At the end of the nineteenth century, his grandfather and thousands of other young Indians were brought by the English to eastern Africa to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was a new phase of colonial expansion: the conquest and subjugation of the continent’s interior. If you look closely at old maps of Africa, you will notice a peculiarity: inscribed along the coastlines are dozens, hundreds of names of ports, cities, and settlements, whereas the rest, a vast 99 percent of Africa’s surface, is a blank, essentially virgin area, only sparsely marked here and there.
