Childhood innocence mutating into adult corruption
Charles R. Larson reads a novel and understands today's Kenya
8 February 2008, 18:00 PM
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
M.G. Vassanji
Canongate
The roots of Kenya's current, sad situation---tribalism and corruption---can be identified in M. G. Vassanji's haunting novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. As the narrator remarks late in the story, "The wealthy and the powerful desired no changes." African leaders, reluctant to give up their power, will often do anything (rigged elections, constitutional changes) in order to remain in office. Corruption is often endemic and designed to keep the Big Man's supporters happy; tribalism often impinges on other groups, as in Kenya's situation, because of the significant "settler" communities of Asians and Europeans.
During the weeks since the country's elections, Kenyan blogs have described recent events in the troubled country that have not been widely-publicised outside of the country. Asian residents have become particularly apprehensive of their future position; many have said they want to leave. The fear of the repetition of earlier purges of Asians in East Africa is clearly in their minds. Equally troubling are reports of Ugandan forces inside Kenya (in Nyanza and Western Provinces), supportive of President Kibaki, a Kikuyu. According to one blog, Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, is no friend of Raila Odinga, a Luo and the contender for the Kenyan presidency. All of these machinations are fairly blurred but belie a troubled situation not likely to be resolved quickly or easily.
To these contexts, Vassanji (an Indian born in Nairobi but raised in Tanzania and a Canadian citizen for much of his adult life) brings a unique perspective not widely explored in fiction, in spite of the significant Asian population that helped develop Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania economically and industrially, especially before independence.
The insights of Vassanji's novel are profound and illuminating about the current unrest in Kenya, especially because of the main character who states at the beginning of the story: "My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years."
Throughout the entire narrative, Lall identifies himself as a Kenyannot as an Indianand he repeatedly professes his loyalty to the country. He claims this identity in spite of his ambiguous statusneither African (the majority) nor European (the minority). Further, since he is initially presented as a child during the final years of colonial rule, we see his attempts to fit into what he believes will be a vibrant multi-racial society after independence, with all people living harmoniously. His closest playmate and lifelong companion is a Kikuyu boy, Njoroge, who eventually will fall in love with Lall's sister, Deepa. The three youngsters spend some of their happiest times with two white children, untroubled until the Mau Mau revolt. That rebellion was instigated by Kikuyus, the largest ethnic group in the country and, in 1963, led to Kenya's independence and Jomo Kenyatta's presidency.
Thus, as a child, Lall is aware of the country's ethnic diversity but not troubled by it. His father is a businessman and his family resides in an Indian enclave in the Rift Valley. Lall's grandfather originally left India--as did thousands of others--to help build the Kenyan railroad. There are occasional racial tensions, especially after the Mau Mau uprising when many of the country's peoples, including Africans, lived in a state of fear. Many more Africans died in the revolt than did Asians or Europeans, as tribal differences among the Africans became polarised, similarly as they are today.
As a young adult, after independence, Lall works in the civil service in the ministry of transport. He holds a fairly innocuous position until one of the governmental ministers begins using the young man as a go-between, essentially to help launder political money arriving in huge quantities from outside the country. As Lall observes on one occasion, "To the African I would always be the Asian, the Shylock; I would never escape that suspicion, that stigma. We lived in a compartmentalized society; every evening from the melting pot of city life each person went his long way home to his family, his church, his folk. To the Kikuyu, the Luo were the crafty, rebellious eggheads of Lake Victoria, the Masai the backward naked nomads. The Meru prided themselves on being special, having descended from some wandering Semitic tribe. There were the Dorobo, the Turkana, the Boran, the Somali, the Swahili, each also different from the other. And then there were the Wahindithe wily Asians who were not really African."
As the years pass, Lall's money-laundering for government officials eventually takes him to the highest echelons of the state. He becomes the indispensable middleman, identifying his situation as a "place in the middle…an Asian…my natural place." Like the tar baby he has touched too often, he can't stop engaging in such nefarious work because he is aware that he knows too much. He realises that he might be eliminated. "Total corruption," he muses, "occurs in inches and proceeds through veils of ambiguity."
Lall's prescient awareness of Kenya's precarious situation is unsettling. In addition to the incipient tribalism, the country is surrounded by unrest that could easily spill over into Kenya: "A small war ravages the north, Somali shiftas ambushing vehicles and attacking drought-stricken villagers; in fact, the entire belt of land from northern Kenya through Sudan and Uganda into Congo cries out in an agony of rape and abduction, war and pillage. An ethnic war, a politically inspired cleansing, threatens the Rift Valley. In Nairobi's South Sea, Muslims and Christians, including perhaps youth from the MuKenya movement, or perhaps simply the idle and unemployed, of whom there are plenty, have gone at each other, burning mosques and churches."
Corruption and ethnic strife are the Siamese twins of Vassanji's riveting novel. To the author's credit, the characters--Africans, Asians, Europeans--are fully humanized, be they victims of one another or of self-inflicted wounds. Vikram Lall, especially, is a daringly bold portrait of a man in many ways without a country. A wanderer, displaced and narrating his story from Toronto, he aches for a return to the only country he has ever identified as home: Kenya.
Read the novel and weep.
Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.
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