Abstract
Ugandan-born journalist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has published two autobiographical works: No Place like Home (1995) and The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (2008). The former is an account of her childhood and adolescence in Uganda up to the expulsion of the Asian community in 1972. The latter work is a highly unusual combination of autobiography combined with no less than 113 recipes, each of which highlights a specific person, period, or event in her memoir. While No Place Like Home responds to the accepted principles of autobiographical writing, The Settler’s Cookbook defies generic classification and is perhaps the author’s own way of depicting the Asian community, sandwiched between two communities, the Europeans and the Africans. In this article I propose to focus on Alibhai-Brown’s critical stance towards her community in her analysis of the social and political reasons for the negative image of the Asian in East Africa, as reflected in the first part of my title. Despite her frank observations on the endogamic nature of her community, she also pays tribute to the many Asian women who tried to build bridges between communities, a difficult task considering the constraints placed on female agency. As she states in The Settler’s Cookbook, “[t]o be an Asian woman in the 1950s in East Africa must have been both exhilarating and confusing” (2008: 151). Alibhai-Brown’s work, written in the diaspora and with the benefit of hindsight, has unravelled many of the paradoxes of the ambiguous position of the South Asian community in East Africa.
Introduction
The act of writing the story of one’s life entails reliving the various phases of identity formation as they were experienced at the time, an almost impossible feat as the knowledgeable adult has to keep her superior understanding at bay if the right voice is to be transmitted. 1 Life writing is invariably a falsification because even as she is doing her best to set down the child’s worldview without the benefit of subsequent knowledge, the identity or subjectivity of the adult autobiographer is itself undergoing a process of development. Identity is always on the move, always in a state of flux, so even as she writes, her own subjecthood is changing.
Paul John Eakin (1999) has asked pertinent questions about the dichotomy between the “I” who speaks in self-narrations and the “I” who is spoken about. Self is defined by and lives in terms of its relations with others. Differentiating between male and female autobiography has led to these two models being split along gender lines. 2 Likewise individual versus communal-oriented autobiographies can be contested not only in terms of gender but also in terms of the development of the genre of autobiography. Moroever, these gender binaries can conflict with racial or ethnic boundaries. In her work, the Ugandan-born journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown breaks these essentializing categories to create a hybrid text. In terms of postcolonial narratives, created by both male and female authors, autobiography tends to be defined as relational more than individualistic–Western (Moore-Gilbert, 2009: 17–18). I do not subscribe to any reification of women’s life writing but the relational dimension of Alibhai-Brown’s work is underscored by the conflation between the key events in the lives of her community and those of her own. In fact her writing reveals underlying tensions in her disavowal of the middle-class, entrepreneurial spirit for which the Asians were — and are — so renowned. She also questions the underlying double standards of the community, the most outstanding example being those of her own father, who shunned his daughter for literally acting independently, as will be discussed in the section on female agency.
Thus, even though autobiography has traditionally proclaimed its goal to be an exercise in self-determination, what Eakin calls “the myth of autonomy” (1999: 43), Alibhai-Brown cannot avoid entangling her own life story with the growth of an Asian community in Britain’s former colonies in East Africa. “We are a people with no history” (NP 96), she writes. 3 “For the sake of our children, we need now to explore honestly our history and by telling it, give it substance” (NP vii). This self-imposed demand for honesty gives rise to a degree of ambivalence in her autobiographical writing, due to the pull between the Western idea of existence from birth as a separate, isolated individual who is disciplined into rendering an account of herself for others and the South Asian concept of belonging to a clan or community to which one must owe allegiance and loyalty at all costs. This raises the question of whether Alibhai-Brown adopts an ethnographic posture towards the world of her parents and their upbringing. The dominant mode of her work seems to owe more to her professional background as journalist and observer rather than to a private quest to conduct an introspective investigation of her own inner life, although her work does contain moments of cloying sentimentality and unexpected prudishness. My article probes into these tensions which are apparent in Alibhai-Brown’s excursions into life writing. Edward Said writes that “borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity” (1984: 166). Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has striven all her life to break down the barriers that enclosed the Asian community — she clearly wishes to pay tribute to the many Asian women who tried to build bridges between communities in colonial East Africa — but at the same time, perhaps unconsciously, she defends the customs and quirks of her childhood ethnoscape.
Both her autobiographies — No Place like Home (1995) and The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (2008) — fulfil the expectations of the western-style genre: they trace the linear progress of an articulate, gifted young woman who successfully completes her degree in Makerere University and then leaves Uganda for a promising future in Britain as a postgraduate student at Oxford University. The former work is an account of her childhood and adolescence in Uganda up to the expulsion of the Asian community in 1972. The latter work is a curious combination of autobiography combined with 113 recipes, each of which highlights a specific person, period, or event in her memoir. 4 While No Place Like Home responds to the accepted principles of autobiographical writing, The Settler’s Cookbook defies generic classification and is perhaps the author’s own way of depicting the Asian community: a buffer group, sandwiched between the Europeans who scorned them, and the Africans who resented them. In this sense her memoirs can be categorized as autoethnography; that is, “a hybrid text that combines autobiographical and ethnographic writing practices [which] situates the writer in, and through, a social milieu, or ethnos, that is irreducibly tied to the subject it constructs” (Jolly, 2001: 83). Dan Ojwang describes Alibhai-Brown’s use of food as “a potent vehicle for the scripting of what may be called communal autobiography or auto-ethnography” (2011: 71). Likewise, Maya Parmar contends that Alibhai-Brown “fashions selfhood through community” (2013: 142; emphasis in original). Her work provides by far one of the most complete histories of the East African Asian community by offering a much more nuanced narrative than the one-dimensional chronicle of the male Hindu money-grabbing shopkeeper or ruthless, urban industrialist (see, e.g. Bharati, 1965, 1972; Ramchandani, 1980; Twaddle, 1990; Van den Berghe, 1975). 5 She delicately interwines stories of the constraints of gender and class in order to demonstrate how women’s lives were coloured by both the subtleties of internal fragmentation and external prejudices.
The retrieval of childhood experience is one of the most problematic tasks entrusted to memory. Neither of the two selves through which the story of childhood and youth is told, the narrating “I” or the experiencing “I”, is trustworthy: the testimony of the child, who was there, is lacking in understanding; the testimony of the adult, who is omniscient, is lacking in — for want of a better word — authenticity. At best, an uneasy truce between the child or adolescent (memory) and the adult woman (understanding) is aimed at. Alibhai-Brown tackles the challenge and achieves a balance through the incorporation of detailed descriptions of food, in the form of recipes, which she relates to key moments in her narrative. I discuss Alibhai-Brown’s autobiographies from three main perspectives: a historical amnesia as to the Asians’ political and economic role in East Africa, the erasure of female contributions to the evolution of the community, and the symbolic status of food as an articulation of both a personal and a communal identity. Alibhai-Brown’s life story functions as the route along which she traces the history of her fellow East African Asians.
Historical amnesia
East Africa had commercial ties with India centuries before the first Europeans established trading posts on the African coast. Sugata Bose reminds us that:
[I]n the eleventh century, Arabs and Persians as well as a few South Asians began to draw the Somali and Swahili coast of East Africa more firmly into the Indian Ocean network. The rapid spread of Islam across the Indian Ocean between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries wove a new pattern of economic and cultural unity throughout this vast interregional arena. (2006: 18)
Hindu and Jain merchants had joined their Muslim counterparts well before the first incursions by the Portuguese. South Asians were therefore no strangers to the East African coast but it is also true that they only came to inhabit the African continent, most visibly in southern and East Africa, in unprecedented numbers under the British colonial machinery. For at least a millennium the Indian presence in East Africa had been confined to the Swahili Coast, but the first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid growth of the Indian role in the interior of East Africa. Since their arrival in considerable numbers in the late nineteenth century, they have been haunted by the pervasive stereotype that they came to Africa as “middlemen”, serving the interests of the British Empire — for example in the construction of the railway — and forming an exclusive ethno-cultural community that saw itself as superior to the indigenous African.
The Asians did little to dispel their stereotype as collaborators in the British imperial enterprise in East Africa, since whiteness was to be emulated, however meagre the rewards were for an aspiring brown colonial subject. As Alibhai-Brown so graphically states, they could only collect scraps from the imperial banquet:
You would probably drink cocoa at night and wear Clark’s shoes. These were the crumbs of England that dropped around us and which we fell upon with unseemly, unthinking eagerness. They gave us illusions that we too were civilised and worth something. (NP 26)
However, on Alibhai-Brown’s wedding day in England in 1972, when she and her family have all been reunited after their expulsion from Uganda, her aunt reminds her that, in some vital ways, Asians are definitely not English:
“We’re not like the English. […] Marriage is different for us, it’s about duty and izzat [reputation]. Spoil your name and you can never buy it back”. (SC 269; emphasis in original)
Her aunt is right to remind her niece that, in cultural terms, British-Asians do not share the same values as mainstream culture; her words also hint at a long history that had evolved along very different lines from the British. Indeed, in the era before European colonization, when Asians had no need to scramble to pick up the “crumbs of England”, they played a vital part in the development of the maritime commerce that would have an indelible impact on the different coastal societies of the Indian Ocean rim, including East Africa.
Alibhai-Brown regrets the feeling of “emptiness, [being] historically and geographically disconnected” (SC 13) and remembers the endeavours of one of her primary school teachers to instil a sense of cultural pride into his pupils. The adult writer condones the chauvinistic patriotism of the youthful schoolmaster in Uganda as an example of “exiles [who] spin heroic yarns to salvage pride from the humiliation of forced exile”. The Asian children were taught that:
Indians were first in everything, you know, we made the maps, and counting and ships, and brought everything to this place, balls, skipping ropes, chess, spices, writing, everything made in India. We were here in the first century, be always proud of that, children. (SC 42)
Winston Churchill’s commendation of the pioneering spirit of the Indians in My African Journey (1990/1908) may have been a grudging acknowledgement that they were willing to carry out Europeans’ dirty work, rather than an attempt to rewrite them into the larger history of the Indian Ocean. This is what Alibhai-Brown undertakes in her work, despite a certain ambivalence towards her community. What makes her autobiography so intrinsically hers is the circumspect, almost condescending distance she maintains from their failings and at the same time her insistence on their belonging to East African history. She captures the way Indians were players in the transnational movement of peoples, commodities, and ideas before and after the rise of the British Empire. The Indian Ocean is presented as the space where both dominant and subaltern histories collide and thus reveal less savoury aspects of the South Asian role in the region:
[Indians in Zanzibar] were appointed by the Arab ruling classes to do their books and keep finances under control. These backroom men saw slavery mainly as a means to keep profits high. […] Sir Tharia Topan, the richest and most powerful Indian in Zanzibar in the mid-1800s and, like me, an Ismaili, was undoubtedly involved with the lucrative buying and selling of humans. This role of the Indians is still vehemently denied by East African Asians. (SC 47)
6
Alibhai-Brown is careful to acknowledge that her veiled attack on the integrity of her forebears emerges from a particular, limited position. She and Sir Tharia Topan are both Ismailis, and this common heritage shapes who she is and structures what she knows, thus rendering her authority credible. What David Simpson has referred to as “aggressive-defensive self-affiliation” (2002: 42) establishes her credentials quietly and efficiently, and these frequent allusions to her Ismaili heritage are Alibhai-Brown’s way of justifying her narrating self and authorizing her subject position.
Thompson describes the Ismaili Muslims as “a minority within a minority” (1975: 30).
7
Throughout both autobiographies Alibhai-Brown pays homage to her spiritual leaders, the Aga Khan III, who was a great believer in female emancipation and education “long before the sluggish, powerful men in the West” (SC 87), and the present Aga Khan IV, despite his aristocratic lifestyle. Her outspoken attack on what she calls “viciously Talibanized Muslims” as opposed to “reformists like the Ismailis” (SC 88) echoes the political stance she takes in her work as a journalist for newspapers like the Independent, for which she receives regular bouts of criticism from readers and fellow journalists from all ethnic and religious groups. Admiration for her Ismaili background blends in with a vindication of East African Asian genealogy to “speak the previously unspoken, to reveal what has been hidden or repressed” (Eakin, 1999: 87). Ludha Damji, an ancestor of hers, was an early and pioneering trader who provided essential goods for some of the best known nineteenth-century Empire builders:
These explorers used knowledge gained by the Indians who had preceded them into the interior. Speke and Richard Burton were among those who were given information and advice. No credit was ever given to the brown pioneers. (SC 50)
Alibhai-Brown shows herself to be particularly aggressive in her plea for the Asian presence in East Africa to be acknowledged in her account of the social atmosphere in the aftermath of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. At that time hostility towards the Asian presence intensified to alarming degrees and many Asians were reluctant to stay in Africa because of the growing menace that hovered in the atmosphere. The contributions made by several leading Asians, such as the trade unionist Makhan Singh and the liberationist Pio Gama Pinto, never seemed to be mentioned, let alone celebrated, by black Africans. She laments that “[o]ur children know nothing about these figures; East Africa has erased them from collective memory” (SC 191–2). 8 While it is true that many of the Indian freedom fighters have been omitted from African post-independence narratives, another lacuna in East African Asian history is women. They tend to be figured as victims of a rigid family structure, whereas writers like Alibhai-Brown suggest that they may have negotiated new forms of female agency, some being able to take advantage of the privileged social position of Asians in East Africa.
Female agency
The history of the settlement of South Asians in East Africa has been narrated almost exclusively as a male experience. The Lall children in M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) are third generation Africans, and Anand Lal Peshawari, Vikram’s paternal grandfather, was one of the many Indians who built the East African railway. We are told little of the grandmother’s story; she laid no railway tracks but raised a family in a hitherto unfamiliar territory, becoming one of what Dana April Seidenberg has called “the forgotten pioneers” (1996: 93).
9
There has been a dearth of academic research into the female East African Asian experience but Alibhai-Brown’s two autobiographies fill this gap and tell the stories — so often neglected and underestimated — of the many Indian women who “were the primary managers and salespersons in their family dukas while their husbands were traveling to trade” (Desai, 2013: 72). Male and female responses to the immigrant condition are not and cannot be lived in the same way; the stories of these women’s experiences in dukas — some of which were located in remote areas — need to be told. Memoirs or fiction written by and about East African Asians problematize what Avtar Brah (1996) has called “diaspora space”. Diaspora space refers to the area where people can cultivate their cultural hybridity and their diversity in background, faith, and language, through a variety of different responses made by male and female characters in diverse situations. Brah defines it as the place
where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate, and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptively mingle even while these syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. (1996: 208)
I find Brah’s theory particularly appropriate in this discussion as she is also a Ugandan of Indian origin who writes from first-hand experience about the upheaval surrounding the forced expulsion of Asians from Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972. 10
These “twice migrants” (Bhachu, 1985) have been immersed in a complex ontological puzzle as regards their identity and filiation. The circumstances surrounding the lifestyles of Asian women who settled in East Africa and the internal clash between the sexes that took place are gradually being revealed in recent work, both in the realm of creative writing and non-fiction. In Jameela Siddiqi’s second novel Bombay Gardens, Baby, now a resident of Great Britain, muses:
I am only Indian by race. I was raised as an African girl, in a small village in East Africa. And, in my country in East Africa, being Indian had, at one time, been the biggest crime one could commit. (2006: 17)
In her tribute to East African Asian women Alibhai-Brown slides into the role of what Kamala Visweswaran calls a “hyphenated ethnographer” (1994: 15). She alternates between the role of spokesperson for and that of spokesperson from the female collective. Her memoirs struggle with the demands of identity and community against her training as a journalist. During the years of indentured labour in East Africa, there was a scarcity of Asian women, unlike the plantation colonies, such as Mauritius and Trinidad, to which men and women migrated together. Despite being officially frowned on, many Asian men had long-standing relationships with African women. However, the arrival of Asian women during the second decade of the twentieth century reinforced the ethnic network and intraethnic marriage. This situation calls to mind the changing attitude of the British in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the arrival of the memsahibs put an end to sexual relationships — official or otherwise — between white men and Indian women. The British closed in on themselves and became a close-knit caste-like group which lived in dread of the threat of the lascivious Indian male. In East Africa it would be the African who would represent a similar sexual menace for Indian womanhood. Alibhai-Brown suggests this similarity:
The children of the black/Asian liaisons would be called chotaras, a word that we used to denigrate people and describe anyone who wore bright colours like luminous pink and green. Terror of contamination and failure encouraged the transformation of Asian women into porcelain ornaments, symbols of purity and wealth, exactly like middle-class Victorian women. (NP 57; emphasis in original)
At the turn of the twentieth century, which witnessed a large influx of male workers from India to build the Uganda railway (1897–1901), gender relations continued to be based on the necessity of controlling and safeguarding women’s sexual purity, on which men’s honour — izzat — and social status were heavily dependent. In the East African context this translated into an excessive enclosure of the various Asian groups within their own communities for fear that their daughters (or wives) would be led astray by African men. The early Indian migrants who disappeared into remote parts of the interior to start new families with African women were ostracized from polite society: “The community went into denial about these mavericks who couldn’t resist interracial copulation” (SC 61). An irony of history is that the hybrid children born of these marriages were inevitably shunned by the Indians but could easily “reclassify” themselves as Africans after 1972 while upright, “pure-blood” Asians were expelled from the land of their birth.
Migration, whether as a free person or as an indentured worker, involved economic gain and social and geographical mobility. However, women’s lives tended to remain as cloistered and as circumscribed by the family as ever. Women’s responsibilities centred on managing the home and bringing up children. Marriages were arranged between families from similar backgrounds but until a sizeable community of eligible young people existed in East Africa, many young brides were sought in India. For these women marriage also involved emigration to a new, unknown land without the comfort and support of familiar surroundings. Alibhai-Brown comments on the mythologizing of East Africa in the subcontinent as a land of milk and honey. 11
Women’s purity was worshipped at the altar of tradition, and it led to girls being groomed for the only careers that were left open to them: marriage and motherhood. In the first half of the twentieth century there is nothing specifically Asian about this, as working outside the home — and even less following a professional career — were options open to only a tiny minority of women anywhere in the world. However much it was shunned, widowhood was part of life, but divorce was simply unheard of. Few Asians actually divorced in East Africa, often owing to the emotional blackmail of the couple’s family and to what Alibhai-Brown sarcastically calls the Ismaili Muslim “indomitable Marriage and Morality Council”. She reveals that “[a] family’s khandani, izzat, honour, mattered more than happiness in marriage. If the odd couple did part, disapproving tongues lashed the woman who had so carelessly allowed her man to escape” (SC 154; emphasis in original). What is of interest in the East African Asian context is the constantly lurking fear of miscegenation, with the African male cast in the role of potential ravisher. Standards of sexual purity were less applicable to men and certainly the attraction of the African woman was understood and even condoned, at least provided the community at large did not find out. The Asian male, so solicitous of his wife’s and his daughter’s chastity, was less likely to curb his own inclinations when the “shameless” African woman threw temptation in his way, as the novels of Peter Nazareth have shown. 12
Although women were obliged to comply with rules of female decorum, Alibhai-Brown shows how the younger generation fought, not always successfully, against these constraints. The young Yasmin is chosen for the part of Juliet in a British Council production of Shakespeare’s play, but her delight at winning first prize in the drama competition sours the moment she returns home to a severe lesson from her extended family:
They appeared so deadly serious, I thought someone had died. […] [One of my cousins] grabbed me and there followed a frightful beating. I still carry some indelible marks. My crime? Romeo was black, and for an Asian Juliet this was forbidden love even in an innocent school play […] they called me a vaishia, a slut, a polluter of their good name. (SC 206–7; emphasis in original)
The outcome of her unplanned deviation from expected female behaviour was complete ostracism by her father. Kassim Damji turned against his own daughter and refused to speak to her after that night. The adult Yasmin can only speculate on the reasons for his somewhat hypocritical response:
Was he incapable of practising the racial equality he preached? I’ll never know. […] A man who sought freedom all his life feared any signs of it in his children. Perhaps because he knew it would make us too much like him. (SC 207–8)
Alibhai-Brown’s ambiguous feelings towards her father, at once hesistantly admiring and resentful, echo the author’s ambivalent attitude towards the East African Asian community on the whole. Her work continuously betrays these processes of disaffection and rupture, loyalty and solidarity, raising the issue of “whether (post)colonial subjectivity is necessarily constructed along a relational axis” (Moore-Gilbert, 2009: 19). Kassim, her father, stood for education, progress, and individualism; Jena, her mother, embodied tradition, protection, and solidarity together with a steely determination to survive. Both parents provided the young Yasmin with the necessary tools to become a mature, questioning adult, unafraid to disclose the contradictions and inconsistencies in the norms governing sexuality and gender among South Asians. Her first boyfriend, Vinod, considered a “catch” by her schoolmates, had been a Hindu, which was an unsurmountable barrier, because “although the various Asian faiths worked and played together, when it came to crossover sex and marriage the old taboos came down with swords in hand” (SC 190). Whether it was because “[l]iving among Africans at ease with their bodies and sex made Asians even more uptight than Indians and Pakistanis were on the subcontinent” (SC 181) or simply because diaspora communities tend to overprotect young women who may easily be led astray because “[s]ocial death — the ultimate horror in all Eastern families — is feared more than real death at times” (SC 264), the adult Alibhai-Brown has not shaken off the prudery that she imbibed as a child. The Indian films that she enjoyed so much when a teenager have lost the awe they once held for her:
These days [1995] the films are dreadful: men and women in revealing clothes, going to bed together, the women behaving like Madonna. Now I know this is deeply hypocritical for someone who still wears the odd miniskirt and long sexy slash up a black skirt, but I cannot bear these films. They blaspheme against my memories, the purity that I fantasise we all might have had if we hadn’t been mucked up by history. (NP 80)
Laying the blame for the degradation of her community at history’s door is a surprisingly simplistic and uncalled-for tantrum on Alibhai-Brown’s part. In fact, at times, the “we” in her autobiographies becomes somewhat suspect, hovering between an all-encompassing “we the East African Asians” and a much more restricted “we the Ismailis-who-were-expelled”. The occasional outbursts of ethnopiety illustrate Fischer’s description of what he calls “mosaic memory” as being
layered in differently structured strata, fragmented and collaged together like mosaics in consciousness and in unconscious maneuverings, all of which takes hermeneutical skills to hear and unpack. (1994: 80)
The site of narration of these two texts — both are written from the UK — determines Alibhai-Brown’s fluctuating subject position. Safeguarded by her current professional profile, she hovers between her categorical or ascribed identity as an East African Asian in exile and a more practical identity that allows her to inscribe herself within mainstream Britain. Desire for the crumbs of England still seems to determine her affiliation. The in-betweenness of the East African Asian imbibed during the colonial era has survived independence as she seems unable to shake off the “historical subservience” that she ascribes to other Asians (SC 82). In a more recent book she betrays this sensation of perpetual ambivalence:
I don’t feel [English], though I may one day. It depends on how the nation shapes up in the future and whether we migrants feel safe, appreciated and content within Albion’s new imagined borders. Our suitcases are half packed. Just in case. (Alibhai-Brown, 2015: 49)
This shifting response to the socio-political definition of Asianness — British but not quite — owes much to the lenses of nostalgia and hindsight, through which she views her community as having been “mucked up by history” (NP 80). Sentimental yearning notwithstanding, she constantly reflects on the double standards that ruled people’s lives and which slowly transformed into a culture of philistinism. Money would become the great divider and possession of sufficient income would curb any whiff of scandal or unseemly conduct.
Poverty, whether because of a lack of business sense, downright incompetence, or bad luck, singled out the Damji family, for “Asians without much money were an embarrassment for an aspirational community” (SC 99). Alibhai-Brown’s “profligate father squandered money, feelings, family, his own life” (SC 137) leaving Jena, her mother, to provide the economic support for her family whenever he was on one of his frequent absences or failed to fulfil his traditional role as breadwinner. Jena often relied on the goodwill of neighbours to eke out a living: “[i]ncredibly hard-working, at one time she was doing three jobs — cooking, teaching and sewing — to keep the family from penury” (SC 90). Her mother remained a constant model of female agency, despite the family’s pecuniary difficulties and her engrained loyalty to a husband that she regarded as “not a bad man, just too careless” (SC 90).
Jena was 16 when she married Kassim, her “free-wheeling bohemian” husband, twice her age, and found “feminism thrust upon her” (SC 89–90). She soon learnt to stand up for her rights and men and women in the community respected her for it. One incident has lodged itself very firmly in Alibhai-Brown’s memory as it was a turning point in her parents’ relationship. Kassim had left the children alone in the car outside while he calmly spent hours drinking in a bar:
My mother stormed in. No woman had ever entered the place to reclaim her man. […] Papa was humiliated. He grabbed her finger and broke it. It remained an accusing curve all her life, and Papa, who was never physically violent, gave up gambling in City Bar for good. (SC 136–7)
Alibhai-Brown’s mother learnt how to define herself and make her own space, warning her daughter of the perils of abandoning her education too soon and of relying too heavily on a husband’s income:
Plenty time in life to learn to cook. You girls have bigger future than us ladies, so innocent and ignorant we are. You must be somebody. Men are no good, have to stand on own feet. Make your own money, don’t ask a man for anything. Yassi, you do that, then I will teach you rice and everything. (SC 38; emphasis in original)
Alibhai-Brown pays tribute to women like her mother who dared to defy convention and step into Brah’s diaspora spaces, “where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptively mingle” (1996: 208). Her mother’s “failure” to train her in the basics of Indian cooking, which “for an Asian bride is an invitation to a beating or a kick back to her parents” (SC 272), points to Jena’s understanding that the ability to prepare a satisfying meal may be an essential part of the female repertoire, but her daughter could aspire to a larger, more enriching domain than the kitchen. Ironically, as a newly married, postgraduate student at Oxford, Alibhai-Brown would learn to cook not only traditional roti, puri, and rice, but a whole range of “creative, sometimes impertinent and playful blends of Indian, Pakistani, Arab, African, Chinese and English, now Italian and American too, forever in flux” (SC 16). Her detailed descriptions of 113 recipes “fragmented and collaged together like mosaics” (Fischer, 1994: 80) interlace her memories of people, places, and events and, by including a variety of dishes suitable for different occasions, she recaptures past histories and rewrites the East African Asian presence through their cuisine.
Food as culture
Historically, food and cooking have constituted an ideal scenario for establishing community networks and Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook offers abundant examples of food as a way of cementing family ties and ethno-religious loyalties. Preparing a meal ceases to be a daily routine, undertaken out of necessity rather than choice, and instead takes on a communal aura, becoming the manifestation of a shared culture. Through the exchange of recipes and culinary tips, women reconnect with their culture on a regular basis and by doing so, they weave together the separate threads of East African Asian identity. The recollection of these regionally-defined ingredients is not, however, to close ranks and reject other cuisines. On the contrary, it serves to reinforce the communal cuisine and reflect the mixture — rather than juxtaposition — of different food traditions. Ojwang claims that food in Alibhai-Brown’s memoir “approaches the status of a substitute for writing itself” (2013: 64), while Parmar suggests that the process of writing memoirs or autobiographies often serves as therapy for overcoming traumatic experiences. She argues that the limits of language only allow this to be palliative but, in the case of displaced women like Alibhai-Brown who recreate the comfort and communality of food, the words in the recipes can express the powerful emotions of “rejection and defiance” (2013: 142). Parmar focuses on the racism that Alibhai-Brown encountered in Britain but I read the recipes as symbolic cultural nourishment that defines who people are from what they eat and how they cook it.
Food is not only a source of stamina and physical strength and indispensable for survival, but is also associated with solidarity and comfort. It is “intrinsically connected to economics, politics, communication, knowledge, marriage, trade and the movements of peoples” (SC 16). Sharing out whatever little one has is an essential part of hospitality in South Asian cultures. It is in meticulous descriptions of cooking and detailed recipes that Alibhai-Brown demonstrates not simply the hybridity of the cuisine but more importantly the borrowing and interchanging of Indian and African foodstuffs and cooking methods. Each dish, however simple and straightforward its preparation, evokes a whole range of emotion, which in Alibhai-Brown’s memoir taps into an intellectual frame of reference as well as the purely physical sensations of smell, sight, and taste. It is as though each recipe functioned as a rasa, the physical pleasure of the taste of well-cooked food pointing to its comforting nature and conjuring up fond memories for the author and, by extension, for East African Asians familiar with the social context. 13 It is almost as though Alibhai-Brown’s disapproval of contemporary Indian films — “they blaspheme against my memories” (NP 80) — has been channelled into an over-sentimentalized recollection of the past.
In the years following independence, before Idi Amin expelled the Asian community, Alibhai-Brown talks about the double standards of the community:
Inexpensive dishes of penance were brought to mosque […] [while] in the homes of the big people, with the curtains drawn, the feasts were getting more outrageous, food absurdly richer, as if they were living through the last days of a hedonistic civilization. (SC 194)
Creamy Lamb is just such a dish that would normally have only been eaten during Eid but came to be consumed on a regular basis during these troubled times. At the other end of the spectrum, Matoke with Peanut Curry (SC 62) is an example of culinary fusion. The recipe calls for a combination of Indian and African ingredients that mimics the coexistence of South Asians and black Ugandans before class or ethnic divergences became solidified under colonialism and before Asians became the buffer group between the Europeans and the Africans, a convenient scapegoat for both, and a highly visible stumbling-block in the way of African “advancement” (Van den Berghe, 1975: 279). The detailed dishes that feature in The Settler’s Cookbook cross class and ethnic boundaries, from the simple life-saving watery dhal (SC 73), rotlo, the fare of the railway men — “[w]ithout it all those brave Indians who came to build the railway would have died even faster than they did, poor things” (SC 60) — and the deep-fried vegetable pakoras (SC 329), to more luxurious biriyanis (SC 221–3) and the laborious dhansak (SC 95). The Settler’s Cookbook stresses how the art of cooking functions as an articulation of both a personal and a communal identity. Each meal or written recipe works as autobiography and history in addition to engaging with the more political issues of class and ethnic belonging. The memoir is woven together with a love of cooking and eating around the external markers of colonialism and later Africanization policies, not forgetting the generational shifts and the constraints of izzat within the Asian community itself.
East African Asian women experimented with local foodstuffs, “although there was no snob value to be gained by assimilating African food” (NP 123), but their efforts at hybridizing their cuisine and embracing Ugandan culture were not appreciated by the new African elite. While a head prefect at Kololo Senior Secondary School in 1968, Alibhai-Brown met the then commander of the army, Idi Amin. When she asked him why there were no Asian recruits in the army, his response left no doubt about his opinion of the Asians and their place in the newly independent nation:
He looked down at me, a malevolent laugh burned up from his belly like lava, and he spat: “Because we do not eat chorocco [lentils] in the army. We are brave people, we Africans, we eat red blood meat. You are not African”. (SC 212)
African food could not compete in prestige with English food, thought to be healthier and better, and girls like the young Yasmin were taught to bake traditional cakes and sponges. Jena, horrified with the large number of (pork) sausage rolls that her daughter was making, only for them to be thrown away uneaten, devised ingenious ways to make the English dishes more acceptable. Garam masala was a favourite ingredient to spice up the insipid fare as her “Indian shepherd’s pie” proves (SC 165). The respect with which English cooking was regarded was just another instance of the self-effacement of the Asian community in relation to the whites and their self-imposed entrenchment well above the Africans:
As we learned more about English food, we found new ways to appropriate it, lead it away from itself. We were in awe of the great old country and had come to believe she had built up invincible powers on a devilishly potent diet. (SC 166)
Not all East African Asians were so deferent, however. Alibhai-Brown recalls individual acts of female resistance to European dominance. She recollects an elderly Indian woman who was famous for providing folk remedies for malaria. Some of her patients were whites who resorted to her ministrations when conventional medicine failed to work for them. What they did not realize was that she had added her own urine to the potions she provided especially for them as “the extra ingredient, she said, was revenge for their supercilious behaviour towards her people” (SC 80).
Alibhai-Brown’s gastromomic recollection of the recent past of the East African Asian community highlights the friendship, solidarity, and support that the women provided for one another. There is little in her recipes to recall the frustrations and fears that the more discerning women were suffering. Ojwang suggests that the decision to construct her autobiography with a culinary framework confirms the tense relationship that the young Yasmin had with her father. Kassim Damji ate little, “one egg on toast for supper each night [and] had all his teeth removed at forty for good health” (SC 202). Her father’s indifference to food extended to his lack of concern for his immediate family, which continues to haunt the adult woman years after his death:
Kassim Damji’s failures as a father, which account in part for the deep sense of loss, disappointment, and trauma at the heart of Alibhai-Brown’s memoirs, are symbolized in his poor appetite and his alcoholism. (Ojwang, 2011: 79)
She finds a photo of herself after his funeral in 1970 and this unexpected discovery seems to upset her poised narrative voice, venting the frustration of the adolescent girl whose innocent challenge to Asian patriarchy forced her to lean heavily on her mother for comfort, guidance and love:
In the pocket of a tatty jacket frequently worn was that photo of me from the Uganda Argus announcing my A-level results. Too bloody late and pride rather than affection, I thought. Did he wave it at his friends, showing off a daughter whose voice he refused to hear? (SC 234)
Conclusion: A pernicious trap
Anita Mannur acknowledges that writing life histories is fraught with narrative hazards:
the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recognition that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past, allowing the colors of history to seep out of the mind’s eye. (2007: 12)
Alibhai-Brown’s two autobiographies seek to overcome the challenge of reconstructing the history of a community that political circumstances obliged to disperse around the globe, mainly in India, Canada, and the UK. Her memories of the past have clearly been coloured by the present, not only due to the legacy of the Amin regime in Uganda but also because of her own personal project to rehabilitate the negative image of the East African Asian: “Asians were in a pernicious trap with no escape. If they did well, poisonous envy was raised against them; if they were poor, they were accused of being a drain on a poor country” (SC 80). Her resentment against Amin is palpable. Although she admits that “[i]nsecurity and greed had made many East African Asians careless and dishonest, and they had invited antipathy by not opening up to Africans socially or economically” (SC 277), she blames his “reign of terror” (SC 253) for obliterating her people from Ugandan history:
When I went back to Uganda in the late 1990s, Idi Amin’s henchmen had removed the road name and erased the man [Allidina Visram] from history, a reminder of how we were destined to be a people who leave no trace. (SC 67)
The two autobiographies are informed by the adherence to the strict code of conduct inscribed in izzat — often with the complicity of women themselves — but Alibhai-Brown celebrates the determination of her mother — and of women like her — to refuse to conform to unreasonable demands and stand by what she thought was right. The Damji family’s precarious economic status testifies to the fact that not all East African Asians belonged to a privileged socioeconomic class. The Uganda Asian crisis was effectively a class conflict but “race coincided with class and became politicized” (Desai, 2013: 207). This neglect of class differences in histories of the East African Asian community has distorted and perhaps even justified their categorization as a class of exploiters (Hand, 2011). Perhaps surprisingly then, Alibhai-Brown was advised not to write her memoirs as “I would bring them shame. Words, words, how they fear the power of words” (SC 13). In this respect historian Cynthia Salvadori, the author of We Came in Dhows (1996), was obliged to exercise a certain degree of self-censorship as many of her interviewees requested the erasure of certain details (Desai, 2013: 73) Alibhai-Brown is forced to admit that “[f]or practical, entreprising folk, too busy doing and making and moving, there is no space for self- or group reflection” (SC 14). At the same time, she regrets that:
in spite of these [arrogant] attitudes and the resentment we were building up in those around us, we continued to feel at peace with ourselves. […] we seemed incapable of understanding the turmoil around our heads or the deep sense of peril growing in our hearts as we lived our stratified lives, only ever insecure about what the African was going to steal from us and how, whatever we had, it could never make us as grand as the wazungu. (NP 58–9; emphasis in original)
Both texts, No Place Like Home and The Settler’s Cookbook, preserve and recreate what Indianness represented in colonial Uganda for a young woman growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is in the second, more ambitious work that Alibhai-Brown can finally pick up the crumbs of Empire, spice them up and claim more than just a footnote in British imperial history. Her work, written in the diaspora and with the benefit of hindsight, has unravelled many of the paradoxes of the ambiguous position of the South Asian community in East Africa.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Reference FFI2015-63739-P.