Who wrote this piece?
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The East African
Sunday, July 19
2011
My connection with India is unexpectedly direct. My
maternal grandfather — my mother’s stepfather—came to Kenya from Goa, India in
the 1940s as a teenager.
He was in the Police force for some time, married my grandmother
in the early 1960s, and adopted her two daughters— my mother and her sister. He
had a daughter with my grandmother in 1962 and raised all three girls as his
own. After working in Nairobi as a mechanic for over three decades, he retired
and went to live upcountry in the village with my grandmother where he was
quite a spectacle — a quiet, unassuming Goan man living quite comfortably in
the heart of Kikuyuland.
Though my story wasn’t featured in her books,
Cynthia Salvadori who died in Lamu on June 26, 2011, will be best remembered
for her painstaking documentation of stories like these in her extensive work
on the history of South Asians in Kenya.
Through Open Doors: A View of Asian Cultures in Kenya; We Came
in Dhows; Two Indian Travellers and Settling in a Strange Land all capture the
stories of the South Asian experience in Kenya, which would otherwise have been
forgotten.
Salvadori has been described as a child of several heritages —
her father was Italian and was jailed by the Mussolini regime for his outspoken
opposition to the tyranny of fascism. After being released from prison, he went
into exile and found his way to Kenya.
Salvadori’s mother was English, related to the explorer John
Hannington Speke, the first white man to see the source of the Nile, as well as
to H. Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines, among other work.
It is into
this rich heritage that Salvadori was born in the 1930s in Njoro, Kenya. Upon
launching her last book, Kenya’s former attorney general Charles Njonjo said:
“Two forces came to Cynthia from this extremely rich heritage: A deep
commitment to Kenya, and a deep commitment to the dignity of the marginalised
in society. Both these forces show in Cynthia’s many books and writings.”
Njonjo
aptly describes her as “a hunter-gatherer of memories.” In the 1970s she and
her late colleague and partner Andrew Fedders joined forces, she as
photographer, he as writer, to produce three books Maasai; Turkana, Pastoral
Craftsmen and Peoples and Cultures of Kenya, as well as numerous articles about
Kenya.
In the
1980s, Salvadori then turned her attention to the South Asian community in
Kenya.
With the
support of her publisher Kul Bhakoo, she compiled the encyclopaedic Through
Open Doors: A View of Asian Cultures in Kenya. The first edition, published
in 1983, met with such an enthusiastic reception that she did an updated
edition, published in 1987.
It is
remarkable that until Through Open Doors, South Asian history and
culture in East Africa had gone virtually unrecorded, despite their conspicuous
economic footprint in the region.
Her first
compilation of South Asian history came in the wake of the 1972 expulsion of
South Asians from Uganda and the nationalisation of South Asian-owned
businesses in Tanzania under Nyerere’s Ujamaa philosophy. Perhaps preferring to
lie low and not rock the boat any further, the South Asian community did not
embark on any serious documentation of their history and culture until an
“outsider” took an interest in chronicling their heritage.
South
Asians in East Africa are often viewed as one homogenous, insular group, but
Salvadori’s works helped to bring out the diversity in the various South Asian
cultures — Sikhs, Hindus, Punjabis and so on.
Bhakoo
says, “Cynthia helped put Asians on the map from an independent point of view —
unbiased, open and fair to all communities.”
Through
Open Doors described the historical background of the South Asians in Kenya but
had little information about individual people. To fill this gap, Salvadori
then began recording the personal histories of Indians in Kenya which resulted
in the critically acclaimed three-volume set entitled We Came in Dhows: Stories
of the Indian Pioneers in Kenya, published in 1996. Works of this nature
required spending a lot of time gathering stories from Indian families, and painstakingly
reconstructing their early years in Kenya, going back to even before the
British arrived at the East African Coast in the 1880s.
After that,
she, with her historian colleague Judy Aldrick and two translators, Vimla
Chavda and Shariffa Keshavjee, translated and annotated two original Gujarati
journals, one Bohra and one Parsee, which was published as Two Indian
Travellers, East Africa 1902–1905.
Salvadori
then turned her attention to the communities in northern Kenya who have long
been marginalised by successive governments. She translated from Italian and
helped to revise Gabra, Camel Nomads of Northern Kenya by Paul Tablino (1999).
While
working on that she was commissioned by the Kenya Human Rights Commission in
2000 to compile The Forgotten People Revisited, Abuses of Human Rights in
Marsabit and Moyale Districts.
She spent
the next six years working with the original author in southern Ethiopia to
completely revise and illustrate a massive Borana dictionary entitled Aada
Boraanaa, A Dictionary of Borana Culture, which was published in early 2007.
During that
time she also translated (again from Italian) and edited Decisions in the
Shade; Political and Juridical Processes among the Oromo-Borana by Marco Bassi,
which was published in 2005.
She then
turned her attention back to the South Asians of Kenya; her last book was
Settling in a Strange Land, Stories of Punjabi Muslim Pioneers in Kenya,
co-authored with Shaila Mauladad Fisher and published in December 2010.
Zahid
Rajan, executive editor of AwaaZ magazine which focuses on South Asian culture
in Kenya, says that Salvadori filled a much needed gap in South Asian history.
“Cynthia
was an anthropologist, so she was deeply committed to human stories. She
noticed that there was a lot of literature on Europeans and Africans in Kenya,
but hardly anything on the Asians, so she went about filling it — and did a
sterling job of it.”
Her legacy
will not be quickly forgotten, says Nairobi advocate Pheroze Norowjee. “She
made our community aware of our own history, and aware that we were a part of
Kenya’s history. She was also very much concerned about marginalised
communities: She had written several books on the Maasai and Turkana, as well
as undertaking several studies of the Borana, including translating a Borana
dictionary. She felt that these communities must be recognised and protected
from neglect and discrimination,” he says. Bhakoo says she had an extraordinary
dedication to detail and commitment to the research that her books required.
“Cynthia
didn’t just do the normal armchair research when she was writing; she actually
lived the book. She would spend vast amounts of time interviewing one family
after another; gathering information and putting her notes together. Through
Open Doors, for instance took nearly seven years to complete — from 1981 to
1987, when we published the revised edition.”
Bhakoo says that putting a manuscript to bed was quite difficult as the
additional research and inside stories would go on and on.
“She was very intense, checking and double-checking the work to make sure that
the facts were correct. She and I got along because I let her do things her
extremely thorough and meticulous way.”
Before her
death, Salvadori was looking for funding to publish a book on Lamu and was
starting a book on Sufism in East Africa.
Her friend
and illustrator for the Lamu book, Yoni Waite, says Salvadori loved animals and
was very devoted to her cats. She says Salvadori also wanted to be known as a
historian of minority communities.
“I’ve known
her practically all my life. She was very methodical; her work had to be
perfect. I’m hoping the Lamu book will still be published.”
Mauladad
Fisher, who was her co-author on Settling in a Strange Land, a collection of
stories of Punjabi Muslim pioneers in Kenya, says that Salvadori was always
curious and was quite the adventurer, even as she got older.
“She did
not have a permanent home because she loved to travel. She went backpacking
around the world after university, and would travel to Ethiopia from Nairobi
mostly on foot, hitch-hiking on lorries for part of the way. When I asked her
if she was afraid she would meet bandits, she dismissed the notion, saying,
‘What would anyone do to an old woman like me?’”
Mentor and
friend
Ms Fisher
adds that Salvadori was not only- a friend and co-author, but a teacher and a
mentor as well. “It took ages to put our book together, but all the work was
worth it. Her recording of history is invaluable. We — not just Punjabis or
Indians but Kenyans as a whole — have a lot to thank her for. “
Cameraman
and founder of Africapix Ltd Sir Mohinder Dhillon admires her discipline and
warmth. “She was very disciplined and time-conscious, and that is how she got
so much done. She made an impression on every body she met. I’m trying to
emulate that, that you must try to make friends with everybody.”
He adds,
“My brother Jindi and myself had a very pleasant lunch with Cynthia last
February in Lamu. She was very energetic and insisted on walking up the steps
where I was staying, and she did it without panting; joking that she was much
younger than me (she wasn’t). I shall cherish that pasta lunch when she
insisted on reading my autobiography before it went to the publishers. We have
lost a treasure.”
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