AFRICA: Between Black & White

The news of Africa has been largely written in conflict of black v. white. But a third group exists there—"the indigestible filling in the black-and-white sandwich," as it has been called. Africa's Asian minority poses problems of its own. They showed most plainly ten years ago in Durban, South Africa, when in the course of a minor scuffle an angry Indian merchant pushed an African boy's head through a shop window and gave him superficial cuts. Passersby spread the word exaggeratedly: an Indian has killed an African. That night Africans began attacking every Hindu in sight. Next day they burned homes, looted stores, clubbed men, women and children to death, raped girls and hurled them into burning houses. In three days 1,229 people were killed or wounded, 1,532 homes were damaged or destroyed.

There have been no comparable flare-ups since, but the problem remains and has how taken a new turn. Last week, for instance, the newly formed Uganda National Movement had a boycott going of all non-African shops, the purpose being to "drive the Asians into the large towns. After that we shall put pressure on them there too." Long snubbed by the whites, the Asians now find themselves in danger from the blacks, and few can decide to which side to run.

Land of the Free. It was the whites who brought the first large group of Asians to Africa rather than engage black workers on the building of the great Uganda Railway—"the two ribbons of rust," as Disraeli called it, "that stretch from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria." Natal landowners also began importing Indian "coolies" to work their languishing sugar plantations. In four years Natal's sugar exports multiplied 33 times. The indentured Indians became settlers in their own right, and other immigrants—the "free" or "passenger" Indians—flocked to make a new life for themselves in the new land. In 1897, aged 28, young Mohandas Gandhi was stoned by Durban white settlers and came close to being hanged from a lamppost.

Today, there are 800,000 Asians in Africa south of the Sahara—Hindus (the majority), Sikhs, Ismaili and Shia Moslems, Parsees and Christians from Portuguese Goa. The fourth Aga Khan left his Harvard studies in 1957 to be installed not in Pakistan but in Africa, where his Ismaili followers once weighed his portly grandfather in diamonds. The shop signs of Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika are almost all Indian—V. B. Patel, the timber merchant; H. J. Peerani, the baker; Mohanlal, the tailor. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Indians are called Banyans, and elsewhere whatever the African wants to buy—a bolt of cotton, a kerosene lamp, a bicycle—it is almost invariably an Indian dukah wallah in a filthy, tin-roofed shop that sells to him. In Kenya, Asians pay one-third of the colony's indirect taxes and run some of Nairobi's smartest shops; in Zanzibar they control the clove market; in Tanganyika they dominate the economy. In Uganda, where before the war Indians were responsible for as much as 90% of the trade, there is a saying: "Europeans have the power, Africans have the land, and the Asians have the money."