This is not Namaste Wahala: On Silences, (His)Stories and Ghana’s Oldest South Asian Family
/by Girish Daswani
Two bodies jogging along a beach in Lagos collide. One is Nigerian, the other is Indian. They stare into one another’s eyes for longer than is comfortable, and then bump into each other several times as they fumble to continue their run. But they cannot continue their day nor their lives without thinking about each other. It is “love at first sight”. This is predictably how you begin a romcom Nollywood-meets-Bollywood movie. In this case, the movie is Netflix’s Namaste Wahala, the first Nigerian film on Netflix to both tackle the theme of Black-Brown (or ‘Blindian’) relationships and chart in the US and UK. There is, truly, a lot to celebrate and be thankful for.
But there is also a lot to process, and question. In this post, I want to look beyond the storyline itself and propose a reflection on the deeper issues and entanglements this Lagos-born fairytale both conceals and, (un)consciously exposes. I will do so by 1. contextualizing Namaste Wahala within the longer history of the South Asian presence in West Africa and 2. shifting the focus away from the fantasy of “happy endings” in order to explore how social class, caste, and even race matter in such relationships. My focus will be more specifically on the case of the Sindhis of Ghana. Why? Well, the Sindhis are a diasporic ‘Hindu’ community which both Daryani Ahuja’s and my family belong to. As for Ghana, this is where a substantial portion of my father’s family has been living for over a century now, and this is also where I have been working for the past 20 years. The story that follows is therefore both historical and personal. But before diving into the heart of the matter, a general introduction to Namaste Wahala is in order.
Namaste Wahala: Bollywood X Nollywood
Namaste Wahala is no typical Bollywood film. It is a film set in Nigeria, which stars Nigerian actors and draws on Nollywood’s equal notoriety for dramatic performances. The merging of these two industries and thematic styles is a smart move, especially since Nollywood is the world’s second most prolific film industry in the world after Bollywood, and since Bollywood is extremely popular in many African countries, Nigeria included. Produced and directed by a female Indian-Nigerian (Hamisha Daryani Ahuja) and featuring some amazing performances by a Nigerian cast (including Ini Dima-Okojie, Joke Silva, and Richard Mofe-Damijo), as well as Indian actors (Ruslan Mumtaz, Sujata Sehgal and Daryani Ahuja herself), Namaste Wahala sets to bring together the seemingly disparate worlds of India (through Indians living in Nigeria) and Nigeria through a fairylike tale on the cross-cultural opportunities for love, romance, and marriage. The movie raises questions about the (missed) opportunities that Indians and Nigerians may have when it comes to romantic encounters, and how to resolve the traditional tensions of cross-cultural and inter-racial relationships. Can Indians fall in love with Nigerians and can Nigerians be in a long-term committed relationship with Indians? How do these two nationalities come together? How can a Netflix Naija movie help us imagine what happens when two seemingly disparate worlds collide?
Namaste Wahala‘s trailer
After having watched Namaste Wahala (which translates into “Hello Trouble”), my mother told me: “It was funny, but it lacked depth”. Indeed. But to be fair, although it seeks to entertain as it educates, the movie’s ambitions to reach global audiences are rooted precisely in the fact that it does not take itself too seriously. Entertainment comes in the form of the hilarious performance of the Nigerian taxi driver and the Indian mother at the airport; of the two musical-interlude Bollywood-style songs; of comic interactions stemming from inter-cultural and inter-linguistic confusions. Moving between standard English, Nigerian pidgin, Hindi, and some Yoruba and Igbo, dialogues bring the viewer into several converging worlds. The film’s dizzy array of “lost in translation” situations is funny, entertaining even. Daryani Ahuja skillfully uses these moments to highlight the different worlds that these characters are from, move in, and push through. To her credit, she centers several strong female protagonists, and dedicates substantive time delving into the subtleties of these lead female characters’ lives and inter-relationships, while also touching on the topic of gendered violence. Yet, women are also caught in a cycle of repetition as they become the bearers of traditional and patriarchal authority and the violence that this holds. Watching Raj’s (Ruslan Mumtaz) Indian mother (Sujata Sehgal) and Nigerian girlfriend Didi (Ini Dima-Okojie) compete for his love and attention by cooking him home-cooked meals and waiting to see whose dish he would like better made me cringe. The male characters are not feminist role models, and neither are they carrying this movie – though they eventually redeem themselves as supportive friends, fathers, and partners. Instead, the men act as a backdrop to the battle of wills and wits that takes place between several female characters.
This focus on strong female leads could be due to the fact that the film’s director is an Indian businesswoman-turned-filmmaker who grew up in Nigeria. She certainly got the Indian “mother” role down well, as there were many times when Raj’s mother made me think of my own mother (especially her single-minded need and urgent desire to feed her son). The difficulties faced by Raj and Didi to be together in matrimony is foregrounded from the very beginning of the movie and Daryani Ahuja does a wonderful job at showing how inter-cultural and inter-racial relationships are usually unacceptable and a struggle for many Indian/Nigerian mothers to accept. Their roles as the conduits of social-cultural reproduction highlight the difficulties of such mixed romantic relationships and the limits of the Nigerian-Indian union. However, like with all good romcoms, we are brought through these tensions only to experience an overcoming of obstacles and the reaching of the desired fantasy of inter-cultural bliss. The couple reconcile, the in-laws learn to like and respect each other and their children’s choice of partner, and a full-on Indian wedding takes place. Cue: dancing, music, and Naija-Indian food.
Namaste Wahala’s male lead is Raj (Ruslan Mumtaz), an Indian expat who works as a financial banking consultant in Lagos. When the movie starts, we quickly understand that he had not been there long: He is still learning Nigerian pidgin and is unfamiliar with many local customs. Raj’s situation is certainly not representative of Lagos’ Desi community as a whole. Indeed, most of the roughly 50,000 Desis who live in Nigeria today are Sindhis, many of whose families have been living in Nigeria (and endowed with Nigerian passports) for more than one generation. Why, then, did Daryani Ahuja opt for a recently landed expat instead of a member of the local Desi community? The answer might have to do with marketing. Indeed, Raj primarily serves as an empty signifier that is meant to encapsulate, and thus appeal to, the wider “Hindu Indian” audience and (I’m guessing) a Bollywood fan base. Would a local Desi have been deemed too niche for South Asians based outside of Africa? It seems like it. And one comes to the same conclusion regarding anything of substance regarding his positioning beyond his handsomeness and what I noted above. For apart from being told that he is Leila’s (played by the movie’s director) cousin, we know close to nothing about him – neither his ethnic-linguistic group, nor his caste, his relationship to Nigeria’s Indian (and Lebanese) communities, nor his relationships back home beyond his parents. What we do see is a generic “Hindu Indian” boy who is socially uncomplicated and also historically vacuous. An attractive, empty, versatile narrative vessel. Yet despite the shallowness and thinness of the character of Raj, I did relate to him in a few ways. His relationship to his mother reminded me of my own, for I too am the only son of an Indian mother. His mother’s lack of enthusiasm (to put it mildly) at the idea of an inter-racial marriage also struck a chord, for I am married to someone who is neither Sindhi nor Desi. I did not, however, relate to Raj’s presence in Nigeria. I rather felt a disconnect and an unease. I came to realize that this is due to the fact that the movie completely occludes the longer and more complicated history of South Asians in Nigeria or other parts of (West) Africa. This silence felt all the more so glaring to me that the director herself is from Nigeria.
In this post, I want to tell one of the many untold stories of the South Asian presence in West Africa. This story centers on family I know very well: my own. It spans six generations over the course of c.130 years, starts in Hyderabad and unfolds in Kumasi, Accra, and elsewhere in West Africa, via what is now India. I hope that this condensed memoir will serve to both foreground the historical relationship of South Asians and Africans and highlight some of the limits of these connections. What follows is based on scholarly research, as well as on interviews I conducted with several members of my family over the course of the past 20 years.
A Family History: Sindhis in Ghana
The presence of South Asians – especially Sindhis – in West Africa is entangled with the history of the British Empire, and more particularly with the British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent (the “British Raj”, 1858-1947) and the “Gold Coast” (today’s Ghana, 1821 to 1957). Sindhi merchants are known to have traveled to the African continent since the early 19th century. Some of them moved to Zanzibar, East Africa, in the 1800’s. In 1883, a portion of them emigrated from Zanzibar to Kenya (Mombasa and Nairobi). Ten years later, in 1893, Sindhi firms were established in Sierra Leone. It is in that period that my ancestors settled in the region.
According to available records, in 1890, a Sindhi by the name of Bhai Bhoolchand was the first “Indian” to travel to the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Almost thirty years later (1919), my great-great grandfather and his brother were the first Sindhis to start a business in the Gold Coast. My grandfather, Victor, was one of the first Sindhis/Indians to become a Ghanaian citizen. It is to this personal story – which informs why and how Namaste Wahala affected me – that I now turn.
Victor Baboo arrived in the Gold Coast in 1951. His given name was Vassiamal Chelleram Daswani. His family was from “Sind” (or Sindh). Located at the western edge of South Asia, the region, which was occupied by the British from 1843 to 1947, covers the southern portion of the Indus valley as well as its Delta. It is bounded by the Thar desert to the east, the Kirthar mountains to the west and, very conveniently as far as seaborne commerce goes, the Arabian Sea to the south. My ancestors belonged to a family of “Sindworki”. This term is commonly used to refer to Sindhi traders who were historically involved in business ventures in West Africa and along other British colonial trade routes. The Daswani brothers were part of a community (bhaiband) of seafarers and traders doing business outside of Sind, which originated in pre-colonial Hyderabad, and especially took off in the mid-nineteenth century, after British annexation. As Mark-Anthony Falzon (2004: 120) notes, Sindhi trade did not start “with British Imperial expansion and hegemony, but rather […] Empire fostered a certain homogeneity which itself in turn served as a boost for increased production and exchange.”
Victor’s father – Chellaram Tarachand Daswani (born 1901) – had seven brothers. They built their homes next to one another in Hyderabad, Sind. The brothers and their families were known as the “eight house family” (“ata gari” in Sindhi). The houses were all located on one street, side by side, on a single plot of land that they shared in Gidoo Bandar. Chellaram first visited the Gold Coast with his father (Tarachand Jasoomal Daswani) and uncle (Metharam Jasoomal Daswani) in 1919. He was just 18 years old then and didn’t stay too long due to fears of malaria. His father and uncle remained though, and they opened a store called “Metharam Jassomal Brothers” in the marketplace of Cape Coast. The business was renamed “Bombay Bazaar” and expanded in several Ghanaian cities.
Around 1937, Chellaram returned with his two brothers (as was common at the time, their wives and families stayed behind in Sindh). Together, they helped expand the family business, first in Sekondi, and then in Accra. Their stores catered to British colonialists, other expatriates, and the Gold Coast élite. They were, in other words, thriving merchants who benefitted from their role as commercial intermediaries in the British imperial context, and this particular status meant that they were themselves part of the Gold Coast élite (see Murillo 2017). Eventually, Chellaram parted ways with his brothers and, in 1950, he settled in Kumasi and ran the company his father started called Bombay Bazaar.
Victor, my grandfather, moved to Kumasi – the heart of the Asante kingdom – a year later to join his father. Like most of Sindh’s “Hindu” population, he was forced to permanently leave his homeland during the Pakistan-India partition of 1947 (thus creating the Sindhi diaspora) and, like the rest of his family, had found refuge in what was now India. There, he had been working in Darjeeling for a trading company called Oriental Silk and Jewellery when he received the telegram from his father asking him to join him in the Gold Coast. Soon after, Victor’s two brothers, Jackie and Babu, followed. They had built a family home in Nhyiaeso, a suburb not too far from their shop in Adum. Victor’s then young wife Mohini was soon to follow. Victor was well-known in Kumasi, especially by people who frequently walked along the main commercial stretch called Kingsway Street. He even makes an appearance in one of Kwame Anthony-Appiah’s books:
“In the 1950’s, if you wandered down it (Kingsway Street) toward the railway yards at the center of the town, you’d pass by Baboo’s Bazaar, which sold imported foods and was run by the eponymous Mr. Baboo – a charming and courteous Indian – with the help of his growing family… I remember Mr. Baboo mostly because he always had a good stock of candies and because he was always smiling”
Three generations of Daswani’s lived in the Nhyiaeso house till Chellaram and his wife left the Gold Coast in 1959 for Madras, India, leaving the business in the hands of Victor and his two brothers. Two years before, in 1957, what is now Ghana had become an independent country. By that time, the Daswani’s owned several thriving businesses, including Tarachand Chellaram, Liberty Store, Eastern Store, and Super Dry-cleaning Laundry –all located in and aroundKumasi’s Prempeh II Avenue. They sold imported fabric and clothes, imitation jewellery and electrical items, and many members of the Ghanaian élite came to their shops to buy traditionally printed fabrics and have their suits made. Their dry-cleaning store did exceptionally well. However, Ghana was about to enter into a series of political and economic changes including rising cocoa prices, further restrictions in imported goods, the 1966 coup that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah, and a currency devaluation. In 1969, the Alien Expulsion Act that forced foreign traders (mostly Lebanese and Indian) to surrender their businesses to the government. Many smaller foreign businesses did not survive. According to my family, it was Victor’s friendships with people in power that saved him and his brothers from a certain economic death and from being physically expelled from Ghana. The Daswani’s, therefore, stayed, and Victor took on Ghanaian citizenship.
According to a family member, Victor’s absence from its day-to-day running and his preoccupation with maintaining his social status amongst his Asante friends eventually caused the gradual decline of the family business. This led to the separation of the three brothers. Victor, being the eldest of the three brothers, had final say on how the business was run and over time his brothers held some resentment toward him for not properly caring for their collective interests or allowing them to branch out on their own. They complained that he held too tight a grip on their economic purse strings – he hosted and attended lavish parties, gave expensive gifts to local chiefs and businesspeople, spent his time with friends and playing golf, and did not manage company accounts well. Victor felt his brothers did not understand him. Victor’s brothers wanted a share of the company in Kumasi. After his parent’s intervention and lots of angry words, and tears, he gave his brothers what he could, and they parted ways. One evening, Jackie packed his bags, caught a tro-tro to Accra and went to Lagos, Nigeria, before eventually moving to Dwala, Cameroon. Not long after, in 1968, Babu left for Accra and started his own business in the Tudu Central Market. His company, which was called Leather Rite Industries, was making and selling sports shoes and traveling bags. Colonel Acheampong’s time (1972-1978) did not help matters. Under his rule, the profits of Ghanaian and many foreign-owned businesses suffered. But I’ve also seen a picture of my grandfather with Acheampong in my family home in Kumasi – so, maybe that explains why his business survived.
What Matters: On Becoming Indian-Ghanaian
Victor is my father’s father. I first visited Ghana in 1999, when I was twenty-four years old. A little while before, my father, who had left my mother and me and moved to Australia when I was 9 years old, had experienced a racist attack at a pub in Melbourne. The violent incident had left him unable to return to work. I on my end had just finished university in Singapore (where I lived and where I am a citizen) and was taking a year off before applying for graduate school. One day, my father called me up and said that he wanted to reconnect with his estranged family. “Sure”, I said. “As long as mum says it’s okay.”
Although Victor’s eldest son, my father had been raised in Madras by his grandparents (Chellaram and Heti). Why they and not his parents raised him is another story. What matters here is that he had never truly known his father (Victor), mother (Mohini), and four younger siblings, who were all based in Ghana. For the longest time, he was convinced that his grandparents were his true parents. Imagine his shock, as a young teenager, when he was first told that his “father” was coming to visit him from Ghana.
Our first trip to Ghana lasted three weeks. The family reunion had such a positive impact on both us that we returned only a few months later. This next trip lasted close to seven months. I fell in love with Ghana. I picked up some Twi (living in Kumasi), made friends, helped at the family restaurant (Vic Baboo’s Café), traveled the country with a Ghanaian NGO, and even met a wonderful Igbo girl from Liverpool who was studying Medicine at KNUST. Most importantly, I reconnected with my father and my grandfather (who I had met only a couple of times before in Singapore) – two men who resembled each other in their flirtatious charm and their love of socializing.
My grandfather took a liking to me and we spent a lot of time chatting. We did so in English. Mohini, my grandmother, spoke Sindhi and Hindi, and only a little bit of English. Since English had taken over as the language I used at home and in my social life after I started school in Singapore, my Sindhi had faded quite a bit (and I’ve never learned Hindi), so I was not able to interact with her in the same way (my mom and her used to correspond in Sindhi – which is written using the Persian script – though; while doing research for this post, I found one of the letters my grandmother Mohini had sent her).
During one of the many long conversations I had with Victor, I told him of my desire to go to graduate school to become a Sociologist or an Anthropologist and wanted to learn more about his life in Ghana. So, he allowed me to interview him and he shared many stories with me. He introduced me to his friends and told me about his life in Ghana as we took long drives together. He loved Ghana. Ghana was his home, not India, he told me. Victor may have been the heart of the Indian community in Kumasi and the delegate of the Indian consulate in the Asante Region, but he never wanted to live in India. Nor did he want to die in India.
One morning, in 2000, as we sat under the shade of two mango trees in the back garden of our home in Nyhiaeso, he explained why he loved Ghana so much. He had lived in Ghana for most his life and had been welcomed by its people in ways that he could never truly repay. They shared what he described as similar “values” and he felt loved by those whom he came to see as his friends: those whom he befriended in the clubs, societies and associations he belonged to. He held several leadership roles and joined groups like the Rotary Club (Victor founded the Rotary Club, Kumasi, in 1962), the Masonic Lodge, the Kumasi Golf Club, and the Officer’s Mess. This is where he met current and future Presidents, traditional chiefs, and the professional or business class. He threw the wildest parties and attended many cultural gatherings and festivals. I’ve seen pictures of him with Ghanaian leaders – from Mrs. Rawlings to President Kufuor. He was acquainted with Asantehene (King of Asante) Osei Tutu Agyeman Prempeh II (died 1970) and became close friends with his successor, Asantehene Opoku Ware II, who was a lawyer in Kumasi before he ascended the throne to become the King of the Asante peoples. Victor always wore traditional clothes whenever he attended weddings, funerals, and installation ceremonies. He also regularly visited Manhyia Palace with gifts and greetings for the Asantehene. He felt that his relationships with other Ghanaians had to be cultivated, maintained, and sustained over time through gift exchange and by extending and accepting invitations.
My grandfather was Asante before he became Ghanaian. I remember him taking me to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi to show me a statue of Asante’s mythic and famous traditional priest. He told me the story of how Komfo Anokyei magically brought the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa) from the sky for the first Asante King Osei Tutu (died 1712 or 1717). He then pointed to the place where a magical sword (afena) was allegedly stuck into the ground – just like King Arthur’s sword, he said. Komfo Anokye was supposed to have held the key to immortality, but due to the transgressions of several subjects and relatives, he did not share his secret. For Victor, this was as much his story to tell as it was the history of the Asante people. It only made sense to me later, why, since the Golden Stool was not just the seat of traditional authority in Kumasi, but also the spirit of all Asante people – living, dead, and yet to be born. Victor had become a subject of the Asante kingdom through his years of being in Kumasi. He was a living testament to how to become a Ghanaian without being from Ghana. He was not unlike other migrants before him who were seen as clients or allies of the Asante kingdom – many former rulers, including the Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame (1804-23), used rewards and promotions of migrant groups to gather further social and political centralization (McCaskie 1986a).
Victor planted roots and was connected to Ghana by them. He grew old and eventually died in Kumasi. In 2002, he was given a traditional farewell with many of his family and friends in attendance, including the then-President John Agyeman Kufuor. Victor may have been a delegate of the Indian consulate in the Asante Region, but he wanted his ashes to be spread in Ghana. They were scattered in the Pra river. While I could not attend the ceremony, I continue to think of him every time I return to Kumasi. I want to remember my grandfather for the wonderful person he was, but I do not want to romanticize his life. He was a beautiful soul and larger than life – everyone who came to know him grew to love him and continue to remember him to this day. He was also an entrepreneurial pragmatist who resembled other Gold Coast merchants and African elite of the mid 20th century. Victor was a “big man” (obirempon), someone distinguished by his ability to mobilize socio-economic resources and cultural capital in order to enhance his status in Asante society (McCaskie 1986b). He represented the doubleness of life that is also represented in Asante history – he was not just X or Y but both XY. He was not just Indian (Sindhi) or Ghanaian (Asante), but both Indian and Ghanaian.
Ghana’s Kwaku Ananse stories are about the world and its doubleness – a remembrance of the past as filled with contradiction. My grandfather’s world was also filled with doubleness and the unity of liminality. Yet, the liminal always re-emerges in any new social structure that is formed. While my grandfather forged close associations and new ties with Ghana that surpassed even his own (grand-) father and age-mates, and eventually became a Ghanaian citizen, there were certain lines that he would not cross. For example, when my grandfather saw that I was dating a British-Igbo girl while in Kumasi, he pulled me aside and advised me not to take the relationship “seriously”. It was better to marry someone from within your own community, he told me.
Such an advice won’t surprise anyone who knows that amongst the Sindhis at least, it is preferable to marry someone within your jati (or caste) and region (Hyderabad versus Karachi) (see Falzon 2004). Family surnames and the reputation and wealth of that family also mattered (and they still do to some). As Falzon (2004: 81) writes: “Sindhis are patrilocal, and… generally ready to engage in long-distance marriage-matching.” This is not unlike many other diasporic groups in Ghana (see Akyeampong on the Lebanese diaspora) and in the West African diaspora, who commonly seek marriage partners from within their own community. Other factors such as social class, religion, family reputation, educational background, and profession become important considerations. Given these criteria for marriageability, any claim to cosmopolitanism or universalism becomes a cautionary tale, resembling endogamy and the reproduction of social class.
“On the one hand, the practice of making matches and circulating women across space feeds into the Sindhi discourse of cosmopolitanism as ‘being everywhere’; on the other, it goes against the very spirit of ‘world citizenship’ because marriage matching is in effect a technique of group endogamy aimed precisely at avoiding universalism. This dialectic is worth emphasising for it constitutes the basis of a sound understanding of how cosmopolitanism is articulated in practice.”
Victor’s Ghanaian-ness, as socially expansive and deeply affective as it was, had its limits. And these limits were tied to the very theme of Namaste Wahala: Marriage.
Namaste Wahala: When Fiction Erases Facts
Let us now return to Namaste Wahala. At one point in the movie, Raj’s mother, who had landed unannounced in Lagos from India only to learn that her son had a local girlfriend named Didi, was complaining to her husband about that very relationship over the phone. Speaking of Didi, Raj’s father replies: “So, she’s a Nigerian girl. What’s wrong with that?” In the scene immediately after, Leila, the character played by Daryani Ahuja, asks Raj’s mother: “What’s the difference? Do you think being Nigerian or Indian is going to affect your son’s happiness?”
These lines provide the viewer with the aspirational fantasy that “love conquers all“, including the eventual overcoming of ethnic, racial, and linguistic barriers. Does it matter whether Raj’s bride-to-be is ‘Indian’ (that is actually Indian citizen or Desi) or Nigerian? Ideally, it should not matter. But, in reality, it does, not only for Desi, but also for African communities. Thus, in the movie, Didi reveals that her mother faced many challenges when she (an Igbo woman) married her husband (a Yoruba man). The mother’s response regarding Raj is: “But he’s Indian”. And, similarly, as Raj’s mother insisted: a “Sunita” would be better than a “Didi”. Through these lines, Namaste Wahala plants another seed of future possibility: The destigmatization of South Asian-African marriages, whereby “it should not matter” whether an Indian marries a Nigerian or vice versa. On that matter, Daryani Ahuja said in an interview:
We [South Asians and Africans] are actually so similar…We are actually all one, and that’s the whole theme of the movie.
This quote echoes what my grandfather said to me about South Asians and Ghanaians: That they shared so much in common and that this was why he felt truly at home in Ghana. Yet, as Falzon (2004) also observes, the aspirational sense of global belonging that Sindhis hold also has its limits in practice. Social class, wealth, and the ability to play certain traditional roles matter. It is also generally wished for that the bride-to-be has her own family wealth, possibly a professional career, and a good social standing, in addition to being able to be the dutiful wife and mother who can instill “values” to her children. So, for real, how many Sindhi/Desi parents would say: “Does it matter if she’s Indian or not?” My informed guess is very few.
One year after my grandfather passed on, his eldest son, my father, would sit in that seat of liminality and contradiction and defy expectations and cultural boundaries by marrying a Ghanaian woman.
Namaste Wahala with a twist
Accra, Ghana, 2003: I remember receiving a phone call from my father one weekday afternoon. He had woken up early that morning and said he was going to visit friends without telling me anything else. I was in Accra doing my doctoral research on Pentecostalism and more specifically on the Church of Pentecost (Daswani 2015). My father sounded strange over the phone. His voice was muffled as he asked me to quickly get ready. He said that a car was coming to pick me up from my uncle’s home in Dansoman, to bring me to Old Fadama – where he was getting married in the next hour. Everything had been set up: the tent, the food, the bride’s family was there as well as the two Pentecostal pastors officiating the marriage. He wanted me there in attendance and by his side – he said he felt guilty for not telling me about this earlier, and that he could not go through with the wedding without me. I was certainly surprised. I knew he was dating Helen (who is Akan Ghanaian) but not that he was planning a wedding. I put on my only shirt and got there in time to say a few words to honour the couple. Once the traditional gift giving of cloth, yams, a bottle of Schnapps, and the Bible, was over, we ate, drank Star beer and danced to highlife music. They looked happy and I was happy for them. I visited Helen several times over the course of several months while my father was in Australia and until he returned for her. They now live in Melbourne with their two beautiful teenage daughters.
The author and his father on the latter’s wedding day, Accra, 2003
Later, I found out that there was a good reason why my father never told anyone in the family about the wedding. Why he had been secretive about the whole thing – even with me. Desis in Ghana who later heard about it were quick to gossip. Everything was discussed: from race, to social class, to age. “What will people think?” always remains on the lips of some, as I’ve been able to witness on many occasions over the years, especially in the context of Indian weddings. My father is, in many ways, a real-life Raj: A good looking Desi expat who was raised in India, and who, against all odds, married the Ghanaian woman he fell in love with. What distinguishes him from Raj though is the fact that his relationship did not, and still to a large extent does not, benefit from the open-arm acceptance of the Desi community.
My father’s and my family’s story in West Africa, endures. This story, like so many other stories of this kind, is old, complicated, and layered with historical entanglements. Call it a Namaste Wahala tale with a twist.
With special thanks to Katherine Blouin for helping me craft and edit this family (hi)story
References
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Appiah, Anthony Kwame. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Bhavnani, Sapna. 2020. Sindhustan.
Daswani, Girish. 2015. Looking Back, Moving Forward: Pentecostal Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghana Church of Pentecost. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Falzon, Mark-Anthony. 2004. Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 1860-2000. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
McCaskie, Tom C. 1986a. “Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society.” Journal of African History 27: 315-339.
McCaskie, Tom C. 1986b. “Accumulation, Wealth and Belief in Asante History. II. To the Close of the Twentieth Century”. Africa 56(1): 3-23.
Murillo, Bianca. 2017. Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana. Athens: Ohio University Press.
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