Imaginings of Khoja, Maasai and Swahili Aesthetics in Artist Ethnographer Sultan Somjee's narratives

Abstract

This paper investigates the hitherto unexplored interaction between Asian settlers and the indigenous women with whom they came into direct contact in East Africa from the early 20^th century onwards. The impact of their interaction was on the production of cultural artefacts as well as the artistic sensibilities within the Indian Ocean imaginary. This paper offers a close reading of Asian-Kenyan Sultan Somjee’s two absorbing ethnographic-historical narratives, Bead Bai (2012) and Home Between Crossings (2016). Somjee offers a rare gendered perspective into the multi-generational and transnational lives of Asian merchants’ wives in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. I examine how Somjee draws on the Khoja, his community, and Masaai and Swahili material culture to create an interstitial space at aesthetic, emotional and intellectual planes hitherto unexplored in creative writing from East Africa. In particular, what makes the work of Sultan Somjee unique is that he explores artefacts of art, both oral and visual, in addressing Asian-African race relations from a different perspective.