The Asians in Their Midst

For many European settlers, "Africa for the Africans" simply means packing up and going home, painful though it may be. The future is far darker for the Asians in East Africa, who have long formed a precarious middle class. Despised by color-conscious whites, whom they greatly outnumber (400,000 to 96,000), resented by East Africa's 25 million blacks, the Asians --mostly Indians and Pakistanis--are loath to return to homelands that few have seen, and where jobs are already critically scarce. For the great majority of Asians, there is no other alternative but to stay on in an increasingly hostile Africa where, as one Western diplomat succinctly said recently, they are "the hard upper rung against which the rising African bumps his head."

Exporting Profits. Though they have been trading on the east coast of Africa for centuries, most of East Africa's Asians have taken root in this alien land only since 1895, when the British brought in 32,000 Indian workmen to build the narrow-gauge railway that opened the interior to colonization. Asians quickly turned from railroad building to trade, and so completely dominated commerce that until 1919 the rupee was the official currency of East Africa.

Today, millionaire Indian merchants and manufacturers occupy some of Nairobi's finest homes; but the Asians are for the most part small shopkeepers--duka wallahs to the Africans--and junior civil servants, who have never found middle-class security in their middle-class vocations. African nationalists have long complained that the Asians are a clannish, alien people whose only interest in Africa lies in the profits to be wrung from African customers. "The Indians are opportunists and quislings," cries Nyasaland's Prime Minister Hastings Banda. "Everywhere in the country they are taking business from African businessmen." The Asians make a habit of shipping much of their profit out of Africa; African politicians charged bitterly last fall that their true loyalty was disclosed by the sums of money that they raised for India during the border war with China.

Three years ago, half of the Asian merchants in Uganda's Buganda kingdom were driven out of the country by a wave of ugly violence and a boycott of Asian shops. East Africans were cheered last week by the departure from Mozambique of the last batch of 4,600 Indians deported to their homeland by Portuguese authorities in revenge for India's 1961 takeover of Goa. In Tanganyika, all 6,000 Asian civil servants will lose their jobs as soon as enough Africans can be found to replace them.

African Leadership. In Kenya, when ex-Mau Mau detainees returned to their villages after rehabilitation courses in British camps, they used their new knowledge of basic economics to take over rural trading posts from the long-hated Asians. Lately, Kenya's Indian merchants have contributed heavily to both big African political parties in hopes of buying protection after Kenya gets uhuru (freedom). Kenya's Nationalist Leader Tom Mboya is one of the few politicians to pledge that his Kenya African National Union will permit no one to be "victimized on grounds of race, color, tribe or religion." But even Mboya adds blandly, "We of course wish to see Asians and other non-Africans adapt themselves to the new order by accepting African leadership and African government."

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