Postcards from Zanzibar (O Heraldo, 27/6/26)

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https://www.heraldgoa.in/cafe/postcards-from-zanzibar/479818/

Goa’s diaspora is one of the great wonders of the modern world, as generations of women and men from this tiny slice of the ancient Konkan coastline adapted fast and seized opportunities even faster, so the widely scattered global Goans keep supplying an unexpected force to reckon with in many different countries.

These extraordinary annals are ongoing, and often complicated. Recently, for example, we saw European Council president António Costa – former PM of Portugal who simultaneously holds Overseas Citizenship of India – at the forefront of international peace efforts with regards to Ukraine, but also some indecent hawkish sniping between Claire Coutinho and Suella Fernandes Braverman on the UK right wing, where they are two of three Goan women in Parliament. 

So far, to her credit, Coutinho is formidable in the British mainstream without resorting to dog-whistle racism and outright xenophobia like many of her Conservative colleagues, but Braverman has plunged into the extremist fringe with alacrity. Now this grand-daughter of Assagao – where her father still owns their ancestral home – represents herself as effectively “white” nationalist, which is both extremely surreal and another indication of Goan powers of assimilation.

Whatever you may think of Braverman’s opportunism, the best way to understand her career is in the continuum of nationalist politics that many other ambitious diasporic Goans have engaged with over at least five generations in India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka (where the editor Armand de Souza is credited with awakening Sinhalese anti-colonialism), Kenya (where Fitz de Souza represented the Mau Mau and helped write the Constitution, while Goan-Kikuyu intellectual Joseph Murumbi Zuzarte was Vice-President), Angola (via the iconic freedom-fighter Sita Valles), and Mozambique (the influential Pan-African revolutionary Aquino de Bragança). Each is an amazing story, but also similar in being woefully understudied, the consistent problem for Goan history and especially when it comes to the diaspora. It is that broad context that makes Selma Carvalho’s new Guts, Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar 1865-1910 (Speaking Tiger) so welcome, and an important landmark achievement.

Carvalho is an unusual multi-faceted and highly motivated constant presence in Goan (and increasingly Indian) letters, and this is her third book from the New Delhi-based publisher Speaking Tiger, after the novels Sisterhood of Swans (2021) and Notes on a Marriage (2024). Guts, Glory and Empire is actually her fourth book about Goans in Africa, after Into the Diaspora Wilderness (Goa 1556), A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa and Baker Butcher, Doctor Diplomat: Goan Pioneers of East Africa. Alongside, she writes columns and short stories, and edited three volumes of The Brave New World of Goan Writing anthologies, along with editing and publishing the admirable Joao-Roque Literary Journal online.

Guts, Glory and Empire “is not a narrative of subjugated people,” writes Carvalho, in her useful introduction, instead “a story of how one uppity South Asian community – Goans- came ashore as sailors, cooks and clerks, and went on to become merchant princes and philanthropists, infiltrating every sphere of the sultanate from the musical to the medical, creating an extraordinarily empowered South Asian society. These chameleon-like men with their easy facility for language, mercantile adventurism, administrative efficiency and personal charisma tended to the sultans as doctors, traders, musicians and interpreters. They became both agents and detractors of empire’s political theatre in the Indian Ocean. Their arrival on an island which would play a crucial role in the carving up of Africa, their meteoric rise to power, their place wedged between South Asians and Europeans, their immense but entirely forgotten contribution, and their poignant decline within a generation form the central premise of this book. Inevitably, it is an attempt to reclaim the weblike connexion of Indian Ocean histories.”

There are many things Carvalho does well here, albeit accompanied by some characterizations and conclusions which would not meet full approval of professional historians, but the main thing is everything is backed up by copious notes, and all the relevant references and sources. 

I especially appreciate how she worked with the genealogical expert Richard D’Souza to contextualize her subjects’ backgrounds, and relied on oral histories and original archival sources in multiple countries. The results are not exactly academic, but so what? This writer had to persevere outside academic privilege to tease out storylines only she had the gumption to research up to now. Let us appreciate this significant contribution for what it is, on its own merits.

One of the reasons Guts, Glory and Empire is valuable – and every serious library in India should get a copy – is its focus on the strategically vital islands of Zanzibar off the Swahili coastline, now part of Tanzania. 

In the second half of the 19th century, its Sultanate was subjected to British “protection” and became the main staging ground for expeditions and exploitation of the mainland, with great historical consequence for both colonizer and colonized. Thus, it was in Zanzibar, where Carvalho writes “the complexion of Goans as colonised subjects changed. Within the walls of the Portuguese consulate with its shuttered windows, Portuguese flags, two desks, wall-clock and wash-basin, elite Goan men gathered on Friday mornings dressed in their best suits for a visit to the sultan’s palace on Eid days or some such ceremonial event. A new self-awareness was percolating for these men, that of autonomy. Here, they could direct their energies toward their own futures and fortunes. Here, their budding republicanism found free reign, emboldening them to question empire’s authority, to challenge it, and demand for themselves equal rights.”

Make no mistake, this is hidden history to all extents and purposes, even if many Goans know it as their family background. In-between experiences like these – like ours - are inconvenient to assimilate into simplistic nationalistic narratives, but that is precisely why their retrieval and re-framing are all-important right now.

“By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Goans were an indispensable part of Zanzibar’s national character,” writes Carvalho, with great feeling, “Goans who managed the government press, the government post offices and the royal stables. Goans dominated the retail trade, they redrew Zanzibar’s architectural skyline, they fashioned its public square with a weekly orchestra, they provided medical care to the royal family, ran pharmacies, boarding houses, produced church music, theatre and organised dances at their club. Significantly, they made prompt and large donations to charities and relief funds, and funded the English newspaper by advertising on it. In September 1898, the sultan conveyed his thanks for the ‘loyalty of the Goans in Zanzibar who had always supported and assisted His Highness’ Government.’ As the nineteenth century drew to a close and the edges of empire hardened in East Africa, Goans resisted British interference in their affairs but eventually became loyal subjects. The British, even as they favoured these ‘honest, hardworking and loyal set of men’ as their clerks, also disempowered them, erasing their individual agency and autonomy. With the cast of flawed characters chronicled here, we gain a sense of these lives, their values, their ambitions, their petty jealousies, their absorptions, their politics and their ambiguous place in race relations. This is a unique glimpse of a nineteenth century South Asian society and its engagement with the Arab sultanate and Indian Ocean empires.”