Alhamdullilahi, EA is more Arab than African

The other week a Kenya newspaper referred to an alleged false prophet who had taken advantage of a vulnerable local celebrity and conned her of her affections as a “half cast” (that was an error, the word is half caste).

But the message was clear; that the false apostle’s mixed race somehow explains why he is a crook.

One instance I never tire of referring to is a political campaign in Kampala some years ago where one of the candidates, otherwise a nice chap, said his opponent was unfit for office because he was a “kyotara” (half caste), and even went as far as saying this suggested his mother was a woman of loose morals. Actually he called her a prostitute.

In other words, no honest black woman can date a white or Asian man.

These things keep cropping up in Tanzanian, Kenyan, and Ugandan newspapers.

An office block under construction will collapse and kill 25 people, and the story will be told in a fairly straightforward way, with the occasional reference to greedy and corner-cutting contractors.

There will be no reference to the owner of the building being a Kikuyu or Muganda businessman.

As soon as it turns out the owner is of South Asian descent, the stories and commentaries will be sprinkled with references to “conniving” and “greedy Asian” real estate owners.

This kind of prejudice is played out daily in most parts of the world.

However, there are two big differences in East Africa. People of Arab descent, who live mostly along the Coast, are more African than some of the rest of us who claim to be “indigenous” because their forefathers arrived here before many of ours did.

The Bantu migrations into East Africa from West Africa happened between 300BC and the 16th century AD.

The Luo migrations happened much later.

Arabs have been sailing and settling the east coast of Africa since pre-Islamic times, possibly as early as the 5th century BC; by the 7th century AD, a large influx of people from Arabia and the Gulf gave rise to the Swahili.

And the last Luo settlements in Kenya, happened when Mombasa had been a successful trading post for centuries.

Many Asians in East Africa today are descended from the workers who arrived in Mombasa toward the end of the 1800s to build the Kenya-Uganda Railway.