REVIEW: MATATA TIMES THREE By Peter Nazareth peter-nazar...@uiowa.edu
I finished reading MORE MATATA, a novel by Braz Menezes, a few days ago. It is a very good novel. The protagonist is called Lando and in this, the second novel in a trilogy, he focuses on a lot of the give and take of political issues in Kenya, that is, from the fifties up to the early sixties. Lando provides realistic and passionate discussions between Goans who have different points of view about the issues that concern them and their future such as the take over of Goa by India in 1961, the forthcoming Independence of Kenya in December 1963, the portraits and actions of the most powerful African politicians in Kenya, etc. I had made a few comments and asked a few questions in Goa Book Club after reading Volume 1; specifically, I wondered how it was possible to tell the story of Goans working for the civil service in Kenya during a time of Mau Mau without mentioning Mau Mau at all. But I see now that my questions were being answered in Part II, subtitled "Love After the Mau Mau". Lando not only knew everything I asked, he knew it in fuller detail than I did. What I thought were secrets mentioned in whispers were actually given expression directly by different people in Kenya: they were only whispered in the Ministry of Finance in Uganda, where I worked in the late sixties and early seventies. The second novel is a very political, which no reviewer I have read seems to have noticed. Lando describes the landscape, the flora and fauna, with great depth and insight. But it also includes the people, something barely noticed by tourists busy watching animals making love instead of people fighting to get back their land. Lando went everywhere in the country, not only out of curiosity but also following his occupation after graduation as an architect. His father was a Bank employee and member of the Goan Gymkhana, full of civil servants, so he grew up being aware of what was going on. Being an architect gives him a particularly practical way of looking at and seeing everything. I have a question when it came to Saboti, mentioned in the first volume and in more depth in the second. When she returns into Lando's life and he finds out more about her, he realizes she is not from Seychelles as he had thought: she was English through her father and Masai through her mother, so she was "nusu-nusu", half and half. My question: Lando loses her in England after too short a time apart, loses her to an Englishman. At this time, love across the races was difficult -- but what happened would suggest that their love was not love but infatuation. Yes, such a relationship across colour lines would be difficult at that time, but the novel gives examples of overcoming such a barrier such as Joseph Murumbi, whose father was Goan and mother Masai. But the ultimate meaning of the relationship will depend on what is presented in Part III. Lando is a good storyteller. He is observant and has a wide and deep knowledge and is sympathetic to the Kikuyu people over their land alienation and yet is not blinded to political betrayals or to the scheming of the British. By good storyteller, I mean that several episodes are very dramatic. The chapters are short, almost anecdotal. There is a fine sense of humor and irony in the chapter titles. Lando is not as straightforward as he appears to be. For example in JUST MATATA, he realized when sent to boarding school in Goa in the first volume that he had to use strategy to get his parents to take him out of the school and back to Kenya. The way he did it was to write a letter to his parents that he wants to become a priest. He knew this would lead to his mother taking him out of any possibility of entering the seminary and back to Kenya: and in the meantime, he would have good food instead of starving like most of the boarders from East Africa. Menezes' way of structuring the novel is not external like an architect but internal in that certain images become iconic and icons and represent more than what they seem to be such as the cover image of the two zebras attempting to kiss. What does this mean? We have to figure it out. Maybe it has more than one meaning. I intend to send one copy of the book to Sasenarine Persaud (Guyanese of Indian origin, a Canadian and now an American citizen). He wrote to me recently that he noticed I always called my father a Goan and never an Indian and he wondered why. I decided that rather than explain, I could draw his attention to several chapters in MORE MATATA that would make it clear to how real the Goan presence in East Africa was, particularly in Kenya, which was the centre of the British presence in East Africa. In his acknowledgements, Menezes says that most people are unaware of the special culture of Goans that developed under four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese rule. The point is WE EXIST!!! We do not define ourselves through tourist brochures, we are not like zebras for tourists to gawk at, though the black and white colours of the zebras could be a metaphor for Goans, who have combined cultures, East and West, who have not merely resided where they went, whose children became part of the people and the land and had an awareness and made contributions. A big struggle for Goans has been to prove that WE EXIST AS A PEOPLE. It is the details provided by Menezes in short chapters with ironical titles that we know we exist. But after the event, after decolonization, the task is even more important: Goans are being made invisible in that what they achieved seems to be in danger of being lost to history. What is history? On one level, it is a record of what happened. If there is no record, what happened disappears, and so do the people. The Author's Note at the end explains how he came to write the novel: "Renowned authors like M.G. Vassanji have covered much of the Indian history in East Africa. However, there is a gap in the Asian history of Kenya that needed to be filled -- how a small community from Goa played an inordinately important and quiet role in the administration and the services economy of British East Africa, and when it was time to leave Kenya many went. Others stayed behind in the land they loved. In all the novels written previously by European authors, especially those set in Kenya, the Indians and Goans were merely 'props and shadows' in other people's stories." He concludes, "That is how The Matata Trilogy was born." It was the need to tell the story of the Goan people, a story that goes back hundreds of years. Like most Goan authors in East Africa, Menezes feels compelled to summarize the story of the Goan people from the time the Portuguese, under Afonso de Albuquerque, stepped ashore in 1510 and claimed the territory in the name of the Portuguese Throne. "During this period of occupation they imposed their own religion and culture on people creating distinct blend of Indo-Portuguese." Here I would sound a cautionary note: this kind of summary simplifies history and makes it a touristic come-on. And I should add that Vassanji deserves recognition for his prize-winning third novel, "The Book of Secrets", where the protagonist, Pius Fernandes, is a Goan teacher of history who comes to Tanzania and stays on after Independence. To my surprise, I discovered that I had something in common with Braz. We were musicians -- he played drums, I played clarinet and harmonica -- and we were influenced -- as was Cliff Richard, the Beatles, etc. -- by Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle music. We both -- in our different universities and countries, made a bass out of a tea chest and we sang music that Donegan sang, chiefly songs from Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. As my son-in-law Patrick Cronin said, music gave us the greatest freedom in those colonial days when you were expected to be totally obedient to authority or you could be kicked out of university, as happened to many people I knew, whose lives were ruined. It is great that Lando names some of the musicians, the greatest of whom was Donald Dias, a bebop pianist, born in Tanganyika, who died much too young of leukemia. So one of the things Braz is doing is naming people who would otherwise be forgotten. It is not only the group history that is important: it is the creativeness of the individual too that matters. "You see, Goans were labelled and treated differently because they came from a Portuguese colony," said Menezes in an interview. "They spoke English, danced the waltz, drank whisky, spent their time in prayer, were honest and, above all, the poor economic picture in Goa meant they were more than willing to migrate to earn money. They were British colonisers' dream employees... westernised, honest, matata-avoiding, god-fearing, cheap labour." The story begins in 1928, the year his father, eyes full of dreams of a better economic future, boarded a steamer headed from Goa to Mozambique, but landed in British Kenya instead. All this is fine, but lest one gets too caught up in the stereotype of the obedient Goan civil servant, one should pay attention to the text. The Goans were not totally obedient and did not stay out of politics. On the contrary, MORE MATATA provided details and portraits of Goans who were anti-colonial political activists such as Pio Gama Pinto, JM Nazareth, and others. Pinto was imprisoned by the British and after independence; he was elected to parliament in an African constituency. He was assassinated in early 1965 and is considered to be Independent Kenya's first martyr without any concern about the fact that he was a Goan. To this day questions are asked about who killed him -- when it is well known who did and why. So the notion that Goans stayed out of politics was a cover for political involvement in Kenya and an ongoing debate about whether those working for the British could go against British interests. A lot of such debates take place in the novel in the Goan Gymkhana and the other Goan institutes. Braz Menezes explains why Goans were docile. "The Goans were docile, probably because of the inquisition that left them mentally castrated. As long as they were praying, singing and dancing all was fine. But if they had the audacity to think, they would be in trouble. This was what was beaten into the Goan over 250 years. And sing and dance and pray and build churches is what they did in Kenya too. They were no matata." In fact, we should have been warned by the strategies Lando used to survive boarding school in Goa and getting his parents to take him back to Kenya that he is sharply aware of political strategies being used. He is aware of the meaning of Harold MacMillan's famous "Wind of Change Speech" and he is aware of who will pay the price, as he suggests in his parodic title from the children's song, "When the Wind Blows, the Cradle will Rock" (chapter 22, page 192). The British realized they were losing the war to the Mau Mau guerillas so they came out with a new strategy, which included new scapegoats: the Asians. Suddenly the problem for Africans was not land alienation but the Asian dukawalla. By the time Independence Day came, on December 12, 1963, it is going to take the form of handing over power to those who will see things through western eyes and who will become what some people have called "the spare parts bourgeoisie". So the Goans, who had served the colonialists and carried the burden of the white man's bureaucracy, can now just be junked. Without their knowing what is happening. Except that they do know what is being done. As usual, the issues are discussed in the bar of the Goan Gymkhana and the Institute. Mervyn Maciel, author of BWANA KARANI, says: of the novel: "For me, a former civil servant of colonial and independent Kenya, some of the chapters revived memories of old friends like Pio and Rosario Gama Pinto, Olaf Ribeiro, L. D'Cruz and many others who feature prominently in the pages of this book. Lando and his friends relied heavily on the B.B.C. World Service for news, but there was also the other 'Goan Grapevine Service' often provided by visiting Goan civil servants from up-country who, throwing caution to wind and forgetting they were all bound by the Official Secrets Act, freely dispensed with the latest news on the security situation during the Emergency-this no doubt from the 'inside information' they had as trusted civil servants." However, we have not come to the end of the story. How is the third novel to pull things together? What relationship develops between Lando and Saboti after they meet again? She has two sons, a daughter, three grandsons, her husband has passed away; Lando is single again. What about Pio Gama Pinto, whose widow Menezes thanks "for filling in some gaps in the narrative on Pio." Lando places the story in a wider context with his Prologue about waiting for the 2012 re-election of Obama, which he is discussing by phone with Saboti. Things can change. How will the third novel pull it all together? "Matata" is a Kiswahili word that means "trouble", but it has as many nuanced meanings as the writer chooses to give the word, depending on the time, place and context. I thoroughly recommend MORE MATATA as a 'must read' for anyone interested in the recent history of Kenya, as seen through "eyes that are neither black nor white." -- Peter Nazareth (born April 27, 1940) is a Ugandan-born critic and writer of fiction and drama. His novel set in East Africa amidst the Goan community is called 'The General is Up'. He also edited 'Goan Literature: A Modern Reader', one of the first anthologies of Goan writing, as an issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature, East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1983. Goanet Reader is edited by Frederick Noronha and welcomes well-written articles of relevance to Goa and its people for distribution via cyberspace. Readers are encouraged to send their feedback to the author and goa...@goanet.org