Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Trishula Rachna Patel, author of Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia

What inspired you to write this book? 

The primary motivation for writing this book was in response to a childhood existential crisis that stemmed from questioning where I came from, and where I belonged. I was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and my family are of Indian origin, so this was partly a family history as well as a community history. As a minority community, our history has been left out of traditional narratives. It took a decade of intense archival research as well as conducting oral histories to realize that it perhaps mattered less where Indians in Zimbabwe came from, but more what they – we – had lived through and experienced as part of the country’s transition from being the British settler colony of Rhodesia to becoming Zimbabwe.

I was also inspired by my maternal grandfather, who died when I was eight years old. He was the first of our family to be born in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1925, was a member of the nationalist movement, and even served as treasurer for the Zimbabwe Africa People’s Union (ZAPU). He was the only grandparent I knew in life, and I’ve spent the years since his death trying to learn about his life and his motivation for sacrificing his best years as well as his financial stability to support the anticolonial movement. He never wrote down his own memoirs, and what he did for the country cannot be found in any traditional archives. His story was left to his granddaughter to tell instead.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I learned that the writing process is never truly complete. I was making last minute edits even as I worked through manuscript proofs, and every now and then came across a sentence or a paragraph I wish I had done differently. Academics are perfectionist in nature; it’s why we’re notoriously unable to meet deadlines, stymied by the idea that what we need to turn is not the very best version our work could be. I had to learn to be comfortable with this, and to sit in the discomfort of perhaps finding a typo on the second page of the published book, or realizing how much more I still had to say on a particular subject. I hope readers will also understand then that the story I tell is still incomplete. There is so much more left to say, not only on the history of Indians in Zimbabwe, but on their future, and on the questions of race and identity that this book poses. One of the joys of being a historian is that each new article or book builds on previous work and adds another layer of factual and analytical sediment for the next scholar to take on and rework in their own way. I hope that this book can inspire scholars of migration and diasporas not only in Africa but across the globe to continue telling their communities’ stories, and show the ways in which migrant populations have become critical threads in the fabric of the new places they call home.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

I think it was how straightforward the argument I was trying to make was. In academia, especially for junior scholars, there’s pressure to make overcomplicated arguments that radically change the field. In rewriting and revising the book for publication, I ended up coming back to the very first argument I made in my application for the Fulbright fellowship which funded most of my research in the field – that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is an African history, and that Indians are no longer a diaspora, but have made geographical and historical claims to an African identity that transcend race and ethnicity. Once I took a step back from attempting to make complex, circular arguments about the broader nature of colonialism, I realized that I needed to go beyond Western and imperial ideas about race and identity and think about how ordinary people experienced colonialism itself. They did so through the lens of ideologies about gender, generation, race, religion, and class, all of which defined their identity on the ground as an African population, not a foreign one. In other words, I let my historical subjects tell me what was important about the story I was telling on their behalf, rather than imposing my own assumptions and theories on them. Once I did that, it was truly surprising how significant – and simple – the thesis I ended up making about the nature of citizenship, race, and colonialism really was.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

It’s definitely the opening story of the book, which is about the leader of ZAPU, Joshua Nkomo, being disguised in a sari by Indian women to evade arrest from the white settler government. Whether this actually happened can’t be verified in any archive, but it’s an oral tradition passed down from generation to generation of a family who have been in Zimbabwe since the 1890s. By telling this story, they showed how they were a critical part of Zimbabwean history and lore. Indian families across the country often provided shelter for Black nationalists, either those who had warrants out for their arrest or who were being smuggled out of the country to join the exiled resistance abroad or to Eastern Europe for military training. But what really entertained me was the idea of Nkomo wrapped in the traditional colorful piece of fabric, somehow being successfully disguised as an Indian woman. He was a tall, rather broad man, and there have been other rumors about his attempts at dressing as a woman to evade the authorities. It’s a great piece of historical gossip that does everything a good story should – it has drama, it has meaning, it’s kind of funny, and it unfortunately ends with his eventual arrest and detention in 1964, so there’s the element of tragedy as well. Shakespeare couldn’t have thought up a better plot himself.

What’s next? 

I’ve started work on my second book, which will be a history of cricket in Zimbabwe. Cricket was a colonial export that spread throughout the British Empire, including to Southern Rhodesia. The first players and administrators were white farmers, linking the game with the land imperialism that displaced Black Africans. The sport was dominated by white players but was increasingly coopted by non-white populations. At the same time, policies of segregation and racial discrimination denied non-white peoples, and especially Black Africans, access to political power and economic opportunities. As Rhodesia transitioned to Black majority rule, the national cricket team continued to be dominated by white players, even as the economy remained in the hands of white farmers. The new country of Zimbabwe entered the international stage as an independent nation and with a cricket team with Test status, the most prestigious form of the sport. But in the twenty-first century, cricket in Zimbabwe declined in the face of political and economic struggles. A fast-track land reform process began evicting white farmers from their land, and several prominent white cricket players left both the team and the country. Even as it diversified, the national team’s standards declined, a deterioration from which it has yet to recover. Cricket serves as a lens into the country’s decolonization, reflecting the challenges it faced in establishing itself as a sovereign nation and dealing with the legacies of colonialism, including the redistribution of economic and political control from a white minority to the Black majority population.