“My memoir covers a wide expanse of time and place. The period itself encompasses a span of a hundred years. While the narrative ends in 1971 when I was forced out of Uganda, it begins with recounting the slave trade in 1871. This length of time is essential to place events in proper perspective and add understanding to how things came to be.

                   My sojourn takes me to three continents.

                   I was born in Tanga in 1926 at the time of the British regime and, at age seven, was sent to India for my education. Although I attended a fine English school in Goa (St. Joseph’s Arpora), a Jesuit college (St. Xavier’s) in Mumbai, then Grant Medical College founded by the British, it was distressing to be discriminated against by the English, particularly as I had a fondness for their language and esteem for their literature.

                   My time as a doctor in Tanganyika left me incensed. The colonial system defined our status, relegating the Indian peremptorily to a position of little worth. Limitations of where we could work, live and socialise left us believing we were not quite as good as or quite as equal to the white man. Our wings clipped, our spirit curbed, we could not fly, we could not soar. The realms of the truly free were not for us. The innate gentlemanliness of a few good and understanding Britishers did not make amends for the injustices of colonialism.

                   I did not let my aspirations of wanting to be a surgeon by British standards go by the wayside. I finished my training in Britain and returned to Africa as a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in orthopaedics. Eminently suited to be the kind of doctor that newly independent Tanganyika desperately needed, I found out I was the wrong man. In colonial times, I was not white; now, in Tanganyika, removed from the shackles of colonialism, I was not black.

                   For the years I lived and toiled there, my endeavours did not go without effecting some change for the better. I wanted, very much, to continue to give of myself, but I was not a native. If each little act is a ripple on a pond extending itself, sometimes unseen under the lotus leaves, then the ways of the people and the course of history are altered by the cumulative effect of such acts, considered insignificant at the time.

                   I write this story to appease my loss. Also to air my grievance that I received neither justice at the hands of the white colonial nor understanding at the hands of the black indigene. The people who shaped my life came from varied, sometimes markedly dissimilar backgrounds.

                   It is a story not often heard."

Excerpt from Preface, ‘No Place For Me’