Introduction

In a recently published article, the editor of this collection, Gijsbert Oonk (2006), persuasively argued that there has been an unfortunate tendency of sociologists, economists, and anthropologists to ignore South Asian entrepreneurial failures in East Africa, to concentrate only upon the successful, and then to infer from these successes commonly held qualities such as ‘hard work’ or superior business acumen that are meant to explain the achievements of the South Asians and the comparative poor performance of the Africans. Contesting this unfortunate analytical orthodoxy, Oonk argues that we need to understand the success of South Asians, many of whom were Gujaratis, ‘from a historical point of view’, that the early South Asian migrants ‘started with a far more favourable socio-economic position than their African counterparts’, and that we should recognise not all South Asians were successful, the less successful and the failed returning to India. That the South Asian migrants started from a ‘far more favourable socio-economic position’, that they, unlike the vast majority of Africans, ‘were accustomed to a money economy and the concept of interest’, that many of them could read and write, was simply down to their good fortune, to coincidence, the coincidence of economic opportunities becoming open to South Asians pre-favoured with socio-economic capital. This is but one example of how chance has knitted the pattern for four centuries of British-Gujarati history, a history spanning three continents.

From the outset, when the East India Company's ship The Hector dropped anchor at Swally Hole in August 1608, this mutual history has been periodically swept up by the currents of chance, which carried some Gujaratis along trade routes re-paved with colonialism to Africa and then to Britain where they have now, in a remarkably short period, built a notably prosperous, culturally strong community that exhibits many of the chief features that are currently fashionable when labelling a ‘diasporic’ social group. In this article, I try to extend the hand of friendship to what the French sociologist, Professor Boudon (1986: 173) has called the ‘very unwelcome guest, ubiquitous but studiously concealed, ignored and even denied the right to exist by virtually everyone’, an analytical welcome to chance as it has been manifested in contingency, coincidence, and character.