A smile hangs loosely over Aurora's lips. Had I seen Aurora in the milling crowds of London or onboard a red double-decker bus, I would never have guessed that Aurora with tightly knitted, curly hair and the voluptuous, full breasts and buttocks of an African woman was in any way ethnically related to me. But if Aurora goes back two generations, she can trace Goan ancestry in her bloodline.

Aurora comes from Cabo Verde, an archipelago of islands off the West coast of Africa. Much has been written about Goan migration to the East of Africa, to the thriving coastal ports of Mozambique and Mombasa, but much less is known about what took Goans further on their Diaspora journey. Cabo Verde was settled by the Portuguese as early as the 15th century. It was uninhabited, hardly the sort of land worth colonizing except for the fact that like so many of Portugal's dominions it was conveniently located; fortuitously placed between two important European routes to India and Americas and unfortunately for Africans an ideal location for boarding slaves. What would have brought Goans all the way to these remote tufts of land peeping out of the North Atlantic Ocean, not thriving cities like Nairobi or Kampala but a huddle of islands which were in themselves not prosperous?

In 1838, the British set up a coaling station on Mindelo, one of the islands of Cabo Verde. From then on, it became a busy refuelling point for British ships sailing from London and Southampton, both Eastwards as well as the Americas. It is a curious fact that as soon as a coastal region became a fuelling port, it soon had splotches of Goan communities developing there. It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that much of our Diaspora seeds were sown by our Goan sailors who sailed on these ships. Abandoning a ship was at times more for self-preservation than anything else as conditions on these ships wrecked by disease and shortages of food and water made the thought of continuing the journey unbearable. Charles Boxer in The Principal Ports of Call, tells us that in the first few centuries of the Portuguese doing the Lisbon-Goa round-trip, the Crown preferred the ships not to dock anywhere other than Mozambique for refuelling and watering, one reason being to avoid desertions by the crew. The Goan community in Cabo Verde, settled on the main island of São Tiago and just off São Tiago is a smaller volcanic Ilha do Fogo which sustained a miniscule settlement but quite a few of them, Goan. But there is another darker reason which brought the Goan Diaspora onto the islands of the West Coast of Africa.

In 1905, the Portuguese engaged in a curious experiment. They shipped labour from Goa to another set of West African islands, further down the coast from Cabo Verde, that of São Tomé-Principe, rich in sugarcane, coffee and cocoa beans. The Portuguese were having trouble with African labour and they hoped the influx of foreign labour would help. Conditions on the plantations were severe. Beatings were common sometimes on the hands with a circular piece of wood, called a palmatoria, a heavy paddle. For more serious infringements, thick rubber or strips of hide were used. It is difficult to know in what capacity Goans worked on these plantations. Aurora says most of the Goans brought onto plantations on the West Coast came as overseers and thinks her own Goan ancestry possibly stems from just such an occupation. Goans were intermediaries between the Portuguese and the native Africans. Perhaps some Goans wielded the thick wooden palmatoria on calloused African hands or likely most of them were at the receiving end of the whip on their own backs. In any case, they did not flourish in São Tomé-Principe. They died given the brutality of circumstance, resulting in great financial loss for the Portuguese and the experiment was abandoned in São Tomé-Principe at least.

It is intriguing that Goans so often occupied this unsavoury position, the Devil's pawn as it were, between the colonizers and the indigenous natives, whether it was the plantations they oversaw, British Civil Services they came to occupy in East Africa or the offices in British companies in the early oil-producing countries of Iran and Aden. To the European, whether Portuguese or English, the African was difficult to control, the import of labour from China was undesirable and unsustainable given the climate in Africa, but the "crafty yet docile" Asian and particularly the Goan who had so successfully been converted to Christianity could be "trusted" as a middleman. Christianity had also altered the Goan in a more fundamental manner. The re-engineering of the Goan meant the stronghold of the "communal" was broken. Community would continue to be important to him but only as a secondary source of inspiration and strength. At a very critical level, he understood the elevation of the individual above that of the collective and this in some part made him amenable to being a middleman.