My Journey between Three Cultures

By Reggie Vaz

This biography is an attempt to enlighten foremost our grand-children about a part of their roots. I have tried to trace back to my parents´ birth and upp-bringing in Goa - India, my childhood and teenage years in Nairobi – Kenya and subsequent settlement finally as an adult
in Uppsala – Sweden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9789177857693

Book preview

Index

INTRODUCTION and BACKGROUND

This narrative is a diary of events and experiences intended foremost to enlighten our grandchildren – Matilda, Emma, Tove and Amanda (I have nicknamed them as the META-quartet) – who hopefully will master English by their teens and be able to apprehend what moulded their grandfather to the person he is and, in addition, to provide them with some insight into a quarter of their roots. The necessity of knowledge of one´s roots dawned on me with clarity when I recall Matilda´s indignation as her primary school (Class 1) classmates refused to recognise the fact that she has indeed Indian roots!

I, Custodio Resurrection Vaz was born at the Indian Maternity Home in Nairobi at 10:30 a.m. on April 1, 1945 and weighed 6½ pounds at birth. I enjoyed the luxury of growing up in the capital of the British Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, my home for the first 19 years of my life. These years were generally carefree, filled with the joys and pleasures that go with childhood, and that offered numerous challenges as a teenager into unknown and unexplored avenues in the pathways of life. I was hardly aware of in my young years, of the Kenyan nation´s struggle for independence from Great Britain, which started in the early 1950s, gave rise to the well-known Mau Mau uprising and finally resulted in the proclamation of independence of the liberated Republic of Kenya in 1963. The country chose then to become a member state within the British Commonwealth.

Both my parents originated from Goa, a tiny semi-island in the vast landscape of India, situated approximately in the middle of the west coast facing the Arabian Sea, with a coastline of 101 km. It was then a Portuguese province. Portugal defeated the ruling Sultan in 1510 and seized power in Goa where they set up a permanent settlement. Their rule lasted for four and a half centuries. I have the notion that, under Portuguese rule, few Indians from other parts of India were allowed to settle in Goa. The Indian invasion of Goa commenced on 18 December 1961 and on 19 December, Prime Minister´s, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian troops recaptured this Portuguese enclave and annexed it, together with Daman and Diu, into the Indian Union. On 30 May 1987, Goa gained status as the Republic of India´s twenty-fifth State. Although the smallest state by area, it boasts of being India´s richest state. The literacy rate was, according to the 2011 consensus, 87%, with 90% of males and 84% of females being literate.

The Portuguese who had ruled for around 450 years appeared to have been completely overwhelmed and capitulated without a struggle. Goa merely overnight became an integral part of the Republic of India. I recall that my parents, then settlers in Kenya were shocked that there was no military resistance whatsoever from our former Portugal masters. Prior to its independence Goa was predominantly (over 90 %) Catholic but this has changed dramatically. According to the 2011 census, in a population of approximately one and a half million inhabitants, 66% were Hindu, 26% were Christian and 8% were Muslim. The society justly boasts today of a peaceful co-existence between the two main religions. The Catholic inhabitants of Goa who generally had Portuguese surnames called themselves then as Goans, while other communities such as Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims living either in Goa or in the rest of India were referred to then, by us Goans as Indians. I recall from childhood that as Goans we were extremely proud then of our Portuguese heritage and felt to some degree superior to other Indians. This attitude may have been partly based on the notion that the level of education amongst Goans was generally higher seen from our horizon when compared to the average Indian living in Kenya. We were of the impression in Kenya that a large proportion of Goans were considered by the British as loyal and thereby fit to work as employees in the Civil Service while the average Indian more often did manual labour or was into craftsmanship or within small or medium sized shopping enterprises. My current impression is that the term Goan as defined above and distinct from the term Indian has thanks to time gradually weathered away and merely refers today to an inhabitant from Goa.

I have spent two long holidays as a child in Goa, the first time for approximately five months between December 1949 and May 1950. Our second long holiday was between January and May, 1954. As an expatriate living in Kenya, I believe that Dad was entitled to long leave every five years. I have re-visited Goa twice on my own, for about a week each time, firstly following duty travel to Japan and China, in November 1981. Secondly, following duty travel to Ahmedabad, India, in January 1982, I sized the chance to first see New Dehli, then Bombay and, finally, revisit my relatives in Goa. My latest visit, to date, was in 2001, for two weeks, this time during the festive season of Christmas and New Year and in the company of my sister Olinda, my wife Wivi-Ann, our daughter Fredrika, her boyfriend then Joakim, our son Emanuel and his wife to be, Sofia.

Nairobi, my birthplace on the edge of The Great Rift Valley traversing Africa, has a song dedicated to it, by the British singer from the 1950s, Tommy Steel. It became a capital city in British East Africa in 1907. Nairobi of today has a population of a little more than 3 million inhabitants. At an elevation of 1795 metres above sea level just by the Equator, it is cool enough and ideal for residential purposes. It is the only major city in the world that can boast having a wildlife National Park within its boundaries. Nairobi was initially, in 1899, founded as a central railway camp and waterhole during the construction of the railroad from the coastal town, Mombasa, through to Kampala, by Lake Victoria, in neighbouring Uganda. I realise today that I was privileged to grow up then in an exclusive, although secluded and well protected segment of a very diverse Kenyan society, with little to worry about under my childhood and teenage years. I left Kenya thanks to a Swedish scholarship for higher academic studies in Uppsala. This journey of my life commenced on 27 July, 1964, when I boarded the Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) flight which had started off in Johannesburg, landed in Nairobi and continued with transit stopovers in Khartoum, Geneva and Copenhagen. We arrived at our final destination on 28 July and touched Swedish soil at Arlanda Airport, at precisely 13:35 on a very sunny afternoon. It was the first time in my life that I had ever flown or travelled abroad all on my own. During this flight of about 16 hours I became aware of and got acquainted to two of my fellow travellers, who I realised were also selected to accompany me on the scholarship programme financed partly by the Student Union of the University of Uppsala and to a major extent by the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA). One of them was Olavo Fonseca, a Goan from Nairobi, in his 40s, and a teacher at the Kenya Science Teachers´ College (KSTC) in Nairobi, which was financed and run by the Swedish Government through SIDA. His pupils at the KSTC were Kenyan citizens who were trained to become teachers with the noble aim to help raise the level of education in Kenya. Olavo had been granted a one year scholarship at the University of Uppsala to help promote his knowledge in the Sciences that he taught at the KSTC. After returning to the KSTC, he eventually became the Principal of this college. The aim of our scholarship programme was to receive adequate educational and teaching skills so that we could successively replace the expatriate Swedish teachers at the KSTC. My second student comrade to be on the SAS flight was Suresh Gohil, an Indian (as defined initially) of about my own age, from Mombasa, with whom I studied alongside with in Uppsala between 1964 to 1968.

I have re-visited Nairobi 5 times after leaving for good in 1964. The first was for a month in 1966, to commemorate my Dad who had passed away in February that year. Although this was a period of strict mourning in black according to our Goan traditions where no festivities were permitted, Mum and Olinda hosted a party to celebrate my 21st birthday. According to British tradition then, this was the age when one was entitled to the key to adulthood. The 3 of us took also a short vacation at a seaside resort in Malindi. While in Nairobi, I was also privileged to function as Bestman at my good friend Cecil D`Cruz´s wedding, on 11 April 1966, at St. Teresa´s Cathedral in the suburb of Eastleigh (denoted as no. 1 on the map of Nairobi, see Chapter 3). My second visit took place the following summer during my vacation from Uppsala University, in 1967. Then, in 1971 when Wivi-Ann and I married, we celebrated our honeymoon with a trip to Kenya visiting Nairobi, Mombasa and Malindi, as well as a brief visit to Tanzania. Among the popular tourist attractions we covered in Kenya were – the Ngong Hills (no.2) and the renowned Karen Blixen author´s home there, Nairobi Wildlife National Park, the Great Rift Valley at the Escarpment, Lake Nakuru, the habitat of thousands of pink flamingos, as well as the Wildlife National Parks at Amboseli and Tsavo. On the short trip to Tanzania, we stopped in Arusha and spent a night at a hotel at Lake Manyara with a magnificent overview of the surrounding Wildlife National Park.

My last two visits to Nairobi were in October 1981 and September 1989 respectively. These were duty trips in assignments as a short term consultant. In September 1989, I was in Nairobi on behalf of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The purpose of the visit was to investigate the feasibility of having the Kenya Government Analytical Laboratory in Nairobi participate in an international pilot project sponsored by the FAO/WHO (World Health Organisation) with the aim of analysing levels of the environmentally persistent chlorinated organic insecticides like DDT and industrial pollutants like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in human milk from breast feeding mothers. I stayed then in the suburb Westlands (no. 3) at my cousin Albyn Vazz´s home. Albyn was the very last of my close relatives to leave Kenya for life abroad in search of a safer, secure future. They opted for, were selected after application and settled in Canada.

Uppsala has been my home since 1964. My academic studies at the University of Uppsala led to, in 1968, the Swedish degree Filosofie kandidatexamen – which ranks higher than the British Bachelor of Science degree. I then went on to graduate for a Master of Science degree in Analytical Chemistry and was awarded this in 1969. In line with the intentions of my scholarship terms, I was then to travel to England for a teacher´s training course for a year before returning to serve at the KSTC in Nairobi. My scholarship, viewed from a legal perspective, contained no formally binding obligation that compelled me to fulfil the intentions of the programme. Since the political situation for Asian non-citizens in Kenya was rather unstable following independence in 1963, I chose to remain in Sweden and terminated my scholarship. Thus, I did not enrol for the teachers´ training course that SIDA had planned in England. SIDA who had taken over responsibility from the University of Uppsala for my scholarship was sympathetic to my plea not to return to Kenya and did not pressure me to do so. In addition, it was during this period in time that Uganda´s dictator, President Idi Amin, was arbitrarily expelling Indians from the country and this led to much concern among the Indian population of East Africa and was followed by a mass exodus of Indians mainly from Uganda but also from Kenya. To my knowledge the Indians living in the Republic of Tanzania and Zanzibar, formerly German and then British Tanganyika, were more at ease with their political and personal situation and did not feel the pressure to leave the country they had decided to settle in and made their homes for decades.

It was not originally my plan to settle in Sweden – I had vaguely planned to complete my University studies and eventually consider emigration to, for instance, Australia, Canada or for that matter Great Britain. The notion of settling down in Sweden, where I really had no ties, was not on my map. I was far away from my family and friends, with a foreign tongue-twisting language and, in addition, the climatic conditions were definitely not in line with my background and taste. There was no way I was going to get stuck up in the vicinity of the North Pole. But destiny luckily chose otherwise! More explicitly, it is Wivi-Ann´s credit and fault – call it Swedish girl power – that I remain put in Sweden. Put plainly, it was the power of love – loosely defined in those days in foreigner circles as the Swedish Sin – that influenced my judgement and settled my fate. Well in all honesty, I fell for her and have paid the price for this – who could imagine that I who was born, breed and thrived at the Equator with all its advantages and charms would wind up close to the Polar Circle with polar bears lurking round the corner – instead of lions – in a country with endless dark nights during autumn and freezing temperatures in winter. All these features were naturally in direct and dramatic contrast to Nairobi´s pleasant and appealing tropical climate, which I took for granted while living there.

Do I have regrets – no, not for a second! It´s impossible to evaluate how extremely fortunate I have been. I should perhaps lay my case to rest especially as several of the Swedes close to me point out now and then that, on occasion, I tend to be more Swedish than them. Should I take this as a compliment? My feelings are mixed here – naturally, I am a Swedish citizen or should I say I have a Swedish passport. I possess an excellent grasp of the language thanks to Wivi-Ann, am comfortable and respect the morals and traditions that are characteristic of Sweden as a democratic, tolerant and solidary nation. Yet, why should I be categorised as a Swede in particular as the first 19 years of my life were moulded by influences from parts of the Asian and African cultures that I had the privilege to experience. Even though I have thoroughly acclimatised to living in a European culture today, I do not feel the need to have my roots and identity enchained in a particular sector. I feel cosmopolitan, with no compulsion to assert that I am a Swede in spite of holding a Swedish passport. I am inclined to consider myself as a citizen our global universe. Life is simple – home is where the heart is, no boundary restrictions can change this, especially in today´s world when we travel, commute and communicate globally, crossing manmade country borders in no time.

It was partly thanks to the efforts of Birgitta Dahl, then a University student and local politician in Uppsala – she advanced in 1994 (and held this position up to 2002) to become the second ever female President for the Swedish Parliament under the Social Democrats – who helped me substantiate my application to the Swedish Immigration authorities for a permanent work permit and eventually Swedish citizenship, which I acquired in 1974, the year our son Emanuel was born. Bigitta Dahl was a pioneer and instrumental in the struggle and achievement of greater equality between women and men in Sweden. I was granted citizenship at the ripe age of 29. I deliberately awaited applying for citizenship until close to this age because it was then highly unlikely I would be called upon to do military service, obligatory under law at that period in time, in particular for Swedish males. By sheer coincidence, I ran across Birgitta Dahl one morning in August 2014, in the city centre in Uppsala. I sized the opportunity to thank her for helping me in the late sixties and she vaguely remembered my case. She was then 77 years old and happily enjoying the privileges of retired life as a Senior Citizen.

My first serious long-term employment was as an analytical chemist in 1969 at the Agricultural University of Uppsala, situated on the outskirts of the city, in Ultuna. I began in 1971 commuting to work at the Special Analytical Laboratory of the Swedish National Environment Protection Board in Stockholm and was employed there up to 1975. I was then fortunate to gain employment in Uppsala at the Swedish National Food Administration (NFA). This drastically reduced my commuting time, from home to work, to 15 min on a bicycle instead of over an hour by car or by train and public transportation in Stockholm. I remained in the services of the NFA, with different positions and tasks within the organisation, up to my retirement in 2012.

The notion to put into print the history of my life popped up several years ago and resulted in collection of raw data on my family tree, mainly through conversations with Mum and Olinda and in part by interviewing particularly some of my cousins now living in Toronto, London and Goa. I was in this manner able to complement and check details of the rough family tree sketch of our family and closest relatives. Most of the information gathered on our parents´ background has been passed on orally with scarcely little written official documentation to verify the data. My own memories of our young days are very scarce, thus fortunately, Olinda´s memory bank is much greater than mine and I have taken advantage to record here her knowledge of our earlier days, to fill in the gaps. The time and patience to settle down to serious writing came first in 2014. This inspiration has been at its best either in the quiet, very early hours of the fantastic summer mornings at our cottages in Lövvik, – in the county of Hälsingland, 230 km northwest of Uppsala – just as the first sun beams break through the trees around our plot, or at our flat in the Uppsala suburb, Rickomberga, as the mist lightens and the autumn leaves start to fall. Inspiration in winter time comes only after a New Year, in February-March, when the number of light hours increases dramatically, and the landscape is preferably covered in glimmering, crisp snow that revitalises the senses after having gone through the darkest months of October-November, when the sun is barely capable of lifting itself above the horizon.

As the saying goes, writing has been for me, 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. It is not my intention to put into print a literary masterpiece, this narrative is strictly dedicated to our grandchildren who hopefully by their teens have grasped sufficient English to be able to understand this Swenglish essay, meant to enlighten them on my journey into each of these three worlds. Initially, I had planned just to record the history of my life so that our grandchildren, the META-quartet, embodying plain and sheer girl power, would have an idea as to how it all started in Goa, continued in Nairobi and eventually ended up in Uppsala. As my efforts to write progressed, I, gradually, felt the need to expand my story to include some information that Fredrika and Emanuel could find of interest. Eventually, I gave into the urge to go into greater details, for my own benefit, as I have scattered pieces of information in various articles, clips and documents I have saved through the years. Having been educated as a scientist, I guess that this yearning to dig into details and facts lies in my nature. In addition, in the wildest of my fantasies, I picture myself as old and senile, with a fading, unreliable memory, when one of the META-quartet, makes the effort to visit me. Imagine then, being able to having this narrative at hand and read to me, helping me to remember all the good old days that I had the privilege to enjoy. Finally, I blame our good friend Gunnar Lemhagen who managed to sow the idea that I should seize the opportunity to compare these three cultures. This challenge has gradually matured and I have attempted to highlight the advantages as well as disadvantages, as seen from my horizon. I hope that I have, in this process, managed to convey these observations without turning them into seeds of discontent among family and friends, as I communicate my personal conclusions on these cultures, in particular, on aspects of religion, politics and social behaviour.

I feel extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to embark on this incredible and fascinating journey between 3 cultures. It begins on the Asian continent, in Goa where my parents were born, continues to Africa, in Nairobi where my sister Olinda and I came to see the light of day and lands finally in Europe, in Uppsala, with my marriage to Wivi-Ann and the births of our children, Fredrika and Emanuel, and consequently of our grandchildren, the META-quartet. I have been gifted with the chance to select rather freely the very best of each culture and have for the most been open heartedly welcomed into each of these.

The history of events described below are divided into 3 main chapters – GOA, NAIROBI and UPPSALA respectively. Then the chapter entitled THE PROS- AND CONS- OF THE THREE CULTURES attempts to summarise