Alvaro Collaco, born in Jinja, Uganda and rising to the position of Acting Head of the Budget Department, Ministry of Finance, Uganda, wrote in the 40th Anniversary souvenir of the GOA, UK: "Regardless, wherever he goes, an emigrating Goan carries in his heart that burning desire to be part of a Goan community symbolized by access to a Goan Clubhouse." This statement was only partly true for the emigrating Goan of the early 1900s had no tradition of belonging to a club and nor could he have imagined the central place a club would come to occupy in his community.

The Club was a colonial appropriation by the Goans. It played an important role in the lives of British and German officers and settlers in the colonies of East Africa, deftly ensuring segregation from the indigenous population while ensuring cohesion of their own community. Many of the earlier clubs were gentlemen's clubs, barring entry to women. In a World of Difference, Philip W. Porter writes: "In East Africa, the first structure established in any colonial administrative settlement was usually The Club, where colonial officers and their families would relax, drink their 'sun-downers' after work and reinforce their various prejudices." This idea of exclusivity, cohesion and community, fits in well with the Goan psyche and the first Uganda Goan Club, the Entebbe Goan Institute, came into being on April 24, 1905, in Uganda. Later the Goans Clubs of East Africa would fracture along caste lines to accommodate our own strident notions of exclusivity.

Clubs and close-knit associations of this sort usually engender sub-cultures, a spontaneous outpouring of collective energy which finds release in the discovery of something entirely new, be it music or art forms. The Goan Club in East Africa seems to have given rise to none of this and yet change is often imperceptible to the human eye. Peter Nazareth, author of The General is Up, wrote to me: "The Goan Institutes were the center of the Goan social, sporting and religious life. The Entebbe Goan Institute had a reading room, mostly for newspapers and magazines and it also had beautifully bound books from way back. Even more important, the Institute was a dynamo for what I would call living change; that is, the events of the country affected it and were affected in turn by what happened in the Institute."

The Club with its spacious sports facilities, bar for sundowners, tranquil reading rooms, where English was the predominant language, where conversations revolved around the civil services, the education of their children and news from Goa, became a catalyst for change. Thus began a slow Anglicizing of this society while at the same time tethering it to Goa. Writer Armando Rodrigues reminisced with me about those early days in Uganda: "Concerts and Konkani plays were organised frequently by the Jolly Boys. Marshall Fernandes was a good violinist, Ishmael Francis played the drums, Beatriz Almeida played the piano. After work got over at 4 pm, we dashed home for tea and then to the Club. Ladies played badminton, cards, men played tennis, field hockey, cards, carom and volleyball. After that, we quenched our thirst at the bar, with the usual camaraderie of "my round or your round." Favourite drinks were Bell beer, Nile beer or Scotch and soda. Other diversions were fishing, hunting, walks, picnics in the famous Botanical Gardens."

The Goan Club or Association born on the plains of East Africa has been imported by the Goans to the new Diasporas of the Gulf, the UK and Canada but the Club House as a metaphor for the Goan community is a relic of the colonial past and best left there. We have to find new ways of defining our community is this changing world of amorphous relationships.

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