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Fifty years ago, on 12 December 1964, the Republic of Kenya was proclaimed, with Jomo Kenyatta as the new country’s first president. A proud moment in the decolonizationg of Africa—and centrestage were several anti-colonial freedom fighters of Goan origin, who had faced down the British through the preceding years. During the crucial Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, the rebels (including Kenyatta) were represented in court by Fitz de Souza, who went on to help frame the new country’s constitution, and served as deputy speaker of the Kenyan parliament. Pio Gama Pinto was a crucial ideologue behind the Kenya African National Union, and founded the influential Pan African Press. Another countryman, Joseph Murumbi Zuzarte, became vice-president of Kenya in 1965 (he had a Maasai mother), founded the largest art gallery in the continent, and his collection of 50,000 books remains the bedrock of the Kenya National Archives. How did these children and grandchildren of the Konkan find themselves embroiled deep in the most significant moment of Kenya’s modern history? The answer is richly detailed in Selma Carvalho’s A Railway Runs Through: Goans Of British East Africa, 1865-1980, first compiled as part of the “Oral Histories of British-Goans from Colonial East Africa Project” to “record and archive the fast-fading voices of East African Goans who had migrated to Britain in the wake of Africanisation policies and expulsions”. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, UK, the book has now been published in India by Goa-based CinnamonTeal. Carvalho’s title refers to the Uganda Railway, a notorious imperial project denounced as a “gigantic folly” even while it was being built to connect the port city of Mombasa to the shoreline of Lake Victoria. Like many similar British schemes, it was implemented mainly by Indians: 32,000 labourers were imported from the subcontinent; 2,500 died, many more never returned, staying on in Africa alongside Gujarati traders, Sikh soldiers and many Goans, who occupied an uncomfortable, and eventually problematic, intermediary position in the stratified colonial pecking order. About that in-between role, Peter Fullerton, a former district commissioner, is quoted: “Goans provided the whole of the clerical service for Kenya…I think it was a matter of trust. We trusted Goans in a way which was quite unique. And they were very trustworthy people. They were incredibly loyal, totally honest. We got on with them. They were Christian, they spoke good English, they were friendly, they had a good standard of living. We had a lot in common with the Goans.” As Carvalho points out, this perception of closeness translated directly to “compromised loyalty” in the eyes of other Indians in East Africa as well as the “native” Africans. It was mirrored by a significant shift in Goan perceptions of themselves, “continuous reinforcement of English as the lingua franca in church, schools, clubs and the work environment; the emphasis on a Britain-centric curriculum in school; the Goan’s role in the civil service” transplanted their “location of identity” from Goa and India to Britain. Yet they continued to live in Africa, an uneasy “paradox of their lives”. A Railway Runs Through is written in an engaging conversational style, though occasionally prone to Edwardian attitude and language like “edge of civilization” and “bush country”. Undoubtedly, this is due to the book’s admirable reliance on first-person accounts and oral histories, as well as the impressive period research that Carvalho undertook to highlight and weave together scores of vivid, fascinating individual and family histories of Goans in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Nairobi and Kampala. There are many remarkable nuggets in A Railway Runs Through: a laughably presumptuous resolution of Nairobi’s snooty Goan Institute that “the direction of communal, social and political affairs…is always entrusted to the upper-class”, and descriptions of tailor-turned-prospector Manuel d’Souza, who discovered Tanzanite, the “Sultan’s Goanese Band” of Zanzibar, and the zebra-riding Dr Ribeiro, who tended his red-rose bush with human blood. Like Carvalho’s book, the charming Bomoicar: Stories Of Bombay Goans, 1920-1980, presents a cultural history that usually falls outside the margins of mainstream narrative. Compiled with terrific taste, sensitivity and evident joie de vivre by veteran journalist Reena Martins, this slim compilation of personal recollections delightfully recalls Cotton Mary and Matchmaker Susan, 1940s’ Bandra “when children ran around gardens with butterfly nets”, and 1950s’ Prohibition when, contributor Bennet Paes recalls, the musician Chic Chocolate “crammed us boozing bums into his Hillman and sped off to a Mahim joint run by his friend, a comely middle-aged Aunty”. These are stories from before Bombay became Maximum City Mumbai, when it still remained “uncomplicated and accepting” and, as contributor Eric Pinto recalls, “a pound of beef set you back four annas” and “life, as in food, was cheap and good”.