Uhuru Street by MG Vassanji

Annie Gagiano

In this loosely-linked collection of short stories, published by Heinemann in 1991, Moyez Vassanji gives readers of African fiction a picture of the lifestyle of the Indian community of Dar es Salaam over a period of about forty years, beginning in the 1950s. Now a resident of Toronto, educated in the USA, Vassanji spent some of his youthful years in Tanzania, but the stories are not directly autobiographical. Indeed, although one of the sixteen tales describes a young man, an illegal temporary immigrant to Germany, masquerading as a refugee in order to make a life beyond Africa for himself and his family, and another story depicts an Indian who had left Tanzania, strolling contentedly through the streets of Toronto with his daughter, the final tale is of an Uhuru Street resident who has returned to Tanzania to stay - and all the other stories form a mosaic of lives led in and around this specific neighbourhood. Uhuru Street in Dar es Salaam, formerly known as Kichwele Street, "began in the [African] hinterland (...), came downtown lined by Indian shops, and ended at the ocean".

The city's own long history is evoked in references to the Arab, Indian and European people who came to it: "traveller and merchant, slave trader, missionary and coloniser". It is thus a history of a specific type of African city - one which attracted entrepreneurs, adventurers and exploiters from elsewhere, a situation bound to change when independence (signposted in the title) came to the region. But although Dar es Salaam changes, its expatriate citizens link it to a larger world and they themselves remain bound to it in their memories, even if they do not return.

The Indian shops and tenements of the city - mostly very modest establishments - form the setting of most of the tales, as these Muslim Indian families (often third-generation settlers) eke out a modest and somewhat precarious living from commerce. Many of the fascinating series of portraits (which is what most of these stories are) are of an urban underclass one could find in most cities across the world - poorly-paid servants; widowed food vendors; tough boys and timid ones; seamstresses and drivers; concerned mothers and hard-nosed businessmen. But these descriptions all have a distinctive local flavour and they are all filtered through a memory that is at once nostalgic and sharp-eyed. As a reader one breathes the seediness, the sadness and the irrepressible vitality of this urban atmosphere which is so very provincial and yet also glamorous in its own way, and also African almost despite itself.

Many of the stories acknowledge the inevitable racial tensions and hierarchies of this multi-ethnic society, within which the Indian families form a specific communal cluster. For instance, an Indian half-caste orphan who had an African mother is brought up by one prosperous Indian family and married into another one, but has the denigratory nickname "Black"; and Indians from Goa, one gathers, are also considered as being lower on the social scale than those with connections to India itself. Sometimes the racial references are veiled, as when a struggling Indian family employs an "indispensable" butler-housekeeper-factotum; he is described at first sight as "a proper mshamba - a man from the farms, from the interior" (13) - and evidently black. This means, of course, that he is a person who would otherwise, in cruder terms, be called a "raw" African. Yet he has a Muslim name: Ali. Although Ali is later fired for being a peeping Tom, he is loved by the boy-narrator of this story for his storytelling and entertainment skills - which range from American "cowboy" imitations to a wide range of African beast fables he tells the narrator.

One is also shown the outside influence of British colonialism on this community when a royal visit (in a helicopter!) by Princess Margaret takes precedence over all other activities in schools, or on the streets of the city.

Class tensions, resentments and rivalry within the Indian community are often alluded to - most stories show families aspiring to middle-class status and desperate to acquire the consumer goods that would signpost this. In the story called "The Beggar", three well-off schoolboys unwittingly, by their insensitivity to his need, drive a poor man to desperate aggression. In a detail reminiscent of the South African pass law system we are shown that the unemployed are liable to be endorsed out of the city.

On the other hand, in the story titled "Breaking Loose", a young Indian woman, a student, slowly develops a sense of her own Indianness through her respect for the sophisticated Ghanaian professor who courts her and together with whom she decides to defy her family's racial-cultural prejudices (by having such a relationship).

The most dreadful dimension of the city's increasing racial tensions (as independence comes) is shown in the ironically-titled tale "What Good Times We Had". In it an admittedly racist and snobbish Indian woman is tricked, robbed, raped and murdered on the eve of her intended departure from Tanzania - "Was this revenge, or plain avarice?" she asks herself in her final moments.

Since many of the stories feature an adolescent boy as protagonist or narrator, sexual awareness is often a focus. In "For a Shilling" the narrator refers bluntly to that "crazy world of our daily associations - of Arabs, Africans, Asians and assorted half-castes - in which the arse was king", and he says this awareness was their "weird introduction" to the other, "hidden world" of girls (35).

Sexual and social sophistication are always aspired to, but seldom achieved - even by "the London-returned", who certainly deem themselves to be the acme of cosmopolitanism whilst "suppressing a vague knowledge" of their own "recent roots" along the lower reaches of Uhuru Street.

In one of the later stories the initial transition to Britain, then Canada, is evoked - and finally, the "recreation" of Dar es Salaam in a sector of Toronto. But emigration is a hard road for most of these young Indian Tanzanians, involving (at least at first) experiences of loneliness and precariousness … "From a sitting-room full of family in Dar into this utter, utter loneliness under an alien sky" (22) reads one sentence in the story "Refugee". But these young (and older) people flee their motherland because of threatening rumours that young men will be conscripted to fight Idi Amin, and news stories of rape, murder and robbery of Asians.

Once returned, the protagonist in the final story notes that the passing ships "no longer carry portents of faraway, impossible worlds" (130) - his romantic yearnings have been shattered. As he revisits the "once beloved" Uhuru Street, he grieves at how narrow and small it now seems. The question "What is home?" (135) has by now assumed a new poignancy. An initially promising new relationship in Dar es Salaam fizzles out, leaving only the recognition that the "bare longing ... underneath ... is only a plain longing for a home, a permanence" (139). And the permanence for which the protagonist in the final tale (and several other stories) settles is the ritual reclamation of the streets of the city - especially, one may presume, Uhuru Street itself.



LitNet: 02 September 2004

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