The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
SynopsisPlot
Vikram Lall comes of age in 1950s Kenya, at the same time that the colony is struggling towards independence. Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren of an Indian railroad worker, search for their place in a world sharply divided between Kenyans and the British. We follow Vic from a changing Africa in the fifties, to the hope of the sixties, and through the corruption and fear of the seventies and eighties.
Story
About this book
Vikram Lall grows up in 1950s colonial Kenya, the grandchild of an Indian railroad worker. His family belongs to neither the British ruling class nor the African majority, occupying an uncertain middle ground in a society organized along racial lines. As a boy, Vic and his sister Deepa form friendships that cross these lines, but the Mau Mau uprising, an armed resistance against British colonial rule, reshapes daily life with suspicion and violence.
Vassanji traces post-colonial Kenya through one family's experience. The 1960s bring optimism and a new national identity, while the 1970s and 1980s introduce political corruption and a climate of fear. Vic moves through each period at a distance from both African and European communities, and his personal story, including friendships tested by politics and a love strained by the divisions around it, raises questions about loyalty, belonging, and complicity.
Spanning several decades, the narrative marks specific historical shifts rather than treating Kenya's independence era as a single episode. Vassanji, born in Nairobi and raised in Dar es Salaam, writes from within the East African Indian diaspora, whose communities grew around the railway and the trades that followed it.
