Memoirs of a muhindi: Fleeing East Africa for the west (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2017)

By Mansoor Ladha

In this lucid and richly detailed memoir of his life in Tanzania before moving to Canada, Mansoor Ladha outlines the history of his family in the context of the social and political changes brought about through the struggle for independence from British colonial rule. A journalist by profession, Ladha engages issues of racism, struggle, homeland, and migration in his quest for building a plural and informed social landscape through his activism and journalism, and of belonging and survival in a rapidly changing world. This is a spirited and engaging memoir of a life lived on two continents (Africa and North America) and three countries (Tanzania, Kenya and Canada) from 1943 until the present-day. The initial chapters of the book provide first-hand glimpses of East African Asian Ismaili culture and society as it was lived in Zanzibar, Lindi and Dar es Salaam, as well as the intrepid worlds of student activism and the editing bureaus and cutting room floors of journalists during the epoch when Tanganyika became Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere and his Ujamaa politics. Charting the role of South Asians in opening up the interior of East Africa through their business acumen, Ladha expresses his fierce love for his natal homeland, Tanganyika, his disillusionment with the social and political policies instigated by Nyerere, and the subsequent migration of the family to the USA and Canada.

Ladha explores how postcolonial realities in East Africa provided the impetus for Indians, many of whom were into their third generation, to migrate out of East Africa despite their loyalty to their East African homelands. The last chapters focus on the author’s immigration to Canada in 1972, the ruse of “Canadian experience,” and other challenges of settlement in Toronto and Edmonton. This is not a stereotypical “rags to riches” story in which the immigrant prevails against all odds. Rather, by unapologetically unfolding his life-history, the author reflexively raises critical and timely questions about the complexities of home, migration, citizenship, identity, identification, race, racialization, and the politics of belonging and othering. Curiously and perhaps fittingly, religious identity is not chiseled out as a flashpoint in the author’s life. Rather, it is being a “muhindi”—a KiSwhaili term for a person of Indian/Asian origin—that is foregrounded in the author’s self-identification. Conveyed forthrightly, each of the author’s anecdotes gives voice to these complex issues. There is nostalgia, bitterness and loss but also an honest desire for understanding and a yearning for reconciliation across vast geographical spaces, political configurations, and cultural boundaries. If there is a critique to be levelled, then it would be why the author chose not to write two separate volumes: the first before his immigration to Canada and the second after his arrival. Certainly, the sections concerning the life of a working journalist in Tanzania during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s are the most riveting and revelatory, and thus deserve a dedicated volume of their own. Nevertheless, by taking the reader through the arc of his life, Ladha provokes his readers to ask questions about the unsettled place of the immigrant body in post-colonial nation-states and challenges pervasive tropes about immigrants in Canada and elsewhere, particularly from non-European backgrounds as desirous of being identified as cosmopolitan. Indeed, he concludes this important work with the statement: “I do not want to be a dweller of several lands, accepted by none.” This is a work that memorializes the experiences of a vanishing “bridge” generation that is difficult to put down.