SMALL ACTS OF COURAGE

The MSNBC journalist reflects on his family’s history of multinational activism.

Velshi, author of The Trump Indictments, traces his family’s roots back to Chotila, a village in Gujarat, India. The author’s father told him the elders left the area because of a lack of opportunity, a trend Velshi suspects partly arose from the famines that swept the nation in the mid-1800s. Induced by the exploitation of the British Raj, these famines killed approximately 15 million people. Velshi’s ancestors immigrated to South Africa based on stories about the prosperity it could offer. There, the author’s elders enrolled his great-grandfather in Gandhi’s famous school at Tolstoy Farm, an experience that kicked off several generations of creative resistance. In one example, Velshi chronicles the case of his anti-apartheid uncle, which included being charged with selling yeast to Black families, an activity that was against the law. Under government pressure, the Velshis fled South Africa for Kenya. Later, when anti-Indian sentiment rose in Kenya, they ended up in Canada, where the author’s father would eventually successfully run for office, becoming one of the first immigrant Canadians to do so. During the swearing-in ceremony, he used a Quran, “another first in Ontario political history.” Velshi’s family history doubles as a personal history of the oppressive colonial systems that have forced Indian migration around the world. The author is charmingly aware of some of the narrative’s shortcomings, doing his best to compensate for the lack of women represented in his family’s story and admitting that some of the overly idealistic parts reflect his “glass-half-full” mentality. Despite these weaknesses, this work is essential reading for members of the South Asian diaspora who rarely see their history told in such a compassionate, cleareyed manner.

A journalist’s instructive family memoir provides a crash course in Indian diasporic history.