East Africa's Indian Table

The Indian table of East Africa grew along the Swahili coast and its hinterland, where traders from Gujarat and Kutch had crossed the western Indian Ocean with the monsoon winds for centuries before the colonial period. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries families from Gujarat, many of them Ismaili Khoja, Hindu and Muslim merchants, settled in Zanzibar, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Nairobi, and their kitchens became the base of a cooking that is Indian in its grammar and East African in its larder. A Spicy Touch, the cookbook of Noorbanu Nimji written with Karen Anderson, records this table from within one such family, with Gujarati roots, an upbringing in Tanzania and Kenya, and a later life in Canada.

The cooking of the East African Indians is best understood as a Gujarati kitchen that moved house twice. The first move carried it across the Indian Ocean to the Swahili coast and the Great Lakes country, where the cook kept her habits of the tadka, the ground masala and the careful balance of sour and sweet, and set them against what the region offered. Cassava, green bananas, maize flour, coconut, sweet potato and the fish of the coast entered the repertoire beside the familiar lentils, rice and flatbreads. A Spicy Touch shows this in its recipes, which treat the household's inherited spice cupboard and the markets of Tanzania and Kenya as one pantry rather than two. The coast gave the dishes their character. Coconut milk, long familiar on the Swahili coast and on India's own western shore, softened the sauces of fish, chicken and vegetables, and tamarind and lime supplied the sourness that a Gujarati cook already expected. Cassava, boiled or fried and finished with chilli and salt, became a snack of the Indian household as much as of its neighbours. Maize, the staple of the interior, stood in for wheat in some places, and the cook adapted her breads and porridges to what the market held in each season. Beef and goat, the meats of the region, were cooked by the Muslim families in the manner of the Indian kitchen, with ginger, garlic, green chilli and fresh coriander, while the Hindu households kept to vegetarian cooking and drew on the same beans, greens and roots. Pigeon peas, known across the region as well as in Gujarat, appear in the cooking of both worlds, and the Indian cook's way with them, slow-simmered and finished with a seasoned oil, passed easily into the East African pot. Street and market food followed, among them chips with a sharp chilli and lime masala, skewered meat grilled over charcoal, and fried pastries with spiced fillings, all of which belong to the region's towns as much as to the Indian quarter. The second move came in the 1960s and 1970s, when political change in the newly independent states led many Indian families to leave for Britain, Canada and elsewhere. They carried the East African Indian table with them, and in Canada it was recorded in print by Noorbanu Nimji, whose book is one of the few that preserves the cooking as a family practised it, in measures and methods that a capable cook can follow. The dishes now stand as a third thing, a cuisine of two continents remembered in a third, and the value of the record lies in its refusal to flatten that history into either an Indian or an African menu.

The East African Indian table is bright with fresh chilli, lime, coriander and ginger, softened by coconut and given body by cassava, beans and maize, and the sour, hot and sweet notes are kept in the balance of a Gujarati kitchen. A meal in these households sets a seasoned lentil or bean dish and a vegetable beside rice or flatbread, with a fish or meat dish in the Muslim homes and a chutney or pickle of fresh chilli and lime to sharpen it.