Between Black & White

The news of Africa has been largely written in conflict of black v. white. But a third group exists there--"the indigestible filling in the black-and-white sandwich," as it has been called. Africa's Asian minority poses problems of its own. They showed most plainly ten years ago in Durban, South Africa, when in the course of a minor scuffle an angry Indian merchant pushed an African boy's head through a shop window and gave him superficial cuts. Passersby spread the word exaggeratedly: an Indian has killed an African. That night Africans began attacking every Hindu in sight. Next day they burned homes, looted stores, clubbed men, women and children to death, raped girls and hurled them into burning houses. In three days 1,229 people were killed or wounded, 1,532 homes were damaged or destroyed.

There have been no comparable flare-ups since, but the problem remains and has how taken a new turn. Last week, for instance, the newly formed Uganda National Movement had a boycott going of all non-African shops, the purpose being to "drive the Asians into the large towns. After that we shall put pressure on them there too." Long snubbed by the whites, the Asians now find themselves in danger from the blacks, and few can decide to which side to run.

Land of the Free. It was the whites who brought the first large group of Asians to Africa rather than engage black workers on the building of the great Uganda Railway--"the two ribbons of rust," as Disraeli called it, "that stretch from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria." Natal landowners also began importing Indian "coolies" to work their languishing sugar plantations. In four years Natal's sugar exports multiplied 33 times. The indentured Indians became settlers in their own right, and other immigrants--the "free" or "passenger" Indians--flocked to make a new life for themselves in the new land. In 1897, aged 28, young Mohandas Gandhi was stoned by Durban white settlers and came close to being hanged from a lamppost.

Today, there are 800,000 Asians in Africa south of the Sahara--Hindus (the majority), Sikhs, Ismaili and Shia Moslems, Parsees and Christians from Portuguese Goa. The fourth Aga Khan left his Harvard studies in 1957 to be installed not in Pakistan but in Africa, where his Ismaili followers once weighed his portly grandfather in diamonds. The shop signs of Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika are almost all Indian--V. B. Patel, the timber merchant; H. J. Peerani, the baker; Mohanlal, the tailor. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Indians are called Banyans, and elsewhere whatever the African wants to buy--a bolt of cotton, a kerosene lamp, a bicycle--it is almost invariably an Indian dukah wallah in a filthy, tin-roofed shop that sells to him. In Kenya, Asians pay one-third of the colony's indirect taxes and run some of Nairobi's smartest shops; in Zanzibar they control the clove market; in Tanganyika they dominate the economy. In Uganda, where before the war Indians were responsible for as much as 90% of the trade, there is a saying: "Europeans have the power, Africans have the land, and the Asians have the money."

Harder South. Treatment of Asians varies with the geographical latitudes and gets harder farther south. In Nyasaland almost no economic restrictions are placed upon the Asians, but in Southern Rhodesia a Hindu may not buy liquor without a special permit. A Moslem attorney from Nyasaland, working on a case in the capital of Southern Rhodesia, suddenly found that he could not use the washroom or take the elevator. In Dar es Salaam an Asian may play cricket with Europeans, but he will not then be able to join them for a drink at the Gumkhana Club. In the Union of South Africa, Asians have long since been virtually eliminated from voting rolls, have been gradually squeezed out of the civil service, and, being lumped together with the "coloreds" (mulattoes), are subject to all the hardships and indignities of apartheid, and are referred to as "coolies."

Most Indians have no desire to go back to the home country: third-or fourth-generation Indians like to think of themselves as "brown Africans." Because of their devotion to large families ("If we have only four or five children," explains one Uganda tailor, "our neighbors sneer at us and say we are too poor to have any more"), the Indian population in East Africa shot up 74% in the past ten years. "The Asians," the Asians say, "are in Africa to stay." So far, the whites have grudgingly let them, but some Asians are beginning to wonder: What about the blacks?

Divided by caste, religion and geography, the Indians have leaders but no solid front. The Africans and their rabble-rousers accuse them of bleeding the country to send money to India, of profiteering, and of binding ignorant blacks to usurious installment-credit schemes.

The Minister of Finance to His Highness the Kabaka (King) of Buganda says: "There will be plenty of room for Europeans even after self-government. But we are determined to get rid of the Asians." Adds Nyasaland's demagogic Dr. Hastings Banda: "If they interfere in politics, they will be told to clear out. We will boycott their stores, and they know what that means--bankruptcy."

The Football. Convinced of late that African nationalism is the coming thing, Africa's Asians are now trying to come to terms with it. In Kenya, Indian members of the Legislative Council have joined with Labor Leader Tom Mboya against the whites. But the fact remains that a few years ago the Mau Mau were just as ready to dismember Asians as Europeans (though Nehru blindly urged Kenya's Indians to support the Mau Mau "liberation army"), and that in some of the recent riots in Nyasaland, Indians and their shops were the chief victims. "We are like a football," says one Nyasaland Moslem. "We get kicked from the European side. We run to the African side. The Africans kick us, and we run back to the Europeans."

One of the few Indians on the continent ever to hold high political office is Sir Amar Nath Maini, Uganda's Minister of Corporations and Regional Communications. Says he: "I know perfectly well that to take office under the British administration means to take the political kiss of death. But what's the alternative? Integration? This 'We-demand-no-special-rights, we-just-want-to-be-brown-Africans' attitude won't get us anywhere. The Syrians tried it in Ghana, and now they are being squeezed dry and flung out. We can come to terms with the African, but only if we hold a bargaining position--only if he can see that he needs us."

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