Introduction

Contact between Asians, Africans, and Europeans in East Africa has a long history and was largely influenced by the economics and politics of colonisation and the emergence of nation-states. This long-standing relationship resulted in a particular ‘East African Asian culture’ in which Gujarati (Indian), Swahili (East African) and European cultures were adapted, transformed, and re-invented. The migration of Asians from one continent to another, where they became a minority, resulted in the development of various strategies of adaptation, with the group adopting new socio-cultural values while maintaining some of their original values. Despite the information we have on the number of migrants, their religious backgrounds and their reasons for migration, we know very little about the ‘cultural baggage’ of these migrants and even less about how and why this changed after their migration. This cultural change was not a natural, harmonious process; rather there were many conflicts, which required painful decisions to be made.

One such decision was the exchange of the Gujarati language in favour of the Swahili and English languages. The first generation of Gujaratis in East Africa knew how to read, write, and speak Gujarati, whereas the third-generation migrants may speak Gujarati with their parents but prefer to use English among themselves and they also do not know how to read or write Gujarati. This exchange of Gujarati in favour of English was the result of individual and community-based decisions. It should not be seen as a simplified process of a minority community adapting to ‘globalisation’, or ‘westernisation’ by instrumentally choosing the more ‘global’ language, the language of the business elite. On the contrary, as we will see, the colonial state promoted English and German education in a period when the Gujaratis successfully supported and sponsored their own Indian schools, using Gujarati as the vernacular language. The Germans in Tanganyika and the British in Uganda and Kenya were not able to implement their education systems because Gujaratis refused to support the interests of colonial states. They followed their own cultural and economical agenda. Interestingly, the Gujaratis themselves promoted the English language when the independent East African nations started to promote Swahili, the vernacular East African language.