Elephants and tigers

Chinese businessmen in Africa get the attention, but Indians are not far behind

The Economist - Oct 26th 2013 | DAR ES SALAAM

ABHIJIT SANYAL is sitting on a beach-chair watching frothy waves roll in from the Indian Ocean. He arrived in Tanzania a year ago after a career in his native India with Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods giant. ChemiCotex, an industrial company in Dar es Salaam, hired him as chief executive to oversee the expansion of its “tooth-and-nail business”, which dominates the Tanzanian market for dental care and metal goods.
“A lot of the challenges here are familiar to someone like me from India,” he says. “And so are the solutions.” Distribution is hampered by poor infrastructure, as is the electricity supply. Ancient and modern manufacturing processes co-exist uneasily. Most customers are middle- and upper-class; the rest are too poor.
What surprised Mr Sanyal when he arrived was how often people in Tanzania mistook him for a local. “On a new continent you expect residents to recognise you instantly as an outsider—but not here.” East and southern Africa host large populations of people from the subcontinent, mainly India. Most distributors of Samsung goods in Kenya are Indian. Many of their ancestors came as railway-workers and traders in the early 20th century. The rupee was then east Africa’s main currency. Mahatma Gandhi spent two decades in South Africa and Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, backed African nationalist movements in the 1950s. Until 1999 India’s trade with Africa exceeded China’s. “It’s not called the Indian Ocean for nothing,” says Mr Sanyal.

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