"I am Tanzanian, but also Indian"

The expatriate community in rural Tanzania is quite separate from the local one. Expats come to have their own restaurants, shops, and hobbies that are often not only financially unreachable but also culturally unpalatable for Tanzanians. The sad reality is that the phenomenon is not limited to foreigners. A holdover from the continent's colonial era, still active populations of white and Indian Tanzanians dot even the remote landscapes of rural townships, sometimes making their presence felt in ethnically familiar expatriate communities or creating their own separate ones.

If expatriates are at least understandable for creating their own little social bubbles out of unfamiliarity with local life and pure homesickness, the affinity of these long-term non-black holders of Tanzania citizenship toward the clearly non-African life is more enigmatic. Most of the non-black Tanzanians are born and bred on the continent, perhaps spending a few years outside for studies or business, but not enough to be considered well-versed in customs of the foreign lands where expatriates come from. If anything, their perception of expatriates should be as caricatured as those of their black fellow countrymen.

But beyond the usual views of learning about the outside world that is open to everyone (think American movies, European soccer leagues, and for a lucky few, interaction with foreign coworkers), non-black Tanzanians have the added route of preserved traditions of their vague, faraway "homelands." Such traditions, at least in a strictly culinary aspect, was on full display when I went with a coworker to a home-made Indian lunch in the middle of Iringa. The hosts, no stranger to Tanzania through generations of residence, cooked up the most authentic Indian food available in town.

As authentic as the food was, though, the hosts' backgrounds certainly were not. The wife is a third-generation Tanzanian who has never set foot in India, while the husband has spent the last decade and a half living in Tanzania and in Saudi Arabia. If this were the US, there would have been great changes in their foods as local ingredients and cooking methods are adopted, purportedly to suit local tastes. But the food remains unapologetically exotic as their mutual communication in Hindi, with no plan whatsoever to "tone it down a bit" for the guests.

Because their foods, languages, and by extension, habits, and ways of life remain so distinctively foreign even after three or four generations, these non-black Tanzanians see more eye to eye with people originating from their faraway ancestral homelands than black families living half a block down the street. And as the male host from India demonstrates, with more foreigners arriving despite bureaucratic hurdles, ethnocultural enclaves will expand and ties to the homeland will only increase, at the expense of further distancing themselves from their black neighbors.

Yet, even if the opposite is true and the ethnic community dwindles down to nothing, it is hardly conceivable that non-black Tanzanians will become less steadfast in holding onto their cultures. Their status as a dominant minority with tiny demographic representation and disproportional wealth will only cement a self-justified sense of not just economic, but also social and cultural superiority. They will rather lock themselves away in gated compounds of isolated grandeur than subject themselves to the insults of having to live in substandard means of the impoverished majority.

It is one of those things that many black Tanzanians may feel embarrassed about. I heard many black Tanzanians speak with pride about the beauty of nature on this continent, and that non-blacks "come and never want to leave."  Yet, such an explanation for why there are so many non-black Africans only serve to indirectly remind every casual observer just how many of these immigrants to Africa came despite complete lack of intention to truly become one of the locals. This cannot be more polar-opposite to immigrants' mentality in the US, and to a slightly lesser extent, much of Western Europe.

This is not to say there is no hope for racial harmony. Some level of difference and tension are bound to always exist among different races, simply due to the irreconcilable discrepancy in backgrounds. But the country as a whole can still develop, even with the communities of the so-perceived "poorer" races. And this does not necessarily require assimilation of one into the other, but more tolerance of inherent cultural differences, and not entrench those cultural differences as social ones. As the number of non-black Tanzanians still remains tiny, chances for Tanzanians of all races to institutionalize such compromises are still quite good.

Comments

  1. I find your post truly condescending. You are pointing out that the family despite having been living for three generations in Africa as not genuinely African. Do they not live and pay their taxes, educated, breathe in Africa. Do they not call Africa home? I fail to see what food has to do with it aside from adding diversity to the continent. Indeed this way of thinking is dangerous in a sense of dividing the locals and those of more recent foreign origin. I have seen this way of thinking probably too often to be good and frankly nothing good will come out of it

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