And Home Was Kariakoo

F
ROM ABROAD
, I
OFTEN SEE
A
FRICA
perceived merely as a place of war, disease, and hunger, a sick entity deserving pity and sustenance and all help possible. Schoolchildren gather to donate quarters to it. Men and women make professions pointing out its woes. Celebrities collect funds for it. People keep asking: Is there hope for Africa? Africa, it seems, is the world’s perpetually poor relation.

Over the years I have often revisited East Africa, where I was born and raised, as were my parents and one grandfather. From the inside, the place is actually very different, and the world looking out also seems very different. It is as though a distorting lens separated these two realities. East Africa is an exciting place; to me it always was. During my revisits I saw problems, of course—some of them new, others merely larger—but there was much more. I walked through vast food and clothing markets, saw abundance as well as poverty; there was begging and sullen unemployment, but also there were games and festivals, there was joy. There was music and colour. Boys and girls in uniforms traipsing off to school early in the morning on city streets and country roads, people gathered for a wedding, men crowded under a tree after a funeral. Intellectuals ruing the lost days of idealism. I have witnessed poetry being made and
discovered, in the language of the country; the youth in debate about their future, reminding me of the hopeful, exciting days of my own youth; early schoolers shyly come to a stage to announce their ambitions. Late one evening a man gave me a ride back from a literary reading at a bar and told me he had ambitions of building a supercomputer, and his own personal library. Every place is a universe in itself; I saw a vast diversity in a varied and teeming country. There was life, there were people. There was the geography.

Growing up in a country you absorb a sense of its multiple dimensions, carry images of its distant places, and hear the poetry of their name-sounds—and come away with a certainty or expectation that you’ll see much of it during your lifetime. It’s yours, after all. Circumstances took me away, and for a long time it seemed to me that I would never visit those lost dimensions, experience the land in its variety, appreciate the diversity of its people. I was wrong, all it required was a will to go and do just that.

One day I decided I would visit and experience that land as much as possible; travel to its different corners and write—not about the country per se but about myself in it; not as an outsider reporting to outsiders but as someone from there, who understood. If in the process I could provide a context, or indulge in history, which is a passion, or in memory, which is a form of history, all the better. There were moments when the thrill of travel and discovery was such that I wished I could go on and on, from place to place, and never stop. But I was not young anymore, and one lives with constraints; twice I had to be told
Enough
, and reluctantly, facing an inviting, unvisited landscape, I turned back. I had to stop.

—MGV   

D
OWN BELOW, OUT THE AIRPLANE PORTHOLE
, lay the vast unconquered landscape of Africa—so different from the parcelled geometry of Europe which I had crossed over or the grey, highway-girded northeastern United States where I had made my home for the time being. The red earth and green scrubland, a few huts, a solitary figure wending its way on a trail to somewhere, perhaps carrying water, all under a cool morning sun that would in no time replenish its fires and begin to bake the earth. It must have been the arid north of Kenya, south of Somalia, down there below me, but it didn’t matter, the familiarity was unquestionable and it filled me with a huge emotion. This was my country. This was East Africa and I was returning home.

I was twenty-one, it was only sixteen months since I had gone away, but that was a long time then. Mine was the overwhelming emotion of someone who had feared he might not see home again. The people, the places; the music, the language: everything that was suffused into my pores and my very being, now crowded out by new challenges and pushed back into memory. That feeling about my African home would never change over the years and decades that followed, during which I would go to many places, including Canada,
which gave me a home, and my Indian ancestral homeland, which partially claimed me back.

Many from my generation left during those heady 1960s and ’70s of the last century, soon after independence. Most went away to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, and some have returned for visits, but few that I know with that intensity of emotional reclamation. Of mad belonging. Some of those who left never returned, having made good their escape, packing their bitterness with them—bitterness at the politics, the revenge racism, and the socialist policies and broken official promises that drove them out; others left simply to fulfill the colonial dream, finding their way to what had been the centre of their universe—London, now simply the West. Whence this sense of place in me, I have often wondered. To call it nostalgia is too easy; I recall harrowing moments from a deprived childhood, as well as happy ones. I don’t long for the crowded bedroom of my childhood, the despair of a single mother on the brink of breakdown; they are gone. Dar es Salaam, where I grew up, has changed; Nairobi, my birthplace, has changed. I have seen both these cities which were my home metamorphose during numerous revisits—populations multiplied, violence increased, beauty and serenity reduced to squalor. Toronto, where I live and have made my home, has changed too; it has become friendly and cosmopolitan, its urban spaces look renewed, as they do in the American cities I have known: Boston, Philadelphia, New York. But, to use a metaphor, returning to the original home either one can opt to observe how everyone has aged and everything is no longer the same, and how ultimately, predictably disappointing it all is; or one sees the familiar and the dear in the older, broken faces. One has memory, and attachment and commitment, one is aware of change and history as it applies to everything.

Modern aesthetic—I mean the western one—prefers ironic detachment, a stony turning away from the emotion, a haughty look askance at anything that might give joy or sadness—seeing the inevitable winter behind the summer, the motive behind the charm, the spent passion, the bitter aftertaste. Does climate have anything to do with this? Those of us from the south—where fruits and vegetables actually rot and smell, and death is real, not irony—sometimes fear what the winters might be doing to us. I see my feelings about my place of birth to be mixed, obviously, growing older demands that, but disappointment does not poison the joy or the attachment.