Kenya's hopes and horrors
Aidan Hartley
THE IN-BETWEEN WORLD OF VIKRAM LALL by M. G. Vassanji
Canongate, £14.99, pp. 439, ISBN 1841955388 £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
Novels set in Kenya by Europeans are so different from those by black Africans that one struggles to imagine they're about life in the same place. The same might be true of works by Kenyan Asians, the third group in our messy ethnic menage-ir-trois, but sadly I can't judge because I haven't read any. That Vikram La/1 is quite unlike Elspeth Huxley or Meja Mwangi or anything I've read before is just one reason to like it immensely.
Another is that the story of the people who migrated from the subcontinent to East Africa must be among the most incredible that the empire and commonwealth have to yield. This is material that forces reviewers to use phrases like 'magisterial, epic sweep'. Consider, please. These people arrived as indentured coolies to build the 'Lunatic Express' railway to Uganda. They braved man-eating lions, had as many adventures as European pioneers, and overcame white bigotry in myriad entrepreneurial schemes that served to make them very rich indeed. Inspired by Gandhi, they lent a rare dose of intellectual credibility to African nationalism. After 'Ulturu' black leaders like ldi Amin, `Mwalimte Nyerere — and even in a former life our own dear President Mwai Kibaki — rewarded them for this with intimidation and expulsion. So what did the exiled Asians do? They rose to become the Western world's most talented industrialists, lawyers, doctors, Bank of England economists, and film directors. Meanwhile among the only reasons East Africa didn't completely implode is thanks to private capital, most of which is run by tenacious Asians who clung on.
The East African Asian 'experience', then, is dramatic stuff. But yet another reason to like this hook is that in my view no recent novel better sums up the entire Kenyan experience over the last halfcentury for middle-class people of any background, Asian, black or European. What M. G. Vassanji relates in his fiction is what really happened to this very special country.
The hopes that were so high in the 1960s have been steadily corroded over 40 years of misrule, relentless corruption, pig ignorance and selfish cynicism, By telling us what could have been, books like Vikram La/1 help me feel that all is not lost. It just depresses me that African authors all seem to live in exile: J. M. Coetzee is in Adelaide, while Mr Vassanji has been in Canada since 1978.
As for the story itself, M. G. Vassanji's gives us a tale of the hopes, dreams, disappointments and tragedies suffered by a set of childhood friends growing up in the nation they all call home. He writes simply, in the style of a sad man's memoir. 'My name is Vikram I211,' he begins, `one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous reptilian cunning.' Over 420 pages, we discover how he got to be in this position,
Growing up in the Rift Valley settler town of Nakuru. Vikram and his sister Deepa are friends with Njoroge, a lowly Kikuyu boy, and the more privileged European Bruce children. As can be expected, the racial strata that only slightly impinge on their innocent relationships very much affect their parents' lives. Yet despite his treatment by haughty colonials in his shop, Papa La11 sits glued to the radio listening to Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Later, when Mau Mau erupts, he obediently takes part in neighbourhood patrols — until his licensed pistol is stolen. An African is arrested, but Vikram discovers that the thief is Uncle Mahesh, a radical out to assist the guerrillas. This secret becomes an unbearable burden when Vikram later realises that the gun has been used to massacre the entire Bruce family, including his favourite, eight-year-old Annie. Later in life, Njoroge argues that Mau Mau savagery was a necessary step towards `Uhuru' (a view with which I beg to differ) and while Vikram hears him out he never really recovers from Annie's death.
True love between people of different races in a homeland they adore as much as each other is the central theme of this story. The adult passion of Deepa and Njoroge is thwarted by all the usual cultural blockages and this seems to symbolise a wider failure among different sorts of Kenyans to emerge from their ethnic ghettoes for the good of their country. Vassanji investigates this idea from different interesting angles in various vignettes and this for me is the most rewarding thread of the book.
Less well constructed is the plot of how Vikram became a 'cheat of monstrous reptilian cunning'. I very much looked forward to reading into the cliché of a modern-day Asian Shylock, since this theme was clearly inspired by the Goldenberg scandal currently being investigated in Nairobi. Allegations in this saga are that President Moi's kleptocratic gang that ran Kenya until 2002 used Asian bagmen to loot the nation of countless millions of dollars.
As a young man Vikram devotes himself to public service in management of the East African railway along which his grandfather toiled. He is an idealist, yet he quickly comes to realise that stereotypes require him to be bent. Black leaders will never accept him and his kind as Kenyans, however long they've been around or how much they've done to prove their citizenship. Indeed, his black bosses' tolerance of him is entirely contingent on his willingness to he a 'crafty alien corruptor'.
Unfortunately we never observe the process of Vikram's transformation into one of Africa's mega-criminals, or of his homeland's spiral into near-collapse. I wanted something a bit more evil, like Orson Welles among the ruins of Vienna selling expired penicillin. Instead, here we have an idealist who is blown by unfair stereotyping into theft. He turns into a bemused but nice guy with a dreadful reputation. We don't see him become cynical, which is presumably what happens when you spend several decades stealing and kowtowing to gangsters, he doesn't do anything at all dreadful and we don't see the consequences of his actions. We only get a sense of these consequences when Vikram returns home from exile at the end to face his accusers, staying in the Nairobi neighbourhood of Eastleigh. This, once an upwardly mobile Asian suburb, has now become (in reality as well as in the book) a typical district of our capital, a cesspool of crime, filth and teeming poverty.
Vassanji doesn't deliver properly on the criminal story and therefore the book feels unresolved. His comes to an abrupt and unconvincing finale in a house fire, which reminds me of the stories I wrote in English at prep school: 'And suddenly the house caught on fire. The end.' This is a great pity. I sense it's because the author has lived in Canada for 26 years and all that safety and comfort has caused him to fall out of touch with his subject. It happens to all of them, including Coetzee. But for the rest of us who stay on in Africa huddled behind our high-security fences contemplating the barbarians at the gate, this novel comes as a wonderful relief package.
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