The In-Between World of Vikram Lall KINDLE MOBI by M.G. Vassanji

The story of a man of Punjabi Indian heritage growing up in 1950's Kenya during the turbulent shift from colonialism to independence, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G Vassanji won the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2003. Looking back from his Canadian home where he remains "in between" cultures, the character Lall struggles to understand how living between cultures has shaped his life. The novel stands as witness to Kenya's colonial past, but also its post-colonial and neo-colonial present; it is about the three races whose intersection in that place and at that time shaped the present reality.

Lall has grown up in a multi-cultural milieu; the novel opens with five children, a white brother and sister, an Indian brother and sister, and a Kikuyu boy, whose friendship symbolizes the promise of the nation on the verge of independence. But the end of the unequal and corrupting Kenya in which "The [white] settlers saw it as another South Africa ... except this would be better, more like Devonshire or Surrey, with the Africans their happy servants or junior partners. And the Indians ... almost as racist as the whites - and lazy" soon changes from hopeful revolution and self-determination to violent racism and massacre. The novel deliberately blurs the line between victim and victimiser. The new African elite suddenly begin to act more and more like their British predecessors. The Mau Mau freedom fighters who gave up everything to fight the colonialists are now hounded on the streets and arrested for the flimsiest reasons. The same colonial policemen and their African collaborators who tortured the Mau Mau and other blacks during the emergency are still in office as security advisers for the new ruling class. Looking back Lall "Never felt as though he fit in anywhere...It was not for me to change this world. Moral judgments, therefore, I shied away from ... I therefore prefer my place in the middle, watch events run their course. This is easy, being an Asian, it is my natural place" even when his childhood friends are murdered in uprising and reprisal.

Vassangi's novel is a story of survival, much of it based upon his own life, and his own failure to rise above the confusing social and political nightmare he became a part of. Of his immigration to Canada, he says he "left Kenya the most corrupt man in Africa". The series of events he describes offer a real history of the failure of post-colonialism which is not necessarily the responsibility of a people ill equipped to form a government, but as the end result of the oppression, exploitation and resentment fostered first under colonialism and then perpetuated by those who benefitted most in fomenting an environment of suspicion, racial and ethnic hatred and who to this day continue to exploit a disunited Africa for their own purpose. (H)