejudiced histories and novels of Europeans and as “stereotyped and marginal characters in African-authored writings,” says Mustafa, explaining her inspiration to pen this valuable social history. What Mustafa is too polite to state is that perfidious Albion (i.e the Brits), pastmasters at the game of divide-and-rule played their cards to perfection in East Africa driving a deep wedge between the natives and culturally — but not politically — exclusive Indians. Even to this day Indians who raised themselves up by their bootstraps and taught Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians the few vocational trades they knew when these nations became independent, are widely regarded as exploiters and rapacious traders by politically naive native Africans who remain massively ignorant of the wholesale loot of these territories by European settlers working hand-in-glove with British agri-business multinationals. Ironically with anti-Asian sentiment stoked by the British unabated in these territories, East African Asians have migrated in large numbers to Britain, Canada and Australia greatly enriching their economies with their professional skills and commercial acumen. However this or any other political analysis of the decline and fall into mediocrity of the high-potential nation states of former British East…
