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In Kenya's The East African, Wambui Mwangi reviews a book, Blanche Rocha D’Souza’s Harnessing the Trade Winds: The story of the centuries-old Indian trade with East Africa, using the monsoon winds, that examines the very long history of interactions between India and Africa.

Networks of Indian and Arab traders were incororating the East African coast into the globalising dynamics of empires from the early Egyptian and Roman through to the British, Dutch and Portuguese colonial conquests. The lucrative transactions in African ivory, gold, silk, spices and, significantly, slaves that anchored the Indian Ocean trade circuits, inevitably brought with them their necessary traders and administrators, their spin-off ventures and migratory patterns, their cultures and commercial products, their beliefs and ritual objects, and even their vegetables, as D’Souza’s useful examination of plants introduced to Africa from Asia reminds us.

Indeed, the Portuguese found Indian settlements at significant trading points when they arrived at attempting their own conquest of East Africa. It is in any case undisputed that by the end of the 16th century, trade between East Africa and India was brisk enough for the Portuguese to levy taxes sufficient to propose building Fort Jesus in Mombasa and to import many thousands of labourers from the subcontinent to Mombasa to work on the fort’s construction, thus significantly expanding the nucleus of Indian settlement in that region, and adding a layer to the intricate weaving of social reproduction on the East African coast and its hinterland — as these trade networks extended westwards into the lands beyond Lake Victoria.

The British colonial railway project, starting at the end of the 19th century and importing Indian labourers into the East African hinterland en masse, was thus a much later, and by the terms of D’Souza’s argument, proportionately less-influential impetus to cultural exchanges between India and Africa. In any case, by the 19th century, the twin forces of pre-existing trade networks and colonialism (Portuguese, Dutch and British) had resulted in the entrenchment of Indian settlement along the East African seaboard and its hinterland, and on islands such as Zanzibar and Mauritius.

Mwangi is critical of D'Souza's thesis that Indian-African interaction is little known and questions the extent to which she excuses Indians in East Africa from collaboration with British colonialism, while also wondering about the extent to which the presentation of Indians as legitimate Africans reflects a general environment in East Africa of ethnic conflict and insecurity.

Recently, it was possible for ethnic murderers to warn passengers in one language to disembark at the next stop, because they calculated that those passengers who were not of their ethnic group would not comprehend their spoken words, and would remain in the matatu, innocently waiting to be massacred. This is what subsequently happened: The bloodbath was predicated on literal cultural incomprehensibility.

The image of that matatu, holding its multiplicity of lives and cultures in much the same way as our contemporary East African republics contain the assorted combinations of our identities and communities, should give us some indication of the urgency of work which, unlike D’Souza’s, takes into account the fact that we are constantly interacting with each other, and constantly changing our understandings of each other and ourselves.

Nevertheless, although it may not be intellectually breathtaking, D’Souza’s work is a salutary reminder of the necessary work of active social communication and cross-cultural exchanges, and of the imperative to cultivate societies based on multicultural respect and pride in the rich variety of our ways of "being East African."

Mwangi's essay is well worth reading in full.