What should have been the pivot of Sabby’s interior monologue is the painful exclusion of the tailoring community from the lives of elite Goans. But this is addressed only peripherally (pp 100-102). In actual fact, a collection of oral histories of former East African Goans deposited with the British Library (Kings Cross) reveals the extent of the discriminatory practices faced by this community. The founding constitution of the Nairobi Goan Institute put in place in 1905, had as its guiding principle that ‘no other than a member of the Goan community of good social repute shall be eligible to the membership of the institute.’ Throughout the townships of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika (now Tanzania), tailors continued to be excluded well into the 1950s, from the privileged social institutes Goans fostered. Only in Malawi where numbers were considerably low did some sort of solidarity exist which allowed tailors to be members of the Malawi Goan Social Club. The irony was, many of these tailors with thriving businesses of their own, were financially far better off than civil service clerks. Read full text here https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/nonfiction-2/
Do check out our other titles and writing by novelist Jessica Faleiro, historical researcher Clifford J. Pereira and lecturer and writer R. Benedito Ferrao. In the fiction section there is a one-act play by Isabel Santa Rita Vas, and short fiction by novelist Ivan Arthur and newcomer Ayesha Souza. The Editorial TeamJoao Roque Literary Journal
