“[Their] … naturalization as British citizens moved
the location of identity for Goans from Portugal to Britain. Geographically
though, they lived in Africa.” In so saying, A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980
(2014), Selma Carvalho’s latest book, encapsulates the complex socio-cultural
and political identities of Goans in a history spanning Asia, Africa, and
Europe. Because of my own familial connections with once-British Kenya, it has
often been a source of wonderment that a community as small as the Goan one has
not only found itself in so many parts of the world, but also been enmeshed in
global histories. East Africa is so embedded in Goan cultural memory that even
for those not connected with that diasporic history, the Swahili song “Malaika”
is one that forms part of the “Goan soundtrack” – that aural legacy that
continues to be heard at family and village celebrations, like stories of relatives
in far off places. Bearing witness to the importance of oral accounts, Railway successfully transits from
interviews to written sources to record a storied past.
In comparison to her previous book Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010),
Carvalho is far more attuned to the formation of racialized Goan identities in East
Africa in Railway. This is apparent
in her analysis of how Luis Antonio de Andrade, born in 1865 of mixed
Portuguese and Goan origins, prospered in Zanzibar in the early 20th
century. A shrewd businessman, Andrade capitalized on his position “[a]s
medical assistant to Sultan Sayyid Ali Bin Sayid,” while “never […]
compartmentalis[ing] his identity. He was a Portuguese man; […] a member of the
European clubs […]. But that did not preclude him from being an intrinsic part
of Goan society” in Zanzibar. “Photographed on occasion wearing an
African-styled fez,” Andrade was
awarded the Brilliant Star of Zanzibar and honoured as a Chevalier of the Order
of the Immaculate Conception by Portugal.
Yet,
this analysis may have been extended by comparing someone as high profile as
Andrade with such other transnational figures as the Goan cooks who also
traveled between Asia and Africa. How might we understand their racialization
as cosmopolitan figures who traversed continents and empires, even? This is not
to imply that Railway does not
address issues of class and caste. One notable area where it does so is in
speaking of the 1936 “break-away and founding of the Goan Gymkhana” in Kenya,
which “made a faction of upper-caste Goans even more insular and exclusivist.” However,
even in highlighting the peculiar nature of political rifts in the community,
it is still the history of the elite that dominates, further obscuring
subalterns.
Because
most of the oral history the book relies on emerges from interviews with East
African Goans now resident in Britain, Railway
eschews how those accounts might have been “coloured,” had
Africans also
been interviewed. Apart from a reference to Joseph Zuzarte Murumbe, decolonized
Kenya’s second Vice President – a man of Goan
and Masai heritage – there is little
other mention of the names of black Africans. Nonetheless, Carvalho effectively
explores intersectionality in the making of identities in East Africa. For
example, note her observation of how “[t]he unsung African-Asian partnership
was pivotal in the emancipation of Goan women and the development of a middle
class.” This astutely demonstrates how colonialism may have subverted
entrenched notions of gender and class, but did so by participating in a larger
system of racial difference. Accordingly, Railway
is a useful text not only for those with an interest in postcolonial studies,
but also for those wishing to explore the multiple tracks of global Goan
history.
