Piecing together the fascinating story of Goan migration

Joseph Murumbi perhaps best epitomises the complex, yet fascinating story of Goan migration. The son of a Goan trader and a Maasai woman, Murumbi (1911-1990) born Joseph Murumbi-Zuzarte was the first foreign minister of independent Kenya and went on to become the country’s vice-president under Jomo Kenyatta. He resigned that post in under a year after the assassination of Goan-Kenyan freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto.

One of the greatest collectors of African art, Murumbi and his wife Sheila co-founded the African Heritage Pan-African Art Gallery with Alan Donovan. The Murumbi Peace Memorial was put up in tribute to their memory in the Nairobi City Park.

Murumbi’s father Peter Nicholas Zuzarte’s intrepid journey from the North Goa village of Guirim to Baringo, Kenya in 1897 is just one of the many highly engaging accounts of Goan migration retold by London-based Selma Carvalho in ‘Into The Diaspora Wilderness’. “He set sail from Bombay to Aden, and then in a German boat for the port of Zanzibar, arriving in Mombassa on a dhow.

Possessed of a steely determination, he walked from Mombassa to Baringo, a distance of over 600 kilometres,” she writes. Zuzarte set up the Londiani Trading Company in Baringo, where he met the daughter of a Maasai medicine man. The relationship would eventually break up, with Zuzarte marrying Ezalda Clara Albuquerque, already a mother of nine.

Murumbi moved with his father to his new family and at six, says Carvalho, was sent to school India, first to Good Shepherd School Convent and later to St Joseph’s High School, both in Bangalore. A detail perhaps little known is that he passed out of St Pancras European Boys High School, Bellary. Carvalho’s book, set for its India-launch in early August, started a little over two years ago when she felt the urge to tell her own story in the diaspora.  Her family moved to Dubai and from there to other parts of the world. “I didn’t want to tell the story in a vacuum and so I began constructing the economic and political backdrop to it,” she says of the collection of personal, family and community stories picked up from long days of interviews and hours of sifting through archival material.

Intriguingly much of the material for the Africa chapters was right there in England, where Carvalho is based. “The East Africa diaspora are now residents of the UK or Canada, having left Africa in the aftermath of post-Independence Africanisation policies. The stories of a bygone era were waiting to be told and I was an avid listener. I am only the narrator. It is their story which lives now only in their ageing memory.”

Etched into our memory now is the account of the acerbic British historian and explorer Richard Burton who set out on his 1856 East Africa expedition accompanied by two Goan servants and Captain Hanning Speke. Thrown into a completely new and terrifying environment, nothing could have prepared Valentine Andrade and Caetano Rodrigues for the “severity of Africa”, Carvalho writes. But the men survived and on one occasion, one of them had to dive into crocodile infested waters to recover Burton’s gun.

Thousands of Goans have worked as cooks and stewards on board British ships, returning after long journeys to do up their family houses in the villages. In more recent years, young Goan men armed with the Portuguese citizenship (Goans are still entitled to one) have headed to the UK. With some 8,000 Goans now estimated to live there, Swindon has possibly the most robust concentration of Goans in the UK, says Carvalho.

Back in Goa, with so many young men migrating from the village, the parish priest of Agacaim  has been hard  put to assemble a village football team.

“Because human beings are constantly in a state of evolution, we want to find comfort in the past while charting a future. I merely responded to this longing in my writing,” says Carvalho who believes the stories of Goans who left its shores are as integral to piecing the community’s collective identity as of those that stayed behind.