"‘Zanzibar was the genesis of the Goan migration to British East Africa’: Historian Selma Carvalho" in SCROLL (12 July 2026)

While the history of the South Asian diaspora readily maps on to the contours of the British empire, this is not the full story and especially not so in the case of displaced Goans. Of course, having been a Portuguese colony from 1510 to 1961, it may be considered likely that Goa saw its migrants seek opportunities in other Portuguese overseas territories. Again, not entirely the case.

In her new book, Guts, Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar, 1865-1910 (Speaking Tiger 2026), Selma Carvalho offers a reconceptualization of Goan diasporic history as having been the result of the small community navigating the intricacies of multiple and overlapping political dispensations. For Goans in nineteenth-century Zanzibar, their official citizenship may have been Portuguese, but they had to contend with the region becoming a British protectorate; in the meanwhile, the Indian Ocean island was also ruled by Omani sultans.

Slavery, colonialism, and trade have created a complex multicultural heritage in Zanzibar that contrasts with its diminutive size at just over 1500 square kilometres. While currently the Goan presence on the island has diminished much like the remembrance of its history, Carvalho chronicles an intrepid community who simultaneously benefitted from, colluded with, and were sidelined by European imperial machinations in the Eastern African isle.

In this interview, Carvalho explains Zanzibar’s importance as a historical location in the making of Goan diasporic identity within the volatile milieu of nineteenth century imperial politics. The author also reflects on why the heyday of Goan involvement in East Africa has receded into the backdrop while considering the part historiography plays in situating communities rendered marginal despite their contributions to shaping global modernity.

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RBF: “Zanzibar” all but disappears in 1964. That is the year it became part of Tanzania, the name of the new nation a portmanteau of two former territories, the other being Tanganyika. If one were to place them in order according to how the former British East Africa factors into the making of South Asian diasporic history and identity, then the country in first place would be Kenya with Uganda a very close second. Tanzania would appear thereafter with Zanzibar lurking within the fused moniker of that nation, almost fatefully so because the island’s name, although of Perso-Arab origins, begins with the last letter of the English alphabet.

Yet, your new book argues for the significance of Zanzibar, both as an important port in the making of nineteenth-century imperial trade relations and for the shaping of Goan identity in Africa. In your earlier writing on Goan migration such as A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980 (2014), it is not that Zanzibar does not get a mention; however, the little island is not accorded nearly as much attention as Guts, Glory and Empire deservedly gives it. What prompted this newfound research direction?

Additionally, there is much to be said about the similarity between Goa and Zanzibar. Both are Indian Ocean enclaves, both have been culturally shaped by Portuguese and Islamic influences while also being part of the trade in enslaved Black people, and both became part of other nations in the 1960s. What attracted Goans to Zanzibar, especially in the 1800s?     

SC: My research into the Goan presence in East Africa spans roughly eighteen years. It coincides with my
arrival in London, where I was warmly welcomed by this extraordinarily successful and articulate community who called themselves East African Goans. I realised at that moment that here was an untold story. There was a sparse breadcrumb trail left by the late Teresa Albuquerque in her book Goans of Kenya (1999), and there were a number of academic books which had investigated the subject as one of migration. But there was no literature at all on the actual people who migrated mid-nineteenth century, the minutiae of their lives, politics, hopes, aspirations and contributions. During the course of my research, I began to realise that Zanzibar had in fact been the genesis of the Goan migration to British East Africa. The question intrigued me—why had they settled in Zanzibar? There was a history of elite Goan communities in Portuguese East Africa, but what had brought them to Zanzibar? There is not one single route that might have led to Zanzibar, rather there are several possibilities. Indeed, this early exploratory phase of mid-nineteenth century ocean crossing is for me, at least, one of the most exciting periods, and as yet not fully explored.

Initially what attracted Goans was this adventurous spirit they carried which enabled them to cross oceans. As Zanzibar grew prosperous and by a quirk of destiny became central to European imperial expansionism in East Africa, Goans found their own ascendancy linked to this opportune moment in history. A few Goans who had arrived as stewards and cooks, then took to setting up taverns and small shops. They became immensely prosperous, recruiting men from Goa to work for them in Zanzibar. Later, Goans arrived to work in clerical and administrative positions. During the interlude they became central to the sultanate as doctors, interpreters, musicians and merchants. Important administrative posts, such as that of postmaster and government press manager, were held by Goans.  

RBF: As you note, “[i]t is during … the mid-1860s … that [the] men who would shape the destiny of Zanzibar—Prince Barghash, John Kirk, C. R. Souza—began to assemble and their lives began to converge in the manner of small islands.” Thereupon, “within a few years, Barghash would be crowned sultan, Kirk would become consul-general at the British consulate, and C. R. Souza emerge as one of the richest men on Zanzibar island.”

For Barghash and Goan entrepreneur Caetano do Rosário Souza, the future was not necessarily promised. The former tried several times to become Sultan of Zanzibar, his failed efforts even resulting in him being exiled to British India, and Souza, despite his pluck, often found himself the subject of derision amongst the administrators who were steadily carving out a European sphere of influence in East Africa.

And yet, here we have an ambitious Arab prince, a high-caste Goan Catholic, and a British career colonialist who would come together to shape the destiny of this Indian Ocean African island. What might be said of this particular historical juncture that would bring together such an unlikely assemblage of foreign actors and, even more so, to the exclusion of indigenous people?  

SC: I think one of the extraordinary things about Zanzibar is that everything we believe we know about empire and the indigene gets turned on its head. The African was indigenous to Zanzibar, but the Arab did not consider themselves non-indigenous to the Swahili coast. In fact, if I can push this a little further, I suspect even the Kutch with a centuries-long association and settlement along the Swahili coast did not consider themselves non-indigenous. “Belonging” as we understand it today, with its defined geographical demarcations, does not translate to the early nineteenth century. The Kutch were under the protection of the sultan, their names appearing in his book of “Sultan’s Hindees.” As in any society, a pecking order had been established, and unfortunately in Zanzibar, the indigenous African was placed at the bottom of that hierarchy, disenfranchised from every avenue of power other than which they derived from their Arab owners. (It was different on mainland Africa, where indigenous African chiefs asserted territorial power.) It is this curious confluence of Arab royalty, British imperialism, and South Asian merchant capitalism that shaped the destiny of Zanzibar. This tenuous co-dependence laid the blueprint for modern cities as we know them today.

RBF: “Mistaken for mixed-race Europeans and called half-caste Portuguese by the British, Goans took pride in being part of the European world…” Your book makes it quite evident that the identity of Goans appeared to be quite malleable in the way they were perceived in Zanzibar of the nineteenth century. This was not always so: “[N]ot all Goans had their racial identity so easily blurred … [T]hose dwindling at the bottom, the throng of brawling ‘Goanese’ who lived in filthy conditions…, [were] dismissed as native[s].”

Thus, even as Britons may have grudgingly accorded elite Goans some shared cultural (or, less so, biological) Europeanness, this was still in the service of drawing a line between themselves and this other group who were marked by a lack of purity of racial/cultural origin. That there also existed visibly poorer Goans did not help.

This signals two layers of distinction on the island. The first is between the races and the second within the Goan community itself which drew from “[a] recurring theme … among British colonial officials … [who accused] lower class Goans [of] living in squalor.”

The more well-heeled Goans were quick to capitulate:

All the charities, committees and clubs formed by Goans to discuss matters of health, education and welfare, comprised the upper-class who lived in the more salubrious parts of town distanced from … poverty [and working class Goans] … Already an intersectionality between class and race was emerging, where class could blur racial differences, and make oneself acceptable to European hegemony.   

Your book is not devoid of mention of non-elite Goan people, but it centres the lives of those Goan subjects whose caste privilege and European acculturation (because of the Portuguese colonisation of their homeland) allowed them to be advantaged in the colonially hierarchical multiculturalism of Zanzibar.

How separated were poorer Goans from their patrician counterparts in everyday life and society at the time?

SC: What becomes obvious in Goan diaspora history, beginning with the nineteenth century satellite Goan community in Bombay, is that the Goan elite carried a profound sense of noblesse oblige. They may have socially distanced themselves from working-class Goans—to the extent that they excluded them from their clubs and committees—but they also felt a responsibility towards their well being. Hence, one of the first collective acts that takes place is the forming of two charities on Zanzibar island, that of St. Joseph and St. Francis Xavier by 1874.

It is in the constitution of these charities that an early understanding of democratic franchise and gender equality becomes obvious within Goan society. But a form of internalised racism persisted toward their own working-class populations—the cooks, stewards, tailors, people who were not Europeanised in mannerism, speech, and cultural pursuits. Their lack of Europeanisation was an embarrassment to elite Goans. The Portuguese language was instrumental in social gate-keeping. Those who could speak the language were imbued not just with social mobility but also a quasi-political power.

Caste rivalries persistent among Catholics in Goa resurfaced in Zanzibar, and from the tired old tropes of caste arose fresh divisions, markedly between the uneducated trading class and the urban educated class. At times, these rivalries played out in public leading to catastrophic diplomatic tensions impacting international relations.

RBF: Although Zanzibar found itself ensconced in the political intrigues of Omani sultans and
European colonisers, it did not mean that Goans—as small as this community was—were not also involved in administrative goings on. Here, I am referring not only to their employment as interpreters and clerks by the island’s Arab and British authorities, but also the fact that Goans were appointed as vice-consuls and consul-generals in the Portuguese consulate on the island. What does this reveal of the peculiarities of Portuguese colonialism in comparison to its British counterpart?

It is also important to underscore that although Goans were Portuguese citizens in East Africa, curiously, “until a Portuguese consulate was established in 1885, the affairs of Goans were overseen by the British consulate.” With no Portuguese administrative body in place, “[f]or those Goans who had registered with the consulate, effectively, it meant they became British protected subjects.” This was foundational to how Goan identity evolved, you contend, for “[i]t was this ‘protection’ which the Goans encountered in Zanzibar that would lay the foundation of their understanding of citizenship, that it could be dual and changeable.”

In 1897, this mercurial self-making led “the Portuguese Consul-General Ferreira de Castro [to call] the Goan community in Zanzibar, amphibio, amphibious in nature switching nationalities as it suited them.” I would challenge the consul-general’s characterization of why Goans switched politico-national loyalties and ask, instead, if the reason this miniscule community’s allegiances were variable is because they sensed the necessity of being flexible given the still-forming world order. Certainly, this must have also had to do with British ascendancy across the globe which contrasted so starkly with Portuguese decline?

SC: In Africa, Portugal found it hard to colonise with boots on the ground. Already, in neighbouring Mozambique a dependence on Goan elites as agents of empire had been established by Portugal. In Zanzibar, this authority was formalised. The appointment of Dr. Brás Souza as vice-consul in 1885 and later as consul-general imbued Goans with consular authority. The trend continued with elite Goans being given judicial power over other Goans. Thus began a period of collaborative empire-building, a sort of partnership between native Goans and the Portuguese.

To the second point, in Zanzibar, Goans understood that political loyalties could be multi-faceted. The book gives us a glimpse into how easily loyalties could switch for Goans depending on the situation—they could ask to be under British protection or the sultan’s protection. Often, if Portugal’s relationship with the sultanate became strained, Portugal would place Goans under the protection of the Germans.

RBF: One cannot speak of Africa of the past centuries without addressing the trade in enslaved Black people. Were Goans complicit in these ventures? In the racial hierarchy of the island—where elite Goans were greatly advantaged—how did Goans treat Black people?

SC: There is a notion that empire was driven entirely by Europe’s militaristic might. But the longue durée was made up of disparate people living together, each one asserting their own power where they could engage in the oppression of other people. Some instances of Goan-inflicted oppressions are detailed in Guts, Glory and Empire—the blurring of slave and servant for instance. There are, at least, two instances where Goans buy slaves to work for them.

Although, litigating the past is futile, the practice of slave-ownership was frowned upon even at the time. Principally, it fell afoul of the law, but more importantly it was morally abhorrent. The French Catholic missionaries with whom Goans were closely allied in Zanzibar were staunch abolitionists. It seems incongruent that on the one hand Goans kept close company with the French missionaries while on the other hand the very same people owned chattel labour.

RBF: Elvira Martin née Souza is one of the rare figures in the book of whom we get a fuller profile as a woman. This notwithstanding, your research findings emphasize how rarely she was “referred to by her name. She had simply disappeared into being Mrs James Martin.” Beyond being defined only through heteropatriarchy, how might we understand the lives of Goan women in this moment?

SC: One of the misgivings I harbour is that I could not flesh out the lives of women in the book. The archives were silent because it was men who inhabited the public space and were visible enough to have left behind a documented record of their lives. Once in a while a glimpse is afforded by way of an obituary or a will where the wife is the beneficiary and then a story can be extrapolated from that nugget of information.

Elvira Martin Souza is that rare Goan woman who is visible in East Africa’s history. Much of this visibility stems from her being the daughter of the aforementioned Dr. Brás Souza. Later, Elvira became even more renowned as the wife of the Maltese adventurer James Martin. Elvira and James were very much part of the early colonials who set up camp around what would, by 1899, become known as Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Accomplished, talented, able to sing in several languages and a great lover of music, an entire chapter is dedicated to Elvira Martin Souza in the book.

RBF: “As empire formalised in East Africa, as colonists established associations and increasingly usurped power, as the crown government solidified and favoured white settlers, the Goan entrepreneur faded in East Africa ... A causal relationship has to be assumed between the rise of empire and the decline of the Goan as an autonomous agent.” In so saying, Guts, Glory and Empire signals the end of the halcyon days of Goans in Zanzibar, their legacy obscured.

Apart from the rise of empire, the fault for why this history is little known you lay at the feet of the community itself: “That Goans had no sense of their historical relevance has condemned their story to obscurity. That no such institutions or historians chronicled their tremendous contribution rendered them mute.”

While your book intervenes in this loss, what does it also say about how minority communities are researched in South Asian diasporic studies (where “South Asian” is really North Indian) and what may this advise for future enquiries about Goa and its diasporas?

SC: There is a question to be asked as to why some histories are forgotten or erased. I cannot find an explanation as to why the extraordinary history of the Goan interlude in Zanzibar had not been written about. And a vast unwritten history still exists out there of the Goan presence in Mozambique. To investigate these histories, of course, requires tremendous financial resource. It is incumbent on institutions to set up funding. Goan history suffers from the label of being a “niche history” but the disparate threads of the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean have to become part of the national consciousness. That is how we become a nation by being genuinely interested in each other’s lives and recognising that these are shared pasts.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say, that is how we begin to understand our shared humanity. For instance, until Guts, Glory and Empire, there was no recognition of the Goan engagement with the nineteenth-century Arab world. We remember the Goan presence in East Africa only as having serviced the British administration, but there had been a long history prior and parallel to that.

From Scroll. 

"Interview: Author Peter Nazareth on Working with Idi Amin, the Goan diaspora in East Africa and More" in SCROLL (22 August 2021)

 

Peter Nazareth, writer, professor, and critic ended his teaching career of nearly five decades at the University of Iowa on 1 July, 2021. Despite having spent the majority of his lifetime as an educator, Nazareth also worked as a bureaucrat in Uganda, where he was born to Goan parents in 1940. His experience in the Idi Amin administration in the early-1970s led to him writing the novel, In a Brown Mantle (1972) which prophesied the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. In part, this led to Nazareth’s own departure from his birth country.

While he was a college student at Makerere University College (Kampala, Uganda), Nazareth met Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who became a lifelong friend. Prior to his departure from Uganda with his family, Nazareth obtained a graduate degree at Leeds University. However, it was not England the Nazareth family would migrate to but the United States. In 1973, Peter Nazareth accepted the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, after which he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. He went on to become a professor there, Chair of African American World Studies in 1991-1992, and advisor to the IWP.

As a littérateur who crosses the boundaries between fiction-writing and writing about fiction, the breadth of Nazareth’s legacy is as varied as the continents he has lived in. Apart from writing his own novels and short stories which are a record of the Goan diasporic experience in East Africa, he was one of the first to anthologize literature by Goans from around the world. In this interview, Nazareth reflects on his life experiences and work, his critics, other authors, and also what the future might hold.

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“Your [ask] whether I ever met [Idi] Amin. I did. The scene in The General is Up where Ronald has his back to the wall while he hears the General give a scary speech while launching a new development bank was based on my experience: I had my back to the wall...

“I once went for a drive with my wife and daughters in Entebbe and as we turned round a corner, I found myself looking into Amin’s face and he into mine...

“I used to have two nightmares about Amin. One, that he discovered that I had written a novel based on him ...  The other was that he would make me an ambassador to another country, which was [the] first step to being killed.”

RBF: These are quotes from your response to an August 2020 query from Jeanne Hromnik, a South Africa-based Goan writer, who asked on a listserv called The Goa Book Club about the relationship between your time in Uganda’s Finance Ministry, under the Idi Amin administration in the 1970s, and your novels. In a Brown Mantle (1972) foretold the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in the same year as its publication while The General is Up (1984) looks back on those events. Neither of the novels name Amin nor Uganda; instead, the action unfolds in the fictitious country of Damibia and, as the title of the second novel intimates, the General stands in for Amin.

I can only imagine how traumatic it must be to dredge up these memories. I am so sorry that you and your family had to deal with this.

PN: Things were not always scary.

Soon after Amin’s coup, I was chairman of the parent-teacher association of the school my two daughters went to. We were opening a new building. This was to be followed by a dance.

We decided to invite Abu Mayanja to open the new building. Then there was to be a barbeque followed by the dance. Who were we to invite as the guest of honor for that part?

We decided to invite Amin’s wives. There were four [at the time]. Two accepted: Mama Malyamu and Kay.

Abu Mayanja was a powerful Muganda politician.  He was imprisoned by Obote and he was released when Amin came into power. I had to give the speech to introduce him. I was in a tight spot because I admired his courage but I despised his politics.

I think I gave the most skillful speech of my life. Abu Mayanja was so impressed by it, he squeezed my hand.

Then came the barbeque. We were running a little late and, exactly at that time, a young army man arrived with the wives of Amin and another woman who was painted and sat right through the barbeque glaring at Amin’s two wives. I discovered when I got to Iowa and read a magazine that she was Amin’s mother and she was a witch.

My wife [Mary Nazareth] asked a friend to give her a ride home with our two daughters, Kathy and Monique.

The young officer who brought the wives and mother and I talked. I discovered he believed in fighting every week or he would go soft. I told him I had tried to get the army band for the dance but could not get them so I had to settle for the police band.

“Next time you want the army band, tell me,” he said. “I’ll get them for you.”

I was to discover he was the biggest killer in Uganda. He was called Major Maliyamungu, which means something like “God’s affair.”

Anyway, I had to dance with the guests of honor. I danced with Mama Malyamu and then with Kay.

You will see in the movie The Last King of Scotland that, much later, Kay was killed and dismembered but her body was sewn together and Amin gave a lesson about what happened to people like her.

RBF: This is quite a moment that you recall! A dance sounds like the appropriate metaphor to conjure up in explaining how one might maneuver between happier events and tense political episodes.

When you watch something like The Last King of Scotland, how much do such fictionalizations recall the past for you and at what point do such productions feel like they do not do the past justice at all? Regardless, it must also feel traumatic at times to see or read about that era.

 

PN: What you mentions is very real to me so it is not really from the past.

 

I may or may not have mentioned that there is a Ugandan, John Otim, who has been communicating with me about a novel he has been writing (and it is nearly ready for publication) called Strongman. It draws a lot from my novels but at the same time is different from my novels in style, rhythms, angles towards the Amin figure, music (it draws from the Beatles, Cliff Richard, and other singers), space (it flies over Africa).

He says that two Ugandans who have read it are not happy that he has not presented Amin as a complete monster, but what he has done works, and I pointed out to him that some people who met Amin said he was very charming. All I can say is that it works.

And it tears apart the movie The Last King of Scotland. 

I have not met Otim but he studied in Makerere, and later in the US, and then taught at a University in Nigeria, and now is jobless in his hometown Lira in Uganda because of coronavirus.

I know Lira for two reasons. When I was young, my father decided to drive us around towns in Uganda in his Ford Consul and one of the towns we went through was Lira.

Second, soon after the coup, Amin was trying to stop all Obote projects and all projects in Obote’s hometown, which was Lira. The head of my department in the Ministry of Finance, Anthony Ocaya, persuaded the government to send someone who would not be accused of being tribally biased, and they decided to send me. 

The project was the construction of a sugar mill financed by the Soviet Union. By the time it was functioning, I was not in the country.

RBF: The feeling of the present-ness of the past, as you experienced it, makes sense in how it continues to be an integral part of who you are and were. From that perspective, it also seems apt that you would be in correspondence with contemporary writers who delve into East Africa's history.

I never asked you how you came to be a part of the Ministry of Finance! I'd love to learn more about this.

PN: When I came back from [graduate studies at] Leeds with my wife and daughter, I applied for a position at Makerere [University]. I was turned down. I tried to fight my case, but I did not succeed.

It was late in the year and the only job I could get was in the government as my hometown of Entebbe was essentially a government town. I was interviewed by an English officer in the Ministry of Public Service who then posted me to the Ministry of Finance temporarily until they found a more suitable place for me.

As it turns out, the Secretary to the Treasury was a powerful man who got to like me and kept me in the Ministry. I liked the Ministry too because I did all kinds of important things and kept on improvising.

I had to do a short study in Law and take an exam, which I passed. And I was promoted to Senior Finance Officer in the Ministry.

I developed my writing skills.

The Ministry had its hand in many other organizations. I had time to read books when I was not busy.

Towards the end of my Leeds experience, I thought I had been miseducated all my life (due to colonialism) and would have to re-educate myself. The Ministry of Finance was just the place. It took me three years to do a basic re-education. I heard a bang in my head that told me I was ready.

At the same time, I got very involved with the Entebbe Goan Institute and became President three times. This part of the story is told in The General is Up.

You might say I had a different kind of life in the Ministry. In addition to my novel, I also wrote a book of literary criticism. Clerks and secretaries typed my manuscripts. I gave them credit in both books by name since they worked gratis.

RBF: In replying to Jeanne Hromnik’s question (on the Goa Book Club listserv) about why you chose to fictionalize certain elements of your novels, you state: “I was working in the Ministry of Finance in Uganda. We had to take an oath not to give away secrets. I decided to write a novel set in a country called Damibia so I could not be accused of writing about Uganda and making it possible I would end up in prison.”

By the time you were at Yale, In a Brown Mantle had already been published and not long thereafter, the expulsion of Asians from Uganda was underway.

Did you decide not to return to Uganda because of the recurring nightmare you used to have of Amin discovering your novel?

Also, while your immediate family was with you, did you still have other members of the family in Uganda and were you concerned for their safety?

PN: Outsiders do not understand the complexities of Uganda.

Although my citizenship was taken away (by one person), another person gave me a newly printed certificate that permitted me to stay on in Uganda and continue working in the Ministry of Finance. My wife and two children were also given that certificate so I could stay on.

The head of my department in the Ministry of Finance at that time was Anthony Ocaya. He was an Acoli, a different tribe from Amin.

He told me to stay on. But things changed after a few weeks and he talked to me and told me to leave the country because he was going to leave three weeks after I left to work in the US because he was tired of dodging assassins. He said we would meet in Washington.

I stayed at his place on my way from Yale to a conference at Kansas City. I had wanted to stay on in Uganda but my friend Joje Waddimba sat me in his car and talked me into leaving for the sake of my wife and children. He said he would come to the airport to say goodbye. 

I took leave of a few weeks so I could depart. This was to make sure I would not be stopped from leaving. Officially, I was supposed to return to Uganda after the Seymour Lustman Fellowship was over. But my fellowship had two more months to go.

I received a letter from a junior officer in the Ministry of Finance saying my leave was over and when was I coming back? I replied that my fellowship was not over but my permission to return from immigration did not cover those two months so I could not come back. The letter from the junior officer said that he consulted the Standing Orders and found that I was considered to have abandoned my position. He thanked me for my seven years of devoted service.

I had not intended to return but I wanted to keep all my options open.

From Yale, I was invited by Iowa to join the International Writing Program and to teach in African American Studies.

My sister, Ruth, left Uganda for England and then Canada a few weeks after I left. My brother-in-law Cyril left for Canada a few weeks later. Cyril died suddenly in Toronto.

My brother John, 7 years younger than me, obtained a degree in Makerere (Maths Honors) and started working in the Ministry of Planning in Entebbe. He could not stand the irrationality of the government and he applied to the University of London to be accepted for further studies. He was accepted and left for London. 

David, my other brother who is two years younger than John, had his citizenship confirmed and did not have to leave. But his girlfriend Lydia had all her documents stolen and had to leave. And so David left. The first message I got from him was he was getting married and he asked for my blessings.

My brothers wound up in Canada. John found a way to argue with the British in Ottawa that David deserved the British citizenship (prior to becoming a Canadian) because our late father had an MBE and British citizenship. My brothers’ children were born in Canada.

I had a younger brother, Rex, who died years ago in Bombay when my parents took him and David there with them on holiday.

RBF: Because of your time at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), you have been able to interact with several writers, in a sense allowing you to remain connected with East Africa even after your exit from Uganda.

For instance, you were asked by Heinemann in America to evaluate the manuscript that would become Kenya-born writer M. G. Vassanji’s first novel – The Gunny Sack (1989). Vassanji was then invited to IWP. While he was there, you arranged a local launch of his book and you’ve also taught his work in your courses.

What are your thoughts on Vassanji’s use of literature to look back at the South Asian community in East Africa during British colonial rule and after?

Coincidentally, both The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets (1994) have Goan characters in them. But, as Clifford Fernandes notes in his 2017 essay “The Fallacy of Vassanji’s Goans,” the author often misrepresents Goan legacies, and especially in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). Of the novel’s pivotal setting in 1950s’ Nakuru, a racially diverse region of Kenya where the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels are being retaliated against by the British, Fernandes finds it curious that there is only one mention of a Goan character. In his estimation, “[f]or much of the book, Goans disappear from the colourful and dramatic world of Vikram Lall, as if they were never there in East Africa.” Fernandes’ purpose, as I see it, is to argue for a truer representation of diversity in Africa even as Goans were (and are) minorities in the region.

In his historical fiction, is Vassanji appropriative at the same time as he is dismissive of the Goan presence in British colonial East Africa?

PN: Moyez Vassanji and I had a close relationship when he and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, edited several journals and introduced me to many African writers. I don’t think he knew I had written a favorable review of his first novel for Heinneman.

I don’t think he really understood my novel In a Brown Mantle since he was not from Uganda. Vassanji is not a good literary critic. He said in a review of my first novel [in And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014)] that I expected my narrator [Deogratius (or Deo) D’Souza] to be an idealist when in fact the character was corrupt. I thought this was obvious. 

The word “bastard” in the last line of my novel [“‘Goodbye, Mother Africa,’ I said, as the plane lifted off. ‘Your bastard son loved you.’”] has a double meaning. At the end, by going through the story of all the confessor figures who haunt him including Pius Cota, [Deo] recognizes his sins.

I think Vassanji felt guilty when he took ideas from other writers to stimulate his own writing, not realizing there is room for many writers. I was initially upset by the fact that he used the same epigraph from T. S. Eliot in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall as I did for In a Brown Mantle.

[From In a Brown Mantle: “Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle” – T. S. Eliot, “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land.]

I taught The In-Between World of Vikram Lall only once.

RBF: Well, one cannot miss that other coincidence between The General is Up and Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets – both have crucial Goan characters named Pius. Your Pius Cota, however, appears a decade before Vassanji’s Pius Fernandes. Makes one wonder.

A sensitive subject, now. Some have accorded other meanings to your use of the moniker Pius, seeing in it a similarity with the name of Pio Gama Pinto (1927-1965), a Goan journalist and anti-colonial activist who became independent Kenya’s first political martyr. But isn’t it the case that In a Brown Mantle has also been (allegorically) connected to Pinto?

PN: Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated while I was still at Leeds (with my wife and daughter).  Malcolm X had stayed with Pio on a visit to Kenya. He was assassinated just before Pio [both in 1965 and three days apart]. 

I knew by intuition that Pio was next.

When I started writing my novel, I had Pio in mind but I had never met him. I called the character Pius because that was a saint-like name. Cota was a solid name like a rock. In contrast to the novel’s narrator.

Pio’s brother, Rosario, read my novel, assumed the character was Pio, and threatened to sue me in England because the character was not like Pio, and if I knew his brother, I would not have said what I did.

When I mentioned this at a Goan conference in Toronto, I received a message from Pio’s widow [Emma Gama Pinto (1928-2020)] telling me to forget about Rosario.

As a writer, I have received most of my criticism from Goans.

RBF: After Leeds and Iowa, did you ever return to Uganda for a visit?

PN: I did not return to Uganda for a visit. My writing went back. There was much more writing than there would have been if I went back. 

RBF: You and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have been friends for several decades now, even finding yourselves in the same countries on three continents – Africa, Europe, and North America. Was the University of Makerere where you first met? In your 2018 interview with me for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, you told me that it was Ngũgĩ who advised you to “[start] writing about Goans,” and you did so in your fiction while also portraying them within the colonial multiculturality of East Africa. Conversely, would it also be right to say that you have influenced his work?

PN: Ngũgĩ gives me high praise in his 2016 non-fiction book Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. When I thanked him, he said the book would not have been written without me.

I was two years ahead of him at Makerere. Ngũgĩ told me I was lucky, on my return to Uganda, to be working in the Ministry of Finance because teaching at university took up most of the energy that would otherwise go into writing.

Ngũgĩ wa thiong'o, Elvania Zirimu holding Kathleen Nazareth, unidentified person holding Julia Zirimu, Pio Zirimu, Peter and Mary Nazareth.

RBF: Also back in our previous interview you had told me how your call for a 1983 special issue of Journal of South Asian Literature, that would focus on Goan writing [republished as Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature (2010)], put you in touch with Richard Lannoy (1928-2016). He corresponded with you, sharing the unpublished writing of his late spouse, Mozambique-born Goan Violet Dias Lannoy (1925-1973). Later, this would lead to the posthumous publication of her novel, Pears from the Willow Tree (1989). You’ve mentioned to me that you had met Richard in England following your correspondence with him. Could you tell me more about this and his memories of Violet?

PN: It was the summer of 1992. We had gone to England for a celebration of Andrew Salkey. Richard Lannoy invited us to his place at Bath.

I taped an interview with Richard. He told me that Violet had met the man who became her first husband [Behram Warden], a Parsi, at a Gandhian camp [in India].

[Behram’s] father refused to let them get married. He told all the chemists in Bombay not to give his son the required medicine to deal with his asthma.

The next time he had an attack of asthma, he died.

After Violet died, Richard took care of her papers. He discovered a lot of papers in which she had written in a garbled way to her dead husband.

Richard could not read the papers but he knew she did not love him. He burst into tears.

I took the interview tapes with me and handed them to someone who transcribed most of my tapes—but she vanished without a trace.

RBF: This is a rather unfortunate set of events. Perhaps the lasting legacy of your interaction with Richard Lannoy is that Violet’s novel was published – something she was unable to achieve during her lifetime despite much effort.

You retired on 1 July, 2021, right? How many years of service did you complete at University of Iowa and what are you looking forward to doing now that your time is all your own?

PN: I started teaching when I got to Iowa in August 1973 and I did not receive a break (or vacation) until I retired this month. Work got more intense in the Spring 2021 semester: I taught three classes on Zoom, one or two classes every day except for the weekend—and then I had to read and grade essays.

I did not enter my office for a year and a half and then I entered it with my wife to clear out the office and also give away some books. 

I don’t know what I will do next. What I know from past experience is that things will turn up.

From Scroll.