Utter radicals: Kenya’s Goan Connection
A review of Yesterday in Paradise
By Vivek Menezes, an outstanding journalist!
(First published by the Times of India several years
ago)
The story of
Goan migrants to East Africa is among the most astounding episodes in Indian
diaspora history. A tiny percentage of migrants from the subcontinent
(themselves no more than five per cent of the overall population), pathbreakers
from the Konkan, played an outsized role in the colonial expansion, and then
the anti-colonial push for independence. Aquino de Braganza was a crucial
ideologue and negotiator for Mozambique’s freedom fighters. A G Gomes invented
the “Gomesi”, now a national dress in Uganda. But most incredible is the record
and legacy of Goans in Kenya.
“Yesterday in
Paradise” by Cyprian Fernandes is an elegiac but no-holds-barred chronicle of
when “Goans dominated in the colonial administration of British-ruled Kenya,
Uganda and the once German-ruled Tanganyika … the colonial administration would
have collapsed but for the skill and management of the Goan clerks and accountants.
In semi-tropical Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, they found an even larger
paradise than they could have ever imagined. Until 1963, they enjoyed life with
a gusto that could only have been found in their beautiful Portuguese-ruled
Goa.”
Fernandes
deserves congratulations and lasting gratitude for ‘Yesterday in Paradise’. It is
a book only he could have written, including anecdotes and perspective, which
remained unwritten for decades after being bullied out of Kenya. His wife was
warned: “dear lady get him out of the country today. They are going to kill
him. They have a bullet with his name on it.” Happily, those anxious moments
led to a happy ending. Now the veteran journalist is peacefully settled,
counting his blessing, “I have woken up each morning and my prayer has been: ”thank
you God. It is great to be alive in Australia. Thank you.”
It is little
known -- and even less understood–– how important
Goan migration was in the making of modern native consciousness across the British
and Portuguese maritime empires. Fernandes correctly attributes this pioneering
spirit to the “18th century Pombaline Reforms and the sense of
equality by which Goans regarded Europeans in the 19th century.
Burton stated
that it is “No wonder that the black Indo-Portuguese is an utter radical, he
has gained much by Constitution.”
The Goan
attributes of public philanthropy and community service out of the
pre-Portuguese Goan concepts of communidade (community) and were revisited by the
European enlightenment. This concept was very important to the community of
Bombay and was carried to the segregated highlands of Kenya by such people as Dr
Rosendo Ribeiro and Dr A C L de Sousa.
Later, doctors,
chefs, musicians, dentists, motor mechanics, carpenters, tailors and workers with
other skills joined in. When the end of
British colonialism appeared on the horizon, a handful of Goans helped lead the
way for Kenya. Pio Gama Pinto broke apartheid rules by entering European
restaurants and hotels in Nairobi and Mombasa in the early 1950s. As a result
of his efforts, non-whites were finally allowed access to such places.”
Gama Pinto
was “an ultra-national Goan freedom fighter. The other was Fitz de Souza,
lawyer, constitutionalist, parliamentarian, deputy speaker.”
Son of a Goan
father and Masai mother, Joseph Murumbi Zuzarte was a “freedom fighter, one of the
architects of Kenya’s constitution, the biggest player in the defence of the
Kenyan leadership in detention during the Mau Mau insurgency, and set up the
network of the Kenyan diplomatic corps. He was Kenya’s first Foreign Minister
and Kenya’s second Vice-President.
Like other
Indians in East Africa, Goans struggled to remain in the post-colonial
environment, and the majority migrated to the West. A significant number came
home to India. (Many went West just as soon as their children had found their
feet). But Fernandes reports, “There is one group of people who deserve Kenya’s
collective applause: the Goans who remained. I am not sure that those who
stayed after everyone had left did it for reasons of commerce and business, or
they could not fathom living anywhere else, or because some of them were
genuinely dedicated to the betterment of the country, if not for the people.
Whatever the
reason, the eternal survival instincts of the Goans have allowed them not only
to prosper but also to become one with other Kenyans.”
Wonderful
irony that Goans who pushed the colour bar in one direction – insistent on
parity with Europeans – now tip the scales in the other, conceding no ground to
the definition of African. Much the same happens everywhere.
Cyprian
Fernandes – self-described “addicted to living by my wits and by the seat of my
pants” – speaks for an entire community, “I am a man of many parts, from many
places … Kenyan dust runs through my veins and resides in my DNA, which means
my body will always be Kenyan, my soul belongs to the country of my adoption
Australia. “Yet the Goan in will only die with the last sunset.”
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