HARVARD HISTORICAL STUDIES • 185

Published under the auspices

of the Department of History
from the income of the
Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest
Robert Louis Stroock Fund
Henry Warren Torrey Fund
Indians in Kenya
The Politics of Diaspora

R SANA AIYAR

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015
 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First Printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aiyar, Sana, 1979–

Indians in Kenya : the politics of diaspora / Sana Aiyar.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-28988-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
1. East Indians—Kenya. 2. Indigenous peoples—Kenya. 3. Kenya—Politics and
government—1963–. 4. National characteristics, Kenyan. 5. Kenya—
History—1963–. 6. Kenya—Race relations. 7. Politics and culture.
8. Asian diaspora. I. Title.
DT433.545.E27A39 2015
305.8914'06762— dc23
2014037068
 Contents

Introduction 1

1. From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 22

2. “Civilization” in Kenya 71

3. Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 118

4. Between Rebellion and Suppression 177

5. Negotiating Nationhood 218

6. Uhuru and Exodus 261

Epilogue 296

Notes 303

Archives Consulted 359

Acknowledgments 361

Index 365
 Gujranwala
Lahore Amritsar
PUNJAB
NORTHERN PUNJAB
PAKISTAN

SINDH
RIFT
VALLEY Gulf of Karachi
Oman KUTCH GUJARAT
CENTRAL
Kibigori Elementeita INDIA
Lake
Kibos
Victoria Fort Gilgil KATHIAWAR
NYANZA Ternan Fort Hall
Kiambu Bombay
Nairobi Machakos BOMBAY
PRESIDENCY
Kui Goa
SOUTHERN
Railway
Tsav o R .
International Boundary Gulf of
COAST s
Colonial Provincial Boundary Aden ile
Highlands 76
3 m es
i l
2
Kikuyu Reserve Mombasa sa: 7m
ba 2 87
m
Mo ar :
y- zib
ba Z an
m -
Bo ay
mb
Bo
UGANDA International boundary
KENYA I N D I A N (present day)
Highlands Disputed border
Lake EAST AFRICA
Victoria Nairobi PROTECTORATE
O C E A N Provincial boundary/princely
state in British India

Mombasa
TANGANYIKA Zanzibar N
(TANZANIA)

0 250 500 km

Map 1. India and Kenya in the Indian Ocean. Copyright © 2015 by Sana Aiyar.
 N
Kapenguria NORTHERN

Kitale RIFT
VA L L E Y
Eldoret CENTRAL
Kakamega
Thomson’s
Falls Nanyuki
Meru

a Kisumu
Mt. Kenya
tori Elburgon
L a k e Vic Kericho A
Nyeri
Nakuru Karatina
be

N YA N Z A Gilgil
rd

Murang’a
ar

Kisii Naivasha Fort Hall

eM

Kijabe Makuyu
ts

Githunguri
Limuru Thika
Ruiru
Nairobi
Njiru-
Dandora

SOUTHERN

avo Ri v e r
Ts

COAST

Railway
Mombasa
International Boundary
(present day)
Provincial Boundary

HighlandT

Forest Reserve

Kikuyu Reserve
0 50 100 km

Map 2. Kenya, especially Central Province and Rift Valley, c. 1930.

Copyright © 2015 by Sana Aiyar.
 R
Introduction

to bring out the Indian theme in my life,” Kenyan

“ I H A D N OT P L A N N E D
writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o remarked about the appearance of India and
Indians in his 2006 memoir on his childhood, “but there it was, staring at me
right from the pages of my narrative.” Three decades earlier, Shiva Naipaul
had noted this “shadowy” presence of Indians in Kenya who were “just there,”
eliciting “neither comment nor wonder.” Both concluded that the legacy of
colonialism had led Africans to believe that their “destiny was inextricably
linked with the destiny of the white man”—a relationship “established in
admiration, resentment or both.” Indians were marginal in the “shared space”
inhabited by blacks and whites in Kenya. This “marginality,” Naipaul re-
flected, “invested the Asian with an odd kind of invisibility.” In 2012 Ngugi
announced, “It is time to make the invisible visible.”1 A year later, the veil
of invisibility unexpectedly lifted when the Westgate shopping mall in
Nairobi came under siege for four days in September 2013, resulting in the
death of at least sixty men, women, and children, many of whom were Indian.
Somali extremists al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack.
Approximately a third of the retail shops at Westgate were owned by
Indians. Well-armed Indian security groups went into the mall to overpower
the gunmen, and civilians organized rescue efforts, using their cars and
trucks to transport the injured to hospitals, the closest of which were the
M. P. Shah and Aga Khan University Hospitals, and bringing food and water
to the rescuers. A twenty-four-hour vigil was held at the Jain temple within
the Oshwal Center located opposite the mall to honor and pray for the dead,
and Indian Muslims formed a human chain of solidarity around Westgate.

1
2 Indians in Kenya

Images of rescuers, mourners, and victims flooded the media within and
outside Kenya. These included pictures of Indian men bringing black and
brown children out of the mall and of African and Indian men and women
embracing in empathy, collectively forming a moving picture of the triumph
of humanity over inhumane acts. Far from being a shadowy presence,
Indians were front and center in this moment of crisis. Sandeep Vidyarthi,
whose great-grandfather had settled in Kenya in 1896, was among those who
brought the injured and dead out of the mall during the siege. In his words,
he was one of many “ordinary African[s]” who “came out to help.” Vipul Darji,
a steel trader who provided refreshments to the rescuers, similarly stated,
“We are all Kenyans now.”2 Patriotic fervor was on display as Kenyan flags
were erected next to Hindu deities at the Jain temple and were carried by
all those who formed the human chain outside the mall. Vidyarthi and Dar-
ji’s nationalist claims in referring to themselves as “Africans” and “Kenyans”
came on the eve of Kenya’s fiftieth anniversary of nationhood. The rhetoric
of unity in the face of adversity belied the discursive and institutional en-
tanglement of political, economic, and racial concerns over the changing
meanings of “Indian,” “African,” and “Kenyan” during the half century be-
fore independence. This book makes visible these entanglements by ana-
lyzing diasporic politics that emerged from Indians’ engagement with their
civilizational homeland, India, in their territorial homeland, Kenya.
An overwhelming emphasis on singular territorially and racially bounded
scholarship on Kenya has resulted in the historiographical marginality of
Indians, who are assumed to be historically insignificant. Far from being
marginal, the paradoxical invisibility of always-present Indians that was noted
by Ngugi and Naipaul can be located in contestations over a shared political
space during seventy years of colonial rule, the resonance of which continues
to be felt in the postcolonial nation. Between 1887 and 1968 the number of
Indians resident in Kenya increased from approximately 6,878 to 176,613.
The majority of these were traders, skilled workers, and their families who
settled in Kenya during British colonial rule. At independence in 1963 Indians
constituted 2 percent of the nation’s population and formed its petty
bourgeoisie. They predominated in the retail, wholesale, and manufacturing
sectors of the economy, and provided skilled labor as clerks, policemen, en-
gineers, plumbers, carpenters, masons, tailors, contractors for labor and
other services, schoolteachers, and lawyers, many holding technical and
supervisory positions. Nearly 30 percent of the population of Nairobi, the
colonial and national capital, was Indian.3 Despite their visible presence,
 Introduction 3

with some exceptions Indians appear in a cameo role in studies of colonial

and postcolonial Kenya that are concerned primarily with black and white
politics. Works that do consider the history of Indians in Kenya have focused
almost exclusively on Indian business.4
Reflecting the popular Swahili proverb Baniani mbaya, kiatu chake dawa
(literally “The Hindu Bania trader is evil, but his shoes are medicine,” that is,
Indians are mean but their business is good), these studies analyze economic
practices of Indian business in Kenya and African resentment toward them.
The demographic and occupational diversity of Indians is obscured in such
approaches that flatten out the relationship between Indians and Africans as
apolitical and unchanging, shaped exclusively by the relative material wealth
of the traders. They also elide the political mediations and civilizational af-
filiations that framed Indian-African encounters and created a public po-
litical realm where racial and economic concerns shaped by generational and
nationalist transitions in India and Kenya were deeply contested. Indians in
Kenya examines this range of diasporic politics in colonial Kenya. It traces
Indians’ subimperialist colonizing ambitions, interracial anticolonial ac-
tivism, and postcolonial assertions of citizenship over six decades. In so
doing, it reveals competing and contradictory political claims that simultane-
ously created moments of interracial solidarity and discourses of racial
difference in Kenya.

IMMIGR ANTS AND EMPIRE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

After a century of territorial and political acquisition by the British East India
Company, India came under the direct rule of the British monarch in 1858.
Over the next fifty years Britain acquired colonies and protectorates across
the Indian Ocean. This expansion was facilitated by the material, administra-
tive, and military power of its Indian empire. Central to the imperial ideology
of Britain’s second empire was the civilizing mission that envisioned bringing
“Western” modernity and progress to the colonies. Colonial discourse thus
distinguished between colonizing rulers and colonized subjects, although in
practice this separation was never complete. From the late eighteenth cen-
tury on, imperial rhetoric and policy were premised on shifting racial and
civilizational hierarchies between rulers and subjects that were resurrected
and contested across time and space. In India the colonial state was preoc-
cupied with classifying a multitude of often overlapping social, religious, and
occupational groups into distinct singular caste and racial categories, while it
4 Indians in Kenya

divided its non-European subjects across the ocean along ethnolinguistic

“tribal” and racial lines. In settler colonies such as the Cape Colony, Natal,
and Transvaal in South Africa, the distinction between the indigenous “na-
tive” and colonist European served the self-governing ambitions and racially
segregationist policies of European settlers, while the administration used
racial hierarchies toward realizing its own project of imperialism, which was
caught up with the spread of Christianity, civilization, and commerce.5
Between 1830 and 1920, Britain built an empire that spanned the Indian,
Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. This was an empire over which the sun literally
never set. The consolidation and imperial development of these colonies re-
quired reliable and economically viable administrators, soldiers, economic
agents, and workers. From the mid-nineteenth century to the First World
War, approximately 29 million Indians left the subcontinent, the majority of
whom arrived in Britain’s crown colonies and protectorates as sojourners
and settlers. Many of these departures marked a circulatory migration, as
travelers frequently returned to India, often to leave again. They included
merchants with large-scale business ventures across the littoral realms of
the Indian Ocean that predated British imperial rule; government clerks,
policemen, soldiers, lawyers, and teachers educated in English who, after a
century of colonialism in India, were familiar with Britain’s administrative,
judicial, military, and educational colonial institutions; and petty traders who
took advantage of opportunities to venture into new territories. Britain’s
Indian subjects in its colonies outside India were intimately connected with
the expansion of the empire as agents of modernity who straddled the discur-
sive division between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, with the
abolition of slavery, more than a million Indians arrived in Fiji, Mauritius,
Natal, Burma, Malaya, and the Caribbean as indentured laborers to work
on European-owned plantations on contracts that by the 1890s gave them
the right to settle in the colonies at the end of their indenture. The settle-
ment of Indian merchants, professionals, artisans, and laborers complicated
the colonial equation of all non-Europeans with “natives” in nomenclature—
since, much like the Europeans, Indians had no inherent territorial claim
of belonging—and in substance, as they considered themselves settlers who
were distinct from indigenous “natives.” Among the most famous of such
sojourners in the Indian Ocean was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who in 1893 ar-
rived in South Africa, where he got entangled in the racial hierarchies of
the colonial state that identified him as a non-European and attempted to
treat him like a “native.” This was a category that equated him with Afri-
cans, a classification he fought hard to resist.6
 Introduction 5

In 1895 Kenya was absorbed into the British Empire as part of its East
Africa Protectorate. Merchants from the western coast of India had been
trading along the East African coast for centuries before this. Invested in
the spread of commerce beyond the littoral realms of the new protectorate,
they facilitated and welcomed the establishment of British rule in the re-
gion. These merchants were joined by small-scale traders, civil servants em-
ployed as clerks, guards, and policemen—all in supervisory positions over
Africans—skilled workers, and indentured laborers employed to build the
Uganda railways. Merchants, clerks, administrators, laborers, and artisans
emigrated from Gujarat, Punjab, Goa, and Bombay, including Hindus, Sikhs,
Muslims, and Christians. Like others who traversed the Indian Ocean,
these migrants returned to India regularly and often permanently. Close to
two-thirds of the 40,000 indentured railway workers exercised their right
to repatriation. Those who stayed behind either established dukkas (small
retail shops) along the railway line or offered their expertise as skilled arti-
sans to a range of employers. Government employees and skilled workers
contracted by private firms also returned to India at the end of their tenure.
Those who settled in Kenya permanently continued to travel back to India
for marriage, education, and business. Men married women from their home-
towns in the subcontinent and returned to Kenya with their brides. In the
absence of higher educational institutions in East Africa, families sent their
children to schools and colleges in India, where they witnessed anticolonial
agitations and nationalist assertions after the First World War. The com-
mercial community in Kenya also moved between the two colonies seeking
lucrative business opportunities. They exported East African raw cotton and
ivory to India and imported cotton piece goods, jute bags, foodstuffs (in-
cluding tea, sugar, rice, and oil), and consumer goods into Kenya. The large-
scale merchants sold their wares to wholesalers, from whom petty traders
procured goods for their shops on a system of credit. The Indian rupee was
the medium of circulation across the Indian Ocean and within East Africa
until the early 1920s, further reinforcing the connection between India and
Kenya.
The proximity of India and the circulation of people and goods within
the empire shaped Indian diasporic consciousness. The continuing affi li-
ation of Indian immigrants with their homeland was articulated in sev-
eral tangible ways. This connection has been the subject of many recent
works that remap South Asian history to include these extraterritorial ex-
periences and exchanges. Over the last decade, several scholars have used
the Indian Ocean to highlight the material, ideological, and political
6 Indians in Kenya

connections that shaped the imaginary of South Asians beyond the territo-
rial boundaries of India. Thomas Metcalf and Robert Blyth, for example,
have conceptualized the western Indian Ocean as a sphere of Indian influ-
ence. They consider colonial India as the nodal point from which British
rule expanded in the region through territorial conquest facilitated by the
British Indian Army, consolidation achieved by the spread of colonial ideas
and administrators from British India, and infrastructural expansion devel-
oped by Indian labor in new colonies. Moving beyond this imperial em-
phasis, Sugata Bose, Sunil Amrith, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Nile Green have
highlighted the mediations of colonial subjects, material goods, nascent na-
tionalists, and their ideas, analyzing the Indian Ocean realm as a connected
region, linking the littoral regions of Malaya, Burma, East Africa, South
Africa, and the Gulf with India historically and historiographically. Fo-
cusing on mobility and extraterritorial affiliations, these works have revealed
the extent to which universalizing solidarities based on religion, ideas of
equality, and anticolonialism were constituted by and resonated within the
Indian Ocean space through print capitalism, sacred geographies, and ex-
patriate patriots.7
These journeys, imaginaries, and connected routes have primarily led back
to the same destination—a singular “homeland,” India. Susan Bayly has em-
phasized the importance of the idea of a “greater India” among transnational
activists, concluding that the “acts of imagination which give life to national
identities in arenas far beyond a bounded territorial homeland obviously take
their power from the fact that they connect so directly with the real-life ex-
periences of so many people in colonial and other diasporas.” In his influ-
ential work, Sugata Bose characterizes the Indian Ocean as an interregional
arena, between the national and the global. From this perspective, he ar-
gues that anticolonialism “as an ideology was both tethered by the idea of
a homeland while strengthened by extraterritorial affi liations.” Most re-
cently, Ramachandra Guha has suggested that Gandhi’s critique of colo-
nialism, which shaped his nationalist protest in India, was itself the result
of his political consciousness that formed in a particularly diasporic context
in South Africa.8
The Indian orientation of this scholarship has resulted in three historio-
graphical arguments about South Asians who mediated in this space. First,
these works highlight a cosmopolitan, globalist ethos of ideas that consti-
tuted anticolonial discourses in India. Second, the emphasis on mobility and
circulation as a key constituting element of Indian Ocean historiography has
 Introduction 7

led to a chronologically driven conclusion about ruptures within these oce-

anic networks. Scholars have shown that as universalist affiliations conflicted
with the economic and political realities of territorial and racial articula-
tions of nationalism from the late 1920s onward, the seamless trespassing
of boundaries by sojourners that had created an interregional arena ended.
This, they argue, interrupted the flow of people, goods, and ideas across the
Indian Ocean. Third, focusing on the consequent immobility of the twen-
tieth century, these works emphasize the inward-looking diasporic conscious-
ness of settlers for whom homeland, the place of their departure, and host
land became physically separate. The Indian moorings of the diaspora in
this framework render diasporic politics as belonging to a singular home-
land, India, with little attention to their engagement with the Indian Ocean’s
African littoral.
Building on this scholarship, this book moves our narrative focus beyond
Indians’ extraterritorial connections that looked east to India to include a
second homeland to which Indians made territorial and generational
claims. This homeland was constituted in the diasporic hinterland, that is,
Kenya. Indians in Kenya uses the Indian Ocean as a horizon from which
to study the political strategies, rhetoric, affiliations, and specific claims of
Indians for whom Kenya was not just a host land but was a homeland
during moments of mobility and immobility. Gaurav Desai has warned
that the “enthusiasms for Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms risk erasing the
histories of sub-Saharan exchanges” that were also simultaneously taking
place. He cautions against “ethnocentricisms that would label a shared
ocean as only Indian” and calls for the inclusion of “African spaces, people,
and ideas” in such studies.9 Toward this end, this work pushes the frontiers
of South Asian history beyond the littoral realms of the Indian Ocean to
study local history in a connective framework. It throws into relief the ex-
istence of two homelands—India and Kenya—for diasporic Indians, whose
political imaginary was simultaneously local and extraterritorial. Frederick
Cooper points out that the “spatial imagination of intellectuals . . . and po-
litical activists . . . was neither global nor local, but was built out of specific
lines of connection and posited regional, continental and transcontinental
affinities,” which expanded and narrowed over time.10 This was the case
for Indians in Kenya.
Emerging from the lived reality of their Indian Ocean crossings were ideas
and practices concerning politics, class, and race that shaped Indian claims
and languages of belonging to India and Kenya. These resulted in political
8 Indians in Kenya

and material connections that evoked both India, their civilizational home-
land, and Kenya, their territorial homeland. It was in this encounter that
universalizing ideas of civilization, citizenship, equality, and solidarity cir-
culating within the Indian Ocean were applied in a very specific and local
material, political, and economic context. This book argues that diasporic
consciousness emerged from Indian connections and interactions between
two local spaces, tethered to two homelands.

B E I N G “ I N D I A N ” I N K E N YA

Indian immigration to Kenya was intimately linked with the British colo-
nial project there. Although traders from the western coast of India were a
visible presence in port towns such as Zanzibar and Mombasa well before
1895, it was in aligning themselves ideologically and geographically with the
colonial state in the last decade of the nineteenth century that Indians made
a territorial claim in Kenya, establishing a permanent settlement there.
British explorers and statesmen depended on the material and political cap-
ital of these merchants in the East African littoral of the Indian Ocean. As
the British moved into the hinterland, they encouraged the settlement of
Indians in the new protectorate, using Indian business expertise to create
a monetary colonial economy, Indian labor to build a railway to connect this
with the larger imperial economy by exporting agricultural produce, and
Indian skilled ser vices in administration and other infrastructural develop-
ments. Until the early 1900s, the colonial state envisioned developing Kenya
as the “America of the Hindu,” considering Indians subimperialist agents
of civilization in the region.11 In the first two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, these Indians were joined by European colonists who were encouraged
to settle in Kenya as farmers and develop their land to produce cash crops for
export. These settlers, many of whom had moved north from South Africa,
brought with them racial hierarchies and political ambitions based on their
experiences there. They emerged as a powerful political lobby, joining the
colonial administration when the state consolidated its rule in Kenya. As
“Europeans,” they considered themselves the only legitimate agents of civ-
ilization and modernity in Africa. By the First World War, colonialism in
Kenya was premised on a state that distinguished between its colonial sub-
jects, creating a racial pyramid in which Europeans were on top with po-
litical and economic privileges denied to non-Europeans, especially direct
electoral representation to the Kenya Legislative Council and access to the
fertile highlands of Kenya. Below them came “Asians,” Indians, who were
 Introduction 9

kept out of the highlands but were given limited political representation and
economic rights. The state continued to encourage traders to venture across
the colony and employed Indians as clerks, guards, supervisors, and skilled
workers but decisively prevented them from becoming agriculturalists by
closely monitoring the purchase and sale of land. At the bottom were “na-
tives,” Africans, whose political and economic engagements with the colo-
nial state were severely circumscribed. African “chiefs” were appointed
as local authorities, although they had no autonomous power over the com-
munities they represented, while the first African was nominated to the
Legislative Council only in 1944. It took another decade before Africans
were enfranchised on a limited basis. Ordinary Africans were expected to
perform a dual function—to make European farms profitable export-
oriented enterprises by serving on them as laborers, and to join the colo-
nial monetary economy by cultivating their own land and selling their sur-
plus to petty shops run by Indians to pay taxes.
Over nearly seventy years of its rule, the colonial state in Kenya tried to
strike a delicate balance between maintaining its racial pyramid to keep Eu-
ropeans at the top and facilitating African civilizational progress through
carefully formulated structural policies in employment and education. Within
the government, Indians held jobs in middle-level clerical, supervisory, and
policing roles, while Europeans were predominantly managers. Africans were
kept almost entirely out of the civil services until after the Second World War,
and when they were recruited, salaries were scaled according to race
with non-Europeans receiving three-fifths of the pay given to Europeans
until the mid-1950s. Indian skilled labor was brought to the colony on con-
tract, receiving fi xed wages from either public or private employers, while
the government’s African employees were predominantly hired as unskilled
workers, receiving wages based on qualifications and skills that were acquired
through formal education, a realm in which the colonial racial hierarchy
operated. Until 1911, when a Department of Education was set up, Chris-
tian missionaries were at the helm of Western-style institutional education
in Kenya. In 1911 the government began to promote education in the colony,
establishing separate schools for Indians and Europeans and assisting mis-
sionary-run schools financially. By the 1920s the state had become directly
involved in African “education.” In keeping with its vision of Africans as
laborers and agriculturalists, the government’s efforts were directed to-
ward agriculture and technical training, especially in the railways and
Public Works Department, where it hoped to create a skilled labor force
based on a system of apprenticeship. In these departments, small numbers
10 Indians in Kenya

of unskilled workers were trained by skilled Indian artisans while African

askaris formed the police rank-and-file headed by Indian and European
inspectors and officers. This put Indians in a supervisory position over Af-
ricans within the government. Outside the purview of the state, Indians
and Africans set up privately funded schools. These were also racially sepa-
rate. From 1906 onward Indian merchants financed Indian schools that
were aimed at spreading education among the trading community in Nai-
robi and Mombasa. The high fees charged at these private institutions
were prohibitive for ordinary Africans. On their part, in the early 1930s
secular, independent schools were started by politically active Kikuyu to
move African education away from missionary influence.12
The racial segregation of colonial education was reflected in stark eco-
nomic inequality along racial lines. At the moment of decolonization in 1963,
59 percent of all Indian residents in Kenya had received at least nine years
of schooling, an education that only 4 percent of Africans had benefited from.
This disparity was reinforced by the lack of higher educational institutions
in Kenya till 1957. Hitherto, Indians had crossed the Indian Ocean to at-
tend colleges and universities in India and to earn professional degrees, a
journey Africans joined only in the late 1940s, when the postcolonial gov-
ernment of India sponsored scholarships for them. In structural terms, this
immediately put Indians at an employment advantage, as 23 percent of
Indian adult males held technical jobs and 4 percent were in supervisory
positions, whereas only 1 percent of adult African men were in such occu-
pations and almost none were supervisors. At independence, 18 percent of
working Indians earned more than £750 a year in the private sector, mostly
in commercial ventures. At the time only 1 percent of Africans earned more
than £600.13
Diasporic consciousness in Kenya emerged from Indian mediations of
such hierarchical colonial structures and a civilizational identity that was ar-
ticulated in racialized discourses. The economic, educational, and employ-
ment structures of the colonial state that created racial divisions between
Europeans, Indians, and Africans marked Indians as materially different
from Africans, a process in which Indians were complicit. Whether as em-
ployees hired for skilled jobs and receiving higher salaries than unskilled Af-
rican workers, as supervisors in workshops, the railways, and the police with
authority over African apprentices and askaris, as traders benefiting from the
absence of competition from African businessmen as the state bound Afri-
cans to land and labor through its taxation policies until the mid-1930s, or as
 Introduction 11

political activists demanding rights of representation, being “Indian” in Kenya

separated these immigrants from indigenous “natives” in tangible ways. Such
differences were sustained by continuous contact with India and endogamous
social and economic patterns of settlement that emphasized the civilizational
affiliations of diasporic Indians with their Indian homeland. This was visible
in their racial distance from Africans in their territorial homeland. As noted
earlier, families made Kenya their permanent home, with single men crossing
the Indian Ocean and bringing their brides back to East Africa. Interracial
marriages were rare and unwelcome. In 1909 colonial officials reported that
a small number of Jemdars (former indentured laborers who had returned to
India at the end of their contract where they were once again recruited by the
railway authorities in Kenya to oversee railway workers) married African
women, in particular Masai women along the coast. Disapproval of such mis-
cegenation was reflected in the Swahili term chotara, used by colonial offi-
cials to refer to “half-breed” offspring of such marriages. This disapproval was
also recorded in the excommunication of a young Punjabi laborer-turned-
shopkeeper in Kisumu from the Punjabi settlement in the area when he mar-
ried an African woman in the early 1900s.14 In the economic realm, hiring
skilled workers in Kenya, predominantly Indians who were brought to the
colony on contract, was a more cost-effective system than investing time and
capital in training unskilled workers locally. Moreover, Indian businessmen
who ventured beyond the East African coast depended on a racially bound
circuit of credit and supply from exporters, wholesalers, and petty shop-
keepers, all of whom were Indian. Big business and petty trade were family-
run operations. This created a racialized network of trade in the colony.
In their studies of Indians in Africa, scholars have considered diasporic
attachments to their civilizational homeland in several ways. They assume
this affiliation to be static, unchanging over time, marking an impenetrable
boundary between Indians and Africans. This book considers the ways in
which Indian civilizational discourse in Kenya was evoked at different his-
torical conjunctures to simultaneously establish political proximity to and
create distance from Africans. It highlights how diasporic consciousness was
shaped by civilizational affiliations that were articulated in shifting racial-
ized political discourses among Europeans, Indians, and Africans in Kenya.
Thomas Blom Hansen has argued in his work on Indians in Durban that
this affiliation was an “unwieldy fetish” for the imagined “greatness of the
civilization” which constituted Indian race consciousness. This, he concludes,
distanced Indians from Africans. In colonial Kenya, rather than being an
12 Indians in Kenya

imagined fetish, civilizational discourse was shaped by Indians’ tangible

connections to India, which served to make specific claims in particular
historical moments between 1895 and 1968 in Kenya. Throughout this
time, political assertions discursively emphasized “Indian” rights. What
constituted being “Indian” in Kenya, however, was constantly changing. As
their Indian homeland transitioned from being the jewel in the crown to a
postcolonial nation, Indian civilizational claims were framed in multiple
ways. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, merchants posi-
tioned themselves as subimperialist colonizers, asserting their rights as
imperial citizens to gain parity with European settlers in political repre-
sentation and land ownership; this is discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. This
extraterritorial rendering of Indian civilizational genius constituted the
idea of “greater India,” which Isabel Hofmeyr notes functioned as a
“boundary in the process of imagining India within empire.” In high-
lighting their modernity and civilization, “Africa” emerged as a fault line
as Africa and Africans came to represent a “frontier” between the “civilized
and savage” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 Indeed,
the first organized political campaign of Indian merchants in Kenya em-
phasized their economic role in bringing modernity to Africa in the form of
trade. As India moved out of the empire, this frontier shifted.

B E T W E E N SO LI DA R IT Y A N D F R IC TIO N

The consolidation of the racial pyramid of the colonial state in Kenya coin-
cided with the rise of nationalist politics in India. Anticolonial critiques came
together after the First World War in mass movements in the subcontinent
at the same time as a new generation of immigrants traveled across the
Indian Ocean as petty traders, skilled artisans, and professionals. They car-
ried with them notions of equality and freedom embedded in Indian
nationalist discourse that were universalist in scope as these Indians wanted
to achieve the same in Kenya. These aspirations were reinforced by their
encounter with the hierarchical underpinnings of the racializing state in
Kenya, which marked them as being below Europeans on the civilizational
ladder of privilege and access. Demanding equality of treatment, particu-
larly political and economic rights, Indian activists criticized European
racism as abhorrent to their civilizational genius, which was resulting in the
overthrow of the empire in their homeland. In Kenya, this demand for ra-
cial equality brought them into a space inhabited by another group of non-
 Introduction 13

Europeans, Africans, who were also on the receiving end of European racism.
From the late 1920s on, Indian political discourses and strategies were in-
timately linked to African politics as brown and black non-Europeans pushed
against the racial hierarchy of the colonial state while constituting racial fron-
tiers in their claims and languages of belonging. This engagement arising
from specific, local economic and political concerns is analyzed in Chap-
ters 3 and 4.
The entanglement of African and Indian politics has been the subject of
several recent works that study interracial alliances and ruptures as mutu-
ally exclusive. Few consider the simultaneous coexistence of solidarity and
friction in constituting this relationship. This paradoxical coexistence is cen-
tral to Indians in Kenya. Historiographical approaches have considered this
relationship either through the lens of solidarity (especially as a theoretical
framework for considering connections, aspirations, and momentary align-
ments of non-Europeans) or from the perspective of friction. Felicitas Becker
and Joel Cabrita, for example, have pointed to the exclusionary implications
of universalist civilizational rhetoric circulating in the Indian Ocean, un-
derscoring the need to “hold cosmopolitan practices in tension with exclu-
sionary dynamics.” Antoinette Burton has also warned against too easy a
celebration of the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity, which glosses over simul-
taneous invocations of racial hierarchies. Similarly, Hofmeyr has concluded
that Afro-Asian solidarity was “form with little content.” However, she points
out that “if there was any content in these discourses of ‘Afro-Asian’ soli-
darity, then it was to be formulated in the periphery,” in still-colonized
realms of the British Empire that were home to Indians.16 Indeed, rather
than being binary analytical devices, both friction and solidarity provide
entry points into this study of the connected history of Indians and Africans
in Kenya, relationships that are located in specific times and spaces.
The attainment of nationhood in their civilizational homeland reverber-
ated in Kenya in contestations over the direction of Indian politics there.
These public debates underscored different diasporic assertions of their
rights and privileges in their territorial homeland, Kenya. Demographic tran-
sitions in the 1930s diversified the occupational, religious, and class con-
cerns of Indians. Indian workers unionized to demand higher wages and
better working conditions from the government and their Indian employers.
Their leadership emerged as the most radical voice of anticolonial politics,
emphatically arguing for immediate self-governance in 1950. Indian repre-
sentatives within the Legislative Council tempered this radicalism, as did
14 Indians in Kenya

Indian employers. The division of the diaspora’s Indian homeland along reli-
gious lines in 1947, when India and Pakistan became postcolonial nation-
states, also inspired some Muslims in Kenya to argue for separate political
representation for Hindus and Muslims in the Legislative Council on the
basis of their now distinct and warring civilizational homelands in South
Asia. Emboldened by the success of anticolonial movements in India, which
they had personally witnessed, some among the new generation of immi-
grants aspired to achieve the same in Kenya, articulating a virulent critique
of colonialism that envisioned an interracial struggle for independence.
Other political activists, however, cautioned against too unconditional and
immediate an alliance with Africans, supporting their “progress” toward
self-governance from a safe distance in rhetoric rather than in practice.
Indians in Kenya locates the fractures in diasporic politics in particular
moments and places, highlighting the ways in which Indian civilizational af-
filiations simultaneously opened up and closed off spaces of interracial col-
laboration—a process in which Indians and Africans were equally engaged.
In his study of racial politics and nationalism in Dar es Salaam, James
Brennan has argued that “Indian diasporic politics of equality offered a pow-
erful but limited vision.” He identifies this limitation in the “condescending
language of civilization” that originated in invocations to “Greater India” in
the early twentieth century and continued as “tutelary nationalism” in the
1940s and 1950s. Brennan notes that these “revealed [the] hierarchical under-
pinnings” of the “much-vaulted cosmopolitanism of the Indian Ocean world,”
concluding that “Indian nationalists in Tanganyika rarely engaged African
political concerns.”17 This was not the case in Kenya. A common enemy,
the European settlers, and a shared aspiration to racial equality led Indian
leaders within and outside the Legislative Council to make common cause
with African grievances on multiple occasions in the realm of organized, in-
stitutional politics. These are examined in Chapters 3 and 4.
From the early 1920s onward, Indian intellectuals and political activists
criticized specific economic policies relating to Africans, particularly labor
and tax legislation that did not directly affect Indians, and demanded po-
litical representation for all non-Europeans, including Africans. Since the
desire to acquire land in the highlands motivated Indian merchants to ini-
tially question the racial hierarchy of colonialism in Kenya, in their criti-
cism of the political lobby of Europeans these merchants-turned-politicians
joined African political organizations and leaders who were doing the
same. From the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, Indian and African members of
 Introduction 15

the Legislative Council and elected officials of their racially bounded po-
litical organizations often collaborated on political strategies and specific
issues, including labor and land policies, constitutional changes, and
electoral processes. In the realm of institutional politics, the demand for
land and representation predominated in African political concerns.
While Indians evoked their civilizational achievements to challenge the
racial hierarchy of the administration, Africans’ claim to land was based
on their indigenous status as belonging originally to this territory. Since
Indians were predominantly traders and skilled workers, not agricultur-
alists, there was no conflict between their demand for racial equality in
land ownership and the discourse of indigeneity that accompanied the
African demand for land. In fact, the shared aspiration to land ownership
in the highlands brought Indian and African political initiatives together
rhetorically and institutionally.
Beyond land, low wages and high living costs triggered labor protests
among Indian and African workers in the interwar years. Although these
movements remained racially separate, trade union leaders collaborated
over their demands, consulted with one another, and shared the political
space. As elaborated in Chapter 3, in 1949–1950 they successfully aligned
their movements for a brief moment. The universalizing aspirations to
equality and freedom allowed leaders to cross racial boundaries and put up a
united front against a common enemy: European settlers leveraging their
position within the colonial administration to treat both Indians and Afri-
cans as unequal. This joint front of non-Europeans reached its zenith at a
mass meeting of about 20,000 Africans and Indians in Nairobi in April 1950,
at which they demanded immediate independence. Indian nationhood oc-
cupied a modular presence in this anticolonial politics for both Indians and
Africans during this time. With the outbreak of the Mau Mau rebellion and
the ensuing emergency in 1952, however, competing visions of Kenyan na-
tionhood dominated political debates. These are discussed in Chapters 4
and 5. Although the Indian political leadership continued to rhetorically sup-
port Africans’ ambitions to self-governance, the interracial alliance was
stretched to its limit as the urgency and radicalism of the rebellion deter-
mined the direction and pace of decolonization. Within and outside the Leg-
islative Council Indians disagreed about whether their support should be
conditional or unconditional. Many were concerned that the violence of the
Mau Mau meant following a trajectory of anticolonial politics different from
the one that had succeeded in India. Others attested to what they believed
16 Indians in Kenya

were the rebel’s legitimate political aspirations. African politics was also
divided over the need or desirability of allying with Indians.
Several recent works have pointed to the extent to which diasporic en-
dogamy resulted in anti-Indian nationalist discourses in East and South Af-
rica. With some exceptions, they do not consider interracial politics that came
together and ruptured around specific policies and imagined futures of the
nation, which is the concern of this book. As Jon Soske has noted, “in the
eyes of Africans, institutions of diasporic endogamy,” especially their do-
mestic organization around marriage, food, and religion, were “signifiers of
racial exclusion and social hierarchy” in South Africa. The impenetrability of
these diasporic spaces, Brennan has argued, created “racial resentment upon
which African nationalist thought and practice” was built in Tanganyika.
Similarly, Gijsbert Oonk concludes that Indians’ “ethnic entrepreneurship,”
particularly their tight credit networks, made them “settled strangers” in
East Africa.18 The Indian Ocean circulations and civilizational affiliation of
Indians sustained similar patterns of endogamous diasporic settlement in
Kenya. Public political discourse and strategies, however, were largely shaped
by secular concerns that related to specific colonial policies and business
ventures and were framed by racial and civilizational claims. This was a
masculine space, as only Indian men were elected to the Legislative Council
and leadership positions in political organizations. Indians in Kenya is a study
of the civilizational discourse of these men in making economic and political
claims in Kenya. Although gendered subjectivities and religious affiliations
shaped diasporic consciousness in social organization, most visibly in mar-
ital arrangements, Indian political discourse was largely unconcerned with
sexuality, religious practices, and other cultural preoccupations.19
While the joint front of Indians and Africans went beyond rhetoric, taking
up particular issues, this politics was deeply contested. As non-Europeans,
Indians and Africans inhabited a shared space in Kenya both politically and
geographically. In the colonial capital, Nairobi, Indians and Africans lived,
worked, and organized protests against specific grievances that affected their
everyday lives. The lived reality of colonialism’s racial inequality, however,
was unequal. This limited the scope and success of elite interracial collabo-
rations. In the capital and smaller towns and market centers, by the late 1920s
the dukka had come to occupy a tangible space where economic aspirations
to material accumulation could be realized both for shopkeepers, who were
predominantly Indian, and for their African customers. The inequality of
Indians and Africans that resulted from educational, occupational, and in-
 Introduction 17

come differences exposed the disjuncture between the universalizing anti-

colonial rhetoric of equality and the lived economic reality of colonial privi-
leges. Until the First World War, the achievements of Indian entrepreneurs
in bringing the hinterland into the interregional colonial economy across the
Indian Ocean were used by Indian politicians to highlight Indian colonizing
abilities and ambitions in an attempt to gain parity with European settlers.
In this rendering, Indian civilizational genius, particularly its ability to cross
the ocean as an agent of modernity, made Indians equal to Europeans and
superior to Africans. Indian transnational nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s
opened up the discursive space to stake a territorial claim in Kenya on the
basis of racial equality, an interracial aspiration, as Indian colonizing ambi-
tions were abandoned in favor of nationhood. At the threshold of indepen-
dence, Indian entrepreneurship, with its past contributions and future vision
of economic development, was evoked in territorial and generational asser-
tions as Indians made a nationalist claim to their Kenyan homeland. In the
1960s, Indian shopkeepers and businessmen continued to retain their posi-
tion in the economy as traders and industrialists who ran family-owned ven-
tures. Their political stake in the new nation emphasized their rights as citi-
zens to maintain this status quo, resisting the state’s efforts to deracialize
their businesses. Although race consciousness held within it the promise of
interracial solidarity as Indians and Africans united against the racialism of
the colonial state, the friction of racialized economic structures and political
discourses limited the scope and reach of these alliances. This book con-
siders Indian proximity to and distance from African politics as it resulted
from this economic framing of their civilizational genus and genius. Chap-
ters 3, 4, and 5, in particular, explore the diversity of Indian and African poli-
tics in their embrace and disavowal of interracial collaborations in specific
moments and locations.
At the end of the Second World War, pressures on land, high taxes, and
the increasing cost of living, particularly housing and food for Africans, fur-
ther racialized impoverishment. African customers encountered this pov-
erty in dukkas, where everyday goods such as sugar, potatoes, and maize
became unaffordable. Hoping to make a profit, shopkeepers refused to label
their goods with fi xed prices, relying on bargaining and black marketing to
sell their goods, pulling their customers into a cycle of debt. Although
Indian and African workers campaigned together for better working condi-
tions in the late 1940s, the former were employed as skilled artisans, earning
higher wages than the predominantly African unskilled laborers, further
18 Indians in Kenya

distancing their needs and demands. The rhetoric of indigeneity emerging

out of the demand for land resonated in political organizations. Indian
shops were targeted in protest against their trade practices, and African
leaders demanded that Africans be employed in skilled jobs that were being
usurped by Indian artisans. In African political discourse during the 1940s,
material inequality resulted from the presence of immigrants in their
land—Europeans who usurped the most fertile highlands and had a mo-
nopoly over the production of cash crops, and Indians who, with their en-
dogamous trade practices, monopolized wholesale and retail and cheated
Africans. This critique of Indian accumulation of wealth was framed as the
colonial privilege of nonindigenous Indians and voiced a desire for African
shops. Eager to shift focus away from the highlands issue and increase agri-
cultural exports from the colony, the administration encouraged the estab-
lishment of “native” businesses in market centers under its supervision. With
high licensing fees, restrictions on the quality and kinds of goods these en-
trepreneurs could trade in, and no viable institutions to offer them credit,
colonial surveillance limited rather than aided nascent businessmen, for they
were unable to compete with the entrenched dukkawallah (Indian petty
shopkeeper), who operated largely outside state control. The rhetorical im-
agery of the cunning Indian trader who cheated the poor African customers
was used as a populist trope by African political leaders that reflected real
grievances, as Indians were the most visible and immediate obstacle to their
economic aspirations. This aggrievement resonated among aspiring shop-
keepers and ordinary marketgoers, who boycotted Indian shops and criti-
cized interracial protests in Nairobi, urging their leadership to keep their
political organizations and movements monoracial.
From the mid-1950s onward, both within and outside the Legislative
Council, African leaders began to articulate a vision of nationhood in which
freedom and equality would be meaningful only if the colonial inheritance
of economic inequality was reversed in postcolonial Kenya, if necessary by
state intervention to privilege its African citizens by redistributing wealth
in land and trade. Although these leaders had welcomed interracial alliances
in the 1940s and early 1950s, they were ambivalent about the reach of this
collaboration beyond the general demand for independence and very spe-
cific legislative issues. As independence appeared imminent in the late 1950s,
they used the Swahili proverb Wengi huwa kama paka urafiki wa mradi
(Many people are like cats befriending a mouse, extending friendship to make
a profit) to warn Indians that they would receive no privileges in the post-
 Introduction 19

colonial nation. For them, the claims of having developed the country eco-
nomically, which Indians framed as nationalist assertions during the 1950s
and 1960s, were no different from the colonizing ambitions of early twentieth-
century Indian colonists. Within a few years of independence it became clear
that freedom had not brought material change in the lives of ordinary Ke-
nyans; this resulted in “ner vous conditions characterizing the postcolonial
moment in Kenya’s political economy,” in which Indians were implicated.20
The postcolonial state espoused a racialized nationalist discourse, positioning
Indians as permanent immigrants whose rights would always be subordi-
nate to the interests of the indigenous citizens of the nation, as determined
by the state. The continuing affiliation of Indians to their civilizational home-
land, visible in their entrenched position as the nation’s petty bourgeoisie
with a monopoly in trade and skilled work, triggered legislation intended
to replace Indian skilled workers and shopkeepers with an African middle
class. This resulted in a voluntary exodus of Indians out of Kenya, discussed
in Chapter 6.
Beyond the realm of organized politics, African ambivalence regarding
Indian material wealth revealed itself in violent confrontations from the
mid-1950s onward. Mau Mau guerrillas were involved in sporadic and or-
ganized raids on Indian shops and homes for supplies such as food, watches,
and guns. High rates of unemployment during and after the emergency in
Nairobi, where Indian residents accounted for approximately 30 percent of
its population, resulted in petty thefts, muggings, and large-scale burglaries
in Indian stores and houses. The boundaries of race and class pushed against
one another in interracial spaces of urban living, manifesting as mundane
confrontations—between pedestrians and motorists and between shop-
keepers and customers, for example—that carried within them the threat
of escalating racialized violence. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it, “I am not sure
if it’s the fact of their Indianness or the fact of their being a most visible
part of the affluent middle class [that triggers violence]. In such a case the
line between the racial and class resentment is thin.”21 At the same time,
some Indians began to articulate a civilizational discourse that portrayed
Indian “innocence” as the “victim” of “savage” African violence, which found
wide spread resonance in the community. This was, on one hand, a reac-
tion to the political discourse of indigeneity that from the mid-1940s threat-
ened to treat them as unequal citizens in postcolonial Kenya and to being
on the receiving end of everyday violence. On the other hand, Indians un-
derscored their civilizational difference from Africans by claiming that their
20 Indians in Kenya

material profits were evidence of their nationalist endeavor to develop Ke-

nya’s economy. Therefore, they argued, as citizens with equal rights they
ought to be entitled to retain their circuits of endogamous business
organizations—economic networks that were closed to Africans who consid-
ered them colonial privileges. By the early 1960s racial and class concerns
converged as several Indians pointed to the escalating everyday violence to
argue that Africans were not ready for self-governance. At independence ap-
proximately half of the Indian population did not take up Kenyan citizen-
ship. In 1968 many of them became twice migrants, departing for Britain.

Being “African,” “Indian,” and “Kenyan” signified historically specific affili-

ations and concerns that shifted over time and space, changes that are traced
in this book. This work aims to disentangle the multiple ways in which these
identities were constituted in practice by historicizing their use in political
discourse. The murkiness of these terms as racial categories aligned with
skin color is, however, reproduced in my use of “Indians” and “Africans.”
While this nomenclature alludes to the singularity of the very same territo-
rial, racial, and national affiliations that this book calls into question, I use
“Indian” and “African” as descriptive group categories. While I am cogni-
zant of the contemporary conflation of “India” and “Indian” with the
Indian nation-state that emerged in 1947, in this book “Indians” include
those immigrants in Kenya whose civilizational homeland gained nation-
hood as Pakistan at the same time. Historically, immigrants from the In-
dian subcontinent in Kenya were and sometimes continue to be referred to
as “Asian” in East Africa and Britain. I have avoided using this as a descrip-
tive term, since “Asian” is an inheritance from colonial racial categories both
shaped and challenged by Indians. I have limited my use of the language of
color in describing historical subjects as “brown” and “black” because the
territorial affiliations and civilizational claims belied by these terms are
central to this book.
Indian diasporic consciousness that emerged from its attachment to its
civilizational homeland, India, and its territorial homeland, Kenya, resulted
in paradoxical claims to racial solidarity and difference. With the exodus of
Indians in 1968 it appeared that the rhetoric of solidarity had run its course
and that the politics of racial difference had triumphed, rupturing the pos-
sibilities of interracial coexistence. Sandeep Vidyarthi and Vipul Darji’s ref-
erences to themselves as “Africans” and “Kenyans” in the aftermath of the
Westgate mall siege, however, emphasize the enduring promise of this dis-
 Introduction 21

course, which can be located in par ticular historical conjunctures. The

fleeting reconciliation of racial differences in such moments of national soli-
darity serves as a reminder for us to take seriously the possibilities and limi-
tations of the politics of diaspora that reveal a long history and diversity of
interracial engagement. Indians in Kenya is the story of both the success of
Indian-African solidarity and the friction of racial hierarchies that were two
sides of the same coin between 1895 and 1968.
 ONE

R
From the America of the Hindu
to White Man’s Country

was a Bohra merchant who arrived in Mombasa

A L I B H A I M U L L A J E E VA N J E E
from Karachi in 1890 seeking business opportunities. Two decades later, in
an appeal for “justice and equality” for Britain’s Indian subjects in East
Africa, he announced, “It is we the Indians who have made and developed
the deserts of East Africa. . . . It is the Indian traders who have been trading
there for the last 300 years and it is they and they alone who have done the
work of exploitation and development of the country’s resources.” Jeevan-
jee’s claim to the territorial and material development of Kenya was a colo-
nizing one that predated British rule in the region. This had been acknowl-
edged by John Kirk, Scottish explorer, botanist, and companion of David
Livingstone, who visited Kenya in 1866 as the British vice-consul in Zan-
zibar. Kirk noted the absence of English trading firms, in contrast to Indian
merchants, in whose hands “whole trade in everything was. . . . But for the
Indians we [the British] should not be there now,” he proclaimed.1 Signifi-
cantly, Kirk emphatically stated that it was only by gaining “possession” of
them that Britain had been able to exert economic and political influence
in East Africa.
Itinerant traders from the western coast of India had been operating along
the East African coast since the sixteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth
century they were predominantly engaged in transactions involving German
and American goods, copal, ivory, sugar, and Surat cloth.2 The majority were
Muslim, mostly Khoja, merchants based in Zanzibar and Mombasa whose
businesses thrived on a network of apprenticeship and partnership across
the Indian Ocean. In 1874, approximately 4,300 such traders were resident

22
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 23

in the littoral realms of East Africa; they were joined by another 2,500 over
the next decade. In 1888, Queen Victoria issued a royal charter to the Im-
perial British East Africa Company, recognizing the economic and political
rights that it received along the Swahili coast after negotiations with the
sultan of Zanzibar. Seven years later, in June 1895, the Company sold its
“property, rights, and privileges” to Her Majesty’s government as it embarked
on an expansive and expensive infrastructural project to open up the
interior—the Uganda Railway, which was planned to run between the port
city of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, and Kisumu, on the eastern shore
of Lake Victoria.3
Colonialism changed the economic, political, and geographic milieu of
Indian engagement in East Africa. Indian Ocean merchants aligned them-
selves with the imperial project both ideologically and territorially. British
imperialists relied on their economic expertise to establish colonial rule in
the area, especially after Indian merchants facilitated the transfer of land
leases between the sultan of Zanzibar and the British consul general. As
military campaigns, in which Sikh soldiers participated, and the railways
brought the East African hinterland under British rule, these merchants
moved inland along the line, settling in railway depots and trade centers
from Mombasa to Kisumu, diversifying their businesses. Although many
such traders continued to rely on their precolonial Indian Ocean networks
for the success of their ventures, they took advantage of economic opportu-
nities afforded to them as British subjects with quick and easy access to
Mombasa and Bombay. By 1911, approximately 11,886 Indians had settled in
Kenya, of whom 1,524 were traders who set up large firms and small shops
along the railway line. They served as intermediary capitalists linking the
local bazaar economy of the newly colonized protectorate with the interre-
gional colonial economy across the Indian Ocean. In the absence of freely
available, reliable local labor, between 1895 and 1903 close to 40,000 in-
dentured labors were recruited from India initially with the help of these
capitalists, resulting in a demographic change in the population of Indians
in Kenya. Approximately a third of these workers settled permanently in East
Africa at the end of their contracts, finding employment in a variety of skilled
and semiskilled mechanical jobs. As the colonial state expanded, the gov-
ernment recruited low-level Indian clerks to serve in the administration,
employing about 1,500 by 1911. A small minority of fifty-four agricultur-
alists also started farming in the new protectorate at this time. By 1921,
23,000 Indian merchants, retailers, petty dukkawallahs (shopkeepers),
24 Indians in Kenya

skilled workers, professionals, and their families had settled in Kenya, spread
across Mombasa, Nairobi, Kisumu, and other town centers in the protec-
torate (see Map 1).4
Big merchants such as Jeevanjee positioned themselves as subimperialists—
settlers with exceptional business expertise to offer in the colonization of
East Africa, a project they were deeply invested in. The dukkawallahs, railway
workers, and government employees provided skills that fulfilled a different
economic necessity—small-scale internal trade and cheap skilled labor. Be-
tween them, Kenya was set to become the “America of the Hindu,” as Sir
Harry Hamilton Johnston, special commissioner to Uganda, put it in 1901.5
Kenya’s Indian colonists were joined by European farmers who from 1902
onward were given large tracts of land in the highlands by the governor. Many
of them migrated north from South Africa, and after the First World War,
land was made available to British soldiers as a reward for their war ser-
vice. By 1911, there were 3,167 such Europeans in Kenya, a number that
rose to 9,621 by 1921.6 These settlers wanted to make Kenya a “white man’s
country,” and they moved swiftly to undermine the status of Indian traders
as the protectorate became a crown colony in the early twentieth century.
They dismissed the merchants’ subimperialist claims and demands for parity
arguing that the Indians were not equal or desirable partners in Britain’s
colonizing mission since their own progress along the ladder of civilization,
according to European ideas of enlightenment, was far from complete. The
white settlers considered themselves the real colonizers in East Africa. They
began to demand preferential treatment, especially after they were given
political representation in Kenya’s Legislative Council in 1906, hoping to
make Kenya a self-governing white man’s country similar to South Africa
and Australia. In particular, these farmers wanted to ensure that the fertile
highlands would be reserved exclusively for their use, keeping Indians
out—a demand that found a sympathetic audience among colonial admin-
istrators in Kenya and Britain, who accepted the underlying principle of
the settlers’ argument about the racial and civilizational difference be-
tween Indians and Europeans. However, unlike the settlers, who wanted
to expunge Indians entirely from the protectorate, colonial officials tried to
keep the two communities separate but equal.
Between 1902 and 1920, the nature of the colonial state and the future
development of Kenya became a topic of heated debate among Indians, who
wanted to make it the America of the Hindu; Europeans, who envisioned a
white man’s country; and the colonial administration in Kenya and Britain,
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 25

which remained avowedly racially unbiased in the governance of its Indian

and European subjects by trying to balance the demands of both and by
keeping them in completely separate economic, social, and political realms.
The global spread of the British Empire added an interregional perspec-
tive to resulting debates on colonialism in Kenya, as events taking place across
the Indian Ocean in British India drew the attention of the Colonial Office
in London to the struggle going on in Kenya. It soon became clear that the
colony could not simultaneously develop both as the America of the Hindu
and as a white man’s country.

I N D I A N A N D E U RO P E A N CO LO N I S T S

The Imperial British East Africa Company was formed under the presidency
of William Mackinnon in April 1888 to officially accept and administer
coastal regions acquired from the sultan of Zanzibar in 1887 and expand
Britain’s sphere of influence in the area by winning concessions from local
rulers and purchases. In granting a royal charter to the Company, Queen
Victoria’s government noted that the colonization of East Africa would not
only benefit “natives inhabiting” the territory by protecting them from slave
trade but also be advantageous to the commercial interests of “our subjects
in the Indian Ocean . . . who may otherwise become compelled to reside
and trade under the government or protection of alien powers.” These sub-
jects were Indian traders. Within a year, the Company, whose members in-
cluded John Kirk, George Mackinzie, and Frederick Lugard, reported that
several of these merchants operating in German East Africa had moved to
settle permanently within the “British sphere” in order to get the “protec-
tion” of British rule. This was encouraged by the Company, which hoped
that these “energetic traders” would avail themselves of the business oppor-
tunities opened in Kenya and “divert the trade of the interior from the old
and less satisfactory routes” to the “company’s territory.” 7
Among the “energetic traders” that the Company had its eye on were Alli-
dina Visram, an Ismaili Khoja from Kutch, and Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee.
Visram set sail for Zanzibar in 1877 as a fifteen-year-old boy. Tapping into
the mid-nineteenth-century network of Khoja traders, more than 2,000 of
whom were settled in the region, he became an apprentice to Sewa Hajee,
a trader from Kutch, who had a large trading post in Bagamoyo, across the
island of Zanzibar, which was briefly the capital of German East Africa. Five
years later Visram embarked on his maiden caravan journey inland and
26 Indians in Kenya

began to trade in Indian cloth, beads, blankets, and other goods in exchange
for local ivory. By 1896 he had become a successful merchant with a trading
partner in Bombay, and in June of that year he arrived in Mombasa, where he
heard about a British plan to build a railway to Uganda. Visram’s own interest
in Uganda had been triggered when an Arab trader had brought him samples
of fine Uganda cotton. He set up an office in Mombasa, which had been a
major port of export and import in the Indian Ocean for centuries, and even-
tually ventured further inland, where he found an abundance of local prod-
ucts for trade but no regular buyers. Spotting a great business opportunity,
Visram set up shops across East Africa and put together a fleet of dhows to
facilitate this trade—although the latter venture proved a failure in the face
of competition from British steamships. By the turn of the century, he had
more than 500 Indian employees in fifty branches across the protectorate.
His firm exported ivory, hides, rubber, beeswax, simsim (sesame), ground-
nuts, and chiles. Through the network of small shops he invested in, his firm
sold imported cotton goods, beads, enamelware, blankets, brass, copper, and
iron wire to Africans. Jeevanjee, meanwhile, was a Karachi-based trader who
went to South Australia in 1886 to hawk Indian textiles and spices. Having
worked closely there with British officials, Jeevanjee arrived in Mombasa in
1890, joining a small but prominent community of approximately 500 Bohra
merchants. He established a branch of his Karachi-based firm, A. M. Je-
evanjee and Company, in 1891. He became an agent to the Imperial British
East Africa Company, recruiting Indians to the port on a contractual basis
for policing and wage labor, and provided rations for its Indian and African
workers. Quite accurately, John Kirk referred to these Muslim merchants as
“citizens of the world” who took advantage of both their precolonial Indian
Ocean networks and the new opportunities triggered by the British coloniza-
tion of East Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century.8
In 1893, Frederick Lugard wrote a treatise on the rise of Britain’s East
African empire in which he emphatically argued that constructing a railway
from the coast to Lake Victoria would stimulate trade by finding new mar-
kets. Like Visram, Lugard and other colonial officials had also seen great
economic opportunity in the fertile hinterland of East Africa, which in their
perspective had remained untapped because of inadequate transport. Dip-
lomatic attempts to gain access to the area were unsuccessful, as the Ka-
baka ruler of Uganda rebelled against both Lugard, who had gone there as
a British agent, and Christian missionaries. The railway scheme thus be-
came a convenient way of spreading civilization in the form of “trade, in-
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 27

dustry and development.” It also fulfilled the requirements of the Brussels

Act of 1890 to counteract the slave trade from the interior of Africa by con-
structing railways as an economical substitute for “carriage by men,” that
is, porters, who missionaries had argued were essentially slaves. Lugard
pointed to a threefold advantage of building this railway, which he estimated
would run for 657 miles. First, he believed that it would be relatively cheap
to build, costing approximately £2.24 million by his calculation. Second, he
saw the line as a bridge between Mombasa, the port from which local goods
would enter the global market, and Uganda, where these goods were being
produced, thus enabling Europeans to penetrate the interior without having
to pass through the plains, which were unsuitable for “men and animals”
due to “heat” and “disease.” Finally, he suggested that the railways would
allow the European colonization of large, uninhabited tracts of fertile high-
lands because it would ensure the safe and quick transport of Europeans
and their goods to the coast.9 In making his argument, Lugard pointed to
the success of the railways in India, especially in the fertile region of Punjab,
in integrating the local Indian economy with the global trade of the metro-
pole. Furthermore, extending the British sphere of influence into Uganda
had become strategically important for Britain, as the secretary of state,
Lord Salisbury was worried that Germany would seize territory in the re-
gion that contained the source of the Nile and block the river’s flow into
Egypt, which, with the opening of the Suez Canal, had become the most
important geopolitical point for access to British India. In 1895 Her Majes-
ty’s government permitted the construction of the Uganda Railway.
Building a railway that would spread civilization and bring an end to the
slave trade required labor. Lugard had estimated that the African popula-
tion in British East Africa was about 6.5 million, amounting to fourteen
people per square mile.10 Much of the hinterland along which the railway
was planned was uninhabited. While Lugard did not acknowledge this at
the time, the military campaigns of the 1880s that Britain had launched in
its conquest of the region had faced stiff resistance but eventually pushed
many African communities further into the interior. Natural disasters in-
cluding a prolonged drought, maladies such as the locust plague and a cattle
disease, and the success of the British in forcing villages into submission
had resulted in the low population density that Lugard encountered. Con-
sequently, he believed that with no scarcity of land, Africans did not feel
the “pressure of existence” and therefore had no incentive to offer them-
selves as labor for the construction of the railway. Moreover, officials of the
28 Indians in Kenya

Company found it difficult to recruit free labor because of the continuing

Swahili and Arab caravan trade in the region that hired Africans as por-
ters, bringing them back into a system of slavery from which the British were
eager to distance themselves. John Kirk also noted that African free labor
that had been hired on the coast was unreliable because these men were
recruited on a daily basis and would leave to cultivate their own land as soon
as it rained.11 Lugard thus suggested that labor be imported from India as
a substitute for African workers.
With the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833, owners
of sugar plantations in Mauritius and British Guiana had looked for an al-
ternative supply of labor and established a system of indenture wherein men,
and eventually families, were recruited from India to work on the planta-
tions. Eager to shake off the legacy of slavery, the colonial government of
India and Her Majesty’s government stipulated that these laborers sign con-
tracts to ensure that they had been recruited freely. Indentured laborers
were given a set wage and were hired for a fixed period of time, after which
they would be repatriated to India. In 1834, the first ship of Indian coolies,
as they were referred to, set sail for Mauritius, but more than a third died
en route due to abysmal conditions on the ship. Those who survived the
journey found, on arrival in Mauritius, that while the principle of slavery
had been abolished, the infrastructural system of the plantation economy
dealing with workers had remained the same. Contemporary abolitionists
argued that in fact indentured labor was a new system of slavery, and in 1838
the government of India imposed a ban on the export of Indian labor.12 Six
years later this ban was lifted. The system of indentured labor had several
advantages from the perspective of the plantation owners in British colo-
nies scattered across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Unlike in the
free labor market, wages were set before labor was recruited, and employers
were protected from any rise in the wage market, thus keeping their costs
low. The limited period of indenture meant that in times of decreased de-
mand for products such as sugar, employers did not have to maintain labor
on their premises— another financial attraction. By ostensibly addressing
some of the concerns regarding the social rights of labor, such as allowing
families to migrate, adjusting legislation to give laborers the opportunity to
settle in the colonies after the end of the indenture, and recognizing their
right to practice their religion, by 1842 the plantation lobby in London had
persuaded the government of India that, far from being a new system of
slavery, the opportunities that opened up for Indian indentured laborers
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 29

across the British Empire made it a morally legitimate and economically

profitable form of labor recruitment worth administering directly. By the
time Lugard was looking for a substitute for African labor in East Africa in
1893, Indian coolies had been successfully transported and settled in Mau-
ritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, and, closer to home, Natal.
While the Company provided the blueprint for the construction of the
Uganda Railway and the advantages it would bring, it did not have the cap-
ital to build the rail line, especially since it acknowledged that the line would
become remunerative only once the areas it went through were populated.
On July 1, 1895, its royal charter was revoked and the Company’s territo-
ries in East Africa—known as the East Africa Protectorate—were trans-
ferred directly to Her Majesty’s government. In June 1895, Lord Salisbury
authorized the importation of Indian coolies to work on the Uganda Railway.
Jeevanjee’s firm, which had already been supplying labor in Mombasa for
construction and policing, began to recruit coolies for the railway. A year
later, the government of India took over as the recruiting agent for the Uganda
Railway in India, in order to ensure the humane and legal treatment of coo-
lies at their point of departure. Laborers, primarily Sikhs and Muslims from
Punjab who set sail from the port of Karachi, were hired on three-year con-
tracts, for which they were paid at least Rs 15 per month, given free rations
during their tenure, and granted the indefeasible right to return passage on
the completion of their contracts. The average cost per laborer shouldered
by the government was Rs 30 per month. Approximately 40,000 Indians
worked on the railway between 1895 and 1908. In 1903 alone, the railway
had 18,000 such Indian employees and 1,000 African workers. Jeevanjee
was removed as recruiting agent, but he procured construction supplies for
the line as well as rations for the coolies. He made a fortune as a contractor,
shipbuilder, and general merchant, within a decade earning the reputation
of being a “hustler.” Visram also benefited from the railway construction,
opening shops all along the railway line to trade in goods and currency. He
set up factories to manufacture soda, jaggery, and color skins as well as
a ginning mill and oil factory in Mombasa, and his firm served as agent
for various insurance and steamer companies. While these intermediary
capitalists made huge profits with the laying of the Uganda Railway, Her
Majesty’s government ended up spending more than £6.5 million on its
construction.13
The extraordinary expense shouldered by the British taxpayer on the
building of a railway line over a largely uninhabited land created skepticism
30 Indians in Kenya

in the metropole, especially in the British press, over the logic behind this
scheme. In 1898 the railway reached the Tsavo River, where a bridge had
to be constructed for the line to continue (see Map 1). Within a few weeks
of their arrival in Tsavo, laborers began to disappear in the middle of the
night. The British officer overseeing the railway construction, Lt. Col.
Patterson, initially speculated that their fellow laborers had murdered them
for money. However, he was awakened one night by his agitated servant, who
announced that a Jemdar, Ungan Singh, had been carried away from his tent
by a lion. Evidence of this man-eating lion was found in the area around the
camp in the morning, including Singh’s perfectly intact head. The trail sug-
gested that there were two lions prowling the camp, and at least twenty-five
laborers were attacked before Patterson’s team hunted down the animals.14
The fear, resentment, psychological trauma, and loss of life became a trope
for the British public to criticize the government, referring to the Uganda
Railway as the “Lunatic Express,” most humorously in a poem published in
1896 in Truth, a magazine in Britain:
Aboard the Lunatic Express;
What it will cost no words can express;
What is its object no brain can suppose;
Where it will start from no one can guess;
Where it is going nobody knows;
What is the use of it no one can conjecture;
What it will carry there’s none can define;
And in spite of George Curzon’s superior lecture,
It clearly is naught but a Lunatic Line.15

Lugard and Kirk had argued that the railway would benefit the empire eco-
nomically by connecting the fertile highlands and the cotton-growing re-
gion around Lake Victoria to the coast and thus stimulate trade. But in 1901,
when construction was completed, there were no cultivators residing in these
lands. In fact, the first 300 miles of the railway were built over uninhabited
territory.16
In 1893, when he had first proposed using Indian labor on the railways,
Lugard was acutely aware of the continuing criticism from the British Anti-
Slavery Society and Christian missionaries, who pointed to abuses in the
indenture system, especially regarding familial emigration and the lack of
economic opportunities after the indenture period was over. Therefore, he
had simultaneously argued that Indian labor should be used not only to build
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 31

the Uganda Railway but also to develop East Africa by settling Indians per-
manently as agriculturalists and “Asiatic colonists.” He had proclaimed, “It
is not as imported coolie labour that I advocate the introduction of the In-
dian but as colonist and settler.” Lugard saw a triple advantage in this. First,
emigration would bring relief to the congested districts and overcrowded
provinces in India. In par ticu lar, he suggested giving tracts of land to
veteran soldiers of the British Indian Army from Oudh and the Madras
presidency who would serve a dual function in East Africa— cultivation and
policing to “maintain peace,” much as they had done in India itself. These
settlers would also grow agricultural products for export, thus giving an
impetus to trade. Second, by encouraging not just laborers but also artisans
to migrate, East Africa would receive “civilized settlers” whose wants would
result in increased imports. Third, believing that Africans were “extremely
imitative,” Lugard argued that Africans’ wants would increase from contact
with Indians, thus compelling them to offer their labor to fulfi ll their “in-
creasing necessities” such as wearing clothes; on the other hand, they would
produce more on their own lands by learning methods of cultivation from
the Indian ryot, such as using bullocks, sinking wells, and irrigating. Anti-
cipating a dynamic that came to determine the structural relationship be-
tween Africans and Indians in the mid-1930s, Lugard also predicted “com-
petition” between the two communities, which he believed would “compel
indolent [African] labor.”17
Indian traders and laborers were central to the modernizing mission of
the British in Kenya in colonial discourse in the 1890s. The significance of
this would resonate among Kenyans a century later. From Lugard’s perspec-
tive, Indian merchants, retailers, and agriculturalists would be indispens-
able to the colonial economy as agents of civilizational progress who would
stimulate demand for consumer goods among Africans. Since shopkeepers
would require customers to pay for their purchases in currency, Africans
would enter the monetary economy in the process. This need for money,
he hoped, would incentivize them to offer their ser vices as wage labor and
increase their own agricultural productivity, both of which would help de-
velop the protectorate’s economy, which was geared toward the export of
local produce. Indian merchants such as Jeevanjee and Visram readily po-
sitioned themselves as agents of modernity bringing civilization to East Af-
rica. Indeed, they were the immediate beneficiaries of the railways, which
produced no short-term material gain for the colonial state. The success of
these traders and railway workers shaped Indian political discourse over the
32 Indians in Kenya

next six decades of colonial rule in Kenya. The entangled history of Indians
and the Uganda Railway found expression in two competing popular
discourses in the postcolonial nation in the twenty-first century. In 2006,
musician Eric Wainaina’s album Twende Twende included a trilingual song,
“Subhaa,” written in English, Punjabi, and Kiswahili. Declaring the singer’s
infatuation with a “bindi girl with henna hands,” the song celebrates inter-
racial love: “They say birds and fish can’t fall in love / I’m no fish, you’re no
dove / When I’m cut I bleed / That’s the first thing you need to know about
me.” Significantly, the lyrics allude to the centrality of the railways in the
history of Indians in Kenya not only in the choice of Punjabi rather than
Gujarati (the predominant language of dukkawallah) but also by referring
specifically to a girl who had “come from a distant land / With steel and
flame / They built you a railway straight to me.” Wainaina collaborated with
DJ Gupz in this song, motivated by a “medium-sized media frenzy” trig-
gered by the father of a Sikh girl who created a “scene at Nairobi Hospital”
when he discovered that his daughter was pregnant with the child of her
African boyfriend. At the same time, controversy erupted in Kenya over
the indigenous authenticity of the term harambee (come together to work),
the national call made by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first prime minister.
Many Indians and Africans claim that harambee derived from a religious
(Hindu) call to the goddess Ambe made by laborers working on the railway,
which Kenyatta allegedly witnessed. Unlike “Subhaa,” harambee’s con-
tested etymological origins serve in popu lar discourse to emphasize ra-
cial difference introduced in the country by the Uganda Railway.18
In 1901, Sir Charles Eliot, the first commissioner of the Protectorate of
East Africa, toured the area and reported to London that the colonial ad-
ministration ran very thin in the newly acquired interior and that “nothing
had been done to . . . develop the natural resources of the country.” In his
reply, Lord Lansdowne, the secretary of state, made it clear that he could
not send more revenue or manpower for administrative or military purposes.
Instead, he suggested increasing taxation to generate revenue locally and
encouraging “Indian settlers,” who would “do much to increase the pros-
perity of some of the up-country stations.” Echoing Eliot’s concern about
the need to generate more revenue was Harry Hamilton Johnston, a promi-
nent British official who had been at the forefront of the treaty negotiations
between the British and the East African “chiefs” in the 1880s. Johnston was
appointed special commissioner to Uganda in 1889. In his report to the
British government in July 1901, he pointed to two reasons—“political and
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 33

philanthropic”—for holding Uganda. He underlined the strategic importance

of the Nile headwaters, commenting, “We take particular interest in the wel-
fare of Egypt because that country is at present such an important stage on
the way to India. The maintenance of our control, therefore, over the East
African and Uganda Protectorates is necessitated by our regard for the po-
litical future of India.” Furthermore, he argued, “Indian trade, enterprise,
and emigration require a suitable outlet. East Africa, is, and should be, from
every point of view, the America of the Hindu.” Toward this end, Eliot iden-
tified, in addition to the coast, the “hot and damp” regions of the lowlands
in East Africa, especially the districts between Gilgil and Elmenteita and
between Kibigori and Kibos, as suitable for Indian agricultural settlement
(see Map 1). He agreed with Johnston that families of Indian settlers would
be a “good element” and therefore suggested that His Majesty’s government
settle 200 Indian families in the area to grow “high qualities of tobacco,
cotton and rice,” none of which was being cultivated in the region because
of the lack of labor. Eliot estimated that this would cost about one lakh of
rupees—Rs 100,000.19
In the early 1900s, the imperial government did not immediately involve
itself in recruiting agriculturalists from India with quite the same urgency
and enthusiasm as it had demonstrated when recruiting indentured laborers.
By 1904, about thirty settlements of Punjabi cultivators had emerged at
Kibos, near Lake Victoria. Without any governmental supervision, they had
begun to grow rice, cotton, and linseed. Eliot and officials in Britain saw
great advantage in utilizing these Indians as “pioneers” because they had
“accidentally” made progress toward solving the problem of “what to grow
where,” showing themselves to be capable of producing cash crops such as
cotton and providing agricultural models of irrigation and cultivation to
Africans living in the area. Significantly, Eliot argued that Indians, unlike
Europeans, would be “quite content” to receive occupancy rather than
ownership rights in the lands, which was good “financial policy” because
the government would remain the “original” landlord. Eager to reap the
benefits of the Kibos settlement, Lord Lansdowne instructed Sir Donald
Steward, the new commissioner for East Africa appointed in July 1904, to
look into the possibility of settling more such agriculturalists “of the proper
class” in other parts of the protectorate. In 1906 Sir James Hayes Sadler,
Steward’s successor, appointed a committee to propose the terms on which
Indians should be invited to settle in East Africa. The 1907 report recom-
mended bringing families to the lowlands between the coast and Kiu and
34 Indians in Kenya

between Fort Ternan and Lake Victoria and giving them about 50 acres of
land (to be increased to 150 if at least 30 acres were brought under cultiva-
tion within three years) on a “village community system,” with permanent
taxation set along terms similar to the ones that had been initiated in the
Madras and Bengal presidencies in India. As a practical incentive, settlers
would be exempt from taxation for the first five years.20
As is evident, Johnston’s vision of making Kenya the “America of the
Hindu” was taken seriously by colonial administrators in the protectorate
and in the metropole. In the very same report in which he advocated Indian
immigration and settlement, Johnston identified a “second source of profit
to the United Kingdom”—an allegedly uninhabited region “without par-
allel in tropical Africa,” about 12,000 square miles of fertile soil that lay at
a cool elevation of 6,000–10,000 feet. This was the Kenyan highlands, ex-
tending from the Central Province to the Rift Valley. Some of this territory
in the Rift Valley region was alienated to the British through a treaty with
the Masai who conceded parts of the areas they occupied. In 1893, while
lobbying for an East African railway, Lugard had noted that because of the
hot and damp weather elsewhere, “European colonization might not be
feasible” until the cooler highlands were easily accessible. The railway, he
had argued, would make European colonization possible. For health rea-
sons, Johnston agreed, the highlands were suited to being made a “white
man’s country.” 21
According to the estimates of colonial officials, in 1910 nearly 1 million
Africans lived in the highlands. However, since the majority of them were
seminomadic and not agrarian, the administration considered the highlands
largely “uninhabited” areas that had become accessible with the comple-
tion of the railway line. As early as January 1902, Eliot, while exploring the
possibility of Indian settlement to boost the protectorate’s economic devel-
opment, was quick to point out to Lord Lansdowne that it would not be
“expedient” to give land to Indians in the highlands, which he hoped “for
the most part” would be taken up by “white colonists” who could not settle
other parts of the protectorate. Rather than viewing this as discriminatory
in any way, Eliot was convinced that the “cool grassy uplands, so attractive
to the white man, were positively distasteful to the Hindu.” By April 1903,
Eliot was even more emphatically urging the British government to invest
further capital in developing East Africa, so as to attract European colo-
nists who could “live and thrive” in the highlands as successful farmers and
whose produce would, within ten years, enable the country to “pay its way.”
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 35

Gradually, and initially in very small numbers, European colonists arrived

in Kenya. In January 1902, a group of twenty-four Europeans held a meeting
in Nairobi to form a committee to encourage the colonization of the pro-
tectorate by Europeans. A year later, on January 14, 1903, the Planters and
Farmers Association was founded with twenty-three members. They were
persuaded that the country was “in every way” suitable for European set-
tlement because of its climate and fertile soil and asked His Majesty’s gov-
ernment to make land grants of freeholds—rather than the existing leases
issued by the railway, which required tenants to quit upon demand and
without compensation—to encourage European immigration. Furthermore,
Europeans at this meeting announced that Indian immigration was “en-
tirely detrimental” to them because it created unfair competition.22 Although
the particular nature of this competition was not explicitly stated, it became
apparent by 1904 that they were referring to merchants such as Jeevanjee
and Visram, whose businesses were flourishing at this time.
Stewart appointed a Land Committee in October 1904 to make recom-
mendations on the government’s land policy. The committee included two
judges and two prominent European farmers: Hugh Cholmondeley, the third
Baron Delamere, and Frank Watkins. Lord Delamere had moved to Kenya
in 1901 and became the largest landowner in the region within a decade,
while in 1905 Watkins became honorary vice president of the Colonists’ As-
sociation of British East Africa, an organization of 200 members founded
to “advance the development of . . . [Kenya] as a white man’s colony.” Six hun-
dred Boers from South Africa had been given leases on land in East Africa
by 1904, bringing the total number of Europeans to 1,813, of whom about
800 were adult men. It was clear in the report of this committee that Euro-
pean farmers were not making any profits in East Africa. They made three
main suggestions to remedy this situation. First, Delamere and Watkins
accused the government of being feudal landlords because Europeans
were leased crown lands and were not allowed to become owners of their
farms. In the absence of representative government, they concluded, “a set-
tler without sufficient means” would not put the necessary capital into de-
veloping his land, since he did not own it. Therefore, the Land Committee
asked that all restrictions on the transfer of lands be lifted so as to make
settlement and development easier. However, fearing that unregulated
transfer of land would result in the purchase of the prized highlands by
Indian merchants, who had much more capital than European settlers did,
the committee put forward the idea of reserving land for different races
36 Indians in Kenya

across the protectorate. Arguing, as Eliot had, that the areas suitable for
European settlement were “comparatively small,” they suggested that In-
dians be excluded from European areas and that Africans be put into
“native reserves.” The same policy of racial segregation was recommended
for towns such as Nairobi because of concerns relating to “business and
health.”23
In explaining the reasons for the economic stagnation of European
farming, the committee also pointed to the lack of labor to cultivate the high-
lands. Therefore, a second set of recommendations sought to resolve the
labor problem by encouraging Africans to live in “small villages” on Eu-
ropean farms, where they could grow crops for their own consumption in
return for providing agricultural labor.24 These “squatters,” as they came to
be called, who by the 1940s accounted for approximately one-fourth of the
Kikuyu population, had migrated at the turn of the century from Ki-
kuyuland in the Central Province into the Rift Valley, where they cleared
forested areas and grazed Masai land before some of this region was in-
cluded as part of the highlands (see Map 2). From 1918 onward, the expan-
sion of the European highlands threw back the Kikuyu pastoral frontier,
and these squatters went from being “colonizers” on Masai land to being
tenants on white farms in the Rift Valley.25 A second provision—a pass
system of identification for the “floating population” of Africans in towns, to
control vagrancy and employment—borrowed from a similar system in
South Africa. A third major suggestion made by the Land Committee to
ensure European productivity and profit was to advise the colonial adminis-
tration not to give any official encouragement to Indian agriculturalists to
settle in the protectorate. In contrast to the restrictions preventing Indians
from buying land in the highlands, Delamere and Watkins announced that
it would not be “possible” or “politic” to “restrain the energies and capital”
of Europeans wanting to cultivate land in Indian areas.26
A year later, European settlers added a fourth grievance to their list: the
governance of the protectorate “as if it were a province of India.”27 As Thomas
Metcalf has argued, from the perspective of administration, British India
was “the nodal point from which people, ideas, goods, and institutions ra-
diated outwards” to British colonies in the Indian Ocean. The Indian Penal
Code was first drafted in the 1830s in India and enacted in 1860. It emerged
from a century-long interaction between British and Indian legal philos-
ophies and practices. Once codified, Indian civil and criminal proce-
dures were exported across the Indian Ocean, initially to the Malay Straits
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 37

and then to East Africa in 1897.28 Being British colonial subjects without
electoral representation, Europeans in the protectorate were governed by
the same set of laws as Indians in India and in East Africa. In 1905, the
Colonists’ Association objected to “placing white men under laws intended
for a colored population despotically governed.” It appealed to the Colo-
nial Office to abolish Indian laws and instead put Europeans under English
common law. This would also open up the way for them to be included in
the colonial administration, since “taxation without representation” was
“alien to the British constitution.” Furthermore, demanding that Kenya be
treated “freely and frankly” as a “white man’s colony,” the association under
Watkins’s vice presidency objected to the use of Indian currency in the
protectorate, as it put Indian traders at a distinct advantage.29
While barter was the widespread system of internal trade, the Indian
rupee circulated in the Indian Ocean, reflecting the centuries- old pre-
dominance of Indian merchants in this realm. As traders moved inland
with the railways they set up small shops along the line, taking with them the
rupee. By 1911 there were close to 900 Indians in Kisumu, the last stop on
the train line originating in Mombasa, and 248 in Nakuru in the Rift Valley,
while 207 and 151 settled in the Central Province towns of Machakos and
Kiambu, respectively (see Maps 1 and 2).30 The majority of these settlers
were dukkawallahs. According to J. D. Ainsworth, subcommissioner of
Ukamba, Adamjee Alibhai had opened the first shop in the interior in
Machakos in 1895. Arthur H. Hardinge, who as His Majesty’s agent and
consul in Zanzibar had first introduced the Indian Penal Code in the new
protectorate in 1895, noted that with the expansion of Indian dukkas into
the interior, Africans had become familiar with the rupee currency. The
Wakamba in Machakos, for example, had started using the rupee as a me-
dium of exchange as early as 1898. Moreover, he pointed out, hitherto the
government had kept stores of trade goods for Africans on a barter system,
but with the opening of dukkas, the government closed down its stores and
the Indian rupee began to circulate in the bazaar economy. By 1905 there
were three shops in Muranga, Fort Hall district, one of which belonged to
Visram, and close to ten shops in Machakos owned by Khoja merchants.
Visram also owned the majority of the fifteen shops that operated in Kisumu.
Visram’s firm lent money to traders who bought ivory from hunting cara-
vans in the hinterland. Debtors returned this ivory to Visram’s shops, which
dotted the railway line. By 1910 approximately 85 percent of internal
monetary trade was in Indian hands.31 This immediately linked internal
38 Indians in Kenya

trade with the Indian Ocean economy, to which Europeans did not have
immediate access.
Colonial officials in Kenya juxtaposed the large profits made by Indian
merchants against the lack of capital that Europeans brought with them.
The recent Anglo-Boer wars in Transvaal and the Orange Free State, in
which Indians led by Mohandas K. Gandhi had supported Britain’s war ef-
fort, likely made colonial officials predisposed to supporting Indian mer-
chants over the European settlers, the majority of whom were Boers who
had migrated north to Kenya.32 C. W. Hobley, subcommissioner of Naivasha,
dismissed the Colonists’ Association’s grievances, pointing out that Indians
contributed 25 percent of the municipal taxes in Nairobi and were not
demanding political representation, unlike the Europeans, whose taxes
amounted to only 6.5 percent. Even more damning, Ainsworth criticized
Watkins and his association for being notorious for spending “more of their
time agitating” than endeavoring to “make the country prosperous.” How-
ever, the commissioner of lands, J. Montgomery, and the secretary of state,
Lord Elgin, believed that Indians needed to be restricted from the high-
lands, arguing, as had Eliot and the Colonists’ Association, that Europeans
could only settle in limited areas due to their physical disposition. In 1902,
Frederick Jackson, deputy commissioner for East Africa, had announced that
there would be no distinction between Indians and Europeans regarding
the right to acquire lands. Four years later Elgin told commissioner J. Hayes
Sadler, quite paradoxically, that although the exclusion of British subjects
from holding land in East Africa was not in accordance with the policies of
His Majesty’s government, “in view of the comparatively limited areas” suit-
able for European colonization, “a reasonable discretion” would be exercised
by local officials in dealing with applications for land, and only European
settlers should be granted land in the highlands. In 1908, Elgin reaffirmed
this pledge even more directly, announcing that while it was “not conso-
nant with the views of His Majesty’s Government to impose legal restric-
tion” on the purchase of land, “as a matter of administrative convenience”
Indians would not receive land grants in the uplands.33
Quite blind to the inherent hypocrisy of that policy, Montgomery advised
Sadler that he “should not refuse land to Indians in certain defined tracts
and in limited quantities,” for several political, moral, and practical reasons.
At the same time, Montgomery noted that Indians had migrated to East Af-
rica generations before Europeans had; that Indian labor had built the
Uganda Railway; that the trading wealth in the protectorate was Indian; and
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 39

that Indians were British subjects.34 Therefore, he concluded, Indians could

not and should not be kept out of East Africa altogether.
Until 1910, the colonial administration tried to balance the growing eco-
nomic and political demands of the European farmers against the reality of
their lack of productivity, especially in the face of the success of Indian mer-
chants and agriculturalists, as Sadler and Montgomery were uncertain about
the permanence of Europeans in the protectorate. The imperial govern-
ment was not ready to promote the interests of these farmers at the cost of
alternative ways of ensuring the economic development of East Africa. De-
spite objections from the Colonists’ Association, His Majesty’s government
appointed a committee on Indian immigration in 1906 and sent D. D. Waller,
as “protector of immigrants,” to visit India to recruit fifteen families for set-
tlement in Kibos. He came back empty-handed, however, and recommended
instead that the government import indentured labor from India and pro-
vide incentives for them to bring their families and settle in the protectorate
after the end of their contracts.35 Though Waller’s mission failed, in 1907
Winston Churchill, as undersecretary of state for colonies, continued to in-
vite Indians to emigrate to East Africa and settle in a “village community
system” in the area between the coast and Kiu and from Fort Ternan to
Lake Victoria. Inherent in Churchill’s scheme was the recognition of the
exclusivity of the highlands for Europeans. Montgomery and Sadler had
warned that Indian immigration on a large scale would upset white set-
tlers, but unlike the European settlers, they did not want to stop Indians
from entering Kenya altogether. Indeed, as Churchill wrote in his account
of his visit to East Africa in 1907, “is it possible for any government with a
scrap of respect for honest dealings between man and man to embark upon
a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from a region in
which he has established himself under ever security of good faith? . . .
The Indian was here long before the British Official.” In building his
argument Churchill pointed to the Sikh soldiers who had borne an “honor-
able part in the conquest” of East Africa; the Indian trader, who “has more
than anyone else developed the beginnings of trade” by “penetrating where
no white man would go”; Indian labor that built the railways on which “ev-
erything else depends”; and the Indian banker, who supplied the “largest
part of capital yet available to business and enterprise and to whom the
White settlers have not hesitated to recur for fi nancial aid.” Although
prone to hyperbole, Churchill was not exaggerating. Allidina Visram had by
this time become a moneylender to Indians and Europeans alike, having
40 Indians in Kenya

made a handsome profit from the shops he opened across the protectorate.
He set up sawmills in the hinterland to supply timber to Europeans and
ginneries to tap into interregional trade in the prized Uganda cotton that
his firm exported to Bombay. Visram was such an important figure in the
region that the Aga Khan, on a visit to the protectorate in 1905, appointed
him “waras” (wāris)—head of the Ismaili community in the entire
region.36
While their views on Indian immigration differed, colonial officials ful-
filled the Colonists’ Association’s demand for political representation. A Leg-
islative Council was set up to oversee the local administration of the ex-
panding protectorate, and its first session was held on August 16, 1907, in
which at least two members of the Colonists’ Association—Delamere and
W. L. Wilson—were included. As European farmers began to play a direct
role in shaping colonial policy, they worked to ensure that their economic
interests were protected by the state. Having succeeded in preventing the
governor from making land grants to Indians in the highlands, they now
moved to get him to provide cheap labor to work their lands. African labor
continued to be in short supply, hindering both European agricultural un-
dertakings and cotton production. Delamere suggested the introduction of
a “poll tax” on “able bodied males” to catch “idle men who do nothing for
the development of the country” as a way to make Africans enter the wage
labor economy, a policy that the secretary of state for colonies, the first
Marques of Crewe, readily accepted. The policy was immediately suc-
cessful in getting the desired result. By 1909, settlers reported the steady
flow of Kikuyu laborers from the Central Province into the highlands. Ki-
kuyu laborers were paid about Rs 4–12 per month, a wage lower than that
of Indian railway workers, who received Rs 15 in addition to board and
lodging. The Kikuyu were found to be “good workmen” and “easy people
to get along with.” As Captain (later Major) Ewart Scott Grogan, owner of
100,000 acres of land, candidly put it in 1909, the settlers believed that
the Kikuyu had no “natural right” to land and therefore it was quite legiti-
mate for the government to levy a tax on the areas that they cultivated. This
tax compelled them to work on European farms, ensuring plenty supply of
labor in the highlands.37
Beyond the highlands, fiber industries set up by European firms along
the coast to exploit the fertile natural resources of East Africa that made
cotton cultivation possible also required a reliable supply of labor. While
Delamere focused on extracting African labor for work on the highlands,
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 41

Sadler was apprehensive about using forced labor and appealed to the Co-
lonial Office in 1908 for indentured laborers from India to be employed on
the coast to grow cotton. In urging the secretary of state to approve of this
request, Sadler argued that “outside the European settlement area, I think
the protectorate has everything to gain from Indian settlement, both in the
actual development . . . [of Kenya], and in the stimulating effect it will have
on production by natives,” on whom the state ultimately depended “for the
production and development of its economic resources.”38 By this time
the treatment of coolies across the British Empire had brought the attention
of Indian nationalists in the subcontinent to the plight of their compatriots
overseas. A controversy regarding the sexual assault of women on plantations
in Fiji and Mauritius by Indian overseers and male laborers had called into
question the ideological mores of the very system of indentured labor,
which, despite regulations and the encouragement of familial emigration,
had continued to be an exploitative one. The status of Indians overseas, es-
pecially women, was conflated in nationalist discourse in India with the
position of India in the empire. Therefore, the British government began to
reconsider the system itself and set up the Sanderson Committee in 1908 to
report on Indian emigration to British colonies and to make recommenda-
tions for future policy. Until then, the secretary of state was not prepared to
approve the further emigration of Indian labor under the indenture system
to East Africa.39
In 1910, Sir Percy Girouard arrived in Kenya as the new governor and
noted the lack of any defined policy in the Protectorate of East Africa.40 There
were three main concerns that had governed colonial policy up until this
time—racial and ethnic distinction, economic productivity, and intercon-
nected imperial policy between Britain’s Indian Ocean colonies. These three
concerns were simultaneously contradictory and complementary, making ad-
ministration quite ad hoc. However, they anticipated the direction of colo-
nial policy, which would be consolidated within a few years. While avoiding
any outright discrimination between Indians and Europeans, successive
commissioners, governors, and colonial secretaries had acknowledged the
racial distinction between the two in decisively excluding Indians from the
highlands because of their climatic suitability for Europeans, who could not
settle in damp and warm areas. Africans were treated as a third racially dis-
tinct group, divided into “tribes”—some created, others reinvented, including
Kikuyu, Masai, Luo, Kalenjin, Kamba, and so on—and put into “native re-
serves,” where they were expected to cultivate crops for sale and enter the
42 Indians in Kenya

colonial economy. Within the reserves tribal chiefs were appointed by the
colonial administration to “traditionally” govern their communities and
supply labor to the state as needed. These chiefs tended to be spokesmen
deriving legitimacy from the colonial state who “conveyed an impression of
social order under their control” that was illusionary as their political au-
thority was often challenged by those they claimed to represent.41
Despite encouraging Indian settlement in the protectorate, the colonial
state maintained control over the areas where they could settle, exposing
its racial bias. In 1899, it founded the town of Nairobi as a railway depot.
Within a few years Nairobi replaced Mombasa as the capital of British East
Africa, becoming an important political and commercial center. Its popu-
lation rose from 5,000 in 1902 to 16,000 in 1910. During this time, the pop-
ulation of Europeans in the protectorate was approximately 3,000, while that
of Indians rose to 11,000. Nairobi and Mombasa were home to the majority
of Indians, where 3,361 and 3,957, respectively, had settled.42 Indian mer-
chants and railway workers lived in Mombasa and transient indentured la-
borers moved along with the rail line, while the new colonial capital attracted
Indian traders, retailers, artisans, and clerks. According to one estimate, in
1905 there were a thousand Indians living in Nairobi along with fifty Euro-
peans.43 Five years earlier, uninhabited swampland around the Nairobi River
was given to Indian merchants on a ten-year lease. In 1901 Jeevanjee bought
the Indian bazaar that had sprung up in Nairobi, and in 1904 he built a per-
manent market, called the “Jeevanjee Market,” before returning to India
for a four-year sojourn. Visram also purchased land here. In 1908, the gov-
ernment announced that no extensions would be made because the area bor-
dered European commercial areas. In its terms of employment, too, the state
differentiated between its European and Indian subjects. In 1910, like
Churchill a few years earlier, Governor Girouard also acknowledged the im-
portant role Indians played within the colonial administration as “subordi-
nate staff.” Although Europeans settlers demanded that “the white man be
substituted for” Indians, Girouard doubted the “financial success of any such
policy.” Inherent in this argument was the belief that Indians would earn
lower wages than the Europeans even if they performed the same tasks. Such
a racial distinction made it possible for the colonial state to administer its
new protectorate on the cheap. By 1911, the government employed almost
1,500 Indians in low-level administrative position. They included clerks, sta-
tionmasters, policemen, and sub-inspectors.44
The need to make Kenya economically productive was the second driving
force behind colonial policy. By pushing Africans into segregated reserves,
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 43

Europeans ensured access to the prized highlands. However, to profitably

cultivate these fertile lands farmers needed cheap labor from the reserves.
As Europeans joined the colonial administration they shaped an oppressive
policy of taxation and identification through its pass system to induce labor
to work on their lands. At the same time, the economic contribution of
Indian merchants in developing trade, lending capital, and opening up the
interior was unquestionably recognized by all Europeans. In 1911, 1,500
Indian traders lived in Kenya, not all of whom were big merchants. These
small-scale retailers survived on low margins of profit and maintained prices
of “European articles of use” at a level that was “better for the consumer at
all events” by keeping the average cost of living in East Africa low. In his
evidence to the Sanderson Committee, Kirk remarked, “Drive away the In-
dian and you may shut up the protectorate.” Grogan also acknowledged that
Indians were a “fundamental factor” because of their small scale of opera-
tion. He admitted that “if any attempt were made to remove him [the In-
dian] today the whole thing would collapse like a puff ball because there is
nothing else in it. He fills there [in Kenya] the middle sphere between the
native and the white organizer, the coordinating factor.” 45 Despite objec-
tions raised by some farmers, Jeevanjee was appointed to the Legislative
Council in 1909 on Churchill’s recommendation as a reward for his pio-
neering work in developing the protectorate. Having made a huge profit as
a contractor for the Uganda Railway, Jeevanjee established a commercial
empire across the Indian Ocean, which included two lines of steamships
between Mauritius and Bombay and between Bombay and Jeddah. Some
Europeans lauded Jeevanjee in the European press as a “real asset to a young
country,” characterizing him as a “hustler . . . in Oriental garb” who spoke
English “with quite a good accent” and whose “methods” were “approxi-
mating more to the European, than Asiatic type.” His market in Nairobi, in
fact, had been built with the aim of developing trade in European produce
on a global scale.46 Racial considerations, however, led to the imposition of
restrictions in this commercial area.
In 1908, plague broke out in Nairobi and spread to the highlands, leading
Europeans to conclude that unhygienic conditions in the Indian bazaar had
caused the outbreak. The colonial state stepped in, restricting “lower class
Indians and the African natives” to “specific quarters for residence and small
trading.” Refusing to see this as in any way racially discriminatory or eco-
nomically restrictive, the undersecretary of state for colonies argued in 1911
that “no restrictions whatever” had been placed on Indians “of good standing
and habits.” The precedent of racial segregation had been set, however, even
44 Indians in Kenya

in the commercial realm. In 1910, Europeans opened a market in Nairobi

for the use of Europeans only, claiming that the Jeevanjee Market was un-
sanitary and used contaminated water. Indian traders were prevented from
entering this new market space, as European councilors passed a bylaw in
Nairobi that established the authority of a “market master” who “shall not
accept produce from any but European and American consignors” and which
stated that “non-Europeans shall not enter the market-house unless autho-
rized by European employers to act on their behalf.” As racial distinction
came to be used to circumvent and circumscribe Indian traders in the
economic sphere, Johnston remarked to the Sanderson Committee in 1910:
“It is rather a scandal . . . that 400 European farmers should have the power
to monopolize the whole of . . . British East Africa and exclude Indians.” 47
Although Nairobi was far from London, it was this fear of scandal that
dictated imperial policy in the metropole. European farmers and colonial
officials in Kenya and Britain recognized the slow development of Euro-
pean economic productivity. The need for labor was crucial to their enter-
prises in the highlands and on the coast. In the absence of reliable African
labor the governor turned to Indian indentured laborers to cultivate cotton.
It was, in turn, the presence of this very class of “lower” Indians that Euro-
peans used to justify their segregationist policies in Nairobi. In contrast, in
London the exposure of the abuses in the recruitment and experience of
indentured labor across the Indian Ocean and in Fiji had brought the en-
tire system to a standstill, resulting in an acute labor crisis in East Africa.
Continually aware of the interregional reach and repercussions of policies
introduced in one part of its empire on a colony in another region, Churchill,
in refusing to acquiesce to the Colonists’ Association’s demand to end
Indian immigration, had argued, “We ask is such a policy possible to the
government which bears sway over three millions of our Indian empire?”
Similarly, in 1909, Johnston argued emphatically against making Kenya a
white man’s country because of the strong tendency among settlers, espe-
cially from Transvaal and Natal, to “assume a rather too-slave holding ag-
gressive policy towards the blacks” and an “unreasonable” attitude toward
Indians.48 Johnston was obliquely referring to the discriminatory treatment
of Indian indentured laborers in Natal by self-governing Europeans in the
colony. Gandhi had by this time succeeded in launching his first successful
satyagraha (nonviolent protest) against these policies, and colonial offi-
cials were worried about the spread of the racialized politics of South Af-
rica in its new protectorate by settlers from the south who encountered
Indian traders and laborers in Kenya.
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 45

The colonial government had tried to reconcile its racial, economic, and
imperial concerns by creating three distinct spaces for its European, Indian,
and African subjects, but the principle of keeping governance equal and
separate was a complete failure. The colonial state emerged as one whose
main function was the control of land and labor. It was beginning to create a
three-tiered economic and political structure in the East Africa Protec-
torate in which the Europeans, who were in a numerical minority, were at
the top, benefiting from the prized highlands and limited political represen-
tation despite being the least productive economically; Indian merchants,
shopkeepers, and clerks were placed in the middle, and the colonial admin-
istration tried to protect their existing economic rights without expanding
them; and at the very bottom were Africans, who, as the numerical ma-
jority and original inhabitants of the land, contributed the highest revenue
to the state in the form of taxes but, apart from the “tribal chiefs,” received
no political or economic benefits.

INDIANS AS SUBIMPERIALISTS

Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, as the only Indian member of the Legislative

Council, and whose commercial interests were most threatened by the
emerging lobby of European settlers, protested against the encroachments
on Indian settlement and economic enterprise in East Africa. On a visit to
London to investigate new markets for East African cotton and rubber in
September 1910, shortly after he joined the council, Jeevanjee gave an in-
terview to a British newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. He criticized recent
attempts to circumscribe Indian commercial and agricultural activities in
the Nairobi market that had debarred Indian traders and in Elgin’s 1908
pledge that Indians would not be allowed to buy any land in European areas
as a matter of administrative convenience. Emphasizing the economic con-
tributions made by Indians, in whose hands nearly 85 percent of the colo-
ny’s monetary trade remained, he accused European settlers of deliber-
ately trying to exclude Indians from any share in the commerce of the
country. He pointed to the racial principle that had underpinned the market
and highlands policies, proclaiming that the greatest problem of the twen-
tieth century was that of the “coloured vs. white peoples.” Significantly, in
his criticism of the situation in Kenya, Jeevanjee was careful to emphasize
his loyalty to the British crown. Having worked closely with the Imperial
British East Africa Company and received land and political awards from
several commissioners, Jeevanjee’s political orientation was aligned with
46 Indians in Kenya

the imperial project. He emphatically announced that he was a “proud

citizen of the British empire.” Moreover, he proclaimed that if Indian enter-
prise was allowed to operate freely, in a very few years Kenya would become
“a second India, and a source of great strength to the Empire.”
As someone who had benefited from the spread of imperial rule across
the Indian Ocean, Jeevanjee was in no way critical of the colonial project—
he merely wanted to ensure that he could continue to benefit from it in Kenya.
Much like other politically active Indians across the empire at the time, in-
cluding Gandhi, Dadabhai Naoroji, and G. K. Gokhale, Jeevanjee appealed
to the notion of imperial citizenship, which in principle vested equal rights
in Britain’s subjects across all its colonies. Jeevanjee’s visit to London coin-
cided with the publication of the Sanderson Committee’s report, which af-
firmed the material advantage of Indian immigration to East Africa and en-
dorsed the continuation of the indenture system only if such laborers were
allowed to settle anywhere in the country after the end of their tenure.
During his visit, articles in the Daily Chronicle, Wednesday Review, and
Manchester Guardian criticized the existing segregationist tendency in the
protectorate as “inexpedient,” “unfair,” and “inconsistent” with the “sound
principles of imperialism.” With headlines such as “Amazing Action of the
Colonial Office, Suicidal Policy” and “Imperialism on Trial,” it was clear that
Jeevanjee had found a sympathetic ear in the British press, especially since
many of the white farmers in Kenya were in fact Boer and not British.49
The media coverage in London of an Indian merchant’s criticism of Eu-
ropean settlers in Kenya underscored the global political milieu of British
colonialism. Jeevanjee was no exception in this. By 1910, Gandhi’s agitation
against the “Black Act” in Transvaal, which required all Indians to register
with the government and risk arrest if a registration certificate was not pro-
duced upon demand, had catalyzed into a mass movement there. This to-
gether with a move to impose a £3 tax on indentured laborers who wanted
to stay in the country at the end of their contracts had become a concern
for Indian politicians in the subcontinent and colonial administrators in the
metropole. The publicity given by the former to the treatment of women in
Fiji and the restrictive legislation in South Africa had resulted in the Sand-
erson parliamentary committee on Indian immigration to all crown colo-
nies and protectorates. Clearly, events taking place in one part of the em-
pire resonated with people in India and Britain who were beginning to
organize protests against specific imperial policies. Within India, the parti-
tion of Bengal in 1905 for “administrative convenience” was seen by sev-
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 47

eral political leaders as a thinly veiled strategy of the colonial administra-

tion to divide Hindus and Muslims and undermine the emerging nationalist
imaginary. This had combined with an economic critique of colonialism as
imperial citizens argued that India’s wealth was being drained to England
to promote British industrialization. This resulted in the first organized,
public political agitation of the twentieth century in Bengal, the Swadeshi
movement, which objected to the division of Bengal and boycotted British-
made goods imported into India in favor of products made domestically.50
As the economic and social grievances of Indians across the empire came
together in the emerging anticolonial nationalist critique in India, the London
branch of the All-India Muslim League, an organization formed in India in
1906 to represent the interests of Indian Muslims to the British adminis-
tration, took up Jeevanjee’s grievances, as Muslims accounted for more than
half of the Indian population in Kenya at this time.51 The League sent a
formal letter of protest to the Colonial Office criticizing the racial preju-
dices of white settlers who had brought with them a “bitter and unreasoning
prejudice against colour” from South Africa. Rejecting the settlers’ claim
that the future development of Kenya should be toward making it a “white
man’s country,” M. T. Khaderbhoy, secretary of the League, stated that Kenya
had not been “won, like Australia, from barbarism by the unaided labour
and enterprise of the white man,” nor could it be “developed and colonized
by a non-tropical community.” Therefore, he opposed the reservation of the
highlands and the exclusion of Indian traders from commercial areas as a
grave injustice to Indians, pointing to their “invaluable work” in developing
the protectorate that predated British rule. Other demands included trial
by jury, nomination of Indians to the magisterial bench, and respect for the
“religious scruples” and “caste observations” of Indians who were impris-
oned. Mediating between the political milieus of East Africa and India
from London, and thus connecting the local disabilities of the diaspora in
Kenya with political concerns in the homeland, Khaderbhoy concluded
that “the maintenance and extension of anti-Indian prejudice in the legis-
lation and administration of East Africa cannot fail to have most unfortu-
nate effects on the contentment of the people of India under British rule
and to react most adversely on the political situation.”52
The extraterritorial affiliations of the League brought India, Kenya, and
Britain into the same political realm in 1910, as Khaderbhoy emerged as
the champion of Indian Muslims in India and Kenya, exemplifying the global
resonance of the experience of colonialism. Significantly, Jeevanjee had been
48 Indians in Kenya

careful to distance himself from the politics of Indian nationalists. The eco-
nomic principle highlighted in the Swadeshi movement, that of boycotting
imported goods and keeping domestic material consumption local, was the
antithesis of the global economic structure of import and export that
Jeevanjee had utilized to build his commercial empire. Moreover, his own
opposition to settler politics in Kenya had not resulted in any skepticism
regarding the ideological and structural reality of colonialism, as had been
the case for Swadeshi nationalists. Therefore, in his interview in the Daily
Chronicle, Jeevanjee emphatically stated, “I have nothing to say against the
Imperial government. . . . I have no sympathy with the [Swadeshi] agitation
which is going on . . . in India.”53
The reply to the League from Lord Dingwall, who had recently been ap-
pointed undersecretary of state, marked a decisive shift in imperial policy
regarding the position of Indians in Kenya. The pro-Indian Churchill was
replaced at the Colonial Office, and Indians went from being the favored
settlers who would make the protectorate the “America of the Hindu” to a
subordinate position as Kenya was developed as a white man’s country. First,
in an attempt to undermine the Indian claim based on historical connec-
tions while still recognizing Indians’ “value,” Dingwall made a distinction
between Indian merchants whose influence predated colonial rule by sev-
eral centuries and the “new breed” of Indians who had entered the colony
as coolies. Next, claiming that these migrants—whom he estimated at about
50,000—were of a “different class,” he argued that Indians had not been
particularly successful economically since they had become petty trading
intermediaries between the larger European firms and Africans and were
themselves dependent on European credit. Deliberately ignoring the prog-
ress of Indian agriculturalists at the Kibos settlement and the lack of the
same among European farmers, Dingwall proclaimed that Indians had done
nothing to develop agriculture for the last 200 years and that the future de-
velopment of the country would be based on British agricultural enterprise
and capital, aided by African labor, which by 1911 was becoming available
as a result of the high poll and hut taxes imposed by the governor. Finally,
dismissing Jeevanjee’s and the League’s claim about racial discrimination,
Dingwall pointed to the presence of African squatters in the highlands to
argue that those areas had not in fact been reserved exclusively for Euro-
peans, although he reiterated Elgin’s pledge regarding the desirability of pre-
serving the area for European cultivation. As for the European market in
Nairobi, which Indians were prevented from entering, he saw no inherent
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 49

disadvantage to the Indians in this unofficial policy of segregation because

they had the Jeevanjee Market for their trading activities. Anticipating an
argument European farmers would use after the First World War to fur-
ther undermine the position of Indians in the country, Dingwall concluded
that African “native” progress was ultimately the most important concern
of the imperial government and that missionaries who had taken on the civi-
lizing mission of educating Africans had indicated that “contact of the na-
tives with the unfortunately low caste of Indians entering the country has
hindered their advancement towards civilization.”54
After the debacle in England, on his return to Kenya, Jeevanjee continued
to protest against the “humiliation” experienced by his fellow countrymen.
In particular, he objected to the “unjustifiable treatment meted out” to In-
dians by the white population in East Africa. In a series of newspaper ar-
ticles published in London and Kenya, Jeevanjee pointed to the “colour-
hatred” that was rampant among the settlers, and warned that the “disastrous
and mischievous squeezing out of Indians” was inconsistent with the highest
conceptions of the empire. Having personally experienced the unexpected
empirewide interest in his case after that fateful interview with the Daily
Chronicle, Jeevanjee used the English print media to reach a wide audi-
ence of settlers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, and the British
public. Since most of the European farmers in Kenya were Boers from South
Africa, he was able to position himself as antisettler but pro-British by af-
firming his political alignment with the imperial project, which included
India and Kenya. Rather than appealing to a humanitarian discourse re-
garding Indian indentured labor across the British Empire, Jeevanjee por-
trayed Indians as subimperialists in East Africa and claimed that the In-
dian case in East Africa was entirely different from that of Indians in other
colonies. Emphatically inserting Indian trading intermediaries into the his-
tory of colonial expansion in East Africa, Jeevanjee pointed out that it was
only through the influence of Indian traders that Great Britain had succeeded
in obtaining the lease of the territory from the sultan of Zanzibar. High-
lighting the Indians’ “pioneer work” in converting the “hopeless desert” into
a fertile field, Jeevanjee adopted the civilizational discourse of the imperial
project that aimed at lifting the land and inhabitants of Africa out of their
“savage” state. In doing so, he argued that Indians had welcomed white set-
tlers into the country, and he criticized the Europeans for wanting to rid
themselves of the Indian competitor even though they owed their presence
in the protectorate to the Indians. As subimperialists in Kenya, he stated,
50 Indians in Kenya

“we advance our claim not as mere citizens of the empire but also as first
makers of the land. . . . We who have adopted East Africa as our country
and made it our home cannot afford to run away at the mere approach of
the white bullies.”55
Deliberately using the imperialist discourse that characterized Africa as
an uncivilized and savage land, Jeevanjee emphasized his demand for equality
on the basis of imperial citizenship. As a proud subject of the British Em-
pire, Jeevanjee reminded the colonial administration in London that his poli-
tics were antisettler, not anticolonial. “We are proud,” he wrote, “of being
the citizens of an empire over which the sun never sets. We are conscious
of the innumerable blessings that the British rule has conferred on India.”
He appealed to His Majesty’s government to protect its Indian subjects, who
were partners in the imperial project, from “white Africans” whose politics
were detrimental to the establishment of an economically profitable crown
colony in East Africa. Finally, exploiting the position of India as the jewel
in the crown, Jeevanjee went “as far as to advocate the annexation of this
African territory to the Indian Empire. It would be more beneficial to Great
Britain,” he argued, for Kenya to be placed “directly under the control of
the Indian Government instead of the Colonial Office, with provincial gov-
ernment under the Indian Viceroy.”56 Alluding to the global resonance of
Gandhi’s passive resistance in South Africa, which by 1912 had emerged as
a mass movement and in 1914 catapulted Gandhi to the status of Mahatma,
Jeevanjee appealed to Indian nationalists to take up the case of Indian mer-
chants in Kenya with His Majesty’s government. Despite the distinct ter-
ritorial and colonial concerns of the political milieus in Kenya (where the
British colonial project was in its infancy), Britain (where the humanitarian
concerns of public opinion dictated much of imperial policy), and India
(where the Swadeshi movement had ushered in an era of nationalist politics
that was abhorrent to his business enterprises), Jeevanjee straddled all three
realms in a bid to gain concessions for Indian merchants in Kenya.
In underscoring Indian merchants’ subimperialist agenda through the rhe-
torical and material performance of loyalism and positioning Indians as set-
tler colonists in Kenya, Jeevanjee was articulating a demand for equality with
his fellow citizens—white settlers—that uncritically internalized the white
man’s burden as one that was shared by all imperial citizens, including In-
dians. This language of political claim making was framed as an appeal to
the notion of civilization—a belief that equal rights would be accorded to
all civilized men within the empire. These rights were universal yet, para-
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 51

doxically, inherently limited. As colonists, Indian colonial subjects highlighted

their civilizational attainments to demand equality with European colonists
on the basis of being imperial citizens. This idea of equality was a univer-
salizing aspiration, one that would transcend racial boundaries between Brit-
ain’s white and brown settlers in Kenya. However, it was limited to the cat-
egory of “Indians.” In political discourse, being “Indian” in East Africa
acquired a civilizational definition and identity that was located in antiq-
uity, in invocations of India’s past civilizational achievements; in geography,
as the territory of India was the birthplace of this civilization; and in race,
as Jeevanjee argued that Indians retained their distinction as they traversed
the Indian Ocean and applied their civilizational genius in Kenya. In em-
phasizing the colonizing abilities of Indians, Jeevanjee reached out to pre-
colonial history: “Only before a few decades this tract of land owned the
sway of the Sultan of Zanzibar who being brother of the Sultan of Muscat
was in every sense an Asiatic and evidently we have all along been claiming
East Africa to be an Asiatic Power.”57
As argued by Jeevanjee in his quest for equality with his fellow European
colonists, Indian traders in Kenya evoked both their prediasporic past, lo-
cated geographically in India, and their diasporic present, located in Kenya,
as the epitome of civilizational progress in demanding their rights as impe-
rial citizens. “Have not the Indians,” Jeevanjee declared, “quite apart from
their ancient civilization, science and past splendour, during the amazingly
short period of the last 50 years [of colonial rule] proved themselves by their
intellect and resourcefulness to be extraordinarily adaptable to such useful
influences of the western civilization as are beneficial to make one a useful
citizen and have not they given practical proof of their accomplishments by
aspiring to high positions in life . . . on modern lines?”58 In the particular
context of Kenya, “modern lines” referred to trade, urbanization, literacy,
and familiarity with currency—the essence of Muslim merchant life in the
Indian Ocean. Jeevanjee’s civilizational discourse thus had wide resonance
in the protectorate.
In their everyday interactions in Kenya, big merchants and petty traders
inhabited the vestiges of modernity in three interrelated material forms:
trade, clothing, and money. Taking advantage of the railways, Indian busi-
nessmen moved inland from Mombasa in search of new markets for their
imports, particularly cotton cloth, the sales of which would provide them
with currency to purchase ivory for export. In their words, in their “Jour-
neys to the Interior,” they encountered an “Africa in Darkness” that was
52 Indians in Kenya

simultaneously “weird and wonderful.”59 These were intimate encounters.

The coastal language Kiswahili served as the common medium of conver-
sation, integral to material exchanges between buyers and sellers. Barter
was a frequent means of trade that blurred the distinction between traders
and customers. Farmers exchanged their agricultural produce for goats
and cows that they considered “their wealth.” Often traveling on foot be-
yond the railway depots, these traders relied on the hospitality and local
geographical knowledge of Africans in these areas, whom they identified as
“natives,” “Wakikuyu,” “Mkavirondo,” and “chiefs.” The trappings of Indian
notions of civilization framed these encounters. Between 1902 and 1905,
for example, Ebrahimji N. Adamji, a young Bohra petty trader from Mom-
basa, traveled inland to Kisumu and Kavirondo (Nyanza) in search of busi-
ness opportunities, and a rich Parsi engineer from Zanzibar, Sorabji M.
Darookhanawala, made a journey to Lake Victoria that was sponsored by
Visram. It was the first time either of them had ventured beyond the main
port cities of the Indian Ocean. For both, “the wilderness [of the African
hinterland] was strange,” as were the people they encountered. Adamji and
Darookhanawala used the term jungli (of the jungle) to describe the “Kavi-
rondo” whom they met, spoke to, and stayed with during their travels, thus
linguistically and descriptively equating Africans with living outside of
towns in the “wilderness” of the jungle. Darookhanawala also used the
Gujarati term for tribe and in one instance adivasi (the word used in India
to for people living in forests), while Adamji used the Swahili term wash-
enzi (uncivilized) once in his travelogue.60
In particular, Adamji and Darookhanawala noted the absence of clothing
and money as the medium of trade—features that distinguished the Indian
trading community in East Africa from the Kavirondo they met outside
Mombasa and Zanzibar. This marked a civilizational and racial boundary
between them. As Darookhanawala observed, the Kavirondo not only had
no monetary trade but also did not know how to make mashuas (dhows),
quite literally the conduit of modernity in the Indian Ocean, in which In-
dians had been sailing between India and East Africa for centuries. Based on
this, he concluded that they were “living in darkness.” 61 In his memoir,
Adamji recounted an exchange in Kiswahili with the “Mkavirondo chief” in
whose hut he stayed overnight. Adamji asked him “why he was roaming
about naked? So he said, ‘where to get clothes?’ I told him to buy clothes with
money. He said ‘where to get money’ [but] . . . ‘they did not care for clothes,’ ”
preferring to spend the money on usanga (beads). Nevertheless, Adamji suc-
ceeded in a business transaction, exchanging beads for fresh cow’s milk.62
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 53

While the prospect of material profits shaped Adamji’s encounter with the
naked Kavirondo, to whom he wanted to sell cloth, Darookhanawala took it
upon himself to advise, through an interpreter, the unclothed men and
women he met in 1901 near Lake Victoria in Nyanza to “cover themselves
up,” believing this suggestion to be a “very noble thing.” In response, an “el-
derly” man started “shaking with rage. He told me that I was a very wicked
man to have only seen the nakedness of sex . . . because I was full of lust I
covered myself up.” Darookhanawala recounted becoming “pale with shock
and shame” and reflected that “if we compare their integrity with that of so-
phisticated [civilized] people, then the so-called cultured modern generation
should be ashamed of themselves. They call themselves cultured and clothed
but I consider them naked under their so-called respectability.” In his inti-
mate encounters, clothing and sexual mores separated Darookhanawala
from the Kavirondo he met. Although he positioned himself as an agent of
modernity in Kenya, Darookhanawala’s 1902 memoir hinted at a critique of
Western civilization itself, which was voiced with more clarity by Gandhi
in Hind Swaraj a few years later. Darookhanawala concluded that “the
so-called missionary-influenced people are actually ruining their [Kikuyu]
traditional way of life,” noting that such Kikuyu had turned into “selfish, self-
centered, money-minded people” who were “cunning” and told “lies.” 63
Mahmudah Basheer-ud-Deen, who arrived in Mombasa as a young bride
from India in the second decade of the twentieth century, also recalled the
stark contrast between clothed Indians and naked Africans. In Karachi, be-
fore boarding the ship that would take them to East Africa, Mahmudah’s
husband turned to his veiled wife and told her that since they were leaving
India she could uncover her face. Although she kept her burqa on during
the journey across the Indian Ocean, she removed her veil once she settled
into her railway compartment in Mombasa en route to Nairobi. She felt ex-
tremely self-conscious and naked, she recounted in 2006. As she looked out
the window of the moving train, Mahmudah was reassured at the sight of
“nange pange” (completely naked and carefree) Africans; she reconciled her
anxiety over the loss of the veil with a personal realization that nakedness
was in the eyes of the beholder.64
Civilizational distance and racial thought resulted in different private mus-
ings about being Indian in Kenya in the early twentieth century; these did
not automatically, necessarily, or deliberately create racialized hierarchies
of economic and political suppression. However, with the reservation of high-
lands and commercial areas for Europeans only, by 1914 it was clear that
racial difference was being used by the settlers and colonial state to limit
54 Indians in Kenya

the rights of imperial citizenship because of race. In its encounter with such
racial colonial hierarchies, Indian political discourse began to use its civili-
zational difference to legitimize the demand for parity with their fellow col-
onists, Europeans—a parity that through its privileges would resurrect the
very hierarchy they were challenging rhetorically.
Jeevanjee’s business interests were not the only ones affected by the new
economic policies being initiated to the advantage of the Europeans. Several
other prominent Indian merchants, including Allidina Visram, were equally
keen to protect their commercial projects. Together they formed a political
organization, the East African Indian National Congress, on March 7, 1914,
which held its first meeting in Mombasa under the presidency of Jeevan-
jee’s brother, Tayabali, while Alibhai Mulla was traveling overseas. In his
opening remarks as chairman of the welcome committee, Allidina’s son Abul
Rasul pointed to the “vested interests” of Indian business in Kenya, which
ran into “huge sums of money.” He was careful to state that the disabilities
faced by Indians had only recently been imposed with the arrival of Euro-
pean farmers. The primary object of the Congress was to defend against
attacks on the rights and interests of Indians in British East Africa and to
combat any legislation that constituted “an encroachment upon or deroga-
tion” of the rights enjoyed by Indians in the colony. Echoing the same be-
lief as his brother in the Indians’ right to equality based on their imperial
citizenship, Tayabali emphasized Indian loyalty to and pride in being mem-
bers of the “brightest jewel in the Imperial crown.” Indeed, in a show of
loyalty that underscored their local prominence, Abul Rasul and Jeevanjee
had organized a coronation celebration in Mombasa in June 1911 to “rejoice
the new reign” of King George V and invited all Europeans residing in the
city to attend a meeting held at the Jamatkhana (Ismaili mosque). While rec-
ognizing that Indians were first and foremost businessmen, in his presiden-
tial address Tayabali showcased the Indians’ subimperialist abilities: “To pen-
etrate into strange and savage lands, even with business motives, demands
a measure of courage, enterprise, self-denial and general strength of char-
acter.” This, he believed, proved that Indians had acquired a considerable
stake in the country of their adoption and were part of its history, future,
and development. Therefore, they would not acquiesce to any differential
legislation on the grounds of “origin, language, race, color or creed,” par-
ticularly attempts that differentiated between the legal status and treatment
of Indians and that of their European fellow colonists. Consequently, among
the first demands put forward was for Indian representation on the Legis-
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 55

lative Council, which had been absent since 1912, when Jeevanjee volun-
tarily withdrew from the council. Tayabali attributed this void to the gov-
ernor’s refusal to nominate an Indian, accusing him of giving in to the “racial
prejudice” that was getting its deadly grip on Kenya.65
Next, as a “loyal, industrious, enterprising and law abiding” subject of the
crown, he objected to segregation of commercial and residential areas in
Nairobi. Tayabali also complained about the extension of racial segregation
in the railways. However, underscoring the conciliatory rather than confron-
tational role that he hoped the Congress would play, Tayabali— despite criti-
cizing the exclusion of Indians from the highlands—stated that Indians would
“respect the prejudices of others” and had “no desire to obtrude ourselves
into any particular residential quarter already occupied by Europeans.” He
merely wanted to ensure that no further encroachments would take place
and to “jealously guard the rights that membership of Britain’s vast empire
conferred on Indians.” 66

THE LIMITS OF IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP

The governor, Sir Henry Conway Belfield, remained unmoved. Repeating

the same argument put forth by his predecessors, he countered that Indians
had been prohibited from the highlands for “good” and “sufficient” reason.
He refused to nominate an Indian to the Legislative Council, and he re-
vealed his racial bias in his statement upholding segregation in the railways,
announcing that the “habits of many Indian passengers render it impossible
for Europeans to take long journeys in their company with comfort.” Fur-
thermore, Belfield argued that segregation in townships was vital to the
maintenance of health and sanitation.67
The Colonial Office, meanwhile, continued to relentlessly pursue a policy
of separate but equal despite the evidence in East Africa that the recogni-
tion of difference was being used by the governor and European settlers to
treat Indians unequally. In July 1914, the secretary of state for colonies,
Viscount Harcourt, insisted that there was no reason to give British Indians
in Kenya “a status in any way inferior to that of any other class of His Ma-
jesty’s subjects resident in the colony.” 68 Yet he refused to acknowledge the
discrimination inherent in preventing Indians from acquiring lands in cer-
tain parts of the protectorate. In 1914, an official report published by Pro-
fessor W. J. Simpson on sanitary matters in East Africa gave further endorse-
ment to the principle of segregation, providing Belfield justification for
56 Indians in Kenya

rejecting the Congress’s demands on the grounds of public health. Reporting

on the 1908 and 1911 outbreaks of plague in Nairobi that had spread to the
highlands, Simpson noted that as Nairobi’s population had grown from just
5,000 in 1902 to 16,000 in 1910, the “intermingling” in towns and trade cen-
ters of races of “different customs and habits” had caused unsanitary con-
ditions throughout East Africa. He pointed to the prevalence of diseases
such as malaria, dysentery, relapsing fever, and smallpox among Indians and
Africans that “readily transferred” to Europeans because of this. Therefore,
Simpson suggested that Indians, Africans, and Europeans be separated into
residential and commercial quarters. Moreover, he recommended a “neu-
tral belt” of unoccupied land of at least 300 yards around European areas
to ensure the healthfulness of the locality. The Indian bazaar owned by
Jeevanjee and Visram was highlighted in newspapers as a “Plague Spot”
where overcrowding was causing a public health crisis.69
Indian traders, big and small, had set up shop and residence in the market,
while African migrant laborers lived in the same shops-cum-residences,
renting from Indian landlords. The market was thus densely populated. Simp-
son’s suggestion of segregating races by opening up new and separate racial
zones did not consider the undesirability of such a move for traders, who
did not want to venture out of the Indian bazaar to other officially demar-
cated “Indian” areas—notably on River Road—because of the lack of com-
mercial activity there. Nor did it take into account the state’s paltry finan-
cial ability to actually build the infrastructure needed to effectively solve
the public health crisis. Jeevanjee Market had emerged in the swamp area
that the governor had assigned to Indians in 1900, who had noted the prev-
alence of mosquitoes making this space “unsuitable” for Europeans. In 1911,
a drain was constructed through the market, but it was left open and
incomplete. Residents used this open drain in the absence of any public la-
trines. Rather than racial “intermingling” causing sanitation problems, it was
overcrowding and the open drain that became a breeding ground for
malaria and other diseases. Yet the Legislative Council moved unanimously,
on the basis of Simpson’s report, to remove the entire bazaar, despite the
ninety-nine-year lease on which Indians had bought land in the market and
the fact that they paid £15,000 in municipal council taxes in 1911. How-
ever, the local government did not have the money to demolish the market.70
Unable to actually implement any of Simpson’s suggestions because of the
lack of resources, the colonial state stepped in to—at the very least— ensure
the racial segregation of Indians and Europeans. In 1915, an ordinance was
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 57

introduced that gave the governor complete power to veto the transfer of
land between individuals of different races. Ostensibly passed to prevent the
exploitation of African owners by “land sharks,” in practice this ordinance
meant the exclusion of Indians from any crown lands, including those in
townships and the highlands. Governor Sadler, under whom this bill was
initiated in 1909, had argued emphatically that the experiment of making
the highlands a white man’s country was a “very large and interesting one”
and that the colonial administration in East Africa should do everything it
could to help the European farmers. He therefore ensured that the governor
would have to sanction all transfers of estates.71 With the 1915 ordinance
this became official policy. While Simpson had recommended in his report
the residential separation of races, he did not see any reason to prevent people
of one race from owning property in areas where other races resided. In
1917, Governor Bowring suggested that ownership itself be restricted in the
European areas to Europeans only, a move sanctioned by the Executive
Council, which consisted entirely of Europeans. The resentment among
Indians over land that had thus far been focused on the highlands and
threats to raze the Nairobi market now came to include the coastal belt,
where Indians had lived for centuries. In August 1918, twenty-one plots in
Mombasa came up for auction, and the municipal council subsequently pre-
vented Indians from bidding on them. This exclusion was justified as neces-
sary for sanitation and public health. In reality, Indian merchants had been
the only people in East Africa to make money “hand over fist” during the
First World War. Governor Bowring worried that “Indian encroachment”
was such a serious threat that unless certain parts of Mombasa were desig-
nated for Europeans only, Indians would buy all the land in the city.72
A third blow to the Indian position, following the sanitation and land
ordinances, came from the Economic Commission, consisting of five
Europeans—including Grogan and Lord Delamere—whose 1919 report in-
troduced a new dimension into the debate between Europeans and Indians,
which had thus far been limited to the highlands and hygiene: the economic
stagnation of Africans caused by an increasing number of Indian migrants.
Rejecting the Indians’ claim to have been the first makers of the land, the
report concluded that, apart from occasional incursions by “half-caste Bal-
uchis,” the interior had been untouched by Indians. Grogan, in his evidence
to the Sanderson Committee in 1909, had argued emphatically against
Indians’ claims of having done “pioneer work” in Kenya, quite accurately
stating that before the British had arrived Indians resided only along the
58 Indians in Kenya

coast. Indeed, he noted, “you never find an Indian except in very very close
contact with the Government stations.” He repeated this in the Economic
Commission report which highlighted the centrality of colonial rule, in
particular the construction of the Uganda Railway, in introducing Indians
into the interior. However, the argument Jeevanjee and others had made
was not that Indians had opened up the hinterland before the British did
but that they were equal partners who had shared the burden of colonial
conquest. Therefore, Delamere and Grogan shifted focus away from big
merchants such as Visram and Jeevanjee to the population of clerks, arti-
sans, carpenters, and mechanics, arguing that they created unfair competi-
tion for Africans and concluding that the free admission of certain classes
of Indians into the country should be banned, just as it had been in self-
governing Natal.73
Between 1911 and 1921 the Indian population in Kenya increased from
approximately 11,000 to 23,000. Of a population of about 15,000 Indians
in 1919, 3,942 were large-scale merchants and petty shopkeepers, while 3,024
were skilled workers, particularly artisans, carpenters, masons, drivers, and
mechanics, and 2,500 were government employees in low-level jobs, serving
predominantly as clerks and policemen. Mombasa continued to attract
wholesale merchants and railway workers, bringing the town’s Indian pop-
ulation up to 8,473 in 1921, while the new colonial capital was home to small-
scale traders, petty retailers, and a large number of skilled laborers. Between
1911 and 1921, there was a 179 percent growth in the number of Indians in
Nairobi, which increased from 3,361 to 9,361. In Mombasa and Nairobi, In-
dian workers from Punjab were contracted by the railways, which provided
them with rations and accommodation in “landies,” while private firms em-
ployed local Indian artisans and “fundies” (carpenters) in their workshops.
Far from being subimperialist merchants who had achieved a level of civi-
lization equal to the Europeans’, the majority of these workers spoke no
English, had low levels of literacy and education, and earned wages deter-
mined by their employers. The Economic Commission report claimed that
this class of Indians deprived Africans of “all incentives to ambition and
opportunity of advancement” by providing a ser vice that Africans could
offer if properly trained and without Indian competition. Picking up on the
conclusions of the Simpson report, it also added that Indians were a physically
undesirable element in the country because of their “incurable repugnance
to sanitation and hygiene,” making them a “menace” to Africans, who were
“more civilized than the Indian.” 74
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 59

In 1901, Darookhanawala had also noted the lack of hygiene among the
Indians he met, particularly the “unclean manners of” Memons, Bhatias,
Khojas, and Banias, who had “dirty clothes and dirty homes.” They “have
no idea of cleanliness,” he lamented, reserving his most disparaging obser-
vations for Indian travelers on the railways. He objected to their “disgusting
habits,” which included spitting, resting “dirty shoes on seats,” eating “their
food and chutneys” that spilled “all over the place,” and washing their hands
and feet with water that made the cabin floors “muddy and slippery.” For
him, imperial citizenship and India’s civilizational achievements were lim-
ited to the higher class of merchants, who were entitled to economic and
political rights based on their literacy, property, and material wealth. In-
deed, Darookhanawala pointed out that “the English dislike them [Indians]
because of this. I don’t blame the English and I feel the Indians are entirely
to blame because of their lack of manners.”75 While Europeans underscored
the presence of poor, uneducated Indians in building their racial argument
to prevent all Indians from acquiring property in the highlands and to sepa-
rate out the commercial areas by race, the big merchants directly affected
by these limitations highlighted their civilizational progress to demand rights
for themselves, not for the poorer and uneducated working-class Indians
whom the Congress did not represent. After its initial meeting in March 1914
at which it emphasized its loyalty to the crown, the Congress followed the
injunction of His Majesty’s government issued at the outbreak of the First
World War to keep all controversial matters in abeyance during the hostili-
ties and did not organize any further protest.76 A new poll tax imposed on
Indians in July 1914, however, triggered a week-long strike in Mombasa and
Nairobi, highlighting the different preoccupations of merchants and workers
as the latter also protested against the unhygienic living conditions and over-
crowding in their landies.
Although Darookhanawala had blamed Indians for their unsanitary life-
styles, laborers contracted from Punjab and employed in the railways were
given accommodation in small rooms of about fifteen by twenty-two feet
where up to ten workers lived, cooking their food on open fires and sleeping
on the floor. The rooms were overcrowded, dark, and unclean, stuffed with
cooking utensils, blankets, sacks, and other personal items belonging to their
inhabitants. One such “landie” in Mombasa was built next to a mule shed
from which carcasses of dead animals were not immediately removed. The
stench from the shed pervaded this room. The mealie rations the workers
received had “foreign matter” in them. With no doctor on site, when laborers
60 Indians in Kenya

fell ill they were required to walk to a hospital irrespective of the severity
of their illness. Indian workers complained about the quality of their ac-
commodation and rations, objecting in particular to the lack of light and
space in the landies. In July 1914, a poll tax of Rs 15 was imposed on all
Indians, including contracted workers. For a week starting on July 20,
approximately 2,500 workers went on strike in Mombasa and Nairobi,
refusing to pay this “non-native” tax. These included fitters, boilermakers,
carpenters, riveters, molders, and drivers employed in the railways and
Public Works Department, and fitters and fundies employed in a European-
owned engineers’ firm in Nairobi, Messrs. Lamberts Limited. Railways and
Public Works Department workers demanded exemption from the poll tax,
arguing that their employment contracts had no mention of such a tax,
while the locally recruited fundies employed by Messrs. Lamberts called
on their employer to pay on their behalf. As the strike progressed, a formal
list of demands was presented to the general manager of the railways, which
included a number of grievances in addition to issues of tax, board, and
lodging. For example, workers objected to a change in bonus policy. Hitherto
a Rs 36 bonus had been given to employees after three years of service, but
this benefit had been rescinded. They protested against wage policies that
deprived them of their pay on sick days and foremen who were “too strict”
in timing their arrival at the workplace, refusing to pay them for the day’s
work if they were late. Employees demanded that they be allowed to at-
tend funerals of their coworkers who “die as foreigners in this land,” often
because of poor working and living conditions, and wanted religious holi-
days to be extended to all Indian workers regardless of their faith. They
argued that the existing policy of allowing Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs to
take leave only on specific days coinciding with their par ticular religion
sowed “wild oats of disunion between the Indian brothers.” 77
A European political activist and lawyer, L. W. Ritch, who had been a
close associate of Gandhi’s in South Africa, had been present at the first
meeting of the Congress a few months earlier. Although the Congress had
limited its concerns to the issues of land and trade, Ritch had returned to
Nairobi in early July and advised the strikers to organize themselves through
the Congress to include Indians in Kisumu, Makindi, and Nakuru. While
the majority of workers did not speak English, English-speaking Mehr Chand
Puri led the negotiations with the general manager of the railways in Nai-
robi, serving as an interpreter and mediator. Significantly, Puri was a close
associate of Ritch’s and had arrived in the country six weeks prior to the
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 61

strike. He represented Indian workers, but was himself unemployed. The

workers’ demands underscored very specific and real material grievances,
yet the involvement of Ritch and Puri signaled a political move from Nai-
robi to take leadership of the spontaneous, local protest in Mombasa and
harness growing economic frustrations among Indians throughout the pro-
tectorate through the Congress’ organization. The colonial state could not
conclusively prove that either had organized the strike. However, both
Ritch and Puri were deported from Kenya for sedition when it became
clear to the state that merchants such as Jeevanjee and Visram were not
entirely representative of the occupational or political orientation of its In-
dian subjects in Kenya.78
Punjab, and, significantly, the Sikh diaspora that originated from there,
had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity in the first two decades of the
twentieth century. Punjabi Sikhs and Bengali intellectuals who had migrated
to North America’s Pacific Coast at the turn of the century founded a
transnational anticolonial revolutionary party, the Ghadr Party, which had
branches across the British Empire and coordinated with a similar dia-
sporic group in Germany. Its aim was the overthrow of colonial rule in
India, by violent means if necessary. The outbreak of the First World War
gave them the opportunity to do so with Germany’s assistance.79 A small
number of Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs employed as contractors, carpenters,
clerks, and coolies in Kenya had links with the Ghadr movement. Although
the government never found any direct connection between them and the
July 1914 strikers, the colonial state had kept the community under surveil-
lance. In fact, a motivation for Ritch and Puri’s deportation was their al-
leged connections with “extremists” in Kenya who were identified as Ghadr
sympathizers. Many such sympathizers were detained, deported, or exe-
cuted in East Africa during the First World War.
The Ghadr Party mobilized supporters through the publication of the
Ghadr paper from its headquarters in San Francisco, which first appeared
in Kenya in November 1913. By March 1914 at least seven mail packets con-
taining issues of Ghadr had arrived in Kenya, five of which were addressed
to the secretary of the Punjabi Arya Samaj (a Hindu socioreligious organi-
zation) and two to the Sikh temple in Nairobi. Sita Ram, a telegraph sig-
naler from Gurdaspur, Punjab, organized Ghadr activities in East Africa be-
fore he was deported to India and detained in Punjab. In a letter to a
Mombasa-based Indian merchant intercepted by the government, Sita Ram
wrote of his attempts to mobilize Indians in Nairobi, where he was employed,
62 Indians in Kenya

Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Voi. Arguing that to “suffer in silence” was foolish,
he urged Indians to stir themselves against the British, especially Indian
soldiers who were defending British East Africa against the Germans, who
wanted to extend their East African empire. Calling on them to “refuse to
fight the Germans,” Sita Ram was involved in trying to decode military
telegrams. He also appealed to merchants to rouse the Indian commercial
community to unite under the leadership of Jeevanjee and Ritch, their “pa-
tron,” to form a united front to “crush the vermin” that had “deprived us of
all our freedom and hopes for Swaraj [self-rule].” Significantly, he noted
the need for his “brothers” to “create friendly feelings with the other races.”
Another suspected Ghadrite was Sita Ram’s namesake, Sita Ram Acharia,
who arrived in Kenya in 1912 also from Gurdaspur to work on the Uganda
Railway. In August 1914 he joined the military branch of the East Africa
Pay Corps. The Department of Criminal Intelligence in India investigating
Ghadr activities believed that Germany tried to make him an agent by
urging him to join the Indian National Party based in Berlin. Another ac-
tivist, Devi Dial from Rawalpindi, Punjab, who returned to Bombay from
East Africa in May 1914, wrote a letter to Hira Lal Dey in Nairobi in which
he vowed to sacrifice his life for India’s “liberty and freedom,” hoping to
overthrow the rule by “tyrant Rakshasas [monsters] who spend all their time
in thinking to suck our blood.” He too was interned in Punjab. By May 1916,
twenty Indians were deported to India on suspicion of being involved in
seditious activities, including connections with the Ghadr party. In addition,
Bishendas Sharma, the resident magistrate’s court clerk, who hailed from
Hoshiarpur, Punjab, and Kesho Lal Dwivedi, chief clerk of the High Court,
who was from the Bombay Presidency, both of whom were living in Mom-
basa, were charged with sedition and imprisoned for fourteen years. Fuel
contractors Ganesh Das and Jograj from Rawalpindi, who were living in Voi,
were hanged for their involvement in blowing up a train in September 1915,
along with Kishen Singh, who was hanged for treason. Bodraj, another fuel
contractor from Rawalpindi who was living in Tsavo, was fined Rs 300 for
sedition, while Savle was sentenced to twenty years of rigorous imprison-
ment for his involvement with the “extremists.” 80
In contrast to the actions by railways and Public Works Department
workers and those involved with the Ghadr movement, the Congress’s de-
mand for access to the highlands and the deracialization of commercial zones
in Nairobi threatened neither the daily functioning of administration nor the
future of the colonial state. However, with the publication of the Simpson
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 63

and Economic Commission reports, it appeared that European settlers, in

the absence of any Indian representative on the Legislative Council, were
ready to take full advantage of the Congress’s wartime lull by enacting land,
public health, and immigration policies detrimental to them. As a result, in
1918 Indian associations in Mombasa and Nairobi affiliated with the Con-
gress began to petition the Colonial Office to intervene on their behalf to re-
move these “humiliating conditions” and “save the community from plunging
into active agitation.” Allidina Visram had died in 1916, but his son Abul
Rasul, Jeevanjee, and several other Indians had drafted these petitions. Hus-
senbhai Virji, for example, became politically active during this time. Like
Visram and Jeevanjee, Virji also belonged to one of the most prominent mer-
chant families in East Africa. In the 1880s, his father, Suleman Virji, an Is-
maili from Gujarat, had set up shops on the Swahili coast in Mombasa and
Zanzibar, selling hardware to Arabs and Africans. In the early 1900s, Suleman
expanded his business, opening shops along the railway line to sell provisions
to the workers. He subsequently founded a firm in Nairobi, Suleman Virji
and Sons, that bought ivory from hunters and European settlers and sold
them daily goods. Suleman’s son Hussenbhai continued the family business
and became a leader of the Ismaili community, building a mosque in Nairobi
funded almost entirely by the Virjis in 1921. Another Muslim, Shams-ud-
Deen, from Kashmir, joined the Indian Association of Nairobi and the Con-
gress during the war. Unlike the others, however, he was not a rich merchant
but had arrived in Kenya in 1900 to work in the railways as a member of the
East African civil service. He was subsequently employed as a court clerk in
Nairobi. Manilal Desai, a Gujarati Hindu, went to Kenya in 1915 to work as a
managing clerk for a European firm in Nairobi called Harrison, Salmon, and
Cresswell. He, along with Mangal Das, who was a Punjabi contractor and
proprietor of Highland Furniture, became respectively secretary and vice
secretary of the Indian Association of Nairobi and began to organize Indians
to protect their “social, moral, intellectual and financial advancement” in
East Africa. In August 1919, Desai was personally affected by the segrega-
tionist tendencies of the colonial state when he tried to lease a house in the
Parklands area of Nairobi but was prevented from doing so because it was
deemed a European residential area. Two Hindu barristers, V. V. Phadke and
B. S. Varma, also became politically active in Nairobi at this time.81
Immediately after the war, this new generation of political activists con-
tinued to use Jeevanjee’s language of imperial citizenship to protect their
rights. Based on their “honorable and important part” in defending the
64 Indians in Kenya

empire, they demanded treatment on equal footing with all of His Majes-
ty’s subjects. In an appeal to Governor Bowring, Mangal Das argued:
“While the English statesmen were extolling the parts played by India [in
the war] and were holding out promises that she would henceforward be
treated as partner of the British Empire, measures were being enacted in
this country [Kenya] which deprived the Indians of most of the rights they
possessed before the war.” These early hints at an emerging critique of colo-
nialism caught the attention of the government of India and the Indian
secretary of state, Edwin Samuel Montagu, who had been drawing up a list
of political reforms for India in order to start the gradual shift toward lim-
ited self-government through constitutional change. Montagu warned the
colonial secretary, Lord Milner, that Indians resented—“with good reason,”
in his judgment—measures taken in any part of the empire that came into
conflict with the king’s assurance that Britain would recognize India’s war
effort and reward Indians for their loyalty. He predicted that discrimina-
tory measures such as the ones introduced in East Africa “afford powerful
weapons to the disaffected while they perplex and discourage the loyal.” 82
This was an astute observation of the situation in Kenya for an official sit-
ting in London whose primary involvement had been in placating Indian
nationalists in the subcontinent.
In November 1919, the Congress held its second meeting under the
presidency of Hussenbhai Virji, with Das, Desai, Shams-ud-Deen, Phadke,
Varma, and Abul Rasul Visram in active and vocal attendance. The Con-
gress lodged its strong objection to the Economic Commission’s demand to
exclude Indians entirely from the country, especially since the commission
had consisted entirely of Europeans and had failed to gather evidence from
Indians in writing its report. Such antisettler views did not, however, lead
these men to question the imperial project itself. A total of forty resolutions
were passed at this meeting, of which the very first confirmed the Congress’s
unswerving loyalty to His Majesty’s throne and person and its “hearty co-
operation” with the colonial government of East Africa. Other resolutions
passed at the meeting demanded the franchise for Indians to elect Indian
representatives to the legislative and municipal councils, the removal of re-
strictions on land sales, trial by jury, the rejection of a bill aimed at the seg-
regation of races that had been introduced in the Legislative Council, and
a condemnation of the European settlers’ effort to restrict Indian immigra-
tion into the protectorate.83
As political protest through Indian associations in Nairobi and Mombasa
and the Congress grew, various solutions were put forward to keep Kenya a
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 65

white man’s country without excluding Indians entirely. One such scheme
was the Indian colonization of German East Africa. Jeevanjee’s suggestion
in 1910 that Indian colonization of Kenya would make it economically prof-
itable was taken seriously by colonial administrators in India, Britain, and
East Africa. With the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the British
government expanded its territorial presence in East Africa. Sir Theodore
Morrison, a former principal of Aligarh College in India who had been posted
as a political officer to German East Africa, put forward the idea of estab-
lishing a “Colony for India” in Tanganyika. Morrison argued in the spring
of 1918 that this would allow German East Africa to become the America
of the Hindus, while British East Africa could be made a white man’s country.
After all the wartime setbacks they had faced, Jeevanjee, Virji, and Abul
Rasul Visram were delighted to have “official” backing to implement their
subimperialist ambitions, and they organized several public meetings in
Nairobi and Mombasa between September and December 1918 to support
Morrison’s scheme to reserve the newly acquired territory solely for Indian
agriculturalists and to place it under the direct administration of the gov-
ernment of India. The London branch of the All-India Muslim League also
joined the campaign to make German East Africa a field for the “natural
expansion and exercise of their [Indians’] legitimate rights to trade and
commerce.” 84
Virji, Jeevanjee, and Abul Rasul Visram deputed Shams-ud-Deen to visit
India and present their case for Indian colonization to nationalists there as
a demand that was “in conformity with the law of equity, justice and British
citizenship.” They completely miscalculated the political climate in India.
In April 1919, while Shams-ud-Deen was in India, General Dyer opened
fire on a nonviolent crowd in Amritsar, Punjab, killing more than 350 people,
including women and children, who had collected in a garden called Jallian-
wallah Bagh to protest against the continuation of the Rowlatt Act, which
gave the government the power to imprison without trial anyone suspected
of conspiracy, after the end of wartime hostilities. In the aftermath of this
incident, political leaders in India who had supported Britain’s war efforts
began to question and ultimately reject the very notion of imperial citizen-
ship. Shams-ud-Deen saw the transition occurring before his eyes as loyal
subjects of the crown became anticolonial nationalists, and he quickly real-
ized that they were not sympathetic to the subimperialist ambitions of
Indian merchants in East Africa. Within Kenya, the “rude shock” of the
Jallianwallah Bagh massacre caught the attention of the large Sikh commu-
nity of artisans, among whom leaflets circulated describing the killings and
66 Indians in Kenya

reporting, incorrectly, that damage had been done to the Golden Temple,
their holy site in Amritsar. Eager to distance themselves from the nationalist
movement in India, the Indian Association of Kisumu, where 1,600 Indians
lived, squelched these rumors and informed the district commissioner of
Nairobi in July 1919 that the Indian leadership had “successfully combated
all attempts to make the Rowlatt Act an issue for the Indian community in
this country.” 85 In 1919, the political aspirations of Indians in East Africa
did not converge with those of nationalists in the subcontinent, although
this was to change imminently.
The seriousness with which the Indian associations pursued Morrison’s
idea for an Indian colony in German East Africa provoked emphatic oppo-
sition from both the governor and settlers in Kenya. European opposition
to the scheme among officials and farmers took the shape of several inter-
related concerns regarding imperialism and African colonial subjects. First,
Bowring, Lt. Gen. Montgomery, the former commissioner of land, and Eu-
ropean settlers within the Legislative Council and the Convention of As-
sociations (the successor to the Colonists’ Association) highlighted the ide-
ological foundations of imperialism in East Africa, which was intended to
usher Africans toward modernity and progress. The task of empire in Af-
rica was seen by Europeans as the “gradual uplifting of the African inhab-
itant by contact with the civilization of the west and not the imposition of
the civilization of the east.” Western civilization amounted to “education”
and “training in accordance with western ideals,” which were portrayed as
antagonistic to those of the East. Unlike Africans, who were seen by Euro-
peans as “savage” and as a “child race,” settlers and officials acknowledged
that Indians had a political past and an ancient civilization. However, Euro-
pean members of the Legislative Council were quick to point out that this
“despotic Asian” civilization had resulted in the failure of Indian races to
govern themselves, which in turn had “driven” Britain to take over control
of India’s affairs. As colonial subjects progressing along the road to enlight-
enment themselves, Indians, despite their economic achievements, could
not be subimperialists in Kenya, since they brought with them neither
Christianity nor civilization. Therefore, members of the Convention of As-
sociations argued, Indians were neither capable of ruling Africa, having
“never yet been the ruler of any but Asiatics,” nor preferable as partners in
sharing the white man’s burden.86
A second concern highlighted by officials and Europeans regarded Af-
rican opinion on Indians. Bowring and Montgomery were convinced that
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 67

Africans viewed Indians with “intolerance if not contempt,” since they looked
upon the latter “as only another coloured man no better than himself.” Ask
any African, Montgomery confidently announced, if he preferred an En-
glishman or Indian as ruler, “I have no hesitation in saying he would cast
vote for the former” and have the “strongest objection” to the latter. Even
the pro-Indian Johnston had noted in 1909, “When the negro does raise
himself to that [civilized] intellectual level he becomes mentally much more
like a white man than the Asiatic ever will become.” A letter from Tanga
elders to the district commissioner in December 1918 certainly seemed to
confirm this. Professing loyalty to the British, the elders asked not to be
placed under the rule of Indians, stating, “We in East Africa need the con-
trol and care of Europeans for developing ourselves, our country and our
children.” 87
The Indian merchants did not in fact want to directly rule Africans. They
remained loyal subjects of the British Empire, and their aspiration for a
colony in German East Africa was accompanied by the demand that it be
placed under the colonial government of India, rather than that of Kenya,
since the growing lobby of European farmers within the Legislative Council
had severely limited their economic ambitions. Therefore, even while high-
lighting African ambivalence toward Indians in general, the pronouncements
of officials and settlers pointed to a more concrete realm of racial antago-
nism: the economic sphere. Building on the report of the Economic Com-
mission, European settlers who wanted to ensure that Indians would per-
manently leave the colony highlighted the negative competition from Indian
carpenters, masons, engine drivers, and mechanics, who prevented Africans
from taking up opportunities of development that these technical jobs cre-
ated. Within the Legislative Council, Europeans positioned themselves
as champions of the Africans, arguing that Africans’ economic interests
were hindered by Indians who fi lled subordinate posts under European
supervision—positions that, given technical education and contact with
European civilization, qualified Africans could occupy.88
At a discursive level, Montgomery and Grogan argued that Indians were
a further obstacle to Africans even in the realm of trade. They announced
that petty shopkeepers—who, according to them, were much “cleverer”
than Africans— deceived their clients by taking advantage of their igno-
rance. In 1909 Montgomery had remarked to the Sanderson Committee, “It
is a pity . . . that any British subject should go into a very primitive tribe
and put a bad aspect of British subjects before them.” In concrete terms,
68 Indians in Kenya

these “bad aspects” amounted to moneylending and predatory practices such

as purchasing surplus grain from African farmers and then selling it back
to them at a higher price, as happened with Masai and Elgeyo farmers in
Ravine station before the war. This created conflict between the buyer and
seller, especially in Ravine, where a famine was imminent. Europeans used
this incident to illustrate the extent to which the Indian “takes the bread
out of the native’s mouth.”89
On their part, Indians were quick to counter these arguments by invoking
the achievements of their homeland, claiming to be on par with the Euro-
pean settlers and using their civilizational differences to highlight their
superiority to and distinction from Africans. As Isabel Hofmeyr, Mark
Frost, Nile Green, and Joseph Lelyveld have argued, by anchoring the
demand for political rights in the status of imperial citizenship, the political
discourse of South Asians across the Indian Ocean was “rooted in a no-
tion of civilization—specifically Asian civilization.” The focus on India as the
source of civilization for diasporic imperial citizens resulted in a racial
consciousness in the Indian Ocean that was simultaneously territorial and
extraterritorial, as India’s civilizational genius traveled with Indians who
traversed this realm. For them, Africa and Africans came to represent a
“frontier” between the “civilized and savage.”90
In his representations to the colonial state beginning in 1910, Jeevanjee
had adopted the modernizing discourse of the imperial project in Africa that
aimed at lifting the land and inhabitants of Africa out of their “savage” state.
In so doing, he distinguished between civilized and uncivilized colonial
subjects, as the diasporic construction of “Indianness” not only evoked a
spatial and civilizational difference between Indians and Africans but also
conflated race with civilization. Indians therefore objected to being treated
in the same way as Africans. During his time in South Africa, Gandhi had
infamously “made up” his mind “to fight against the rule by which Indians
are made to live with Kaffirs and others.”91 Similarly, Indians in Kenya
objected to the use of the word “coloured” for themselves, arguing that the
term applied to “darker varieties of mankind, as negroes, mullats, etc, and
never to Indians.” Jeevanjee and the Muslim League pointed out that most
Europeans who had migrated to Kenya were Boers and white settlers from
Natal who were so blinded by their “colour prejudice” that they failed to
“recognize the very wide distinction between the highly organized and an-
cient civilization of India and the semi-barbarous condition and outlook of
the Kaffir.” They criticized Europeans for regarding Indian British sub-
 From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country 69

jects as “undesirables and niggers to be boycotted and got rid of.” In Feb-
ruary 1918, the Nairobi municipal council passed an ordinance regarding
public rickshaws that distinguished between Europeans and non-Europeans.
Taking offense at this principle of dividing humanity into only two “classes”,
Desai proclaimed that this was a “slur on the ancient civilization of our com-
munity” because the council had deliberately failed to “distinguish between
Indians and the barbarous” Africans. Although the Indian railway workers
claimed neither the subimperialist achievements of the merchants nor civi-
lizational parity with Europeans, during their strike in 1914 they had also
objected to being made to “live in common” with Africans, who “trouble us
unreasonably and only for fun’s sake.” Specifically, this took the form of al-
leged thefts and “pilferages.”92
Even as Indian political activists juxtaposed their civilizational achieve-
ments with those of Africans both discursively and materially, they accused
Europeans of treating Africans badly. Having learned from the Ravine sta-
tion incident, an editorial in the same newspaper that had objected to the
term “coloured” for Indians appealed to the government to prepare for a
drought-induced famine in Nairobi in February 1911, which had driven up
the price of mealies and caused hardship for the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu, the
editorial pronounced, were “naturally thoughtless” and did not think to save
for the future. Therefore, they were in danger of starvation unless the gov-
ernment brought maize into Nairobi from Kisumu, where the yield had been
generous. The newspaper was making this call, the editorial proclaimed, with
the aim to “practice what we preach” regarding “equality and even-handed
justice.” Publicly vocal Indians began to develop a critique of Western civili-
zation for its moral maladies that created material discontent. Although it
was good for business when Africans in towns began to adopt Western
clothes, as it was Indian traders who supplied them with such materials,
Indian newspaper editorials lamented that urbanized Africans had ac-
quired the European “vice” of “conceit,” which made them untrustworthy.
Furthermore, obliquely referring to the low wages paid to African workers,
articles highlighted the importance of Indian retailers in supplying goods
at a low price, stating, “If you want him [the African] to go to the European
trader instead of the Indian bazaar pay him so as to enable him to eat with
knife and fork and to wear flannel coats with long slits.” In 1919, in his
presidential address at the second public meeting of the Congress, Virji re-
vealed a strong antisettler discourse, directly contesting the Europeans’
claim that Indians were a negative influence on Africans, arguing that if
70 Indians in Kenya

the Africans needed to fear anything, it was their “exploitation” by Euro-

peans. Although in 1911 Indians had enthusiastically supported the gover-
nor’s policy to introduce a poll tax on Africans to compel them to offer their
ser vices as labor, less than a decade later Virji referred to the law of regis-
tration as favoring “semi-slavery principles.” He warned that the “develop-
ment” of Africans was being carefully structured to fall in line with the in-
terest of the white settler that superseded those of the “natives.”93
As the status of Africans emerged as a talking point for Indian and Eu-
ropeans alike, it became clear to Bowring that “provocative” and “thought-
less” racialized statements were providing a “suitable field in which extreme
agitators had been able to sow the seeds of . . . discontent.” With the “posi-
tion” becoming “acute,” in May 1920 the secretary of state for colonies, Vis-
count Milner, outlined the Colonial Office’s policy regarding the Indian ques-
tion. He rejected the Congress’s demand for elective representation but
provided for the nomination of two representatives on the Legislative Council
on a special “communal” franchise of Indians only. Twenty-nine Europeans
(eighteen officials and eleven settlers) represented about 9,000 Europeans,
whereas the more than 25,000 Indians had two representatives, keeping the
balance in favor of the white farmers. Abul Rasul Visram and V. V. Phadke
were the two Indians nominated to the Legislative Council. Apart from this
concession, however, Milner came out quite decisively on the side of the
settlers, upholding the reservation of the highlands. Significantly, on the con-
tentious issue of segregation in residential and commercial areas, Milner in-
stitutionalized Eliot’s scheme of racially separate spheres of colonial gover-
nance. He proclaimed, “The principle in laying out of townships in tropical
Africa separate areas should be allotted to different races is not only from
the sanitary point of view but also on grounds of social convenience the right
principle.”94 As the Protectorate of East Africa became the crown colony of
Kenya, the Colonial Office abandoned its plans to make it the America of
the Hindu. Milner’s decision marked a triumph for the European settlers
and their demand for a white man’s country. The Congress spent the next
two decades contesting this policy.
 T WO

R
“Civilization” in Kenya

who had positioned themselves as

I N D I A N I N T E R M E D I A RY C A P I TA L I S T S
subimperialists in the first two decades of the twentieth century found Vis-
count Milner’s acquiescence in May 1920 to the European settlers’ demand
for racial segregation on the grounds of social convenience an affront to their
economic achievements and political status in Kenya. As they realized the
racial limits imposed on Britain’s Indian loyal imperial citizens, leaders of
the East African Indian National Congress began to criticize the civiliza-
tional and colonial discourse of the settlers in defending segregation. Through
the early 1920s, these merchants-turned-political-activists, who had a ma-
terial and ideological investment in protecting their subimperialist position,
were replaced by a new generation of leaders who represented a growing
community of professionals and skilled workers. They began to question the
unfulfilled promises of political and economic rights made by the state and
the thinly veiled racial considerations of their benefactors who determined
colonial policy. This critique of colonial subjectivity unfolded simultaneously
for South Asians across the Indian Ocean.
While criticizing the economic structure of colonialism before the war,
political leaders in India, including Mohandas K. Gandhi, had declared their
loyalty to the crown in the hope of receiving postwar rewards, particularly
self-governance. By 1920, it became clear that these rewards would not be
forthcoming. Those who had been loyal imperial citizens before the war
became anticolonial nationalists in its aftermath, and Gandhi launched his
first political mass movement in India. This nationalism had extraterritorial
resonances, as Gandhi accused Lloyd George of breaking his wartime

71
72 Indians in Kenya

promise to Britain’s Muslim subjects to protect their holy places in the Ot-
toman Empire. Gandhi’s “political genius in combining extra-territorial
Islamic universalism with love for the territorial motherland” brought the
plight of Indians in East Africa within the legitimate orbit of anticolonial
agitation in the subcontinent.1 The simultaneous disappointment with
their unavailing claims as imperial citizens in Kenya and in India led to a
convergence of political aspirations on both sides of the Indian Ocean. Re-
flecting the global implications of having an empire over which the sun
never set, a united political realm emerged in India and Kenya among Brit-
ain’s Indian colonial subjects, who were seething from the humiliation of
Milner’s proclamation. Protests against it were heard on the streets of
Bombay and Allahabad, while in Nairobi at public meetings of the Con-
gress and the Indian Association, leaders directly addressed events taking
place in their homeland. In speeches, they criticized the European settlers
in general and Milner’s imperial policy in particular.
The united political realm resulting from ideological disenchantment with
colonial policy across the Indian Ocean was reinforced by the people who
traversed this space. Between 1911 and 1921, the population of Indians in
Kenya almost doubled from 11,886 to 22,822, approximately 6,000 of whom
were born in Kenya. Two-thirds were first-generation immigrants from
Punjab, Bombay Presidency, Goa, Kathiawar, and Kutch (see Map 1).
They emerged as the petty bourgeoisie in the colony, both diversifying the
occupational and geographical spread of Indians in Kenya and shaping
the political discourse among Indians, Europeans, and Africans on Indian
claims.2 Close to 4,000 Indians engaged in commercial enterprises were
joined by 3,000 skilled and semiskilled artisans, including mechanics, tai-
lors, engineers, plumbers, and masons. Approximately 2,500 Indian clerks
and workers were employed in government ser vices and the railways, while
the colony was home to forty Indian professionals, including doctors, school-
teachers, lawyers, and journalists. A decade earlier, Indians in Kenya had
been predominantly engaged in trade, particularly as intermediary mer-
chants. In 1921 they were equally split between skilled and semiskilled
professionals and businessmen. Traders settled across the breadth of the
colony following the railway line, while the professionals and artisans lived
primarily in Nairobi and Mombasa.
Between 1911 and 1921, the number of Indian traders in the colony in-
creased 260 percent. By 1931, they were joined by another 11,000—a 365
percent increase within a decade. They included wholesale merchants who
 “Civilization” in Kenya 73

imported and exported goods to India and petty shopkeepers engaged in

local retail trade. Together they developed a tight network of goods and
credit, monopolizing close to 90 percent of Kenya’s internal trade conducted
in currency and one-fifth of the colony’s trade overall.3 In the early 1920s,
about 21 percent of Kenya and Uganda’s trade was with India. Seventy per-
cent of East Africa’s raw cotton was exported to India, particularly Bombay,
by large Indian merchant firms in Mombasa, along with ivory, Zanzibar
cloves, and carbonate of soda. India supplied approximately 20 percent of
Kenya’s imports. Thirty percent of that was in cotton piece goods, including
bleached and unbleached cotton, blankets, and printed, dyed, and colored
cotton, which were imported by the same Indian companies in Kenya along
with jute gunny sacks, wheat, flour, ghee, rice, sugar, and tea.4 Wholesalers,
predominantly in Mombasa, supplied these commodities on credit to retail
shopkeepers in small quantities. These dukkawallahs stocked Indian imports
along with bicycles, cooking pots, cigarettes, beads, and ready-to-wear items
such as hats, shoes, shirts, belts, and baby clothes. The Indian rupee was the
medium of exchange for both external and internal trade. Approximately
17,832 of Kenya’s 22,822 Indians lived in Nairobi and Mombasa. By the early
1930s, Indians constituted close to 35 percent of Nairobi’s entire popula-
tion. They included exporters, wholesalers, retail shopkeepers, and skilled
and semiskilled workers. The remaining 5,000 Indians were predominantly
petty traders and their families, who operated in newly opened market cen-
ters along the railway line in and around African reserves. Approximately
1,200 lived in the Central Province in Nyeri, Fort Hall, Kiambu, Embu,
and Meru; 2,376 set up shop in Nyanza around Kisumu, North and South
Kavirondo, Lumbwa, and Nandi; and just over 1,000 settled in the Rift
Valley at Nakuru, Naivasha, Ravine, and Uasin Gishu. Within these areas,
the largest concentration of Indians was in Kisumu, where 1,626 lived, fol-
lowed by Nakuru, where 650 Indians settled, while Kiambu and Fort Hall
were home to 618 and 291 Indians, respectively (see Map 2).5
Several dukkas sprang up in the same location, competing with one an-
other for customers in the absence of any governmental supervision. With
exiguous capital resources, for they were often indebted to the Mombasa
wholesale merchants, they sent small quantities of agricultural produce to
these wholesalers, shouldering the packaging and transport costs.6 By 1930,
Indian traders were deeply entrenched in the three-tiered economy of the
colony—as dukkawallahs in the reserves, as retailers and wholesalers in Nai-
robi and Mombasa, and as large-scale exporters and importers operating
74 Indians in Kenya

across the Indian Ocean. With their racially endogamous trade practices,
which operated within a strong network of credit and supply, they connected
the local, intermediary, and interregional economies of this realm.
The demographic changes of the 1920s, particularly the increase in num-
bers and diversification of occupations and geographical location of Indians
in the colony, shaped political discourse in Kenya. In making their subim-
perialist claims to parity with Europeans, Indians had emphasized their civi-
lizational achievements to distinguish themselves from Africans in an attempt
to share the white man’s burden as fellow colonists. As the limits of impe-
rial citizenship revealed themselves, new migrants who were influenced by
the anticolonial rhetoric of India settled in the colony, abandoned the de-
mand for parity, and criticized the racial hierarchy of colonial rule in Kenya
that invested European farmers with economic and political privileges de-
nied to non-European colonial subjects. The accompanying rhetoric of
equality that became the basis of Indian political claims opened up discur-
sive space for the Congress to shift its strategy for attaining parity with Eu-
ropeans. Its members abandoned their colonizing ambitions, and through
their criticism of the racially discriminatory politics of the settlers they
began to consider the European influence on land and labor policies per-
taining to Africans. These included the system of employment registration
(kipande) to control labor after the war, a change in currency from the
rupee to the florin and eventually the shilling, a legislative proposal by Eu-
ropean farmers to lower African wages by one-third, and increases in hut
and poll taxes. In opposing these changes, Indian politicians expressed
solidarity with their fellow non-Europeans, Africans, who were also at the
receiving end of governance that was unapologetically biased in favor of
the white farmers.
Africans were not simply silent spectators watching the Europeans and
Indians in Nairobi as they were staking claims on their political and eco-
nomic interests. A mission-educated Kikuyu, Harry Thuku, organized a
public protest against the government’s labor policies through the East Af-
rican Association. Thuku arrived in Nairobi from Kambui in the Central
Province in 1911. He was jailed for forgery for two years, but in 1918 he
secured a coveted position as a telephone operator in the government trea-
sury. Exposure to the workings of the colonial administration together with
the everyday lived experience of politics, colonial economic policies, and ra-
cial structures in the colonial capital framed Thuku’s political orientation.
A common enemy—the European settlers—and the transnational resonance
 “Civilization” in Kenya 75

of the Indian question gave Thuku inspiration and the opportunity to col-
laborate with the Congress as he proclaimed that he was the Gandhi of
Kenya.7
While Thuku, with his alliance with the Congress, found such widespread
support among Kikuyu in Nairobi and the Central Province, that the gov-
ernor had him arrested and exiled for almost a decade, he was challenged
by many who objected to his collaboration with the Nairobi Indians. Some
were skeptical about the subimperialist ambitions of intermediary capital-
ists, and others articulated a discourse of indigeneity as they argued that
Indians—as settlers—had no legitimate right to economic or political de-
velopment on African land. This included skilled and semiskilled workers
whose wealth and jobs African migrants in Nairobi aspired to since only a
very small number of Africans were employed by the government till the
early 1920s as well as Indian traders.
Indian shops in the Central Province, the Rift Valley, and Nyanza were
spaces of intimacy where aspirations for material accumulation were simul-
taneously realized and crushed for ordinary Indians and Africans. In Nai-
robi and Mombasa the dukkawallahs’ customers were both Indians and Af-
ricans who bought food and household supplies as well as clothes and other
consumer goods from them. In the reserves, however, the clientele at In-
dian shops were predominantly Kikuyu, Kamba, Masai, and Luo cultiva-
tors who came to the dukka to sell their produce such as oil seeds, beans,
maize, simsim, hides, and millet in return for cash, and to buy foodstuffs
including sugar, ghee, and maize. By the 1920s, Africans began purchasing
bicycles, hats, clothes, and cigarettes from the retailers, who also served
as moneylenders. The upcountry shopkeepers bought and sold in small quan-
tities, maintaining low margins of profit. Their shops doubled as their homes.
Dukkas were the only market spaces in these areas where cultivators could
sell their crops for currency, as barter remained the primary mode of trade
between Africans. They needed this cash to pay hut and poll taxes. Because
of this transaction, for many Africans the Indian shop was their first and
only sustained material encounter with colonialism. Petty dukkawallahs op-
erating with small capital and in small quantities closely watched every busi-
ness transaction to maximize their marginal profits. Unregulated by the gov-
ernment, they relied on verbal bargaining rather than ticketing goods with
fi xed prices for their sales, cut corners on weights and measures, and were
more interested in inducing their clients to buy their goods than in pur-
chasing small quantities of produce. As moneylenders, they insisted that
76 Indians in Kenya

their clients repay their debts by buying goods from their shops rather than
by returning the money. The goods would be worth four to five times the
debt, according to some reports.8 Their livelihoods depended on sustained
African consumption of the commodities they stocked. Paradoxically, their
profits were linked to high selling prices, which in turn brought down the
purchasing power of their clients.
For their African customers, the dukka occupied an intermediate space
between their homesteads and the colonial state. It was here that their pro-
duce was exchanged for the currency they needed to pay their taxes. Much
as with the dukkawallah, their livelihoods depended on the sale of their goods
to Indian shopkeepers. Their profits depended on extracting the largest sum
of money for their produce. The petty retailers, however, were disinterested
in buying from them unless the transaction included a sale. Therefore they
offered low buying prices, leaving their customers with little surplus cash
after paying taxes. With this Africans purchased everyday food necessities,
as well as items such as shoes and hats that were social markers of prosperity
from the very same shops.9 The intimately interlinked material destiny of
the Kikuyu, Kamba, and Luo cultivators and the dukkawallahs in the Cen-
tral Province, Nyanza, and the Rift Valley found resonance in a popular
Swahili proverb, Baniani mbaya, kiatu chake dawa (literally “The Hindu
Bania trader is evil, but his shoes are medicine,” that is, Indians are mean
but their business is good), articulating the frustrations and dependency of
Africans on the petty traders. This limited the reach and scope of interra-
cial political collaborations.

I M P E R I A L C O N N E C T I O N S A N D I N D I A N N AT I O N A L I S T S

May 1920 marked a turning point for Congress leaders, as Milner’s deci-
sion provoked an emphatic protest from them. Indian political associations
considered it a “betrayal of Indian rights and interests” that would create
“lasting disaffection and bitterness of feeling.”10 Governor Northey, newly
appointed to Kenya, made no secret of his support of Milner’s policy. While
Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee and Shams-ud-Deen had framed the agitation as
an issue of equality, the governor believed that the real question was whether
Europeans or Indians were to predominate in Kenya. Northey held meet-
ings with representatives of both communities, exploring the issues of repre-
sentation, franchise, segregation, and land ownership. Jeevanjee and Shams-
ud-Deen demanded an increase in Indian representation in the Legislative
 “Civilization” in Kenya 77

Council, elected on the basis of a common—not communal—franchise. In

principle, this meant that qualifying Africans would be included in the
common franchise, and the Congress had no objection to this. Lord Dela-
mere, Francis Scott, secretary of the Convention of Associations, and Ewart
Scott Grogan were absolutely unwilling to agree to a common franchise, but
they accepted an increase in Indian representation to a maximum of three.
Northey also opposed a common franchise, claiming that the Africans and
a large majority of the Indians were incapable of making intelligent use of
the vote. Instead, he suggested the introduction of race-based communal
franchise in districts of high Indian concentration in Nairobi, Mombasa, and
Kisumu. Beyond this, he continued the highlands policy as a “permanent
necessity” that upheld Lord Elgin’s 1908 pledge, and the segregation of com-
mercial areas in keeping with Simpson’s report on sanitation. However, on
realizing that the term “segregation” upset Indians, he began to use the word
“reservation” instead.11
The change in nomenclature did little to assuage the Congress’s appre-
hensions. Jeevanjee took particular offense at the “break[ing] of the pledges
made to the Indian subjects of the King” in the promotion of residential
and commercial segregation.12 Others began to highlight the lived reality
of colonialism, in which racial discrimination based on their personal expe-
rience was prevalent and fundamentally antithetical to the king’s pledge of
equality. Manilal Desai, for example, had shared the same ambivalence to-
ward the Swadeshi movement as Jeevanjee had, as described in Chapter 1.
He had arrived in Kenya in 1915 wearing a suit and bow tie at a time when
Indian nationalists were questioning their adoption of Western clothes and
boycotting such imports.13 He worked as a clerk at an English legal firm,
where he was reprimanded for smoking by a European lawyer who an-
nounced that only Europeans were allowed to smoke in the office. Irked by
what he considered a racial slur, Desai resigned from the firm. While unem-
ployed, he met other politically vocal Indians in Nairobi and became in-
volved in politics. Jeevanjee provided Desai with free living quarters and an
office from which Desai organized the political activities of the Indian
Association and the Congress during the war. Unlike Jeevanjee, for whom
business always came first, Desai became a full-time political activist. Seeking
to “awaken” Indians into “political agitation,” in 1919 he started a newspaper,
the East African Chronicle, whose circulation ran into the thousands.14
Across the Indian Ocean there was a resurgence of political activity
in India after the war. The Bombay-based Imperial Indian Citizenship
78 Indians in Kenya

Association had sent Gandhi’s close associate from South Africa, Reverend
C. F. Andrews, to Fiji and South Africa during this time to report on the
condition of Indians overseas after the system of indenture had come to an
end. In November 1919, Andrews visited East Africa at the suggestion of
this association and brought the attention of Indian nationalists to the
Milner decision at a time when, disillusioned by the slow progress toward
self-governance, they were questioning the value of remaining loyal imperial
citizens. In August 1920, the association organized a public meeting in
Bombay attended by several leaders of the emerging nationalist movement,
including Gandhi, Shaukat Ali, Narayana Chandavarkar, and members of
the Home Rule League, to discuss the situation in East Africa. Abul Rasul
Visram was also present. Proposing a resolution on behalf of Andrews, who
was absent, Gandhi asked the colonial government of India to “guard against
any encroachment” on the rights of Indians in Kenya, arguing that “British
Indian settlers” in East Africa had been better off under German rule, when
such disabilities had not been imposed on them. Within two months of
making this appeal as an imperial citizen who still believed that this status
might guarantee equality across the empire, Gandhi announced that his
“faith in the British statesmen” had been “shattered.” Abandoning the strategy
of making claims as imperial citizens, Gandhi stated that Indians overseas
should not expect any assistance from the imperial government until India
had obtained “complete responsible government.” At a “Gujarat conference”,
held in Ahmedabad in October 1920, resolutions were passed supporting the
East African Congress in its protest against the Milner decision.15
The London-based Indian Overseas Association, headed by another friend
of Gandhi’s from South Africa, H. S. L. Polak, had successfully lobbied to
end the system of indentured labor. It now took up the case of Indians in
East Africa, putting pressure on officials within both the India Office and
the Colonial Office. In particular, Polak pointed to the transnational reso-
nance of the racial legislation in Kenya, arguing that the “surge of nation-
alism” in India made Indians “more acutely conscious of these disabilities
than they have ever previously been.” The “racial superiority, colour preju-
dice and political domination” of Europeans in East Africa, Polak stated,
offended “ever widening circles of the people” animated by “pride of race
and national self-esteem.” He warned that unless colonial officials recog-
nized “the meaning of the new spirit in India and the aspirations” of its
people, the imperial government would be “hopelessly” compromised and
discredited.16
 “Civilization” in Kenya 79

This surge of nationalism was evident for everyone to see. The support
of Indians during the war and Lloyd George’s broken pledge about respecting
the immunity of Muslim holy places had become the basis of a mass move-
ment in the subcontinent, known as the Khilafat/noncooperation movement,
under Gandhi’s leadership. Having established himself as a formidable
challenge to colonial rule within a similar diasporic setting in South Africa,
Gandhi had returned to India a Mahatma, exemplifying the significance of
the circulation of ideas and colonial subjectivity across the Indian Ocean. The
transnational resonance of the Khilafat agitation did not go unnoticed in
Kenya. Under Desai and Mangal Das, the leadership of the Indian Associa-
tion of Nairobi and the Congress used the anticolonial tenor of the agitation
emanating from India to argue that it would be a mistake for the imperial
authorities to treat their grievances as purely a local concern. In a letter to
Governor Northey, Das warned that 320 million Indians were anxiously
watching the condition of their countrymen in British colonies, and he pre-
dicted, “Why the Indians cannot freely come, acquire land, have represen-
tation on local governing bodies and live generally a peaceful and contented
life without being subjected to daily insults in a country which they fought
to acquire, in which they were largely instrumental in developing and for
which they have shed their blood when it was invaded by the Germans, will
be the questions asked by the Indians in India, here and elsewhere.”17
Desai was right. Within India, vernacular and English-language news-
papers such as the Bombay Samachar, Lokapakari, Desabhaktan, Kathi-
rava, Maharatta, Gujarati Punch, Prakash, Andhrapatrika, and Indian So-
cial Reformer proclaimed that “the duty of Indians is plain. . . . Let us
strongly protest against the expropriation of our rights.” In an attempt to
pressure the government of India to intervene in Kenya, editorials, news-
paper reports, and letters urged the Indian public not to be silent on ques-
tions in East Africa, where Indians were being treated as “slaves.” Objecting
to Milner’s decision, the papers assured expatriates that they could “rely on
the support of nationalists in India in their struggle.” Furthermore, the edi-
torials explicitly connected the Khilafat issue and the Jallianwallah Bagh
massacre, which had “roused public opinion to bursting point,” with events
going on across the Indian Ocean on the grounds that “India is in no mood
to take every kick lying down.” They threatened that if East Africa became
a white man’s country, “India too will have to do its duty in retaliation by
insisting on expelling every colonial from its trade, ser vices and other values
of life. . . . [I]t is sure to wreak its vengeance on those who have offended.”18
80 Indians in Kenya

The racial discrimination embedded in Milner’s policy alienated not only

this new generation of nascent Indian nationalists but also loyalists such as
the Aga Khan, who took a particular interest in the situation in East Africa
because almost half of the Indian population there was Muslim. He warned
that “racialism” in Kenya would “seriously jeopardize the great [postwar] im-
provement” among Muslims across the empire. In particular, he juxtaposed
the “sobriety” of his Ismaili followers, who had “stood aloof from political
unrest,” to the aggression of the European settlers during the war. The need
to reward the loyalty of Indian Muslims was further emphasized by Desai
and Shams-ud-Deen, who pointed out: “It must not be forgotten also that
in East Africa and other eastern campaigns in Mesopotamia and Palestine
the loyalty of His Majesty’s Indian Musalman troops, who formed nearly
one half of the fighting forces, and are mostly Sunnis by religion, was put to
a very severe strain because they had continually to fight against their own
fellow-Musalmans and their own Khalifa.”19
As the Khilafat movement in India gained momentum and nationalists
there included in their purview the treatment of overseas Indians in the em-
pire, the secretary of state for India, Edwin S. Montagu, and the Indian
viceroy, Viscount Chelmsford, announced that the government of India had
a responsibility toward Indians suffering from racial discrimination in any
crown colony. This was especially marked in Kenya, where a large number
of “free” Indians had lived for centuries and which, because of its physical
proximity, had a close connection with India. Montagu and Chelmsford came
out on the side of the Indians on the three key issues of political represen-
tation, racial segregation, and land ownership. Fearing the political conse-
quences of legislation on racial lines in India and across the empire, they
publicly objected to the Colonial Office’s policy in Kenya that prevented In-
dians from attaining political equality with Europeans. They also criti-
cized racial segregation in commercial areas as placing Indians at a dis-
tinct disadvantage, since the majority of them were traders, and argued
that the principle of the communal franchise—that is, racially based po-
litical representation—would exacerbate racial antagonism.20 Montagu
and Chelmsford’s demand for a common electoral roll based on property re-
quirements and an education test for all British subjects in East Africa was
particularly ironic because they had extended the same colonial principle
of communally defi ned political franchise—in this case along religious
lines—in their reforms for India, which triggered as virulent a criticism
among nationalists as the question of communal franchise in Kenya had
caused among Indians in East Africa.
 “Civilization” in Kenya 81

Desai, Jeevanjee, Shams-ud-Deen, Das, and others within the Congress

found support against Milner in a diverse group of people, including Indian
nationalists, the Aga Khan, the viceroy, and the secretary of state for India.
Within Kenya, Northey continued to oppose them. Rather than being an
unbiased arbiter between Indians and Europeans, the governor had little
sympathy for the Indians and did not demur from making personal attacks
against them, claiming that Jeevanjee, though an astute businessman, was
“illiterate.” In an attempt to delegitimize the claims of the Congress, Northey
announced that the group’s “political section” was a “recent import” from
India that was totally unrepresentative of the mass of Indians in Kenya, who
were unfit for any form of franchise. “In the hands of these agitators,” he
argued, “the uneducated trader can be swayed and made to take part in a
political movement which he does not understand and with which he has no
sympathy.”21 Picking up on Northey’s accusation that the agitation in Kenya
was an import, European settlers started objecting to the “inappropriate
interference of India” in local Kenyan matters. In September 1921, Lord
Delamere and C. Kenneth Archer published a pamphlet entitled “Memo-
randum on the Case against the Indians in Kenya,” in which they claimed
that the Indian protest identified completely with Gandhism. Delamere
was particularly irked by the auction of one “Ghandi [sic] hat . . . amidst
scene of wild enthusiasm” at a July 1921 meeting of the Indian Association
in Nairobi, which he took to be evidence of a transnational anticolonial
conspiracy. Pointing to the nationalist movement in India, Archer pro-
claimed, “Britain cannot surely tolerate the introduction of a state of affairs
into Africa which risks Indian predominance there if there is even the
slightest chance of India choosing to follow the wrong path some day and to
break away from the empire. . . . Britain cannot consider sharing her re-
sponsibility of government over the native races of Africa with Indians who
may someday not be British subjects at all.”22
This stance was amplified when Winston Churchill replaced Milner as
secretary of state for colonies in February 1921. Churchill the postwar
statesman entrusted with the task of keeping the empire together was a far
cry from Churchill the undersecretary of state for colonies, who only a de-
cade earlier had remarked that it was impossible for a government with “any
scrap of respect for honest dealings” to pursue a policy that would under-
mine the status of Indians in East Africa. In August 1921, he met Desai,
Jeevanjee, and Shams-ud-Deen in London and dismissed their develop-
mental claims on Kenya. In complete contradiction to his observation in
1908, in which he had praised India colonials for going where “no white man
82 Indians in Kenya

would go,” Churchill announced that it was only through “a white man’s”
effort, brains, and capital that the protectorate had been opened up, without
which Indians would not have been able to “cooperate” in developing East
Africa. Refusing to buckle under pressure of the Indian delegation in London,
which had the support of the secretary of state for India, Churchill emphati-
cally stated that he would not break up East Africa “for the sake of Gandhi,”
especially at the risk of driving the Europeans out.23
Although it appeared, rather ironically, that the colonial administration
in India was supporting Gandhian nationalists by taking up the cause of its
Indian subjects in Kenya, in fact this was not the case. Officials within the
India Office in London argued that the Indian nationalists’ aim was to draw
the Indians in East Africa into the noncooperation movement as a bargaining
tool that could be used with the colonial government in India, as it high-
lighted the extraterritorial resonance of the nationalist movement—something
the Indians in East Africa had in fact hitherto distanced themselves from.
Rather than foment anticolonial agitation, the India Office claimed that it
was simply upholding the cause of those diasporic subimperialists in Kenya
who desired that India remain in the British Commonwealth. This was all
the more necessary at a time when loyalists such as the Aga Khan and anti-
colonial Hindus and Muslims were united, despite their different religions,
in their opposition to racial discrimination against Indians in Kenya.24
Fearing a backlash from the Khilafat movement, Montagu and Chelms-
ford put pressure on Churchill and Northey to appease the moderate de-
mands of Husseinbhai Virji, Abul Rasul Visram, and Jeevanjee and avoid
further fueling Gandhi’s movement. However, the India Office underesti-
mated the bitter disappointment felt by its loyal Indian colonial subjects over
Milner’s decision. As the nationalist movement gathered momentum in India,
the political imaginary of Indians in Kenya underwent a subtle but irrevo-
cable change. In marked contrast to the intermediary capitalists’ reaction
to the Swadeshi movement in East Africa, when Jeevanjee and Allidina
Visram had deliberately distanced themselves from the agitation in India,
Virji put forward a resolution supporting the Khilafat issue at the annual
meeting of the Congress, held in Nairobi in November 1919. In January 1920,
the Indian Association in Mombasa observed a “National Mukti [salvation]
day” to commemorate the “bloody murders of unarmed innocents” in Punjab
during the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre the previous year, holding meet-
ings throughout Kenya in “honour of the dead.” The Association aimed to
“prove to those who are mourning the loss of valuable lives . . . that they have
 “Civilization” in Kenya 83

our deepest sympathy . . . and to prove also that we are worthy of the name
of Indians in the truest sense.”25 Such sentiments of empathy toward their
civilizational homeland were exacerbated by Northey’s support of settlers,
exposing the racial hierarchies of the colonial state in East Africa that placed
Indians at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Europeans as Kenya became a crown
colony.
With nationalists in India taking up the cause of their compatriots in Kenya
and the latter aligning with the anticolonial agitation in their homeland, a
united political realm emerged across the Indian Ocean. This transnational
nationalism was used by Indians in Kenya to emphasize local concerns. By
1920 it was clear that the colonial state in Kenya and the Colonial Office in
Britain considered Indians unequal to Europeans. In response, abandoning
their subimperialist claims to parity, Indians within the Congress not only
expressed solidarity with Gandhian noncooperation but also began to criti-
cize the state for institutionalizing racial discrimination, which had been
espoused by the European farmers. Together this led them to question the
colonial project itself. In an editorial published in the East African Chronicle
in August 1921, Desai poignantly articulated a discursive shift in the Indians’
political and civilizational claims: “If those governing the empire are fol-
lowing a policy of refusing to recognize the rights of certain of their peoples
because of the colour of their skin, we are afraid the British empire will
prove to be a failure . . . either the British empire must admit the equality of
its different peoples . . . irrespective of the colours of their skins and the
place of their birth, or it must abandon its attempt to rule a mixture of peo-
ples. There can be no half way.”26 The same month, the Chronicle reported
that Marcus Garvey had sent Gandhi a telegram conveying the best wishes
of more than 400 million “negroes” to Indians in their fight for “emancipa-
tion from foreign oppression.” Desai’s editorial on the cable mentioned Gar-
vey’s aspiration for an “Africa for Africans.”27 His articles underscored the
disjuncture between the universalizing liberalism of colonial ideology and its
emphasis in actual practice on racial difference that bestowed Britain’s impe-
rial citizenship rights based on a hierarchical classification of skin color.
While Desai himself had hitherto used Indian civilizational difference to ar-
ticulate subimperialist ambitions, after 1920 his political discourse reflected
a new framing of racial consciousness that emphasized racial equality.
In February 1921, the Chronicle collected Rs 4,000 for the Jallianwallah
Bagh memorial in Amritsar, indicating an emerging alignment with the na-
tionalist movement in India and a virulent critique of the racial foundations
84 Indians in Kenya

of the British Empire. Das went a step further at a public meeting in Nai-
robi, stating, “When we get self-governance in India, we too can bring our
cannons and rifles and fight for our rights in this colony.”28 Although Das’s
belief that “might is always right” was the antithesis of Gandhian nonvio-
lence and a radical solution to the problem of racial discrimination, not all
Indians were ready for such events. In a discussion on W. E. B. Du Bois’s
writings published in the 1920s that predicted a “world rebellion against
white domination by coloured races,” including the “negroes, Indians, [and]
Japanese,” Desai reaffirmed a “more optimistic” hope that the British race
would “find its head in spite of its temporary blunders . . . and lead the world
away from the shadows [of violence] on the horizon.” However, Northey’s
insistence on implementing Milner’s policy of segregation led Indian leaders
including V. V. Phadke, Desai, Jeevanjee, Shams-ud-Deen, and Abul Rasul
Visram to propose a program of noncooperation—similar to the one Gandhi
was leading contemporaneously in India—by resigning from government
offices and refusing to pay taxes. In January, Phadke resigned from the Leg-
islative Council in protest against the passing of a public health ordinance
that further institutionalized racial segregation, and Visram followed soon
after. At a meeting in Mombasa in May 1921, Jeevanjee, who had remained
aloof from the nationalist agitation in India since the early 1900s, signaled
his reconciliation with Gandhian anticolonialism as he urged Indians to with-
hold their taxes and join the “passive resistance” that was based on “soul
force.”29
As the Congress began to use Gandhian strategies of boycott, his language
of satyagraha, and the discourse of racial equality, European settlers began
to fear that Indians would “stir up disaffection” among Africans. On their
part, pointing to the increase in the number of Indian immigrants in the
colony, European settlers pressured Northey to ban Indian immigration al-
together. They argued that African development, on which the entire impe-
rial project was premised, was hindered both economically and civilization-
ally by the presence of the Indian petty bourgeoisie. The settlers also
characterized Indians as “semicivilized” people who lived on meager means
in unsanitary houses with little to no literacy in English. They argued that
Indian traders exploited the “uncivilized” Africans, and thus prevented
African progress toward Western “civilization,” a transition that only Euro-
peans could orchestrate. While Delamere and Archer had hitherto limited
their critique of Indians to the disruption of African progress along the lines
of Western civilization and Christianity caused by the unwanted influence of
 “Civilization” in Kenya 85

“Asiatic civilization,” they now began to worry that Indian shopkeepers in

African reserves, where European presence was negligible, were “poisoning
the minds of the native against the British Administration,” something
Governor Bowring had also been concerned with in January 1919.30 It was
the fear of such an antisettler alliance of Indians and Africans that led a
member of the Convention of Associations to write a lecture entitled “The
Thermopylae of Africa: Kenya Colony’s Responsibility in the Conflict of the
Primary Races—the Asian Problem.” The lecturer unapologetically put
forward his goal as “the defence of white supremacy in Africa,” which was
threatened in the early 1920s by the “constructive genius” of the Indian
civilization “adopting and adapting” Western knowledge to Indian needs
and “forging weapons” with which India would win freedom. The arrival of
new immigrants from India, who were imbued with “bitterness” toward
British control, therefore needed to be stopped. White rule in Kenya, the
lecturer went on to argue, would not be under such a threat because Afri-
cans had none of the “constructive power” that the Indians possessed. How-
ever, he warned, the Indian “invasion” of Kenya was dangerous because the
“insidiousness” of Indians could easily instigate agitation among the “imi-
tative” Africans.31
While European settlers feared that the Indian civilizational “genius” that
had led to anticolonial agitation in India would be imitated by Africans, for
Indians in Kenya their criticism of the racial hierarchy espoused by the
farmers led them to a rhetorical emphasis on racial equality for all colonial
subjects, including Africans. Influenced as he was by Gandhian notions of
equality, during his time in East Africa, C. F. Andrews was instrumental in
persuading Virji, Jeevanjee, and Visram to refrain, on principle, from asking
for “any preferential treatment for Indians and consequent reservation of ex-
German East Africa for Indian colonization.” Significantly, he believed that
the policy of reserving land for any immigrant group was immoral in a situ-
ation where Africans were the “rightful owners of the soil.” Such a reserva-
tion, Andrews persuasively argued, would create a new kind of imperialism,
which Indians everywhere ought to be fighting against.32 In persuading
them to abandon their subimperialist rhetoric and ambition, Andrews ar-
gued that Indians and Africans were fellow sufferers. He cast the former as
being positioned to alleviate the latter’s suffering in two specific ways. First,
he pointed to Indian traders, especially those operating in the reserves,
who “initiated” Africans into the “mysteries of trade and barter and the
value of money.” Second, he noted, unlike Europeans, who did no manual
86 Indians in Kenya

work in the colony, Indian artisans and mechanics used African assistants
in “actual daily apprenticeship” and thus helped them develop skills. An-
drews’s words revealed the spaces of intimacy increasingly inhabited by
ordinary Indians and Africans. For him, it was in these spaces that the lack
of “racial barriers” allowed expressions of equality and made possible a poli-
tics of solidarity, which he urged Indians to take up. Therefore, Andrews
counseled Indians to remove their own “sin” of “colour prejudice” against
Africans. However, in his discourse on Indian claims to equality in the
colony, Andrews emphasized the civilizational achievements of Indian
traders and artisans, who “kept some form of civilization in evidence, in
the midst of primitive and naked savagery.”33 While in the early 1900s this
racial difference was used by Indians to make colonizing claims on Kenya,
in the early 1920s Indians’ civilizational contributions were reframed as
expressions of equality aimed at racial solidarity, not subimperialist privi-
leges. This was a significant discursive difference, albeit one that belied a
continuing sense of Indian civilizational superiority vis-à-vis Africans.
Andrews toured East Africa at a time when politically active Indians there
were aligning themselves with Gandhian anticolonialism and demanding
racial equality. He was referred to as “Mahatma Andrews” in the Chron-
icle in a direct appropriation and eulogy of Gandhi’s political leadership in
South Africa and India. A letter to the editor in January 1921 positioned
Indians as “natural sympathizers” of Africans, suggesting that they should
stand “united” by holding annual congresses to put together “a moral weapon
of truth and righteousness,” similar to Gandhi’s satyagraha in India, to de-
fend themselves against Europeans. Taking Andrews’s advice seriously, the
Congress not only abandoned its demand for an Indian colony in Tangan-
yika but also embraced his emphasis on racial solidarity. An early expres-
sion of this was voiced by Abul Rasul Visram, who at the third annual meeting
of the Congress, held in Mombasa in December 1920 and attended by thou-
sands, put forward a resolution assuring Africans of the “enduring ties of
fraternity” that the Indians had shared with them for “three centuries.”
Visram hoped that this would be a blow to the “Machiavellian policy of di-
vide and rule” that the Europeans were following. While Jeevanjee had
evoked their precolonial Indian Ocean connection to stake a claim for In-
dians in Kenya as subimperialists just six years earlier, Visram used these
centuries-old Indian Ocean circulations as a way to connect the political
cause of Indians with Africans. Signaling a change from his own civiliza-
tional discourse of a decade ago, when he had referred to Africans as “savage”
 “Civilization” in Kenya 87

and in need of “uplift,” Jeevanjee proclaimed that Indians were “in sym-
pathy with and tried to encourage” Africans in their aspirations and pledged
“loyal support and cooperation” in helping Africans attain the “betterment
of their status.”34 Within less than six months he got the chance to fulfill
this pledge.

A COMMON ENEMY

The silver Indian rupee circulated throughout British East Africa as early
as 1888. Initially brought to the coast by intermediary merchants, it moved
inland with retailers and dukkawallahs, as discussed in Chapter 1. Until the
First World War, the pound sterling, pegged to the gold standard, remained
strong and European settlers received approximately Rs 1,500 for every £100
they brought into Kenya, as the rupee was valued at about 1 shilling sterling
and 4 cents. At the end of the war, the price of silver increased worldwide,
resulting in a rise in the value of the rupee. By February 1920, the rupee
had gone up to 2s 9d sterling, causing panic among Europeans, who now
received only Rs 1,000 for every £100. Since wages and taxes in the colony
continued to be paid in rupees, the fluctuation in the value of the rupee
put Europeans at an economic disadvantage. Therefore, settlers successfully
petitioned Northey to stabilize the East African rupee at 2 shillings ster-
ling in March 1920. Within a few months, however, the Indian rupee had
settled back to its wartime value of 1s 4d. Although the settlers now wished
to return to that earlier exchange rate, Northey had fi xed the rupee at 2
shillings, so they could not.35 In consultation with the East African Currency
Board, which had been set up in London to oversee such economic matters
in the transition of Kenya from a protectorate to a colony, an entirely new
currency was put into circulation by February 1921. The florin coin, which
was valued the same as the rupee (2s sterling) and was the same shape and
size (30 millimeters), weighed much less and contained less silver. This, how-
ever, did little to ease the financial hardships of the Europeans: internal costs
continued to inflate, since their own poll tax and the wages they paid
African labor remained at the rate of the wartime rupee. Moreover, although
the government imposed a ban on the importation of the Indian rupee into
Kenya, Indian traders smuggled coins in, putting the farmers at a further
disadvantage. To resolve this problem, in August 1921 the rupee was demon-
etized and an entirely new currency, the East African shilling, was intro-
duced in Kenya and valued at one-half a rupee or florin. At 29 millimeters in
88 Indians in Kenya

diameter, the East African shilling was marginally smaller than the rupee,
a difference almost unnoticeable to the unsuspecting eye.36 This was by
design and had significant implications.
As far as the Europeans and colonial government were concerned, the
introduction of a new currency achieved two ends. First, the initial fi xing
of the local rupee at a figure considerably below its exchange value in India
put Indian traders at a disadvantage, as the capital they imported from the
subcontinent depreciated in value in Kenya and increased the cost of im-
ported foodstuffs (particularly ghee, rice, and sugar) and consumer goods
in their shops. This was an attempt at circumventing the strong Indian Ocean
trade networks that had preceded colonial rule and undermining the con-
tinuing hold of small- and large-scale Indian traders in the colony to make
way for European trade. Second, it facilitated the lowering of African wages.
In early April 1921, the Convention of Associations proposed that “native”
wages be cut by a third because of the currency change.37 The farmers ar-
gued that the laborer who had been paid Rs 6 per month in 1919 and 6 flo-
rins in 1920 was now receiving 12 shillings in 1921. Willfully refusing to
account for the fact that the East African shilling had a value less than half
that of the rupee, they cut wages to 8 shillings, a 33-percent reduction in
actual terms arguing, at the same time, that this was in fact a 50-percent
bonus. Furthermore, with the blessing of the East African Currency Board,
the Europeans tried to convince Africans that they were not in fact re-
ceiving lower wages, since the shilling looked exactly like the rupee. Giving
the European settlers carte blanche, Northey announced that wages were
“purely a matter between employer and employee.” While he refused to
take part in negotiating labor wages, his support of wage reduction was evi-
dent as he also claimed that with the introduction of the East African shil-
ling the value of local wages had increased by 50 percent, rendering Euro-
pean production unprofitable.38
Neither the Indians nor the Africans were fooled by the currency swindle.
Even the India Office objected, suggesting that, at the very least, the shil-
ling should have a completely different design from that of the florin or rupee
to avoid any confusion.39 The devaluation—and ultimately demonetization—
of the Indian rupee was detrimental for Indian Ocean trade and threatened
to disrupt the credit and supply network of wholesalers and dukkawallahs.
Subsequently, two new associations were formed in Kenya and India to
protect Indian commercial interests—the Mombasa Indian Merchants
Chamber and the British India Colonial Association, based in Bombay.
 “Civilization” in Kenya 89

Neither the symbolic significance of introducing the East African shilling

to sever the centuries-old Indian Ocean ties with the subcontinent nor the
Europeans’ desire to mitigate inflation by manipulating the currency in their
favor was lost on the Indian intelligentsia. As “Cynicus,” a regular contrib-
utor to the Chronicle, put it in a poem titled “Hapana Rupia” [The Rupee
Is No Longer]:
How much I loved to hear you jingle, my rupees!
Your mere possession meant to me so much of ease . . .
. . . my much loved rupees
Went up in leaps and bounds with fearful ease
Till one day they valued two and four,
Though still one found they would not purchase more.
’twas then that our sage councillors decided
On steps that since have been derided
They said that our rupee should be demonetized
And florins two and bob, be stabilized
With the result that trade was absolutely paralyzed
And “settlers” found their prospects positively sterilized.40

Indian trade did not take place in a vacuum. Dukkawallahs were as depen-
dent on their clients for the success of their business as their African cus-
tomers were on them to turn their agricultural produce into the currency
they needed to pay taxes and purchase goods. Therefore, in building their
argument against the much-derided “tin” florin, Indians noted that a vast
amount of money was being pilfered from Africans. As pointed out in the
Chronicle and in petitions by Jeevanjee and Desai to Northey, Africans had
no protection, since the change in currency was aimed at duping them by
lowering their wages by a third. Editorials stated that 7s 6d, the current wage
paid to laborers on European farms, was itself too low. Due to the initial
fi xing of the rupee at an artificial level in March 1920, the cost of food im-
ported from India had gone up, not only causing a dislocation of trade but
also decreasing local purchasing power, which directly affected African
buyers since dukkas charged more for imported goods to recover their costs.
At the same time, in May 1920, Governor Bowring had approved an increase
in poll and hut tax, which had been fi xed at Rs 3 and 5 in 1915 to a max-
imum of Rs 10 each.41 Lower wages and higher taxes meant that Africans
had less money to spend in Indian shops, and with this drop in business duk-
kawallahs further raised the prices of food and consumer goods in order to
90 Indians in Kenya

maintain their margins of profit. This vicious cycle highlighted the extent
of interdependency between the dukkawallahs and their clients. It also
opened up the rhetorical space for the Congress to claim political solidarity
with Africans on the basis of a common enemy and a shared desire for ra-
cial equality in the eyes of the state and economic growth.
As the issue of currency and labor came together, at public meetings and
through the Chronicle, Desai, Jeevanjee, Das, and Shams-ud-Deen accused
the Europeans of “milking the native.” They criticized labor practices, ar-
guing that a “great anti-labour conspiracy” had been hatched by the colo-
nial administration and white farmers that robbed Africans of their “just
dues.” They protested against “forced labor,” the use of the kiboko (rhino
whip), and “torture” on European farms, arguing for the need to “create a
campaign” against this. Although Indian labor was not subjected to these
practices, Desai concluded that “racialism . . . leads to the opposition of
Asians and of Africans,” thus identifying the grounds on which an interra-
cial movement could be built, despite the difference in the specific demands
being made by each group.42 On June 4, 1921, the Indian Association of Nai-
robi passed a resolution strongly opposing the Europeans’ proposal to de-
crease wages, noting that with the increase in the hut and poll taxes and
the decrease in the selling price of African produce, the “cost of necessi-
ties” was very high. Under these circumstances, Desai argued in the Chron-
icle, a lawyer was needed to protect Africans against such policies, and Af-
ricans should be given elective legislative representation, since they had a
“right to a voice in African affairs.” Deliberately pointing out that the anti-
Indian and anti-African “mischief makers” were “identical,” from July 1920
on, multiple pages of the Chronicle were dedicated entirely to discussions
on the African labor question. Soon thereafter, the Indian leadership put
these words into action. Responding to an exhortation by Jeevanjee to
Indian shopkeepers in September 1921 at Eldoret, which was home to 146
Indians, to reach out to the Africans they met on a daily basis, a dukkawallah
in Lumbwa, where 339 Indians lived, called a meeting with Lumbwa chiefs,
urging them to “do all they could against the white man,” promising to
provide funds and legal advice if the chiefs got into trouble for doing so.43

T H E G A N D H I O F K E N YA

Indians were not the first or only community to criticize colonial policy and
protest against it. During this time a political organization was formed among
Africans in Nairobi. Desai, Jeevanjee, and the readership of the Chronicle
 “Civilization” in Kenya 91

were undoubtedly influenced by what they saw happening around them, and
they used this opportunity to put into action their rhetoric of solidarity.
In 1921, Harry Thuku was an active member and founder of an organi-
zation called the Young Kikuyu Association, later renamed the East African
Association, to develop a “great voice” that represented not only the Kikuyu
but also other Africans, including the Masai and Kamba. The association
was an offshoot of the Kikuyu Association, whose members were primarily
Kikuyu chiefs. On May 25, 1921, a meeting of the Young Kikuyu Association
in Nairobi signaled the beginning of the first organized protest of Africans
against colonial policy in the realm of institutionalized politics. Thuku called
the meeting to oppose the proposed decrease in African wages and criti-
cize a new labor registration law that the association considered “tanta-
mount” to “slavery.” A law introduced in 1919 required all African men over
the age of sixteen to be registered at their local district office. They were
issued a kipande, an identification certificate with personal details, including
their thumb impression, name, district, tribe, and employment history, and
it was completed with the signature of their employer attesting to their
release from employment. Every African male was expected to carry his
kipande and produce it if demanded by the police. Copies of the certificate
were sent to the Central Registration Office in Nairobi, kept as a perma-
nent record, and used as “evidence” to document labor contracts and track
the employee’s movements. Any man found without a kipande could be pros-
ecuted, and without it he could not be legally employed.44 This effectively
meant that the colonial state could ensure a constant supply of labor to
European employers, irrespective of wages, since no African could break out
of his labor contract without the consent of his employer. Consequently, the
kipande became the most detested symbol of colonial power, especially
among the Kikuyu, who lived in Nairobi and the Central Province.
Initially, Thuku’s demands were fairly moderate. He protested against pro-
posed legislation that was unfavorable to African interests and complained
about tribal chiefs who acted as intermediaries between the colonial state
and Africans in the reserves and refused to criticize labor policies.45 Indeed,
it was these intermediaries who were the immediate face of colonial au-
thority, as they were responsible for enforcing the new labor legislations.
One of Thuku’s main complaints was against the tribal retainer Waiganju
wa Ndotno for forcing girls and young women to work on European farms.
Thuku objected to the kipande laws, the increased hut and poll taxes (which
in May 1921 were approximately 16 shillings), and the proposal to lower
wages. He also demanded that the franchise be given to “all educated British
92 Indians in Kenya

subjects” and that title deeds be provided to githaka (customary land tenure)
holders as a way of ensuring land rights. As demonstrated by historian John
Lonsdale, in the early 1920s the demand for githaka titles endorsed by the
colonial government emerged among elders in Kiambu to stop the alien-
ation of land to European settlers. Significantly, land ownership and ten-
ancy were left undefined, and as a result, there was no distinction made be-
tween the two. For Thuku, labor rather than land rights needed to be
addressed with great urgency. Therefore, after an unsuccessful meeting with
the chief native commissioner and senior commissioner of Kiambu, he pre-
pared a memorandum that he sent to His Majesty’s government, outlining
these specific African grievances. The East African Association subsequently
met with Colonel Watkins, acting chief native commissioner, to object to the
“badge of slavery” that Africans were forced to carry in the form of the regis-
tration certificates. Refusing to take their argument seriously, Watkins com-
pared the kipande with the passport that Indians and Europeans carried.46
Northey’s initial reaction to Thuku was one of disdain. Much like the way
he had dismissed Desai as being unrepresentative of the average, illiterate
Indian shopkeepers, in August 1921 he dismissed the East African Associ-
ation as representing a “semi-educated town-dwelling class” of Africans that
would “wither as quickly as it has sprung up.” He justified the use of female
labor on Europeans’ farms, one of Thuku’s major complaints, on the grounds
that “the moral standard of African girls is exceedingly low . . . to represent
[her] as an innocent maiden whose virtue is imperiled whenever she leaves
her village is entirely to distort the true picture.” 47 However, just as Indian
politics became increasingly radicalized after the governor insisted on keeping
the status quo, over the next seven months Thuku’s frustration with the state’s
refusal to even acknowledge their grievances resonated among many living
in the rural reserves around Nairobi, especially around Fort Hall district.
Between July 1921 and March 1922, Thuku traveled extensively through
Kikuyu reserves in Fort Hall, gathering increasing support for his associa-
tion. On January 26, 1922, a letter written by him in Kiswahili was read out
to 1,000 men in Ruiru, urging them not to trust district officers or headmen.
At a series of meetings held on February 26 and 27, Thuku announced that
the headmen were “paid to cheat” ordinary Africans by the Europeans who
had stolen their land. He urged his audience to throw away their kipandes,
refuse to pay such high taxes, and do no unpaid labor. Thuku criticized the
European settlers, the colonial administration, and the missionaries who kept
Africans in a state of “slavery,” announcing that he was “the snake who would
 “Civilization” in Kenya 93

bite” the Europeans until they left Kikuyu country, imploring Africans to
ask the government what became of the taxes they paid, and accusing mis-
sionaries of “teaching the word of Satan.” As the tenor of Thuku’s speeches
became more and more radical, the new chief native commissioner, G. V.
Maxwell, recommended that Northey deport him. On March 10, 1922,
Thuku was arrested in Nairobi and exiled to Kismayu for a decade on the
grounds that he was “dangerous to peace and good order.” His arrest led to
a mass gathering in Nairobi where his supporters were fired on by the po-
lice, resulting in deaths and injuries. Thuku’s short-lived movement thus came
to a violent and abrupt halt. What made the colonial government so anx-
ious about Thuku was his increasingly anticolonial rhetoric and his emphatic
rebuttal of the Europeans’ claims that it was Indians, rather than the white
settlers, who were hindering African progress.48
In his efforts to mobilize Africans to protest against the kipande, Thuku
had joined hands with other political associations in Nairobi that “were
fighting for equal rights in Kenya with Europeans.” He met Manilal Desai
during his time at the treasury and was impressed with the Indian Associa-
tion, which, in his words, aimed to “combat inhuman behaviour.” Their mu-
tual preoccupation with political agitation became the foundation for an in-
timate friendship. Desai was delighted to see “all classes in Kenya waking
up, like the Indians, to the advantages of combination”; since “the country
is theirs [Africans’], therefore they should indeed be allowed to have a voice
in the running of it.” He considered the East African Association’s requests
to be “fair and legitimate” and in his editorials in the Chronicle urged the
government to hear the “real owners of this fair and fertile land.” Desai be-
came not just a friend but an advisor to Thuku, helping him draft the mem-
orandum of grievances that his association sent to Britain to 1921.49 The rhe-
torical shift in the Congress’s language of claim making, from emphasizing
their rights as imperial citizens to a critique against racial discrimination,
opened up the ideological space to express solidarity and strategically ally
with the other non-Europeans. For Desai, the principle of racial equality
necessarily meant that Africans must have the same rights. However, he also
recognized the distinctly African claims to rights in Kenya on the basis of
their numbers and territorial origins. Indeed, in building his argument
against the highlands policy, Desai pointed to Africans as the real owners
of land in Kenya. Although in so doing he implicitly positioned Indians as
settlers, the interests of indigenous Africans and diasporic Indians were not
in contestation, since only 120 Indian agriculturalists lived there.50
94 Indians in Kenya

In July 1921, joint meetings of Indians and Africans were held in Nai-
robi. Shams-ud-Deen, Das, Jeevanjee, B. S. Varma, and Virji also supported
the East African Association and invited its members to informal meetings.
They gave Thuku a car to tour the Kikuyu reserves, an office in the Indian
Association building in Nairobi, and access to the Chronicle’s press to print
his pamphlets. He was also allegedly in receipt of £30 a month from them.
His Indian friends introduced Thuku to Andrews at a tea party hosted by
Abul Rasul Visram, a meeting he greatly appreciated as he considered An-
drews “an influential man in India and England, and a close friend of
Gandhi.”51 Thuku requested that Andrews carry a message to England: “Ask
the King of England to stop the European settlers using the kiboko [rhino
whip] on their Africans.” His East African Association also asked Jeevanjee,
Desai, and Visram, who went to England in July 1921 to meet Churchill, to
represent “the Africans’ case” to the Colonial Office. Through the Chron-
icle, Desai gave publicity to these meetings and resolutions, reporting on
them at length. W. N. Moyah published a letter to the editor in the Chron-
icle thanking the Indian Association for taking up the African protest against
the lowering of their wages and asked the Indian delegation going to London
to explain to the bwana mkumbwa sana (“the very big man,” presumably
the secretary of state for colonies) that the “natives” were very poor and
needed help. At various meetings in the Fort Hall district reserves, Thuku
was accompanied by representatives of different tribes, including a Kikuyu
from Fort Hall, a Kavirondo, an Akamba, and other “men wearing turbans,”
most likely Indians. The Indian Associations’ resolutions supporting Thu-
ku’s demands were read aloud in Kiswahili and Gikuyu at these meetings.52
Just as the Indians had exploited the noncooperation movement taking
place in India to legitimize their demands, Thuku articulated a similar po-
litical subjectivity that exemplified universalizing aspirations of anticolo-
nialism, which transcended territorial and racial boundaries in political
discourse. “There is an Indian named Ghandi [sic] in India,” Thuku told his
audience in Kiambu in February 1922: “At first he was rejected, now he has
beaten the Europeans who no longer have any say in the affairs of India.
Now everyone follows him and no one can stay him. I shall be as he is.” He
repeated this at another meeting attended by thirty chiefs and more than
a thousand Africans in Thika in July, stating, “Ghandi [sic] is going to be
King of India and I am going to be King here.”53 It is impossible to fully
appreciate Thuku’s self-appointed status as the Gandhi of Kenya and his
alliance with Indians in Nairobi without locating the united political realm
 “Civilization” in Kenya 95

across the Indian Ocean within which local and transnational political
ideas and movements converged. Thuku and the East African Association
were not only inspired by the Indian agitation in Nairobi but also saw a
strategic opportunity to give their local agitation— one concerned with ex-
clusively Kikuyu grievances—interracial and transnational significance.
On a personal level, Thuku was favorably disposed to Indians based on his
everyday experiences with them in Nairobi. A Goan had taught him how to
operate the telephone efficiently when he got his job at the treasury, and he
was impressed with Desai’s decision to quit the European law firm where
he had been employed after he was prevented from smoking just because
he was not a white man. Politically, he saw great value in joining forces,
since both the Indians and Africans were “fighting for equal rights” with
the Europeans. It was this alliance that was viewed with suspicion by Eu-
ropeans because of its potential potency, especially as Desai and Thuku
identified these settlers as their common enemy. As Desai put it in the
Chronicle, “The native and Indian races are becoming further and further
estranged from the European.”54
Although Thuku’s specific demands relating to labor and taxation were
entirely local in origin and were ethnically bounded by particular Kikuyu
concerns, Christian missionary H. D. Hooper, European settlers, and
Northey concluded that Indians were “poisoning the minds of the native
against the British Administration.” Refusing to legitimize Thuku’s move-
ment by acknowledging the grievances of Africans, the governor believed
that Thuku was simply being induced to act as a propagandist for Indians
since he was financed by them. For his part, Hooper claimed that Thuku
was distributing leaflets on civil disobedience that came from India. Even
though Thuku did not elucidate specifically on the issue of the Khilafat,
Hooper stated that the Khilafat Party was making a bid for an antiwhite
alliance throughout Africa and indicated that its Nairobi-based “represen-
tative” was Thuku’s main supporter. For Hooper, these connections were
dangerous because they could trigger an agitation that was “poisonous for
primitive folk.” According to him, Thuku was playing a “very hazardous
game” by disseminating ideas from Nairobi that Africans in the Central
Province were “all too ready to swallow, without the power to digest them.”55
The unnamed supporter to whom Hooper was referring as the source of
the dangerous ideas from Nairobi was Desai and his Chronicle.
Far from being “primitive,” African political discourse was complex
and deeply contested. Having publicly allied with the Congress, Thuku
96 Indians in Kenya

precipitated a debate among the Kikuyu in the Central Province that ex-
emplified three overlapping political and economic concerns. First, a gen-
erational split over competing political imaginaries between older and
younger men emerged that shaped the political realm in Kenya well into
the 1950s. Customarily, Kikuyu elders were landed men who were heads
of households. Land was important to the social and economic organiza-
tion of this group not because of an inherent scarcity but due to the role of
landed wealth in providing bride wealth, often in the form of livestock.
Adulthood, marriage, and land were thus intricately linked in precolonial
Kikuyuland, and landed elders who needed men to work on their land and
become warriors when necessary loaned land to poor, landless men so that
they could “get a start in manhood.” This patron-client relationship in
which wealth, social leadership, and patronage were conflated began to
unravel as the obligations of elders altered under colonial rule, with “tribal
chiefs” becoming mediators between the state and its subjects, supplying
labor rather than providing land.56 These chiefs, who were appointed by
the colonial government and thus implicated in the imperial project, were
the target of Thuku’s movement as he circulated notices warning the
Kikuyu: “Do not trust in District Officers or the Headmen.” In retaliation,
the chiefs—whom the government considered to be Africans’ legitimate
representatives—delegitimized Thuku as being unrepresentative of “their
people.” Shortly after Thuku sent a memorandum of grievances to His Maj-
esty’s government in July 1921, Kikuyu chiefs who were members of the
Kikuyu Association announced that Thuku’s East African Association did
not represent Kikuyu country. When it became clear that people were
attending Thuku’s meetings in the thousands, Kikuyu chief Koinange wa
Mbiyu (henceforth Chief Koinange) tried to dismiss them as young and
“headstrong” men, emphatically stating that the older chiefs and headmen
distanced themselves entirely from his movement. He tried to ban Thuku
from entering Kiambu reserve, while paramount chief Kinyanjui held a
meeting with several other chiefs to criticize Thuku’s disloyalty toward the
colonial administration.57
Second, the subimperialist ambitions of Indians were viewed with
skepticism by these headmen, who believed that Indians had no legitimate
right to political representation in Kenya at all. Kinyanjui held meetings in
the reserves at which he warned his fellow Africans that “[Thuku] has
written to the Colonial Office and told them that they want Europeans to
go away and instead they want to bring Indians to rule us.” This was a
 “Civilization” in Kenya 97

misunderstanding—or, at the very least, a misrepresentation—of the In-

dian subimperialist colonization scheme, which had been abandoned by
1922. However, the belief that Thuku had petitioned His Majesty’s govern-
ment to allow Indians to rule Kenya evoked the most vocal protest and
discussion among the Kikuyu. Furthermore, articulating a discourse of in-
digeneity, they criticized Thuku’s alliance with Indians, arguing that the
country belonged to the Kikuyu.
On July 25, 1922, the Kikuyu Association held a meeting in Thika attended
by almost thirty chiefs and a thousand Africans. Six hundred and eighteen
Indians lived in the area. Several statements made at this meeting highlighted
a deep distrust of Thuku’s alliance with Indians, as chiefs questioned the
very right of Indians to any claims in their country. Arguing that it was the
Indians rather than Africans who supported Thuku, they announced: “In-
dians feted and garlanded him and proposed to pay the expenses of a dep-
utation of himself and some of his lieutenants to visit India. . . . Indians are
our friends when we are selling and buying from their shops, but not in any
other way. . . . [I]f the Indians are asking for rights they may get [them] in
India but not in the Kikuyu country, as we are expecting our birth-rights in
our country.” 58At a later meeting of more than a thousand representatives
of the Kikuyu, Swahili, Kavirondo, Buganda, Lumbwa, Masai, Kisii, and
Kamasia at the settler stronghold of Nakuru in the Rift Valley, where 650
Indians lived, further protest was voiced against granting Indians rights equal
to those of Europeans. Chief Koinange accused Thuku of “currying favor”
with the Indians even though the Africans’ land was small and could not
stand an influx of more immigrants, while Kinyanjui stated that the Kikuyu
“did not want Indians to obtain houses or plots of land.” In fact, he an-
nounced, “we would like to burn him [the Indian].”59
Whereas the Kikuyu Association statement referred to Indian shopkeepers
as “friends,” the economic frustrations of ordinary Africans within the Cen-
tral Province, Rift Valley, and Nyanza reserves and in Nairobi began to be
voiced against dukkawallahs and Indian artisans in the early 1920s. Expres-
sions of racial solidarity led to a political collaboration between Thuku and
Desai in the colonial capital, but these did not find resonance in the rural
areas. The chief native commissioner received complaints in Nyanza and
the Central Province of dukkawallahs who cheated customers by taking
advantage of the confusion caused by the change in currency and charging
high prices for their goods. Although Das countered that this was a problem
not particular to Indian shopkeepers only, stating that “the desire for
98 Indians in Kenya

making profits is inherent in men of all races,” administrators, settlers, and

spokesmen from the reserves used the recurring trope of the cheating In-
dian shopkeeper to make their political and economic claims. By 1921, 900
Indians had settled in Kiambu and Fort Hall, where Thuku was most ac-
tive. Gideon Gatere, an apprentice carpenter who was in government em-
ploy, accused Indians of being “people of lies” and listed several complaints
against Indian shopkeepers who “stole” from Africans and against Indian
mill owners who deceived their African employees. He pointed to the duk-
kawallahs’ insistence on selling to their customers and their disinterest in
buying from them. From his perspective, Indians were greedy: “Indians
are just like a cat when it sees a rat; so it is when they see anyone with ru-
pees they want them.” Furthermore, dukkawallahs were blamed for keeping
Africans in poverty, with the profits they made through their resale of
African produce, such as maize, simsim, and hides, being pointed to as evi-
dence. For example, in Yala in Kavirondo, Indian retailers paid 3.24 shil-
lings for thirty-six pounds of simsim, which they then sold to Mombasa-based
exporters. After spending approximately 9 shillings on packing and
railway freight, they made a profit of about 10 shillings. Aspiring to make
similar profits, Kikuyu in the Central Province demanded the establish-
ment of their own shops so that they were not forced to buy from and sell to
Indian dukkas only. Moreover, the chiefs announced that they did not want
Indians living in their reserves and therefore advocated a ban on Indian
immigration.60
Significantly, this criticism was juxtaposed to the civilizational benefits
that the Europeans brought with them, including ending warfare; building
bridges, roads, and hospitals; teaching Africans to wash themselves, wear
clothes, and cover themselves; and showing them “the way of God.” Kikuyu
chiefs emphatically asserted their loyalty to the colonial government, an-
nouncing that “the white man” was the father of the Kikuyu. Indians, on
the other hand, did not teach them any skills, such as trade and artisanal
work. Therefore, at a meeting with Watkins in Nakuru, a group of Kikuyu,
Kavirondo, Lumbwa, and Masai representatives asked the government to
provide technical education so that Africans could take up their “real place
in the work of the country” and replace the Indian petty bourgeoisie, who
were “threatening our very existence.” 61
Like the Indians, Africans also used the print media in staking their po-
litical and economic claims, making the public political sphere in Nairobi a
deeply contested, interracial one. On July 1, 1921, a vernacular monthly
 “Civilization” in Kenya 99

newspaper, Sekanyolya, edited by an expatriate Ugandan clerk, Zefiniya Sen-

tongo, published a supplement in English, “for the benefit of European sub-
scribers,” entitled Indian versus Native Claims. It stated, “We, the educated
natives of this country . . . [believe that] Indians have done nothing in the
way of Native education, the mass of Indians are illiterate and inferior in
education to the natives . . . our education and training has been carried
out on western lines, as being the best for our advancement.” 62 The East
African Association immediately held a mass meeting to put “on record that
in its opinion” Indians were “not prejudicial to the advancement of natives”
and that “next to missionaries the Indians are our best friends.” It also sent
a letter signed by more than thirty Africans to the Chronicle that emphati-
cally rejected the claims made in Sekanyolya. They accused the Europeans
of putting “force and pressure” on some Africans in Nairobi to publish the
anti-Indian treatise that had appeared in Sekanyolya. The letter argued that
the Indian presence in Kenya had been advantageous for Africans because
the skilled workers had taught them arts and manual industry, while the
shopkeepers had spread trade and business to the farthest corners of their
land. In contrast to the contributions of the Indian petite bourgeoisie, they
argued, the mzungu (white settlers) had impoverished them by exploiting
the country for their own gains, leaving Africans starving and reduced to a
condition “worse than that of dogs.” 63
The rise of antisettler opinion among the Kikuyu had been triggered by
a critique of the usurpation of the Kenya highlands by Europeans and their
extraction of labor, neither of which had anything to do with the Indians.
Thuku made it clear that he had not asked for Indians to become political
representatives for Africans as either district commissioners or councilors.
He dismissed the resolutions passed by the African chiefs and the Kikuyu
Association as inauthentic, claiming that Watkins had given them cigarettes
to get them to say ndio bwana (yes sir) and agree with his anti-Indian opin-
ions. Rather, he pointed out, “Indians had not taken away any of our land
by force; they had no power and were only traders.” Not only did Indian
tradesmen teach Africans skilled work in towns like Nairobi, Thuku ar-
gued, but the shopkeepers near the reserves provided an invaluable ser-
vice by selling small quantities of commodities to Africans, unlike Euro-
pean shops, which stipulated a minimum purchase.64 As far as Thuku was
concerned, the Indians had “proved their friendship” by “constantly”
helping in “every possible way” and showing them “much sympathy,” as
was evident in the campaign Desai was carry ing out in the Chronicle.
100 Indians in Kenya

Although Watkins and the European settlers proclaimed that just the op-
posite was true, in a confidential letter to Churchill Northey admitted that
relations between Africans and Indians were “sufficiently friendly” and that
the Indian trader was welcomed by the former, who were “generally indif-
ferent” to Indian artisans and clerks. It was perhaps because of this under-
lying dynamic that Northey also refused to allow the Colonial Office to set
up an enquiry into African opinion regarding Indians, believing this would
lead to a “strong Indian canvass” and explode the argument made by Euro-
peans and tribal chiefs regarding African opinions of Indians in the colony,
about which there was clearly no consensus. Even without an official report
on the African point of view, Shams-ud-Deen, Desai, and Das were also
quick to assure Africans that they had “never expressed their desire or am-
bition to rule the natives or gain supremacy over them.” Editorials in the
Chronicle written by Desai blamed colonial officials for creating a “vicious
atmosphere” in the colony.65
Although the Kikuyu chiefs, European settlers, and the governor tried
to delegitimize Thuku as simply being a pawn in the Indian agitation for
parity with the Europeans, his arrest on March 10, 1922, made it clear that
he had a following large enough to frighten the colonial administration about
his potential threat to it. Over the next two days, a group of more than
7,000 men and women gathered in Nairobi around a policed fence, de-
manding his release. The majority were Kikuyu, although several Indians
were also present. The crowd, which had remained peaceful for two days,
turned hostile when six of their representatives returned from an unsuc-
cessful meeting with the governor’s deputy. As the group began to disperse,
some women accused those leaving of being “cowards,” causing the crowd
to surge toward the police line. In an act of colonial brutality reminiscent
of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in 1919, the police opened fire on the
unarmed crowd, killing sixteen men and two women and injuring twenty-
two men and nine women. Two of these men were Indian. Northey praised
the police for their “patience, discipline and fortitude” in the face of a “na-
tive riot,” proclaiming that the thousands of people gathered had attended
the meeting out of compulsion or curiosity and did not have any grievances
against the government.66
Since the colonial administration willfully refused to legitimize Thuku
by even acknowledging the basis of his movement, if only to refute him, it
looked elsewhere to identify the organizers of this “incident.” Photographic
evidence was put forward to show Indians “in considerable numbers . . . con-
tinually in conversation with the mob.” Four Indians carry ing rifles were
 “Civilization” in Kenya 101

seen proceeding toward Thika on the Fort Hall road the night before the
incident in Nairobi. Afterward, Indians “hampered” the police inquiry by
not volunteering to help. Desai was kept under surveillance by the police
as he held several meetings with Africans from all over the country. In the
hope of gathering enough evidence to have him arrested, Watkins had the
Chronicle office searched for seditious material and other publications that
did not comply with legal procedures.67 However, no concrete proof was
found. Officials even offered to release Thuku in exchange for a statement
that Desai, Shams-ud-Deen, and Das had engineered the entire protest. Be-
lieving this to be a bluff to imprison his Indian friends along with him, Thuku
replied, “If you want to arrest my ‘guilty’ friends then start earlier, with the
Europeans— especially the dangerous ones who taught me English.” He
added, “I am quite sure that natives do not need to be told by the Indians
that they are not masters in their houses, as they have learnt this from Eu-
ropeans who are treating them very badly, especially by way of compulsory
labour among women and children on their plantations.” This enduring
friendship was reciprocal. When Thuku was deported without trial, Desai
and Shams-ud-Deen, who believed that his association was constitutional
and legitimate, demanded that the government show proof to the contrary.
However, without a trial they did not get a chance to prove his innocence.
Instead, Desai gave money to his mother while Thuku was in exile, where
he opened a school for Indian and Somali children. On his release, he bought
land in Eastleigh from a Bohra former employee of Jeevanjee’s, Yusufali,
who was willing to bypass the law that prevented Africans from purchasing
land in non-African areas.68
In December 1924, in a letter describing Thuku’s arrest, Andrews wrote
to Gandhi, “Tyranny is the same all over the world. The essence of tyranny
lies in the repression . . . of individual[s].” In reply Gandhi published an ar-
ticle in his paper Young India: “Poor Thuku! His appeal [to Indian nation-
alists] . . . will secure no relief for this victim of lust for power . . . he will
perhaps find comfort in the thought that even in distant India many will
read the story of his deportation and trials with sympathy. He may also find
solace in the fact that many perhaps as innocent as Harry Thuku are today
locked up in Bengal without any trial or hope of it in the near future.” 69
While Gandhi astutely summed up the transnational possibilities and limi-
tations of early anticolonial protest across the Indian Ocean, this experience
set the foundation for several other interracial collaborations in the 1930s
and 1940s. In March 1922, however, having snuffed out African agitation,
Europeans and colonial officials turned their attention back to Indian
102 Indians in Kenya

demands for political and economic equality, as Indians continued to pro-

test the racial principles embedded in Milner’s 1920 decision regarding the
communal roll and the highlands policy.

E U R O P E A N S T H R E AT E N A C O U P

Although colonial officials and European settlers deliberately refused to ac-

knowledge any of Thuku’s grievances as legitimate, Christian missionaries
who were in close contact with the Kikuyu in the Central Province were
quick to point out that his complaints were serious. Reverends Hooper and
Cayzac, stationed in Kahuhia and Mungu in Kikuyu-land, believed that
Thuku found widespread support because of very real economic grievances
and people’s realization that the high taxes they paid did little to benefit
them. Hooper noted that at Thuku’s meetings the focus of discussion had
been land and githaka deeds, and that the most emphatic protest was ar-
ticulated against the allotment of land to Europeans. Just like Desai and
Thuku, Hooper criticized the settlers for failing to educate Africans in lit-
eracy or vocational skills and warned the government to change its pro-
European bias in its expenditures, since this was giving the settlers the power
of self-government, something to which Africans were “strictly opposed.” 70
The Colonial Office in London took the missionaries’ advice seriously. In
January 1922, just a month before Thuku’s protest reached its peak, Churchill
tried to keep the local problems in Kenya balanced with Britain’s global
imperial concerns. “We must be very careful,” he told Delamere and Ar-
cher in London, “not to shape the laws of the empire, in any one part, in such
a way as needlessly to inflict an invidious distinction upon those who may be
held in some way to represent the enormous mass of subjects of the British
crown in the land of Hindustan.” Moreover, since imperial ideology in the
metropole, as elucidated by Churchill, was committed to Rhodes’s principle
of equal rights for all civilized men, he was, in principle, willing to grant the
fullest exercise of civic and political rights to both Africans and Indians who
conformed to well-marked European standards. Specifically, conceding to
the Indians’ demand, he proposed the introduction of a common electoral
roll for all British subjects who met property and education qualifications.
He also brought down the number of European unofficial representatives in
the Legislative Council from eleven to five and increased the Indians from
two to three, thus maintaining a very slight European majority in the admin-
istration. Acquiescing to the Europeans on the most emotive issue, the high-
 “Civilization” in Kenya 103

lands, he recommended that His Majesty’s government make racial reserva-

tion there a definite policy but proposed the removal of all other forms of
commercial and residential segregation for all enfranchised subjects.71
Although Desai had emerged as a prominent, and perhaps the most vocal,
political leader of the Indians, Delamere and Northey objected to his in-
clusion in the Legislative Council. Instead, Visram, Shams-ud-Deen, and
Phadke accepted the governor’s nomination in the interim.72 While their de-
mand for a common political franchise had been fulfilled, Indian associa-
tions and the India Office continued to protest against the reservation of
the highlands. The Convention of Associations also objected to the proposals,
in particular to Churchill’s evocation of Rhodes’s principle of equal rights
for civilized men, as “political formulas which may mean a great deal or
nothing at all,” depending on the interpreter. Archer argued that it was im-
possible to define legally or accurately “a civilized man” by any framework
that would be universally accepted as binding. Poignantly, he noted that In-
dian “civilization” had led to an “inevitable struggle between east and west.”
Under Archer’s leadership, the Convention rejected as a solution for Kenya
the “nebulous formula” of equal rights for civilized men, stating that it cre-
ated false hopes of “peace when there is no peace.” 73
Ignoring the Convention’s protest, Churchill finalized his proposals in July
1922, in a paper known as the Wood-Winterton Agreement. The common
roll enfranchised Indians and Africans, but the governor had full discre-
tion to set the qualifications at a level to ensure that no more than 10 per-
cent of Indians received the right to vote and that voting rights would not
be given to “an embarrassingly large number of Africans.” The common roll,
however, was an illusion because the proposal provided for the racial reser-
vation of seats in the Legislative Council, ensuring that three of the seven
total constituencies would return only European candidates, while two mem-
bers, an Indian and a European, would be elected from the four other prov-
inces. The plan rejected commercial and residential segregation but empow-
ered the colonial administration in Kenya to impose sanitary and policy
regulations at its discretion. Regarding the highlands, the agreement rec-
ommended no change in the status quo but gave the India Office the right
to reopen the question at some future date.74
Emerging unquestionably victorious in receiving common franchise and
keeping the highlands issue open, the Congress leaders accepted this set-
tlement. Archer and Delamere, however, refused to acquiesce in what they
believed was the beginning of the end of Kenya as a white man’s country,
104 Indians in Kenya

stating that the principle of Indian elected representation would legislate

Europeans out of existence. According to Archer, “The highlands would go,
segregation would go, immigration could be thrown open to Indians without
restrictions and the stronghold of western civilization in East Africa would
be swept away.” He also objected to giving direct political representation to
Africans “long before they were capable of appreciating, still less performing,
the duties of the government,” resulting in political chaos.75
Since the Colonial Office seemed determined to accommodate Indian
political aspirations, the settlers took matters into their own hands. In Jan-
uary 1923, the Europeans opened a trading firm, the Nyanza Trading Com-
pany, which boasted twenty-five carts and a hundred oxen to transport com-
modities from the African reserves and stimulate trade by circumventing
the ubiquitous Indian wholesaler. The firm was welcomed by colonial offi-
cials and missionaries. In April 1923, the European and African Traders As-
sociation was established as a means of further boycotting Indian traders
and helping to depoliticize and derail the growing Indian agitation. They
pledged to employ only Europeans and Africans as mechanics, artisans, and
clerks, thus hoping to eliminate the 20 percent of the Indian population that
held these jobs. Furthermore, European stores were opened throughout
the country that refused to deal with Indian wholesalers, and the associa-
tion planned to establish a labor and information bureau in Nairobi to by-
pass Indian contractors in matters relating to the supply and demand of
labor. The Convention of Associations suggested a range of different strate-
gies for boycotting Indian traders and forcing the closure of small dukkas.
One involved a legislative proposal to restrict the sale of certain commodi-
ties, such as maize, simsim, and groundnuts, to newly established buying
centers that would issue licenses only to those traders who did not have
small shops in the reserves. No one outside these buying centers would be
permitted to sell the specified commodities. By breaking the link between
large-scale Indian traders and small dukkawallahs, the association thus
hoped to undermine the Indian wholesalers in the colony, leading to their
voluntary exodus from Kenya.76
Both these ventures were complete failures. European stores were un-
able to compete with the dukkawallahs, who were willing to buy and sell in
small amounts and run their shops on very low margins of profit. Approxi-
mately 2,376 Indians lived in Nyanza, most of whom were traders. Although
the Nyanza Trading Company offered to buy maize from Africans for double
the usual price, it was not able to displace Indian traders. Existing trade
 “Civilization” in Kenya 105

regulations confined buying and selling to certain defined areas in the Af-
rican reserves. Europeans were thus forced to set up shop in close proximity
to dukkas and were unable to compete. In the aftermath of Thuku’s agita-
tion and arrest, with no immediate policies that alleviated their economic
concerns, Africans boycotted the Nyanza Company, fearing that if Euro-
pean trade was encouraged in the reserves, the reserves would ultimately
be usurped by settlers, just as the highlands had been. The only rebuttal
the Europeans could offer was to blame Indians for carry ing out “unscru-
pulous and mendacious anti-European propaganda” among “uneducated”
Africans by giving them “doped tobacco.” Furthermore, the Company an-
nounced that European stores could not compete with the Indian shops be-
cause of the “abusive” practices of the latter, such as falsification of weights,
bakhsheesh (gratuities), heavy commissions, and unfair barter.77
With the failure of the practical approach to squeeze out the Indian trader
economically, the Europeans turned to a civilizational critique to convince
Churchill that his appeasement of Indian immigrants was undermining the
imperial project. In an attempt to expose the hypocrisy of the Colonial Of-
fice, which was concerned with the British public, European settlers began
to distance themselves from the home government. Arguing their case, and
astutely foreshadowing the crisis that would overwhelm British policy in the
late 1960s when thousands of Indians from Kenya arrived in the metro-
pole, the settlers proclaimed, “It is difficult to imagine anything short of
the appearance of a race question in their midst which will shake the
people of the UK in their comfortable belief that such things belong to the
remote past or now visit only in the unbalanced minds of alarmists and
narrow-minded colonials. . . . [T]he immigration of 165,000 British Indians
of the labourer, artisan and shop-keepers classes into Great Britain would
produce the same numerical relations with the white and Asiatic races which
actually today exist in Kenya. Then would the anxiety of East Africa be
understood.” At meetings in Eldoret and Nakuru, which had large Euro-
pean populations, settlers pledged to resist “without reservation” and by every
means—including armed force—the enactment or enforcement of any legis-
lation in conflict with the minimum demands of the Convention of Associa-
tions to control Indian immigration, impose a racially defined communal
franchise, and reserve in perpetuity the highlands for Europeans.78 Further-
more, articles by European settlers in newspapers such as the East African
Standard threatened Indians with violence and bloodshed if measures were
taken to introduce Churchill’s plan.
106 Indians in Kenya

With the rising racist tone of settler agitations, the Colonial Office be-
came less and less sympathetic to European objections. A new South African–
born governor, Robert Coryndon, replaced Northey, who was recalled by
the Colonial Office.79 However, he proved to be even more sympathetic to
the European settlers and warned the Colonial Office against any attempt to
force the settlers to accept Churchill’s proposals, adding, “The effect of
this would be very serious violence and the certainty of deeply embittered
feelings which years would not wipe out.” Influenced by the rising agitation
among the settlers, he informed the British government of a European vigi-
lantism that had resulted from strong “public feeling” and been “stiffened”
by headlines like “Be Prepared,” “No Compromise on Indian Question,” and
“Asiatic Claims to be Resisted at All Costs” in the press. Coryndon was cer-
tain that grave public disturbances, such as extensive hostile demonstrations,
boycotts, destruction of bazaars, and the shooting of Indians in district cen-
ters, would occur if Churchill’s proposals were implemented. He believed
that the threats of violence were very real because of a large number of highly
trained soldiers who had settled in the colony after the war. The “cult of
violence,” he warned, was creating “a dangerous precedent that encouraged
other races” to pursue “unconstitutional” methods of agitation. By January
1923 Coryndon was convinced that a coup would occur that would para-
lyze the colonial government and expel Indians from the capital, Nairobi,
to Mombasa. The entire European population, the governor informed
the new secretary of state for colonies, the Duke of Devonshire, was
“standing upon awakened race instincts.” Therefore, he was unable to
put the Wood-Winterton plans into action. Instead, he tried to pass a bill
restricting the entry of Indians into Kenya, claiming that this would dees-
calate the crisis. However, Devonshire did not let it pass.80
Despite their blatantly seditious threats, Coryndon refused to use the
power of the colonial state to control the settlers, which included not just
former British soldiers but Boers. Due to the large numbers involved, he in-
formed Devonshire that deportation was not possible, and he refused to
declare martial law because the government’s administrators—the commis-
sioner of police, district commissioners, and senior railway staff—supported
the Europeans. Indeed, many of these officials were settlers themselves.
Although Coryndon positioned himself as a mediator between the Indian
and European representatives of the Congress and Convention of Associa-
tions, at a public meeting of about 120 members of the latter he stated, “I am
South African born.” 81 This intentionally cryptic message made it clear to
 “Civilization” in Kenya 107

both Indians and Europeans that the governor’s sympathies lay at least par-
tially, if not entirely, with the latter. Within and outside the Legislative
Council, Shams-ud-Deen, Jeevanjee, Virji, and Desai criticized Coryndon
for frustrating any chance of a compromise. This, together with pressure put
on the Colonial Office by the secretary of state for India and the Indian Over-
seas Association, won them another audience in London with Devonshire.82
After a series of meetings with Coryndon, the India Office, and Indian
and European representatives, the Duke of Devonshire presented a final
official report on the Indian question to the British parliament in July 1923.
Having reached an impasse that exposed the contradictions of the global
British Empire, the Colonial Office finally took shelter in an innovative dec-
laration of African paramountcy that made it permanently and decisively
impossible for white settlers in Kenya to follow the path to self-governance
that their counterparts in South Africa had managed by 1923. In it, Dev-
onshire outlined a new policy that, “in the face of irreconcilable points of
view” between Europeans and Indians, focused on the one point on which
they both agreed: safeguarding African interests. Announcing that “primarily
Kenya is an African territory,” His Majesty’s government concluded that “the
interests of the African natives must be paramount and if and when those
interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former
should prevail.” 83 Specifically, he directed the colonial administration in
Kenya to focus on the economic development of Africans. The policies re-
garding franchise, segregation, the highlands, and immigration exposed a
desire to maintain the status quo and assert the dominance of the Colonial
Office to balance Indian and European political and economic aspirations.
The franchise was extended to Indians, but on a communal basis, since Devon-
shire did not see why racially separate representation was “derogatory” or
“disruptive.” A communal franchise would also provide the framework for
the eventual inclusion of Africans into the representative electoral structure
in the colony. Racial segregation in commercial and residential areas was
decisively rejected, but Indians were kept out of the highlands permanently.
Unwilling to exclude subjects of the British Empire from any colony, the
paper concluded that restriction on immigration would be imposed only
under “extreme circumstances.”
The Devonshire Declaration, as it was referred to, was received with great
resentment by Indians within Kenya and their transnational group of sup-
porters because of the highlands policy and the decision to impose com-
munal representation. Andrews predicted, quite accurately, that the racial
108 Indians in Kenya

restriction of the highlands would eventually result in the overthrow of the

“mighty empire” in Kenya. The Indian associations and the Congress orga-
nized meetings in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu at which leaders expressed
their “grave disappointment” with the declaration, which undermined their
“legitimate hopes.” Shams-ud-Deen and Desai referred to communal fran-
chise as the “curse of India,” where religiously defined political representa-
tion had been introduced by the colonial government in 1909 and extended
in 1919, exacerbating Hindu-Muslim antagonism. In protest, they boycotted
legislative elections. The new viceroy to India, Lord Reading, who had fol-
lowed his predecessor’s lead in supporting the Indian agitation in Kenya,
referred to Devonshire’s policy as a “national humiliation” for Indians across
the empire but decided against asking the Colonial Office to reconsider its
decisions, since the recommendations had been reached after “such pro-
tracted deliberations.” 84

INTERPRETING AFRICAN INTERESTS

Having succeeded in ensuring communal franchise that protected their ma-

jority in the Legislative Council and asserting their permanent and exclu-
sive right to highlands, the Europeans accepted the new proposals and po-
sitioned themselves over the next decade as trustees of African development
alongside Christian missionaries, who had been doing most of the work of
“civilizing” Africans in the reserves through education. The Devonshire Dec-
laration clearly stated that the primary duty of the colonial administration
was the advancement of Africans by protecting them against any measure
that would “retard . . . economic growth.” 85 However, there was no single
or successful trajectory of African economic growth. Africans, Indians,
Europeans, and colonial administrators were deeply divided over the direc-
tion, structure, and specific policies that ought to be implemented to facilitate
this growth. As they debated among themselves and with one another,
the only issue all agreed on was the immediate and urgent need to make the
colony economically sustainable and profitable. Although Thuku’s pro-
test was snuffed out, the Colonial Office had learned a lesson and did not
allow European settlers to link wages and taxation again. Indeed, after
March 1922 the hut and poll tax was lowered from 16 shillings to 12 shil-
lings to ease some of the economic pressure that had bubbled to the surface
during Thuku’s agitation. The government also set up vocational training
schools and started training programs within its departments, such as the
 “Civilization” in Kenya 109

railways and Public Works Department. By the late 1920s, approximately

44,000 Africans had enrolled in a variety of schools, some of which were
administered by the government; others had received some financial as-
sistance from the state, as well as privately-funded schools, often run by
missionaries. Several hundreds of Africans had also gone through five-year
apprenticeships as indentured contracted workers in the Native Industrial
Training Depot at Kabete and in workshops of railway employees, especially
Indian artisans.86
The railways employed close to 10,000 Africans. The scale of training and
employment was low, however, for several reasons. First, while the govern-
ment started employing thousands of Africans, only 1,500 were hired as
skilled workers. This meant that for the majority of railways and public works
workers, who were unskilled laborers earning between 13 and 16 cents per
hour, employment did not alleviate their poverty. Apprentices were paid be-
tween 4 and 10 shillings per month, and skilled artisans took home 20 to
120 shillings depending on their level of training. Governmental supervi-
sion and training was a double-edged sword, as they provided employment
opportunities, but the state closely surveyed its workers, categorizing them
into three classes based on European officials’ judgment of their abilities.
Indian skilled workers continued to be hired in higher-income services. While
they commanded higher wages than their African counterparts, the gov-
ernment did not have to invest capital in training them, as they arrived in
the colony with these skills. Therefore, African technical training was lim-
ited in quantity and quality. For the colonial administration, Africans were
primarily agriculturalists whose economic productivity was, in the eyes of
the state, linked to the export of their produce. In 1926, one-fifth of Kenya’s
agricultural exports were grown by African farmers. The colonial state
wanted to increase this share.87
Between 1926 and 1930, however, there was a dramatic decrease in this
proportion, as African-produced goods fell to one-eighth of the colony’s total
agricultural exports. In the aftermath of the currency fluctuations described
earlier, this decrease coincided with a trade deficit, going from a surplus
balance of £879,000 in 1926 to a £180,000 cash deficit by 1934.88 The solu-
tion to this problem was apparent for all to see: increased African produc-
tivity reoriented toward export, which would result from changes in agri-
cultural practices and trade policies. However, the proposed reforms were
fiercely contested, as they exposed the inherent contradictions in the eco-
nomic structure and the increasingly apparent fact that African, European,
110 Indians in Kenya

and Indian economic interests competed with rather than complemented

one another. With the alienation of the fertile highlands to European farmers,
Africans were expected to cultivate on small plots in their reserves, where
land was not readily available for the poor. By the late 1920s clan elders had
stopped parceling out land to the landless, as the material productivity of
land in the colonial economy made the customary significance of land own-
ership even more prized. As the profits of agrarian exports kept increasing,
landed elders benefited and began to get rid of their clients who had hith-
erto received land from them, thus changing the social contract of Kikuyu
relationships.89 Overcrowding in the reserves, resulting in low production,
was exacerbated by high taxes and lowered purchasing power, so African
producers found it difficult to either buy more land or invest in their plots
to increase productivity. Rather than review land policy that restricted own-
ership and the cultivation of cash crops or increase wages, colonial officials
and European settlers argued that it was the existing trade and marketing
structure that had created the crisis.
In 1930, a Colonial Office memorandum on policy regarding African eco-
nomic development announced that the doctrine of trusteeship—which the
Europeans settlers had taken upon themselves—must be applied in the
trading sector as well.90 In Kenya, the Agriculture Department, whose of-
ficials were European farmers, concluded that the reason for the decrease
in the value of African agricultural exports was the Indian petty shopkeeper.
They argued that there were more traders than needed in the reserves,
causing market inefficiencies. Between 1921 and 1931 the number of In-
dian traders in the colony increased from 4,000 to 15,000. Close to 5,000
of them operated in and around African reserves, not only in larger town
centers such as Kisumu, Kiambu, and Nakuru but also in rural upcountry
areas such as Ravine, Meru, and Fort Hall, where anywhere between 26
and 150 Indians families lived as retailers, setting up shops and stalls in the
same market centers (see Map 2). Officials concluded that there were too
many dukkas, given the low quantity of produce, and that these traders
contributed to the decrease in African cultivation by offering very low pur-
chasing prices to their clientele. The large numbers of shops competed
with one another to drive down buying prices, which left African farmers
with little capital to put back into their land and increase productivity. By
falsifying weights, these traders would make profits on their sales and pur-
chases, thus cheating their customers. Furthermore, they bought produce
with little attention to quality, resulting in enormous wastage, as exporters
 “Civilization” in Kenya 111

would reject poor-quality products, particularly maize cultivated in the

Central Province.91
Therefore, two bills were introduced in the Legislative Council that aimed
at breaking the internal trade monopoly of the ubiquitous dukkawallah by
introducing changes in immigration and marketing policies to eliminate the
middleman between the cultivator and exporter. Previously, in November
1923, an Immigration and Employment Ordinance had been proposed to
ensure the “continued improvement” of African welfare by requiring all new
immigrants to possess an employment certificate. In addition, entrepreneurs
wanting to enter Kenya were required to prove the existence of untapped
business opportunities and demonstrate how they would benefit Africans. It
was hoped that these measures would force existing Indian firms to search
locally for employees, rather than rely on their diasporic networks, leading
to their eventual closure, and limit the economic ambitions of entrepreneurs
from India, who were looking across the Indian Ocean for business expan-
sion. A decade later, a bill was introduced to reorganize and control the
marketing of African produce by issuing trade licenses, which clearly dis-
tinguished between buying centers engaged in internal trade and those
that were oriented toward export. Its aim was to ensure closer govern-
mental control over trade in the reserves, which had hitherto been unregu-
lated, and to gain the confidence of overseas buyers. Wattle bark, cotton,
groundnuts, simsim, hides, beans, and cashew nuts—the products that
dukkawallahs traded in—were subsequently earmarked for export. It was
hoped that this bill would undermine the monopoly of Indian traders by
breaking the link between the dukkawallah and the wholesaler/exporter.
The government wanted to stabilize trade in agricultural produce by
making it independent of these small retailers. Moreover, by establishing
new export markets on specific days and times and issuing licenses for ex-
port purposes, it hoped to end the dispersal of African produce among a
large number of petty traders and instead facilitate the accumulation of the
same in a few government-controlled centers that would also monitor
quality.92 Officials claimed that this would also give the government the
opportunity to protect “innocent” African cultivators from the “cheating”
Indian traders who falsified weights by putting dukkawallahs under close
governmental surveillance and issuing trade licenses to Africans to en-
courage them to set up their own shops. In practice, however, the govern-
ment’s efforts were geared toward export and breaking the network of
petty retailers and exporters, so internal trade between Indian shopkeepers
112 Indians in Kenya

and African buyers in everyday foodstuffs and consumer goods remained

unchanged.
Welcoming, and in many cases initiating, these proposals, European
farmers and their trade associations argued that Indian shopkeepers, big and
small, hampered rather than preserved what they interpreted as African in-
terests. They wanted to get rid of the dukkawallah entirely by involving the
government in internal trade. For example, the European Farmers’ Asso-
ciation suggested that the government stabilize the domestic price of maize
above its export parity so that the Indian petty traders could not afford to
buy it and Africans would be forced to sell their maize to European asso-
ciations, which would then export the grain.93 Deflecting political attention
away from the issue of land and toward trade, the farmers argued that
African business interests should be developed and protected. Europeans
hoped that these new market centers would stimulate African production and
create larger and more profitable markets for local produce than the dukkas
had provided.
As the Indians saw it, European settlers needed cheap labor for their farms
and were fundamentally opposed to increasing African agricultural produc-
tivity which required investment in the reserves rather than the highlands,
dealing with land scarcity within the reserves, and allowing Africans to pro-
duce cash crops such as coffee. The Mombasa Chamber of Commerce, the
Indian business organization set up in 1920 to protest against the currency
change, dismissed the Europeans’ blame of Indian middlemen for the small
quantities of trade in African produce, arguing that this would only increase
with improved methods of harvesting and reformed land policy. Seventy per-
cent of East Africa’s raw cotton was exported to India and 20 percent of its
imports came from India, of which 30 percent were cotton piece goods.
While the Europeans had no incentive to sell cotton to India, especially after
the Kenyan currency was decoupled from the Indian rupee, cotton ginneries,
particularly in Bombay, relied on Ugandan cotton. The colonial government
in Kenya was no longer dependent on Indian big business, as it had been at
the turn of the century, but the government of India took great interest in
the concerns of approximately sixty Indian ginneries that had opened in East
Africa, including Narandas and Company in Jinja, Uganda, which was the
largest in all of the region. Moreover, the Munitions Board had set up new
industries in India during the war whose products, including cotton goods,
grain, flour, tea, sugar, and tobacco, needed external markets.94 Therefore,
the government of India successfully intervened to prevent the Kenya Leg-
 “Civilization” in Kenya 113

islative Council from passing the immigration bill due to its own reliance
on the network of Indian traders across the Indian Ocean. Evoking the
geographical and historical connections of the Indian Ocean realm as cre-
ating “exceptional opportunities” for trade, officials within the India Office
pointed to the “absolute necessity” of the Indian merchants in stimulating
trade in African reserves, as they provided the only market for African pro-
duce irrespective of its quantity. Government officials also argued that the
Africans preferred coarse Indian cotton cloth to the lighter variety of Lan-
cashire cotton, thus claiming that the interests of the dukkawallah and
African customer were perfectly aligned.
Many within Kenya concurred, pointing out that it was European and
African economic interests that were contradictory. The Congress announced
that the European settlers had no incentive to raise the standard of living
among Africans, since this would come about only with higher wages, which
the farmers could not afford to pay. In contrast, its members argued, In-
dian businesses benefited from an increase in the Africans’ purchasing power
through increased sales. Casting dukkawallahs as economic benefactors
of those living in the reserves, the Congress’s leaders were quick to point out
the reliance of Africans on the Indian shops for affordable everyday goods.
In the absence of African-run shops, if the dukkas shut down, Africans would
be forced to go to European stores, which were unable to maintain the “ex-
ceptionally low” prices of Indian traders, as was evident from the failure of
the Nyanza Trading Company to compete against Indian shops. African in-
terests, as interpreted by the Congress, were protected by the Indian traders.
Missionaries such as Hooper, John Archer, and Andrews agreed, noting that
because they could track changes in African consumption on a daily basis,
business patterns were one of the only reliable metrics of African prosperity.
They observed the willingness of the dukkawallahs, in contrast to European
shop owners, to trade in goods of lower quality and in smaller quantities,
which allowed Africans to enter the cash economy. The missionaries also
noted that by the mid-1920s, Africans had begun to model their own en-
terprises after Indian shops.95 Moreover, they argued that the large number
of shops operating in the same center, the majority of which did not sell goods
at fixed prices, allowed clients to get the best deal through “chaffer and bar-
gain.” The Nyanza provincial commissioner believed that this guaranteed
full market price to producers. K. P. S. Menon, a member of the Indian civil
ser vice, visited East Africa in 1934 to study these markets. He observed pro-
ducers in the Central Province and Nyanza Province going from shop to
114 Indians in Kenya

shop asking questions, lingering to watch other trade transactions, and

making informed business decisions. Taking agency into their own hands,
they would boycott shops where they felt they were treated unfairly, par-
ticularly those that cheated in weights, an observation that local district
commissioners confirmed, stating, “The native lets down the Indian more
than the Indian lets down the native.”96
While the Congress had taken the lead in articulating the political aspi-
rations of city-dwelling Indians in Nairobi and Mombasa, it was the up-
country petty traders who were directly affected by the proposed trade and
marketing legislations. In July 1932, a new organization was formed under
the leadership of J. B. Pandya to represent Indian commercial interests ex-
clusively, as a complement to the political efforts of the Congress. Pandya
was a Gujarati businessman from Mombasa who briefly joined the Legisla-
tive Council in 1926 with Phadke when most of the Congress leadership
had refused the governor’s nomination in protest against the Devonshire
Declaration. In 1928, the Congress succeeded in rescinding their decision
to cooperate with the colonial government, a move that no doubt revealed
to Pandya the divergence in interests between the seasoned politicians of
Nairobi and the traders, whose livelihoods were no longer the exclusive con-
cern of the Congress. The first session of this Federation of Indian Cham-
bers of Commerce and Industry of East Africa (FICCI) was held in
Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria, where Indian dukkawallahs had
first settled at the end of the railway line and where by 1921 more than
1,500 Indians lived.97
Beyond highlighting, as the Congress and the government of India had
done, the hypocrisy of the settlers in pushing their own land and trade lobby
in the guise of African interests, the federation, based on the experiences
of its members, criticized the particular policies being implemented in order
to reveal the embedded monopolistic principle that prevented, rather than
encouraged, African trade. For example, in May 1932, an economic report
by the financial commissioner, Lord Moyne, recommended the imposition
of protective duties on the import of sugar and flour to encourage internal
trade. Pandya argued against this “prohibitive” duty by pointing out that local
sugar cost 45 shillings per bag, whereas imported Java sugar could be bought
by Africans for 19 shillings. Likewise, Kenyan flour cost 23 shillings a bag,
while imported Indian flour sold for 17 shillings. Since Indians and Afri-
cans were the largest consumers of such items sold in dukkas, he argued,
protecting European interests would significantly increase their cost of living.
 “Civilization” in Kenya 115

Furthermore, Pandya stated that the low volume of African produce had
resulted from the refusal of the government to invest in schemes of planting
and production in the reserves, where land was scarce. Therefore, he lob-
bied against the reorganization of markets to delink purchases and sales until
the actual volume of African agricultural output increased. According to him,
the existing system where African customers could buy and sell at the same
center allowed them to negotiate according to current market conditions,
thus permitting emerging African shopkeepers to make a profit through re-
sale. Separating buying and selling stores would increase overhead costs for
all dukkawallahs, including African shopkeepers, driving up selling prices
and lowering buying prices; the result would be to trap the African cus-
tomer in the very same vicious cycle that the marketing legislation wanted
to break. The secretary of state for colonies had welcomed the trade and
marketing bill, stating that it was “absolutely vital” that primary producers
receive the best price possible for their products. Pandya argued that these
controls thwarted rather than encouraged African trade and the establish-
ment of African-owned shops. In 1933, for example, licensing fees were
increased for small wholesale and retail traders to 100 and 150 shillings,
respectively. The same ordinance also restricted the total value of goods in
these shops to £120. In opposing this increase, Pandya and his federation
pointed out that the licensing fees were unaffordable for the new African
shopkeepers, especially since they, unlike the Indian traders, did not have
an existing credit network from which to borrow the money for the fees.
However, with an estimated annual increase in government revenue of
£33,000 resulting from these fees, the Legislative Council ignored Pandya’s
logic and passed the bill.98
While they failed to block the licensing fees legislation, Pandya’s arguments
were taken seriously by the colonial administration, especially his point about
the continued need for dukkawallahs to operate in African reserves. In 1935,
new trade and marketing policies were introduced in the colony that the
Colonial Office hoped would both increase the prosperity of African pro-
ducers and benefit the Indian shopkeepers to whom Africans sold their com-
modities. The government insisted on distributing licenses for trade in cer-
tain high-value products, but it consented to give fourteen days’ notice before
restricting trade in such commodities—sufficient time for small shopkeepers
who kept small quantities to sell their stocks of such demarcated goods.
Moreover, rather than establishing new markets, the majority of existing
trading centers were declared legal markets, and no bar was imposed on
116 Indians in Kenya

Indians wanting to set up a stall to buy African produce in the reserves. Al-
though white farmers had engaged in a decade-long campaign to rid Kenya
of the Indian shopkeepers, as pointed out by Frank Furedi, David Himbara,
Michael Cowen, and Scott MacWilliam, even after the implementation of
the marketing legislation, Indians continued to have a monopoly on in-
ternal trade. Despite the efforts of the Europeans to separate retail from
export, these shopkeepers simply avoided the licensing issue by having dif-
ferent members of the same family take out separate licenses for internal
and external trade.99 Far from facilitating African enterprise, the legisla-
tion created further structural impediments to African trade, the reper-
cussions of which were felt in the mid-1940s, as discussed in Chapter 3.
Market centers continued to be spaces of intimacy where hopes of mate-
rial accumulation were fulfilled and frustrated, and where economic and
political aspirations were articulated in racialized discourses. For their Af-
rican clients, the dukka was a space of symbolic and literal dishonesty, as
the Indian trader charged different prices for the same commodity to dif-
ferent people and made a profit off those customers who did not have ef-
fective negotiating skills by overcharging. Moreover, as the only suppliers
of foodstuffs in the reserves, retailers hoarded their stocks to drive up prices
and falsified weights. Customers complained also that once the transaction
was complete, the shopkeeper would refuse to take back or exchange de-
fected goods.100 While political leaders such as Thuku were willing to col-
laborate with the Congress in Nairobi, cultivators in the reserves considered
the interests of the dukkawallah as diametrically opposed to their eco-
nomic aspirations. At a 1921 meeting of 1,000 Africans in Nakuru, where
650 Indians lived, speakers announced that Indians fleeced them of their
wages.101 Over the next decade, it was in this competitive space—where
negotiating and bargaining led to cheating and boycotts—that Indians be-
came the most visible and immediate obstacles to economic upward mo-
bility for aspiring African traders and African cultivators, who felt the
pressure of increasing taxes they could not meet from the sale of their
produce to the dukkawallahs.
In emphasizing the extent to which Indian traders stimulated rather than
stunted African economic development, Indians within the Congress and
FICCI made developmental claims on the colony in demanding political and
economic rights. They pointed to the aspirational status of Indians, arguing
that their material wealth was within the reach of Africans. In so doing they
marked Indians as civilizationally different and superior, even as they sought
 “Civilization” in Kenya 117

racial solidarity with their fellow non-Europeans. Unconcerned with such

expressions of political solidarity, dukkawallahs were preoccupied with main-
taining their livelihoods. They articulated Indian civilizational difference
in racial terms. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o recalled, during his childhood in the
1940s in Limuru, the dukkawallah who employed Africans for domestic
and shop work, insulted his employees, referring to them as jungli (wild/
uncivilized). The word was appropriated into Gikuyu as njangiri (rootless
like a stray dog).102 At the same time, for many Africans, economic hardship
and race consciousness were conflated, as their critiques of the traders’ busi-
ness ethics extended to Indian customs. For example, a letter to the editor
from an African in Mengo referred to Indians as the “great unwashed” and
ridiculed “how the Indian dresses, how he lives, his house, and his man-
ners when eating, what a man is at clearing his throat!”103 The intimacy of
the everyday interactions of Africans and Indians in shops and market cen-
ters created the rhetorical possibilities and strategies for expressions of soli-
darity and difference. As Indian and African politicians formed alliances
against European settlers and the colonial state in Nairobi, the recurring
tropes of the cheating dukkawallah in African political discourse and the
rhetoric of civilizational genius in Indian political claims revealed the
limits of such collaborations.
 THREE

R
Political Homelands across
the Indian Ocean

took place in Kenya and India in the 1930s and

T U M U LT U O U S C H A N G E S
1940s. The global depression of the interwar years caused colonial of-
ficials to shift their priorities away from earlier, interregional imperial con-
cerns to focus on local political and economic conditions in different colo-
nies as each struggled to become economically self-sufficient. In Kenya, the
governor introduced a dual policy to promote the ostensibly separate-but-
equal development of the crown’s African and non-African colonial subjects.
The powerful lobbying of European settlers ensured that this separation was
never complete. Dual policy in reality translated into several attempts, not
all successful, at increasing African agricultural productivity while at the
same time guaranteeing the constant supply of cheap labor to European
farms and infrastructural projects in Nairobi and Mombasa by increasing
taxes and decreasing wages.1 African politics was thus shaped by the socio-
economic realities of an increasingly interventionist state that was seen as
the mouthpiece of white settlers, as well as by changing internal social and
economic norms. Meanwhile, within the Indian subcontinent, the depres-
sion brought economic and political convulsions that found expression in
competing nationalist movements as mass civil disobedience collided with
religious and class interests, making the anticolonial space in India a deeply
contested one. Simultaneously, there was a surge in Indian immigration into
Kenya.
Between 1931 and 1948, the Indian population in the colony grew from
41,423 to approximately 100,000.2 This increase reflected the permanent
settlement of an earlier generation of migrants and a new wave of settlers,

118
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 119

many of whom had witnessed the mass mobilization of their compatriots

against the colonial state in India. These demographic changes were reflected
in the communitarian identities, geographical spread, and occupational di-
versity of Indians in Kenya. The majority lived in the Central Province, with
approximately 42 percent concentrated in Nairobi alone, while Mombasa
was home to 29 percent of the colony’s Indian population. Muslims from
Gujarat and Punjab, who had been in a numerical majority in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, became a 30 percent minority by the 1940s.
Hindus and Sikhs from Bombay, Kathiawar, and Punjab accounted for the
bulk of new migrants, emerging as the petty bourgeoisie in the colony as
shopkeepers and artisans. The number of Indians engaged in commerce in-
cluding retail and wholesale trade increased from 25 to 34 percent, while a
third of Indians were skilled and semiskilled workers employed in private
firms and government departments as metal and construction workers, car-
penters, textile workers, railway engineers, superintendents, policemen,
drivers, office clerks, and shop assistants.3 The changing religious and oc-
cupational composition of the Indian diaspora in Kenya with differing and
often competing economic and political concerns was reflected in a number
of new political and social associations whose leadership was contested.
In 1947, Britain lost its jewel in the crown as India gained independence.
The 1940s also saw the institutionalization of Indian and African politics in
Kenya as activists organized protests to make territorial and generational
claims there through associations and trade unions. Historians of the In-
dian Ocean have argued that the mobility of people and ideas was restricted
with the rise of anticolonial nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, resulting
in a more inward-looking diasporic consciousness among South Asians whose
Indian moorings were severed during this time.4 In East Africa, however,
both the older generation and the new wave of Indian migrants considered
Kenya their territorial homeland, but their politics reflected a racial con-
sciousness that was shaped by events taking place in their civilizational home-
land, India, and by being “Indian” in Kenya.
Indian independence served as an exemplar to Indian and African po-
litical leaders among whom the anticolonial discourse of Indian nationalism
resonated and found expression in very specific, local, material, and political
aspirations in the colony. The 1923 Devonshire Declaration consolidated
in Kenya three important aspects of the racial structure of the colonial
administration that Indians, Europeans, and Africans mediated over the
next four decades. First, the highlands were reserved for Europeans who
120 Indians in Kenya

held steadfast to this exclusive privilege. Second, with communal rolls

and seats within the Legislative Council, Kenya’s colonial citizens were sep-
arated into racially-defined political communities in the eyes of the state.
Third, African “interests” were declared paramount over Europeans and
Indians as far as the government was concerned. Through the 1930s
and 1940s Europeans, Indians, and Africans competed with one another
and among themselves over what these “interests” were and who best repre-
sented them. Indian and African political discourse reflected structural and
discursive racial differences in their negotiations with the administration,
which created the possibilities of interracial collaboration but also limited
them. Since Indians earned their livelihoods in trade, skilled, and semi-
skilled work, they sought access to the highlands on the principle of racial
equality rather than practical compulsion. For the Kikuyu, whose subsis-
tence depended on agricultural productivity, land scarcity in the reserves
triggered their demand for the deracialization of the highlands, which they
claimed as their right as first belongers in the country. A shared objection to
the highlands policy brought Indian and African political activists together,
but the lived reality of economic inequality and political discourses that as-
serted race-based territorial and civilizational claims limited the scope of
such collaborations. Indian diasporic politics revealed four interrelated
concerns, including an engagement with anticolonial nationalism in India,
trade unionism among Indian and African workers, interracial anticolonial
organization, and closer involvement in governance through the Legislative
Council. These political trajectories were often at odds with one another,
causing fissures within the Indian public sphere that reflected the different
political concerns, solidarities, and diasporic musings of a community nego-
tiating its understanding of and changing relationship with two political
homelands—India and Kenya.

CO LO N I A L S U B J EC T S I N TH E I N D I A N OC E A N

By the late 1920s, the East African Indian National Congress had emerged
as the main voice for Indian politics at a colonywide level. Indian Associa-
tions in towns across Kenya worked in close cooperation with it. Open ses-
sions of the Congress were held annually at which officers were elected,
presidential addresses were delivered, and resolutions were passed. It
made representations to the All-Indian National Congress in India, the
governor in Kenya, and His Majesty’s government in Britain. In protest
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 121

against the continuing reservation of the highlands and the communal roll,
the Congress’s office-bearers boycotted the Legislative Council and re-
fused to accept the governor’s nominations. Although in 1926 V. V. Phadke,
a barrister, and J. B. Pandya, later president of the Federation of Indian
Chambers of Commerce and Industry, were persuaded to join the council,
within a year the Congress succeeded in rescinding their decision to coop-
erate. Under the leadership of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, Manilal Desai, and
Shams-ud-Deen, the Congress passed a vote of no confidence in the gov-
ernor, and in March 1928 no Indian came forward to contest in the Legis-
lative Council elections. 5 However, the Congress’s political boycott did not
result in any change in the government’s highlands policy, and in 1933 it
resumed its participation in governance, putting up candidates for election.
While Muslim merchants had initiated the move to organize Indian po-
litical activity through the Congress, its membership and leadership in the
late 1920s reflected the changing demographics of Indians in Kenya, among
whom there now were Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh professionals, especially
journalists and lawyers.
This new generation was influenced by the rhetorical politics and success
of Desai’s alliance with Thuku, as well as by the growing postwar nation-
alist discourse in India, which they had personally witnessed. Significantly,
this anticolonial critique transcended territorial boundaries as new arrivals
from India became involved in local politics in Kenya. As they traversed the
Indian Ocean, much like Jeevanjee had, new members of the Congress high-
lighted the unity of this realm. However, unlike the subimperialist ambi-
tions embedded in early evocations of this unity, Indian politicians under-
scored the precolonial connections of Kenya and India in their criticism of
colonial policy to make their claim to political and economic equality in the
colony. In a pamphlet published in the 1930s, U. K. Oza, a Gujarati college
principal who moved to Kenya from Bombay in 1926 with his wife and chil-
dren, wrote of their voyage, “We had very hazy notions of Africa and we
were all very ner vous as we steamed into the unknown. Imagine my sur-
prise therefore when on entering the Kilindini harbor [in East Africa] . . . a
familiar sight met my view. The green tall waving palms, the splendid mango
trees, the bright shining sun and the clear blue sky of the . . . South Western
Coast of the historic peninsula of Kathiawar [in Gujarat, India] were all
reproduced there as in a dream. . . . I could not resist contemplating that
the East Coast of Africa was as much Indian as the coast of Kathiawar.” 6
The buildings in the old town of Mombasa, especially the houses with their
122 Indians in Kenya

massive carved doorways and heavily ornamented facades, emphasized a

“feeling of familiarity,” as they reminded Oza of the old ports of Gujarat,
including Junagad, his birthplace. He reinforced these geographical and
architectural connections with a narrative that revealed the mythical and
historical movement of Indians along the East African coast since “the
very beginning of things.” He underplayed the influence of imperial net-
works for Indians in Kenya, which had been central to the arguments of
subimperialist merchants, instead emphasizing civilizational, material,
and cultural exchanges between the inhabitants of the two coasts. In the
“very remote past . . . several thousand years [before] Christ,” Oza claimed,
Arjuna, the hero of the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata, had visited
East Africa and married a “native Queen” there. Connecting Gujarat with
East Africa, he stated that in the same millennia the Hindu god Krishna’s
capital, Dwarka, was situated “so as to face Moghadisho . . . in a straight
line drawn as the crow flies.” The ancient puranas (Hindu texts), he wrote,
“trace the course of the Nile to a great Lake, mention Zanzibar, Lake
Tanganyika . . . and following the native nomenclature, Unyamwezi, de-
scribe the Country of the Moon.” He went on to characterize the Indian
Ocean “as a highway of commerce,” pointing to Hindu merchants who had
been moving across this space since the sixth century, bringing rice, wheat,
linen, and silk to East Africa and taking African produce, including wicker
and basket work, coconuts, and ivory, back to India.
In so doing, Oza deliberately established Indian connections with East
Africa that predated colonial rule to make two related arguments in the con-
temporary moment. First, he undermined European colonial claims to
having initiated an “age of discovery,” emphasizing Indians’ historical and
geographical knowledge of the littoral realms of the Indian Ocean. Indeed,
he pointed out, it was a “Cambay pilot,” Kana Mallum, who brought Vasco
da Gama from Malindi to India in the late fifteenth century when the latter
mistook him for a Christian. Second, underplaying the importance of British
colonial rule in Kenya, Oza highlighted India’s civilizational achievements,
noting their technical ability to traverse this realm and the “civilising in-
fluence of Ancient India on the Eastern Coast of Africa.” In the early
twentieth century this influence took a material form: Oza emphasized the
modernizing influence of Indian traders on Africans, who became con-
sumers of “modern” amenities such as soaps, razors, bicycles, and hurricane
lamps that were sold in Indian shops, and who were trained by Indian em-
ployers in practical skills such as carpentry, bricklaying, and cart and motor
driving. Furthermore, Oza claimed that Kiswahili’s words that were used
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 123

to express “need,” “debt,” and the “acts of clothing and building” had San-
skrit roots.7 Such statements, which emphasized Indian skills and moder-
nity, alluded to African “ignorance” of the same, revealing the continuing
early twentieth-century race consciousness among Indians that marked
them as civilizationally different and superior to Africans. In 1930, Oza
used this civilizational argument to criticize the colonial project itself.
Casting Indians in an influencing role leading Africans in their progress
to modernity, Oza juxtaposed the corrupting impact of European settlers to
Indian morality. Pointing to their indulgence in alcoholic drinks and ciga-
rettes, the “loosening of matrimonial ties,” and the “scandalous attitude of
the European [man] toward African women,” Oza stated that Europeans
brought with them a “wave of immorality” that taught Africans “Bwana
makubwaism”— a per formance of modernity, empty of moral values, that
involved smoking cheap cigarettes, wearing secondhand loosely fitting gar-
ments, drinking cheap liquor, and speaking pidgin English—rather than self-
reliance and independence. Oza went on to argue that Indians, who were
“thrifty,” “God fearing,” and “industrious,” presented an example to Afri-
cans, who could emulate the Indians’ trading skills and “lift themselves out
of serfdom,” which they were tied to on European farms. As he put it, “No
Indian has been known to teach a native to drink, to be insolent, or to de-
spise his tribesmen.” Significantly, his critique of the specific kind of Western
civilization European settlers in Kenya brought with them led Oza to con-
clude that, unlike the farmers, the Indian “welcomes the native as a social
equal.” 8
In January 1924 Bengali poet and Gandhian nationalist Sarojini Naidu
visited Kenya, espousing a similar territorial claim that positioned Indians
as agents of modernity and “guardians” of African interests. “When I came
into Mombasa bay,” she announced in her address to the Congress, “my
thoughts went back to our mother country from whence boat after boat of
brave adventurers came to your shores bringing precious gifts—gifts that
bear the hallmark of civilization, bringing with them wheat and rice that
feed the body.” She emphatically stated that Kenya was “Indian soil,” to which
Indians had a right born “of patriotic love which has been nurtured, fos-
tered and developed by the sweat of the brow and the blood of the heart.”
This history, she argued, connected “one race with another,” “one country
with another.” While this historical connection and developmental claim had
been used by subimperialists to underscore their racial superiority to Afri-
cans to secure their status as colonists, Naidu and Oza rendered it into a
portrayal of the Indian as one who “helped, solaced and succored” the
124 Indians in Kenya

“black man who to-morrow will be the citizens of the world.” 9 For Oza, a
common aspiration of African and Indian colonial subjects to indepen-
dence served as a bridge between their racial and civilizational differences.
This emphasized the resonance of India’s nationalist movements across the
Indian Ocean, as Oza identified himself as standing for “complete indepen-
dence” in both India and Kenya.10
Much like the first generation of Congress leaders, who emphasized their
loyalty to the British Empire in asserting their rights as imperial citizens,
Oza too had been an “admirer” of the colonial project. As he put it, the
turning point came at the end of the First World War, which brought “dark
disillusionment” for Indian nationalists who had hoped that their wartime
loyalty would be rewarded with self-government. Instead, at a time when
India had “pulsated with hope,” the “gruesome massacre” at Jallianwallah
Bagh took place. Then Mohandas K. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, in
which Oza had participated, was crushed by the colonial state. The “fraud-
ulent” promises of the colonial state and its violent excesses led Oza to re-
consider his prewar assumptions about the benefits of imperial rule.11 A
similar transition was occurring within Indian associations in Kenya. Isher
Dass was a Punjabi Hindu whom Jeevanjee met in London in 1927 and
hired to sell radios in Kenya. Although the venture was unsuccessful, Je-
evanjee made Dass, who had been politically active in London, the secre-
tary of the Indian Association of Nairobi. In December 1927, at a public
meeting in Nairobi, Dass proclaimed, “The war [in which Indian troops
fought] was a European one and had nothing to do with Indians. What did
Indians get in return? The massacre of Jallianwallah Bagh.”12 As the Con-
gress began to shake off the subimperialist trappings of its founders, men
such as Oza—who was elected its honorary general secretary in the early
1930s—and Dass became politically active, changing the Congress’s orien-
tation and replacing the leadership of big merchants.
Political events in India served as the catalyst for the rise of anticolonial
consciousness among Indians in Kenya, but their diasporic experience was
also central to this transition. For Oza, the “last cords of attachment [to em-
pire] were snapped” when he arrived in Kenya. He recounted his attempt
at walking through Mombasa and being told that some “celestially charming”
avenues were maintained exclusively for Europeans. “All the pleasure of
being in familiar surroundings [imagining Kenya as Indian] naturally van-
ished,” he wrote. Significantly, this was presented by Oza in a Gandhian
rendering. By 1930, Gandhi was using the recurring trope of racial dis-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 125

crimination in the railways that he had experienced in South Africa in his

anticolonial political discourse. Two years before Oza set sail for Kenya, in
his Gujarati memoir about his time in South Africa that was published be-
tween 1924 and 1925, Gandhi claimed that his satyagraha began in 1893
on the night he was thrown out of the first-class compartment reserved for
Europeans at Pietermaritzburg. Much like Gandhi, Oza presented his
transformation from being a loyal imperial citizen to an anticolonial nation-
alist as resulting from his encounter with European settlers in Africa. As he
put it, “Upto the present moment I had not realized that the disabilities
of Indians in Kenya could be so galling.”13
Negotiations over the highlands and common roll had exposed the hier-
archical racial underpinnings of colonial rule in Kenya and the limited reach
of subimperialist claims among many diasporic Indians who had in fact been
implicated in the colonial project in East Africa. Oza blamed the “virus of
whitedom” for the intensity of racial hatred in Kenya, which he believed had
no precedent in other parts of the empire. After the war, he noted, British
politicians had become “raving, brutal, diabolic maniacs” as they condoned
“abuse, terrorization, insults, assaults, misrepresentations and threats of
wholesale massacre and assassinations” to ensure “white domination in East
Africa.”14 Criticizing the idea of “trusteeship” itself, which he characterized
as an “ungodly race between immigrants” to share the spoils, Oza thus came
to include within his anticolonial, “independentist” politics the “birthright”
of Africans, which he thought neither Indians nor Europeans had hitherto
considered. Indeed, Oza did not spare the subimperialist leadership of the
Congress, whose attitude he likened to that of “weak exploiters” for having
failed to include African grievances in their agitations. Taking seriously the
1923 Devonshire Declaration, he wrote that immigrant communities, in-
cluding Indians, should “subordinate themselves to the view” that develop-
ment in East Africa would be in the interest of Africans. Despite his racial-
ized discourse emphasizing Indian civilizational achievements, Oza thus
concluded that Indians should consider Africans as political equals.
It was Oza, Dass, and Tyeb Ali, a Muslim lawyer from Zanzibar, who suc-
ceeded in pushing the Congress to continue its decade-long boycott of the
Legislative Council and began to take up political and economic issues be-
yond the racially exclusive concerns of Indian legislative representation and
commercial enterprise.15 Five years after Harry Thuku’s arrest, Ali an-
nounced in his presidential address to the Congress in 1927 that the orga-
nization would address specific African grievances, which had little impact
126 Indians in Kenya

on the everyday lives of Indians, on the grounds that the interests of Afri-
cans and Indians were “indissolubly bound together.” He condemned “the
shady methods” used by Europeans to extract African labor and criticized
the imperial government for turning a blind eye to the prevalence of “forced
labour” in the colony. A year later, Dass accused the governor of helping
settlers “in every way” to exploit the country at the cost of Africans, who
paid more taxes than any other community in Kenya.16
At its public annual meetings and through its Legislative Council repre-
sentatives the Congress began to routinely demand the abolition of the ban
on Africans from growing cash crops such as tea and coffee, restrictions on
the possession of livestock, the kipande law that required all Africans leaving
the reserves to carry identification papers, ordinances that made the breach
of labor contracts a criminal offense, and the heavy poll and hut tax levied
on Africans that drove them “out of their land.” It also criticized the gov-
ernment for pressuring tribal chiefs to send labor to European farms and
voiced concern over land hunger caused by overcrowding in the reserves.17
Significantly, none of these specific grievances and restrictions limited In-
dian political or economic aspirations, since very few Indians were engaged
in agricultural pursuits as cultivators or laborers. However, these policies
reflected the racial principle of colonial governance that the Congress op-
posed, thus enabling it to expand its political scope beyond the particular,
racially confined concerns of Indians. Furthermore, acutely aware of Indians’
diasporic status, the Congress rejected a 1925 administrative proposal to
create a million-acre agricultural reserve for Indians in Voi and a 100,000-
acre reserve near the Tana River, arguing that reserving land in Kenya for
any immigrant community was immoral since Africans were “the rightful
owners of the soil.” Decisively shaking off the colonizing ambitions of its
founders, the Congress supported C. F. Andrews’s view that to accept such
race-based reservation would mark “the beginning of an imperialism” that
was contrary to its leaders’ fight for nonracial, equal citizenship.18

N YO N G E Z A YA 2 5 % H A L I B O R A YA K A Z I !
( I N C R E A S E W O R K E R S ’ PAY B Y 2 5 % )

While the leadership of the Congress articulated an ideological and discur-

sive change from asserting their claims as subimperialists to posturing as
critics of colonialism, it did not reflect other kinds of demographic shifts
that were taking place among Indians in Kenya. In the late 1920s, about
4,800 Punjabi Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs lived in Kenya, the majority of
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 127

whom were mechanics, masons, engineers, construction workers, metal-

workers, carpenters, shop assistants, and office clerks.19 They were employed
by the colonial government (especially in the railways), European and In-
dian firms, and Indian shopkeepers. Indian workers earned between 30
and 200 shillings a month and worked up to fourteen hours a day. Some
were brought to Kenya by private employers on contract, while others were
employed in government as permanent staff; indentured laborers who re-
mained in the colony after the completion of the railways constituted a third
group.20 Neither of the two main colonywide organizations—the Congress
with its elite political concerns regarding Legislative Council representa-
tion, access to the highlands, and African labor grievances, or FICCI with
its single aim of protecting Indian traders—included within their scope of
activities the interests of these working-class Indians. The economic depres-
sion of the 1930s brought with it rising unemployment, falling wages, and
long working hours as employers scaled back the benefits they had hitherto
provided their employees. In 1933, in an effort to limit expenditure, the
railway authorities downgraded the position of Indian artisans from “per-
manent” to “temporary.” This took away several employee privileges including
long leave with full pay, pension, free medical care, free passage back to
India, and a month’s notice if employment was to be terminated. The main-
tenance department started paying daily wages dropping the rate from 9
shillings to 4 shillings. In response, in December 1934, railways and other
employees organized a meeting of 500 workers in Nairobi to lay the foun-
dation of an organization of Indian artisans and workers to protest against
these measures. They were unsuccessful, as the railway authority did not
rescind the majority of its policy changes.21
In March 1935, thirty-nine Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh workers met in
Nairobi and launched the East African Trade Union. A Punjabi Sikh,
Makhan Singh, became its elected honorary secretary. Over the next fif-
teen years, Singh succeeded in consolidating various efforts among Indian
and African workers into an organized trade union movement. In April
1950, he demanded immediate independence at a public meeting; he was
arrested a few weeks later. Singh served the longest detention— eleven and
a half years—of any political activist during that time.22
Makhan Singh was born in Punjab and moved to Kenya in 1927 at the
age of fourteen to join his father, who had taken a job in the railways in 1920.
In the aftermath of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919,
Punjab itself had come to hold special significance for Indians. Punjab’s
“wrongs,” as Gandhi put it, were memorialized in the anticolonial narrative
128 Indians in Kenya

not only in India but also in Kenya at the time Singh’s family settled in the
colony.
In June 1931, Makhan Singh graduated from a government Indian school
in Nairobi and started working at his father’s printing press. By 1935, he
had undertaken a detailed study of the condition of Indian workers in the
colony and concluded that they were “being exploited by both the Euro-
pean and Indian capitalists.” In particular, he criticized the insecurity of
their terms of employment, long working hours that left employees “men-
tally and physically weakened,” the loss of wages and benefits resulting from
retrenchment in the railways, and insufficient wages that did not cover the
costs of educating workers or their children, especially for those who had
to pay for their own food and housing. Singh used his position in the East
African Trade Union to organize and make official the purpose and aims of
the union. Membership was opened to all workers, including the unemployed,
irrespective of “caste and creed or colour” at the rate of 50 cents per month.
Workers were expected to “come into class consciousness.” Singh set up a
permanent office in Nairobi, a constitution for the union, and a managing
committee. The union campaigned for a minimum wage of 200 shillings a
month, an eight-hour workday, the abolition of overtime, hourly and daily
wages, weekly payment, labor cards that included information on the wages
promised, accident insurance, fully paid regular and sick leave, and a min-
imum age of employment to be set at fifteen years. It also demanded that
workers be employed through trade unions and workers’ committees rather
than agents and that Singh’s union be given the right to supervise and in-
vestigate the condition of workers in factories and workshops.23
Under Singh’s guidance, workers’ protests were organized by printing
handbills at his father’s printing press in Punjabi and Gujarati. These con-
tained details of meetings and resolutions announcing strikes and their terms
of settlement. Membership of the union increased from 480 in 1935 to 2,500
by 1937. Among the first successful campaigns launched by the union was
the demand for an eight-hour workday in factories and shops, and for con-
tractors. The intensity and mobilization of this campaign, which began in
October 1936, resulted in the acquiescence of approximately forty employers
in Nairobi to workers’ demands. In March 1937, Indian employers, including
managers and owners, formed an organization called the Indian Contrac-
tors and Builders Association. They decreased wages and increased the
working day to nine hours. More than 95 percent of construction work was
in Indian hands, and about 1,000 Indian artisans worked as bricklayers in
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 129

construction. The union led the bricklayers on strike in Nairobi. Construc-

tion came to a halt, and within a week the Contractors and Builders Asso-
ciation agreed to their demands. A month later workers in several Indian
firms, including contractors, furniture makers, and box body makers, forced
their employers to recognize the union, increase their pay by 15 percent and
limit their working hours. On the heels of this success, Indians employed
by a European motor ser vices company went on a six-week strike and ne-
gotiated a 15–22 percent increase in their wages.24
With these major victories in Nairobi, the union held its first annual open
session in July 1937 in the capital, where Singh demanded a trade union
bill that would provide for the compulsory registration of trade unions in
Kenya, thus guaranteeing legal protection for registered unions, especially
when their members went on strike. Within a month, the Trade Union Or-
dinance already being considered was passed in the Legislative Council,
making it legal for workers to unionize and make their demands collec-
tively. Over the next few years, through a series of strikes Singh succeeded
in ensuring wage increases for Indian workers and an eight-hour workday
from a number of private employers. In December 1938, Sikh and Hindu
artisans employed by a Sikh contractor organized the first successful five-
day strike in Mombasa, securing a 25 percent wage increase, an eight-
hour working day, and accident compensation.25 The provincial commis-
sioner of Mombasa had entered the negotiations on the side of the
employer who was also supported by FICCI and a member of the Con-
gress who was an elected Legislative Council representative from there.
Highlighting the class-based divisions within his own community, Singh
pointed out the hypocrisy of the government in delegitimizing workers’
spokesmen and organizers by labeling them “agitators” while recognizing
representatives of employers’ organizations, such as FICCI and Congress
members of the Legislative Council, as community “leaders.” Singh’s poli-
tics attracted the attention of the new generation of leaders within the Con-
gress. In May 1937, as its honorary general secretary, Oza called a meeting
of 1,500 Indians in Nairobi to express solidarity with African and Indian
workers, and in 1938, Singh attended the annual meeting of the Congress
as a special delegate along with another member of his union, Mota Singh.
Together they successfully included in the Congress’s resolution several
workers’ demands, including an eight-hour workday, paid leave, workmen’s
compensation, and a minimum wage. They asked the government to remove
restrictions in the Trade Union Ordinance of 1937 that prevented workers
130 Indians in Kenya

from appealing to the courts if their unions were not allowed to register,
and demanded the replacement of daily wages with monthly wages in the
railways and Public Works Department, and increased wages, free housing,
and paid leave for artisans working in the railways and harbors in Kenya
and Uganda.26
Having succeeded in making the Congress take up the grievances of the
Indian working class, and subsequently serving on its executive committee,
Singh turned his attention to further expanding the scope of the East Af-
rican Trade Union by including African workers in its membership. Influ-
enced by the international labor movement of the interwar period, Singh
firmly believed that the ultimate success of the workers’ movement in Kenya
depended on an interracial trade union that would “harness and mobilize
the energies and fighting spirit of the African and Indian workers.” From
1937 onward, handbills with details of meetings were printed in Kiswahili
and Gikuyu in the hope of attracting African workers in Nairobi and Mom-
basa. In April 1938, Singh sent personal invitations to several political orga-
nizations, including the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), formed in 1924 in
Murang’a (Fort Hall), and the Kikuyu Land Board Association, to a confer-
ence to discuss workmen’s compensation. No representatives of those associa-
tions showed up at the union’s meetings, nor did individual workers.27
There were several reasons for the lack of African participation at this
stage. First, the majority of workers hailed from Punjab. Skilled and semi-
skilled Punjabis constituted much of the working-class population in Nairobi
and Mombasa and had been the first to organize themselves in a coordi-
nated protest against their working conditions, as described in Chapter 1.
Union membership was thus predominantly Punjabi, giving a communi-
tarian color to the trade union movement and making it appear to be
racially exclusive by design. At union meetings speeches were made in
Punjabi by Singh and other leaders of the organization, underscoring the
resilience of language and communal ties among these immigrants who
lived, worked, and protested together. Furthermore, while many Punjabi
artisans were employed by the government, especially the railway authority,
masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, plumbers, shop assistants, and construc-
tion workers were also employed by Indian firms. It was these private em-
ployers to whom Singh’s campaign for higher wages and an eight-hour
working day was directed, and they were the ones who initially acquiesced.
Although unintentional, the communitarian diasporic affiliation emerging
from the structures of employment and the linguistic and political tradi-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 131

tions of Punjab was a key to the success of the union, reinforcing its racial
exclusivity.
Second, African politics also appeared to be racially bound. In the early
1930s, the Kikuyu were the most visible group to organize themselves po-
litically in the Central Province. They formed the KCA to protest against
two issues—perceived attacks on Kikuyu culture and the alleged alienation
of their lands to Europeans. In particular, a missionary-led campaign to in-
troduce legislation to ban female circumcision among the Kikuyu became
the catalyst for the KCA to gather support in the rural reserves, resulting
in a political discourse around the preservation of Kikuyu customs and rights.
As John Lonsdale demonstrates, the “tribe [became] the imagined commu-
nity against which the morality of new inequality” was negotiated by both
tribal chiefs appointed by the government and those who challenged their
authority by criticizing their attempts at implementing colonial policies that
changed existing, “tribal” social practices and land ownership.28
Johnstone Kamau, later Jomo Kenyatta, was a mission-educated Kikuyu
who migrated to Nairobi at the end of the First World War. Kenyatta joined
the KCA and became its general secretary in 1928. He took a lead in criti-
cizing attempts to ban clitoridectomy in 1929, demonstrating its importance
in the social organization of the Kikuyu. At the same time, the KCA high-
lighted the social and economic significance of land ownership for the Ki-
kuyu, as men were required to own land to qualify for marriage. The same
year, he went to London, where he remained for more than a decade, to
represent the KCA’s grievances regarding labor, land, taxation, and political
representation for Africans on the Legislative Council. Between 1902
and 1906 about 6 percent of Kikuyuland, much of it pastoral, had been alien-
ated to European settlers. Representing Kikuyu aspirations to possess land
because of its social importance, in the 1930s the KCA was beginning to
demand the return of alienated land in Kenya. By 1932 close to 200 claims
had been made to the Kenya Land Commission demanding land that was
occupied and fiercely protected by the Europeans.29
In 1938 the Native Lands Trust and Crown Lands (Amendment) Ordi-
nance decisively reserved the highlands for Europeans only. Several re-
cently formed African political associations, including the North Kavi-
rondo Central Association, Taita Hills Association, and Ukamba Members
Association, wrote a joint memorandum to the secretary of state for colo-
nies and governor in protest. The memorandum stated, “Africans can never
be content with what is allotted to them under the Ordinance while the
132 Indians in Kenya

best land in Kenya is given away to White Settlers. They can never agree
to the reservation of the so-called ‘Highlands’ for Europeans . . . [this]
provides with yet another example of the doubtful value of British pledges
which are not worth the paper they are written upon. . . . All the land was
the property of the Africans and if any part of it has been lost it is because
the same has been taken away without the consent of the owners.”30 The
Congress had been the first group in Kenya to demand the deracializing of
the highlands, in 1910. Significantly, Isher Dass had accompanied Kenyatta
to Britain in 1929. 31 But, much like Singh’s trade union, the KCA’s politics
with its focus on land was also a racially exclusive, increasingly ethnically
bound movement. Therefore Singh’s invitations to Kikuyu organizations to
discuss the wage and housing grievances of urban workers at trade union
meetings in Nairobi did not resonate among KCA leaders.
While the land question occupied the political imaginary of the Kikuyu
living in rural reserves, especially as the language of rights was conflated
with an emerging discourse on customary mores and obligations, a growing
number of Kikuyu, Kamba, and Luo migrants arrived in Nairobi and
Mombasa in search of employment and found jobs as wage laborers on a
variety of government projects. Like the Indian workers, African laborers
were also subject to postwar wage decreases, inadequate housing, and
higher costs of living, and they protested against this. In 1934, for example,
dockworkers and fishermen in Mombasa went on strike demanding higher
wages.32
Both Indian and African workers demanded better working conditions,
but their inequality was unequal. With their expertise in carpentry, me-
chanics, engine driving, and construction, Indian artisans were employed
in skilled work that paid higher wages, while the majority of Africans were
classified by employers, including the government, as unskilled workers and
earned very low wages. The government hired some Indians but no Afri-
cans in managerial and superintendent positions, and other Indians found
employment as bank clerks and managing directors, becoming proprietors
of firms and businesses. Even when Africans and Indians were employed
in the same kind of semiskilled labor as shop assistants or bricklayers, In-
dians received higher wages than Africans. For example, Indian bricklayers
and masons earned approximately 400 shillings a month, while African brick-
layers took home 53 shillings for the same work. In 1939, Makhan Singh
calculated that Africans earned between 6 and 60 shillings a month, aver-
aging 13 shillings, while Indian wages ranged from 60 to 600 shillings,
earning on average 80 shillings. The inequities of the private sector were
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 133

staggering, and they were mirrored in public ser vices: Indians employed in
government and the railways and harbor departments earned 400 to 430
shillings a month on average, compared with African employees of the same
who took home 56 to 76 shillings. Such racialized employment and wage
structures created gross inequality in the shared spaces inhabited by Indians
and Africans. Although African workers had been watching the Indian
strikers with interest, especially their techniques of protest, this was a third
reason why they stayed away from Singh’s union. They did not attend In-
dian workers’ union meetings in Mombasa or Nairobi, as their material
grievances were worlds apart.33
On May 1, 1939, however, Makhan Singh’s overtures to the KCA finally
met with some success. The union celebrated May Day by holding a meeting
in Nairobi. Singh invited KCA members Jesse Kariuki, Joseph Kangethe,
and George K. Ndegwa to participate and make speeches, and they
accepted.34 Two months later, at the third annual conference of the union,
which now boasted a membership of approximately 3,000, hundreds of
Africans were in attendance. Kariuki was elected the vice president of the
union, along with Taj Din, and Ndegwa, secretary of the KCA, was made a
member of the central committee. Almost simultaneously, more than 6,000
African workers went on strike in Mombasa in August 1939, demanding
higher wages, free housing, and paid leave. The strike started among
employees of the Public Works Department and spread to several other
government departments, including post, telegraph, and power, as well as
private companies. On August 1, 1939, port work was held up, and workers at
the Coast Wharf also went on strike. In response, the government arrested
150 Africans.35
Although the colonial state succeeded in ending the strike, it took the
workers’ grievances seriously. The Labour Department appealed to the gov-
ernor’s office for the appointment of a labor officer who would oversee the
registration of casual labor, introduce an eight-hour workday, ask employers
to provide good housing, and send unemployed Africans back to their re-
serves. However, officials were careful to assign the responsibility of orga-
nizing the Mombasa strike to “agitators,” whom they identified as unemployed
Kikuyu, Makhan Singh, and Isher Dass, despite the racially exclusive
spheres of Indian and African trade union activity. Paradoxically, even as
the inquiry suggested concrete ways in which workers’ terms of employment
could be improved, administrators concluded that Singh’s union and the
KCA had organized the strike, and they announced that the Mombasa
workers “had not the slightest desire to strike.”36 This refusal to acknowledge
134 Indians in Kenya

the legitimacy of African protest and their public consequences in the form
of spontaneous and organized strikes by blaming the Nairobi Indians for
being the brains behind these agitations was a repetition of the govern-
ment’s attitude to Thuku’s movement in 1922.
On August 5, Singh organized a mass meeting in Nairobi at which speeches
expressing solidarity with the Mombasa strikers were made in English,
Kiswahili, and Hindustani.37 Though the union certainly supported the
workers, there was no evidence to suggest that it had either instigated them
or lent any tactical support. Even in his autobiography written in the 1960s
that aimed at inserting the trade union movement into the emerging post-
colonial nationalist narrative in Kenya, Makhan Singh was careful to note
that the influence of his union during this time was limited to demonstrating
the success of a unified workers’ movement and that the Mombasa strike
was a culmination of sporadic protests that had taken place throughout the
late 1930s.38 The 1939 strike, however, afforded Singh the opportunity to
publicly endorse the emergent African workers’ movement. In his evidence
to the Commission of Enquiry on labor conditions in Mombasa, Singh iden-
tified low wages, long working hours, and inadequate housing as the main
grievances of workers, singling out a number of employers, including Indians,
in construction, domestic work, and agriculture as the worst offenders for
insisting on nine-to-twelve-hour workdays. Singh made a formal presenta-
tion to the government to demand the introduction of a minimum wage,
clean housing for workers (the majority of whom had migrated from reserves
to Mombasa and Nairobi in search of work), rent boards to keep rents low,
and a scheme that provided 30 shillings a month to the unemployed until
they found work. In an attempt to steer the enquiry committee away from
focusing on the immediate cause of the strike and instead address workers’
concerns in Kenya more generally, Singh emphatically stated, “Stress should
not be laid upon the fact of who caused the strike but to the fact that griev-
ances were real and that they should be removed.” According to him, the
average worker who took home 13 shillings a month was not able to meet
his basic living expenses. Singh therefore appealed to the commission to in-
troduce a minimum wage of 50 shillings for Africans with two children; this
would cover 10 shillings for rent, 25 shillings for food, up to 12 shillings for
fuel, water, oil, clothing, and other daily provisions, 1 shilling for taxes, and
2 shillings for the education of their children.39
Since 1935, Singh had evoked a class consciousness based on workers’ soli-
darity, and he emphasized this principle in his evidence to the commission
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 135

and the public meetings he organized supporting the Mombasa strikers.

However, even as he reached out to African workers and political organiza-
tions with the aim of creating an interracial trade union, in his mediation
of the racial structures of labor and employment in the colony Singh revealed
a race consciousness that limited the scope of his political discourse. Indeed,
while Singh calculated 50 shillings as the minimum wage for Africans, he
had hitherto demanded 200 shillings for Indian workers. Although he based
his calculations on the cost of living, especially housing, which was higher
for Indians at 15–30 shillings, the difference in minimum wage underscored
the reach of racial structures and divisions that shaped Singh’s policy pro-
posals. Moreover, in his evidence Singh admitted to having employed a “boy,”
an African domestic servant, whom he paid 15 shillings month. Singh ar-
gued that the actual earnings were closer to 27 shillings, as he provided his
employee and his wife with food and housing, although even with this the
wage did not meet the minimum wage that he was advocating in Mombasa.
As an employer of African domestic help, Singh reflected the predominant
structural inequality in employment, which was drawn along racial lines.
Indian households employed both Indian and African servants, whereas no
Indians were employed in African homes.40
In her biography of Singh, Zarina Patel has argued that the KCA hesi-
tated to join Makhan Singh’s union because its leaders were suspicious of
the motives of Indian workers, who were materially much better off than
their African counterparts.41 Singh’s perseverance in inviting them to
union meetings and his support of the Mombasa strikers allayed some of
this suspicion. On August 19, 1939, Singh wrote to his “comrade” Kenyatta,
who was living in London, asking him to represent his now 3,000-member-
strong union at an international conference that was organized by the
World Committee against War and Fascism and would be held in October
1939 in Brussels. Kenyatta readily accepted, praising Singh for working “in
co-operation with the Kikuyu Central Association with Comrade George
K. Ndegwa.” With their leaders agreeing to collaborate, the Trade Union of
East Africa was poised to successfully create an interracial workers’ move-
ment. However, when the Second World War broke out, wartime censor-
ship closed off this opportunity. In late 1939, Singh traveled to India,
where he participated in a textile workers’ strike in Ahmadabad and a labor
movement meeting of the Kirti Lehar, a left-wing, anti-British Punjabi
peasants organization at Meerut. As a delegate from East Africa, he also
attended a session of the All-Indian National Congress branch in Punjab
136 Indians in Kenya

following Gandhi’s decision to launch a campaign for individual satyagraha.

On May 1, 1940, he joined a May Day parade. The colonial government in
India responded to the wartime anticolonial protest by imprisoning radical
leaders. On May 8, 1940, Singh was arrested. He was detained without trial
for two years, restricted to his village in Punjab upon his release, and put
under surveillance for another two years. Simultaneously, within Kenya,
twenty-three African leaders were arrested, including Kariuki and Ndegwa.
The governor also banned the KCA for being “subversive,” claiming it had
connections with the Italian Council, Britain’s wartime enemy.42

TH E P RO M I S E O F I NTE R R AC I A L P O L ITI C S

Makhan Singh hoped that his trade union based on class solidarity would
transcend racial boundaries and bring together an interracial workers’ move-
ment. The potent possibilities of a combined African and Indian front were
not only watched anxiously by colonial officials in the Native Affairs depart-
ment but also studied by other activists in the Congress and the KCA who
were simultaneously attempting to do the same through different kinds of
sporadic collaborations in the public political realm. Colonial policy regarding
trade, wages, and housing shaped the everyday lives of Indian shopkeepers
and skilled workers, while land scarcity had an immediate and urgent im-
pact on the material and social life of Africans. The Congress had long ob-
jected to the highlands policy on principle, although the majority of Indians
were not agriculturalists. In 1938, when the Highlands Policy Ordinance
was introduced in the Legislative Council to decisively keep Africans out
of the highlands, as Indians had been for more than two decades, the Con-
gress organized a half-day hartal (strike). Demonstrators carried black flags
and posters bearing the slogans “Justice and Fairness Depart from the British
Empire” and “Britain’s Black Day, Reservations of Highlands for Europeans
Only— Shame! Shame!” A meeting of 5,000 people took place in Mombasa,
where the Congress sought “the reversal of this invidious agreement.” 43 In
the absence of African representatives within the Legislative Council, Isher
Dass became the spokesman for Africans. In August 1938, he presented the
joint memorandum of the KCA and Ukamba Members Association, men-
tioned previously, protesting against the Highlands Policy, heralding a united
political front of Indians and Africans on the issue. A month earlier, Dass
had been involved in a Kamba agitation in much the same way that Desai
had supported Thuku’s protest in the early 1920s. The government had forced
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 137

the Kamba to sell their cattle because officials believed that overstocking
in their reserves was causing soil erosion. In July, 3,000 Kamba men, women,
and children marched from Machakos to Nairobi to protest against this de-
stocking. Their leader, Samuel Muindi Mbingu, president of the Ukamba
Members Association, was arrested and deported to Kismayu and from there
to Lamu for eight years. Dass helped orga nize the sit-in in Machakos,
where they congregated, and Congress members supplied provisions to the
protesters when they reached Nairobi.44
Outside the Legislative Council, discontent over specific policies led ar-
tisans to criticize Indians who were part of the colonial establishment, even
those who were fighting for reform from within. In September 1939, the
governor introduced the Compulsory Ser vice Bill for Indians employed by
the government and canceled permissions that had been granted to them
to leave Kenya. In March 1942, the governor appointed Dass as director of
Asian manpower to oversee conscription. For his part, while Dass had been
very vocal in his criticism of colonial policies in India after the First World
War, pointing to the lack of rewards for the ser vice of Indian soldiers, he
explained his pledge to join Britain’s war effort as an assertion of Indian
claims to rights in Kenya. At a public meeting in Nairobi in April 1942, Dass
announced: “Those people who have adopted this country as their mother-
land and have lived here for years must serve the country and its interests.”
Punjabi artisans employed in the railways directly affected by wartime re-
strictions remained unconvinced. Balwant Rai Dhanna Ram, a Punjabi who
had migrated to Kenya in 1938 to work in the vehicle repairs department
of the railways and harbors and, subsequently, in a wartime prison camp
in Nairobi, assassinated Dass on November 6, 1942, along with Saran
Singh Chatter Singh, who had also arrived in Kenya in 1938 and was an
electrician.45
By the early 1940s, the agitations of the Congress and Indian workers
against the racial gradation of government policy regarding the highlands
and wages reflected an increasingly anticolonial consciousness. Political ac-
tivists began to question the very idea that they, as colonial subjects, would
be treated as equals within the empire. In so doing, an interracial, anti-
European discourse emerged within the Congress “against the offensive”
of imperialism, which opened up a rhetorical space for its leaders to engage
with anticolonial politics in Kenya—a realm they shared with Africans.46
While the KCA was banned in 1939, the colonial administration initiated
several reforms to make good on its promise of governing through a dual
138 Indians in Kenya

policy aimed at benefiting Africans materially and politically. It substantially

increased the income of local African authorities, relaxed the ban on Afri-
cans growing coffee (a source of profit through export), abolished the kip-
ande in 1947, and in 1944 nominated the first African representative, Eliud
Mathu, an Oxford-educated Kikuyu from Kiambu, to the Legislative Council.
In October that year the founding of the Kenya African Union (KAU)
marked the resurgence of organized political activity at the institutional
level among the Kikuyu, who demanded further constitutional reforms.
On his return from England in 1946, after an absence of more than a de-
cade, Kenyatta assumed the leadership of the KAU. He did so by deliber-
ately positioning himself as a “senior elder” among the Kikuyu, marrying
into an important lineage— Chief Koinange’s family—and developing a
political discourse that was willfully mediated through ethnic conscious-
ness. Kenyatta politicized the land issue through the KAU, as he had done
when he served as general secretary of the KCA, in order to preserve Kikuyu
customs, and he found support among the rural elite, mostly peasant farmers,
who benefited from this dual policy.47
Kenyatta’s emphasis on constitutional reform through memorandums and
KAU members within the Legislative Council was similar to the strategies
adopted by the Congress. As the Congress had been the first political orga-
nization to formally criticize the government’s land policy, especially in the
highlands, Kenyatta’s emphasis on land resonated with its members. In
1945 it invited KAU delegates to address its annual meeting for the very
first time and passed several resolutions concerning African grievances.
These included the removal of race-based restrictions on growing econom-
ically profitable cash crops; the abolition of discriminatory pricing of African-
and non-African-grown crops; the lifting of all wartime bans on African
political associations; full and direct representation of Africans on legisla-
tive and municipal councils; the inclusion of an African representative on
the Executive Council; common franchise for Indians and Africans; free and
compulsory elementary education for Africans; and free medical ser vices.
The Congress also demanded the abolition of the kipande system, “which
offended the dignity and self-respect of Africans” and interfered “extremely
harshly in the daily routine of their lives,” and asked the government to make
uncultivated land in the highlands available to Africans.48 Since the early
1920s, the Congress had routinely included within its resolutions statements
against the kipande and highlands reservation. The 1945 meeting, however,
included the largest number of resolutions concerning specific African griev-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 139

ances on a variety of political and economic issues. KAU president James

Gichuru, who attended the session, noted the historic importance of this
meeting, announcing that Indians and Africans had “many problems that
are in common,” particularly the “unwritten law of colour prejudice.” It was
this “colour question” that opened the way for the KAU and Congress to
engage with each other on the basis of their shared objection to racial dis-
crimination.49 However, the leaders of these organizations never succeeded
in becoming the sole spokesmen for Africans or Indians.
Although he had supported Singh’s labor movement before the war, Ke-
nyatta distanced himself from the militancy that erupted among urban
workers in the late 1940s. The rural elite had benefited from the govern-
ment’s dual policy, but the economic and social gap between landowners
and the landless increased.50 Both within Kikuyu reserves and outside,
the younger generation of landless men challenged the social norms set
by the landed elders, who on one hand refused to recognize them as adults
because they did not own land and, on the other hand, abandoned their ob-
ligations as patrons to loan land to them. These young men migrated to Nai-
robi in search of work, where the lived reality of low wages and inadequate
housing shaped their political concerns. By 1948, of the close to 76,000 Af-
rican workers in Nairobi, approximately a third were employed in govern-
ment departments and the railways, while the rest found jobs in private firms,
such as printing firms, shops, shoemakers, tailor shops, hotels, construction
companies, and transport businesses where they were hired as taxi and bus
drivers.51 The majority found employment as unskilled labor in the govern-
ment and as “houseboys” (servants) in houses and hotels, earning less than
30 shillings a month, and were without any other benefits, particularly
housing. In the late 1940s, young Kikuyu men based in Nairobi, including
Chege Kibachia, Fred Kubai, Meshak Ndisi, and Bildad Kaggia, who were
concurrently members of the KAU, organized unions for such workers. Ki-
bachia moved to Mombasa in 1946 and established the African Workers’
Federation there. In early 1947, the federation successfully organized a gen-
eral strike of more than 15,000 dockworkers, taxi drivers, and house ser-
vants. Immediately thereafter, Kibachia opened a Nairobi branch of his
federation. In the mid-1940s, Ndisi and Kubai brought together taxi drivers
in the capital who had been going on spontaneous strikes against the state’s
attempts to control their operations, forming the Allied and Transport
Workers’ Union, which had 5,000 members by 1947.52 It was these urban
workers who contested Kenyatta’s leadership within the KAU, challenging
140 Indians in Kenya

his authority as its leader. They were unmoved by the slow pace of the con-
stitutional reform that Kenyatta advocated; the urgency and immediacy of
strikes and workers’ grievances taken up by Kubai and Kaggia resonated
more deeply with them.
By the late 1940s, as representatives of urban workers, Kaggia and Kubai
posed a strong challenge to the customary authority of Kikuyu elders such
as Kenyatta within the KAU. They found support among the migrant
Kikuyu living as squatters in the highlands, a group whom the elders in the
Central Province and the Rift Valley failed to take seriously. As mentioned
in Chapter 1, at the turn of the century, several thousand Kikuyu households
had migrated from the Central Provinces to the Rift Valley, where they
cleared forested land that was occupied by the semi-nomadic Masai. By the
1920s, this area had been alienated to the Europeans as part of the white
highlands, but these migrant Kikuyu lived on European farms as squatters,
cultivating small plots for their own consumption in exchange for labor.
Having worked on these farms for nearly two generations, the squatters be-
lieved that they had ownership rights to the highlands. New labor contracts
issued after the war, when European farms were mechanized, decisively
stripped them of any ownership claims. Through the late 1940s, a rising
political discourse emerged among these squatters, who wanted their “stolen”
lands to be returned to them. Although Kenyatta’s politics emphasized land
rights for the Kikuyu, he stopped short of embracing the squatters’ rhetoric
on the stolen highlands, thus distancing himself from them.53
The divergences regarding the leadership, strategies, and pace of political
activity within the KAU were mirrored in the Congress. As the KAU took
up land and labor concerns and came to dominate the public realm in Nai-
robi, the Congress leadership recognized the growing political organization
among Africans in the colony and was similarly divided over the desirability
and direction of Indian political engagement in this milieu. Ambalal Bhai-
lalbhai Patel was a Hindu lawyer born in Gujarat in 1898 who arrived in
Mombasa in 1923, where he joined A. B. Pandya, another Congress member,
in organizing Indian political activity. He was elected to the Legislative
Council in 1938 and served as Congress president in 1938 and 1945. Patel
tried to steer the Congress away from expressing solidarity with the KAU
too emphatically or readily. Advocating what he called the “Parsi Theory”
of neutrality, he cautioned the Congress against taking a lead in voicing Af-
rican grievances, although he announced that Indians should “identify with
[their] legitimate aspirations.” Noting that by force of numbers Africans would
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 141

be the “decisive factor” in politics, he urged the Congress to stay “clear of

dangerous conflict.” Patel was joined by K. V. Adalja, a doctor based in Nai-
robi, who stated that there was “no justification for the continued wooing
of Africans” by the Congress. He believed that the Congress’s energies would
be better spent on social ser vice rather than political activity. Three law-
yers, J. M. Nazareth, a Goan Christian born in Kenya in 1908, Chanan Singh,
a Punjabi Sikh, and Shivabhai Amin, a Gujarati Muslim, opposed Patel’s
moderation, arguing instead that the paramount concern of the Congress
ought to be consistency with the “real interests of the whole colony.” They
identified these interests as the “economic” and “political” improvement of
Africans, turning Adalja’s accusation about “wooing” into a mark of their
“success in bringing about better understanding between the two races.”
Amin, Nazareth, and Singh succeeded in forging an alliance with the KAU
and creating an interracial public realm outside the Legislative Council in
which they voiced demands for racial equality, something Patel also aspired
to. As he put it, Indians were an ally of Africans “in their struggle for the
removal of the colour bar.”54 Patel worked toward this specific goal for
more than two decades as an Indian member of the Legislative Council.
From 1945 on, the Congress invited KAU representatives to its public
meetings and passed resolutions concerning African grievances. In De-
cember 1945, it set up an African Delegation Fund to collect £500 to fi-
nance a KAU delegation to Britain. Within three months, exceeding expec-
tations, Indians contributed £720. The money was handed over to Gichuru
at a public meeting in Nairobi in February 1946, where Amin declared that
the funds had been raised to push forward “an alliance of all coloured people
to fight for their rights.” Over the next four years, Kenyatta turned to the
Congress for monetary contributions to aid KAU activities.55 Invitations ex-
tended by the Congress were accepted by a growing number of KAU mem-
bers, including Chief Koinange, his son Peter Koinange, and Tom Mbotela,
KAU’s vice president. In his welcome address at the annual session of the
Congress in 1946, A. H. Mohammed emphasized the precolonial settlement
of Indians in Kenya that went back 300 years while also acknowledging their
immigrant status, and tried to convince the African delegates present that
Indians wanted to lend a “helping hand” rather than exploit “the son of the
soil in his advancement towards freedom.” Peter Koinange, who had associ-
ated with Isher Dass in the 1930s, and Mbotela actively participated in this
session, proposing and seconding several resolutions regarding increased
African representation in the Legislative Council, African nomination to
142 Indians in Kenya

the Executive Council, common franchise, and land. A suggestion to es-

tablish an organization to “promote full understanding between Africans
and Indians” was also made. In his presidential address S. G. Amin de-
manded the release of Samuel Muindi, “the leader of the Wakamba Passive
Resistance of 1938,” deliberately evoking Gandhian language and forms
of political mobilization in describing Muindi’s protest. In 1948, even
more officials of the KAU attended the Congress’s annual session, including
Mbotela, James Katithi, Benjamin Manguru, Jesse Kariuki, Joseph Kangethi,
Muchohi Gikonyo, William Kimilu, and James Beauttah.56
By accepting the Congress’s invitations to participate in its meetings, KAU
leaders hoped to advance the “cause” of Afro-Indian “cooperation.” This view
was reflected in a letter to the editor of Baraza that concluded, “Indians
comprehend our difficulty and we can therefore cooperate with them.” At
the time, in the realm of institutional politics there was no conflict between
the two organizations over the issues of land or representation. In his ad-
dress to the Congress, Peter Koinange announced, “If you help us fight for
the restoration of this land . . . we would extend you our hospitality,” while
Mbotela addressed his “brother Indians,” praising their demand for equal
representations within the Legislative Council for all communities, “the ideal
for which was introduced . . . by Indians.”57 For the Congress leadership, the
KAU’s endorsement was significant because of a growing consciousness
among Indians that Kenya was their territorial and political homeland. In
1945, as Congress president, Patel had announced, “It is no doubt our
[Indians’] duty to help our Mother Country . . . but we must not forget
that our greater duty . . . is to work for the strengthening and advance-
ment of Indian settlement in East African Territories.” Three years later,
Devi Dass Puri, a prominent industrialist who had served as president of
the FICCI three times and had been elected to the Legislative Council
in 1936, stated that Kenya, not India, was their “homeland” and that the
“real role of the Indian community was to assist the African” in gaining
self-governance.58
The rhetoric of interracial politics that arose from a common aspiration
for racial equality held within it the promise of freedom. This was echoed
at a Kenya Youth Conference organized by K. P. Shah, Haroun Ahmed, and
Shanti Pandit in December 1947 aimed at consolidating “Kenyan youth”
who were fighting against imperial dominance.59 In their opening address,
Shah and Ahmed welcomed to the meeting the “true sons of soil,” Africans,
present in the audience, referring to them as “our countrymen” to empha-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 143

size their shared nationalist aspirations, which were to be achieved through

an interracial “liberation movement.” Emphatically asserting their claim to
Kenya as their homeland, they announced, “We share the happiness and
sufferings, blessings and tribulations of self-same mother-country Kenya.
It is with them [Africans] that our own destinies are inextricably linked.”
This destiny was a “free and democratic Africa.” 60
The interracial public political realm was forged most enthusiastically by
Indians whose politics were distinctly anticolonial. This impulse was reflected
not only in meetings such as that of the youth conference but also in Indian-
owned newspapers. In particular, the Colonial Times and the Daily Chron-
icle became vehicles for such Indians to criticize government policy, sup-
port the KAU, and shape Indian political discourse in the colony. From 1933
onward, the Colonial Times was published in English and Gujarati out of a
press owned by Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi, a Punjabi Hindu born in Nairobi in
1910. Vidyarthi was joined by several other Indians whose editorial inter-
ventions shaped the anticolonial musings of the Colonial Times. These in-
cluded Pranlal Sheth, a Gujarati Hindu born in Kenya in 1924; D. K. Sharda,
a Punjabi Hindu whom the independent government of India considered
“one of the most brilliant of the younger men in East Africa”; Haroun Ahmed,
a Gujarati Khoja schoolteacher from Kijabe; and Nathoo Amlani, a Gujarati
Muslim.61 Throughout the 1940s these journalists, who were simultaneously
members of the Congress, criticized colonial policy, took up specific African
grievances, and supported politically active Africans outside the Legisla-
tive Council by publishing papers for African political organizations, often
courting arrest.
In 1928, Kenyatta edited the KAU’s Gikuyu-language paper, Muigwith-
ania (Reconciler), which was banned in 1940. The paper was published by
Sitaram Achariar, who had worked closely with Manilal Desai on the East
African Chronicle and edited the Democrat, an Indian newspaper published
in English and Gujarati, which had been sued by Europeans for libel in 1923
but continued to run till the early 1930s. When the colonial government
charged Muigwithania with sedition, it blamed “Indian agitators” for cre-
ating unrest among the Kikuyu. In the 1940s, like Achariar before him, Vidy-
arthi also published two African newspapers—Habari za Dunia (News of
the World) in Kiswahili and Ramogi (Ancestral Father) in Luo. Between
1945 and 1946, Vidyarthi was charged with sedition, fined, and sentenced
to four months of hard labor. In 1947, he was imprisoned for eighteen months
because of a “seditious” letter published in Habari za Dunia.62 W. L. Sohan,
144 Indians in Kenya

a Punjabi Sikh who migrated to Kenya in 1939, wrote a letter to the editor
of the Colonial Times in December 1946 titled “British Belsen,” in which
he compared India to a “big Belsen camp” which saw “a greater degree of
inhuman atrocity on non-violent peaceful people demanding their
birthright—freedom of their country” committed by the British, from whom
“Hitler learnt . . . concentration camp techniques.” Sohan further wrote that
the “criminals . . . Churchill, Amery [secretary of state for colonies] and Lin-
lithgow [governor of India] should be handed over to an Indian people’s tri-
bunal.” Sohan was convicted of sedition in February 1947 and sentenced to
four months’ imprisonment for being a “political agitator with pronounced
anti-British views.” Far from being chastised, Sohan was even further anta-
gonized by the imprisonment. He defended his articles in court stating,
“I believe I am a British slave. . . . [M]y idea is to spread the spirit of revolt
for I believe there lies the salvation of the suffering and enslaved humanity,
brown or black, African or Occidental.” Rather than risk having Sohan con-
tinue his agitation upon his release, the governor decided to deport him and
in October 1947 declared him a prohibited immigrant while he was tempo-
rarily visiting newly independent India.63
Sharda, Sheth, Ahmed, and Amlani launched an offensive against the gov-
ernment’s attempts at silencing them. They started another newspaper, the
Daily Chronicle, to protest against these arrests. In particular, the state’s
use of a recently passed immigration law that vested unlimited power in im-
migration officers to deny reentry to Indians whom they believed were “un-
desirable” was criticized in the pages of the Daily Chronicle as a “dangerous
weapon in the government’s armoury.” The Congress also viewed the bill
as a “dangerous piece of legislation” since it took advantage of the tangible
links Indian political leaders maintained with India, where they frequently
traveled for personal reasons and to gather political support.64 The Chron-
icle also published reports criticizing Europeans for stealing Africans’ land.
In the wake of the African Workers’ Federation general strike in Mombasa,
editorials accused the attorney general, police chiefs, and the Labour
Commissioner of instructing twelve African policemen to fire on the strikers.
Ahmed and Amlani were charged with about fifty counts of libel and sen-
tenced to six months’ imprisonment in February 1947 for this; Ahmed was
also fined £200.65 The articles published in the Daily Chronicle and the Co-
lonial Times were translated into Kiswahili and Gikuyu and printed in Af-
rican newspapers such as Sauti ya Mwafrika (African Voice), the official
organ of the KAU, and Mwalimu (Teacher), edited by Francis Khamisi—both
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 145

of which were published by Vidyarthi after his release from prison. In addi-
tion, another paper called Africa Express published articles on similar an-
ticolonial themes in Gujarati, English, and Kiswahili.66
Govind Dayalal Rawal, a Gujarati Hindu who migrated to Kenya in the
1930s, took up the editorship of the Daily Chronicle during this time. Be-
tween July 31, 1947, and April 10, 1948, he wrote seven articles that led Gov-
ernor Philip Mitchell to conclude that Rawal was a “social evil” who was
promoting “dangerous enmities.” In these articles, Rawal criticized the “op-
pressive imperialist administration” for turning African soil into an arid
desert through “primitive and disastrous methods of farming” and “nefar-
ious machinations,” such as setting low wages that “hamper the ameliora-
tion of their [African] standards of life.” He criticized the draconian mea-
sures adopted by the colonial government against Africans who had begun
to “assert their citizenship rights,” whom it dismissed as “agitators” and
“rapped on the knuckles.” Calling for an end to the “heinous exploitation and
degradation” of colonial people, Rawal proclaimed that the British fear
“and hate the idea that men should be free and that materials should be
shared for the good of all.” Mitchell tried to deport Rawal to India, but his
request was denied by the Colonial Office in London. Instead, the editor
was charged with sedition. The main claim against Rawal, as expressed in
private, was that the Daily Chronicle had been “carry ing on an active cam-
paign designed to create, inter alia, friction between the Africans and the
Europeans.” 67 Mitchell was not inaccurate in his observation. Although Rawal
did not create discontent among Africans, in criticizing the very premise of
colonial rule he underscored the promise of freedom embedded in inter-
racial politics. In signing his articles “A Kenyan,” he voiced an early Indian
imaginary of Kenyan nationhood.
The widespread support within the Congress of the position taken up by
these editors was evident as several members, most of whom were lawyers,
including Amin, Ramesh Gautama, Chanan Singh, Ahmed, and Vidyarthi
formed the Civil Liberties Union in April 1946 to fight against charges of
sedition. The anticolonial tenor of the newspapers was the kind of “conflict”
that A. B. Patel had tried to steer the Congress away from in the late 1940s.
Although he was unable to prevent the Congress from giving its full sup-
port to the KAU and the publishers, he distanced himself from this brand
of politics within the Legislative Council, supporting Mitchell’s decision to
deport Rawal and accusing the latter of “inciting disorder” and acting on
“communist orders” from the Soviet Union, which in turn funded his paper.68
146 Indians in Kenya

E X PAT R I AT E PAT R I O T I S M

The anticolonial politics of the Congress in the capital did not resonate among
its members along the coast, as Patel’s views made clear. While the majority
of recent immigrants had settled in Nairobi and in new trade centers around
the Central Province and Nyanza Province, including Kisumu, Eldoret,
Thika, and Nakuru, Mombasa’s still predominantly Muslim population of
Gujaratis and Punjabis had thus far remained politically inactive. Their public
activities were limited to communitarian associations, as their sectarian
leaders, including the Aga Khan, had urged their followers to remain loyal
to the colonial government in both Kenya and India. Indeed, Patel was not
the only one to distance himself from the growing anticolonial tenor of his
compatriots. Another voice of opposition came from Mohamed Ali Rana, a
Punjabi Muslim doctor born in 1896 in India. Rana’s father had served in
the British Army for thirty-five years and sent his son to London in 1920 to
complete his medical training. Rana set up his practice in Zanzibar in 1924
and moved to Mombasa six years later. In 1936, Rana emerged as a com-
munity leader and established the Muslim Association of Mombasa.69 He
was simultaneously a member of the Congress and aligned with other Mom-
basa politicians against trade union protests of Indian workers there.
Across the Indian Ocean, in a bid to safeguard the interests of Muslims,
from 1940 onward Mohammed Ali Jinnah led a campaign for the creation of
separate, autonomous states with Muslim majorities in independent India.
This demand culminated in the birth of two new nation-states in 1947, India
and Pakistan, whose emergence was accompanied by an unprecedented
level of communal violence in South Asia, especially in Punjab where the
boundary between the two was drawn.70 The resonance of this partition was
felt in Kenya among Muslims who hailed from there and who asked for sepa-
rate electoral representation in the Legislative Council on the basis of their
religious identity. It was assumed by the colonial government at the time and
in subsequent historiography that this demand emerged as a direct conse-
quence of the birth of Pakistan. Far from being entirely derivative of the di-
visive politics that had overrun India in the 1940s, the expatriate patriotism
of South Asians in Kenya reflected articulations of diasporic nationalism and
diasporic communalism, neither of which were entirely located in, or were
dislocated from, their territorial forms in their civilizational homelands.71
The Congress was founded by Muslim merchants whose subimperialist
claims to parity with Europeans had by 1947 been replaced with the claim
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 147

to racial equality for Indians and Africans. Through the 1930s and 1940s
politically active Muslims remained prominent members in it, becoming its
president on several occasions and serving on legislative and municipal coun-
cils. In 1931, a Nairobi-based organization called the Anjuman-i-Islamia, also
known as the Muslim Association, sent a memorandum to Governor Byrne
in an unsuccessful attempt to disassociate Muslims from the Congress. Al-
though the Muslim Association had been in existence for more than thirty
years, this was its first political assertion. Hitherto it had been concerned
with communitarian matters outside the political realm, focusing on fund-
raising and building mosques, especially in Nairobi. Its president, Alla
Bakash, was a Muslim from Gujranwalla, sharing the same birthplace in
Punjab as Makhan Singh. Bakash had risen to prominence in the late 1920s,
becoming a chief railway clerk and, later, the chairman of the Nairobi Mosque
Fundraising Committee. He succeeded in collecting about 500,000 shillings
for the purpose. In his 1931 memo, Bakash claimed that the Congress did
not represent the Indian Muslims, who formed 43 percent of the Indian pop-
ulation in Kenya at the time. Therefore, he asked for separate electorates
for Muslims to elect their own Legislative Council representative.72
Just as had been the case in India, the Muslim separatists’ concerns had
less to do with their religion as a practiced faith and more with it as a signi-
fier of political identity. Far from being a singular category, Indian Muslims
in Kenya were divided by class, region, and sectarian beliefs, including Is-
maili Khojas and Bohras from Gujarat and Punjab and Punjabi Ahmadiyyas.
In 1931, while 12,117 Indian Muslims identified themselves as “Moham-
medan” in the colonywide census, 2,559 listed themselves as Khoja Ismailis,
180 as Bohras, 44 as Shia, 29 as Sunni, and 75 as Ahmadiyyas.73 However,
Bakash presented Indian Muslims to the governor as a unified community
with the same political ambitions. Significantly, in 1931, the Muslim Asso-
ciation had little popular support for its claim. Bakash himself admitted as
much when he refused to hold a mass meeting to take a referendum on dis-
associating from the Congress, stating that this would create “unnecessary
and untimely publicity.” Instead, he distanced himself from Congress leaders
who were Muslim, such as Shams-ud-Deen. In making his case to Byrne,
Bakash claimed that the “tyranny” of the Hindu community through the
Congress had led to the exploitation of “inarticulate Muslims.” 74 He soon
retired from public life, but within a decade changed political circumstances
in India and Kenya presented the Muslim Association with an ideal oppor-
tunity to leverage its position.
148 Indians in Kenya

In 1939, the All-Indian National Congress that had formed government

in several provinces of British India resigned in protest against India’s in-
clusion in the war, and in 1942 Gandhi launched the Quit India movement,
demanding the immediate withdrawal of the colonial administration from
India. The urgency of this demand reverberated in Kenya, articulated
in expressions of expatriate patriotism.75 In October that year an Indian
teacher hung a portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru in his classroom in a govern-
ment Indian high school in Nairobi. Seventeen students were suspended
for going on “strike” and refusing to attend classes when the European
principal removed the image. Inspired by the anticolonial, nationalist mo-
mentum building up in the Indian subcontinent, the Congress celebrated
Gandhi’s birthday and “independence day” in Kenya in 1945.76 At its seven-
teenth annual session held in Mombasa in October 1945, life-size portraits
of Maulana Azad, the sitting president of the All-Indian National Congress,
and Gandhi were placed on the central platform from which the special
delegates delivered their addresses. Through the 1940s this trend continued
as the Congress celebrated the nationalist milestones of India’s postwar de-
colonization, including the formation of an interim government under Ne-
hru’s leadership and independence. It also held mass meetings to publicly
honor Subhas Chandra Bose, who had organized Indian immigrants and
prisoners of war in Southeast Asia into the Indian National Army and
launched an attack against the British. Anticolonial slogans such as “Long
Live Gandhi,” “Long Live Revolution,” “Freedom Is Our Birthright,” and
“Dilli Chalo” (onward to Delhi) the last of these being the anthem of the
Indian National Army, were echoed at Congress meetings. A bookshop
borrowing its name from another nationalist slogan, “Jai Hind” (victory
for India), opened in Nairobi in March 1947, stocking political books on In-
dian independence, including biographies of and writings by Gandhi,
Nehru, and Bose. By the mid-1940s, the Indian independence movement
had crossed the Indian Ocean and voiced itself on the streets of Nairobi
and Mombasa. Indian expatriate patriots in Kenya emphasized that India’s
freedom had “deeper and wider significance for all subject peoples of the
world,” as Patel put it. For the Indian Association in Mombasa, Indian na-
tionhood inspired a desire for the same in Kenya: “Since the independence of
our mother-country our responsibility in this country and particularly to-
wards our African brothers have increased considerably.” 77
Significantly, such support for Gandhi’s anticolonial nationalism in India
was accompanied by public criticism of Jinnah and his movement for Paki-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 149

stan. For example, Congress member Vidyarthi, the Hindu editor of Colo-
nial Times, published an editorial entitled “On the Verge of Freedom,” which
was critical of the policies of the All-India Muslim League and Jinnah. Mus-
lims, who perceived Jinnah to be the sole spokesman of Muslim nationalism
in much the same way that Hindus had appropriated Gandhi as their
“leader,” saw this as a “vilifying campaign.” For Punjabi Muslims, who con-
stituted about a third of the Indian Muslim population in Kenya and whose
families now lived in Pakistan, the Congress’s explicit condemnation of Jinnah
led to their alienation from it. Punjabi Muslim expatriate patriotism found
expression in support for the new Muslim homeland, Pakistan. Consequently,
they boycotted celebrations of Indian independence. In December 1945,
the Congress invited fifty “prominent personalities” in Nairobi to attend its
annual session. Only five of these special invitees were Muslim. Punjabi Mus-
lims boycotted the meeting, claiming inadequate Muslim representation.
Instead, Muslims in Mombasa organized a meeting to celebrate Jinnah’s
birthday and raised funds in support of Pakistan. Speakers took the oppor-
tunity to demand a political reorganization of Muslims in Kenya to avoid
“Hindu domination.” 78
Hitherto, prominent Muslims in Kenya had simultaneously participated
in the activities of the Congress and Muslim communitarian associations
outside the realm of politics, while Ismailis, under the Aga Khan’s direc-
tion, had mostly stayed away from political debates. However, support for
Pakistan unified Muslims across Kenya. In his capacity as the leader of
Indian Muslims in Mombasa, Rana came onto the colony-wide political scene
by passing resolutions deprecating writings, activities, and speeches that
referred to Jinnah and Pakistan in disparaging terms and demanding that
the Colonial Times retract its statements. As Muslim opposition to the
Congress grew more vocal and organized, the Congress attempted to allay
its Muslim members’ fears of Hindu domination by appointing Legislative
Council member S. G. Amin its president in 1946 (after several other Mus-
lims declined). Despite this move, the continued veneration of Indian na-
tionalists such as Gandhi and Nehru created deep cleavages between Hindus
and Muslims. When the Indian Associations held “National Day” on Sep-
tember 2, 1946, to celebrate Nehru’s interim government in India by sa-
luting the Indian national flag and singing Indian national songs, the ma-
jority of Muslims stayed away, holding instead a “day of grief” to be “passed
in silence.” Subsequently, several hundred Muslims resigned from the
Congress because of the “provocation” by Hindu leaders. This gave the
150 Indians in Kenya

Muslim Association—restructured into the Central Muslim Association of

Kenya (CMA) in 1943 by a retired government schoolteacher, Allah Ditta
Qureshi—the perfect opportunity to present itself as a legitimate political
alternative to the Congress, which could no longer claim to represent Mus-
lims. Qureshi was a Punjabi Ahmadiyya who became an alderman in Nai-
robi in 1946 and used his new position to demand a separate Muslim seat
in the Legislative Council.79
Even a Congress stalwart such as Shams-ud-Deen had become convinced
by 1946 that the interests of Muslims were not in agreement with those of
Hindus. As a prominent Congress leader who had served on both the Leg-
islative and Executive Councils, Shams-ud-Deen had simultaneously par-
ticipated in the activities of the East African Muslim Welfare Society,
which aimed to collaborate with Muslim Africans, and the CMA, which set
up a Bihar Relief Fund Committee to raise funds for Muslim victims of the
communal disturbances in Bihar, in eastern India. He had even started an
organization known as Fauj-ul-Muslimeen (Army of Muslims), which was
open to Muslims of all races who swore an oath of allegiance to Allah and
devoted themselves to a life based on religious principles.80
Much of the communitarian focus of Shams-ud-Deen’s activities and
Qureshi’s fear of “Hindu domination” came from the demographic change
in Indian immigration into Kenya. Between 1930 and 1950, Muslims had
shown the lowest population growth of all communities. While the number
of Hindus and Sikhs in the colony had increased about 250 percent, from
24,175 to 62,016, the Muslim population had risen from 15,006 to only
27,445, not even doubling. Of these, 8,402, including Punjabi Muslims, were
Sunni; less than a third were Ismaili and Ithna Ashari Khojas; and 1,934
were Bohras.81 Ismaili and Bohra merchants such as Jeevanjee and Allidina
Visram had pioneered Indian settlement in East Africa and been at the head
of political and economic negotiations with the colonial state. With the im-
migration of Hindus and Sikhs in much larger numbers than Muslims, the
political prominence of the latter appeared precarious. Unlike Hindus and
Sikhs, who maintained ties with India and returned there periodically, Is-
mailis had little contact with India once they migrated. The increase in the
number of Hindus residing in the colony caused Muslim leaders such as
Shams-ud-Deen to fear the numerical submersion of their community, and
they joined European settlers in demanding restrictions on immigration
from India. Furthermore, Shams-ud-Deen failed to gather support from
Hindu members of the Legislative Council when he tried to introduce an
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 151

ordinance that would give official recognition to Muslim religious marriages

because the Hindu members worried about setting a precedent to colonial
interference in all other aspects of Hindu religious practices. Instead, he
made a separate representation to the governor to enact the Mohammedan
Marriage Ordinance. He therefore viewed the CMA’s demand for separate
political representation for Muslims as legitimate and much needed. Rather
than blame the imperial administration for partition in India, he consid-
ered Pakistani nationhood a demand made by “Indians themselves which
has saved India from complete annihilation.” Although motivated by dif-
ferent grievances, in 1947 several Muslim associations in Mombasa and
Nairobi organized themselves politically, petitioned the governor to ban
“Hindu” meetings on the grounds that “inflammatory” speeches were
made against Muslims, and spoke out in support of the CMA—a campaign
that resonated among a variety of Muslims disaffected with Hindus in
Kenya and keen to express solidarity with their new homeland across the
ocean, Pakistan, by distancing themselves from independent India.82
While Shams-ud-Deen himself had been at the forefront of developing
an anticolonial critique in the Congress and had resigned from the Legisla-
tive Council in 1946 after publishing anti-British articles in the local press,
the CMA remained staunchly loyal to the administration. Support for Pak-
istan had heightened diasporic communitarian identity among Muslims of
all political leanings in Kenya, but the CMA’s politics were not entirely de-
rivative of Jinnah’s movement. While expressions of expatriate patriotism
among Hindus in Kenya alienated Muslims, whose new homeland, Pakistan,
appeared to be the antithesis of Indian nationalist affiliations, CMA’s op-
position to “Hindu domination” was less about what was going on across the
ocean in the subcontinent and more about local Kenyan politics. The move-
ment for Pakistan in undivided India was an anticolonial nationalist one.
However, Muslims within the CMA underscored their different religious
identity to separate themselves from what they considered to be anticolo-
nial politics in Kenya. Their demand for separate electorates was accompa-
nied by a strong vote of confidence in the government and a rejection of
the Congress’s “Hindu nationalism.” 83 In a paradoxical attempt to sever its
relationship with a changing homeland India—which emerged as the epitome
of anticolonial aspirations—while declaring its attachment to a new home-
land, Pakistan, the CMA accused the Congress of importing subcontinental
politics into their territorial homeland, Kenya, and criticized Hindus for un-
necessarily referring to politics in India.
152 Indians in Kenya

Emphasizing Muslim loyalty to the colonial state, it announced that Hindus

were prone to “revolutionary,” “subversive” protest and indulged in “the
very objectionable method of non-cooperation with the Government.” 84
Indeed, Rana, the first Punjabi Muslim to resign from the Congress, was a
city councilor from Mombasa and received the Order of the British Em-
pire (MBE) in 1944 for his ser vices during the war, while Bakash and
Qureshi had risen to prominence under state patronage as the chief railway
clerk and a government schoolteacher, with no real fight with the adminis-
tration.85 Beginning in the mid-1940s, then, CMA created a platform for the
voice of Muslim Punjabis within the colonial administration, and also for a
few Ismailis who joined public politics, as the Aga Khan emphasized Is-
maili support of the colonial state to extract concessions regarding educa-
tion and social welfare from the governor. Upcoming elections in 1948
brought the attention of Governor Mitchell to the demands of the CMA.
Leaders within the CMA tried self-consciously but unsuccessfully to reject
their “diasporic” identity. An exclusively Muslim newspaper, the East Af-
rica Star, was started by Qureshi with the sole aim of enabling the Euro-
peans to “distinguish between friend and foe,” because “we Muslims
should not be considered as part and parcel of the dirty Indian propa-
ganda.” Furthermore, he asserted that those Indians who considered
themselves “loyal and patriotic nationals of India” should go back to their
country and “leave us alone here in peace and harmony with the European
community.” He also brought an Ahmadiyya amir to Nairobi with the main
object of counteracting the “subversive communist propaganda sponsored
by the East African Indian National Congress and its henchmen.” Such
professions of loyalty made the CMA a “very valuable element” for Mitchell,
who feared the growing anticolonial direction of Congress politics.86
Despite the CMA’s accusations that “Hindus” were importing subconti-
nental politics across the Indian Ocean, the association was, in fact, doing
exactly the same. The rise of religiously defined political identity was a quint-
essentially Indian phenomenon, as the colonial government had been more
concerned with racial difference in Kenya. In colonial India, the racially
homogeneous subject population was politically divided into religiously de-
fined electoral communities. As the Congress embraced anticolonial, inter-
racial politics in the late 1940s, the governor attempted to weaken this alli-
ance by legitimizing the demands of those who distanced themselves from
anticolonial politics. The violence that accompanied the partition of the sub-
continent helped further the CMA’s claim that Muslims and Hindus were
distinct political communities.
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 153

Despite the presence of Indian Muslims in the Legislative Council,

Mitchell reinforced this myth by referring to electoral organization in British
India and announced in 1946 that communal riots would break out in Nai-
robi unless the CMA’s demands were met. Although the Congress re-
mained opposed to any kind of division of Indians along religious lines,
Patel joined hands with Rana, with whom he had worked closely in Mom-
basa, and agreed to the reservation of two Indian seats in the council for
Muslims. Mitchell opposed the introduction of separate electorates, the
CMA’s demand, on practical rather than principled grounds, arguing that
dividing the Indian electorate for the 1948 Legislative Council elections
was impractical on such short notice.87 Significantly, in private the governor
promised to allow the CMA to “certify” Muslim electoral candidates and
thus ensure that the Congress would not dominate the council by putting
up Muslim candidates of whom the CMA did not approve. As a result, Rana
and Ibrahim Nathoo, an Ismaili businessman from Nairobi, joined Patel in
the Legislative Council. Born in Nairobi, Nathoo had joined the Congress
in 1926, subsequently becoming its assistant secretary. He was involved in
establishing educational institutions for Ismailis in Kenya and served as the
Aga Khan’s private secretary in East Africa from 1945 onward.88
Mitchell hailed this election as a “victory for the moderates” and received
much praise from the Colonial Office for having successfully averted a grave
communal crisis.89 In particular, he was pleased to see that the “well-to-do
middle class merchants and professional men were far too intelligent to
be stampeded by the wild men waving Congress flags,” and he proclaimed
that the Hindu “extremists” had been thoroughly defeated. An African,
Elnid Mathu, was for the first time nominated to the Legislative Council in
1944, resulting in the demand among white settlers for parity in European
and non-European representation in the Legislative Council—a demand
opposed by the Congress and the KAU because it would in effect give
the Europeans complete domination. As a newly elected member of the
council, Rana struck a deal with the European members and supported
their demand. In return, the Europeans joined him in criticizing the anti-
colonial stance of the Congress. They highlighted the loyalty of the Mus-
lims to the British crown and, as a corollary, the disloyalty of the Hindus,
who had begun to ally with the Africans against both the governor and the
Europeans. With this combined front of Europeans and Muslims in the
Legislative Council, in 1950 Mitchell introduced, with Patel’s consent, a bill
that established separate, religiously defined electorates in Kenya. Two
years earlier Patel had received the Order of St. Michael and St. George
154 Indians in Kenya

(CMG) for his loyal ser vice to the empire in 1948. Subsequently, the gov-
ernor nominated Sir Eboo Pirbhai, the Ismaili president of CMA (who was
knighted in 1952) and one of the richest businessmen in Kenya, to the Leg-
islative Council.90
Rana and Patel, the “victorious moderates,” drew much criticism from the
Indian press in Kenya for having “betrayed utterly and completely . . . the
faith that nationalist-minded Indians of all communities” had reposed in
them. Within the Congress, several members suggested that Patel boycott
the Legislative Council, but he refused. Instead, they unsuccessfully peti-
tioned His Majesty’s government to overturn the governor’s decision and
distanced themselves from the elected Indian members of the council.
S. G. Amin, J. M. Nazareth, and a Punjabi Hindu lawyer, R. C. Gautama, were
the most vocal against Patel during this time. Amin and Nazareth served
as Congress president in 1946 and 1951, respectively, while Gautama was
elected general secretary in 1948. The Congress’s opposition to separate elec-
torates arose from a dual opposition: to the principle of communal politics,
especially in the aftermath of the violence of partition, and to the realiza-
tion that the communal problem in India was quite different from the local
concerns of Kenya. Given the Congress’s attempts to put up a united front
with the KAU, it argued that separate electorates would add to the “bane
of division along lines of religious politics,” which would lead to further
divisions—both among Africans “along tribal lines” and between Africans
and Indians along racial lines. Moreover, while they had celebrated Indian
independence, the leaders of the Congress emphasized the specifically
Kenyan context of Indians’ dilemmas in Kenya.91 “It does not matter a
tuppence,” reasoned Gautama in March 1949, just a few months before he
died, “whether my sympathies are pro-India or pro-Pakistan when it comes
to our political and economic rights in this land of our adoption. They remain
one whatever our sympathies. . . . The interests of all non-Europeans are
largely identical in this country.” Indians across the political spectrum had
been influenced by events taking place in the subcontinent but their own
political shifts were concerned with local issues. Be it the CMA, which de-
manded separate electorates to emphasize Muslim loyalty to the colonial
state in Kenya, or the Congress, which rejected religiously and racially
defined electorates in its attempt to cross racial boundaries in the realm of
politics, the fundamental point emphasized by the Indian leadership was:
“This is not India. . . . This is Africa.”92 Yet the resilience of their attachment
to their civilizational homeland was evident in the reverberation of events
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 155

taking place across the Indian Ocean in Kenya within the Congress and
the CMA, whose members used expressions of expatriate patriotism to
achieve different political ends within the colony.

I N D E P E N D E N C E AC RO S S TH E I N D I A N OC E A N

In August 1947, the Indian diaspora’s civilizational homeland became two

postcolonial nation-states. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was
well aware of the transnational significance of the events of 1947 that sig-
naled the beginning of the end of Britain’s second empire. He saw India’s
role as promoting freedom for all people, especially in Africa. Through ex-
pressions of Afro-Asian solidarity, Nehru positioned his new state to facili-
tate the emergence of “one world where freedom is universal and there is
equality of opportunity between races and peoples.”93 He handpicked In-
dia’s first high commissioner to Kenya, Apa Pant, the Oxford-educated son
of the raja of Aundh, a small princely state in Maharashtra that had acceded
to India. Pant was a self-proclaimed Gandhian nationalist. This was his first
diplomatic mission, and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, under Ne-
hru’s guidance, gave him the explicit instruction to strive for better relations
between Africans and Indians. Pant arrived in Kenya in August 1948 in the
thick of the debates over separate Muslim representation. Congress leaders
were delighted to have a representative from India in their midst, especially
one who, like them, opposed the principle of race- or religion-based political
divisions. Amin, Chanan Singh, and Makhan Singh, on his return to Kenya,
became frequent visitors to the high commissioner’s office and residence in
Nairobi, consulting him on the issues of communal representation and
workers’ rights. Pant advised them to integrate themselves with the African
“nationalist” movement, which he presumed was a singular, consolidated one,
warning that the failure to do so would result in Indians being “crushed
between the authoritarian policy of the government on the one hand and
the rising tide of nationalist temperament of the Africans on the other.” 94
Setting a personal example of this, Pant hosted KAU leaders, including
Kenyatta, Chief Koinange, and Peter Koinange, at the High Commission and
attended events organized by the Congress and KAU.
Within a few months of his arrival, Amin introduced Pant to Kenyatta at
Githunguri, where several initiatives such as the Kenya Teachers College
and Independent African Schools had been set up by KAU leaders to break
the monopoly of missionaries over education. By 1948, Githunguri had
156 Indians in Kenya

become a hotbed of Kikuyu political activity, and in November of that year

more than 10,000 African women attended a meeting organized by the KAU
that Pant addressed. At these visits, Pant urged Africans and Indians to form
a “powerful brotherhood . . . devoid of colour” and to act as one political
body. In early 1949, he toured Kikuyu reserves, making speeches about
Gandhian teachings, Indo-African cooperation, and the lessons Kenya could
learn from India’s freedom struggle. The lack of higher educational institu-
tions in Kenya had been a major grievance voiced by the KAU. In May 1947,
Nehru introduced five scholarships for African candidates to tour India and
enroll in educational institutions there. Pant increased the number to eight.
Many KAU officials made the journey across the Indian Ocean to India upon
receiving these scholarships. Pant was also involved in setting up an Indo-
African Literary Society to translate political writings by Gandhi and
Nehru into Kiswahili and encouraged privately-run Indian schools in
Kenya to offer places to African children. The Arya Samaj, a socioreligious
Hindu organization, started Hindi classes for Africans. By October 1950,
about twenty-five had enrolled in them. In March 1950, on Pant’s request,
the Indian government sent a commission to look into setting up an inter-
mediate college in Nairobi. The government of India contributed finan-
cially, along with local Indians, to establish the Gandhi Memorial Academy,
where the founders hoped the student body would be split equally between
Indians and Africans.95 The school was subsequently incorporated into the
Royal Technical College, which eventually became the University of Nai-
robi. Pant’s wife was also involved in these efforts. She joined the Nairobi
Asian Women’s Association in February 1950 at a meeting held at the Inde-
pendent African School in Githunguri that was attended by 150 Indian
women and 6,000 African women. The women’s association raised 125 shil-
lings for the African Women’s League, which hosted the event. As chair-
person of the Reception Committee, Pant’s wife advised the association to
open up membership to their “African sisters.”96
The KAU leadership enthusiastically welcomed Pant. For them, Indian
independence served as an example and inspiration. As Kenyatta put it, “Af-
ricans would follow India but needed Indians’ help to gain independence.”
Mbotela echoed this sentiment, announcing that Africans had a “great lesson
to learn out of India and their people.” Furthermore, they appreciated Pant’s
initiatives in making Nehru’s rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity a reality. Ke-
nyatta looked forward to the time “when the African would speak the In-
dian language,” while James Beauttah, one of the first Africans to secure a
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 157

scholarship to India, in March 1947, proclaimed that Africa could escape

serfdom thanks to the educational opportunities that India had opened up
for Africans. In February 1949, Chief Koinange hosted a tea party attended
by KAU and Congress leaders and officials from the Indian High Commis-
sion on the eve on his son’s departure for India.97 Pant had cultivated a very
close relationship with the Koinanges, and as a result Peter Koinange’s trip
to India was covered extensively in the Indian and Kenyan press. Nehru
joined him on visits around the country and held joint press conferences.
Impressed with Nehru’s economic focus on developing Indian cottage in-
dustries as a way of rebuilding the economy, which had been destroyed under
colonial rule, Peter Koinange asked for an Indian team to be sent to East
Africa to teach Kenyans village industries. Furthermore, highlighting the
significance of Indian independence for colonized people beyond the ter-
ritorial boundaries of India, he announced, “We East Africans have a de-
sire to see India prosperous and flourishing so that Africans would have a
pattern of freedom before them. If India failed to consolidate her freedom,
Africans would lose their guide.” Evoking the Indian Ocean realm, much
the way the Congress leaders had in the 1920s and 1930s, Koinange said he
hoped that “the ancient ties” of India and Africa would be revived. “You
[Indians] and we were co-sharers of oppression,” he proclaimed. “Now that
you have won freedom, we expect a great understanding on your part about
our plight.”98
The success of Pant’s activities in fulfilling Nehru’s instructions to befriend
Africans and support their aspirations to freedom provoked criticism in the
colonial administration, so much so that the government of India kept se-
cret the fact that it had sponsored Peter Koinange’s visit to India. Mitchell
tried to declare Pant and his first officer, M. D. Shahane, persona non grata
for having overstepped their legitimate diplomatic activities by “deliberately
engaging in local politics . . . cultivating dissident [among] Africans and en-
deavouring to influence African opinion.” Though the secretary of state for
colonies remained unconvinced that there was enough evidence to take
such a dramatic step at the time, Mitchell continued to keep a close watch
on Pant and his acquaintances, especially the “Daily Chronicle group who
habitually sail as near sedition as they dare.” On a personal note, Mitchell
turned down invitations from the High Commission to attend Indian in-
dependence day parties because Pant had invited “Kenyatta and his Af-
rican crowd,” and refused to attend a dinner hosted by Pant for Lady
Mountbatten, wife of India’s former viceroy who oversaw the transfer of
158 Indians in Kenya

power to Nehru’s government, because Chief Koinange and other KAU

members were in attendance.99
While the Koinanges, Gichuru, Mbotela, and Kenyatta were emphatic in
their appreciation of India’s efforts, through Pant, to collaborate with them,
KAU’s executive committee also recognized the “genuine cooperation” of
the Congress, which it “profoundly appreciated.” In an official letter to Con-
gress president Amin on behalf of the KAU in August 1948, Mbotela ex-
pressed “thanks . . . for all they [Congress] have done for our people in the
way of education.”100 Before embarking on his visit to India, Gichuru re-
marked on the regular and growing presence of KAU delegates at the an-
nual sessions of the Congress as an illustration of the “extent to which Afri-
cans were prepared to go in fostering good relations with . . . Indians.” Peter
Koinange went even further, pointing to the benefits of trade that Indians
had brought to the country. He contrasted the transfer of skills that Afri-
cans had learned from Indians, especially in shoemaking, carpentry, and
electrical and mechanical work, with the limitations put on African economic
aspirations by Europeans, who “simply taught them how to cook and wait
at tables” and thus perpetuated their inequality. By August 1949, an inter-
racial alliance had emerged in the realm of elite institutional politics be-
tween the KAU and Congress, brought together by the promise of freedom
embedded in the rhetoric of anticolonialism. As Peter Koinange stated, “The
KAU, the biggest political African organization, with a membership of
650,000 and 30 branches, was working in cooperation with the East African
Indian National Congress.”101
The interracial political realm was further invigorated by Makhan Singh,
who returned from India in August 1947. Of the seven years he spent in
India, he had been jailed without trial for more than two, and on his re-
lease he was restricted to his village and kept under surveillance for over a
year. During his internment, Singh shared a jail cell with Harkrishan Singh
Surjit, a leading member of the Communist Party of India, who started the
Kisan Sabha (Peasants Union) in Punjab. On his release, Singh joined the
Communist Party, became the subeditor of the official organ of the
Punjab Committee, and coedited a newsletter called Jang-e-Azadi (Fight
for Freedom) with Jagjit Singh Anand. Singh’s decision to return to Kenya
aroused the suspicion of the colonial authorities, who declared that he was an
undesirable immigrant and tried unsuccessfully to deny him entry into the
colony under the Immigration Law of 1947 (which was subsequently used
against Sohan, as previously noted).102
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 159

In the 1930s, Singh had been active in protesting against the low wages,
long hours, and poor employment conditions of African and Indian workers.
While he had been emphatic in his criticism of the colonial government’s
hesitancy in bringing about structural changes that would ameliorate these
grievances, he stopped short of demanding a complete overhaul of the po-
litical state, that is, decolonization. In 1947 he returned to Kenya a staunch
nationalist whose participation in “the freedom struggle of my country
[India]” inspired him to do the same in his “homeland,” Kenya.103 He hoped
to achieve independence by uniting Kenyans across class, racial, and reli-
gious boundaries.
Singh returned to Kenya at a time when Indian politicians were fighting
over the introduction of separate representation for Muslims, the KAU’s at-
tempt at assuming the leadership of African political activity was being chal-
lenged by squatters and urban workers, and the Congress and KAU had
formed a political alliance. He signaled his reentry into Kenyan politics in
a significant and symbolic way. Having seen the destruction caused by par-
tition in Punjab, his birthplace, he protested against religiously defined sep-
arate electorates and, using the Gandhian strategy of individual satyagraha,
went on a ten-day fast to promote the “unity and solidarity of the Indian
people.”104 In one fell swoop, he was able to establish his credentials as an
Indian nationalist who had spent time in prison for the cause and showcase
his authenticity as a Kenyan “freedom fighter” who had been, well before
the Congress, one of the first Indians to reach out to Kenyatta and other
members of the KCA in the 1930s.
As mentioned previously, there had been a resurgence of trade union ac-
tivity led by Ndisi, Kubai, and Kaggia in Nairobi and Mombasa on the eve
of Singh’s return, allowing him to pick up where he had left off in 1939.
Singh demanded eight-hour workdays, a limit for shop assistants and fac-
tory workers of forty-five working hours per week, fourteen days’ local leave,
free medical care, free or cheap housing, and the establishment of technical,
industrial, and trade schools. Although Singh had made many of these de-
mands in the mid-1930s, the revitalization of trade union activity in 1949
reflected several significant changes. First, while in 1939 Singh had de-
manded different minimum wages for Indians and Africans, on his return
he was determined to genuinely integrate the trade union movement, de-
manding “equal pay for equal work” and attempting to organize a labor union
that encompassed both African and Indian workers. At public meetings in
Nairobi, Singh emphasized the need for all employers, including the
160 Indians in Kenya

government and Indian firms, to treat Indians and Africans in the same
way.105
Second, in leadership, though not individual union membership, the
workers’ movement emerged as an interracial one, as Kubai, Kariuki, Kaggia,
L. K. Kigume, John Mungai, and Herbert Kaguma, who had been organizing
urban laborers, welcomed Singh back and consulted with him. Between 1947
and 1950, Singh reinvigorated the Labour Trade Union of East Africa and
assisted several African trade unions register and draft rules, including the
African Stoneworkers Union, the Transport and Allied Workers Union, the
Shoemaker Workmen’s Union with 350 members, the Tailors and Garment
Workers Union with 400 workers, and the Domestic and Hotel Workers
Union with 1,000 members. In September 1948, Singh organized a Cost of
Living and Wages Conference in Nairobi that was attended by Indian workers
unions, including the Indian East African Clerks Association, Indian Shoe-
makers and Workmen Association, East African Press Association, Kenyan
Asian Civil Ser vice associations, and delegates from various African orga-
nizations such as the Railway African Staff Union, Kenya Houseboys As-
sociation, African Painters Association, Kenya African Shop Messengers
Association, United African Press Association, and African employees of the
War Department. A month-long Indian shoemakers’ strike in April 1949 was
followed a few months later by a joint strike of twenty Indian and forty Af-
rican employees of Indian sweetmeat makers against the Indian Confec-
tioners Association when the latter refused to increase their wages. Eager
to shake off the Indian domination of the Labour Trade Union, Singh and
Kubai founded a new organization, the East African Trade Union Congress,
on May 1, 1949, with Kubai as general secretary and Singh as its organizing
secretary. Singh’s union and several other Indian and African workers unions,
including the African Workers Federation, were affiliated with the Trade
Union Congress.106
The Mombasa general strike of 1947 had triggered a number of reforms
within the colonial administration that aimed at redressing wage and housing
grievances through the appointment of a Labour Advisory Board and es-
tablishing government surveillance over trade union activity. In 1949, a bill
was introduced in the Legislative Council to conduct a trade test for arti-
sans in an attempt to align wages with capability. Anyone who refused the
test would be classified as voluntarily unemployed. At the same time, under
the Voluntarily Unemployed Persons Ordinance, the government was em-
powered to engage such “voluntarily unemployed” persons to work on its
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 161

projects. Yet another bill required all trade unions in the colony to reregister.
Unions that represented more than one trade were not allowed to register.
Singh considered these bills hostile to labor, and he argued that all workers
must receive a minimum wage, fearing that the subjectivity of the trade test
would result in even lower wages. He also equated the Voluntarily Unem-
ployed Persons Ordinance with forced labor because of the “principle of
compulsion” that enabled the government to access cheap labor from workers
who refused to take the trade test in protest against the unfair bill. The re-
quirement to reregister trade unions, Singh argued, aimed at taking away
the collective bargaining rights of already registered unions that were ac-
tive and successful. Therefore he demanded the repeal of all these mea-
sures.107 On January 15, 1950, at a public meeting in Nairobi, Singh re-
ferred to the Voluntarily Unemployed Persons Ordinance as a “slave law”
in a speech he made in Kiswahili. A few months later, he tried to organize a
boycott of the civic day celebrations commemorating Nairobi’s newly ap-
pointed status as a city. Although the government did not allow the boy-
cott, the Trade Union Congress distributed black armbands among Indian
and African workers as a mark of protest.108
Singh did not restrict his activities to the organization of trade unions and
strikes. Like Rawal and Ahmed, he launched a press campaign in the Daily
Chronicle through articles entitled “Political Morass and the Way Out” and
“Repression Is Mounting” in which he accused the government of discrim-
inatory economic policies against Africans. In his writings, Singh criticized
the entire colonial system that kept Africans under permanent subjugation.
He argued that colonialism was premised on the British ruling class’s de-
pendence on cheap raw material from Africa and had led to “intensive ex-
ploitation of land and mineral resources.” He warned that a secret plan was
being hatched to take land away from the “native land units” and add it to
the city of Nairobi.109 Furthermore, Singh identified the struggles for “civil
liberties” taking place in towns and in the reserves as those in most need of
Indian support. In particular, he criticized the government’s decision to ban
several African organizations, including the African Workers Federation,
whose reregistration application was turned down in 1949, and the proscrip-
tion of Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini ya Jesu Kristo. These were religious
sects that had taken a strong, increasingly violent, anti-European and anti-
government political turn. Governor Mitchell banned them for being “con-
trary to public interest.” Singh argued that they represented a political up-
surge among African squatters and agricultural workers triggered by land
162 Indians in Kenya

hunger. In newspaper articles he drew attention to the content of the pro-

tests rather than their form, highlighting the demand for more land and
better working conditions that were expressed in these groups, pointing
to their main demands that “land should belong to the original man” and “no
unoriginal man should live here.” While this discourse of indigeneity em-
phasized the claims and rights of Africans as “original man,” thus margin-
alizing Indian claims to belonging because of their diasporic origins, Singh
publicly and wholeheartedly supported them, envisioning Indians in a sup-
porting role in the country. Through his writings and speeches Singh urged
Indians and Africans to “forge a strong unity” to attain “the common cause
of democratic advance” through equal and universal adult franchise on a
common roll and a democratically elected government based on propor-
tional representation. He acknowledged the predominance of African con-
cerns in Kenya, proposing a resolution at the annual session of the Con-
gress in 1948 that stated, “It should be the privileged and sacred duty of
the immigrant communities to assist the African [to] . . . take their rightful
place in the country . . . and become the dominant factor in the government
of this country.”110
As Singh presented himself as a staunch anticolonial nationalist, within
the Legislative Council the newly elected Patel distanced himself from
Singh’s politics, announcing that “Indians who conduct activities likely to
incite the African masses toward violent disturbances” were “enemies of the
Indian community.” Patel further accused Singh of being financed by the
Soviets. For his part, Singh stated that Patel represented the “rich propri-
etary class, not the majority of Indians,” and criticized him for using the
“communist boogey to keep Indian and African workers enslaved.”111
Singh’s politics also evoked hostile criticism from Mitchell, who began to
worry that Singh, “with his strong communist tendencies,” was exploiting
the “African mood.” In particular, he blamed the “Sikhs’ subversive influ-
ence” for the frequent strikes by African workers in the late 1940s. The co-
lonial government refused to register the East African Labour Trade Union
Congress, thus deeming it to be an illegal organization and thereby making
it possible to arrest Singh and Kubai on May 15. In protest, about 7,000 In-
dian and African workers went on strike in Nairobi. They called for “freedom
for the workers and freedom for Africans throughout East Africa,” Singh
and Kubai’s release, and a minimum wage of 100 shillings.112 After a short
trial, Singh was deported to Lokitaung, in northwest Kenya, on the grounds
that he was an “undesirable person . . . who had been conducting himself
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 163

so as to be dangerous to peace, good order and good government” and had

been attempting “to raise discontent and disaffection among His Majesty’s
subjects and inhabitants” of the colony by promoting “feelings of ill-will and
hostility between different classes of population.” In coming to this conclu-
sion, based on the evidence presented by the prosecution and Singh’s cross
examination, Judge Thacker was persuaded that Singh’s insistence on sup-
porting the “good principles” of the outlawed Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini
ya Jesu Kristo, his self-proclaimed “communist” ideology, his writings in the
Daily Chronicle, and his speeches equating colonial policy with “slave law,”
were aimed to “inflame the feelings of Africans” and “calculated to cause
discontent and feelings of hostility against the government” by “inciting
strikes.” Makhan Singh remained in detention for eleven and a half years.
During this time he received several offers to return to India as a free man.
He consistently turned them down, stating, “I have no intension of returning
to India as Kenya is my home and I belong to Kenya.”113
Although the colonial government successfully removed Singh from the
public political realm in Nairobi, the KAU and Congress consolidated its
alliance during this time. Going beyond the rhetoric of solidarity expressed
in the late 1940s, the two organizations presented a joint front of “non-
Europeans” in 1950 by organizing public meetings, adopting joint resolu-
tions, and coordinating the responses of their members in the Legislative
Council to specific policies. In October 1949, Benjamin Manguru, a member
of the KAU executive branch, suggested that a “joint committee of non-
Europeans should be formed by representatives of the EAINC and KAU . . .
[because of the] urgent need of cooperation between non-European
peoples . . . for the attainment of . . . full citizenship . . . and equal economic
and industrial rights and opportunities and trading facilities, especially on the
African side.”114 Although no formal committee was appointed, between 1947
and 1950 the KAU and Congress held joint meetings to discuss and coordi-
nate their political stance on several different issues. In Nairobi, the first
postwar meeting of Africans and Indians, attracting about 6,000 people, was
held in July 1946 to protest against the “ghetto act” passed in South Africa
that had resulted in severe impingement on the property rights of Indians
resident there. Between 1948 and 1952, the KAU and Congress organized
several more joint mass meetings to further discuss the situation in South
Africa. Closer to home, opposition to the principle of communal separation
found resonance in opposition to the communal roll. In December 1950,
as the legislative bill was passed to separate Muslims from the Indian
164 Indians in Kenya

electorate, Nazareth, Amin, Kenyatta, Otiende, Kubai, and Kaggia ad-

dressed a joint meeting to oppose this proposal. This was reiterated in a
joint resolution passed by KAU and the Congress in 1951 that criticized
communal representation as a policy that would “fragment the people of
Kenya” along religious and tribal lines. Instead, the resolution demanded a
common electoral roll that would build a “common consciousness.”115
With the aim of developing this common political consciousness, the Con-
gress consulted the KAU to ascertain its position on the 1947 Mombasa
general strike, a move echoed two years later when Singh approached the
Congress to get its support against the trade union amendments being pro-
posed in the Legislative Council. Five years after the Congress extended
its first invitation to the KAU to attend its annual meeting, the latter recip-
rocated. From 1949 on, Congress invitees attended KAU meetings, espe-
cially in Githunguri, where in the presence of large numbers of Africans
(ranging from 5,000 to 20,000) resolutions regarding political representa-
tion, land, and equality were passed and endorsed by Indian representatives
who made pleas for racial harmony. In April 1951, the KAU called a joint
meeting of the Congress at which Nazareth addressed 20,000 Africans, de-
manding direct elected representation for 5 million Africans in Kenya who,
he stated, were entitled to be included on a common electoral roll. Putting
up a united front against a range of policies being advocated by European
settlers, the KAU and Congress adopted joint resolutions demanding the
resolution of Kikuyu land grievances, the deracialization of schools, and
wages and employment based on merit and ability. Their executive commit-
tees directed their Legislative Council members to come together as
“non-Europeans” in opposing the new bills that required trade unions to
reregister and the Voluntarily Unemployed Persons Ordinance that Makhan
Singh had criticized, rejecting the Europeans’ demand for parity, and ob-
jecting to the governor’s decision to reserve seats for Indian Muslims in the
council.116
The joint meetings and resolutions of the KAU and Congress were pre-
dominantly restricted to very specific policies and issues, although they re-
flected a more general aspiration to freedom and equality. On April 23,
1950, three weeks before Makhan Singh’s arrest, this rhetoric of freedom
found expression in an explicit demand for independence. Constitutional pro-
posals in neighboring Tanganyika that gave parity to African and non-African
members of the colony’s Legislative Council and provided for the election
of representatives to the council on a common roll trigged the protest of
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 165

European settlers there and in Kenya. The April meeting at Kaloleni Hall
in Nairobi was called to discuss the KAU and Congress’s position on the
proposals. Close to 4,000 people were in the hall. According to the orga-
nizers’ estimate, another 15,000 gathered outside, following the discussions
on loudspeakers that had been fitted outside the hall. At the three-hour
meeting, resolutions were passed supporting the proposals. Going beyond
the proximate reason for meeting, the language of the resolutions revealed
a more generalized and growing impatience with the refusal of European
settlers to accommodate African and Indian aspirations. As one resolution
stated, “This meeting warns non-Europeans of East Africa of the grave
danger and threat to their legitimate rights, interests and aspirations” from
the settlers who wanted to “permanently suppress them.” A call to action
was issued, urging non-Europeans to “vigorously take action to safeguard
their future.” In his speech, Mbotela, as vice president of the KAU, noted
that this was the “first gathering” of its kind that had provided the opportu-
nity for “non-European communities” to form “a constructive political unit
to fight and overthrow the unscrupulous domination which European set-
tlers wanted.” He demanded electoral representation for Africans on a
common roll. In his speech, Makhan Singh appealed to his “comrades” to
“unite in a single voice,” since the country was theirs and “no foreign power
had the right to rule it.” He criticized Europeans for claiming that “Afri-
cans and their brothers were not fit for independence,” announcing that Af-
ricans had “the right to claim their freedom.” In a rousing call to his audi-
ence, Singh rhetorically asked his audience if they were “on the defensive
or the offensive.” Taking the offensive, Singh proposed a resolution, sec-
onded by Kubai, that stated, “The real solution of the problem is not this or
that small reform but the complete independence and sovereignty of the
East African territories and establishment in the same of democratic gov-
ernments elected by the people and responsible to the people of these Ter-
ritories only.”117
Singh’s adversary, Patel, was present at this meeting. Not only had he
openly criticized Singh’s radicalism over the last two years, but he had also
tried to steer the Congress away from extending support to the KAU that
would result in “dangerous conflict,” such as the one Singh and Kubai were
advocating. He protested against the resolution Singh proposed, arguing that
they had gathered to discuss the Tanganyika constitution proposals and that
Singh’s addendum was therefore outside the purview of the meeting. Patel
announced that “it was no use considering how they should run before they
166 Indians in Kenya

started to walk.” He was supported by another participant, D. D. Nene, legal

advisor to KAU, who stated that Singh’s was a “communist shot to create
destruction.” Makhan Singh was entirely comfortable with this accusation,
proclaiming, “Yes, I am a Communist. I am fighting for the freedom of all
countries.”118
The KAU leadership was similarly divided over the direction of the
meeting. When Kubai began to refer in his speech to the stolen lands—the
highlands—Eliud Mathu announced that he was “out of order” for discussing
subjects not related to the explicit aim of the meeting, that is, the Tangan-
yika legislation. Ambrose Ofafa, treasurer of the KAU, demanded an expla-
nation for Singh’s reference to “Africans and their brothers,” since the banned
Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini ya Jesu Kristo referred to their inducted mem-
bers as “brothers.” For his part, while Nene opposed Singh’s Communist
leanings, he welcomed talk of freedom, although he too noted that the
meeting had not been called to discuss this. Kenyatta, meanwhile, much like
Singh, spoke directly to the audience, asking them, “Would the European
ever say that Africans were fit to govern themselves?” His question was an-
swered with a resounding “Hapana” (No). Having reached an impasse, the
organizers decided to put the independence resolution to a vote. Patel’s pro-
test was overridden by a show of hands, and Singh’s demand for uhuru sasa
(immediate independence) was adopted in the joint KAU and Congress
resolution. Makhan Singh repeated his call for independence at a meeting
of Africans and Indians at Pumwani Hall in Nairobi days later. Following
suit, the Trade Union Congress demanded complete freedom and indepen-
dence at its May Day meeting. On May 4, after a meeting of Congress and
KAU officials, copies of the resolution were sent to statesmen in Britain,
India, and Kenya, to political organizations in Kenya and Tanganyika, and
to the United Nations. The sense of urgency and contestation at the April
meeting reflected a growing momentum among KAU and Congress mem-
bers and supporters for immediate decolonization and the fear among some
of the leadership of the consequences of such demands, as the colonial state
had hitherto been swift in snuffing out such anticolonial protest.119
Three months later, in his presidential address at the annual Congress
meeting, J. M. Nazareth referred to the Kaloleni Hall meeting as “historic,”
which indeed it was. Over the past five years, through invitations, joint meet-
ings, and resolutions, the KAU and Congress had created an interracial public
political realm where they presented a united front as “non-Europeans,”
taking up not only grievances that they shared, such as the highlands policy,
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 167

but also concerns that were limited to one or the other community, such as
religious electorates and the kipande. This underscored the mutual deci-
sion by African and Indian leaders to acknowledge that the public sphere,
in the realm of elite politics, was an interracial one, and to assert a desire to
build a “common consciousness” in Kenya. The shared experience of negoti-
ating colonial structures that differentiated between subjects on the basis
of race served to lay the foundation for such alliances, creating the oppor-
tunity, as Nazareth put it, for Africans and Indians to join together against
“deep, common hatred of race discrimination which is practiced against
them in their own home.” While such expressions of Afro-Asian solidarity
had come from individual members of the Congress and been adopted in its
resolutions since the 1930s, these had emphasized the expatriate patriotism
of Indians who highlighted their civilizational affiliation with their mother
country, India. In 1950, however, Nazareth positioned himself as a “son of
Kenya,” saying, “I come from that lovely land of Kenya, but in that home-
land of mine, I may not enter European hotels solely because of the colour
of my skin.”120 In making this territorial and generational claim to Kenya,
Nazareth revealed an emergent nationalist consciousness envisioning a self-
governing, democratic future for Indians and Africans in the country. With
the joint political front presented by KAU and Congress members within
and outside the Legislative Council, the interracial workers’ movement led
by Singh and Kubai, and the adoption of a joint resolution demanding im-
mediate independence, this appeared within reach for a brief moment in
1950–1951.

TH E L I M IT S O F I NTE R R AC I A L A L L I A N C E S

Recognizing the potency of this “common consciousness,” in April 1952 the

colonial government that had hitherto permitted the KAU and Congress to
organize joint meetings prevented the organizations from holding public
gatherings where “the condition of Indians and Africans” were to be dis-
cussed.121 The administration, however, overestimated the reach of the rhet-
oric of Afro-Asian solidarity. Despite consistent suggestions from Singh and
Nazareth to form interracial associations and political parties, the KAU, the
Congress, and various trade unions remained monoracial, as its members
and leadership preferred to collaborate on specific issues without merging
institutionally. This was because the public political realm of the 1940s was
a deeply contested one, limiting the scope of interracial alliances.
168 Indians in Kenya

As described in Chapter 2, from the late 1930s onward, the colonial gov-
ernment encouraged the development of African small-scale business and
introduced legislation in 1935 to curb Indian trading activity in the Kikuyu,
Luhya, and Luo reserves in the Central Province, Rift Valley, and Nyanza
Province. By the 1940s, the accumulation of material wealth through trading
enterprises had become intrinsically linked to social prestige and the po-
liticization of such African businessmen on issues involving the country’s de-
velopment and self-determination. In 1945, KAU members W. W. W. Awori
and James Gichuru presented a memorandum to the secretary of state for
colonies emphatically arguing that “every section of African opinion,” in-
cluding the “educated classes,” “men who cannot read and write and whose
lives are normally filled with local or personal affairs,” and the “rich and
poor,” were determined to engage in “the modern system of trade.” Linking
up commerce and the “steady development of civilization,” Awori and
Gichuru argued that Africans, “like other communities[,] would like to
prosper and attain freedom in all walks of life.”122 Toward this end, Oginga
Odinga, a young Luo activist, set up the Luo Thrift and Trading Coopera-
tion in 1947 in Maseno in Nyanza Province, hoping to demonstrate “African
initiative and independence.”123 By the mid-1950s Odinga emerged as a
very important political activist, and he would eventually become inde-
pendent Kenya’s first vice president.
By early 1950, it appeared that very few African retail shops, especially
in Nyeri, were financially viable. Although the government introduced leg-
islation to encourage African business, novice traders faced structural im-
pediments, as close administrative supervision hindered rather than facili-
tated the growth of their ventures. In particular, traders found it difficult
to establish their creditworthiness, and they faced interference from the gov-
ernment that exposed the racial biases of colonial officials. African district
councils were put in charge of issuing licenses for setting up shops, while
the government allocated specific trading centers for such businesses. The
economic and social upward mobility associated with becoming a shop owner
led to a large number of Africans acquiring licenses from their local coun-
cils, as council members did not want to go against the popular tide and
restrict the number of licenses issued in their districts. These Luo and
Kikuyu shopkeepers were allocated land for their businesses by district com-
missioners in the same location. As a result, trading centers had more shops
than clients, thus threatening the profitability of these ventures. Moreover,
the government required new shops to be built of stone—a capital invest-
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 169

ment that the district commissioner of Nyeri calculated would take thirty
years to recover. In the Kamakwa trading station, the administration
prevented African licensees from dividing their allocated plots of land
to diversify their businesses, further hindering their viability.124
Significantly, Indian traders were not placed under such restrictions, as
dukkawallahs could divide their allocations into multiple different ventures.
Not only did colonial policy restrict the scope of African trade physically, it
also circumscribed the performance of novice traders, who were tasked with
establishing their creditworthiness. Traders had to get government approval
to raise loans over a certain limit by proving to be creditworthy, but, as new-
comers to the business of trade, this was difficult to do. Therefore, they were
unable to raise enough capital to buy goods in bulk from wholesale firms.
This forced them to rely on Indian retailers—whose monopoly they had
hoped to break—to purchase goods for their shops in small quantities,
which was always more expensive, especially as the Indian traders added to
the price of purchase transport fees and other overheads to make a profit.
In 1950, Ramogi House in Kisumu, the largest project of the Luo Thrift
and Trading Company, was so heavily in debt to Indians that the district
commissioner feared its liquidation and instead handed it over to Indian
businessmen to run. These African entrepreneurs who were the first to try
their hand at large-scale retail were unable to compete with Indian shop-
keepers. They were caught in a vicious cycle of debt and dependency on
Indian traders, whose economic status they aspired to. In 1948, Africans
employed in commercial activities earned up to 745 shillings a year, while
Indian wholesale and retail proprietors, managerial, and sales employees
earned between 329 and 566 shillings in just one month.125 Their frustra-
tions were articulated in an increasingly racialized discourse on the pres-
ence of Indians in Kenya.
Despite the joint political front of the KAU and Congress, Indian shop-
keepers emerged as the most visible and immediate obstacle to African eco-
nomic advance. Unlike Nairobi, where Indians were employed in a variety
of occupations, Indians in these rural areas were predominantly shopkeepers.
While African traders found them an obstacle in establishing their own small-
scale businesses, farmers hoping to make a profit from the sale of their pro-
duce and customers buying everyday goods from Indians were frustrated
by their encounters with dukkawallahs in the late 1940s. The colonial gov-
ernment had established wartime price controls, import duties, and coupon
rationing, especially on maize meal, sugar, potatoes, rice, butter, and ghee—
170 Indians in Kenya

commodities used by Africans and Indians that were bought from dukkas.
Traders were required to purchase permits for the sale of such items and
mark other goods with fi xed prices. With the end of the war, the govern-
ment gradually began lifting these restrictions, decontrolling par ticular
commodities. Africans complained about their business transactions with
shopkeepers who failed to put price tickets on their goods and overcharged
on items that had not yet been decontrolled, and on bread, soap, sugar,
flour, Indian vegetables, and rice. Taking advantage of the end of coupon
rationing and price controls, traders charged higher prices for perishable
commodities in order to make profits, complaining that their supply was it-
self limited because of “poor packaging” and “rough treatment” in trans-
port. Without the check of rationing on the market, Indian vendors increased
the prices of sugar, wheat, flour, bread, maize, and posho (cornmeal that
was used to make ugali, a popular everyday meal). The prices of other per-
ishable commodities, such as fruits and vegetables, rose as well. In the Nai-
robi wholesale market in 1949, according to one report, Indian stalls sold
vegetables at 5–10 cents higher than African stalls, while European shops
charged 5–10 cents more than Indian shops for potatoes, cauliflower, and
other foods. By 1952 Africans were complaining that although cultivators
of such agricultural produce benefited from such high prices, African con-
sumers in townships with high costs of living could not afford basic food
from Indian stores. This frustration escalated as shopkeepers refused to fi x
the prices of their goods, relying on bargaining as their preferred method
of sale. They also manipulated the fluctuating prices of goods by overcharging
customers, sometimes by up to 30 cents, on staples such as maize, rice, and
posho. In some instances, traders would not sell customers one commodity
unless they agreed to purchase another. After the decontrol of sugar, duk-
kawallahs refused to sell sugar to customers unless they also purchased
posho, even if there was no need for it, thus forcing them to buy sugar on
the black market, typically at another Indian-owned shop and usually at an
artificially increased price.126
In their 1945 memorandum, Awori and Gichuru emphatically stated that
Africans across the colony “watched with anxiety the expansion of Indian
ambitions” in trade and the “unpleasant means by which” they accumulated
material wealth. They noted not only the “invidious competition” between
Indian and African traders that had created an “atmosphere of distrust” but
also the Indians’ “colour prejudice” on display in their “selfishness in trade”
and “exploitation of Africans” in rural areas.127 While Awori and Gichuru
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 171

used their prominence within the KAU to protest the Indian monopoly on
wholesale and retail trade, others found venues of protest in spontaneous
skirmishes, courts of law, and organized boycotts. Indian shopkeepers across
the colony were fined for overcharging African customers, using falsified
weights, and refusing to mark prices on their goods. Such encounters be-
tween shopkeepers and customers sometimes turned violent. In August
1948, Anandji Purshottan Lodhia was arrested and charged with man-
slaughter for firing a gunshot at Ragakazi, a Kavirondo, in the bazaar in
Nakuru when they disagreed over a sale of pieces of timber. A month later,
in September 1948, the government decontrolled the price of potatoes,
which had previously been fi xed at 12 shillings. Indian traders in Nakuru
began to offer only 4 shillings to Kikuyu farmers. In protest, these farmers
boycotted Indian shops in Njoro Market for close to two months. The boy-
cott began in Molo, spreading to Maji Mazuri, Gilgil, Njoro, Elburgon, and
Ravine. By January 1949 it had reached Naivasha (see Map 2). The boycott
was very thorough, and anti-Indian feeling in these areas was so high that
the police had to intervene to prevent picketing. As a Legislative Council
member, Eliud Mathu agreed to discuss the boycott in Molo at a meeting
of Africans and Indians. However, Mathu did not show up. The Africans
who had come to the meeting thus refused to speak on the matter. In the
Fort Hall–Nyeri area, threats of similar boycotts were made although no
action was taken. A boycott started in Limuru, but the intervention of the
district commissioner, Kiambu, ended it swiftly. It took the eventual inter-
vention of Kenyatta, Peter Koinange, and Mathu to call off the Nakuru
boycott, though Kenyatta had initially supported it.128 The political implica-
tions of the boycotts, and especially of KAU members’ explicit and implicit
support of them, were not lost on the Congress leaders, who sent C. B.
Madan to Fort Hall and Nyeri to look into the matter. Madan reported that
the Indian trader had “lost his reputation” and was not trusted in these areas.
He noted an increasing racialization of business, as Africans preferred to
purchase goods from African traders when possible. Madan predicted that
the dukkawallahs would soon be replaced by African petty shopkeepers,
and therefore he suggested that Indians should begin to move out of such
small-scale enterprises and branch out into industrial initiatives by orga-
nizing their capital on a cooperative basis.129
Through the 1940s, leaders within the Congress tried to transcend ra-
cial boundaries in the public political realm but never succeeded in effacing
them. Although the KAU and Congress held joint meetings and together
172 Indians in Kenya

demanded immediate independence, the lived reality of colonial economic

structures that resulted in class and racial boundaries limited the resonance
of such statements. In the late 1940s, Indian workers, the majority of whom
were employed in skilled work, earned between 13 and 250 shillings per
month, while Africans working predominantly as unskilled workers were paid
merely 13 shillings. The inequities of the private and public sectors were
staggering, as Indians earned between 200 and 250 shillings per month in
government employ, in contrast to Africans, who took home on average 50
to 55 shillings.130 Such racialized wage structures created gross inequality
in shared spaces inhabited by Indians and Africans.
As economic frustrations were increasingly vocalized through political or-
ganizations, both the interracial alliance between political groups and
workers and the continuing presence of Indian traders in the colony were
called into question. At the very first Congress meeting attended by KAU
delegates in 1945, James Gichuru had cautiously noted that while the In-
dians and Africans had many problems in common, there were some prob-
lems that were exclusive to the latter, particularly their economic grievances.
As far as he was concerned, “Indians do not come here as missionaries, doc-
tors or teachers, or as administrators but as money coiners.” Therefore, Awori
and Gichuru advocated a ban on Indian immigration as the only way to pre-
vent the “exploitation of Africans by Indians in rural areas.” In September
1948, Kenyatta had initially supported the Kikuyu boycott of Indian shops
as a way of getting “rid” of Indians in their country. At a KAU meeting at
Kaloleni Hall in Nairobi in November he had welcomed the boycott hoping
that it would drive Indians away to “their own country.” He also suggested
launching a similar boycott of European farms to force settlers to leave the
country.131
The KAU’s ambivalence regarding their alliance with the Congress re-
flected a growing criticism of the accumulation of wealth by Indian shop-
keepers and the mistreatment of Africans by Indians in their everyday in-
teractions. Indeed, much as shopkeepers had done, many Indian employers
failed to comply with the government’s policies regarding African labor,
especially in Nairobi. They paid laborers low wages and did not provide
them with rations or adequate housing. Their treatment of African em-
ployees became a point of contention, as the same Africans who worked by
day in Indians’ garages, construction companies, restaurants, homes, and
hotels slept in lorries, food stores, and open verandahs as their employers
refused to give them accommodation or increase their wages so that they
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 173

could afford to rent rooms to live in. Although the Labour Control Depart-
ment of the colonial administration fined such employers when they had
enough evidence, a growing number of letters to the editor indicated that
despite the alliance between the KAU and the Congress, many urban Afri-
cans were skeptical about Indians’ “futile” promises. As Kenyatta put it,
“Indians came to Kenya in the early days as beggars and then made money
out of Africans. When they were beggars they used to behave well to the
Africans . . . today, now that Indians had become rich they treated Africans
like dogs.” James Beauttah, Tom Mbotela, and George arap Katam, president
of the Kalenjin Union, echoed this sentiment at public meetings, including
those of the Congress, criticizing Indians for paying “lip service” to claims of
friendship and cooperating with Africans “only in word,” pointing out that
Indians had come to the colony “poor” but amassed wealth “from African soil
and through African hands.” Alluding to the Swahili proverb in their public
speeches, Wengi huwa kama paka urafiki wa mradi (Many people are like
cats befriending a mouse, extending friendship to make a profit), they
highlighted the extent to which they distrusted Indian political overtures,
believing Congress leaders’ expressions of solidarity to be disingenuous.132
Economic concerns led to the racialization of political discourse in the
KAU and East African Trade Union Congress. KAU members questioned
their alliance with the Congress and urged leaders to restrict the organiza-
tion’s meetings to Africans only, a demand that was echoed in the Nairobi
branch of the African Workers Federation regarding Singh’s involvement
in the Trade Union Congress. In protest of the same, Meshak Ndisi, gen-
eral secretary of the Nairobi-based Allied and Transport Union, resigned
from his post and was subsequently appointed as a representative on the
Labour Advisory Board by the governor before he was awarded a fellow-
ship to study at Oxford. Tom Mbotela also distanced himself from Singh
and his Trade Union Congress, referring to it as “the most ruinous organi-
zation I have ever come across in this country.” As a member of the Nairobi
African Advisory Council, Mbotela was determined to “remove old unde-
sirable” people from the leadership of trade unions, hoping to assume the
position himself. In January 1952, Indian speakers were shouted down at a
joint Indian and African Muslim meeting in Kaloleni Hall. Reflecting an
increasingly racialized political consciousness, African speakers announced
that the problems of “Africans of all creeds [who were] brothers” were
“common.” A common racially defined brotherhood served to unite Afri-
cans in the “duty to their country,” and they urged Indians not to meddle
174 Indians in Kenya

in “African Affairs.”133 While within and outside the KAU, much like the
Indians, Africans disagreed over strategies of protest, contested leadership
claims, and expressed a diversity of economic aspirations, rhetorically a con-
sensus emerged about the right of Africans as first belongers to stake eco-
nomic, political, and territorial claims in Kenya. This discourse of indige-
neity rendered Indians permanent immigrants.
In 1948 Apa Pant had noted that the Kikuyu he met in Nairobi and the
reserves were increasingly vocal about Indians who “treated Africans like
cattle” and took advantage of their “ignorance” in their shops even though
“this is not their land.” Although neither the KAU nor the trade unions closed
their doors to Indians, their alliance was cautious and limited to specific
issues, revealing an ambivalence about building a “common consciousness.”
A letter to the editor in Habari explained why some Africans were willing
to collaborate politically despite the economic structures that remained in
favor of the Indians: “Although Indians practice black marketeering . . . I
do not think they are our major opponents in this land of conflicts. . . . If
the Indians are willing to join hands with us in the struggle to achieve our
political aspirations we would be foolish to refuse such cooperation.”134 The
KAU therefore joined the Congress in putting up a united front politi-
cally—but this cooperation was conditional. At a KAU meeting in April
1951 in Nairobi, Kenyatta announced that Africans wanted Indian friend-
ship to be shown in deeds, not words, and reminded the Indians present that
they were “guests” in Kenya who were welcome, but Africans would not tol-
erate seeing their country become “engulfed” by them. In deliberately using
the term “guest” and positioning Indians as auxiliaries, Kenyatta invoked
Nehru’s reference to his compatriots in Africa in 1947 in a public message in
which the Indian prime minister stated, “Indians who live in Africa must
remember that they are guests of the Africans.”135 Both Nehru and Kenyatta
cast Indians as outsiders in Kenya, juxtaposing their diasporic origins with
the indigeneity of Africans, limiting their right to belong, and making it pe-
ripheral to Africans’ claims and dependent on African acceptance.
Across the political spectrum, Indians were united in not seeing them-
selves as guests. Nazareth, Makhan Singh, Patel, and Puri objected to Ne-
hru’s repeated use of the word “guest,” since it suggested that Indians were
“temporary sojourners” and “in certain eventualities Indians might have to
go back . . . to India.” From the mid-1940s on, in their public speeches and
private correspondence, they emphasized their permanence in Kenya, em-
phatically rejecting the trope of “guests” used by Kenyatta and Nehru and
 Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 175

arguing that “guests do not stay with hosts for generations and do not fight
for rights which can be claimed only by permanent inhabitants of the place.”136
In so doing, Congress leaders asserted their territorial and generational claim
to racial equality and political freedom in Kenya in the present moment with
the aim of securing the same for their future. The future, however, was un-
certain and contested.
U. K. Oza and Makhan Singh had imagined postcolonial Kenya as a pre-
dominantly African nation-state based on the first right that Africans had
to the country as original belongers and by the weight of numbers. In 1927
Oza acknowledged that the Congress’s support for complete independence
and democratic self-governance necessarily meant that Indians should not
demand or expect any seats to be reserved for them in the Legislative
Council. As he put it, “the only democracy that can exist in Kenya must be
an African democracy,” a position affirmed by Makhan Singh in the 1940s.
For both, racial boundaries would be effaced through the development of
a common consciousness through a national language, Kiswahili, putting up
a united political front across class and race, and making Kenya “a free, live-
able home.” In thus developing a “Kenyan spirit,” Oza believed, Indians
would “weld themselves together into a new Kenya race” and Africans
would “come to regard the immigrants as [their] friends . . . who after a gen-
eration would be as much Africans as [they].”137 In this vein, in 1950 Jas-
want Singh, a member of the executive committee of the Congress, sug-
gested that the term “Kenyan” or “East African” be used for Indians who
were permanently resident in East Africa, thus moving to sever the territo-
rial and racial affiliations of the diaspora with its civilizational homeland
in the ser vice of its Kenyan homeland.
However, the diasporic consciousness of Indians in Kenya was shaped by
the circulation of people and ideas across the Indian Ocean, and several
members of the Congress emphasized the continuing importance of their
connection with India. Devi Dass Puri characterized the diaspora as a
“modern migratory movement” and noted that assimilation with the “in-
digenous” population did not mean that they were “complete foreigners
and strangers to all that was ‘Indian.’ ”138 Although in his address as Con-
gress president in 1948 Puri referred to Kenya, not India, as his homeland,
being Indian in Kenya meant mediating racial categories at the structural
and discursive levels, which emphasized the civilizational cleavages be-
tween Africans and Indians rooted in different geographical pasts and
present economic racial inequalities.
176 Indians in Kenya

Beyond the rhetorical possibilities of using these Indian Ocean connec-

tions in local political discourse, the civilizational and diasporic origins of
Indians marked them as materially better off than Africans in Kenya. On the
other hand, while the KAU welcomed strategic alliances with the Congress
on specific issues, for many Africans the critique of colonial rule was trig-
gered by racially discriminatory policies regarding land and representation.
In staking their claim to political and economic equality, leaders of the
KAU emphasized the indigenous rights of Africans, thus highlighting their
historical and racial difference from immigrants based on their geograph-
ical origins. For Nazareth, Kenya was the shared homeland of Indians and
Africans, and both groups had equal right to political representation.
Although he took a lead in collaborating with the KAU, Nazareth defined
Kenyan nationhood as a multiracial one based on a “common consciousness.”
This nationalist consciousness, he hoped, would emerge from interracial po-
litical parties based on ideological affiliations. Characterizing contempo-
rary African politics as “a single, racial block held together by the single
aim of securing freedom and equality,” he warned in 1950 that “if Africans
secure power as a single racial block before political parties cutting across
racial frontier have begun to be formed then the outlook for the minorities
is very bleak indeed.”139 These early articulations of Kenyan nationhood
that was imagined along competing definitions of indigeneity and multira-
cialism were consolidated over the next decade.
 FOUR

R
Between Rebellion and Suppression

British prime minister Harold Macmillan announced

I N F E B R U A RY 19 6 0 ,
in the South African parliament, “The wind of change is blowing through
this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national conscious-
ness is a political fact.”1 In Kenya, the storm that caused this wind had erupted
almost a decade earlier, in an armed rebellion that came to be known as
“Mau Mau.” Announcing itself in the form of oaths taken primarily by the
Kikuyu that committed rebels to unity, secrecy, and violent resistance, the
main demand of the Mau Mau was the return of what they claimed was
Kikuyu ancestral land in the highlands. The urban militancy of postwar labor
movements combined with a moral crisis over land and authority in the rural
reserves, leading to widespread support of the rebellion among the Kikuyu,
especially in the Central and Rift Valley Provinces. In response, the gov-
ernment arrested officials of the Kenya African Union, including Jomo
Kenyatta, launched a military campaign against the rebels that pushed them
into a guerrilla war, and declared a state of emergency in 1952 that lasted
eight years. The Mau Mau rebellion was dismissed by colonial administrators
as an illegitimate, atavistic, tribal expression of the Kikuyu’s difficult transi-
tion to modernity in which colonial rule was the midwife.
There is little historiographical consensus on the nature of the confl ict,
the numbers of people involved, and the exact connection between oathing,
the KAU, and the guerrilla war that broke out in 1952. In the aftermath of
the Second World War, as the colonial state attempted to increase the agri-
cultural productivity of the highlands, European settlers mechanized their
farms and introduced new labor contracts clearly stating that squatters had

177
178 Indians in Kenya

no ownership rights over the land that they had been cultivating for genera-
tions. Approximately 4,000 Kikuyu squatters displaced under these circum-
stances in 1943 were resettled in Olenguruone in the Rift Valley, a move
that evoked criticism among the Masai, who claimed the area as their land.
It was in this context that Kikuyu squatters articulated their grievances in
a discourse about their stolen land, which had been lost three times: to the
Kiambu before the First World War when they migrated to the Rift Valley;
to Europeans in the highlands, from which they had been kicked out of by
the settlers in the 1940s; and in the present day to the Masai in the Rift
Valley. At Olenguruone, this was voiced in the form of a customary oath of
Kikuyu solidarity, which developed a new significance as a politicized oath
of resistance to restore “customary” Kikuyu proprietary rights.2
Simultaneously, in the realm of organized, institutional politics, the KAU
under the leadership of James Gichuru, Tom Mbotela, and Kenyatta failed
to consolidate into a singular nationalist movement Africans’ inchoate, and
often competing, expressions of social and economic grievances. As argued
by John Lonsdale, at best they articulated a form of “cultural nationalism”
in political discourse that mediated between Kikuyu ethnic consciousness
and anticolonial protest.3 Far from being successful, even this politics was
deeply contested. By 1952, six Africans nominated by the governor were in-
cluded in the Legislative Council. They used their position to demand an
increase in the numbers of African representatives and greater involvement
in governance. As president of the KAU, Kenyatta used constitutional
methods such as memoranda and newspapers to demand land and political
reform from the government and through schools in Githunguri moved ed-
ucational initiatives away from European missionaries and government over-
sight. On the heels of the achievements of the labor union strikes, by 1951
trade union leaders such as Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia were growing
increasingly impatient with the impotence of Kenyatta’s leadership and
steered the Nairobi branch of the KAU away from the older generation, rep-
resenting the interests of rural elites, to the concerns of urban workers and
squatters. Kenyatta and Mbotela found the political activism of Makhan
Singh and his Labour Trade Union of East Africa and East African Trade
Union Congress to be too radical. Under their leadership, in May 1950, the
KAU dissociated itself from the Civic Day boycott organized by Singh and
Kubai. They also refused to join or support the workers’ strike that broke
out after Singh and Kubai’s arrest. Mbotela publicly criticized African workers
for supporting Singh, whose extremism had “brought trouble to many,” and
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 179

expressed relief when he was detained. Singh’s comrades, Kaggia and Kubai,
formed a group within the KAU—the Study Circle—that embraced the rad-
icalism of urban protest. Evicted squatters and unmarried, landless young
men in the reserves began to reject the authority of the Kikuyu elders and
expressed their frustrations through Kikuyu oaths as those in Olenguruone
had been doing. These oaths, considered secret and binding, were at the
center of the Mau Mau rebellion. The rebels used the oaths to mobilize the
younger generation of Kikuyu into violent confrontations. While members of
the Study Circle welcomed the potency of this new iteration of Kikuyu cus-
toms, Kenyatta and Mbotela demurred from both the militancy of the trade
union movement and the radicalism of the oaths. They publicly criticized the
Mau Mau for dividing the Kikuyu at a time when unity was needed, and they
joined the colonial administration in denouncing the rebels as criminals. As
Kenyatta put it, “KAU is not a fighting union that uses fists and weapons.” 4
The postcolonial state in Kenya led by Kenyatta attempted to erase from
national memory the violent history of the Mau Mau rebellion and its sup-
pression. However, since the 1970s, historical scholarship has placed this at
the center of narratives on late 1940s–1950s Kenya. The demands, organi-
zation, and political aspirations of the forest fighters have been contested in
these works, as have the extent of the violence unleashed on the Kikuyu by
the colonial state in putting down the rebellion and the political maneuvers
of those Africans who fought on the British side of the war against the guer-
rillas in the Legislative Council and in the forests. 5 While their main
grievance was land scarcity, the rebels attacked structures of colonial
rule, targeting European settlers who had usurped the highlands, and tribal
chiefs. The murder of Senior Chief Waruhiu of Kiambu district on October
9, 1952, highlighted the extent to which chiefs had been delegitimized in
the eyes of the Mau Mau for reneging on their obligation to provide land to
the landless and for their outspoken support of the colonial administration
to which they owed their existence. Governor Evelyn Baring declared a state
of emergency in Kenya ten days later, arresting 180 African leaders including
Kenyatta, whom he thought was the leader of the Mau Mau, and banning
the KAU some months later. As the line between rebel and nonrebel (re-
ferred to as “loyalist” by the colonial administration) became stark, Mbotela,
who publicly criticized the Mau Mau, was found murdered soon after being
appointed to the Nairobi City Council by Baring.
Evidently, Mau Mau was both an anticolonial rebellion and a civil war,
concerned as it was with the issues of colonial land policy, Kikuyu customary
180 Indians in Kenya

obligations, authority, and generational conflict. The formation of the Kikuyu

Home Guard under government auspices to fight the Mau Mau in the for-
ests further positioned Kikuyu against Kikuyu. In order to “break” what it
believed was the binding and secret first oath of unity and weed out the
“passive wing” that provided forest fighters with food, shelter, and ammu-
nition, the government set up a pipeline of detention camps in which thou-
sands of suspects were detained and screened. Those who “confessed” to
taking the oath were “rehabilitated” as the state believed that Mau Mau in-
ductees who broke the oath of secrecy by admitting to have taken it could
be cured of the “disease.” It was in these camps that brutal violence was
perpetrated by the Home Guard to extract forced “confessions” from de-
tainees. The rebels targeted the Home Guard, on one occasion killing ninety-
seven “loyalists” in Lari on a single night. Recent studies of the Mau Mau
and emergency have focused on the violence of the counterinsurgency, while
others have highlighted the extent to which “loyalists” and other non-Kikuyu
communities in Kenya negotiated the social and political convulsions of the
decade before independence.
The rich historiographical debates and empirical details revealed in this
literature do not consider the engagement of Indians with the Mau Mau and
the emergency or their mediation of rebels and loyalists in the political realm.
The emergency came at a time when the alliance between the East African
Indian National Congress and KAU was at its zenith. As KAU members were
arrested, Congress leaders were confronted with the political implications
of the alliance, as the extent of their support for African politics was tested
in this time of crisis. On the other hand, within the Legislative Council,
the colonial state counted on the support of members in putting down the
rebellion. Indian politicians had to publicly choose between positioning
themselves as loyalists on the side of the government or explicitly distancing
themselves from the colonial administration by remaining steadfast allies
of the KAU and defending its detained leaders.
Beyond the realm of institutional politics, the everyday interactions of or-
dinary Indians and Africans were shaped by the rebellion and counterin-
surgency. Geographically, a disproportionately high concentration of Indians
lived in Nairobi, where about 50 percent of all Indians resided, and the main
towns in the Rift Valley, Nyanza Province, and the Central Province, where
about 25 percent lived.6 Evicted squatters migrated either to African reserves
in the Central Province or to the Rift Valley. Many others went to Nairobi
in search of jobs, where the Indian population rose from approximately
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 181

42,000 in 1948 to 86,500 in 1962, constituting nearly 35 percent of the city’s

population.
The colonial capital was a hotbed of political activity and early Mau Mau
raids, and it was the focus, initially, of the government’s efforts to put down
the rebellion. In an attempt to weed out all Mau Mau elements from Nai-
robi, the government conducted two major sweeps— Operation Jock Scott
in 1952 and Operation Anvil in 1954—which pushed the rebellion out of
Nairobi and its neighboring reserves north into the forests of the Aberdare
and Mt. Kenya ranges in the Rift Valley and the Central Province. There
were fewer Indians living in this area, but those settled included sawmill
owners who employed African workers and dukkawallahs whose main cli-
entele was African. About 8,000 Indians lived in small towns in the foot-
hills of the mountain ranges, including Nakuru, Nanyuki, Meru, Gilgil, and
Karatina, where the war between the rebels and the government took place
(see Map 2).7 The sweeps in Nairobi and the guerrilla war brought Indians
into direct confrontation with forest fighters and the colonial machinery
of the counterinsurgency. Political orientation, occupational preoccupa-
tions, and geographical location shaped Indian engagement with the fighters,
detainees, suspects, and state agents, resulting in a diversity of public, inti-
mate, and discursive reactions. Although the political options appeared
stark, much like ordinary Africans entangled in the confrontation between
forest fighters and the colonial state, Indians occupied a space between rebel
and loyalist, simultaneously involved in supporting and suppressing the
Mau Mau.

C R I T I C I Z I N G T H E E M E R G E N C Y, D E F E N D I N G C I V I L L I B E RT I E S

In 1950, J. M. Nazareth had taken the lead in claiming Kenya as his home-
land and facilitating the alliance between the Congress and the KAU, as
discussed in Chapter 3. It was, however, another Goan, Pio Gama Pinto,
who established a personal relationship with several members of the KAU.
Pinto was born in Nairobi in 1927 and educated in India, where he took an
active part in the formation of the Goa National Congress. He returned to
Kenya in 1949, escaping an arrest warrant issued by the Portuguese colo-
nial authorities in Goa. In Nairobi he joined the Congress, became close
friends with the leaders of the KAU, and took over the editorship of the Daily
Chronicle, making it the main Indian vehicle for anticolonial expression in
the early 1950s. Pinto persuaded its owner, another Congress member, D. K.
182 Indians in Kenya

Sharda, to print pamphlets in various vernacular languages, including Bildad

Kaggia’s Inoro ria Gikuyu. He also worked for the All India Radio as its
East African correspondent, using his Swahili programs to criticize the
government, so much so that the colonial administration considered them a
“veiled incitement to colour war” because of their “consistent denigration of
British rule in Africa.” Pinto joined Kaggia and Kubai in the KAU’s Study
Circle.8 Despite severe criticism from some KAU members who wanted to
keep it exclusively African, Pinto remained instrumental in its organization
and administration, and invited its members to hold meetings in the Con-
gress office in Nairobi in early 1952. He also introduced Joseph Zuzarte
Murumbi to the Kenya Study Group. Born in 1911 to a Goan father and
Masai mother, Murumbi spent sixteen years in India and returned to
Kenya in 1933 at the age of twenty-two. He was acting general secretary of
the KAU in 1952 and later became independent Kenya’s second vice presi-
dent. Pinto and Murumbi worked closely with another Goan, Fitz de Souza,
a Bombay-born lawyer in his early twenties who had returned from England
to Kenya in 1952. After Kenyatta was arrested, Murumbi, Pinto, and Legis-
lative Council members W. W. W. Awori and Walter Odede tried to fill the
political vacuum created by the banning of the KAU. They worked toward
establishing a new organization, possibly named the African National Con-
gress of Kenya, along with Sharda and other Congress leaders. Together
they drafted various memoranda dealing with African land grievances,
which they sent to the Colonial Office. When a Royal Commission on Land
was set up to enquire into the land situation, there was no one to give evi-
dence on behalf of Africans, as KAU leaders were in detention. Pinto and
de Souza put together a 200-page memorandum based on the statements
Pinto took from Kikuyu elders in the Central Province. Seven Africans
signed this petition, all of whom were subsequently arrested and never
heard from again.9
In their memoirs published in the late 1960s, Bildad Kaggia and Oginga
Odinga acknowledge Pinto’s political importance during this time. For them,
Pinto was the only Indian who successfully transcended the racial boundary
between Africans and Indians in the political realm. As Odinga put it,
“Anyone who met Pio soon forgot his pigmentation.” Kaggia recalled that
Pinto was “the only non-African who had the confidence of the people . . .
who was not afraid to be seen with KAU leaders . . . [and] identify himself
with KAU or militant African politics.”10 While Pinto was the main liaison
between the Congress and KAU, he was not the only one. The late 1940s
and early 1950s were a period of transition for the Congress on several levels.
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 183

As described in Chapter 3, Muslims who demurred at the interracial, in-

creasingly anticolonial politics of the Congress joined the Central Muslim
Association and succeeded in reserving two seats for Indian Muslims on
the Legislative Council. Recognizing the colony-specific purview of its po-
litical activities—and, perhaps, anticipating the emergence of a territori-
ally defined nation-state much like the ones in its members’ homeland across
the Indian Ocean—the East African Indian National Congress was renamed
the Kenya Indian Congress in 1952, staking a claim to a future nation in
which they would represent Kenya’s diasporic racial minority.11 Beyond no-
menclature, Congress leadership also changed hands. Ambalal Bhailal Patel
retired from politics in 1956, and while he remained a vocal representative
of Indians within the Legislative Council till then, a new generation of
Kenya-born Indians rose to prominence in the early 1950s. These included
C. B. Madan and Chanan Singh, both Punjabi Hindus who were elected to
the Legislative Council between 1948 and 1961; S. G. Amin, the Gujarati
Muslim who had remained within the Congress, becoming its president
during the Hindu-Muslim split of the late 1940s, and who was also a
member of the Legislative Council; Jaswant Singh, a Punjabi Sikh; A. R.
Kapila and D. V. Kapila, both Punjabi Hindus; and four Goan Christians,
J. M. Nazareth, Fitz de Souza, Pio Gama Pinto, and Eddie Pereira.
Although the KAU distanced itself from the Mau Mau, referring to the
rebels as “criminals,” these younger members of the Congress publicly crit-
icized the violence of the emergency and deliberately acknowledged land
hunger, rather than atavism, as the cause of the rebellion. Juxtaposing the
undemocratic principles of the emergency to the rebels’ desire for economic
freedom, at the annual meeting of the Congress in Nairobi Devi Dass Puri
in his presidential address criticized the government for having armed it-
self with “extraordinary powers . . . [that were] in opposition to the princi-
ples of British law and democracy,” freedom, and justice. The Congress
subsequently issued a public statement accusing the colonial administra-
tion of using the Mau Mau as an “excuse” to suspend “civil liberties” in
Kenya. In particular, it objected to its “policy of negation” in banning the
KAU, restricting public meetings, muzzling the press, and detaining citizens
without trial. As a lawyer, Amin pointed out that the last was a violation of
British jurisprudence. He also criticized the administration for putting “a
whole generation of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru” through a “fiery ordeal.” The
enormous amounts of money spent in doing this, he believed, should have
been spent instead on education and development in African reserves. In
press statements and public speeches, the Congress identified “land
184 Indians in Kenya

hunger” as the “real cause” of the turmoil and singled out the “sacrosanct
inviolability of the white highlands” as a “festering sore” that underscored
the “glaring inequalities and injustices” of colonial rule. Pulling the veil off
the racially discriminatory colonial land policy in Kenya, it stated that the
Mau Mau agitation was triggered by Africans’ “moral and psychological”
concerns. The government’s use of the “force of arms” in suppressing the
rebellion only drove the agitation “underground” and thus did not resolve
the problem.12 In so doing, the Congress leadership not only made good on
their political alliance with the KAU by criticizing the arrest of its mem-
bers but also extended their ideological support to the forest fighters by de-
fending their demand for land.
Furthermore, the Congress directly connected the Mau Mau uprising
with nationalist concerns, as it passed resolutions condemning land policy
that denied “the right, solely because he is an African, of owning land in part
of the only country he can call his own.” While its members emphasized the
indigeneity of Africans whose claims of belonging were limited to one
country, Kenya, the transnational resonance of Indians’ own diasporic reality
shaped their political consciousness and rhetoric. For some members of the
Congress, the Mau Mau signaled the inevitability of decolonization. In a
press statement issued a month into the emergency, the Congress announced,
“The direction of liberation and democracy must be speeded up. . . . For Asia
and Africa are on the March and the days of Imperialism and Colonialism
and of race superiority complex are numbered.”13 In the spirit of India’s own
“march” and commitment to anticolonialism, India’s high commissioner, Apa
Pant, had spent four years in Kenya following Jawaharlal Nehru’s instruction
to “befriend Africans above all.” His office had developed very close relation-
ships with the arrested KAU leaders, which continued despite Governor
Mitchell’s unsuccessful attempt to declare Pant persona non grata in 1950.14
Much as it had for the Congress, the Mau Mau and ensuing emergency
gave Pant the opportunity to move beyond rhetorical support of African in-
dependence. His personal reaction and that of the Indian staff in his office
reflected a take on the situation similar to that of the Congress. Shortly after
the emergency was declared, Pant was made a Kikuyu elder at a secret cer-
emony attended by twelve elders, with Chief Koinange presiding. Pinto com-
municated the invitation to Pant and then brought the high commissioner
to a secret, secluded spot in the Aberdare forest where the ceremony was
held.15 With this, Pant signaled India’s continuing friendship with Africans.
Chief Koinange was subsequently detained. Pant considered KAU leaders,
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 185

especially those who had been arrested, to be nationalists, and he believed

that the Mau Mau’s focus on unity and land was an articulation of that na-
tionalism which was being violently suppressed by the colonial state. Rather
than delegitimize the rebels by focusing on the “atavism” of the oaths, Pant
believed that the movement made “deliberate use of practices in order to
create the most powerful binding force on the Kikuyu clan.” As far as he
was concerned, the panegyrics about Kikuyu customs that were being sung
by leaders such as Kenyatta did not indicate either “atavism” or “reversion”
but rather were being used as a method of creating “self-confidence and
faith” among the Kikuyu “to fight the foe who had destroyed these very
things.” Several months before the emergency, Pant’s office developed a de-
tailed memorandum which was a scathing critique of the “reign of terror”
that M. D. Shahane, information officer at the High Commission, believed
the colonial government had unleashed on Africans by subjecting them to
“savage sentences.” Over the next few months in their correspondence with
the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, Pant and Shahane blamed Euro-
peans for being the first movers in the cycle of violence that had broken out
in the colony, suggesting that the European farmers’ “premeditated plan”
had provoked Africans, who “haphazardly” put into action a course of “arson
and murder” as “an inevitable reaction” to their repression. They reached
this conclusion based on tours of Indian officials in the Central Province.16
In November 1952, Pant’s first secretary, Mohammed Altour Rahman,
visited Kikuyu reserves to study the situation and reported the “large scale
existence of organizations mostly on a village basis” that were preparing to
“defend themselves” against the outrages of the government. Krishna Kumar,
an emissary from India, also visited the reserves and met more than 50,000
Africans at individual and mass gatherings.17 He attended twenty-five
meetings organized by the KAU. At the request of thirty self-identified Mau
Mau leaders, he met several oath takers at a remote point in the forest near
Kigumo village in the Central Province. They told him that the Mau Mau
murders were necessary “revenge” against informants who had terrorized
them, joined the oppressors, confiscated their cattle, and raped their women.
Significantly, they pointed out that Kenyatta had not given the Mau Mau any
tactical guidance, although they considered him the greatest protagonist
of African freedom.
The rhetorical overtures and institutional networks of the late 1940s that
brought together KAU political activists, the Congress, and the Indian High
Commission survived into the emergency and became an important source
186 Indians in Kenya

of information for KAU detainees, the Congress, the Indian government,

and African members of the Legislative Council as they dealt with the state’s
excesses. The Indian High Commission began to collect details on the gov-
ernment’s “efforts and propaganda” in putting down the rebellion, high-
lighting those that were “of a terrorist nature.” Kumar met with Kenyatta’s
sister, in whose conservative estimation 25,000 Africans had been detained
and at least 150 shot dead or “drowned in cold water” between October and
December 1952. Awori told Pant that security forces were offering 5 shil-
lings per head for killing African “terrorists,” leading to the murder of more
than 200 Africans each week. He also learned about atrocities being com-
mitted in detention camps from a European farmer working in the Kenya
Police Reserves (KPR) at the Athi River camp and discovered that at Ba-
hati in Nairobi, more than seventy Africans had been tied to a tree and
burned to death over a slow fire; 300 more had been castrated. Based on
the reports he collected, Pant brought the attention of the Indian govern-
ment to the complicity of the colonial administration in all of this. He
calculated that as of November 1952, the Mau Mau had killed about sixty
Africans, of whom he believed that at least twenty were murdered as a result
of personal feuds. However, he concluded that the violence of the colonial
government in trying to suppress the Mau Mau had been “colossal.” He re-
ferred to “mass murders” that the government had perpetrated, and he
warned that the “ ‘emergency’ had caused a cycle of murder, counter-murder,
anger, and counter-anger.”18 Based on this information, the Indian govern-
ment was emphatic that the colonial state was the main perpetrator of vio-
lence in Kenya. Sixty years later, the British government admitted to this
when it settled a reparation suit in favor of Mau Mau detainees in July 2013.19
Nehru had sent Pant to Kenya with the explicit instruction to show Afri-
cans “the contribution India . . . can make culturally, politically and econom-
ically to the welfare of countries bordering the Indian Ocean.” In December
1952 the commissioner of police was so worried about the influence of India
and Indians in Kenya that he proposed to Baring that the administration
take the lead in “developing responsible African politics divorced from Nai-
robi” and India. Indeed, the emergency gave Nehru, the emergent leader
of Afro-Asian solidarity, the opportunity to fulfill his ambition by exposing
the human rights atrocities being committed by the government in the name
of colonialism. Although on their tour of the colony Pant and Kumar spoke
about nonviolent protest in their meetings with Mau Mau and KAU mem-
bers, the Indian government publicly highlighted the excesses of the colo-
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 187

nial state, rather than lay too much emphasis on Mau Mau’s violence. The
Indian Ministry of External Affairs directed the All India Radio, whose
audience in Kenya consisted mostly of Indians, to emphasize “the great
repression and suppression of the Africans.” It galvanized the Indian press,
“informally” releasing to them the numbers of African deaths Pant had
passed on. Editors and journalists in India strongly denounced the Kenyan
government’s use of “counter terrorism” to “overawe [the Africans] by exhi-
bitions of armed might.” Furthermore, they accused the colonial adminis-
tration of “willfully exaggerating” conspiracies about the Mau Mau and
using it as a pretext to curb the “political and economic aspirations” of
Africans by cheating them of their land and citizenship rights.20
While Pant had concluded that Mau Mau violence was a self-defensive
reaction to the violence of the settlers and colonial government, Nehru de-
liberately refrained from publicly criticizing the rebels for their use of force,
since “you do not teach anyone when his house is on fire.” Despite their vio-
lent methods, Nehru was determined to stand by Africans, stating that it
was “the only way I can serve them.” At a speech delivered in Amritsar in
April 1953 commemorating the 1919 Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, Nehru
announced that Indian sympathies were entirely with Africans “in their
struggle against exploitation, repression and colonialism.” Much like Pant,
Nehru considered Mau Mau to be an expression of anticolonial nationalism.
Pointing to the emergency measures, he also noted the “wholesale repres-
sion of Africans who were being denied fundamental human rights” in Kenya.
Colonial officials emphatically objected to Nehru’s “violent and inflamma-
tory” utterances. Oliver Lyttelton, secretary of state for colonies, met pri-
vately with Nehru to persuade him that similar emergency measures in Ma-
laya just a few years earlier had won “the minds of the people.” Nehru,
however, remained unconvinced. The colonial secretary concluded that
Nehru was “someone in whom the term Colonial or Colonialism produces
a pathological and not an intellectual reaction.” For his part, the Indian prime
minister found Lyttelton “exceedingly narrow minded and vengeful,” and
entirely unsuited to dealing with Africa.21 It was evident from Lyttelton’s
meeting with Nehru that beyond expressions of solidarity—not unimportant
in themselves—there was a limit to the impact of diplomatic aide-mémoires
and press conferences, especially since Britain was still smarting from the
loss of the jewel in its crown and was not going to let India dictate its impe-
rial strategies. Nehru did, however, get the opportunity to provide some tan-
gible support to those caught up in the emergency. After Kenyatta’s arrest,
188 Indians in Kenya

Pinto, Awori, and Murumbi asked the Indian High Commission for help in
putting together a legal defense team for his trial at Kapenguria. In response,
Nehru sent an Indian lawyer and former diplomat, Dewan Chamanlal, to
Kenya.22
The new members active within the Congress, including Nazareth, K. D.
Travadi, A. R. Kapila, Chanan Singh, and Madan, were all lawyers who had
qualified in England and returned to Kenya in the 1940s. The first law school
in East Africa was established in 1961, which meant that until that point
aspiring lawyers had to go overseas for training. As a result, very few Afri-
cans had the opportunity to qualify as lawyers, but many Indians did be-
cause of their material wealth, educational access, and mobility across the
Indian Ocean. In 1948, sixty-one Indians, trained either in England or in
India, were practicing law in Kenya.23 From the 1930s onward, these law-
yers had taken up cases to settle business and property disputes between
Indians and also to defend members of their community who were tried for
a variety of reasons, including political ones such as sedition, libel, and de-
portation. Chanan Singh, Amin, de Souza, and Madan had been advocates
for Makhan Singh in the 1940s and 1950s, and Amin had defended Harry
Thuku in 1933, a few years after his release, against the accusation from a
younger trade unionist, Jesse Kariuki, who claimed that Thuku was using
the Kikuyu Central Association’s money for private purposes. Kapila de-
fended journalists and publishers Haroun Ahmed, Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi,
and D. K. Sharda, who were charged with sedition. He also joined the legal
defense team for Makhan Singh, Kariuki, and Kubai after their arrest. In
December 1952 Pant’s Kikuyu house servant was arrested and detained for
possessing “subversive” literature. Within hours he was visited by Indian
lawyers who demanded his release.24 The practice of law was closely con-
nected to politics, especially for Indian lawyers in Nairobi. This legal po-
litical activism came in handy during the emergency.
Baring had intimated to the Indian members of the Kenya Bar Associa-
tion that any attempt to defend Mau Mau detainees would be “looked upon
with disfavor.” Jaswant Singh, de Souza, and Kapila ignored this warning.
They joined Chamanlal’s legal team, along with two lawyers from Jamaica
and Nigeria. Chamanlal also created a panel of nine Indians, including Con-
gress members Chanan Singh, Amin, Arvind Jamidar, and Travadi, to de-
fend less well-known detainees, often completely free of charge. Since Ke-
nyatta was defended by an Indian legal team that was financed by Indian
residents of Kenya, the colonial administration feared that the trial was fast
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 189

becoming one between “Coloured Nationalism” and “White Imperialism.”25

Although the lawyers did not condone the violence perpetrated by the Mau
Mau, especially since they believed that India’s own independence had come
about through Gandhian nonviolent protest, they supported the rebels’ de-
mand for land and criticized the government’s violent counterinsurgency at
Congress meetings and within the courts.26 They were among the first to
discover, during their probing of police witnesses, the “horrifying . . . atroc-
ities being committed” by the police. By December 1952, Chamanlal’s team
was reporting to India that a “grave situation” had developed, as “thousands
of Africans were being moved from their habitations . . . kept in the open”
in detention camps, and then sent into an oppressive pipeline system to be
rehabilitated.27 The exposure that these lawyers gained to the everyday re-
ality of the emergency beyond Nairobi further fueled their anticolonial poli-
tics, which in turn shaped the Congress’s public statements. Stories about
the real and imagined aspects of the oathing ceremonies circulated among
settlers, with details emphasizing “their vileness and fi lth and sexual de-
pravity” in order to delegitimize the political demands contained in the oaths.
Under the emergency ordinances, Baring kept a tight control over news
broadcasts, ensuring that bulletins were about the Mau Mau and publicizing
the murder of white farmers to emphasize its violent nature. Much like In-
dian officials in the High Commission, de Souza and Kapila interpreted the
oaths differently, considering them a means of galvanizing and uniting the
Kikuyu.28
Neither Kapila nor de Souza considered Kenyatta “a man of violence,”
but they did not think he was “a Gandhian” either, reasoning that “if con-
stitutional methods failed, if non-violent methods failed, then [Kenyatta] was
willing to accept violence but up to a point.” Therefore, they argued in his
defense that Kenyatta did not manage the Mau Mau. Kapila and de Souza
believed that the European settlers had seen a “golden opportunity” when
the violence broke out to “demolish the national movement” and “get rid of
Kenyatta,” thinking “foolishly” that once he had been convicted, Africans
would be “good boys and good labourers as before.” For his part, de Souza
concluded that Europeans were following an unofficial policy of “instant
summary justice.” The widespread idea of shooting people on the spot, the
disappearance of vast numbers of Africans into the forests, the arrest of thou-
sands of people who were never heard from again, and the sheer brutality
of the emergency led de Souza to believe that more than 100,000 people
had died, even though the government estimates given to him were about
190 Indians in Kenya

10,000. In 1984, two decades before historian Caroline Elkins’s Pulitzer

Prize–winning book made this argument, de Souza emphatically stated that
the emergency entailed “ethnic cleansing on the part of the British
government.”29
De Souza had met D. N. Pritt, a well-known left-wing barrister in En-
gland, and was deeply impressed by the “strength of his feelings against im-
perialism.” Pritt was already in Kenya to defend six KAU officials who were
being tried at Kapenguria. These included Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Achieng’
Oneko, Kung’u Karumba, Kubai, and Kaggia. In consultation with Cha-
manlal, de Souza asked Pritt to be their lead counsel in Kenyatta’s case. The
legal team was not allowed to live in Kapenguria, where the trial was taking
place, and instead had to stay twenty-five miles away in the garage of the
chairman of the Indian Association in Kitale, a small town in the Rift Valley
where about 1,300 Indians resided (see Map 2). Their host was a shop-
keeper, eventually hounded out of town by European settlers who attacked
and boycotted his shop to protest his support of Kenyatta.30
The appointment of a judge who was known for his racist rhetoric against
both Indians and Africans only compounded the difficulties the legal coun-
sels faced. Judge Thacker, who earlier had sentenced Makhan Singh and
other trade unionists for their political activities, was brought out of retire-
ment and paid more than £20,000 to “do the dirty work of the government.”
According to Kapila, Thacker’s bias was obvious from the start, and he al-
legedly told an Indian clerk that it did not matter what case the defense put
up: “I will make sure that my judgement is so well couched and so well written
that even a court of appeal will not change it and I am going to make sure
that they convict him and give him maximum sentence.” Furthermore, de-
fense witnesses were threatened, and of the twelve people brought in as alibi
witnesses by the defense team, at least one woman was picked up by the
police, put in an aircraft, and told that unless she gave evidence based on a
story manufactured by the police, they would throw her out of the plane.
Prosecution witnesses, meanwhile, were bribed and coached carefully, as
Chamanlal reported to Nehru.31
Within a month of the start of the trial, a European family with two young
boys was murdered by their Kikuyu house help. A week before the verdict,
ninety-seven loyalists at Lari were killed by the Mau Mau in a single night.
Governor Baring became the target of settler anger for having hesitated in
eliminating the Mau Mau. He completely revamped the organization of
the security forces, putting them under the control of the British military.
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 191

This pushed the rebellion into the Aberdare and Mt. Kenya forests. As the
war between the security forces and the guerrillas began, Kenyatta and his
five codefendants were found guilty of managing the Mau Mau. They were
sentenced to a minimum of seven years’ imprisonment with hard labor and
an indefinite restriction order. Despite the prosecution carry ing the
weight of the government, which was willing to go to any length to ensure
the conviction of the accused, Indians continued to defend Mau Mau de-
tainees. Kapila and Nazareth served as counsel for seventy-three people ac-
cused of mass murder at Lari in 1953, with Nazareth leading the team of
seven lawyers; Kapila defended Waruhiu Itote, a high-ranking Mau Mau
guerrilla known as “General China,” after his capture in February 1954; and
de Souza represented more than 200 Mau Mau suspects over the eight-year
duration of the emergency. Another Indian lawyer, R. C. Gautama, won the
acquittal of Mau Mau detainee Augustino Macharia Kamau. In 1954, Naz-
areth served as an acting judge for five weeks to try Mau Mau cases carrying
a mandatory death sentence. Although hesitant about accepting this posi-
tion, he considered it “the duty of citizens to assist in the maintenance of
law and order” and therefore accepted this “unwelcome offer.” He refused
to renew his judgeship because of the “strain” of trying “bullet cases” brought
to court: cases where the accused were found in possession of bullets, a crime
punishable by death. Like de Souza, Nazareth also confronted the subver-
sion of law by colonial agents, which made him question the government’s
emergency measures. In at least one case he successfully acquitted the ac-
cused because the police had planted a bullet in the shirt of the detainee.
Nazareth noted that the bullet was found by the police only on their third
attempt at searching his person, several hours—possibly days—after he had
been taken into custody.32
The efforts of the Indians on Kenyatta’s legal team go largely unacknowl-
edged in most historical scholarship, in which they usually appear in a cameo
role, deprived of the historical context of the KAU- Congress alliance of the
late 1940s.33 However, when he became prime minister Kenyatta expressed
his appreciation of the defense they had mounted by appointing de Souza
the first deputy speaker of Kenya’s National Assembly and by making Chanan
Singh secretary to the Prime Minister’s Office.
During the trial, Chamanlal formed an India-Africa Council. As its
chairman, he issued a strong statement against Europeans in the colony:
“Thirty-five thousand Whites want to continue the Fascist race-ridden rule
over the destiny of 100,000 Indians and 5,250,000 Africans in this country
192 Indians in Kenya

which is not theirs but in which they have robbed the Africans of 16,000
square miles of the most fertile land.” Because of such “outrageous utter-
ances” and his criticism of Judge Thacker at public meetings across the colony,
Chamanlal was declared a prohibited immigrant and prevented from re-
turning to Kenya once the trial concluded.34
After his departure, the Indian High Commission continued to extend
practical support to KAU members who had not yet been detained. Pant
organized an official tour of India for Oginga Odinga, who emerged as a
vocal critic of the emergency during this time, while Pinto arranged for
Murumbi to go on a two-month-long trip to India in February 1953, osten-
sibly to “study community development and cooperative societies,” in order
to avoid arrest. Starting in early 1950, Mitchell—and after him, Baring—had
been suspicious about the activities of the Indian high commissioner’s of-
fice. Based on reports sent from the governor’s office in Kenya, the Colo-
nial Office in London prepared a note on Pant’s first secretary, Rahman,
accusing him and his wife of being “Soviet agents” who were directly con-
nected to the Mau Mau. While Mitchell had unsuccessfully tried to declare
him persona non grata in 1950, Pant was finally recalled to Delhi in January
1954 under pressure from the British government.35
In an effort to purge Nairobi of all Mau Mau suspects, a military sweep,
Operation Anvil, was conducted on April 24, 1954. The office of the Indian
high commissioner was one of the first places to be raided by British troops,
who accused Indian officials of helping the Mau Mau and of being Mau Mau
themselves. They beat up several staff members, intimidated them at gun-
point, and arrested all Africans present. Despite the egregious violation of
diplomatic impunity, Baring issued an informal apology to the Indian gov-
ernment, stating that “unfortunate words” were used in the “heat of the mo-
ment,” but he justified the raid to the War Office in London by arguing that
of the eleven Africans working there, five “acted suspiciously” and were there-
fore sent to “reception camps”—the official term used for detention camps
set up across Nairobi—to be investigated further. Baring’s continued sus-
picion toward the High Commission was evident, as three further raids on
the premises were authorized between June and November 1954. The In-
dian government, meanwhile, officially boycotted a meeting of the Com-
monwealth Parliamentarians Conference hosted in Nairobi in continuing
protest against the “colour bar” in the colony.36
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 193

S U P P O RT I N G T H E R E B E L S

With restrictions on Chamanlal’s return to the colony, Pant’s departure, and

the raids on the Indian High Commission in Nairobi, the colonial adminis-
tration succeeded in silencing its most vocal Indian critics who were tem-
porary visitors. As Kenya’s Indian residents continued to oppose the emer-
gency measures, the government found ways to circumscribe any political
activists who challenged its authority. Jarnail Singh Liddar, a Punjabi Sikh
trade unionist, had been imprisoned for six months in 1950 and 1952 for
“inciting strikes.” During a visit to India he was declared a prohibited im-
migrant, coincidentally on January 26, 1953, the third anniversary of India
becoming a republic. In February 1955, the government got the opportu-
nity to deny reentry to Congress member and lawyer Jaswant Singh on his
return from India. Significantly, Singh was declared an illegal immigrant
due to his “association with the Mau Mau.”37
Curiously, rumors regarding the involvement of Indians with Mau Mau
fighters had emerged two days after Baring declared an emergency. In Oc-
tober 1952, European settlers, Kenyatta, and Eliud Mathu announced that
Indian money and brains, both local and transnational, were behind the or-
ganization of the Mau Mau. In March 1953, loyalist chiefs at Lari went so
far as to suggest that Hindus were responsible for the massacre. Although
these claims were not taken particularly seriously by the colonial adminis-
tration, in early November 1952 Baring came to the conclusion that Indians
were “attempting to exploit the situation.” Betraying his imperialist bias by
alluding to a civilizational ladder of progress on which Africans were at the
bottom, he feared that given the “large number of backward people” in
Kenya, “the field had been left far too open” to Indians, who were “shel-
tering a number of doubtful characters” and indulging in seditious writing
and political unrest. Accusing Indians of instigating Africans against Euro-
peans had been the constant recourse of successive governors who refused
to admit that Africans were capable of developing a critique of colonialism
and organizing to protect themselves against the local administration. This
had been the case with Harry Thuku in the early 1920s, the workers’
strikes in the 1930s, and now the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. While
Baring promoted a public image of Indians’ unanimous support of the gov-
ernment’s emergency measures, secret intelligence reports indicated that, in
fact, “active Asian opinion in Kenya [was] not anti Mau Mau.”38
194 Indians in Kenya

Within the Legislative Council, Ibrahim Nathoo objected to the claim

that Indians were behind the Lari killings, dismissing reports of “Indian
aid to Mau Mau” as a “lie.” He asked the government to “prosecute people
even with the slightest evidence.” Toward this end, Indians were brought
under close colonial surveillance by revamping the collection of intelligence,
which hitherto had been a “blind spot” as far as Indians were concerned.
The Colonial Office sent to the colony intelligence officers with prior expe-
rience in India and knowledge of Indian languages spoken in Kenya, in-
cluding Urdu, Gujarati, and Punjabi. Weekly intelligence reports were reor-
ganized to include an entire section on “Asian Affairs” that covered Indian
political associations and reported on Indo-African contacts, “with special
reference to joint meetings and material (including financial) support in the
political field.”39 The movements of Pant, Rahman, Pinto, and other Con-
gress leaders in Nairobi were closely followed, revealing, unsurprisingly, a
network of Indian and KAU activists. Significantly, the reports brought to
light instances of material and ideological support for forest fighters from
individuals living outside Nairobi in towns with a very small number of In-
dian residents.
The initial intelligence summary of December 1952 reported that gen-
erally, Indians were urging Kikuyu in the Rift Valley to “continue to resist
since success [was] in sight.” Subsequent intelligence analysis suggested that
the “protected position of Indian traders in isolated parts of disturbed areas”
was proof of their “high level” of “involvement” in the Mau Mau. Both these
reports were abstract observations, devoid of any particulars. By February
1953, however, reports from Nyanza pointed to more specific and direct in-
volvement. A “Punjabi auctioneer” from Kisumu, where about 5,000 Indians
lived, “expressed sympathy and support . . . for Kikuyu terrorism” and had
joined “a number of Indians from Nairobi” to tour the colony with the aim
of encouraging other Indians to support the Mau Mau. An Indian in Kisii,
another town in Nyanza with an Indian population of less than 350, was
publicly “advocating Kikuyu terrorist methods” as the only hope for “African
freedom.” Intelligence officers identified six Indian railways employees who
were supporting Mau Mau activities “as the best way to prevent European
‘domination.’ ” In Nyeri, the Kikuyu reserve in Kiambu where 604 Indians
lived, the Patel Brotherhood, an association of Gujarati Hindus, was found
to be “actively” assisting the Mau Mau. Intelligence summaries reported
that even in Mombasa, which was far from the epicenter of the rebellion,
Hindus had announced their support for “the Kikuyu cause and its efforts
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 195

to secure its rights.”40 These reports reflected abstract and particular engage-
ments with the Mau Mau among Indians in towns outside the colonial capital
where the resonance of the Congress’s politics was felt and mediated in in-
timate, everyday relations. They reveal individual instances of Indian sup-
port of the Kikuyu involved in the Mau Mau at the ideological level, as a
Punjabi auctioneer, railways employees, and other unnamed Indians inter-
preted the rebellion as an anticolonial one that “resisted” European “domi-
nation.” Although no Indian ever became a Mau Mau guerrilla forest
fighter, others helped rebels in direct ways.
With the arrest of almost 200 KAU members and the proscription of col-
onywide African political associations, activists in Nairobi reorganized them-
selves into a number of different groups, including informal networks of
KAU members who communicated with its Legislative Council representa-
tives, the Indian High Commission, the East African Trade Union, the Con-
gress, and Indian lawyers. This group, which Baring referred to as Group
Four, included Pinto, who was the liaison between the rebels, detainees, In-
dian lawyers, and Pant. Pinto not only organized political defenses for the
detainees but also supplied arms and money to fighters in the forest from
supply lines in Nairobi. This led to his arrest on June 19, 1954. He was de-
tained without trial in Takwa camp, Manda Island, until July 1959, when his
restriction orders were revoked. Pinto was joined by at least five other In-
dians in this camp, which was set up especially for non-Kikuyu considered
“hard core”—a term used by the security forces for Mau Mau detainees they
were unable to “break” (i.e., force to confess to taking Mau Mau oaths) in the
pipeline system. These included Jaswant Singh, Jaswant Singh Bharaj, Ba-
bubhai Patel, and Bakshish Singh. In addition, Makhan Singh, who had been
arrested two years before the emergency, was kept detained for its entire
duration. While he was repeatedly offered release on the condition that he
leave the colony and return to India, he rejected the offer every time.41 With
one Goan Christian, four Punjabi Sikhs, and one Gujarati Hindu among
them, these half dozen detainees were only missing a Muslim to complete
their representation of the major religions and ethnicities of Indians living in
Kenya. Many others narrowly escaped being caught.
Much of the guerrilla war took place in the Chehe and Aberdare forest
areas of Nyeri, located at the foothills of Mt. Kenya. This brought Indian
sawmill owners in the area, many of whom were Muslim, into the front lines.
Yacoob-ud-Deen founded the Kenya Muslim League in 1953 with his cousin
Zafr-ud-Deen, former Congress leader Shams-ud-Deen’s son. Zafr-ud-Deen
196 Indians in Kenya

was a sawmill owner and became president of the Nyeri branch of the or-
ganization in 1955. His family had moved away from the Congress due to
the religious and cultural bonds they had with Pakistan. Yacoob urged Mus-
lims in the area not to renounce their East African citizenship, and he tried,
unsuccessfully, to recruit African Muslims into the organization. S. Ahmed
Omar, secretary of the Nyanza African Muslims Association, refused to join
the Muslim League, fearing that his community would lose its racially de-
fined “Arab” seat in the Legislative Council if it merged with Indian Mus-
lims on the basis of their religion. During the war, Yacoob supplied food,
clothes, and weapons to guerrillas in the Chehe forest, and in mid-1955 the
colony’s Criminal Investigation Department issued orders for his arrest be-
cause of his involvement with the Mau Mau. Yacoob fled immediately to
Pakistan, returning only after independence.42
Eddie Pereira, a Goan member of the Congress, was one of sixty-eight
Indians living in Elburgon, a small town in the Rift Valley (see Map 2).
Influenced by India’s anticolonial movements, which he witnessed while
attending school there in the early 1930s, Pereira returned to Kenya wearing
khadi (homespun cotton clothes adopted by Indian nationalists in the sub-
continent) and a Nehru cap. Through the 1940s, Pereira wrote several
articles in the Colonial Times supporting Indian independence, signing off
his letters to the editor with the slogan “Jai Hindi” (victory to India). During
the emergency, he offered rides in his car to guerrillas in the area between
the forest and town. Although in wearing khadi Pereira adopted Gandhian
dress, he recalled his support of the Mau Mau in a non-Gandhian manner:
“I, for one, was for armed struggle.” 43
Hassanalli Manji was a second-generation Gujarati Muslim migrant who
had lived in Karatina his entire life. His father had immigrated to Kenya
from Kathiawad in 1905, and his family had been involved in wholesale and
retail businesses.44 Karatina was a small town in the Central Province that
lay between Aberdare and Mt. Kenya; fewer than 600 Indians lived there
(see Map 2). Manji grew up speaking Gikuyu and was, according to his
younger brother, “in the front line” during the war. Since the emergency
measures prohibited Kikuyu workers in towns from traveling to their rural
homes, Manji would collect the salaries of such Africans from Karatina and
deliver them to their families. He also supplied food and “other stuff” to
forest fighters. As reported in the intelligence appreciations at the time,
Africans were afraid of putting their savings into banks. Many deposited
their money with Manji during the emergency, and he, in turn, lent money
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 197

to those in need. The financial support extended to the rebels by Indians

was reported in the official investigation of the Mau Mau, known as the Cor-
field Report, published in 1960. Intelligence reports from Molo, near the
Rift Valley town of Nakuru, where 109 Indians lived, indicated that at least
one Indian had advised the Kikuyu to withdraw their deposits from the
post office savings bank lest they lose them to the government in a com-
munal fine if detainees from the area were found guilty of taking a Mau
Mau oath. In many instances forest fighters took money from Hindu Banias
(moneylenders) to purchase gas for their trucks. The commissioner for
police noted that this exchange of currency amounted to “protection money
to Mau Mau thugs.” While extortion and concerns of physical security would
have motivated Indians to make material contributions, when asked in 1984
if the Mau Mau had used pangas (machetes that were used as weapons by
the fighters) to intimidate Indians and extract money from them, Fred Kubai
replied that it had not been necessary, since many wahindi (Indians), in-
cluding some in the police ser vices, had been recruited by the Mau Mau,
indicating the voluntary nature of some of these exchanges.45
The Corfield Report quoted several detainees’ confessions implicating
India as their source of guns. European farmers had also suggested that Sikh
soldiers trained by the British served as armorers for the guerrillas and pro-
vided tactical direction to them. Although no evidence of transnational gun
running was found, at least two Sikhs were arrested on this charge. Jaswant
Singh Bharaj was a Punjabi Sikh born in Lakhpur, Punjab, in 1935, whose
father had migrated to Kenya in 1914 to work in the railways. Bharaj went
to India in 1947 for his education, arriving in the midst of independence
celebrations. Unlike leaders of the Congress, who were deeply influenced
by the mainstream narrative of Indian independence and Gandhian non-
violence, the Revolutionary Party of India’s advocacy of the use of violence
to gain freedom made a deep impression on Bharaj. On his return to Kenya
in December 1953, he joined the Kenya Police Reserves as part of the man-
datory Asian call-up (which will be discussed later in this chapter). How-
ever, he sympathized with the Mau Mau fighters. For the next five months,
he manufactured arms and ammunition for rebels, including piping for bush
fighters making their own guns, and taught others the art of gun making.
In May 1954, Bharaj was arrested for his involvement in the Mau Mau and
detained in Takwa Camp with the other Indian “hard cores” for four and a
half years. Another Punjabi carpenter, also named Jaswant Singh, met with
a different fate. Singh lived in Molo and was sentenced to death in Nakuru
198 Indians in Kenya

in September 1954 for possessing two rounds of .32 ammunition. Singh was
accompanied by a Kikuyu woman who took him to the forest surrounding
Molo to meet Mau Mau guerrillas. The forest fighters turned out to be mem-
bers of the Kikuyu Home Guard, who arrested Singh for his involvement
in the Mau Mau rebellion.46 Others were imprisoned for their indirect
involvement with the rebels.
A twenty-five-year-old photographer, Thakorbhai Mangaldas Patel, who
forged history-of-employment cards issued to the Kikuyu during the emer-
gency, was charged with “harbouring and consorting with a terrorist.”
Although Patel was acquitted of that charge, he was sentenced to five years
of hard labor for forgery. His arrest revealed how some Indians were
unwittingly caught up in the rebellion, as was the case with Qayyam Dar. Dar
was a young Kashmiri Muslim who owned a sawmill in Chehe forest.47 After
an innocuous run-in with the law in Lahore in 1947, he left for Kenya to
join his cousin, who had migrated there some years earlier. What was sup-
posed to be a year’s break to allow things to settle down in Pakistan ended
up being a lifelong stay. Like Manji, Dar was living in Karatina in October
1952 when a guerrilla named Mukunga came to the sawmill to administer
the oath to his Kikuyu employees, who introduced Dar to him. Dar agreed
to take an oath promising loyalty to the Mau Mau. In 2006, after a delib-
erate forty-year effort by the postcolonial Kenyan state to marginalize the
contribution of the forest fighters in facilitating decolonization and an even-
tually successful counter effort by Mau Mau veterans to secure a position
in the nationalist narrative of the country, Dar recalled his decision to take
the oath, which he interpreted to be uma in Gikuyu and which he translated
as “quit.” He considered the oath as similar to Gandhi’s 1942 call to “Quit
India,” which had led to independence there. The oathing ritual included
taking a symbolic bite of meat and drink of blood to seal the oath. Although
Dar willingly did the former, he refused to drink blood, explaining to Mu-
kunga that he was a Muslim and it was against his religion to do so. From
then on, forest fighters would collect food, medicine, clothes, and newspa-
pers from a hideout near his house at night.
Dar was surrounded by a Mau Mau “gang” soon after this incident. The
guerrillas threatened to kill him because his skin color was different from
theirs. He was saved by workers from his sawmill who arrived at the spot
with General China, who told the gang that Dar was “one of their own
people.” They let him go but took his gun—a “theft” he reported to the po-
lice, in accordance with the emergency provisions. Dar was put under sur-
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 199

veillance and made to report to the police every other day because officers
were suspicious of how he had escaped the “attack” physically unharmed.
A few weeks later, an Italian mechanic living with him spotted the hide-
outs and informed the police. That night when Dar returned home from
his sawmill, his Kikuyu maid sent him into town on the pretext that they
had run out of food. A gang had informed her that they would be returning
to the house that evening to kill the mechanic as punishment. Police suspi-
cions were further aroused when Dar appeared to have escaped yet another
attack unharmed, and one night, as he climbed a tree to whistle to the guer-
rillas to take their food, a European police officer showed up instead. This
final incident convinced the police of Dar’s involvement with forest fighters.
They prohibited him from entering the Central Province and threatened to
either detain him at Manyani camp, where his employees were sent, or de-
port him back to Pakistan. Instead, Dar convinced the police to let him go
to Kakamega in Nyanza, far from the forest fighting, where he had another
mill, and he continued to report to them every week till the end of the
emergency.48
Kundanlal Watson also owned a sawmill, called Keith Sawmills in Kiganjo,
where Dedan Kimathi, the military commander of the Aberdare guerrilla
fighters, had worked in 1948. Watson purchased two additional sawmills in
Meru, a town near Mt. Kenya where fewer than 600 Indians lived. During
the emergency, he left food in a cave near the sawmill for the guerrillas.
Mau Mau rebels would send messages to him through his cook, Rukunga,
who had taken an oath, asking for food supplies and on one occasion taking
piping that they needed to make their guns. The mill was shut down when
police suspicions were aroused. When in the 1980s—before Mau Mau
veterans were included in nationalist narratives of Kenyan anticolonial
movements—Watson recalled the time of emergency, he gave two reasons
for his support of the forest fighters. First, he associated the Mau Mau’s po-
litical aims and agitation with those that had resulted in India gaining “in-
dependence from the British” just a few years earlier. Second, the “cruelty”
of the security forces, who “would bring truckloads of Mau Mau, live pris-
oners and corpses,” and sometimes just a “heap of thumbs,” made him sym-
pathetic to the cause of the fighters.49
While the intelligence summaries in the mid-1940s reported on sporadic
and individual material and ideological support of the Mau Mau during
the emergency itself, the encounters of Eddie Pereira, Yacoob-ud-Deen,
Hassanalli Manji, Qayyam Dar, and Kundanlal Watson were recollections
200 Indians in Kenya

recorded decades later, some by them, others by family members. The pas-
sage of time and the postcolonial context in which these oral histories were
collected— especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mau Mau was margin-
alized from the nationalist narrative, and after 2003, when it was brought
back by the state—colored these memories. The details provided by Pereira’s
son, Yacoob’s aunt, and Dar himself were no doubt embellished by memory
and the passage of time. It is impossible to judge the factual basis of these
recollections. However, considering these personal memories together with
the political milieu of the late 1940s and early 1950s reveals three recur-
ring themes that shed light on the concerns that shaped the engagement of
Indians with the rebellion and its suppression.
First, cognitively, these Indians, especially those within the Congress,
made a direct connection between Indian independence and the Mau Mau
rebellion, which they considered an anticolonial movement. India’s freedom
from colonial rule served as an inspiration not only to diasporic Indians who
considered Kenya their territorial homeland but also to Mau Mau fighters
who aspired to similar political freedom. Mau Mau commander Dedan
Kimathi considered “the fight we have here” to be “similar to the one that
happened in India during their independence struggle.” For General China,
who fought in the British Army in Burma during the Second World War,
conversations he had in Calcutta with Indians on the eve of their indepen-
dence were formative to the development of his political imaginary. Ac-
cording to him, “Unity and trust seemed to my Indian friends to be the most
important elements in any kind of social or political activity, and they trans-
mitted to me a high regard for cooperation as well as a deepening aware-
ness that I personally wanted to play an active part in bringing Indepen-
dence to my people.”50 In deploying customary Kikuyu oathing to achieve
unity and thus give oaths a new political orientation, Mau Mau leaders un-
derscored the transnational resonance of anticolonial nationalism that was
appropriated to organize a local agitation.
Second, everyday encounters between forest fighters and Indians high-
light shared spaces of intimacy in which oath administrators, Mau Mau
“gangs,” and informants met Indian employers and moneylenders. Rather
than being passive spectators during the turmoil of the emergency, individ-
uals such as Dar, Watson, and Pereira encountered the rebels in mundane
moments: supervising their sawmills, conversing with their African em-
ployees, and riding in their cars. Political, racial, and class considerations
shaped the nature of these intimate encounters. As employers who owned
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 201

cars and sawmills, Indians were marked off by their material wealth. The
color of their skin and their deliberate reading of the Mau Mau from the
perspective of anticolonial movements in their civilizational homeland, India,
also underscored a diasporic consciousness that differentiated them from
their African employees. In some instances the boundaries of class and race
resulted in criticism of the Mau Mau itself, as will be discussed. For others,
it was in these spaces of interracial intimacy that Indians encountered not
just forest fighters but the violence of the colonial state and its emergency
measures, which they criticized.
The recollections of Indians caught in the front lines of the military war
are quite dramatic, but forest fighters were not the only Kikuyu suppressed
by the colonial government. Communal punishment, curfews, bans on meet-
ings, and the mass dislocation of Africans who were moved through the pipe-
line of detention camps before being released into government-created vil-
lages were as integral a part of defeating Mau Mau as the forest war.51
Through radio broadcasts on the All India Radio, whose audience in Kenya
was predominantly Indian, and in newspaper editorials, before his deten-
tion Pinto had given publicity to the atrocities being committed behind the
wire, as had the Congress, the team of Indian lawyers defending Mau Mau
detainees, and the Indian High Commission. This collectively brought the
attention of Indian employers to the plight of their Kikuyu employees in
their homes, sawmills, and farms.
Mahmudah Basheer-ud-Deen, Yacoob-ud-Deen’s aunt and Shams-ud-
Deen’s daughter-in-law, lived in the Chehe forest area, but the family moved
to Nairobi shortly after the emergency was announced.52 She recalled hearing
radio broadcasts about the mistreatment and killings taking place in the de-
tention camps. Although the family distanced themselves from the violence
of the Mau Mau, they criticized the repressive measures adopted by the gov-
ernment to suppress the rebellion and provided a meeting place for political
activists after the KAU had been banned. They also protected their Kikuyu
acquaintances from the military combing operations.
Keharchand Kent was one of the few Indian farm owners in Kenya. He
bought a farm in 1929 in Njiru-Dandora, Ukambani Province, near Nairobi,
and named it Punjabi Farm, after his family’s homeland in India. During
the emergency, the KPR would carry out combing operations in the area,
rounding up Kikuyu workers and arresting anyone who seemed “suspicious.”
Keharchand built a false ceiling for his Kikuyu employees to hide in during
these nightly rounds. Some evenings European inspectors of the KPR would
202 Indians in Kenya

stop by and share a drink with Keharchand, oblivious to what was going on,
quite literally, under their roof. His mother, Malvi Keharchand Kent, also
lived on the farm during this time. In 2006 his daughter, Neera Kent Kapila,
recalled evenings when her grandmother would sit on her bed holding her
prayer beads, with the Kikuyu farm workers hiding underneath her bed,
and refuse to let the police enter her room during her “prayers.” Often they
would stay there the entire night. Such instances were repeated in the
houses and shops of Indians— even those who had joined the KPR—in
Nyeri, where the military would comb the area every night and beat Afri-
cans who did not cooperate with them.53
With the restructuring of political intelligence, by 1955 the colonial gov-
ernment was able to detain or deport Indians who had been most active in
providing tactical support to the Mau Mau. Those who escaped arrest con-
tinued to provide safe houses for African political meetings. J. M. Desay,
for example, was a Gujarati Hindu businessman in Nairobi who had spon-
sored several joint Indo-African commercial enterprises and supported the
Kikuyu independent schools in Githunguri by making photographic docu-
mentaries of their activities in the late 1940s. During the emergency, his
house was “open to everyone without distinction of race,” and several KAU
leaders met there when the organization was forced to go underground. Be-
cause of this, the colonial government looked upon him with suspicion, and
he remained in danger of being arrested for being a “communist agitator.”
Ambu H. Patel was a Gujarati entrepreneur and a self-professed Gandhian
who had spent “jail time” in India. He arrived in Kenya in 1952 and
adopted Kenyatta as his baba (father). Along with his wife, Lila, Ambu Patel
looked after Kenyatta’s daughter, Margaret, during the eight years the
leader was in detention. Once the fighting was over, these Indians began to
focus their energy on getting detainees released. Together with Lila, Patel
organized the first public demonstration, attended by several thousand
people in Kiambu, demanding Kenyatta’s release in March 1960. He gath-
ered more than 125 messages from African, Indian, and British leaders sup-
porting his campaign and collected monetary contributions from Indians in
Nairobi that were used toward the publication of pamphlets, transport,
clothes, food parcels, medicines, newspapers, and cash for detainees who
were released.54
In an important essay published in 2003, Bethwell A. Ogot makes a plea
for returning to the history of Kenyan nationalism various powerful voices
in different anticolonial movements that “did not qualify” as Mau Mau war
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 203

heroes, since the term “fight” was restricted to the “physical fight, ignoring
many equally important aspects such as fighting with the pen, or with the
brain, or by generating a powerful spiritual force . . . Most of them have been
allowed to die a second death.”55 Caught up in explicating arguments about
tribalism, nationalism, and neocolonialism, Indian voices have similarly died
a “second death” in historical scholarship and popular narratives. These
voices included Indian journalists who fought with pens in Indian-owned
newspapers; members of the Congress who fought through rhetoric at public
meetings; Indian lawyers who fought with words in courts while defending
detainees; and individual Indians, entangled in their houses and sawmills
with forest fighters and the police, who joined the Mau Mau’s passive wing
as suppliers of provisions or protected their Kikuyu employees from the
excesses of the colonial state.
In the early 1970s, Mau Mau memories published by forest fighters and
their supporters in postcolonial Kenya usurped the narrative of the rebel-
lion that the state refused to acknowledge. Pio Gama Pinto found a place in
this history, but he was presented as an exceptional individual who went
against the grain of mainstream Indian politics. Both Kaggia and Odinga
claimed that he was “regarded by many Africans not as an Asian but as a
real African.” Insisting that Pio did not represent Indian politics in any way,
Kaggia was emphatic that Pinto was the only Indian detained during the
emergency.56 Evidently this was not the case.
In 1962 Makhan Singh was released from detention but was systemati-
cally marginalized by Kenyatta, who had considered him a challenge to his
political authority since 1950. Although he had put forward the April 1950
resolution demanding uhuru sasa and served the longest detention of any
Kenyan during the emergency, Singh did not receive a personal invitation
from Kenyatta to the independence celebrations in December 1963. With
some difficulty, Fred Kubai was able to procure one for him. Kubai’s ac-
companying note to Singh anticipated the erasure of many political activ-
ists from nationalist narratives in the postcolonial nation but hoped that his-
torians would restore their place in Kenya: “Some freedom fighters find
themselves forgotten. . . . But we have played our part—history will always
tell who is who.”57
While there has mostly been a historiographical silence on Indian en-
gagement with the Mau Mau and the emergency, this history has been
preserved in the realm of fiction that highlights the intimacy of this en-
counter, most popularly in 2005 by M. G. Vassanji in his award-winning
204 Indians in Kenya

book The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.58 A less well-known play, A

Time of Emergency, was written by Nazmi Ramji in 1986.59 Set in the
Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi in April 1954, the play features four
Mau Mau “freedom fighters,” Njeri, Karega, Vashira, and Oango, who enter
the home of an Indian petty shopkeeper, Jiva, where they meet his family.
The play revolves around the conversations Njeri and Karega have with the
family, ending with both sides losing their “prejudice” and “distrust” of the
other as they begin to understand the “reality” of their colonial subjecthood.
The play was written in Gujarati, with the explicit purpose of demonstrating
a “lesson” in interracial relations and solidarity for its audience, Gujaratis in
postcolonial Kenya. The lesson was manifold. In referring to Mau Mau
guerrillas as “freedom fighters,” it eulogized them as legitimate nationalists
“fighting for their motherland,” and did so at a time when the Kenyan state
refused to acknowledge their contributions to independence. Pointing to
the transnational resonance of anticolonial sentiments, Karega announced,
“Our leaders have given special emphasis that we must know about the
fights against imperialism put up by all countries.” Significantly, rather than
highlighting the role played by Gandhi in the anticolonial movement in
India, the African protagonists in the play talk about those nationalists who
took to violent means to protest against colonial rule, including Bhagat
Singh, Rani Jhansi, and Subhash Chandra Bose. This was a unique retelling
of Indian independence that marginalized Gandhian nonviolent satyagraha
to draw a parallel between the anticolonial aspirations of the Mau Mau’s
violent methods and Indian revolutionary movements for freedom.
Further, the Gujarati audience was reminded of Indian anticolonial ac-
tivists in Kenya, including Makhan Singh, Pio Gama Pinto, Ambu H. Patel,
Jaswant Singh, Manilal Desai, and Yacoob-ud-Deen. Ramji urged his audi-
ence to remember and take ownership of the history of these Kenyan
“nationalists.” Subtly displacing the assumptions of the racially exclusive nar-
ratives of anticolonialism in Kenya, it is the Mau Mau fighter, Karega, Njeri,
Oango, and Vashira, who recount the contributions of Indian “nationalists”
in India and Kenya. Further, Jiva asserted his own territorial claim on his
Kenyan homeland, stating, “We were born right here in this country . . .
our two children were born in Kisumu. We have never gone out of
Kenya. . . . [T]his is our motherland and we shall die here only.” Recalling the
story of her father, who moved to Kenya at the age of twelve, Jiva’s wife, Mira,
remembered how her family had gone from being small landowners to land-
less laborers in India who could not pay the high taxes charged by the colonial
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 205

government. This embedded critique of colonialism resonated with the Mau

Mau as Njeri proclaimed, “This story seems to be of Kenya! The history
of this country is also like this. My parents also became landless in a sim-
ilar manner.” The lesson of interracial solidarity emerging from the experi-
ence of colonialism leads to the final scene in the play, in which Jiva and
Mira’s children announce they want to “fight like the Mau Mau fighters”
since “we are children of Kenya. How lovely is our country! We shall fight
for it, and wage war for our country.” 60
The aspirational message of Nazmi’s play relies on a particular historical
narrative that highlights the empathy and solidarity of Indians in the Mau
Mau’s fight for independence. However, in the handful of scholarly works
on the Mau Mau in which Indians make an appearance, a different histor-
ical narrative is highlighted—Indian support of the government and its
efforts to defeat the rebels; the counterinsurgency in which many Indians
participated.61

D E F E AT I N G T H E R E B E L S

Although the government of India, several members of the Congress, and

the Indian legal community had been vocal in criticizing the emergency and
supporting the KAU and Mau Mau demand for land and self-governance,
their position did not reflect the opinion of all Indians across the colony.
For some, the violent methods of the rebels were indefensible, although they
believed that Africans had a right to land in the highlands and freedom.
Others, upon finding themselves the target of this violence, supported the
emergency measures for security reasons, as these protected their shops and
homes. Many within and outside the Legislative Council agreed with the
colonial administration that Mau Mau was an atavistic reaction of Africans
who were not yet ready for self-governance, even as they criticized the gov-
ernment for using excessive violence in suppressing the rebellion. Often all
three concerns overlapped, as physical location, political orientation, and
racial consciousness determined the reactions of individuals in their encoun-
ters with the rebels and the emergency.
Much like the generational split triggered by Mau Mau fighters within
the KAU over the strategies of political representation, the rebellion and
the emergency polarized Indians within the Congress. The younger mem-
bers, who were predominantly lawyers and journalists and had been at the
forefront of the alliance between the KAU and Congress, were vocal in their
206 Indians in Kenya

criticism of the government’s emergency measures and unhesitatingly

supported the KAU’s arrested leaders. Others demurred at declaring such
unequivocal assistance. Within the Legislative Council, Patel and Madan
focused on the violence of the Mau Mau and criticized Africans for
adopting such means of protest that not only “did not pay dividends” but also
put their Indian “friends” in an “awkward position regarding support for
legitimate grievances.” In December 1952, as members of the Congress’s
Executive Committee, they issued a statement condemning the “terrorist
tactics” used by “some Kikuyu” and urging them to “abjure violence” as an
instrument for political, economic, and social ends.62
While distancing himself from the Mau Mau, Patel also attempted to sever
the close alliance the Congress had built with the KAU. At a meeting of
the Executive Council in June 1953, shortly after the proscription of the
KAU, Jaswant Singh and R. B. Bhandari moved to very strongly protest the
government’s decision to deprive Africans of any means of political organi-
zation and urged the Congress to make a public demand for the formation
of a colony-wide political party for Africans. They formed the Boycott Com-
mittee to distance themselves from the old vanguard. Revealing their be-
lief that Kenyatta was the brains behind Mau Mau, Patel and Bachulal
Gathani argued that the Congress should not condemn the ban on the
KAU because of the association of its leaders with the forest fighters. They
wanted the Congress to issue a more restrained statement declaring that
the government’s emergency measures had resulted in the “punishment”
of “innocent” people. They were challenged by D. V. Kapila, Jaswant Singh,
K. V. Adjala, and Bhandari, who contended that such a statement did not
have “enough teeth” and succeeded in ensuring that the public statements
of the Congress reflected their belief that “the real cause of the unrest was
land hunger.” Although within the Congress Patel was superseded, he and
Ibrahim Nathoo leveraged their positions in the Legislative Council to
join European members in calling for the death penalty for Kenyatta and
for more repressive measures against the rebels. Furthermore, he urged
Indians in Kenya to assist the government by associating more closely
with the administrative and security machinery set up to deal with the
emergency.63
In so doing, Patel deceived the “rank and file” of the Congress in Nai-
robi, which had passed resolutions to the contrary at its meetings. However,
Indian Associations in small towns such as Nakuru in the Rift Valley, where
about 3,300 Indians lived, made similar declarations of loyalism and volun-
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 207

teered to join the security forces. Deprecating the “violence, arson and blood-
shed” of the Mau Mau, the Indian Association at Nakuru urged the gov-
ernment to make “fuller use” of Indians who were “over ready to come forth.”
The majority of these Indians were petty traders. Serving as their repre-
sentative was Bachulal Gathani, president of the Federation of Indian Cham-
bers of Commerce and Industry, who was concurrently a member of the
Congress’s Executive Committee; he too assured Baring of the “wholehearted
support and cooperation” of Indian shopkeepers and businessmen. Toward
this end, the Indian Retail Traders Association of Kenya Colony began to
pass on information to the commissioner of police for Nairobi, demanding
frequent police visits to African hotels where “suspected people,” including
“rogues and thieves,” concealed knives and arms under long coats, showed
“incorrect identity cards,” and held meetings.64 They also asked that the main
roads leading to Nairobi be guarded early in the morning and suggested
that all Africans entering the city be “searched.” By December 1952, of a
population of approximately 100,000, about 2,173 Indians voluntarily be-
came part of the Home Guard, and 696 joined the police reserves. In May
1953, the government issued a mandatory “Asian manpower call-up,” al-
lowing Indians to join the security forces as storemen, drivers, vehicle me-
chanics, clerks, telephone operators, and armorers. In November 1955, the
first Indian combat group, which consisted of fifty-two men, including
Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, was trained at the police training school in
Gilgit, and was based in a Kiriaini police station north of Forth Hall reserve,
killed two suspected guerrillas.65
Baring enthusiastically welcomed the support he received from Patel and
Nathoo, and he publicly paid “warm tribute” to Indians in the colony for
showing “the greatest restraint” and cooperating with the government. Al-
though in private he remained skeptical about the position of Indians re-
garding Mau Mau and the emergency, as is evident from his intelligence
reports, he handpicked two reliable Indians to oversee the call-up. S. G.
Hassan, a Punjabi Muslim veterinary doctor who was born in Lahore in 1888
and settled in Kenya in 1906, was appointed the director of Asian manpower
during this time. Since 1930, Hassan had been stationed in the Coastal Prov-
ince, where he had set up a dairy cooperative for Africans who supplied pas-
teurized milk to Mombasa. He was also involved in turning a hundred square
miles of land infested by the tsetse fly into fertile farming land. Far from
the hotbed of political activity in the Central Province, Hassan’s focus on
the economic rather than political endeavors involving Africans made him
208 Indians in Kenya

an ideal colonial official. In 1952 he had joined the Legislative Council rep-
resenting Indian Muslims. Following his lead, in Murang’a, Fort Hall, of
the 200 Indians who had joined the Home Guard, eighty were Muslims,
while in Nakuru, a Khoja Muslim called Ghillani returned to the district
commissioner the 120 shillings he had received as remuneration for his ser-
vice in the police force and requested that the money be spent on Kikuyu
loyalists instead.66
In April 1953, Madan had asked the government to oversee the military
conscription of Indians, but his request was refused at the time. Instead,
Baring appointed him chairman of the Asian section, overseeing appeals
from Indians who wanted to be exempted from the mandatory call-up during
the emergency. It soon appeared that many Indians applied for such exemp-
tions. Indeed, although Hassan succeeded in enlisting many Muslims in the
Central Province, his efforts in Mombasa were less successful, and in July
1954 he was unable to persuade an additional 300 men requested by the
state to join the Asian call-up as clerks and office workers. Hassan specu-
lated that this hesitation might have resulted from a campaign by some In-
dians who were “sympathetic” to the Mau Mau, although the colonial ad-
ministration believed that the physical distance of Mombasa from the violent
epicenter of the rebellion dissuaded “commercial-minded” Indians from
joining the Home Guard. “Very disappointed” with the hesitation he faced,
Hassan urged Indians to perform their “duty” to protect their “home,” and
he appealed to Indian employers to make up the salary deficiency of their
employees who joined the forces.67
For some of the Indian leadership, joining the call-up was an ideological
and political move to criticize the Mau Mau and declare their loyalty to the
government. For others, especially outside the realm of organized politics,
as Hassan obliquely suggested, it was the impulse to protect the physical
security of their homes and shops that motivated them to enlist. Indeed, as
Indian spaces, particularly shops, became the targets of Mau Mau violence,
the Indian leadership (including those who had advocated the deracializa-
tion of the highlands and African self-governance) became overwhelmingly
concerned with securing their neighborhoods. In January 1953, Jaswant
Singh joined Chanan Singh in requesting that the government station Home
Guard troops in Indian areas in Nairobi, while Indian associations in Na-
kuru demanded that the government issue firearms to Indians for self-
protection. This request was reiterated in July 1954 at an Asian Conference
held in Nairobi to discuss the emergency, where Madan and Hassan pre-
sented a united front of Hindus and Muslims.68
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 209

When Operation Jock Scott and Operation Anvil cleared Nairobi of ap-
proximately a third of its African residents, the Mau Mau were pushed into
the foothills of the Aberdares and Mt. Kenya ranges. About 8,000 Indians
lived in small towns in this region, in Nakuru, Nayuki, Meru, Gilgil, and
Karatina, bringing them into direct confrontation with the forest fighters,
the military, and the police (see Map 2). While some Indians provided the
Mau Mau with food and sheltered their Kikuyu employees from the police,
as previously described, others joined the government in its suppression of
the rebellion, especially as the vulnerability of Indian shopkeepers was ex-
posed. In the first months of the rebellion Mau Mau attacks were largely
limited to Europeans and Kikuyu loyalists, but there were a few incidents
involving Indians. Shortly after the emergency was declared, a number of
Indian trucks were robbed on the highways, and in Makindi, an organized
raid of Indian shops led to the evacuation of the sixty Indians living in the
village. In early December 1952, an Indian shopkeeper was found stran-
gled, and a month later a large “gang” stole £400 from an Indian house in
Nairobi, wounding its occupant. Beginning in early 1953, more Indians found
themselves on the receiving end of Mau Mau raids as markets and shops
became battlegrounds during the emergency.69 Some of these attacks were
triggered by the practical need for supplies, especially as the war between
the guerrillas and British troops broke out. The economic desire to break the
monopoly of Indian shops also found expression in organized raids, while the
political compulsion to punish Indians for joining the colonial administra-
tion in suppressing the rebellion served as a catalyst for the Mau Mau to
draw a boundary between themselves and Indians whom they considered
loyalists.
In the foothill areas, where there was only a very small Indian popula-
tion, most of whom were traders, the shops’ isolated locations made them
easy targets. For example, only 125 Indians lived in Kijabe; 29 in Ruiru;
106 in Limuru; 375 in Naivasha; and 264 in Thomson’s Falls (see Map 2).
A “gang” of over a hundred Africans attacked the Kijabe trading center,
which lay between Limuru and Naivasha, on Christmas Day, 1953, com-
pletely ransacking three Indian shops. In 1971, Joram Wamweya, who took
the batuni oath in 1953 at the age of twenty-five, recalled a raid on an In-
dian shop in Limuru. Motivated by the desire to earn himself “fame as a
man of courage and daring” and armed with one revolver, he stole wrist-
watches that he hoped would be of use to the Mau Mau. In such instances,
Mau Mau oath takers like Wamweya acted on their own impulse, with no
coordinated master plan.
210 Indians in Kenya

Indian shopkeepers who lived in these remote areas joined the Asian
call-up to protect their homes and businesses, motivated by security con-
cerns. Ratilal Shah, for example, worked in a shop in an extremely remote
rural town, Makuyu, in the foothills of Mt. Kenya. There were only two
Indian shops in the entire area, and he volunteered with the local police to
protect them. During the emergency, Shah killed two Africans whom he
believed were Mau Mau guerrillas. Reacting to raids that had taken place
in the area, a local Indian Association at Thomson’s Falls, a town in the Ab-
erdare forest, requested that the government take “immediate drastic ac-
tion” to stop “brutal attacks on persons and property.” Close by, in Nakuru,
at a mass meeting Indian shopkeepers complained of raids on trucks
carry ing their trading goods to towns such as Makindi. In Ruiru, near
Thika, the local Indian Association asked for firearms to protect shopkeepers
against Mau Mau raids.70 As early as December 1952, Indians formed a
Home Guard at the Nyanza Trading Center.
In so doing, they supported the government and its emergency measures.
Beyond security, they also believed that the Mau Mau’s violence had revealed
the backwardness of Africans. Emphasizing the “savage methods . . . [of]
violence, arson and bloodshed let loose” by the rebels, these traders were
unconcerned with the political legitimacy—or lack thereof—of the Mau
Mau. However, in their choice of words, they obliquely revealed their ra-
cialized view of Africans as being inferior to Indians, a perspective that was
not lost on either the Mau Mau fighters or nonfighting Africans.71
Indeed, Patel and Nathoo’s emphatic support of the emergency led KAU
members to question the credibility of the Congress’s alliance with them.
As Chamanlal put it to Nehru, no African would forgive “any” Indian after
their Executive Council representatives called for the death penalty for Ke-
nyatta. During their tour of African reserves, Krishna Kumar met KAU
leaders who were particularly upset with the position adopted by Madan
and Patel, whom they saw as “tools of Englishmen.” Rahman also noted that
many Kikuyu saw Indians as “arming ultimately to join hands with the
British” in its suppression of them. Although they were well aware of the
supply raids on Indian dukkas that often turned violent and attempts by forest
fighters to blackmail Indians into cooperating with them and giving them
“protection money,” the “excessive zeal” shown by Indian police volunteers
and public demands for protection made by dukkawallahs led to the dete-
rioration of an already ambivalent relationship between Indians and Afri-
cans, especially outside Nairobi. Africans in Murang’a complained that 200
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 211

of the 500 Indians who lived there had become members of the Home
Guard, joined the police in beating Africans, confiscated their cattle, and
watched unconcerned as African policemen raped women. They told
Kumar that Indians were also “outraging their women,” naming Hasim
Jiwa and Narsi Bhojra as particular culprits.72 The efforts of the Congress
and Chamanlal’s legal team to criticize the emergency were undermined
as KAU leaders, Mau Mau commanders in the forests, and ordinary Ki-
kuyu farmers in the reserves began to associate the Indian community as a
whole with the repression unleashed by the government. Anti-Indian
feeling was so high that Pinto’s closest associate, Murumbi, who visited India
as KAU’s general secretary in April 1953, stated that some Indian busi-
nessmen were “siding with Europeans” to secure favors. Reinforcing
Murumbi’s observation, Kenyatta warned that “a dangerous time is coming
for the small Indian merchant in the affected [Mau Mau] areas,” empha-
sizing the need for every Indian to “realize the significance of the changed
revolutionary situation.”73 Kenyatta’s singling out of the Indian petty shop-
keeper in particular geographic locations as being particularly vulnerable
reflected the ways in which racial and class consciousness of the late 1940s,
discussed in Chapter 3, developed new political salience during the emer-
gency as old grievances found violent expression.
Kikuyu squatters who had been evicted from the highlands and were
without any land to cultivate in the African reserves tried their hand at small-
scale trade in the Rift Valley, Central, and Nyanza Provinces, where they
found themselves in direct competition with Indian shopkeepers. Waruhiu
Itote, “General China,” was inspired by the unity of Indians he witnessed
while serving in India during the war, as described earlier. On his return to
Kenya, however, Indians were the main obstacle to his ventures into trade.
Itote set up a business in Mathira, in Nyeri, to buy firewood and sell it to
the railways. The six hundred Indians living in the area had a monopoly
over the supply of firewood to the railways, so Itote’s company was forced
to sell its material through them. “I became very angry one day,” he re-
called in 1967, “when two Asians came and told us to remove it [firewood]
from this place. . . . How dare an Asian, a guest in our country, come and
tell us to remove it? Was this not Africa, our Africa, and were we not Afri-
cans? I boiled with rage and could not control my indignation for many
days. First the Europeans took our land and encircled us and stuffed us into
cages they called ‘Reserves.’ Then, having cut off half our life by robbing us
of our land, Asians came along and stifled us economically. We could not
212 Indians in Kenya

earn money we so desperately needed to drag ourselves up by our boot-

straps, and to obtain the education we must have if we were to rule our-
selves.” 74 Itote’s critique of colonialism emphasized the impoverishment of
Africans caused by land hunger, for which he blamed Europeans, and eco-
nomic deprivation at the hands of Indian traders. This poverty, he believed,
would only be alleviated through economic uplift, but his personal experi-
ence convinced him that Indian traders obstructed this endeavor. By the
early 1950s this economic critique of Indian traders became politicized and
racialized as African political activists began to question the right of Indians
to trade in Kenya. In deliberately using the term “guests” to highlight the
diasporic status of these traders, Itote juxtaposed the indigeneity of Afri-
cans to sojourning Indians in imagining the nation.
Itote’s view of Indians, which resulted from his encounter with the ra-
cially discriminatory structures of the economy, reflected concerns shared
by others involved in Mau Mau. As much as the rebellion was concerned
with predominantly Kikuyu issues of land and authority, it also took up eco-
nomic grievances unrelated to land. Mirroring the 1948 Nakuru boycott dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, in September 1953 the Kiambu Central Mau Mau com-
mittee resolved to boycott Indian shops and shoot anyone who was caught
buying goods from Indians. The strategic politicization involved in specifi-
cally targeting Indian shops reveals the resonance of Mau Mau across dif-
ferent socioeconomic spaces, where it combined with the politics of indi-
geneity. Another forest fighter, Henry Kahinga Wachanga, remembered
Mau Mau raids on Indian shops and homes to take “money, goods, and
lives” as a reaction against Patel and Hassan’s public support of emergency
measures and a sign of the growing distrust between Indian and African
members of the Legislative Council. These attacks were more violent than
the supply raids and spontaneous thefts previously mentioned, and they
resulted in fatalities. In November 1953 a Sikh contractor who was
“wiring African locations” for the government, likely for intelligence gath-
ering purposes, was murdered by two gunmen. On January 1, 1954, two
Indian shopkeepers and an Indian member of the KPR were killed, and in
March another two traders were shot in Nairobi. These kinds of raids were
planned and politically motivated. Wachanga recalled the decision of the
Central Committee in Nairobi to kill an Indian in Bahati who had joined
the police force on the grounds that the Mau Mau oath obliged them to
“have no mercy for anyone” who was their “enemy.” This category included
Indian loyalists. Indian Muslims had been most vocal in their staunch sup-
port of the government and as a result were targeted by the Mau Mau. In
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 213

early 1953, a Muslim sawmill manager in Thomson Falls was attacked,

while in Thika, a Khoja Muslim was murdered on a sisal estate. As a result
of the increasing attacks on Indian shops, merchants in Kariokor, a neigh-
borhood in Nairobi, decided to close their businesses because of the lack of
adequate safeguards.75
Despite the rhetoric of political revenge that latter-day memoirs espoused,
however, Indian shops remained the target of Mau Mau activity during the
emergency primarily for supplies, and fatalities were rare. The total number
of Indians killed during the emergency was twenty-two, of which three
were members of the KPR who were initially believed to have been killed
by the Mau Mau but were in fact shot dead “mistakenly” by their own pa-
trols.76 Encounters with everyday violence, however, racialized the Indian
political discourse.
Apa Pant had criticized the excessive violence of the colonial state in public.
In private he was concerned that the rebellion had drawn a violent boundary
in the realm of African and Indian “cooperation.” Pant feared that Africans
“wanted” Indians to join them in “violent and criminal” acts to get rid of
Europeans, but he believed strongly that Indians in Kenya could not help
in the “loot or arson or in the organized ‘killing’ of Europeans or cattle.”
Therefore he worried that Indians who hesitated in joining the Africans’
“violent ways” would not be considered “friends.” 77 A similar anxiety was
voiced in Indian newspapers, including the Daily Chronicle. In editorials
and published letters, some Indians distanced themselves from their “Af-
rican fellow citizens,” who “must clearly understand that they cannot pos-
sibly expect and will not have any support from Asians if they resort to
methods of violence and terrorism for the attainment of their objectives.”
At the same time, Pant and the contributors to the Chronicle continued to
pledge their active support of “legitimate and constitutionally made claims
for advancement” in all directions.78 The staunchest supporters of African
self-governance cautioned against the use of violence as the means to
achieve it. They consistently underscored the political impulse behind the
armed rebellion and criticized the methods rather than underlying cause
of the agitation. While they identified violent action as separating African
fighters from Indian activists, both of whom wanted independence, their
concerns reflected an increasingly racialized political boundary among In-
dians within the Legislative Council who qualified their support of African
freedom.
In a subtle but significant departure from the efforts of younger mem-
bers of the Congress to emphasize the violence of the government rather
214 Indians in Kenya

than the rebels, C. B. Madan publicly announced that it was only by the
“progression of ideas” rather than acts of violence that Africans would achieve
a “state of confidence to govern themselves.” 79 He thus evoked a civiliza-
tional progression to self-determination that temporally limited the legiti-
macy of African political aspirations. This view found resonance among sev-
eral others within the Legislative Council, who voiced thinly veiled racial
concerns as they negotiated matters of political representation and the re-
distribution of state power to increase African participation in governance.
Patel and Nathoo not only supported the government’s endeavor to defeat
forest fighters but also concluded that by “indulging in violence” Africans
had shown that they were “not in a fit state to take over the running of the
country.” Linking self-determination with civilizational progress, and con-
trasting Mau Mau violence with the developmental stages that would even-
tually lead to decolonization, they argued that Africans had “not proved
themselves equal to the task” and were not yet “ready” for independence.
Patel, Nathoo, and Madan thus put Africans in a waiting room for self-
governance, announcing that it was only after the “development of character”
that Africans could “legitimately make demands which did not conflict with
others’ rights.” 80
In August 1954, a Sikh lawyer, N. S. Mangat, became president of the
Congress. Mangat had been injured during the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre
in Amritsar in 1919. He moved to Kenya in 1923, entered the Legislative
Council in 1937, and became the first Indian president of the Law Society
established by Indians and Europeans in 1945. He was elected president at
a time when Pinto had been detained, Jaswant Singh was in India and about
to be declared a prohibited immigrant, and Nazareth, de Souza, Kapila, Tra-
vadi, and Jamidar were busy with their Mau Mau cases, trying to maintain
a low profile in order to avoid Pinto’s fate.81 Patel was preparing for retire-
ment, leaving Mangat with an opening to steer the Congress in a new di-
rection at a moment when, in his words, “the country is in a state of fer-
ment, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” 82 It was his musings
on this “quiet desperation” that revealed a political discourse based on a
deeply racialized civilizational hierarchy.
The Mau Mau, Mangat proclaimed, was a “desperate struggle for survival”
among some “atavistic” Kikuyu whose “inclement destiny” had “scourged
them almost to the place where-from they had started fifty years ago.” While
Mangat’s criticism of the violence of the Mau Mau was shared by other In-
dians, it was his emphasis on the past that underscored the extent to which
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 215

racial consciousness shaped historical memory and political posturing during

the emergency. For three decades the Congress had abandoned its early
twentieth-century emphasis on the colonizing ambitions and complicity of
early Indian settlement in Kenya. Returning to this narrative, Mangat placed
Indians as agents of colonialism and modernity in East Africa, dramatically
proclaiming that Indian and European colonists had arrived in the country
fifty years before and encountered “a wolf-child gamboling . . . blissfully
oblivious of the stunning progress the rest of Adam’s posterity had made.” 83
Linking African civilizational development with the influence of Indians,
he went on to assert that Africans were “lifted out of the abyss” of their “bar-
barity” through “the contact of the immigrants.” Likely alluding to the Thuku-
Desai alliance of the 1920s, the trade union movement of the late 1930s
and 1940s, and the joint front of the KAU and Congress in the late 1940s,
Mangat argued that this “influence” was especially noticeable in the realm
of organized politics. Through “imitation and emulation,” he announced, Af-
ricans organized themselves politically, eventually giving their “counsel” in
the Legislative Council. Mangat positioned Indians as the catalysts in this
political awakening of Africans through example and by facilitating their po-
litical organization with institutional alliances. This rendering established
a racialized political hierarchy in which Indians led and Africans followed.
Mangat thus cast their relationship in a paternalistic dynamic in which In-
dians were the source of African material progress and political develop-
ment. As he put it, “We have often flattered ourselves by claiming that we
have supported African aspirations. We started doing this . . . before the
Africans knew what their aspirations were.” 84
The Mau Mau, however, exposed Africans as “savagely precious, corpo-
rally smarting, and morally rebellious,” as far as Mangat was concerned. He
therefore argued that Africans were not yet ready for self-governance, sug-
gesting that it was the premature inclusion of the “child” in the Legislative
Council that had triggered the rebellion in the first place. “At this stage,”
Mangat declared, “the child thought that he could get rid of his parents and
assert himself. He rebelled against those who sought to teach him discipline
and bit the hand which fed him. The Europeans, fatherlike, are obliged to
punish him and the Indians, motherlike, feel deep pity for him and for the
child’s own good, approve the punishment.” 85 Not only did Mangat argue
that the African demand for freedom was itself a rebellion that deserved
violent suppression, he also conflated all forms of political expression with
the Mau Mau despite the differences between the forest fighters, KAU
216 Indians in Kenya

leaders and detainees, and African members of the Legislative Council who
had publicly distanced themselves from the guerrillas.
As its president, Mangat moved to the Congress to sever its alliances with
all African politics, turning his back on his own prior demand for a common
roll. “To advocate a common electoral roll on universal franchise,” he dra-
matically announced, “is to promote an act of self-immolation. . . . [T]oday
there are undercurrents in Africa going by the various names of nation-
alism, Africanism or tribalism. Good luck to any African tribe which is so-
ciologically evolving itself into a nation.” Highlighting the extent to which
the destiny of Indians in Kenya was entangled in the colonial reality, he
further proclaimed, “To aid and abet those who are trying to reduce the
Europeans to the same level as the Africans is to court our own disaster. It
would be a tragedy, for us of all people, if the British lion in Kenya dies of
an ass’s kick.” 86
For more than a decade the Congress had shared the public political realm
with the KAU, putting up a joint front on several legislative issues. Mangat
rescinded many demands of the Congress, including the common roll, in-
creased African representation in the Legislative Council, and complete self-
governance. During his two-year tenure as president, as Nazareth recounted
in his memoir, Mangat turned “harshly away from the sympathetic ear and
willing hands” that Indians had lent to Africans and “contradicted the whole
of the past of the Congress and the community it represented.” 87 This volte-
face was also noted by the colonial officials, who considered Mangat’s speech
“a fundamental change . . . from the policy of befriending Africans at any
price to coalition with the Europeans to counter the rising tide of African
nationalism.” 88
From 1954 on, African members of the Legislative Council and trade
unionists were the most vocal representatives of this nationalism, demanding
self-governance through the increase in directly elected African represen-
tatives in the administration. Mangat refused to join them in making these
demands. Other members of the Congress, however, were determined to
ride the wave of African nationalism and moved quickly to marginalize him.
The Executive Council, including Nazareth, passed a resolution of no confi-
dence in Mangat, and at the very next session of the Congress Amin took
over as president, publicly dissociating the party from Mangat, his “deplor-
able views,” and his “gratuitous, unwarranted attacks” on Africans.89 By 1958,
Mangat was completely alienated within the Congress, although he re-
mained a member of the Legislative Council. He eventually withdrew per-
 Between Rebellion and Suppression 217

manently from politics, went back to India, and did not return to Kenya after
independence. The support of Mangat’s racialized rhetoric and policies
thus appeared limited within the Congress. However, he had articulated a
new rendering of racial consciousness in political discourse, albeit in its most
extreme form, that was triggered by the Mau Mau and emergency. This
resonated in the public realm for the next decade in the run-up to
decolonization.
 FIVE

R
Negotiating Nationhood

the military war against the Mau Mau was over. British
BY E A R LY 19 5 5 ,
security forces together with the Kikuyu Home Guard succeeded in de-
feating Mau Mau platoons and commanders through violent military con-
frontations, civilian propaganda, and amnesty deals offered to forest fighters
who voluntarily gave themselves up. Although the emergency continued until
1959, the rebellion had underscored the urgent need for political reform,
which the imperial administration took seriously.1 The rebellion and emer-
gency shaped political discourses about representation and governance for
Africans and Indians. With prominent Kikuyu members of the Kenya
African Union still in detention, the colonial state was eager to involve
in governance Africans whom it considered “legitimate.” These included
“loyalist” Kikuyu leaders who had denounced Mau Mau and its violence,
and non-Kikuyu political activists who had not directly participated in the
rebellion. In 1957–1958 elections were held on a limited, racially defined
communal franchise, bringing to the Legislative Council for the very first
time eight directly elected African representatives, including Tom Mboya,
Oginga Odinga, Daniel arap Moi, Ronald Ngala, and Julius Kiano. Many of
them had been studying outside Kenya at the height of the emergency and
had returned in the late 1950s. Among those elected to the Indian seats were
J. M. Nazareth, Arvind Jamidar, K. D. Travadi, and Zafr-ud-Deen. The ma-
jority had been vocal in their criticism of the emergency and demand for
African franchise and political representation. Several had defended Mau
Mau detainees in court.2 These elected members of the Legislative Council

218
 Negotiating Nationhood 219

were the men who negotiated the transfer of power from the colonial state
between 1958 and 1963.
Over a period of five years, as independence became imminent, these Af-
rican and Indian members of the Legislative Council debated over different
formulations of statehood that reflected competing definitions of nationhood.
For Africans, although specific economic and electoral policies were fiercely
contested, a racialized definition of nationhood epitomized in the slogan “Af-
rica for Africans” emerged as the only logical and acceptable vision for Kenya:
a democratic state with a majority African government. Reflecting on this
emergent nationalist discourse, in 1954 Apa Pant had stated, “Ultimately
Indians and Europeans shall have to merge themselves completely and un-
questionably with Africans . . . [and] become biologically undistinguishable.”
How long this would take, he mused, “depends on the sagacity, tolerance
and farsightedness” of the immigrants.3 In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
however, it became clear that Indians had no desire to become “undistin-
guishable” biologically, economically, or politically from Africans even as
they asserted their generational, territorial, and developmental claims on
the postcolonial nation. The end of the emergency and the task of state
building that culminated in decolonization and nationhood in 1963 ex-
posed this contradiction. The disjuncture between the anticolonial political
discourses of indigeneity and diasporic consciousness, and between the
promise of freedom that would bring equality for all non-Europeans and
the lived reality of material inequality, came to the fore in negotiations
over statehood and nationhood. The contested future of Indians in Kenya
was central to the resultant competing nationalist imaginaries that were
articulated within the Legislative Council and in shared urban spaces in-
habited by ordinary Indians and Africans in Nairobi, Nakuru, Nyeri, and
Mombasa.

I M A G I N I N G T H E N AT I O N

While its leadership changed hands between 1953 and 1958 and its mem-
bers disagreed on how the organization would deal with the rebellion and
the emergency, the East African Indian National Congress was consistent
in criticizing the racialized political and economic structures of the colo-
nial state that it identified as the underlying cause of unrest in Kenya. It also
publicly and repeatedly expressed deep concern “at the alarming continuation
220 Indians in Kenya

of the emergency which is sapping the moral and monetary resources of

Kenya” and urged the government to end its policy of detention without
trial.4 Even those leaders who had been the most vocal in their support of
the government and were emphatic in their criticism of the Mau Mau pres-
sured the governor to call off the emergency and address the economic and
political grievances voiced by Africans regarding land and representation.
Within the Legislative Council, Ambalal Bhailal Patel and N. S. Mangat de-
manded that the government associate Indians and Africans in “machinery
devised to end the emergency.” Like them, Ibrahim Nathoo had praised
the government’s efforts to “completely crush” the Mau Mau, but he also
believed that “the present policy of suppressing the terrorists will inevitably
leave bitterness and acrimony in the hearts of those innocent people who
are bound to suffer.” Outside Nairobi, the Nakuru Indian Association had
encouraged its members to become informants for the government to
help it defeat the Mau Mau. However, it simultaneously criticized the at-
titude of the “privileged . . . who favour repression as a means of uprooting
trouble . . . [and] ignore the economic and social retardation” caused by the
“colour bar” in Kenya. This took the form of racial segregation in land policy,
schools, and hospitals that kept both Indians and Africans out of European
spaces. The essence of the “British way of life” being advocated by settlers
within the government in formulating colonial policy was, as Mangat put
it, racial—a “whiteness” that “fears contamination from Indians and Afri-
cans. Europeans can keep their culture . . . they prefer to stifle themselves
in their own cocoon.”5
Although Mangat had deliberately distanced himself from the Mau Mau
and the KAU, his criticism of the colonial state’s hierarchical racial policies
resulted in a personal position on the highlands that was the same as that
of the forest fighters and KAU detainees. For him, “it is not the wealth of
the highlands which makes their exclusive possession objectionable. It is the
principle of the thing.” This objection was echoed by Patel even as he tried
to steer the younger members of the Congress away from supporting the
KAU. Like Mangat, he was consistent in asking the government to resolve
Kikuyu land grievances and, in particular, deracialize the highlands.6 It was
no surprise that for Jaswant Singh the government’s highlands policy was
“against all concepts of justice and fair play.” However, even his political ad-
versaries Mangat and Patel agreed on this point, reflecting a consensus within
the Congress despite the conflicting reactions of its leaders to the Mau Mau
and the emergency. In February 1953, in its very first public policy state-
 Negotiating Nationhood 221

ment issued after the emergency, the Congress explicitly linked Mau Mau
with the colonial government’s land policy. Significantly, even as Congress
members did not condone their violence, the statement directly connected
the forest fighters’ demand for land with nation building. Advocating for the
deracialization of the highlands for Africans, the Congress announced: “It
is difficult to see how any nation can be built on such glaring inequalities
and injustices based on race or colour.” It further warned that if the high-
lands policy remained the same, “Kenya may find itself forced to spend a
long time yet in the dark Mau Mau wood and when it has got out of that it
may find itself in yet another wood with another night overtaking it.” 7
The Mau Mau emergency had underscored the urgency of political and
economic reform. It was in this context that the Congress leadership repo-
sitioned itself to accommodate the changing dynamic in the colony, as they
recognized the inevitability and desirability of African self-governance and
asserted their claim to this nation. By the mid-1950s, specific Congress
policy on land, trade, and political representation revealed visions of a fu-
ture nation in which Africans and Indians would coexist. In this imagina-
tion, civilizational and racial differences separated them as two distinct po-
litical communities. In the shadow of the Mau Mau, Congress leaders built
a new argument for their old demand for deracializing the highlands by
evoking the African claim to European farms based on their right as “per-
manent and indigenous inhabitants” of Kenya.8 In so doing, they acknowl-
edged Africans as first belongers in the country—sons of the soil whose his-
torical disadvantage and indigenous rights needed to be recognized in the
emergent nation, especially through reform in land policy. While the Con-
gress in its policy statements continued to demand the end of racial discrimi-
nation by law, as it had done for decades, in the aftermath of the Mau Mau
rebellion it asked for legal recognition of the specific interests of Africans.
In particular, while the Congress demanded that the highlands be made
accessible to all residents in Kenya irrespective of their race, it also stated
that by law, African land units (reserves) should be closed off to other races
and that the government should formulate policy that would secure the land
needs of present and future generations of Africans.9 In identifying the par-
ticular interests of a specific community with distinct needs, Congress policy
marked Africans as separate from Indians, and revealed a desire to accom-
modate this difference to the advantage of Africans on the issue of land.
Although for the Congress Executive Committee it was in the acknow-
ledgment of this difference and in the deliberate formulation of policies
222 Indians in Kenya

emphasizing racial inequities that the structural disadvantages facing Afri-

cans would be overcome, at the discursive level, in supporting the prin-
ciple of protecting their “special” interests, some of its leaders such as Patel
revealed the extent to which a civilizational boundary divided them from
the indigenous residents of Kenya. In his public speeches on the Congress’s
land policy recommendations, Patel stated that African land interests should
be legally protected until Africans “reach a level of civilisation enjoyed by
other races.”10 Specifically, “civilisation” was identified in material terms, in
comparing the income and literacy of Africans with those of Indians and
Europeans. Civilizational “progress,” Patel and Mangat argued, would be
achieved only when African wages were equal with the salaries of Indians
and Europeans and they had equal access to schools, housing, and hospi-
tals. Toward this end, they joined other members of the Congress in advo-
cating the deracialization of schools and hospitals, asked the government
to provide housing to migrant laborers in Nairobi, and urged the adminis-
tration to reconsider its employment policies. They asked for an end to the
government’s practice of paying its non-European staff in the civil ser vices
three-fifths of the salary its European employees took home for the same
position and demanded the removal of racial considerations in hiring and
promotion in the public sector.11
For the leadership within the Congress, Indian and African concerns were
different though not incompatible with regard to access to land, education,
and government salaries since Indians were not directly responsible for set-
ting these policies. Therefore the Congress leaders argued that the emergent
post-emergency—and eventually postcolonial—state needed to include
representatives who would ensure that the government catered to the spe-
cial interests of Africans. In the realm of commerce, however, it was Indian
racial exclusivity that put Africans at a material disadvantage. As dis-
cussed in Chapters 3 and 4, for KAU members and the Mau Mau, freedom
was intrinsically linked with access to sectors of the economy that would
benefit them materially. Their skepticism regarding a political alliance
with Indians stemmed from class concerns, as Indian traders were the most
visible and immediate obstacle to their economic betterment. As lawyers
and journalists, the Congress officials, including Mangat, similarly criticized
the legally dubious trade practices of Indian shopkeepers, whose “inno-
vations of deceit” made “black marketeering” a matter of “routine.” Although
the Congress did little to change this, in his 1956 presidential address
Mangat publicly stated, “We are a very industrious people but in trade, for
 Negotiating Nationhood 223

many of us, avarice alone is the spur to our industry.” This revealed the
class consciousness among professional politicians such as Mangat who be-
lieved that, much like Africans, Indian petty shopkeepers had not yet
achieved an adequate level of civilizational progress. While Mangat held
the “humble yet reliable . . . and frugal artisan” in high regard, he criti-
cized the “nefarious trading methods” of dukkawallahs, whose “unscrupu-
lous conduct” was the “greatest disgrace” of Indians in Kenya. He particu-
larly objected to their “unsightly,” “[u]nsanitary,” “unhygienic,” and “unhealthy
habits” that “humiliate us at every turn.” These included “the chewing of
betelnut in public . . . the indiscriminate spitting and blowing of nose, violent
eructation, the fouling of compartments and water closets in railway trains . . .
gargling with blaring and blasting loud enough to drown the puffing of a
locomotive, the wearing of dirty, greasy clothes . . . [and] the conversion
of house fronts to scrap heaps and of lanes into urinals.”12 For Mangat,
modernity and civilization were thus equated with a genteelness that re-
flected a predilection toward European sensibility even as he criticized its
exclusivity. More importantly, his ethical and civilizational critique of In-
dian petty shopkeepers acknowledged African grievances against Indian
traders as legitimate.
In the mid-1950s, Indians within the Congress reworked their land policy
recommendations to accommodate political concerns regarding the indige-
neity of Africans. The same compunction led the Federation of Indian Cham-
bers of Commerce and Industry, which represented Indian business inter-
ests, to consider ways in which they could conciliate African commercial
aspirations. Toward this end, both the Congress and FICCI, whose leader-
ship was often concurrent, enthusiastically supported the government’s pro-
motion of African trade. As businessmen themselves, they identified the
lack of credit rather than their racial monopoly as restricting African ac-
cess to retail trade, and they argued that entrepreneurial success depended
on access to loans. They urged the government to address the structural
problems Africans faced in receiving credit that would allow new traders to
operate in the wholesale market. Noting that “all immigrants owed their
prosperity to loans,” the Congress announced that “what is required now is
butter for parsnips,” suggesting that the state expand its banking facilities
for African traders.13 Furthermore, signaling the need for Indian traders to
help with the expansion of African business, several FICCI presidents, in-
cluding R. B. Pandya, A. H. Nurmohamed, and Bachulal Gathani, made
two important policy recommendations. First, assuring African “brothers”
224 Indians in Kenya

of the “goodwill and cooperation of Indian traders,” they urged Indians to

form “partnerships with suitable Africans.” The failure of Indian petty
traders to voluntarily do so would become the basis for legislative reform in
postcolonial Kenya that restricted Indian trade and led to their exodus out
of the country. Second, recognizing Africans as having a right to “take
their due place and come into petty trading,” they called on Indians to di-
versify their commercial interests, as “the days of remaining content to be
‘just shopkeepers’ are gone.”14 Indian entrepreneurs with the capital to in-
vest in industry moved into manufacturing. The political and economic In-
dian leadership thus attempted to stake an economic and territorial claim
in the emergent nation to ensure their continuing presence in governance
and business in postcolonial Kenya while simultaneously accommodating
African self-determination and enterprise. However, they wanted these to
be voluntary endeavors and not structural changes facilitated by state over-
sight. Indeed the Congress stopped short of recommending government
protection of African trade interests from Indian businesses. While its
leaders had been keen to correct the historical disadvantages of colonialism
on the basis of the rights of indigenous Africans with regard to land, they
did not extend the same approach to formulating trade policy.
By the mid-1950s the colonial government had succeeded in militarily
defeating the forest fighters, but it continued to prohibit the organization of
colonywide African political parties. Patel, S. G. Amin, and K. P. Shah re-
peatedly urged the government to lift this ban, arguing that political par-
ties were the “essence of democracy and free society” and the only way to
bring the emergency to an end.15 As Mangat put it, “There is a flood of na-
tionalism gushing up the Nile. The undercurrents of these black, furious
waves . . . will surely engulf the white peninsula.”16 Well aware of this rising
tide of nationalism, in 1954 the secretary of state for colonies, Oliver Lyttelton,
put forward the Lyttelton Plan, which accepted the inevitability of African
self-governance but assumed that independence was at least ten years away.
The racially divided communal electoral roll was retained, as was the ra-
cial principle in Legislative Council membership, with seats reserved for
representatives of each group. Indians and Europeans continued to be
elected, while African members were nominated to the council. In consul-
tation with African representatives, Lyttelton promised a study on the best
method for African representation in anticipation of general elections in
the colony in 1956, with the aim of ending the system of nomination for
Africans. The only immediate, substantial change was in the Executive
Council, which formed a Council of Ministers to gradually create a “multi-
 Negotiating Nationhood 225

racial” partnership that would involve Africans and Indians in administra-

tive decisions and responsibilities. Three Europeans, two Indians, and one
African were appointed as ministers. While decisively rejecting white self-
governance in the colony, Lyttelton hoped that multiracialism would be the
“midwife in the process of transition from settler colonialism to indepen-
dent African rule in Kenya.” At the same time, Africans were brought into
various levels of the provincial administration and civil ser vices across the
colony in large numbers.17
Within the Legislative Council, Patel, Nathoo, and Mangat enthusiasti-
cally welcomed Lyttelton’s proposals as a “genuine effort” to accommodate
African demands. Patel was made a minister without portfolio, while Na-
thoo became minister of works. Much like the colonial administration, they
also accepted the inevitability of decolonization, which they rhetorically wel-
comed while it was at a safe distance. In its official representation to the
Coutts Commission, set up to study African representation, the Congress
argued in favor of enfranchising all adult Africans, irrespective of their ed-
ucational levels, leading to the political parity of Africans with Indians and
Europeans. Furthermore, they proposed, in principle, a common roll for all
adult voters in the colony.18 In practice, however, Patel revealed that “In-
dians want to achieve progress by evolution, not revolution.” For him, the
Mau Mau had shown that Africans were not yet ready for full, responsible
government based on universal franchise. In the interim, therefore, the In-
dian members accepted Lyttelton’s gradual devolution of power.
The expectation of self-determination opened up the question of what
form of government would best work in postcolonial Kenya as decoloniza-
tion became a reality, albeit a distant rather than immediate one. The In-
dian leadership imagined a multiracial future in which Africans and Indians
would be equally involved in determining policies regarding representation,
land, and commerce. They envisioned a multiracial state in which all three
races—African, Indian, and European—would have equal representation in
both the Legislative and Executive Councils. Keenly aware that in numer-
ical terms they were a minority who, in the absence of multiracial political
parties, were unlikely to be returned to these councils without some form
of reservations, they suggested the allocation of a certain number of seats
to Indians, racially defined, to be elected on a common roll. While mem-
bers of the Congress recognized Africans as having the first claim to be-
longing to the country based on their indigeneity, they were emphatic that
“the Indian is here to stay and to stay as an asset to the country of his
adoption.” In staking this territorial claim, Indians articulated a race
226 Indians in Kenya

consciousness that marked them out as civilizationally distinct as they as-

serted their right to self-determination by ensuring their inclusion in gov-
ernance under the new constitutional scheme through reserved racial seats.
Indeed, Mangat was emphatic that “Indians are proud of their culture and
civilization and they wish to retain them.”19 For his part, Patel defined na-
tionhood in Kenya as a “laboratory to create unity at the apex” that would
represent the differences below. Kenya was a country with “people from three
continents” who had “three colours of skin” and were at “different stages of
culture.” It was only “in the creation of a multiracial society in Kenya” that he
believed “ordered progress and prosperity of all races” would be achieved.
This was echoed by Mangat, who praised the Lyttelton constitution as a
unique opportunity to create in Kenya a nation that would combine “the
liberalism of the west and the idealism of the east . . . [W]e are going
through an experiment never attempted before . . . a multi-racial society.”20
In accepting Lyttelton’s constitutional scheme, which granted neither the
common roll nor the election of Africans to the Legislative Council, Patel
and Mangat ignored the mandate given to them by the rank and file of the
Congress, especially as its stated policy was to demand self-governance within
the Commonwealth. Nazareth, D. K. Sharda, Fitz de Souza, Jaswant Singh,
and Pio Gama Pinto, before the arrest of the last two, formed an Action
Group to withdraw support from Patel, succeeding in forcing him to ab-
stain from participating in the constitutional plans. The Indian associations
in Nairobi and Mombasa joined the group to distance themselves from
Mangat.21 Yet Patel’s actions within the Legislative Council created an ir-
reversible divide between Indian and African representatives, the resonance
of which would be felt in the coming decade. Unlike Patel and Nathoo, the
six African representatives in the council, led by Eliud Mathu, rejected
Lyttelton’s scheme, as did Tom Mboya, a young trade unionist who had re-
cently returned from Oxford, and Oginga Odinga. Although Mathu accepted
the principle of multiracial governance for the time being, they argued that
a multiracial society would not be attained by the provision of just one seat
in the cabinet, a measure that merely indicated the government’s continuing
desire to keep Africans in “third place” in their own country. They also ob-
jected to the ten-year standstill on changes within the Legislative Council
and in electoral practices. Therefore, for Mboya, much like the Action
Group, Patel’s acceptance of the Lyttelton plan was a “complete betrayal of
the brotherhood they [Indians] have so often preached.” Forest fighter
Henry Kahinga Wachanga recalled an increase in Mau Mau raids on
Indian shops at this time because they saw the Indian leadership as
 Negotiating Nationhood 227

wanting “a place above the Africans” in the post-emergency multiracial

government.22
Despite their rejection of his constitutional scheme, Lyttelton left African
members with little choice but to accept their position on the Executive
Council or be left out of the administration altogether. Appolo Ohanga, who
had been nominated to the Legislative Council in 1947, accepted the post
of minister of community development, and Lyttelton made good on his
promise to put together a study on African elected representation. This was
the Coutts Commission mentioned earlier. In 1956–1957, elections were held
throughout the colony in which eight African representatives were directly
elected, joined by six Indians. Although representation and franchise were
limited to those Africans the government deemed “loyalist,” imposing edu-
cational, employment, and income qualifications, by 1957 a new generation
of Indian and African representatives had entered the Legislative Council,
as Patel and Mangat retired permanently from politics. In September 1957,
under Mboya’s leadership, African members brought the council to a stand-
still by boycotting proceedings until constitutional reforms were introduced
to increase African participation and grant full, responsible government.23
In response, Lennox-Boyd, the new secretary of state, allocated six addi-
tional seats to Africans. By-elections in 1958 brought to the Legislative
Council fourteen elected Africans and six Indians, with four Africans and
three Indians elected on special seats. The Council of Ministers included
two Africans, two Indians, and five Europeans. With this, African leaders,
including Kikuyu loyalists and Luo and Kalenjin representatives, used their
position within the government to accelerate the path to self-governance
by forcing a constitutional deadlock until their demands were met. The newly
elected African leadership put pressure on the colonial government to grant
their demand for majority democratic rule with universal franchise. Eager to
reverse Patel’s betrayal, having successfully marginalized Mangat within
the Congress, the new Indian members of the council led by Nazareth joined
their African counterparts in demanding constitutional changes to attain
complete self-determination. This was a short-lived alliance.24

T H I N G S F A L L A PA RT

At a time when the African political leadership was demanding immediate

independence, the colonial administration wanted to control the pace and
substance of African self-determination. Lennox-Boyd argued that “the pre-
mature abandonment of [Britain’s] responsibilities would lead to a decrease
228 Indians in Kenya

in the standard of living and discontent.” Therefore, he advocated the prin-

ciple of “gradualism” to “train Africans” over a period of ten years in po-
litical responsibilities, along with “multi-racialism,” which maintained ra-
cially defined communal voting rolls to “protect settlers.” In the interim, the
Colonial Office hoped to develop a state on the principle of multiracialism
that would manipulate “European fears, Asian timidity and African impa-
tience to a delicate but changing balance” and make it impossible for any
one “member of the team to run off the field.”25 Within the Legislative
Council, European member Michael Blundell took the lead in promoting
multiracialism. He formed a political party, the New Kenya Group, to move
away from the racist legacy of existing European associations that refused
to give up their exclusive access to the highlands. Blundell supported the
African and Indian demand to end racial restrictions in the highlands
but wanted to retain racial representation in the council, envisioning
governance— and eventually the independent state—as a multiracial
partnership.26 Nathoo joined the New Kenya Group. The radicalism of the
Mau Mau, however, had let the genie out of the bottle, as several African
representatives led by Mboya demanded immediate independence. These re-
cently elected statesmen wrested control of the pace of decolonization from
the colonial state and rejected all schemes that put them in a waiting room
for nationhood.
While Kikuyu and Luo members of the Legislative Council were united
in their demand for immediate self-determination, they and their compa-
triots who were still in detention had different hopes for what self-governance
would bring, how the fruits of freedom would change the everyday lives of
the communities they represented, and the role of the state in facilitating
these developments. Kikuyu economic and political aspirations and the colo-
nial state’s mediation of Kikuyu loyalism and rehabilitation had dominated
public concerns in the realm of institutionalized politics in the 1940s
and 1950s. This was reflected in the various futures of their independent
nation imagined by political activists. Forest-fighting landless Mau Mau
and their supporters wanted the kind of freedom that would result in the
equitable redistribution of land. Luo and Kikuyu elite who had not been
deprived of land aspired to a tangibly higher standard of living, hoping
that national self-determination would bring about material change. Jomo
Kenyatta and Julius Kiano wanted to achieve this through capitalist means
by developing a national bourgeoisie of Africans who would displace In-
dians and Europeans in the commercial sector, while Odinga and Bildad
 Negotiating Nationhood 229

Kaggia were socialists for whom freedom would be meaningful only if it was
accompanied by a complete overhaul of the political economy through the
state-led redistribution of resources, especially land. Beyond ideological
concerns, while Luo leaders joined hands with the Kikuyu in the late
1950s, Masai and Kalenjin representatives were skeptical of a postcolonial
state in which Kikuyu and Luo power at the center could potentially mar-
ginalize the interests of their ethnically defined communities. In partic-
ular, their geographical location in the Rift Valley made them fear the
usurpation of their land by Kikuyu squatters and ex-detainees from the
Central Province. In the early 1960s they began to advocate for a constitu-
tional scheme that would decentralize the state’s power by dividing Kenya
into six administrative regions, each having equal political representation.
This principle, called majimbo, envisioned an African government without
a single ethnically dominant center of state power.27
African leaders imagined many different ways of building the postcolo-
nial state in Kenya. However, they agreed on two important principles. First,
the redistributive aspiration of self-governance was at the center of all vi-
sions of the democratic nation-state. Second, self-determination and indepen-
dence meant the formation of a nation-state in which “power must only be
in the majority’s hand.” Rejecting institutionalized forms of multiracialism in
postcolonial Kenya’s government—which Blundell hoped would combine
“the adaptability of the African, the thrift and industry of the Muslim and
Indian and the tolerance and experience of the Arab”—the new generation
of elected African statesmen wanted to spearhead “the struggle for demo-
cratic and independent Kenya.” An abortive attempt at interracial political
organization was made by African and Indian elected members who formed
the Kenya Independence Movement in 1959 after jointly boycotting the
Legislative Council, demanding larger numbers of seats for African repre-
sentatives. It became monoracial within months of its formation. The slogan
“Africa for Africans” gained rhetorical popularity against the slow pace of
constitutional reform embodied in multiracial politics and enabled leaders to
gloss over the economic and political differences among themselves.28 They
articulated a singular nationalist vision of independent Kenya in which Afri-
cans would predominate by force of numbers, by their right as original be-
longers, and by state oversight, ensuring the reversal of the colonial racial
hierarchy that had placed Europeans on top, Indians in the middle, and Af-
ricans at the bottom. They merely disagreed on the particular kinds of ini-
tiatives that their state would foster toward this end.
230 Indians in Kenya

In juxtaposition to this political discourse of indigeneity, Indians were a

numerical minority whose transnational affiliation with India and racial and
diasporic identity rendered them nonindigenous in perpetuity. Not only was
their presence in Kenya intimately linked with the spread of colonialism,
but their economic success, based on endogamous business practices, had
prevented Africans from becoming trading partners in the 1940s and 1950s.
The place of Indians in postcolonial Kenya, heavily laden with the histor-
ical and structural legacy of colonialism, was thus ambiguous. This ambiva-
lence became tangible as Legislative Council members battled over the nuts
and bolts of economic policies, particularly land and trade, and citizenship
rights, especially electoral franchise and equality. Statehood, issues of po-
litical representation, and nation building brought up tensions that had never
been resolved but had been glossed over in the utopia of interracial soli-
darity during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In January 1960, political ne-
gotiations at Lancaster House in London over constitutional reforms revealed
the deeply racialized political postures of Indian and African elected mem-
bers of the Legislative Council.
The Mau Mau rebellion put land at the center of political debate in Kenya,
although African representatives within the Legislative Council did not agree
on a specific land policy. Odinga led the demand that the highlands be held
in a trust and redistributed to those who had lost their ancestral proprie-
tary rights to Europeans, while Kiano advocated a “willing-buyer, willing-
seller” resolution to the land issue. Indians had long supported the dera-
cialization of the highlands, as they had been the first to politically oppose
the reservation of these fertile lands for Europeans. In 1910 Indians had
used this claim to the highlands as a civilizational appeal that would allow
them to own land on the basis of their imperial citizenship. From 1920 on,
leaders within the Congress and Legislative Council had argued that land
ownership was a right based on the principle of racial equality. Therefore,
Nazareth supported Kiano’s free market land policy. The Kikuyu claim to
the highlands in the 1940s and 1950s, however, was one of original own-
ership of land that had been usurped by immigrants. Indians, as immigrants,
had no inherent right to land—a point that African leaders across political
and ethnic divisions agreed on. As Moi put it, Indians should not be per-
mitted to buy land in the highlands at all. For Nazareth, this would amount
to a continuation of the racial principle in independent Kenya, with the re-
placement of white racial reservations with black ones, both of which ex-
cluded Indians. It was in fact this disagreement over land that had led to
 Negotiating Nationhood 231

Nazareth’s expulsion, along with other Indian members, from the Kenya In-
dependence Movement.29
Since the majority of Indians in Kenya were not agriculturalists, differ-
ences over the land question were a matter of principle rather than prac-
tice. While Nazareth clashed with Moi and Odinga over the highlands issue
in the Legislative Council, it was African aspirations to forming the nation’s
petty bourgeoisie that brought to the surface the anxieties of Indians who
wanted to maintain the economic status quo in postcolonial Kenya and made
immediate the gross material inequality between Africans and Indians that
postcolonial statesmen would have to mediate. In the 1950s, close to 10,000
Indians were engaged in commerce and financial ser vices, earning almost
400 shillings a month. While the number of Africans employed in commer-
cial activities in the organized sector of the economy was more than double,
they earned on average only 62 shillings a month.30 The colonial govern-
ment employed 9,000 Indians at various levels in administrative and railway
ser vices. They earned approximately 400 shillings a month compared to the
56 shillings a month that the 50,000 African government employees received.
African employment outnumbered Indians in the commercial and govern-
ment sectors, but they earned considerably lower wages than Indians. These
differences were reflected in the kind of jobs Indians and Africans were em-
ployed in, as Indians were predominantly proprietors and managers and en-
gaged in skilled work, whereas Africans were hired as shop assistants and
as unskilled workers.
For Africans at the threshold of independence, freedom would be mean-
ingful only if this conspicuous inequality was overcome. Mboya, Kiano,
Odinga, and other political leaders began to formulate policies that would
allow the realization of African middle-class nationalist aspirations in trade
and government ser vices by becoming wholesalers, retailers, semiskilled ar-
tisans (especially in the railways), government clerks, junior administrators,
and accountants—the very occupations that Indians were engaged in. En-
visioning this future, Indian Legislative Council representatives feared the
ability of the postcolonial state to confiscate Indian property, dismiss In-
dians from government jobs, and restrict Indian trading activity to correct
the historical racial imbalance of colonialism that it would inherit. To pro-
tect Indian livelihoods from such excesses of the state, the Congress asked
African members to commit to passing legislation that would outlaw the con-
fiscation of property by the state and prohibit racial discrimination in ac-
quiring, holding, and occupying land and in carry ing on trade or business.
232 Indians in Kenya

It also demanded a guarantee that public offices would be filled on the basis
of merit, through a competitive examination open to candidates of all races.
In essence, while supporting the political decolonization of Kenya, Indians
wanted to maintain their colonial-era economic position in the postcolonial
nation. Herein lay the key. For African statesmen, uhuru marked the be-
ginning of a future in which past economic imbalances caused by nonin-
digenous settlers in Kenya would be overturned—if necessary, by the state.
Although the Congress had long expressed solidarity with Africans in their
fight for freedom, as independence became imminent, its desire to main-
tain the economic status quo cast a hypocritical tone on Indians’ claims of
racial equality. Africans in the Legislative Council considered this a move
by Indians to extend colonial privilege. Therefore, Mboya and Odinga re-
fused to commit themselves to any specific policies, arguing that only “good
will” would be a true and lasting safeguard for Indians in the nation.31
In January 1960, African, European, and Indian delegates from Kenya
were called to Lancaster House by the Colonial Office to discuss constitu-
tional changes. The political cleavages between African and Indian mem-
bers, each claiming to represent the best interests of their racially defined
communities, soon became insurmountable. The African delegation, in-
cluding Odinga, Mboya, Kiano, and Moi, wanted immediate independence
with a parliamentary democracy based on universal adult franchise and a
nonracial common electoral roll. This was a straightforward, clear, and un-
surprising demand. It was the position of the Indian elected members, par-
ticularly Nazareth, that marked a dramatic and unexpected change in their
political stance. For more than four decades the Congress had been stead-
fast in its demand for a common electoral roll to undercut the monopoly of
Europeans in administrative affairs and transcend racial boundaries in elec-
toral politics to ensure the equality of all races in the eyes of the state. At
Lancaster House, however, led by Nazareth, some Indian delegates not only
withdrew this demand but distanced themselves from the temporal urgency
emphasized by their fellow legislators. Nazareth announced that universal
adult franchise on a common roll was “not desirable immediately.”32 He con-
tinued to pledge Indian support for African majority rule but proposed
a gradual rather than immediate road to full responsible government on a
“one man, one vote” basis. Instead, identifying Indians unequivocally as a
racially distinct political community, he demanded the continuation of ra-
cially defined communal rolls and racial reservation of seats for a period of
four years.
 Negotiating Nationhood 233

In 1956 Nazareth had publicly criticized Mangat for rescinding the Con-
gress’s demand for a common roll.33 Just three years later, his interracial,
transnational, anticolonial political discourse of equality had run its course.
Negotiations over statehood exposed the different economic predilections
of Indian and African leaders, making it clear that their interests were not
only separate but seemingly irreconcilable. These compunctions, in turn,
revealed the divergence between Indian and African conceptualizations of
equality, citizenship, and rights that were articulated as racialized political
policies. For both, freedom was meant to bring economic equality for all
citizens. The problem was that all citizens were not starting off on a level
playing field in postcolonial Kenya. Materially, Indians were better off than
the majority of Africans—an inequality that the postcolonial state could
extirpate only by redistributing the wealth Indians had accumulated. Po-
litically, African interests predominated over Indian claims to racially neu-
tral equal citizenship, as the redistributive aspiration of nationhood ne-
cessitated state bias to favor its historically disadvantaged African citizens.
African politicians did not trust Indians to take the initiative to voluntarily
open up the business sector to Africans, while the Indian leadership did not
trust African statesmen to safeguard Indians’ citizenship rights to property
and equal employment. Both wanted the postcolonial state to protect their
interests—for the former, by circumscribing the economic reach of Indian
traders, and for the latter by arming the government with constitutional
guarantees to protect minorities to ensure that the state could pass legisla-
tion restricting Indian livelihoods. The constitutional conference at Lancaster
House exposed this contradiction.
For African leaders, “one man, one vote” was at the core of democratic
nationalism—the self-determination that the Indians had long claimed to
support. Democratic nationalism, for Indian members, would put all citi-
zens on a “footing of equality” irrespective of their race. However, in the
midst of talk about restricting access to the highlands and replacing the In-
dian petty bourgeoisie with an African one, statehood appeared to Naza-
reth to be substituting European racial predominance with African “ra-
cialism.” A state that differentiated citizenship rights on the basis of race
would perpetuate colonial policies of racial discrimination against In-
dians politically—the very principle the Congress had fought against for
forty years. Mboya deflected this criticism, arguing that “those who accept
Kenya’s citizenship immediately become Kenyan” and were therefore “Af-
ricans.”34 In this emergent definition of nationhood, citizenship and race
234 Indians in Kenya

were conflated in African political discourse, as being Kenyan was equated

with being African. However, it remained unclear whether the term “Af-
rican” was used as a nonracial, territorial claim to citizenship or if it was
applied to make a racially demarcated claim to belonging originally, that
is indigenously, in Kenya. The latter definition potentially excluded dia-
sporic Indians from the emergent nation.
Reacting to Mboya, K. D. Travadi made a generational claim that em-
phasized territorial affiliation and political loyalty to Kenya, and a willing-
ness to use the term “African” in a nonracial sense: “I, myself am in my 44th
year in this country have had my children and my children’s children born
here in this country and I call myself an African and particularly a Kenyan
first and Kenyan last.” In so doing, he hoped that nationalist assertions would
trump racially defined differences between Kenya’s diasporic and indige-
nous citizens. In building his argument for the common roll, Travadi stated
that since Kenya was a “plural society,” its citizens should not bind them-
selves “to any civilization, western or eastern,” but rather “assimilate” with
one another. He proposed a political system in which the Lower House
would include representatives who were elected on a common roll with
adult franchise and an Upper House that had an equal number of represen-
tatives from each of the three races, also elected on a common roll. Yet
Moi’s position on the highlands, which prevented Indians from exercising
their citizenship rights to buy land because of their racial heritage, re-
vealed to Travadi the impossibility of “common citizenship” in indepen-
dent Kenya unless the constitution guaranteed the same rights to all
races.35 For their part, skeptical that a future state that treated immigrants
as equal citizens would result in a nation “where Europeans govern, Afri-
cans follow, Asians supply the wealth and Arabs sit musing with tolerance,”
African legislators demurred from such assurances. Instead Mboya, Moi,
and Odinga willfully argued that real freedom necessitated state-guided
racial preference toward Africans to right the economic wrongs of the past.
Nazareth considered this a “negation of democracy.”36
Unlike Travadi, Nazareth rebuffed Mboya’s call to Indians to refer to
themselves as African. Pointing out that nomenclature would not resolve the
dilemma over equality and freedom, he asked, “How can Africans deny
the right to own land in the highlands if they regard Asians as ‘Africans’?”37
He argued that since Mboya, Moi, and other African legislators used
“this word . . . in a racial sense . . . we should not think in terms of ‘African
citizenship.’ ” If they did so, he feared, “one man, one vote” would reduce
 Negotiating Nationhood 235

Indians to “insignificance,” as their individual vote would have “no practical

value.” Nazareth therefore turned his back on his own past demand for im-
mediate, absolute self-government. Instead he proposed state oversight over
nation building that aimed at creating political parties with members of all
racial groups, which, ironically, would deracialize politics. This, he believed,
was a prerequisite to universal adult franchise on a common roll. In the
interim, at Lancaster House, Nazareth argued that racial representation was
the only way that Indians could ensure that their “rights and interests were
not wholly ignored.” In so doing, he deliberately and consciously drew a
racialized political boundary around Indians. Nazareth’s disavowal of the
common roll and the African demand for immediate self-determination gave
credence to their long-held skepticism of Indian anticolonial politics and con-
firmed the need for state intervention in making political freedom materially
consequential. As Mboya put it, “Africans are beginning to ask just what
these people [Indians] have done . . . to assist in the struggle for indepen-
dence.” For Odhiambo Okello, another political leader, Nazareth’s willing
acquiescence in multiracial governance proved that “people of Indian origin
in Kenya still maintain the position of mugwumps” sitting on the fence “to
see which side the wind blows.”38
Impending statehood exposed the anxiety of becoming a permanent mi-
nority without adequate representation not only among Indian delegates at
the conference but also among other ethnicities on the verge of becoming
postcolonial citizens. While the fear of political abeyance expressed itself in
racialized politics among Indians, the same concern motivated some African
delegates to distance themselves from the domination of Kikuyu and Luo
politics. The African delegation that had entered Lancaster House united left
it as two rival groups. Once the colonial ban on forming colonywide political
parties was lifted after the constitutional conference, Luo and Kikuyu
politicians formed the Kenya African National Union (KANU) with
Kenyatta—still in exile—as its president, and Kalenjin and Masai represen-
tatives, led by Moi, formed the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU),
demanding a majimbo constitution with equal representation to groups that
were regionally (and, coincidentally, ethnically) defined.39
Although Nazareth tried to position himself as the sole spokesman for
all Indians at Lancaster House, in January 1960 Indian leaders across the
political spectrum were faced with two options. They could either remain
a racially distinct political entity that would demand citizenship rights on
the basis of their racially defined minority status or submerge themselves
236 Indians in Kenya

in the tide of immediate, democratic nationalism. The former option was a

retrograde one that would continue the colonial practice of race-based repre-
sentation. The latter would ensure the absence of any institutional space in
which the voice of Indians, as a distinct political community with specific
concerns arising out of their particular position of being a racial minority,
could be articulated. S. G. Hassan who had been appointed director of Asian
manpower in 1955, supported Nazareth at Lancaster House. Pointing to the
material investment Indians had made in Kenya “on the clear understanding
that it was their home,” Hassan considered temporary racial representation
as the only way to exercise the Indian “right” to “direct representation.” Rec-
ognizing the racial principle involved in such a demand, he argued that as
long as the political discourse of indigeneity among Africans positioned In-
dians as “gatecrashers” and political parties remained monoracial, the con-
stitution must recognize “non-Africans” as a politically distinct group.40 This
assertion of territorial, national citizenship, however, exposed Hassan’s am-
bivalence about the ability of Africans to govern their nation. He believed
that “Africans should learn the art of governing” before the common roll
was introduced, thus agreeing with the colonial state that Africans needed
to be put in a waiting room before being granted self-governance. On his
part, Mboya warned the Congress, “Either you are with us, or you are not
even on the field of play.” 41 As he pointed out, complete identification with
the new turn of the “nationalist” struggle was the logical choice for Indian
leaders with whom African politicians had shared the anticolonial realm for
over two decades.
Although Nazareth and Hassan insisted on the extension of communal
representation, other leaders at Lancaster House and Nairobi distanced
themselves from this position. In London, Travadi was quick to publicly an-
nounce that differences had arisen among Indian delegates over the issue
of franchise and that he did not support Nazareth’s demand for the con-
tinuation of the communal roll. He did, however, accept the reservation of
seats on a temporary basis. In a surprise move, Nathoo, who was minister
for works and had joined the New Kenya Group, distanced himself from
Nazareth, Hassan, and Blundell’s multiracialism. A month earlier, in No-
vember 1959, Nathoo had made a generational claim to Kenya, pointing out
that many Indians had been settled there for more than four generations.
“Those who have made their home in this country,” he had argued in his
support of multiracialism, “have the right to full protection and liberty.”
Speaking directly to African members in the Legislative Council, much like
 Negotiating Nationhood 237

Nazareth, he had posed a rhetorical question: “Do you really imagine that
the Indians want to replace White domination for Black domination?” Yet
at Lancaster House, speaking on behalf of Indian Muslims in Kenya, Nathoo
announced that his community did not want political power, only citizenship
rights. Therefore “there must be a common franchise and no communal
seats.” Furthermore, he publicly dismissed the suggestion of some Euro-
peans that an African government would wreak havoc on the economy, ar-
guing that Africans would be the “greatest sufferers” if that were to happen.42
In Nairobi, Amin and Zafr-ud-Deen joined hands to persuade Indian del-
egates in London to make an “immediate and unambiguous declaration that
the aim for Kenya is independence,” and governance through a popularly
elected legislature on a common electoral adult franchise. They held a public
meeting to “put on record” their claim that Indians were not seeking “priv-
ileges” but insisted on the “recognition and guaranteeing of fundamental
human and citizenship rights” for all in the Kenyan constitution. Therefore,
they stopped short of criticizing the decision at Lancaster House to continue
the temporary racial reservation of seats.43 A group of thirty-one Indians in
Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, including K. P. Jain, a municipal councilor,
K. P. Shah, president of the Nairobi Indian Chambers of Commerce, Fitz de
Souza, and Chanan Singh, former member of the Legislative Council, went
even further. They issued a powerful statement to mark a “clean break with
the past policies and practices,” emphatically distancing themselves from
Nazareth and Hassan, who had allowed “their minds to be befogged by the
special pleading of reactionary elements” in asking for racial representation
and had refused “to take advantage of the present opportunity” of a common
roll that would rid politics of race. They argued that constitutional “safe-
guards” demanded by Nazareth and Hassan would merely create a “false
sense of security” and were not required as long as the constitution con-
tained a bill of rights that guaranteed all citizens “as individuals the human
rights recognized by the United Nations.”44 The group formed a political
party called the Kenya Freedom Party (KFP) and was joined by members of
the Congress who were disappointed with its leadership in London.
In 1961, elections were held on a communal roll with eight seats reserved
for Indians. The KFP’s stand of “undiluted democracy” won the majority
of the Indian vote by a margin of just over 1,000, bringing into the Legisla-
tive Council its founding members Shah, Chanan Singh, S. J. Anarjwalla,
de Souza, and I. T. Inamdar. The small margin of victory showed that
Indians in Kenya did not unanimously support either Nazareth’s politics
238 Indians in Kenya

of racial reservations or the KFP’s unconditional support of “one man,

one vote.” The resonance of KFP’s political rhetoric was, however, felt
by ordinary residents of Kenya, such as Tajdin K. Janoo, who lived in Nai-
robi. As he put it, Indians had been the first group in Kenya to fight against
racial discrimination in their demand for the common roll and the deracial-
ization of the highlands in the early 1910s.45 It was “a pity,” according to
Janoo, that the Indian leadership had “failed miserably” in giving their
support to Africans when it was most needed. The KFP’s stand on these
“vital subjects” had perhaps swung the Indian vote in their favor, albeit only
marginally. KANU won the African vote, but it refused to form an interim
government unless Kenyatta was released. It sat in opposition with the
KFP, while KADU formed the government in coalition with Blundell’s
New Kenya Group. Although KANU had endorsed KFP candidates during
the election, it did not let Indians become official members. In an address
to the KFP, James Gichuru justified KANU’s monoracialism on the grounds
that Africans “cannot consign to oblivion the historical injustices of this
country.” At the 1962 constitutional conference held in London, Chanan
Singh, de Souza, Shah, and Zafr-ud-Deen participated in the proceedings
alongside KANU members. The KFP had supported the “one man, one
vote” scheme without any reservations in the hope that such a move would
deracialize Indian politics. In January 1960, they moved quickly to margin-
alize Nazareth’s retrograde demand for racially defined political represen-
tation, and by 1962 it appeared that their bid to deracialize politics had
been successful, as they not only won (by a slim majority) the Indian vote
but were accepted as a political ally by Kenyatta, the incumbent prime
minister, who took over the leadership of KANU on his release. At its
twenty-seventh annual meeting in 1962 the Kenya Indian Congress dis-
solved as a political party because it was “no longer desirable to function
politically as an Asian organization,” and the KFP merged itself into KANU
in November 1962 when it finally opened its doors to non-Africans.46

PA N G A , P O L I T I C S , A N D R A C I A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Although a political resolution was momentarily reached with the merger

of KFP into KANU and the dissolution of the Congress, the everyday re-
ality of economic inequality exposed tense and increasingly violent negoti-
ations of racialized class dynamics. Different conceptualizations and inherent
contradictions in the meaning of rights, freedom, and equality had led to
 Negotiating Nationhood 239

the fallout at Lancaster House. As their elected representatives were bat-

tling it out in the Legislative Council and at the constitutional conferences
in London, urban centers where Indians and Africans shared living spaces
witnessed similar contestations.
In January 1960 the emergency came to an official end, resulting not only
in increased pressure from political leaders for immediate self-governance
but also a large number of unemployed Africans, many of whom were ex-
detainees who had migrated to Nairobi and Nyeri in search of livelihoods.
The emergency and political uncertainty had dried up employment oppor-
tunities in colonial building projects and industrial ser vices for almost a de-
cade, as few entrepreneurs were willing to risk investing capital at a time of
such instability. Between December 1959 and March 1960, close to 50,000
Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru from the reserves and disbanded detention camps
arrived in Nairobi. More than 10,000 had no formal or permanent employ-
ment. They found lodging in various parts of the capital. Many lived in the
African neighborhood of Pumwani, which had been built in the 1920s to
accommodate migrant labor. Others rented spaces from African and Indian
landlords north of Pumwani in Eastleigh, which had been built in the 1930s
for Indians, and at River Road, west of Pumwani, an interracial business
zone. This was a predominantly Indian area, as it housed Indian residences
and businesses that spilled out of the Indian bazaar established around River
Road in the early 1900s. To its west lay the white neighborhood of Parklands.
River Road, one of the main thoroughfares of the city, connected African
Nairobi with European Nairobi. Indian residents of the capital mediated
between them, spatially and economically.47 In 1959–1960, Indian shop
owners on River Road, whose premises doubled as their homes, rented out
garages, stores, and toilets in their property to recent arrivals in the capital
who had migrated in search of employment opportunities. Such rental ar-
rangements were illegal. Operating under the state’s radar, Indian propri-
etors charged extremely high rents, often close to double the rates paid by
Africans in Pumwani.48 It was the mundane, daily interactions of Africans
and Indians in these urban spaces of intimacy that were reflected in the
racialized political rhetoric of the Legislative Council. While skirmishes
resulting from unemployment, overcrowding, and material inequality had
taken place in interracial areas through the 1950s, a “race riot” in Nairobi
on the eve of the Lancaster House conference revealed the extent of urban
discontent and sharpened boundaries around race and class, setting the
tone for the next two years.
240 Indians in Kenya

On Sunday afternoon, December 20, 1959, at approximately 3:10 p.m.,

an Indian motorist knocked down an allegedly intoxicated African man on
the busy intersection of Duke Street and River Road—the heart of Nairo-
bi’s commercial and Indian residential area. While the man was not seri-
ously injured, close to 500 people gathered at the accident site. Twenty-five
minutes later, police vehicles and an ambulance arrived at the scene. An
Indian inspector, K. L. Sahni, took statements and tried to put the injured
man in the ambulance, but was prevented from doing so by James Jason
Makendia, a twenty-one-year-old African. The police were then told that a
few hundred yards away another African had been hit by a runaway Indian
motorist. Although they found no evidence of this, the Indians and Afri-
cans crowded around the area began to throw stones at one another. By 4:15
p.m. the situation was, in the words of a European inspector, “out of con-
trol.” Since the intersection of Duke Street and River Road was a predomi-
nantly Indian residential area, Indians appeared on the balconies of their
homes, from where they threw stones aimed at Africans on the street. The
Africans, in turn, retaliated with stones aimed at Indian pedestrians; in one
reported incident, a young Indian boy who was trying to flee the area was
hit across the face by an African. At 4:40 p.m. the assistant commissioner of
police arrived to disperse the crowd. Between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m., however,
despite the presence of a riot squad of more than thirty men, twenty Euro-
pean police officers, and seventy rank-and-file askaris (policemen who were
predominantly African), fighting continued at River Road and spread to
neighboring Indian commercial and industrial areas. Skirmishes broke out
northeast of River Road at Eastleigh, especially around Racecourse Road,
the main street separating Pumwani from Eastleigh; at Jeevanjee Gardens,
west of the Indian bazaar; and at Victoria Street, east of the bazaar and south
of River Road. It took 300 askaris and another thirty inspectors to finally
clear the roads and bring the melee to an end. Among those sentenced for
participating in the fighting were at least eleven Africans and one Indian,
who were charged on various counts including conducting themselves in a
“manner likely to cause a breach of the peace,” “riotous assembly,” obstructing
police officers from performing their duties, and being “idle” and “disor-
derly.” 49 One Indian man was fatally hit, and an Indian child was seriously
injured. There were no official reports in newspapers, police statements, legal
courts, or in the Legislative Council of injuries sustained by Africans who
had been hit by stones thrown at them by Indians from their residential bal-
conies and on the street.
 Negotiating Nationhood 241

The reverberations from the events of December 20 were felt well be-
yond those who were caught up in the fighting at River Road, especially
among Indians who made an immediate connection between the riot and
political developments. Within the Legislative Council, Mangat took the lead
in blaming Africans entirely for the incident. He not only presented Indians
as “peaceful” victims of “wanton attacks” by Africans, thus emphasizing race
as the distinguishing identity between the perpetrators of violence and those
at the receiving end of it, but he also used the River Road riot to resurrect
his 1956 argument about the prematurity of giving Africans self-governance.
For Mangat, the fighting had shown the extent of African “irresponsibility.”
He asked the Legislative Council to reconsider the wisdom of giving them
more administrative responsibility, thus appearing vindicated for his long-
held skepticism about African political self-governance. Although Mangat
was explicitly referring to the constitutional conference about to take place
in London, thus racializing and politicizing the disturbances, he insisted that
it was Africans, not the Indians, who were manipulating events for political
gain. He announced that the “riot” was politically “premeditated,” pointing
to the spread of fighting across Nairobi in areas where Indians were pre-
dominant: Eastleigh, Victoria Street, and Jeevanjee Gardens. In so doing,
he publicly accused African political leaders of orchestrating the violence
as a “specially arranged show for the Colonial Secretary [in London] to in-
dicate that if he did not agree to the African demands, they would not re-
main quiet.”50
Furthermore, Mangat used the River Road incident to emphasize the dif-
ferent rights and needs of communities defined along racial lines. Demanding
that emergency-era restrictions on the possession of firearms be removed
for Indians for “protective use,” Mangat made a two-pronged argument high-
lighting racial difference. On one hand, he announced that Indians were
vulnerable to thefts and break-ins because their “property” was “coveted,”
whereas Africans had no need for firearms, since they “had no possessions”
and were not vulnerable to such crimes; thus, he conflated class issues with
racial identity. On the other hand, he noted that the Nairobi riots had re-
vealed “a general hatred against [Indians] for his very face.” He accused Af-
ricans of racially motivated attacks on Indians, an allegation shared by other
Indians.51 Within the Legislative Council, C. B. Madan joined Mangat in
highlighting the “innocence” of Indians, pointing to the blameless women
and children hit by stones during the fighting. For his part, Nazareth,
who was about to reveal his defense of the communal roll at Lancaster
242 Indians in Kenya

House, used the River Road violence to criticize African politicians for cre-
ating a “racial atmosphere” by refusing to include Indians in their political
organizations. On the other end of the political spectrum, I. T. Inamdar, a
founding member of the KFP, criticized the African leadership for forget-
ting “their own obligations” by not doing enough to stem the deterioration
of everyday relations among Indians and Africans.52
Outside the Legislative Council, in letters to the editor, Indian residents
of Nairobi made it clear that they considered the River Road skirmishes a
race riot in which Indians were the only victims. They too politicized the
incident, using it to criticize KFP’s political stand of “undiluted democracy.”
Much like Mangat, a writer signing himself “Menon” emphasized racial
boundaries in an open letter published in the East African Standard de-
manding that Indian policemen be posted in Indian areas in Nairobi be-
cause African askaris “lacked the zeal” and will to catch criminals.53 For
him, the riot had exposed the physical “vulnerability” of Indians. Menon
echoed Mangat’s skepticism about African self-governance by rhetorically
posing the question “what will uhuru bring,” obliquely urging Indians to dis-
tance themselves from African aspirations to independence on the grounds
that “it is better to work under the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
Agreeing with Nazareth’s scheme to continue race-based political represen-
tation, Menon urged the KFP and Indian Legislative Council members to
take a “mandate” among Indians to see if the community as a whole agreed
with their political demand for universal adult franchise in the face of “the
threat of domination by one group.” Significantly, even as Menon portrayed
Indians as vulnerable victims of African racialism, he betrayed his own pa-
ternalistic, racial assumptions regarding Africans. Articulating Indian fears
of African majority rule, Menon wanted the Indian leadership to consider
“how safe is the [Indian] hand that feeds them [Africans],” thus positioning
Indians as the source of Kenya’s intellectual and material wealth and whose
altruism would be subject to the excesses of the majority. A similar argu-
ment was made by H. S. Jagdeo, who blamed African “moborators” who
“clamour for uhuru” for taking advantage of the “overwhelming number
of . . . ignorant Africans” by inciting them with their racially charged po-
litical rhetoric into committing “acts of violence.” Jagdeo illustrated his ar-
gument by mentioning, generally, “indecent assaults” on “hapless [Indian]
women” by African men without giving any particular examples. He also
pointed to their treatment of African women “as no better than beasts of
burden” to emphasize African “violence” and “ignorance.” In using the al-
 Negotiating Nationhood 243

leged treatment of women in the two communities to contrast Indian and

African gender norms, Jagdeo’s letter underscored an increasingly racialized
boundary in Indian imagination between peaceful Indian “victims” and
violent African “perpetrators.” This, in turn, became a hierarchical civili-
zational argument in public discourse about the difference between In-
dians and Africans. In a play on words, Sahib Lal Kohli contrasted Indian
“civilizational” advances in commerce and industry with “weapons of the
Stone Age” that Africans used in their “attacks” on Indians, deliberately
ignoring the fact that Indians had also thrown stones on December 20,
1959.54 For Indians within and outside the Legislative Council, the River
Road incident gave expression to the racialized milieu of urban life in Nai-
robi in the early 1960s and anxiety of a community that believed it was
under physical attack because of the color of its skin.
It was in these circumstances that in March 1960 a murder took place
that created a political sensation among Indians in the colony. A young In-
dian woman, Satya Vati Bassan, and two of her daughters, age three years
and eighteen months, were killed in their car in Nyeri. All three had died
of wounds inflicted by pangas—machetes that were used by Africans in rural
and urban areas for a variety of agricultural and domestic purposes. Satya
Vati’s husband, Pyarelal Melaram Bassan, and their four-year-old daughter
were also injured, the latter very seriously, but they survived the attack. As
his daughter’s life hung in the balance at the hospital, Bassan told the po-
lice that three African men had stopped the car, smashed the windscreen,
and demanded money, attacking the entire family with pangas. His wife and
child had each had a hand severed, and all five had received multiple deep
wounds on their head and face; Satya Vati had received thirty-four blows.
Significantly, Mau Mau fighters had used pangas in their raids, and in the
1950s the panga was associated with the violence of the guerrillas. A day
after the murder, O. P. Madhok, president of the Nyeri Indian Association,
who was also a doctor and who had examined the bodies, announced that
the murder was “political.” He dismissed the police’s suggestion that the at-
tack was a highway robbery, pointing out that the killers had not stolen the
jewelry Satya Vati was wearing. Speaking at a public meeting attended by
over 300 Indians in Nyeri, Madhok highlighted the panga “mutilations,”
which were reminiscent of Mau Mau killings, and insisted emphatically that
“the “barbarous,” “brutal,” “atrocious” murders were politically motivated.
He reached this conclusion on the grounds that thousands of Africans had
attended a “political meeting” on the night of the “inhuman” attack, thus
244 Indians in Kenya

suggesting that African political leaders had incited the murder with their
anti-Indian political rhetoric.55
It soon appeared that robbery had not in fact been the motive for the
murder of Satya Vati and her daughters. Nor, it turned out, was politics to
blame. Within a week of her death, Satya Vati’s husband, Pyarelal Melaram
Bassan, and Wathubia Kiambu were arrested and charged with the murder.
A court drama unfolded with many twists and turns during which Kiambu
argued that he had been paid by Bassan to kill his wife but had stopped
short of doing so. Bassan contested Kiambu’s claim, stating that he had hired
Kiambu to threaten his family, not to kill them. A witness hinted that she
had had a ten-year-long extramarital affair with Bassan that had started when
she was sixteen years old, while another one stated that Bassan believed that
Satya Vati had committed adultery and that he was not the biological father
of her children. Far from being politically motivated, the Nyeri murder was
the result of a familial crisis, which also revealed the intimacy of shared
spaces in which ordinary Africans and Indians lived. Bassan had not only
hired an African, Kiambu, to “intimidate” his family, but also was familiar
with African social beliefs and practices and was himself convinced of their
usefulness. In his testimony, storekeeper Kinyua Njunga recalled Bassan’s
request to him to find a witch doctor to “bewitch” his wife and children be-
cause he “wanted them to die.” Njunga allegedly advised Bassan to leave
his family instead, but the latter would not be convinced. Njunga then in-
troduced him to Kiambu as a potential hit man because, as he stated in his
evidence, the colonial government had “wiped out” witch doctors. In the
courtroom in Nyeri, Bassan and Kiambu each accused the other of having
carried out the actual murder. Bassan was convicted, although the case was
later retried on technical grounds. Outside the court, however, the use of
the panga and the mutilation of Satya Vati and her daughters became the
catalyst for the politicization of the Nyeri murder. Uhuru and the panga were
juxtaposed, quite literally, in public discourse by Indians who glossed over
Bassan’s guilt to emphasize Indian victimhood in the face of African
violence.56
While the Indian Association in Nyeri was quick to claim that the grue-
some murder was a motivated political act, Indian members within the Leg-
islative Council in Nairobi also alluded to African political complicity, but
stopped short of accusing the African leadership of masterminding the at-
tack. Instead, they criticized African representatives for not condemning such
violence more strongly. In so doing, they exposed the latent conditionality
 Negotiating Nationhood 245

of their support for undiluted democracy. Representing the Congress, KFP,

and Kenya Muslim League, Nathoo, Zafr-ud-Deen, Amin, and Madan col-
lectively announced that African political “progress” and “advance” required
as a corollary “responsible” behavior. They appealed to the governor for com-
pulsory defense training for Indian youths so that they could protect them-
selves and their community from violent attacks. Even the KFP, which had
formed with the explicit intent of giving its unconditional support to African
self-governance and had strongly criticized Nazareth and the Congress for
racializing politics on the eve of independence, used the discourse of vio-
lence and victimhood in its public statements about the Nyeri murder. An-
nouncing that it was the “duty” of African leaders to call “public meetings”
in areas where Indians lived in large numbers, the KFP asked African mem-
bers of the Legislative Council to explain the “futility and injustice of vio-
lence against a peaceful community.” Furthermore, Nathoo threatened to
withdraw his support of “undiluted democracy,” warning that African po-
litical “advance” would be “retarded” unless they showed “greater sense of
responsibility,” while Zafr-ud-Deen alluded to “economic disaster” if Indians,
as the backbone of the economy, were not assured by the African leader-
ship of their physical security.57
The peculiarity of the murder itself—the deliberate panga mutilations,
with their echoes of the Mau Mau attacks of the early 1950s, that were aimed
at misleading investigators—was also central to public political statements
in Nairobi. Hassan concluded that the perpetrators of such attacks were “law-
less” Kikuyu from the Central Province. He announced that with the end
of the emergency, the most hard-core African detainees who had not ad-
mitted to “taking the Mau Mau oath”—those who had not been “rehabili-
tated” in the camps—had been released and engaged in violent attacks on
Indians. Implicitly hinting at the connivance of African political leaders,
Hassan suggested that only when Kenyatta was released from detention—the
demand of KANU and KADU—would “such cases of violence” stop.58
In drawing a direct connection between the Nyeri murder and the Mau
Mau, Indians were not alone. African members of the Legislative Council
who had themselves criticized Mau Mau violence were also quick to assume
that Satya Vati’s murder marked the resurgence of ritualistic violence that
potentially threatened their political leadership. Although they denied any
element of political motivation behind the murder, they also assumed that
Africans were the sole perpetrators of violent acts. Kiano said that “we are
all ashamed of the brutal attack” and warned that “similar conditions [to the
246 Indians in Kenya

emergency] should not be revived.” Such violence, he announced, was “a great

disservice to Kenya and . . . diametrically opposed to uhuru.” Condemning
the murder as “horrifying and disgusting,” Mboya proclaimed that while
all Africans should be “happy” that the emergency had ended, “they
should not be over drunk about it. The intention is that the freedom we
now have should be used constructively.” He too stated that “violence
and murder . . . does not advance our struggle for uhuru.” Yet even while
condemning Africans for attacking Indians, African leaders criticized
Indians for being “provocative.” They noted the discontent of their commu-
nity, which expressed itself in increasingly racialized everyday skirmishes,
pointing out that “the African is not the only devil, nor the Asian the only
angel,” especially as Indians absolved themselves from any responsibility
in creating the racialized milieu of the early 1960s.59
The riot at River Road and discourse around the Nyeri murder under-
scored a new rendering of race consciousness, not only among Indians who
drew a racial binary between themselves as innocent, peaceful victims and
Africans as perpetrators of violence, but also among Africans who, much
like the Indians, considered the needs and rights of their community as ra-
cially distinct. At River Road on December 20, 1959, James Jason Makendia
had prevented the Indian police inspector Sahni from helping the injured
African man into the ambulance and in so doing had been the catalyst for
the fighting that subsequently broke out. While he was sentenced for ob-
structing Sahni from executing his duty, Makendia, who had a legal back-
ground, had actually been attempting to facilitate the lawful resolution of
the accident. He had heard Sahni taking statements from witnesses in an
Indian language and asked Sahni to use English, presumably so that African
witnesses could corroborate the Indians’ evidence. Negotiating his distrust
of an Indian inspector, Makendia got involved in the River Road accident
to ensure that Africans’ testimony would get an equal and fair hearing, and
therefore asked for an African police officer to be called to the scene. Sahni
refused, and a physical fight broke out between them when Makendia re-
sisted arrest for challenging the Indian inspector’s authority.60
For other Africans, the police themselves were agents of the colonial state,
whose authority they rejected. Although in their demand for firearms and
police surveillance for Indians Menon and Mangat had underscored the im-
potence of African askaris in resolving local disputes (assuming that they did
not want to alleviate racial tensions), askaris did not in fact have the power
to exercise the authority of the colonial state. Sambo Mwalimu prevented a
 Negotiating Nationhood 247

dispersing crowd of about 200 Africans at Duke Street from leaving, urging
them to ignore the askaris’ and European inspector’s attempts to bring the
fighting to an end. As someone with twelve previous convictions, Mwalimu
was imprisoned for six months for obstruction, while Matinge Mtania, a shop
assistant, was fined £3 for throwing stones at the police detachments that
were trying to get people off the streets. Among others sentenced to up to
nine months for “riotous assembly” and being “idle” were Njega Githahu
and Masiga Makyo. Caught up in the skirmishes as well were Mathekas
Kingoli, Wambua Ndanu, Keso Sililiano, Ndiku Munyao, and Mtinda Mun-
goti, who threw stones at Indian pedestrians, and families who sought shelter
from the stones in their cars. One “sunburnt” European reported being
chased at River Road and kicked by an African on being mistaken for being
Indian.61 The violence at River Road revealed shared urban spaces inhab-
ited by Indians and Africans whose mediations of the colonial state re-
sulted in racial confrontations that resonated among Nairobi’s residents.
This heightened race consciousness was reinforced by administrative struc-
tures in which Africans were blamed entirely for the riot and Indians were
collectively considered victims.
Two magistrates, one Indian and the other European, presided over the
court hearings of those involved in the River Road riot. Not only was no
African qualified as magistrate for this purpose, Africans were dispropor-
tionately higher in number among those sentenced and in severity of their
punishment. Although witnesses reported that both Indians and Africans
threw stones during the skirmishes, only one Indian, Nanji Munji Visram,
was sentenced for throwing stones at African pedestrians. He and Mtania
were fined £3 15s for this offense, while Makendia was asked to pay £12
10s or spend three months in detention for his role in the riot.62 Although
Indians and Africans were fined the same amount for similar crimes and
both were seen as equal in the eyes of the state in this instance, the same
administration colluded in and condoned the payment of lower wages to Af-
ricans on the basis of their allegedly lower cost of living, thus viewing Afri-
cans and Indians as unequal and perpetuating this inequality. It was in ne-
gotiating such racially defined structural predicaments that discontent
increased in the early 1960s among those Africans who felt ambivalent about
the material affluence and influence of Indians. This aggrievement was ar-
ticulated in ordinary, everyday acts of mediation in urban spaces where ra-
cial and class boundaries pushed up against one another. Such class divi-
sions were voiced through a racial, increasingly nationalist lens in African
248 Indians in Kenya

discourses on the redistribution of wealth that would accompany uhuru.

Within and outside the Legislative Council, African skepticism about In-
dians highlighted three interlinked concerns. First, for many Africans, In-
dians were nonindigenous, and their presence in Kenya was inextricably
linked with the colonization of the country—a position reinforced by In-
dians’ own civilizational assertions about developing the economy. Second,
the conditionality of Indian support of African independence in the face
of everyday skirmishes and within the Legislative Council discredited
them politically and exposed their paternalistic attitude toward African
self-determination. Third, class discontent found expression in racialized
violence against Indians, whose colonial privileges and material affluence
were on display in shared spaces of urban intimacy.
Reflecting these concerns, a letter to the editor by Michah W. Othieno,
a Kisumu resident, was critical of the profit-oriented values Indian economic
development had brought with it, the hypocrisy of Indian political maneu-
verings, and Indians’ accusation that the increase in violent attacks against
them were racially motivated. As he put it, the “so-called civilisation” that
Indians took credit for bringing to Kenya had resulted in “greed” and “self-
ishness” among Africans who had lived “contentedly and comfortably” be-
fore such “civilisation descended upon this country with a vengeance.” 63
Othieno positioned Indians and their material wealth as extraneous to the
organic nation. Moreover, he exposed the cynicism of Indian political leaders
for their proclamations supporting African “democracy” while at the same
time wanting to devise a political system that did not “recognize majority
vote.” Othieno was referring to Nazareth’s insistence on the continuation
of racial representation in government at the constitutional conference in
Lancaster House and the popular support for his political posture among
Indians within and outside the Legislative Council. Finally, while Indians
were both implicitly and explicitly underscoring the racial motivations and
political consequences of the River Road riot, Othieno pointed out that al-
though such violent confrontations were “confined within the ranks of . . .
the African community,” they were not triggered by any inherent racial or
political hatred of Indians, but were a reaction to the material privilege of
Indians, who benefited from “commercial facilities” and inequality caused
by “wage structures” that “deliberately . . . favour privileged racial groups.”
Indeed, it was this tension, caused by the entanglement of public discourses
on race, class, and politics, that came to the surface in the run-up to inde-
pendence. Nairobi was not exceptional in witnessing this convergence of
 Negotiating Nationhood 249

urban discontent, racialized politics, and everyday violence. As Jon Soske

has shown in his analysis of the Durban riots a decade earlier, a clash be-
tween an Indian shopkeeper and a young African resulted in three days of
violence on a much larger scale. Similarly, James Brennan has highlighted
the extent to which urban claims of entitlement to rations and housing were
embedded in African racial caricatures of Indian shopkeepers in postwar
Dar es Salaam.64
Although the Nairobi riot of December 20, 1959, appeared, in retrospect,
to be a spontaneous one-off incident, the early 1960s witnessed an increase
in racialized violence as mundane skirmishes between Africans and Indians
spoiling for a fight threatened to turn into large-scale race riots. In the first
two weeks in January, with the River Road episode still fresh in everyone’s
memory, the police dispersed gatherings of up to 1,000 onlookers from
African and Indian areas in Nairobi on several occasions, fearing the
outbreak of similar violence. In the African neighborhood of Pumwani, an
Indian driver was beaten “insensible” when his car knocked down an African
child. On another day, a large number of people surrounded an Indian
driver who hit an African cyclist at the edge of Pumwani and Eastleigh at
the intersection of Racecourse and River Road. It took four police cars an
hour to clear the area. A fight broke out between Indians and Africans at
River Road when an Indian car knocked down an African woman who was
walking on the street. When an Indian pedestrian was fatally hit by an
African motorist at Eastleigh, close to 200 Indians and Africans gathered
and threw stones at one another. While the police were able to prevent the
spread of such fighting to other parts of Nairobi and avert another citywide
melee like the one triggered by the River Road accident in December, in
Mombasa close to 600 Africans and 200 Indians crowded around Girdhlal
Nemochand Shah, whose car had hit and seriously injured an African female
pedestrian. Shah was pelted with stones and beaten on his head, chest, and
back when he got out of his car to check on the woman. According to his
statement, police reports, and the testimony of Peter Omungo, an ambulance
attendant, some Africans in the crowd were shouting “kill the Asian” in
Kiswahili. Omungo took out a stretcher to assist the injured woman but was
hit by onlookers who mistakenly thought he was putting Shah in the ambu-
lance and demanded that he “take the Indian out of the ambulance.” Omungo
sought shelter in the ambulance, while Shah ran to a nearby hotel, where he
fainted. The police used batons and tear gas to disperse the crowd, and
fourteen African men were sentenced for riotous assembly. No Indians were
250 Indians in Kenya

arrested or charged, although they too had assembled in the area. The
woman later died in the hospital.65
Road accidents on the crowded commercial streets of Nairobi and Mom-
basa brought to the surface racial tension that was simmering in interracial
urban spaces shared by Africans and Indians. Not only was Indian material
wealth on display in their cars, but in the fallout of these accidents Africans
mediated colonial administrative and judicial structures that were brazenly
unfavorably biased against them. In these moments, spontaneous physical
attacks on individual Indians appeared to be expressions of African protest
again Indian entitlement, privilege, and affluence. Malcontent among Afri-
cans arising from material inequality was revealed in other avenues of or-
ganized protest that reflected the racialized milieu of the late 1950s and
early 1960s. In November 1959, more than 20,000 African railway workers
went on strike. Indian railway employees who were in supervisory positions
over Africans, and Indian workers who did not join the strike and instead
volunteered to complete the unfinished work of the African workers, were
targeted by the strikers, who threw stones at their houses. Such planned
events marked another racialized boundary between Africans and Indians,
as the latter were considered agents of the colonial state by African workers.
In March 1960, the colonial administration withdrew Indian workers to “pre-
vent racial trouble” at the Kahawa cantonment on the outskirts of Nairobi,
where 2,000 African construction workers went on strike and combined their
demand for better working conditions with a call for uhuru.66
Elsewhere, the frustrations of African entrepreneurs resulted in organized
boycotts and threats of violence from political party activists. In Machakos,
for example, two drivers and thirty passengers riding in two African-owned
buses stopped an Indian-owned bus and tried to overturn it. On another
occasion, storekeeper Hansraji Rama and his wife were hit with pangas at
the Kangundo Trading Center in Machakos in an incident that the police
believed was motivated by trade rivalry, not robbery.67 Members of the Kenya
African Chamber of Commerce and Industry criticized Indian shopkeepers’
“experience” and “cunning,” and identified Indian “exploitation” as the “stum-
bling” block of African business. Such accusations were not new, as the mo-
nopoly of Indian petty traders had been criticized by aspiring African mer-
chants since the 1940s. At the threshold of uhuru, however, this criticism
carried with it the possibility of tangible structural change that would af-
fect Indians. Akoko Mboya, general secretary of the African Chamber of
Commerce, demanded the complete replacement of the “ubiquitous Indian
 Negotiating Nationhood 251

middleman” in postcolonial Kenya, a policy position that found a sympa-

thetic ear in the minister of commerce and industry, Masinde Muliro. In
October 1961, Muliro announced that Indians must “change with the
changing circumstances” and start selling goods to African traders at “fair
wholesale prices.” 68
As the dukka became a tangible space where nationalist aspirations to
political self-governance and economic material change could be realized,
some Indian traders were faced with extortion. In Nyeri, more than 16,000
Kikuyu, many of whom were former detainees, were unemployed. With little
income to spare, especially because of crop failure caused by a drought in
September 1961, the high prices charged by Indian shopkeepers for everyday
goods resulted in boycotts in Embu, Nyeri, and Saba Saba. This discontent
was channeled into politically organized boycotts that took place in Njoro
and Elburgon, lasting for over two months. Shopkeepers were asked to make
political donations to KANU or else find their businesses boycotted. In Nyeri,
Indian merchants reported that African traders demanded £500 to call off
the boycott and threatened to send the names of Indians who refused to
pay to party headquarters in Nairobi to be permanently blacklisted. Such
incidents of political intimidation were so frequent that KANU issued a cir-
cular to Indian shopkeepers warning them to insist on a receipt when money
changed hands. In neighboring Uganda, an organized Buganda boycott of
non-African traders had resulted in instances of violence, including bomb-
ings and the murder of Indian shopkeepers. Indian traders therefore felt
particularly vulnerable and gave money when it was demanded. Although
they considered this extortion, political parties viewed such material trans-
fers as deliberately orchestrated means of redistributing wealth. Indians
were called upon to contribute their wealth in the ser vice of the nation
because of their racial identity as nonindigenous residents and because of
their class status, which made them materially better off than the majority
of Africans.69
Petty crimes and organized thefts were another way in which Indian
wealth was redistributed on the eve of uhuru. These robberies were nei-
ther politically nor racially motivated. However, they were accompanied by
violence, thus fueling Indian discourse about their victimhood at African
hands. Between October 1959 and September 1961, there was an increase
in reported break-ins, thefts, and muggings in Nairobi, Kisumu, Kital,
Kibuje, Mombasa, Embu, and Nakuru.70 Indian shops were raided for cash
boxes, watches, clocks, rice, paraffin, shoes, and other consumer goods.
252 Indians in Kenya

Shop owners and assistants were threatened at gunpoint, in many instances

with guns stolen from Indian police inspectors in the late 1950s, and with
pangas. These thefts often turned violent, with Indians reporting injuries
on their hands, arms, and heads from panga slashings. These were rarely
fatal, although in at least one reported case, Kantilal Devraj Shah, the In-
dian owner of a jewelry store, was shot dead in his shop on Bazaar Street in
Nairobi by a group of Africans who stole goods worth £500. In response to
the increasing violence, eighty Indian traders in Nairobi petitioned the
government to beef-up state presence in Indian commercial zones around
River Road, Duke Street, and Racecourse Street to prevent such robberies.
The security concerns of the Indian commercial community inevitably
led them to representing their needs in the political realm. Significantly,
these traders did not question the desirability of African governance, as
other Indians in the public realm had. The group of eighty traders blamed
the large number of bars in the area for the “unruly” behavior of young
Africans who engaged in petty shoplifting and loosely organized pickpock-
eting, while the Indian Chambers of Commerce met to discuss strategies
that would protect shopkeepers from increasingly violent crimes. Together,
the Indian commercial community asked for increased police surveil-
lance, more police stations, mobile patrols, and firearm licenses to repel
petty thieves and organized robberies.71
Indian shops were not the only places vulnerable to petty thefts and large-
scale organized robberies. The material wealth of Indian homes exposed
the physical insecurity of domestic spaces as thieves carry ing pangas broke
into Indian houses and stole cash, jewelry, clothes, and guns. In some in-
stances these thefts turned fatal as men, women, and children were slashed
to death in their homes by intruders. In Visol near Nakuru, the murder of
shopkeeper Chotobhai Isherbhai Patel, his wife, and their child while they
were eating dinner, along with detailed descriptive images in newspapers
of the bodies of mothers with their arms over dead children in an attempt
to protect them from intruders, further fueled Indian anxiety over their
physical security and sense of victimhood. This was aggravated by the dis-
covery at many crime scenes of very young children found by the police
alive and hiding under tables and beds. Some robberies were carefully
planned, large-scale crimes, with groups of up to twelve men entering
homes, threatening Indian families and their African employees with pangas,
cutting telephone lines, and raiding stores and houses for large amounts
of money, sometimes up to £700, and firearms. A break-in at the home of
 Negotiating Nationhood 253

Indian Legislative Council member and doctor K. V. Adalja in Nairobi while

he was at work made headlines as his wife and three African domestic ser-
vants were threatened with pangas by four men who locked them in a bath-
room. They stole a gold chain off Adjala’s wife’s neck and ransacked the house
for clothes, bicycles, and additional jewelry. The insecurity of Indian com-
mercial and domestic spaces was reinforced by a high incidence of muggings
in which petty thieves, some operating alone and at other times in small
groups, physically attacked with pangas individual men, young and old, who
were walking on the streets in Nairobi, robbing them of the small amounts
of cash that they had on them, and personal belongings such as wrist-
watches and coats. The motivation for these muggings was purely material,
as what these petty thieves stole, sometimes for personal use, sometimes for
resale, were material objects that were symbols and requirements of urban
life. However, these crimes also underscored the conspicuous material ine-
quality on personal display, since Indians, as a race and a class, owned wrist-
watches and coats, while the majority of unemployed African migrants in
the city did not. While these crimes were not racially motivated, Indians
were an overwhelming target because of their material affluence, further
emphasizing the intersection of race and class that sharpened racial bound-
aries in public discourse. Remarking on the increase in petty and organized
crimes in Nairobi, Mboya proclaimed, “When a poor man lives near a rich
man, there is bound to be trouble.” 72

C I V I L I Z AT I O N A L “ G E N I U S ” A S N AT I O N A L I S T C L A I M

On the eve of uhuru, racial and class markers of difference were thus con-
flated into a highly racialized discourse among Africans and Indians. For
Africans within and outside the Legislative Council, political self-
determination was inextricably linked with the redistribution of wealth, an
entanglement that undermined the economic position of Indians in postco-
lonial Kenya and threatened their very presence in the nation. For Indians,
the physical insecurity of their public and private spaces manifested in a
discourse about victimhood that, paradoxically, emphasized their right to
belong in the emergent nation-state, as they asserted their claim to Kenya
as generators of the nation’s wealth. The most frequent and consistent “na-
tionalist” argument made by Indians justified their class status in postcolo-
nial Kenya on the basis of their past and future contributions in the eco-
nomic development of the country. The majority of such claims equated trade
254 Indians in Kenya

and business with a civilizational rhetoric that marked Indians as racially

distinct and superior to Africans. This developmental discourse was sim-
ilar to the one made by Indian intermediary merchants in the early 1900s.
Significantly, at the turn of the century Indian civilizational genius was used
to make subimperialist claims. In the 1960s, it was used to make national-
istic claims.
Mangal Das, a Nairobi resident whose letters to the editor appeared fre-
quently in English-language newspapers, referred to the “civilising influ-
ence” of Indians who were the “lifeblood” of Kenya’s “trade and commerce.”
He criticized KANU and KADU’s political rhetoric on the redistributive
aspiration of uhuru for causing trade boycotts and inciting racial violence.
Das accused African leaders of politicizing and racializing Kenya’s material
inequality by suggesting at their public rallies that all Indians were “rolling
in wealth” and juxtaposing this wealth with African poverty—a condition
they claimed had resulted from the exploitative agenda of Indians. He ar-
gued that Indian wealth was not generated at the cost of African material
progress, yet his historical narrative exposed the thinly veiled civilizational
claim inherent in such assertions. Indeed, Das believed that all men were
born equal and that it was through “inventive genius and skill” that wealth
was created. The “untold riches” of Kenya—gold, diamonds, copper, and
tin—remained “buried underground” until the arrival of Indians in the
country who took advantage of these natural resources. Far from exploiting
Africans to become rich, Das argued that it was the industriousness and
industrial trade acumen of Indians that resulted in the material disparity be-
tween Indians and Africans, as the latter had no interest in engaging in
business. In this precolonial history of trade in Kenya, Africans were con-
signed to a passive role as “slaves,” lacking in the business skills required in
a modern nation-state. In so doing, Das secured the position of Indians in
postcolonial Kenya as providing such skills to counter the civilizational back-
wardness of Africans.73
The monopoly of Indians over economic development was used by dif-
ferent Indians to stake a claim of belonging in the emergent nation. While
the Indians’ accumulation of wealth under colonial rule placed them out-
side the nation in African political discourse, for Indians such as Das this
became a civilizational discourse marking Indians as a racially distinct—and
superior—minority positioned squarely within the nation, which needed
their economic skills. M. S. Sandhu, a Nairobi resident, echoed Das’s argu-
ment, pointing out that political freedom would “mean very little to the
 Negotiating Nationhood 255

common man unless it also brings economic freedom.” 74 This could be re-
alized only with expertise in trade, industry, medicine, and education—
professions that Indians occupied. Therefore, like Das, he made a develop-
mental claim to the emergent nation for Indians as a professionalized
community.75 This civilizational discourse was also used by some Indians
to justify the political necessity of continuing racial political representation
in institutions of governance. In a letter to the editor, a “Disgruntled Asian”
criticized the colonial government for its “premature” lifting of the emer-
gency and “ill conceived” desire to bring Africans into the government. Using
the “panga slashings” to emphasize the brutality and primitiveness of Afri-
cans, the writer voiced a concern over African self-governance. As he put
it, “On one side is the cry of uhuru and undiluted democracy and, on the
other side, ‘panga attack!’ ” 76
While Nazareth stopped short of racializing the violence of everyday skir-
mishes, his demand for the retention of communal rolls and seats belied his
confidence in African self-determination. For him, the political interests of
Indians marked them as a racially distinct political community whose fu-
ture in Kenya as a racial minority needed constitutional safeguards. A sim-
ilar claim was made by Das, who articulated a civilizational and diasporic
argument about the position of Indians in the postcolonial nation. On one
hand, he proclaimed that African leaders lacked “every single item of the
paraphernalia of independence” and were dependent on Indian economic
and intellectual resources to achieve uhuru. Therefore, he urged Africans
to acquire “a deep sense of understanding and humility.” On the other hand,
Das emphatically stated that Indians must be allowed their “distinct national
culture,” which arose from their “filial attachment” to India. This attach-
ment, he noted, did not prevent them from being “loyal Kenyan citizens.”
For Das, their civilizational contributions to Kenya gave Indians a right to
belong in the nation.77 However, he highlighted the diasporic consciousness
of Indian civilizational genus and genius, whose source was India, not Kenya,
and therefore racialized Indian citizenship in the postcolonial nation by un-
derscoring their extraterritorial affiliation that immediately marked their dif-
ference from indigenous Africans.
For others, however, Indian’s claim to Kenya was a territorial one. In his
letter to the editor in which he had criticized the outbreak of violence in
Nairobi, Jagdeo emphasized Indians’ generational and residential claim to
the country, stating that Indians will stay “in this country as long as the
human race survives, for in its soil is mingled their blood and sweat.” 78
256 Indians in Kenya

This territorial permanence was echoed by K. D. Travadi in a newspaper

article in which he emphatically announced, “We are here and are going
to stay, come what may.” Toward this end, as president of the Congress,
R. C. Gautama had demanded that Indians be treated “on a footing of
equality” with other Kenyan citizens and urged Indians to “think of ourselves
as Kenyans and nothing but Kenyans and no longer as Indians.”79 Gautama
hoped that a deracialized national identity would situate Indians as equal
citizens with Africans despite their being, numerically, a racial minority. The
contradictions within these discourses highlighted Indians’ shared sense of
belonging to Kenya, which led them to make a historical claim based on their
past economic contributions to assert their present stake in the country’s
development through capital investments, and to secure their future in the
nation-state by emphasizing their generational and territorial permanence
in Kenya. This claim reflected a diasporic consciousness in which India was
their civilizational homeland, the source of their skills that were placed in
the nationalist ser vice of their territorial homeland, Kenya.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Indian merchants moved into manufacturing as
Britain’s wartime modification of shipping priorities disrupted the import
of manufactured goods into the colony. Indian traders took advantage of the
opportunity to expand their expertise into industrial enterprises under the
auspices of the colonial state, which gave them subsidies to encourage local
manufacturing. By the late 1950s, Indian big business was involved in the
production of aluminum and glassware, in food processing (especially sugar,
wheat, and maize), and in metalworks. These were large-scale enterprises
run by big industrial families, including the Chandarias, who started the
Aluminum Rolling Mill in 1952; the Madhvani Group, which established
sugar estates in 1954; the Kenya Glass Works, run by Patels, who benefited
from the high import duty put on glass in 1954; and the House of Manji,
established in 1954. Each of these families transitioned from commercial to
manufacturing ventures.80 In the early 1960s, these Indian entrepreneurs
continued investing capital in manufacturing as a mark of their nationalist
claim on the country. The discourse of civilizational development was re-
placed by a discourse of national economic development that emphasized
the contribution of Indian capital to the material and social uplift of the
nation, particularly its African citizens.
In response to the demand for Africanization voiced by members of the
African Chambers of Commerce aspiring to replace Indians in the com-
mercial sector, K. L. Bhasin, president of FICCI, pointed to Indian indus-
 Negotiating Nationhood 257

trialists’ investments when he said, “Kenya is our home and we are going to
stay to see it properly developed.” Toward this end, Hassanalli Manji, who
in 1954 invested £75,000 to open a factory that produced biscuits, linked
his commercial profits with the economic development of the nation. On
the eve of independence he was proud of his factory’s great accomplishment,
which was said to have reduced by 20 percent the retail cost of biscuits, which
were no longer imported into the country.81 Looking forward to their con-
tinuing role in developing Kenya’s economy, three Kenya-born Ismaili in-
dustrialists combined national and economic development by investing
£125,000 in a shoe factory to manufacture canvas shoes. Haider Manji, one
of three investors in the National Shoe Company, had noted that more than
90 percent of Africans in rural areas were barefoot. Manji not only hoped
to tap into this market but also saw his business ventures as contributing to
national development by fulfilling the socioeconomic aspirations of Kenya’s
African citizens. Shoes were a symbol of social upward mobility, and by man-
ufacturing shoes locally instead of importing them, he was making them
affordable for the majority of Africans. On the other hand, remarking on
the unemployment crisis in Kenya, Manji brought public attention to the
job opportunities created in his factory. He expected to hire up to 250
African workers to manufacture 6,000 shoes a day, but in a subordinate
position under European and Indian management. As he put it, “With
uhuru approaching . . . if we can create stability and confidence, Kenya’s
problems, notably unemployment, will vanish.” 82 The irony of an Indian
businessman producing shoes as his contribution to uhuru would not have
been lost on anyone familiar with the popular Swahili proverb that reflected
African ambivalence about and dependency on Indian trade: Baniani
mbaya, kiatu chake dawa. (Literally, “The Hindu Bania trader is evil, but his
shoes are medicine,” that is, Indians are mean but their business is good.)
Manji’s practical resolution to Kenya’s economic instability found reso-
nance among many Indians in the public realm. While he glossed over the
racial and political tensions that underlay the country’s economic problems,
in staking their claim to the emergent nation others articulated different
ways in which political engagements and disentanglements could resolve
these racial concerns. In so doing, they exposed many of their own inherent
contradictions, which revealed the complicated ways in which race, class,
and politics collided. Indeed, while Mangal Das voiced a highly racialized
view of the political and economic history and future of Kenya, he was em-
phatic that Indians needed to stay apolitical by being loyal to the “government
258 Indians in Kenya

of the day,” because “majorities are a game of see-saw: they keep changing.”
Yet even as he believed that his community’s future would be secure in
Kenya only by depoliticizing its activities and maintaining its racial and
civilizational distinction, he recognized the need for Indians to reform
their employment policies in relation to their African employees. In the
same letter in which Das talked of the civilizational genius of Indians, he
was also deeply critical of the low wages and poor housing facilities pro-
vided to Africans working on Indian-owned and -run sisal and sugar farms.83
A similar paradox was revealed in the KFP’s stand on undiluted democ-
racy. Although they had given KANU their unconditional political support,
when they were faced with personal instances of racialized violence many
members of the KFP revealed the conditionality of their political procla-
mations, criticizing African political leaders for not having done enough to
stem such events. When an elderly retired policeman, Telu Mandel, was
mugged in Nairobi, his son, one of the thirty-one original signatories of the
KFP statement withdrawing its support from Nazareth during the Lan-
caster House Conference, announced that African leaders should be more
emphatic about condemning this everyday violence. Another KFP member,
I. T. Inamdar, noted the recent deterioration in everyday race relations and
also pointed to the need and obligation of African leaders to induce a sense
of “confidence and belonging . . . to this country” among racial minorities.
Ironically, it was members of the Congress who had acquiesced to the tem-
porary racial principle in electoral representation, not the KFP, who tried
to delink racial violence from politics. In an effort to deescalate the height-
ened racial consciousness that had permeated the public realm, Amin, Gau-
tama, and Saeed Cocker, representing the Kenya Muslim League, joined
together to appeal to their community to “free its mind of any possible
suspicion that African leaders or any African organization” were master-
minding attacks on Indians.84
The messy entanglement of class, race, and politics was apparent in the
inconsistencies between the political discourse, public rhetoric, and economic
policy suggestions not only of Indians but also of Africans. Indeed, although
the nationalist discourse of indigeneity made it rhetorically clear in the early
1960s that Africans would predominate by historical right and numbers in
postcolonial Kenya through state-led initiatives to redistribute wealth, the
African leadership did not always follow through on this. At a meeting of
Indian women in Nairobi who complained about their physical safety, Ke-
nyatta assured them that uhuru was “for all races” and that people who talk
 Negotiating Nationhood 259

of “Africans getting their uhuru were wrong.” In a speech attended by more

than 1,000 Indians in Mombasa, Kenyatta similarly announced that Indians
were “welcome” in Kenya as “friends of Africans.” Yet much like the condi-
tional political support that Indians offered Africans, Kenyatta highlighted
the conditionality of African friendship, warning that Indians needed to
prove their friendship “by deeds not words”—suggesting that Indians who
did not help Africans risked breaking their relationship with them. He em-
phasized the need for “immigrants” to recognize the right of Africans to
rule the country because they were “the majority,” and reassured them
that as long as Indians identified themselves “as children of Kenya,” they
had nothing to fear. However, alluding to Indians’ economic power and
privilege, he criticized them for treating their relationship with Africans as
that of “cat and mouse.” 85 In using “friendship” and “cat and mouse” as al-
legories to describe the dynamic between Indians and Africans, Kenyatta
was relying on Swahili proverbs for populist consumption: Wengi huwa
kama paka urafiki wa mradi (many people are like cats befriending a mouse,
extending friendship to make a profit) and kama huli panya na wali hupewi.
(Literally, “if you don’t eat mice, you will not be given rice”— a song ad-
dressed to a cat to remind it that if it doesn’t perform its duty, it will not re-
ceive any benefits.) At the same time, despite the rhetoric of Africanization
in the commercial sector and the two-month boycott of Indian shops in
Nyeri, Legislative Council member J. P. Mathenge, in his capacity as a
member of the Nyeri Traders’ Association, voted to end “discrimination”
and the racial boycott of Indian traders, as this had failed to resolve the
unemployment problems facing his constituents. Indeed, he noted that many
storekeepers had posted signs stating hakuna kazi (no work here), fearing
racial retaliation from their African employees. Mathenge was endorsed by
Charles Mwaniki, general secretary of the association, who made a personal,
public appeal to Indians to help train Africans in business, stating that they
“need Asian help.” 86
For Africans and Indians alike, the search for “the freedom of democ-
racy” led to multiple complementary and contradictory negotiations around
the boundaries of racial, economic, and political imaginations in the emerging
nation. While recognizing Indians as “outsiders” in Kenya, an Indian living
in Nakuru, Ketan Shevde, proposed that African skepticism of Indians would
be allayed if Indians made material and intellectual investments in devel-
oping African business tactics and education.87 Toward this end, Indian busi-
nessmen in Nairobi donated £600 to KANU for an educational fund. In
260 Indians in Kenya

presenting this money to Kenyatta at a public meeting in Nairobi, L. R. Shah

stated that Indians were “always prepared to help solve the educational prob-
lems facing the youth of the country.” Such solutions, however, were never so
straightforward. In the wake of the constitutional conferences and racialized
violence that broke out in Kenya between 1959 and 1962, K. P. Shah, presi-
dent of FICCI, poignantly noted that self-governance was “only the com-
pletion of the first mile in a long and arduous journey.” As he put it, “The first
mile is relatively easy—the rest of the journey is the most difficult.” 88 This
became clear within the first five years of uhuru.
 SIX

R
Uhuru and Exodus

To the African: “No Guest Am I”

Why do you call me “guest,”
When here I have my home,
When here my father lived and died,
My mother too, and a brother?
Their graves lie there within this City’s bounds,
Where I myself was born,
My children too—all three of them.
Must they and I leave this land,
Be strangers to it
Because your skin is black and mine and theirs is brown,
Your folk came here some scores of years ere ours?
. . . That I am a guest I do deny.
But when you’d drive me out how can I stay?
I lack the power, and now maybe I lack the will.
— J. M. Nazareth

when Jawaharlal Nehru referred to Indians as “guests” in Kenya,

I N 19 47,
J. M. Nazareth objected to the term as situating Indians as permanent out-
siders despite their generational and territorial claim to belonging in Kenya.
Three decades later, Nazareth published his political memoir. The book
opens with the poem he wrote, quoted above, in which he emphasized Kenya
as his homeland, where “his parents lived and died . . . I myself was born,
my children too.” Nazareth was establishing Indians as sons of the soil of
Kenya and criticized Africans for considering them guests in perpetuity and
forcing them out of their own country. Claiming that Indians faced racial
discrimination in Kenya, both the poem and the title of his book, Brown

261
262 Indians in Kenya

Man, Black Country, positioned Indians as unwelcome and unwanted

strangers in the nation simply because “your skin is black and mine . . . is
brown.” This conclusion was echoed by American literary critic and writer
Paul Theroux, who lived in East Africa in October 1967. Theroux lamented
that Indians were the “most lied about race in Africa” and that throughout
Kenya “everyone hates the Asians . . . the feeling against the Asians is
more than mistrust, more than suspicion. . . . It is hatred—blind, bald, crude.
Irrational and based solely on race”1
Both Nazareth and Theroux blamed Africans squarely and entirely for
the racism they perceived in the 1960s—the systematic othering of Indians,
who were placed on the margins of the nation because of their race. The
exodus of approximately 33,000 Indians who emigrated from Kenya to Britain
between September 1967 and February 1968 after the passing of two legis-
lative bills aimed at circumscribing Indian economic activity shaped this
observation. It reinforced several assumptions about the process of nation
building in Kenya that are reproduced in scholarship that considers this
emigration and the withdrawal of all agents of the British Empire, in-
cluding Indians, from Kenya as the inevitable result of decolonization. The
nationalist narrative of political elites in Jomo Kenyatta’s postcolonial
state is privileged in some works that assume the unchallenged unity of
the nation—racially defined—and the liminality of Indian “guests” sitting
on its margins. Other historians who have studied the nature of the postco-
lonial state in Kenya highlight the extent to which the first decade after
independence was colored by unresolved competing political imaginaries
and inter- and intraethnic tensions that had been glossed over in the run-up
to independence but which resurfaced almost immediately afterward. In-
dians are mostly absent from these analyses, underscoring the historio-
graphical marginality of a diaspora assumed to be historically marginal.
This conclusion is interpreted in two paradoxical ways that place responsi-
bility for Indians’ marginality in different directions. On one hand, the en-
dogamous trade practices of Indians that continued into the postcolonial
era are highlighted to emphasize the extent to which colonizing Indians
actively and deliberately situated themselves outside the nation. On the
other hand, Indians are positioned as victims who were forced out of the
nation and made economic “scapegoats” by the racializing postcolonial
state. This perspective, echoed by Nazareth and Theroux, absolved Indians
of any active role in creating such a racialized milieu. For both, Africaniza-
tion and the exodus of 1967–1968 appear as the logical end of the history of
Indians in Kenya.2
 Uhuru and Exodus 263

Such teleological arguments ignore the interracial collaborations of the

1940s and 1950s studied in Chapters 3 and 4 and the political convulsions
of the late 1950s and early 1960s, discussed in Chapter 5, when contesta-
tions over nationalist politics and economic privilege were increasingly ra-
cialized by both Indians and Africans in public rhetoric. Far from being
inevitable, the racialized nationalist vision that triumphed in 1967 and
triggered the exodus of Indians out of Kenya and into Britain was the
product of a par ticular postcolonial historical conjuncture at which nego-
tiations over nationhood fell apart as differences over political and eco-
nomic policies threatened to fragment the nation-state.

U H U R U , N AT I O N B U I L D I N G , A N D A F R I C A N I Z AT I O N

In a bid to reconcile the different political and economic aspirations of all

those who had fought for freedom, especially those who had been caught
up in both sides of the Mau Mau war, in 1964 Kenyatta called on the newly
independent nation to “erase” from its memory “all the hatreds and the dif-
ficulties . . . which now belong to history.”3 At uhuru, like other postcolo-
nial nationalists, Kenyatta was faced with the difficult task of building a
nation-state that had emerged from a violent and internally divided past.
In August 1947, in his first speech as postcolonial India’s prime minister,
Nehru had similarly urged his country to consider the moment of indepen-
dence as a time when “history begins anew.” 4 For Kenyatta and Nehru,
the future of their nations depended on a deliberate retelling of history
that involved forgetting past violence and constructing a national ethos that
would enable citizens to transcend differences. Nehru hoped to achieve this
by emphasizing “unity in diversity”— celebrating the religious and regional
diversity that would unite India rather than divide it, despite the violence
of partition. Kenyatta’s call to his citizens to “pull together” under the
slogan harambee aimed at marginalizing differences by working toward the
common goal of nation building. Toward this end, Kenyatta tried to build an
inclusive state in which he retained full control. He assembled a bureaucracy
that relied heavily on the expertise and leadership of politicians across a
range of political, ethnic, and racial divisions, particularly the new gen-
eration of men who had risen to prominence during the constitutional
negotiations in the late 1950s.
Kenyatta’s first cabinet included Luo leaders Oginga Odinga, as vice pres-
ident, and Tom Mboya; Mwai Kibaki, a young Kikuyu ally of Odinga who
went on to become president in 2002 after, ironically, defeating both
264 Indians in Kenya

Kenyatta’s and Odinga’s sons; and his contemporaries in the Kenya African
Union—Julius Kiano and Peter Koinange, both Kikuyu, and Joseph
Murumbi, who was of Goan and Masai descent. Significantly, Kenyatta
deliberately excluded Makhan Singh and Mau Mau veterans from his state,
all of whom had posed the greatest challenge to his leadership and the KAU
in the late 1940s. Kenyatta also appointed a European settler, Bruce Mc-
Kenzie, as his agriculture minister, and he rewarded his Indian supporters
in the Kenya Freedom Party with important offices. Fitz de Souza became
the deputy Speaker of the House, Chanan Singh was made a parliamen-
tary secretary, and Pio Gama Pinto was elected as a special representative
to the National Assembly. Pranlal Sheth, who after serving as editor and jour-
nalist for the Colonial Times and Daily Chronicle qualified as a lawyer in
London in 1960, participated as an advisor during the constitutional nego-
tiations and became a member of several governmental committees. In Au-
gust 1964, Kenyatta persuaded KADU to dissolve. KADU leader Daniel arap
Moi joined his cabinet, thus including Kalenjin representation in the state
(Moi succeeded Kenyatta as president after his death in 1978). With this
political maneuver, Kenyatta introduced a one-party system in Kenya. Cel-
ebrating the incorporation of the opposition into his administration, he an-
nounced that there was no need for a multiparty system that would repre-
sent different class interests because there was no class struggle in the
country.5 In less than a year, however, Kenyatta faced a challenge from within
his own government, as harambee was interpreted differently by different
statesmen.
The Mau Mau war had been fought for land and freedom, but Kenyatta
made it clear that freedom would not automatically bring land to Kikuyu
squatters, nor were they incorporated into the state machinery. Instead, he
worked out a scheme with Britain to advance loans to his government to
purchase land from European settlers. This not only ensured adequate fi-
nancial compensation to white farmers who left Kenya but also gave Ke-
nyatta’s government the chance to redistribute land without directly dispos-
sessing anyone. Significantly, this resettlement scheme made land available
to anyone who could purchase it. As a result, between 1964 and 1967 more
than half of the farms were reacquired by Europeans. The most contentious
issue in the last decade of colonial rule remained a point of tension in the
early years of the young republic as the redistributive democratic pressure
of self-proclaimed socialists within the government clashed with Kenyatta’s
capitalist agenda. Odinga and parliamentary secretary Bildad Kaggia, who
 Uhuru and Exodus 265

had been a trade unionist since the 1940s, took the lead in pressuring the
government to introduce more radical land reform to benefit “freedom
fighters.” Urging Kenyatta to implement a “bold socialist policy” by dividing
estates into smaller, affordable units for ex-squatters who had neither the
capital nor the creditworthiness to purchase land under the laissez-faire cap-
italist scheme, Kaggia put forward an unsuccessful motion in the National
Assembly to protect the “real sons of soil” who had become “beggars” due
to land hunger under colonialism—a predicament the postcolonial state had
not resolved. Odinga joined Kaggia in criticizing Kenyatta for “hiding under
the cloak of capitalism” and establishing a neocolonial state by moving into
“jobs and privileges held previously by the settlers.” Pointing to the accu-
mulation of land by Kenyatta’s political clique, which had the capital to buy
farms, Odinga noted, “If Kenya started uhuru without an African elite class
she is now rapidly acquiring one.” 6
In December 1964, Kenyatta had inaugurated the Lumumba Institute
in Nairobi to train KANU party officials. Pinto, with his decade of experi-
ence in party organization, became its director and secretary. Along with
him, Odinga, Kaggia, Murumbi, and Achieng Oneko were active in the in-
stitute, using it as a platform from where to push their socialist economic
agenda, including, allegedly, putting together a policy document that threat-
ened to undermine Kenyatta’s regime through a vote of no confidence in
the National Assembly. The “slanderous” antigovernment murmurs coming
from the Lumumba Institute led Mboya, Kenyatta, and Moi to take it over
six months later and shut it down on the grounds that Russian and Chinese
money and ideology had infiltrated the institute. Although Odinga dis-
missed Kenyatta’s allegation of being a “communist,” he openly spoke of the
need to break the predominantly Western influence that had continued in
Kenya in the form of economic loans and military assistance from Britain
and to develop a stronger relationship with the East.7 For his part, Kenyatta
was convinced that Kenya needed an indigenous capitalist bourgeoisie to
develop, arguing that “peace comes through capital” since capital brought
prosperity. He publicly stated that redistributing land for free was against
the spirit of harambee, as freedom and work (uhuru na kazi) went hand in
hand. He was emphatic that there was “no room for those who wait for
things to be given for nothing” in the new nation.8 From 1965 onward, a
public split pulled the state apart into two main factions, each accusing the
other of getting the country caught up in the competing ideologies and in-
ternational alliances of the Cold War, despite the country’s official policy
266 Indians in Kenya

of nonalignment. Led by Odinga and Kaggia, the socialist left accused

Kenyatta, Mboya, and Kiano of being capitalists who were under Western
influence, while the latter trio criticized the “dissidents” for introducing a
“foreign ideology”—that is, communism—into Kenya. The end of harambee
after less than three years of uhuru signified more than Odinga and
Kenyatta’s mutual accusations of being Cold War stooges. Ideological and
practical differences regarding the development of the Kenyan economy
along capitalist or socialist models were at the center of the political de-
bates in 1965 and 1966. By April 1966, the split became official. Kaggia
had resigned in protest as parliamentary secretary a year earlier. At a
reorga ni zation meeting of KANU held in March, Kenyatta, Mboya, and
Moi succeeded in alienating Odinga completely from the party high com-
mand, resulting in Odinga’s resignation as vice president.9
In the emergent war between the left and right, Indians were in a pre-
carious position. Before its dissolution, the Kenya Freedom Party outlined
its vision for the development of Kenya along a “socialist pattern of society”
as the only way to lessen the gap between rich and poor.10 The most politi-
cally active Indians identified themselves with socialist policies. However,
the community as a whole—with their business and trade expertise—was
capitalist and materially better off than the majority of Africans. In 1963,
Indians, with a population of 176,613, constituted about 2 percent of the
Kenyan population. About 40 percent of them were involved in commerce,
industry, and trade, including small retail and wholesale businesses, as well
as large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing firms. In his demand for rad-
ical land reform, Kaggia had pointed to rising land speculation in Kenya re-
sulting from the purchase of large tracts by Indian capitalists, a trend that
Kenyatta himself criticized. Moreover, approximately 28 percent were em-
ployed in skilled and semiskilled positions in government and the private
sector. Political decolonization had not resulted in overturning the economic
inequality of colonialism as Indians continued to make up Kenya’s petty
bourgeoisie as small-scale traders and skilled workers, the economic status
that leaders on both sides of the political spectrum wanted Kenyan Afri-
cans to attain. At independence, 59 percent of all Indian residents in Kenya
had received at least 9 years of schooling, an education that only 4 percent
of Africans had benefited from. This imbalance was reflected in structural
obstacles for the aspiring African middle class because of the employment
advantage of Indians. Indeed, 23 percent of Indian adult males held tech-
nical jobs and 4 percent were in supervisory positions, whereas only 1 per-
 Uhuru and Exodus 267

cent of adult African men were in such occupations. While 18 percent of

working Indians earned more than £750 a year in the private sector, only 1
percent of Africans earned more than £600.11 In the wake of increasingly
violent confrontations that took place in towns with large Indian popula-
tions, especially Nairobi, discussed in Chapter 5, the structural privileges
in employment and education with which Indians started at uhuru devel-
oped new political salience in the first few years of independence.
The left’s critique of neocolonialism, combined with the right’s desire to
create an African bourgeoisie, resulting in a racialized nationalist discourse
that questioned the very presence of Indians in the postcolonial nation-state
and threatened their entrenched economic position as its petty bourgeoisie.
The practical implementation of the slogan “Africa for Africans” to make
freedom economically meaningful was the one thing the left and right could
agree on. In his capacity as minister for economic planning and development,
Mboya introduced a paper on African socialism in May 1965 outlining the
government’s policy of Africanization. Deflecting criticism from the left
regarding the continuity of economic underdevelopment into the postcolo-
nial era, Mboya pointed to Indians, rather than Kenyatta’s government, as
neocolonialists who were the main impediment to national integration and
economic growth. Paul Ngei, a member of the National Assembly, echoed
that sentiment, announcing that the Indian monopoly on trade was compro-
mising Kenya’s independence. Highlighting the “inherited state of affairs in
which non-Africans” owned businesses on the main streets and were “richer
than Africans,” Mboya declared, “This characteristic of our economy must
be eliminated.”12 By moving attention away from land to the commercial
sector, relying on the racial tropes of rich Indians and poor Africans, Mboya
succeeded in killing two birds with one stone. On one hand, the government
appeared to be bringing about a complete change in the economic structure
inherited from the colonial government. On the other hand, by focusing
on business, finance, and industry, the government was accelerating its own
agenda to create an African, capitalist middle class.
The material inequality of Africans and the refusal of Indians to volun-
tarily deracialize the commercial sector opened up a public dialogue about
the desirability of state-led Africanization initiatives that would institute ra-
cially based preferential treatment of Africans over Indians despite the Bill
of Rights in the Kenyan constitution which legally bound the state to treat
all citizens as equal. Anticipating such a move, de Souza and S. G. Amin
suggested a scheme to offer dukkawallahs the same incentive to deracialize
268 Indians in Kenya

the commercial sector as the white farmers had been given. Specifically, de
Souza proposed that the government buy Indian shops and give them to
African traders to conduct business. However, Kenyatta’s administration
did not have the capital for such an investment. KANU members sug-
gested that the government of India advance loans to Kenya to buy out
Indian traders, just as the British government had done for the high-
lands—a scheme that the Indian government did not consider.13 In these cir-
cumstances, Mboya was determined that Africanization was the only
means through which the historical inheritance of African “underprivilege”
and Indian economic monopoly could be shaken off and “existing racial im-
balances” would be corrected. Blaming Indian entrepreneurs for acting as
“single clannish groups” rather than as nationalists, he pointed to their re-
fusal to voluntarily make Africans partners in their enterprises, employ Af-
ricans in their shops, or open their firms’ shares to the public. In so doing,
Indian traders had erected racial barriers to the entry of Africans into busi-
ness. Therefore Mboya announced that the government would restrict li-
censes for certain types of trade and business, exposing “a deliberate bias
in favour of African applicants.”14 The state thus deployed race as a cate-
gory to advance one citizenry over the other. The attorney general, Charles
Njonjo, supported Africanization, arguing that the “moral and social justice
of the correction of historical imbalance in the economic position” of Afri-
cans was rightly an overwhelming concern for the government. Subsequently,
the government introduced several measures aimed at removing existing
handicaps that had prevented the entry of Africans into commerce and in-
dustry. These included the development of market centers in main towns
and training programs for African commercial entrepreneurs.15
Commercial ventures depended on the availability of capital. Indians
predominated not only in trade but also in banking, serving as managers
and bank clerks. Calling for the overhaul of Kenya’s monetary infrastruc-
ture through banks and criticizing, in particular, the intertwined credit
system that Indian traders had access to, a member of the National As-
sembly lamented, “We are not going to have our friends staying here and
occupying the jobs which our people should occupy for the sake of them
being what they are, because if he is a teller in the bank and money is lost,
then he will run to the shop of Panjibhai and bring some money.” Addressing
such structural impediments to African access to credit that Indians did not
face, Mboya announced schemes expanding credit and overdraft facilities
for Africans and giving Africans preference in the distribution of agencies
 Uhuru and Exodus 269

and contracts. The goal was to “establish Africans in a firm position in the
monetary sector by ensuring that a large share of the planned new expan-
sion [would be] African owned and managed.”16
Significantly, rather than impose blanket Africanization policies across all
public and private sectors of the economy, these were piecemeal reforms
that relied on rhetoric that suggested complete structural changes without
actually seeing them through. Keen to keep capital within the country and
abide by the Bill of Rights, the government was slow to implement any sub-
stantial changes that would exponentially increase African participation to
successfully undermine the Indian monopoly in the commercial sector.17 In-
stead, between 1964 and 1967, the state articulated a discourse of racial ma-
joritarianism that, on one hand, emphasized a deliberate state bias aimed
at the preferential treatment of Africans by taking economic advantage
away from Indians and, on the other hand, positioned Indians as extra-
neous to the nation. Despite Kenyatta’s call to the nation to erase enmities
of the past and pull together for its future, in the first decade of uhuru the
nation was increasingly defined as a racially majoritarian one. The dis-
course of African majoritarianism emanating from the National Assembly
placed Indians as permanently marginal in the postcolonial nation both
numerically, as a racially defined minority, and historically, as being unable
and unwilling to shake off their dubious economic past. This discourse
trumped the generational, developmental, and territorial claims that Indians
made on postcolonial Kenya, as politicians relied on three recurring and in-
terrelated themes to explain why the fruits of uhuru had not been shared
equally by all Kenyans. First, they pointed to the anachronism of the
racist, colonial-era attitudes of Indian businessmen in refusing to dera-
cialize their ventures. Second, they highlighted the nonindigenous, dia-
sporic origins of Indians. Third, the material wealth of Indians was juxta-
posed to the general poverty of Africans in two ways: traders were accused
of exploiting African customers, and Indians performing skilled and semi-
skilled work such as engineering, carpentry, clerking in banks, and tai-
loring were seen as usurping jobs that Africans would otherwise hold.
The Voice of Kenya, the government-run radio, took the lead in dissemi-
nating this discourse of majoritarianism. Broadcasts positioned Indians as
a hangover from the colonial past in both origin and attitude, situating them
as onerous to the nation. Listeners were reminded that Indians had been
“middle men” between Africans and Europeans during colonial rule. The
“lip service” they had paid to integration, particularly in the economic realm,
270 Indians in Kenya

was produced as evidence of their continuing “racist” and “exploitative”

colonial attitudes.18 Backbenchers who represented African civil servants
and union officials—the petty bourgeoisie Mboya and Kenyatta wanted
to patronize— echoed a similar theme in their criticism of Indian busi-
nesses, referring to them as “blood suckers” and “dev ils.” Mboya warned
Indians that unless they adopted a “new attitude” and made “friends” with
ordinary Africans, they would face an “explosive” crisis. At a public rally in
Nairobi Kenyatta spoke of similar violence, pointing to increasing “African
wrath” at Indian shopkeepers who continued to “insult” African customers
“even though Kenya was independent.” He announced that uhuru would
be complete only when economic power, not just political power, was in
African hands, and he dramatically called on Indians who were unwilling
to work with Africans to “pack their bags and go.” Although Kenyatta ad-
mitted that some individual Indians were “genuine friends” and “loyal” to
the nation, the community as a whole had “not shown a sense of belonging,”
since Indians had refused to deracialize their businesses and were purchasing
farms in the highlands for purposes of speculation rather than agricultural
development.19
Kenyatta emphasized their diasporic origins to put the burden on Indians
to prove their nationalist credentials by voluntarily loosening their hold on
the retail and service economies before making claims of territorial be-
longing and citizenship rights in Kenya. A similar sentiment was articulated
by the assistant minister for commerce and industry who criticized the trade
monopoly of “non-indigenous Shahs and Patels,” while another member of
the National Assembly lamented, “You think you are in Bombay because
you always find Miss Patel here, another Miss Patel there.”20 Such statements
underscored the indigeneity of Africans and juxtaposed to that the extra-
territoriality of Indians. As the Voice of Kenya put it in broadcasts that reso-
nated across Kenya: “[Indians] said that they had made this country their
home and that they were going to live and die here. They exploited their
chances to the extent that they control the economy of this country, and they
monopolized the ser vices. They had an unchecked run of luck for the time
they were here. They had no partners other than those of their own
choosing. . . . [I]t was all a family affair.” Indeed, Indian businessmen had
continued to predominate in family-run retail and wholesale after indepen-
dence, and skilled Indian workers remained in private and public employ.
However, in placing them outside the nation, these broadcasts deliber-
ately elided the shared history of interracial political protest, arguing that
 Uhuru and Exodus 271

“now the indigenous people of this land want to taste the fruits of uhuru
for which they fought and offered maximum sacrifices.”21
Ironically, even while it publicly refused to recognize the role played by
Indians in the fight for uhuru, in October 1967 the government of Kenya
banned the export of any material pertaining to the East African Indian
National Congress, on the grounds that these were records of “historical
value since the Indian Congress was the first political organization in the
country which advocated the one man, one vote principle.”22 These papers,
still preserved today at the National Archives of Kenya, are one of the most
important collections of primary sources consulted for this book.
The political discourse of African majoritarianism combined concerns
about race and class with populist rhetoric on nationhood, development, ra-
cial predominance and solidarity, and history to place responsibility for the
failures of independence on the Indian minority at a time when the gov-
ernment was facing a challenge within its own ranks. In developing such a
discourse, Kenyatta’s regime did not differ from other postcolonial states in
East Africa. In fact, Kenyatta’s policies were less extreme than either those
witnessed in Zanzibar during this time, where, as Jonathon Glassman has
argued, shifting racial discourses on civilization resulted in the anti-Arab
and anti-Indian pogrom in 1964, and in Tanzania, where James Brennan
has shown how the racialization of urban claims of entitlement in Dar es
Salaam led to nationalization programs that confiscated Indian property and
businesses.23 Kenyatta’s political discourse on majoritarianism was also quite
different from the expulsion of Indians from Uganda under Idi Amin just
two years later. Relying on rhetoric rather than policy, Kenyatta was unwilling
to implement a blanket policy of Africanization in the private sector, refusing
motions by members of the National Assembly to Africanize private com-
panies and prevent the employment of Indians in managerial positions.24
Instead, his state was more concerned with taking political action against
individuals who challenged Kenyatta’s authority.
While Kenyatta, Mboya, and other members of the National Assembly
questioned the nationalist integrity of the Indian community as a whole, Pio
Gama Pinto’s patriotic credentials were never in question, nor had his af-
filiation with other radical leftists within the Lumumba Institute, including
Kaggia and Odinga, been a secret. On February 24, 1965, Pinto became
independent Kenya’s first political casualty when he was assassinated in his
car in broad daylight in the driveway of his house in Nairobi in the pres-
ence of his eighteen-month-old daughter. Kisilu Mutua and Chege Thuo were
272 Indians in Kenya

arrested and charged with the crime. Thuo was acquitted, and Mutua was
given a life sentence. However, in delivering his judgment, Chief Justice
Ainley pointed out that “the case wears an unfinished aspect . . . we may
not have all who were involved in the crime before us.” Scholars and po-
litical activists, including Odinga and Kaggia, believed that Pinto was as-
sassinated by the government, which wanted to silence its leftist critics.25
Vice President Odinga adjourned the National Assembly on the day of
Pinto’s assassination to honor his “dear brother.” Less than a month later,
members of the Assembly demanded that the cabinet, especially the min-
ister of internal security and defense, look into this murder as a matter of
“great national importance.” No definite answer was ever given, but from
1965 until the present day Kenyan parliamentarians have pointed to Pin-
to’s murder as the first of many political assassinations that continue to plague
the nation, obliquely highlighting the role of the Special Intelligence Branch
and the Criminal Investigation Department, which had kept a close eye on
the Lumumba Institute.26 As Kenyatta’s state turned on its own officials,
Joseph Murumbi, who replaced Odinga as vice president, resigned from pol-
itics within just six months of his appointment.
In life and in death, Pinto represented much more than the racially de-
fined diaspora to which he belonged. The resonance of his assassination was
felt more deeply by his political compatriots on the left than by the larger
Indian community, as it exposed the reach of the state and its willingness
to snuff out any detractors, even those within government who were
Kenyatta’s longtime allies. Pranlal Sheth was arguably more representative
of ordinary Indians in Kenya. Born in Nairobi in 1924 to a textile wholesaler,
he had joined the Colonial Times and Daily Chronicle in the 1940s at a
time when the papers had become a vehicle for the articulation of an
Indian anticolonial critique. In this capacity he met Makhan Singh and
became involved in left-wing politics in the trade union movements of 1948–
1949. Sheth eventually trained as a lawyer and became an advocate at the
Supreme Court. He set up a practice in Kisumu, where he met Odinga,
whose political orientation, especially in organizing urban workers, was
similar to his. At independence Sheth was appointed to several govern-
mental committees, including the agricultural board, the economic plan-
ning and development council, and a commission of enquiry into tribal
disturbances. By 1966 his closeness to Odinga made him vulnerable to the
state’s excesses. Shortly after Pinto’s assassination, Odinga suggested that
he move to Nairobi to symbolically and physically distance himself from
Odinga, but Sheth refused, remarking, “What would my African friends
 Uhuru and Exodus 273

think of me if I deserted them at the first whiff of danger?” On August 14,

1966, the government stripped Sheth of his Kenyan citizenship and de-
ported him to India along with five other Indians. The home minister, Moi,
who had overseen the expulsions, met a deputation of Indian leaders, in-
cluding Nazareth, Amin, and A. J. Pandya, but gave them no explanation
for the deportation.27
Within six months, Moi became more willing to explain his actions, as
he was appointed vice president at a time when Odinga and Kaggia posed
a serious political threat to Kenyatta’s regime. In a dramatic turn of events,
on July 6, 1967, Moi declared seven Indians and five Europeans to be pro-
hibited immigrants, giving them twenty-four hours to leave Kenya. In the
accompanying public statement, Moi reprimanded “immigrant races” for
being continually influenced by the animosities of the colonial days and
adopting a “racist attitude.” He criticized non-African communities for
speaking “disrespectfully” of the president and the government, singling out
Indians as being “the worst offenders.” The action was ostensibly intended
to “eliminate the bad weeds” from society and prevent a situation that would
lead to “racial disaster,” and it served as a warning to Kenyatta’s critics, who
were asked to “voluntarily leave the country.” Kenyatta himself justified the
expulsions on the grounds that the Indians had not responded to his doc-
trine of “forgive and forget.” K. Maganlal Jadavrai Batt of Kakamega was
deported for “insulting” the government by saying that he “does not care a
hoot about the Kenyan government” because “all are in his pocket.” Zever-
rchand Raishi Shah of Thika had made himself “unpopular” by boasting that
he was wealthy and had money in Britain. He referred to the state as a “ter-
rorist government.” Kantilal Popatlal Vasanji Samani from Isiolo was accused
of assisting “Shifta bandits” (Somali secessionists with whom the government
was engaged in a military confrontation at the time), while the deportation of
Mohamed Datoo of Eldoret, a former chief inspector of police, was justified
on the grounds that “he deserve[d] it” because he had criticized KANU
youth wingers and referred to them as “dogs.” Mohinder Gurdial Singh of
Nayuki had announced that he was “not prepared to be under a government
led by terrorists,” and Laxmidas Lakhan of Kitale had “made things diffi-
cult” by being “anti-African” and not maintaining racial harmony. A seventh
Indian, Ujager Narain Singh, was imprisoned for “unknown reasons.”28
A closer inspection of the Indians who were deported in 1967 reveals
that they were specifically targeted because of their business competition
with African commercial enterprises in their districts and because of petty
skirmishes they got into with KANU party workers. Batt, who allegedly
274 Indians in Kenya

boasted about bribing officials and ministers, was a shop assistant at a su-
permarket, not a shop owner, unlikely to have the means to bribe anyone,
and was illiterate in English. He claimed that his expulsion was caused by
his refusal to grant goods on credit to an African councilor on the Kaka-
mega Council. Shah was the owner of Chania African Dairy in Thika, who
alleged that his “unpopularity” was not only because of his wealth but also
because of the stiff competition he posed to Dr. Maneno, chairman of Thika
municipality, who had opened a rival dairy cooperative there; Shah held a
Kenya life resident certificate, while both his children were Kenyan citizens.
Rather than assisting Shifta bandits, Samani was a shop owner whose store
had in fact been attacked by them, while Mohinder Singh was the propri-
etor of a construction company that employed 150 Africans who had
unionized. Lakhani too argued that his expulsion was caused by labor dif-
ficulties on the 700-acre farm he owned in Kenya. Datoo, an employee at a
photographic studio, had been involved in a brawl with members of the
KANU youth wing in November 1966; he also held a Kenya life resident
certificate. The deportees included Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs and Gujarati
Muslims and Hindus. The wide geographical spread of the selected Indians,
as well as the different religious and regional communities from which they
came, indicated that the government wanted to “strike fear into the whole
community by the very arbitrariness of the selection of victims.”29
On their part, even as the deportees pled their innocence and made an
unsuccessful bid to remain in Kenya, their skirmishes with KANU cadres
reflected racialized discourses that shaped everyday interactions. While Ke-
nyatta conflated patriotism with loyalty to his government and citizenship
with indigeneity, Indians were complicit in placing themselves outside this
nationalist discourse. Across the country, Indian wealth, albeit relative, served
as a reminder to Africans of the economic inequalities that had remained
unchanged since independence, while Indian businessmen and workers
sought to maintain their material privileges by criticizing KANU’s attempts
to circumscribe their structural advantages. Drawing a civilizational
boundary marked by their wealth, Bhatt, Datoo, and Singh expressed their
lack of confidence in the postcolonial government through racial slurs.
The violence that inhabited shared urban spaces in the early 1960s de-
scribed in Chapter 5, Pinto’s assassination, and the deportations fueled
this discourse.
The language of national integration and racial harmony that accompa-
nied the expulsions underscored the attempt made by Kenyatta’s govern-
 Uhuru and Exodus 275

ment to deflect the left’s criticism away from itself and gain political capital
at a time when its authority was being questioned from within its own ranks.
Through political rhetoric, piecemeal policies, and dramatic expulsions,
Kenyatta and his cabinet portrayed the Indian community’s “colonial,”
racist attitudes, which had no place in the new nation, as being responsible
for the economic hardships of the wanachi (ordinary citizens). Yet it re-
frained from a complete overhaul of economic structures, hoping that its
careful targeting of par ticular individuals would stem the resentment
building up against it. The ineffectiveness of such measures, however, led
local administrative bodies to use their authority to alter these economic
structures, thus putting pressure on the government to introduce more rad-
ical reforms. In December 1966 the Nairobi City Council announced it was
unwilling “to safeguard the provisions of the constitution to the disadvan-
tage of the majority of the people” and evicted Indian stall owners from a
municipal market in the capital to make space, literally and symbolically,
for African traders. Within the National Assembly, KANU members from
rural areas asked the government to restrict Indians from trading outside
of big towns in order to facilitate the development of African businesses.
They demanded that the government allow organized boycotts of shops be-
longing to Indians who refused “to co-operate with us.” Elsewhere in Mom-
basa and Thika, African political activists not only criticized Indian traders
for creating obstacles to the entry of Africans into the commercial sector
but accused Indian employees of mistreating their African domestic workers
and organized strikes. Mr. Lumumbe, secretary general of the Kenya Fed-
eration of Labour, demanded state intervention to help Africans take over
skilled and semiskilled work that had been usurped by Indian workers.30
Although the government relied heavily on the discourse of African ma-
joritarianism between 1964 and 1967 to deflect criticism away from itself,
the resonance of its nationalist prose that identified Kenya as a predomi-
nantly racially defined African nation in which political freedom would be
made economically tangible for ordinary African citizens by the state was
felt well beyond the National Assembly. In his survey in Nairobi in 1966,
political scientist Don Rothchild found that more than a third of African
respondents wanted the government to hand over Indian retail to Afri-
cans, while 23 percent hoped that the government would offer them loans
on easy terms to buy out Indian businesses. His survey reflected popular
support of the discourse of majoritarianism, as Nairobi’s African residents
perceived Indians as having accumulated riches by exploiting Africans and
276 Indians in Kenya

being anachronistic and colonial in their conduct despite uhuru. It also

revealed an increasing expectation among aspiring traders that the govern-
ment would use force to ensure their entry into retail trade.31 Riding this
populist wave, especially as local authorities began to implement large-scale
Africanization schemes that the central administration hesitated to put into
place, the government passed two legislative bills aimed at circumscribing
the economic activities not just of individual Indians but also of very care-
fully selected classes of Indians whom the state wanted to replace with an
indigenous (i.e., African) class.
In July 1967, the National Assembly passed the Kenya Immigration Bill,
which canceled the permanent resident certificates that hitherto had enti-
tled noncitizens to work in the country, replacing them with work permits.
The bill gave the government complete control over the issue of entry and
work permits, stating it would only license those businesses that employed
and trained citizens. All entrepreneurs were required to provide the state
with employment returns enumerating their African, Indian, and European
employees. Three months later, in October 1967, a Trade Licensing Bill was
proposed that required all businesses to apply for new trade licenses, irre-
spective of whether they had held these in the past. Trading in certain basic
goods, including sugar, posho, and other staples used by a majority of Afri-
cans, was restricted entirely to citizens. Noncitizens were required to apply
for government authorization to conduct business in these provisions. In-
dian petty traders, particularly dukkawallahs who sold goods on a small
scale, were directly and immediately affected by the bill. The bills also
listed specific categories of skilled and semiskilled occupations, including
self-employed professionals, who needed trade licenses to operate, and
identified types of business employees whose employers were required to
apply for work permits, including clerks (especially bank clerks), secretaries,
shop assistants, tailors, carpenters, plumbers, and construction agents and
workers—all jobs commonly held by Indians.32
Vice President Moi, Minister for Labour Kiano, and Kenneth Matiba, rep-
resenting the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, enthusiastically supported
the bills, holding that they would provide employment opportunities for up
to 20,000 Africans in the private sector and help correct the racial imbal-
ances of the colonial past. In their public statements Kiano and Matiba made
it clear that Indians with Kenyan citizenship could potentially have their
trade licenses and work permits revoked. They called upon their “fellow citi-
zens” to allow Africans to “catch up with them” in managerial and execu-
tive positions through policies that promoted “black Africans” over Indians,
 Uhuru and Exodus 277

as this was the only way to correct the economic imbalances of the colonial
past.33 Significantly, while the government was explicit about its desire to
make a clean break from the past with the passing of this legislation, both
bills were reminiscent of the marketing legislations introduced by the colo-
nial government in the 1930s that similarly had aimed to restrict the activi-
ties of Indian traders and encourage the development of African business
through state-led initiatives, as discussed in Chapter 2.

BECOMING T WICE MIGR ANTS

Within days of the passing of the Immigration and Trade Licensing bills, it
appeared that Kenyatta’s government’s Africanization scheme had worked.34
Beginning in October 1967, approximately 500 Indians began to emigrate
out of Kenya per week, a trend that escalated in the first two months of 1968,
with 12,000 Indians leaving in January and February. By March 1968, a full-
blown exodus was taking place. In six short months 18 percent of the In-
dian community, approximately 33,000 people, emigrated out of Kenya.35
As Indians began to pack up and leave, their departure further fueled the
discourse on national loyalty and African majoritarianism being voiced in the
National Assembly. Playing to the gallery, Kenyatta announced, “Let
them go, the more, the happier we will be.” Since independence in 1963,
there had been a steady emigration of about 6,000 Indians annually out of
Kenya. Much to the chagrin of the Indian high commissioner based in Nai-
robi, Kenyatta pointed to their destination: “Knowing that India and Paki-
stan are over-populated and that people there are like swarms or locusts
and are faced with shortage of food, they [Indians] have decided to pack up
and migrate to the UK.” Although the high commissioner objected to this
“gratuitous and unprovoked slur on two friendly countries,” Kenyatta was
entirely accurate in his observation that, rather than return to their South
Asian homeland, Indians were becoming twice migrants in Britain. More-
over, he emphasized the voluntary nature of the exodus, stating, “For those
Asians who have refused to take up citizenship and are now leaving the
country there is nothing Kenya can do.”36 Indeed, the majority of the 50,000
Indians who permanently emigrated out of Kenya between 1962 and 1969
were British citizens.
In the 1950s and 1960s, nationhood and citizenship in three politico-
geographic and cultural realms within the former British Empire—Kenya,
India, and the United Kingdom—were defined as singular and distinct.
They did not allow for concurrent affiliations, directly affecting the Indian
278 Indians in Kenya

diaspora that had mediated the three milieus. As India and Pakistan gained
independence in 1947, they gave their overseas diaspora the opportunity to
register for citizenship. In 1955, the Indian government rejected dual citi-
zenship for its diaspora, arguing that Indians resident in British colonies
should identify themselves completely with the interests of their adopted
countries. Fearing that any articulation of “extra-territorial loyalty” to India
would be interpreted by nationalists in these colonies as disloyalty to the
emergent nation-states, the Indian High Commission in Nairobi actively dis-
couraged Indians from registering for Indian citizenship in the hope that
they would begin to think of themselves as “Africans . . . the true children
of the soil.” By 1967, fewer than 4,500 Indians had acquired Indian citi-
zenship, and only 500 held Pakistani passports. Since Kenya was not yet in-
dependent, Indians who followed the Indian government’s advice turned
by default to the local colonial authority to issue them passports.37
Britain came to terms with the loss of its empire during the first wave of
decolonization after the Second World War by passing a Nationality Act in
1948 that created two categories of citizenship: that of the Commonwealth,
the successor to the British Empire, and that of the United Kingdom and
Colonies (CUKC), both of which guaranteed equal rights to entry and resi-
dence in the UK under Britain’s immigration laws. On the eve of Kenyan
independence, the majority of Indians held CUKC passports issued to them
in Kenya by the colonial administration. Although Britain’s nationality and
Commonwealth immigration acts were intended, initially, to protect the citi-
zenship rights of white settlers in the empire as the reality of decoloniza-
tion was unfolding, in 1963 Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys had
assured Indians in Kenya that they were entitled to the same rights as British
citizens. The centuries-old entrenched economic network of Indians in Kenya
and their social and religious affiliation with India convinced British author-
ities at the time that Indians were unlikely to take advantage of their changed
status from colonial subjects to postcolonial British citizens and migrate per-
manently to the United Kingdom.38
In December 1963, when Kenya gained independence, it followed India’s
example in putting territorial and racial limits to citizenship, giving In-
dians two years to apply for—rather than automatically receive— citizenship.
In so doing, it identified them as permanent immigrants, irrespective of
the territorial or generational claims Indians could make on Kenya as the
land of their birth and, in many cases, their parents’ birth. Kenya’s constitu-
tion also prohibited citizens from holding dual citizenship. Indians with
 Uhuru and Exodus 279

one parent born in Kenya were entitled to register for citizenship if they too
had been born in the country. By 1967, approximately 48,000 Indians had
registered as Kenyan citizens and 20,000 had applied for citizenship, of
whom 12,000 had been granted it. Close to 100,000 Indians resident in
Kenya did not apply for citizenship. They possessed certificates of perma-
nent residence in Kenya— canceled under the 1967 Immigration Bill—
which permitted them to live and work in the country, as they had done for
generations. It was 50,000 of these British citizens who immigrated to the
United Kingdom between 1962 and 1968, constituting 28 percent of the
entire Indian population in Kenya.39
The hesitation of more than half of the Indians resident in the country to
take up Kenyan citizenship further stoked the discourse of African majori-
tarianism. The Voice of Kenya criticized the community for sticking to their
British passports “like leeches” and retaining their “British connections” in
the hope of continuing their colonial privileges.40 There were, however, sev-
eral interrelated practical, political, and psychological reasons for the failure
of Indians to apply en masse to become Kenyan citizens and choose to im-
migrate to Britain. Despite the recurring trope used by KANU about the
inexhaustible riches of the Indians and the tangible material advantage they
had over the majority of Africans, their wealth was in fact limited. Regis-
tering for Kenyan citizenship was an expensive process that not all Indians
could afford. Citizenship applications required a £200 security deposit from
applicants and a bond from a Kenyan citizen with immovable property in
the country. Dukkawallahs and petty traders, with an average of five family
members, often had to raise £1,000 or more per family to register for Ke-
nyan citizenship.41 This investment appeared to be a risky proposition given
the political milieu of the early 1960s.
Citizenship by registration was subject to the renunciation of any other
passport, and it could be revoked within seven years at the discretion of the
Ministry of Home Affairs. Mboya explicitly noted that “we are demanding
the maximum from the non-African” by requiring him to “renounce his orig-
inal nationality, his country, his people” and “give one loyalty to Kenya and
Kenya alone.” 42 For the Indian diaspora, whose political, cultural, and so-
cial consciousness had been shaped over five decades, straddling the realms
of three countries tied together, ironically, by the territorial reach of impe-
rial power in India, Kenya, and Britain, the singularity of the loyalty de-
manded by Mboya (and before him Nehru) did not sit well. As noted, only
those Indians who were themselves born in Kenya and whose mother or
280 Indians in Kenya

father claimed Kenya as their birthplace were eligible to apply for citizen-
ship. This created bureaucratic hurdles, as not all Indians had birth certifi-
cates or could request paperwork to establish where they had been born.
The circular migrations across the Indian Ocean created another obstacle
for them. Many women returned to India to give birth to their children, later
rejoining their husbands in Kenya. The offspring of such momentarily frag-
mented families were disqualified from registering for Kenyan citizenship
irrespective of the generational claim they could otherwise make on the
country. The rhetoric of African majoritarianism that threatened the liveli-
hoods of the Indian petty bourgeoisie, the discourse of indigeneity that con-
flated national belonging with racial identity, and the skepticism of Indians
about the ability of Africans to govern the nation-state made Indians un-
certain about their future in the country. This was reinforced as KANU
members inextricably linked national loyalty with political support for KANU.
As National Assembly member P. N. Munyasia publicly commented, Indians
“turn up like locusts” when “called for social invitations or garden parties,”
but by staying away from KANU political rallies they were failing to “ex-
hibit nationalist fervor.” 43
The silencing of Indians who had supported Kenyatta’s leftist critics such
as Odinga did little to allay the vulnerability Indians felt in postcolonial Kenya
in light of the politically motivated revocation of citizenship, deportations,
Pinto’s assassination, and the systematic alienation of Makhan Singh by Ke-
nyatta even though they had shared the stage in April 1950 and together
demanded uhuru sasa. The arbitrary and deep reach of the state in its treat-
ment of Indian political activists and small businessmen in the first two years
of uhuru and the government’s declared policy to replace Indian skilled ar-
tisans and craftsmen with African workers further stoked this sense of in-
security. Therefore, in 1964 many Indians hesitated to take up Kenyan citi-
zenship because it did not appear to guarantee equal treatment from the
state, especially as the government advertised job opportunities explicitly
stating a preference for Kenyans of African origin. Instead, Indians made
material contributions to the state’s development projects to indicate their
permanence in the country and support of Kenyatta’s uhuru. They donated
more than £1,000 to the Nakuru branch of the KANU and raised a similar
amount for the Harambee High School there. Indians in Nyeri offered to
build a multiracial school; the Visa Oshwal community donated 84,000 shil-
lings to the KANU Headquarters Fund in Nairobi; and a group of busi-
nessmen pledged 80,000 shillings to build an X-ray facility in Gatundu Hos-
 Uhuru and Exodus 281

pital, near Kenyatta’s home. On a visit in August 1966, the Aga Khan led
nationwide prayers for the long life of the president the day before Kenyatta
Day and publicly declared the loyalty of Ismailis to Kenya generally and Ke-
nyatta specifically. But such declarations of loyalty did not translate into a
rush to become Kenyan citizens, as the state had not demurred from snuffing
out challenges from all quarters, making it clear that citizenship itself did
not guarantee political, economic, or residential rights. Kenyatta himself di-
rectly and publicly threatened Indians with “dire consequences” if they failed
to “recognize the realities of African independence.” 44
This reality for Kenyatta’s state was the need and desire to redistribute
Indian wealth. For Indians this meant the loss of their livelihoods. Indeed,
public affirmations of political loyalty had not been accompanied with the
voluntary deracialization of Indian trade businesses. The Ministry of Com-
merce and Industry, under whose authority dukkawallahs operated, therefore
espoused the discourse of African majoritarianism, which conflated the issues
of race, citizenship, and historical memory in an attempt to dislodge Indians—
both citizens and noncitizens—from their secure position in the Kenyan
economy. It warned that “unless they [Indians] completely ally themselves
with the government, then the citizens of African origin are likely to wonder
whether those non-African citizens are genuine citizens.” Since British pass-
ports would not be reissued once renounced, Indians feared being rendered
stateless if government officials deemed them not to be “genuine” citizens,
revoked their Kenyan citizenship, and deported them from the country.45
In December 1965, shortly before the deadline to register for citizenship,
thirty politically prominent Indians, including Nazareth and Amin, met at
the Indian high commissioner’s house to decide whether they should en-
courage the Indian community to apply en masse for Kenyan citizenship.
Ultimately they decided against leading Indians in either direction because
of the potential threat of statelessness if their Kenyan citizenship was arbi-
trarily revoked. The majority retained their existing passports. By hesitating
to apply for Kenyan citizenship, Indians placed themselves on the margins
of the nation, though they believed that they had been forced there by Af-
rican statesmen. Amin subsequently emigrated to India. Nazareth himself
had taken up Kenyan citizenship in 1963, but his disillusionment with the
postcolonial state was apparent when he lamented, “To remain here much
longer would be to condemn oneself and one’s children to unending frus-
tration, to an embittered existence.” 46 Although Nazareth stayed in Kenya
till his death in the 1980s, in 1967 he articulated the anxiety felt by many
282 Indians in Kenya

Indians who perceived Kenyatta’s state as a majoritarian one that was ren-
dering them a permanent minority. The violent confrontations and racial-
ized milieu of the early 1960s in Nairobi and their own diasporic conscious-
ness—of being racially and civilizationally separate from and superior to
their African compatriots—was reinforced by the events in Zanzibar in
1964, when people of non-African origin, including those of Indian and
Arab descent, were subjected to violence and became stateless during the
revolution, and by the armed mutinies in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.47
The fear of an uncertain economic future and the certainty that they had
no political or patriotic investment in the present Kenyan nation-state trig-
gered the emigration of close to 6,000 Indians with British passports be-
tween October 1963 and August 1967. Dilbagh Channa, a Punjabi Sikh
schoolteacher from Kisumu, hesitated to apply for citizenship after the Zan-
zibar coup and eventually migrated to Britain. In April 1964, on a visit to
Mombasa, thirty-one year old Channa met an Indian from Zanzibar from
whom he heard about the “butchering” of “Arab Africans.” He recalled this
conversation as very significant for him personally and identified this mo-
ment as the beginning of a deep sense of insecurity about his future as an
Indian in Kenya; he emigrated later that year. Bhadra Patel, a Gujarati, was
another teacher who moved to Britain after drawing “the rural short straw”
when she was posted to a school in Lwak, a remote area in Nyanza Prov-
ince. She wanted a “good future” for her daughter in an urban town but
believed that a transfer was an “improbable dream,” so together with her
husband she hatched an “escape plan” to travel to Britain to attend college
and eventually remain there.48
Sumati Shah, whose father had arrived in Kenya from Gujarat by dhow
in 1917, moved to Britain in the early 1960s in the hope of a more certain
economic future. Unlike many Indian merchants with similarly humble back-
grounds who settled in East Africa at the turn of the century and quickly
accumulated vast quantities of wealth, Shah’s father remained a shop as-
sistant in Nairobi till the early 1930s and began to sell clothing fabric going
door-to-door to Indian households. He was successful enough to employ
an African assistant but never made enough profits to open a shop, and his
large family survived on the small income he brought home from his sales.
For others, the populist rhetoric of the redistribution of wealth accompa-
nying the call for uhuru served as a catalyst to take advantage of the resi-
dential rights that the possession of CUKC passports bestowed them with.
Babubhai Patel, whose father had moved to Kenya in 1942 as an employee
 Uhuru and Exodus 283

in the railways, worked in Nairobi for ten years as a bank clerk. A week
before independence his father put him on a plane to London. Patel re-
called the advice of many Indians of his father’s generation who thought it
better for Indian youth to leave Kenya, as they feared that the independent
state would Africanize the private and public sectors, leaving them unem-
ployed. Kash Singh, who was born in Nairobi, also left Kenya in 1963. As he
put it, “Asians were encouraged to leave so natives could get jobs and farm.”
Jaswant Singh Rayait, a Punjabi Sikh who had moved to Kenya in the 1930s
as a carpenter, also emigrated to Britain at independence for this reason.49
The emigration of Indians who became twice migrants in Britain before
the 1967 legislations was motivated by several factors. For them, being
“Indian” in postcolonial Kenya meant being economically trapped because
of their racial identity—a distinction that came from within the community
as well as the emergent nationalist discourse. They considered themselves
permanently vulnerable to the state’s arbitrary and violent excesses, and so
they deliberately uprooted themselves from Kenya, despite having lived there
for several generations, to secure a “better” future for their children.
Embedded in this voluntary migration was a diasporic consciousness that
considered Kenya a transient “homeland” and a racialized self-identity that
exposed their sense of civilizational difference and superiority. Implicit in
their departure was their political disavowal of African self-governance.
While Indian traders had long been singled out as an unwanted presence
in the nation, it was urban professionals providing skilled ser vices who left
Kenya before the Immigration and Trade Licensing bills were passed. How-
ever, this legislation directly affected as many as 9,000 traders who had not
taken up Kenyan citizenship. The bills, together with the cancellation of cer-
tificates of permanent residence, put the government in control of issuing
work permits with the goal of creating employment opportunities for Afri-
cans. Much like registering for citizenship, acquiring a work permit was also
an expensive endeavor. Each application cost £25 and required a security
bond of £150. Permits were issued for only three to six months at a time,
requiring extensions that were both costly and uncertain. Employers were
therefore hesitant to invest in work permits for employees, while banks were
unwilling to lend money for these permits given the flight risk, especially
as the legislation made it illegal for noncitizens without work permits to stay
in Kenya. This affected not only self-employed artisans such as masons, car-
penters, tailors, and mechanics but also bank clerks and shop assistants.50 For
shopkeepers who could afford the hefty application fees, close governmental
284 Indians in Kenya

surveillance over their employment returns and the particular goods they
could trade in threatened the viability and profitability of their business
ventures. Furthermore, while individual professionals and traders were di-
rectly affected by the legislation, the majority had families who were de-
pendent on them. According to one estimate, for every 3,000 traders, 21,000
Indians, including women and children, were affected.51 Indians had to make
a personal decision about their ability to earn a livelihood in Kenya under
the new legislation, and consequently September 1967 saw a sharp spike in
the average number of Indians with British passports emigrating, rising from
60 per week to 500 in a trend that escalated over the next five months. In-
dian men, women, and children boarded planes in Nairobi bound for
Heathrow; on arrival in England, their friends and relatives provided them
with accommodation and helped them find employment. They settled in
Southall, Ealing, Brent, Wembley, and Leicester—areas where Indians from
East Africa had been living since the 1950s.
The Indian exodus of 1967–1968 has emerged in popular memory and
scholarship as a linear history, an event caused by a single, direct cause—
Africanization. Kashiben D. Mistry, whose husband owned a small business
in Lumbwa, recalled leaving Kenya due to “unrest.” Satchachan S. Deora,
born in Nairobi in 1929, emigrated out of fear for his children’s future, an
anxiety triggered by Africanization policies. These were paradoxically reluc-
tant yet willing migrants who believed they were being pushed out by “people
not ready for independence.”52 Such remembrances create a diasporic narra-
tive that places the blame for the Indian exodus squarely on Africans, who,
according to them, forced them out of their country even though the ma-
jority who left Kenya between September 1967 and February 1968 did so
voluntarily, before the Trade Licensing Bill was implemented, to minimize
the risk of being deprived of their livelihoods. The popular history of these
twice migrants recounts the story of a community under threat, positioning
Indians as unwanted victims who were pushed out of Kenya due to African
racialism. Despite the voluntary emigration of Indians from Kenya, the dra-
matic expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1971 shaped an “East African”
diasporic consciousness that conflated the events in Kenya and Uganda de-
spite their substantially different contexts. In this telling, Indians held no re-
sponsibility for the racialization of the political and economic milieu in Kenya
in the 1960s, while Kenyatta’s state was blamed entirely for the exodus.
The surge in the number of British citizens of Indian descent in Kenya
asserting their residential claim in Britain was not, however, simply a result
 Uhuru and Exodus 285

of the exclusionary legislation passed in Nairobi. On September 5, 1967, days

after the Kenya Immigration Bill passed, the East African Standard car-
ried a headline story that the opposition in Britain was demanding that the
Labour Government urgently pass legislation—to be put into effect within
ten days—to restrict the entry of Indians with British passports into the
United Kingdom. This triggered the exodus. By September 13, 500 Indians
had purchased one-way tickets from Nairobi to London.53 The postcolonial
triumph of the territorial nation-state and its corresponding definition of sin-
gular citizenship was complicated by the existence of a racially distinct trans-
national diaspora for both Kenya and Britain, intrinsically connected through
their shared South Asian minority in 1967–1968. The reality of the economic
monopoly of Indians in Kenya and the threat of Indian immigration cultur-
ally altering Britain forced both postcolonial nations to confront their shared
imperial history, one fraught with inherited racial tensions that did not dis-
appear with decolonization. The threat of impending immigration controls
in Britain was as much the cause of the Indian exodus as the Africanization
policies that had uprooted Indians resident in Kenya for generations in the
first place. Indeed, between July 1967 and February 1968, both postcolo-
nial governments showed an equal commitment to manipulating race rela-
tions to their advantage, with varying degrees of success.
Although Britain in 1948 had bestowed citizenship, including the right
to free entry and residence in the United Kingdom, to members of its
Commonwealth and colonies, race riots in London in 1959 resulted in the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, which restricted the entry of British
citizens holding CUKC passports issued by colonial governments. Since this
effectively restricted the entry of the European farmers settled in colonial
Kenya, when it became clear that the independent state in Kenya would not
allow dual citizenship, the British government passed another Nationality
Act in 1964 that entitled people with “close connections” with Britain to
enter the United Kingdom without any restrictions and regain their citizen-
ship, even if they had initially renounced it. Aimed at protecting Kenya’s
white farmers, the bill defined “close connections” as birth or ancestry, thus
introducing a racial differentiation between British citizens and making it
clear that Indians in Kenya were not “at par with those of British birth.”
With independence, the colonial administration in Kenya was replaced with
a British High Commission, which became the authority that issued British
passports to U.K. citizens in Nairobi regardless of race. As a result, Indians
in Kenya were not subject to the 1962 immigration restrictions, which
286 Indians in Kenya

applied only to passports issued by a colonial authority. The Home Office

in Britain realized at the time that immediately after the transfer of power,
up to 150,000 Indians in Kenya with “no real connection” to Britain would
have an “absolute right” to enter the country. Secure in the knowledge that
there was no historical pattern of Indian immigration from Kenya to the
United Kingdom among the diasporic South Asian community, whose pres-
ence in East Africa predated that of the British, the then secretary of state
for colonies and the Commonwealth, Duncan Sandys, pledged that Britain
would be “responsible for any who remain United Kingdom citizens and do
not take up Kenyan citizenship.” This included Indians, because “anything
else” would create “second class UK citizenship based on racial origin,” some-
thing the postcolonial British government, eager to distance itself from the
racial slights of its imperial past, was determined to avoid. In September
1967, however, sitting in opposition, Sandys walked away from his pledge,
announcing that his government had never intended the transfer-of-power
negotiations to result in “this privileged back door entry” of Indians from
East Africa into Britain.54 He was joined by shadow defence secretary,
Enoch Powell, who moved quickly to demand that the government close
the technical loophole by which Indians with CUKC passports had begun
to enter Britain with the intent of permanent settlement.
The postcolonial Labour government in Britain was, however, anxious not
to “provoke accusations of racialism” by passing legislation of “doubtful mo-
rality” that was explicitly racially discriminatory and would render its own
citizens stateless. Between September and December 1967, home secretary
Roy Jenkins explored different possibilities for bringing an end to the im-
migration of Indians from Kenya without acquiescing to the opposition’s leg-
islative demands. He argued that the current “flood” was a finite problem,
limited to Kenya’s Indians, and he astutely pointed out that it was the threat
of British legislation that was in fact causing the exodus. Citing their “racial,
religious, linguistic, cultural and family links,” Jenkins turned to the Indian
government to facilitate the return of its diaspora. The Indian state, how-
ever, feared that an open-door policy regarding repatriation might result in
the demand of “five to ten million people” across the former British Empire
to return to their civilizational homeland. It refused to “pull British chest-
nuts out of the fire,” announcing that Britain must “shoulder its responsibili-
ties for her own citizens no matter to what colour or creed they belong.”55
In September 1967 alone, 2,600 Indians with CUKC passports arrived
in London, uncertain about their economic future in Kenya and worried
 Uhuru and Exodus 287

that Britain would close its doors to its nonwhite citizens. Although no con-
crete numbers were available at the time, the Commonwealth Office used
individual countrywide censes in Malaysia, Singapore, Jamaica, Cyprus, and
Trinidad to estimate that up to half a million postcolonial British citizens
of non-European origin could technically enter the United Kingdom with
the intent of permanent settlement. The possible arrival of more than 40,000
Indians from Kenya alone within just a few months spurred postcolonial
Britain to come to terms with the legacy of its multiracial and interconnected
global empire. On a visit to Kenya, in a miscalculated move to slow down
the exodus, Sandys publicly stated that “there would be no question what-
soever of the Asians in Kenya being allowed to go to the UK.” This created
even more panic among Indians in Nairobi who rushed to London while
they still could.56
In early 1923, in arguing against giving subimperialist Indians parity with
them, European settlers in Kenya had warned that their anxieties—which
at the time were dismissed by the Colonial Office as racist—would be un-
derstood in the metropole only when “the immigration of 165,000,000 British
Indians of the laborer, artisan and shop-keepers classes into Great Britain”
occurred, creating a multiracial society in England similar to that in Kenya
and “shak[ing] the people of the UK.”57 Four decades later this prophecy
came true. In a television broadcast, Powell announced that “Britain’s co-
lour problem, which has long been simmering below the surface, is now
the top domestic issue as a direct result of Asian immigration from
Kenya.” He later made a sensational speech in which he likened the Labour
government’s policy toward Commonwealth immigration to “watching a na-
tion busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He warned that
Britons would find themselves “strangers in their own country . . . As I look
ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like a Roman, I seem to see ‘the River
Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ” Sandys and Powell were joined by the
Home Office, which argued that continued “colored immigration” would lead
to “intolerable pressure” on social ser vices, specifically education and
housing.58 Camouflaged in the talk of the state’s welfare provisions was the
implicit recognition that British citizens of Indian origin from East Africa
were racially different from the majority of white Britons and therefore would
need “special,” extraordinary state ser vices because of that difference.
In December 1967, Roy Jenkins was replaced by James Callaghan as home
secretary at a time when, according to Callaghan, “everything conspired to
build an atmosphere of alarm, resentment and panic, both in Britain and in
288 Indians in Kenya

Kenya.” Press reports and the opposition both gave exaggerated accounts of
pressures on housing and education caused by these twice migrants, who
“congregated in areas” such as Southall, transforming them into “centers of
immigration.”59 With Kenya threatening to squeeze Indian traders out of
the country, India threatening to close its doors to British citizens of In-
dian origin, and Britain threatening to rescind the right of its non-white citi-
zens to enter their nation-state, those who could left Kenya and rushed into
Britain before the enactment of the legislation. In one month, approximately
10,000 Indians arrived in Britain, threatening to “throw out of balance” the
nation’s ability to socially and economically “absorb” and “assimilate” its citi-
zens “without undue friction.” 60 An exodus was clearly under way.
For Kenyatta, the voluntary emigration of Indians vindicated his majori-
tarian nationalist discourse and Africanization policies. He rebuffed pres-
sure from the British government to stem the emigration of Indians out of
Kenya, announcing that he would not “fall” on his knees and “beseech”
them to stay. The voluntary exodus in fact gave him the opportunity to place
responsibility on Indians—who “despised the poor wanachi” and their
“tattered clothes”—for the failure of uhuru to materialize into economic
progress for ordinary citizens. Such bwana mkubwa, he said—using a de-
rogatory Swahili term that meant “big man” and had been used in colonial
Kenya to describe loyalists, especially chiefs, who had supported the colo-
nial state and become rich—had no place in Kenya.61 Odinga had accused
Kenyatta of becoming a bwana mkubwa in postcolonial Kenya, and the
exodus allowed Kenyatta to deflect this criticism. It was not, however, the
rich Indian bwana mkubwa who was leaving Kenya. The majority of In-
dians who left during the exodus were artisans, clerks, small-scale shop-
keepers, and self-employed petty tradesmen. While 2,700 dukkawallahs lost
their licenses, those with capital to spare redirected their energies, under
Kenyatta’s auspices, to manufacturing—a sector that was left outside the
purview of the immigration and licensing bills. Indeed, Indian big business
continued to flourish in Kenya irrespective of the citizenship of the entre-
preneurs, as 79 percent of all manufacturing firms that employed more
than fifty people and that were established in Kenya in the 1960s were set
up by Indian capitalists. Instead it was low-ranking civil servants, espe-
cially those employed by the railways, and Nairobi-based bank clerks, ca-
shiers, tailors, carpenters, masons, and secretaries who had their licenses
canceled and employment permits rejected, thus making them illegal resi-
dents. Close to 98 percent of the skilled labor in Nairobi was Indian. Be-
 Uhuru and Exodus 289

tween 1960 and 1967 the number of Indian skilled workers dropped from
21,120 to 9,000, indicating that shopkeepers were not the only ones leaving
before their entry to Britain was restricted and they wound up without any
means of employment in Kenya.62
The political rhetoric of African majoritarianism had attacked the racial,
nonindigenous origins of Indians and their economic wealth resulting from
colonial privileges. Yet, unlike in Zanzibar and Uganda, where the state
oversaw anti-Indian pogroms, Kenyatta’s government did not force the em-
igration of all Indians. In fact, the ones leaving were not all shopkeepers or
those Indians who had consistently kept a political distance from Africans.
The majority of twice migrants were Punjabi skilled and semiskilled
workers. Ironically, they had unionized under Makhan Singh in the
1930s and succeeded in forming interracial alliances with African workers in
the late 1940s. The carefully formulated immigration and licensing bills im-
mediately affected this group of Indians, who were the petty bourgeoisie,
the ones whose jobs Kenyatta and Mboya hoped African workers could take
over. Class rather than race was an overwhelming determinant in the In-
dian exodus of 1967–1968, from the perspective of both the state and the
migrants although both espoused racially charged nationalist and diasporic
rhetoric.
It was under these circumstances that Callaghan drafted an amendment
to the Commonwealth Immigration Bill creating a category called “non-
belongers,” who were defined as U.K. citizens who had not been born in
the country and had no “positive connections” with it. Irrespective of the
authority that issued their passports, British citizens who were “non-
belongers” would not have the right to unrestricted entry to the United
Kingdom. Instead, they were given a “generous” quota of 1,500 entry per-
mits to be issued annually, and only those citizens who procured such a
permit could immigrate to Britain. In presenting this bill to the cabinet in
February 1968, Callaghan made three main arguments. First, despite the
absence of concrete numbers, he claimed that under the existing legislation,
up to 400,000 “non-belongers” could assert their citizenship rights to resi-
dence in Britain, of which 200,000 were Indians in East Africa. Second,
while admitting that the British government in 1963 had made a pledge to
take responsibility for its Indian citizens resident there, he announced that
“we could not now afford to honor them.” He justified breaking this pledge
by arguing that rather than depriving Indians of their citizenship, the post-
colonial British state was simply “controlling” the rate of immigration by
290 Indians in Kenya

making its citizens “form a queue for entering the country.” This queue, he
reasoned, was the only way to “foster good race relations,” because the un-
restricted entry of Indians from East Africa put “great pressures on the so-
cial ser vices,” which was not only creating a public outcry but also causing
the state to spend more money.63 The use of inflated numbers created just
the right amount of panic within the cabinet when it convened on February
22 to discuss the bill. Rather than decisively deny British citizens their resi-
dential rights, Callaghan offered the cabinet the ingenious solution of put-
ting its citizens in a waiting room, a move that could be justified on the
grounds of long-term harmonious race relations. With the alarming increase
in the number of Indians arriving from Kenya in February 1968, the pres-
sures on social ser vices and race relations seemed insurmountable to the
British public, the Conservative opposition, and the Labour government.
All argued that something needed to be done to control the flood of im-
migration resulting in a cross-party consensus. Although the Commonwealth
secretary, George Morgan Thompson, recorded his dissent on the proposed
act, which he saw as a “breach of faith” that created a “second-class” cit-
izen based on “racial discrimination,” the Commonwealth Immigration Bill
of 1968 was passed as emergency legislation and came into effect within a
week on March 1, 1968.64
As a counter to the moral turpitude of putting nonwhite citizens, “non-
belongers,” in a waiting room to enter their nation-state, Callaghan offered
another legislative bill. He proposed amendments to the existing Race Re-
lations Act that would make Britain a “multi-racial society” in which Com-
monwealth immigrants would be given “a fair deal not only in tangible
matters like jobs, housing and other social ser vices but, more tangibly,
against racial prejudice.” He deliberately linked the Commonwealth Im-
migration Act, which he personally viewed as a “distasteful necessity,” with
a new race relations policy. Significant structural changes suggested in the
amendment made the government responsible for immigrants during the
“settling-in” period immediately after their arrival, emphasizing a de-
centralized, local, community-based approach to issues of race relations
and integration. The racial particularities of Commonwealth immigrants
became the basis of the 1968 act that restricted the rights of nonbelongers
to enter Britain. At the same time, however, the state’s preoccupation with
cultural differences served as the catalyst for passing the 1968 Race Rela-
tions Act, which laid the ideological and institutional foundations of what
came to be known as multiculturalism. In supporting the bill, the deputy
 Uhuru and Exodus 291

leader of the Conservative Party, Reginald Maulding, proclaimed, “British

people have faced a problem which is quite unique.” Recognizing and me-
diating “difference” in the discourse and exercise of political rights guar-
anteed by the state was not, however, something new to Britain.65 Colonial
governance within the British Empire had been based on recognizing dif-
ference by identifying, categorizing, legitimizing, and reifying “differ-
ences” in colonial societies. In India the main contours of difference were
traced along religious and caste lines, while in Kenya colonial subjects were
separated along racial and tribal affiliations. It was this administrative
legacy of colonialism that became the foundation for postcolonial multicul-
turalism, as the British state recognized difference not to “flatten out” cul-
tural distinctions but to maintain them.66 This, then, became the funda-
mental definition and goal of multiracialism in Britain in the 1960s.

THE DUST SETTLES

Between July 1967 and March 1968, it appeared that close to a century after
dropping anchor across the Indian Ocean, Indians were being uprooted
from their territorial homeland, Kenya, abandoned by their civilizational
homeland, India, and stripped of their citizenship rights in a new national
homeland, Britain, that few of them had ever visited. The very same con-
vergence of transnational discourses on racial integration, national citizen-
ship, and colonial legacy that threatened to render them stateless, however,
served to stabilize the position of those who remained in Kenya and that of
the twice migrants who arrived in Britain.
Just as Britain was moving to restrict the influx of British Indian citizens
from Kenya with the Commonwealth Immigration Act, Kenya was begin-
ning to stanch their exodus. As K. S. N. Matiba, permanent secretary for
commerce and industry, candidly stated on February 16, 1968, the govern-
ment had not expected the panicked exodus following the passing of the
Immigration and Trade Licensing bills. It had merely wanted “the people
of Kenya to participate more fully in the economic activities of the country.”
Indians were singled out because “discontent was brewing” and “from a
political angle . . . no government could just sit and watch.” 67 The following
week Kenyatta’s government started giving public reassurances that there
would be no “wholesale application” of its trade legislation for at least two
years.68 Provincial commissioners reported that the flight of Indian traders,
especially in rural areas, had caused a complete standstill in the sale of
292 Indians in Kenya

certain goods, leaving cultivators with no place to sell produce and con-
sumers with nowhere to buy everyday foodstuffs and provisions. Despite the
rhetoric of replacement that had led up to the trade licensing legislation,
few African entrepreneurs had the capital or credit networks to purchase
shops and move into retail trade. Worried about the destabilization of the
economy, Kenyatta announced in an address to the National Assembly on
February 26, 1968, that his government would not “endanger the buoyant
state of the economy by forcing the pace of localization.” 69 Statesmen soon
began to scale back their anti-Indian rhetoric to halt the departure of Ke-
nya’s middle class, who were predominantly Indian.
The minister of commerce and industry and Vice President Moi were quick
to point out that the exodus had taken place before any licenses had in fact
been denied. They now emphasized the state’s intention to gradually im-
plement the trade legislation and minimize any disruption in business, an-
nouncing that “unless this change comes in an orderly manner . . . there may
be change for worse.” 70 Removing some of the ambiguity that had accom-
panied the legislative acts, Moi clarified that the immigration bill that can-
celed work permits would be implemented in a “phased” manner and would
apply only to certain kinds of jobs. Irrespective of citizenship, all work per-
mits and trade licenses would be issued for a period of five years to give
traders time to transfer their businesses successfully. Matiba further stated
that “skilled personnel” could be contracted by employers, including the gov-
ernment, for at least three years. Moreover, noncitizens were assured that
their work permits and trade licenses would be canceled only if unemployed
citizens could adequately replace noncitizens.71 Having never intended to
get rid of all its Indian petty capitalists, Kenyatta’s government now regained
control over the racial composition of the country’s economy. In April 1968,
when the Trade Licensing Bill was implemented, trade licenses were not
immediately withdrawn. Rather, the bill restricted the goods that nonciti-
zens could trade, thus giving Indians in small towns and rural areas the op-
portunity to diversify their stocks and ally with “front men”—African citi-
zens unconnected to their everyday transactions—to apply for trade
licenses.72
These reassurances and the implementation of Britain’s Immigration Act
brought an end to the exodus, as Indian emigration returned to its pre–
September 1967 rate. Once the dust settled, dukkawallahs who had not emi-
grated remained predominant in the retail and wholesale sector for the time
being, especially in the capital. By 1971, although the government had ac-
 Uhuru and Exodus 293

quired 262 shops vacated by Indians in Nairobi and Mombasa, only sixty-
three Africans had applied for licenses to run them, revealing the continuing
dependence of the national economy on Indian traders.73 Upcoming elec-
tions in November 1968 changed KANU’s discourse regarding Indians as
it began to search for funds for its election campaign. Bruce McKenzie, the
European minister for agriculture, summoned Indian community “leaders”
individually to his office, where the attorney general, Charles Njonjo, gave
them a “confidential message from President Kenyatta” that he was expecting
Indian residents of Kenya to make “generous donations” to his campaign.
Ironically, the majority of those approached were not Kenyan citizens.74 In-
deed, despite Callaghan’s fear that 200,000 Indians from Kenya would mi-
grate to Britain and Kenyatta’s proclamations that noncitizens should pack
up and leave, in 1969 there remained 127,301 Indians in Kenya, of whom
somewhere between 52,000 and 85,000 were not in fact citizens of the na-
tion.75 Two independent surveys taken in the immediate aftermath of the
exodus indicated that the majority of Indians considered Kenya their per-
manent home—their territorial homeland—and had no desire to emigrate
as long as they could carry on their trade. About 50 percent of respondents
envisioned living in Kenya for at least five years, while 22 percent saw them-
selves in Kenya for a longer period. The events of 1967–1968 had, however,
resulted in a sense of impermanence in the minds of those who remained
in Kenya, as only 9 percent of the respondents believed that they would live
in Kenya for the rest of their lives.76
Meanwhile, in July 1968, India agreed to issue long-term visas guaran-
teeing permanent settlement to Indians who were compelled to leave Kenya
for economic reasons and whose U.K. passports were endorsed by the British
High Commission in Nairobi, giving them the “unqualified right to entry”
into the United Kingdom.77 A year later the British government concluded
that it was possible to substantially increase the quota of entry permits for
East African Indians. In boarding one-way flights to Heathrow between Sep-
tember 1967 and February 1968, Indians were hedging their bets against
their future in Kenya and took a risk in heading to the metropole, some for
the very first time in their lives. The risk paid off. Initially, men who were
educated and had expertise in particular skills were turned away from jobs
for being “overqualified.” Their wives stepped in to become breadwinners,
bringing home a paycheck for the first time in their lives by working in fac-
tories and in clerical and secretarial positions. Having feared destitution in
Kenya, these twice migrants showed a readiness to take up work that did
294 Indians in Kenya

not necessarily match their previous experience and abilities. Within six
weeks of arriving, the majority of men found semiskilled jobs in the textile
industries, light industries, and factories, and employment in skilled work
as carpenters, masons, motor mechanics, plumbers, and light engineers. Soon
after consolidating their position, they took advantage of their fluency in
English, a legacy of their colonial education in Kenya, and gained employ-
ment commensurate with their abilities in managerial and entrepreneurial
positions. Having been “accustomed to urban life,” in Nairobi these twice
migrants “mixed easily” at work in Britain since working for “European[s]
was not something new for them.” Their children were admitted into
schools, needing no special language classes, and local schools reported that
they were “no burden whatsoever.”78 By 1972, between 50 and 90 percent
of Indian immigrants from Kenya had become homeowners in Britain, a
clear marker of their stable incomes and permanent residency in the
country. Local community relations councils in the main places where they
had settled—London, Wembley, Leicester, Ealing, and Southall— declared
their integration a success, as Indians from Kenya appeared to be a
model minority who had put very little pressure on social ser vices. As the
report of the Community Relations Commission put it, “The most telling
pointer to the ease with which they have settled is perhaps the lack of local
reactions to their arrival.” 79
From the perspective of the state and Indians from Kenya, Britain’s ex-
periment with multiracialism was a success in the early 1970s. Based on this
experience, on August 18, 1971, less than two weeks after Idi Amin an-
nounced his intension to expel Indians from Uganda, the British home sec-
retary publicized the Conservative government’s plan to welcome its In-
dian citizens from East Africa. As he put it, “One does not give a passport
to a country unless one envisages a right to come into it. . . . [T]he offer of
admission had been made to these people to set their fears to rest so that
they would know that they had someone looking after them.” 80 This was in
stark contrast to the Labour government’s official, public position in 1968.
The issues of citizenship, race, and immigration within both Kenya and
Britain were inextricably linked in 1967 and 1968 as a crisis emerged re-
garding the economic and residential rights of their shared South Asian mi-
nority. It is impossible to understand the Indian exodus of February 1968
without placing the debates over race, citizenship, and immigration in both
Kenya and Britain within the same historical framework. For both states,
the reality of governing postcolonial, multiracial nations presented itself in
 Uhuru and Exodus 295

racialized nationalist discourses. In Kenya, the rhetoric of Africanization jus-

tified the state-led redirection of Indians’ past and present economic advan-
tage, which had resulted in insurmountable racial and class boundaries. In
Britain, a racially defined section of its own citizenry was denied the right
to enter their own state in the interest of future race relations.
African majoritarianism in Kenya and British multiculturalism highlight
the importance of a diasporic perspective that underscores the intercon-
nected, transnational history of postcolonial subjectivity. Two seemingly dis-
tinct and contrary principles of governance—racial majoritarianism and
multiculturalism— emerged from the same historical conjuncture. In 1967
the civilizational affiliations of Indians routed through their Indian home-
land framed a racial discourse that aimed to maintain their economic invest-
ments rooted in East Africa. This together with Indian citizenship claims
negotiated across the temporal colonial/postcolonial threshold of the British
Empire chaffed against singular territorial and racial nationalist imagina-
tions in Kenya and Britain. Far from being an irrelevant minority sitting on
the margins of the nation, in refusing to deracialize their businesses and
voluntarily emigrating out of the country, Indians distanced themselves from
Kenya’s nationalist programs while exercising their British citizenship rights
to residence in the United Kingdom. In so doing, the Kenyan South Asian
diaspora shaped discussions of postcolonial nationhood in Kenya and Britain,
highlighting the predicament of singular citizenship in a multicultural re-
ality in nations with a transnational historical legacy.
 R
Epilogue

J O U R N E Y TO TH E W E S T

I N 2 0 0 2 Tara Arts, a theater company in England, staged Journey to the

West, a play about East African South Asians in Britain. Written as a trilogy
by Jatinder Verma, the story was developed over five years through “first-
hand research amongst East African communities living in England” and
was performed in nine different cities.1 Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations
take up three diasporic moments—Indians’ arrival in colonial Kenya, be-
coming twice migrants in the United Kingdom, and living in multicultural
Britain. Collectively, they emphasize the impermanence of Indians who went
from “India to Africa to England.” Much like this book, the play highlights
shifting but enduring territorial, racial, and civilizational diasporic affilia-
tions that connect each historical moment. Although Indians inhabited Kenya
territorially and politically for more than half a century, this history is left
largely unexplored but continuously evoked. The twice migrants in Britain
elide much of their sojourn in Africa. From their perspective, Kenya was
merely a “serai [resting place], a stop on the way as the caravan continues
on its journey.”
Genesis begins with an origin story of Indian emigration from India to
Kenya. A famine in Punjab becomes the trigger for Punjabi Sikhs wanting
to escape poverty to leave India as indentured laborers. A government re-
cruiter promises them five acres of land in Kenya to settle there permanently.
This first story in the trilogy centers around the building of the railways on
the “red earth” of Africa, the man-eating lions of Tsavo that were killed by
Sikh laborers, and big merchants such as Allidina Visram, whose pioneering

296
 Epilogue 297

example was followed by the Punjabi workers who set up agricultural set-
tlements at Kibos. European settlers and their monopoly over the highlands
get a passing mention in Genesis, which ends before the First World War
with the birth of a boy—the offspring of a Masai woman and a Sikh laborer.
After the death of the mother, the father names his son Kala Singha or “black
lion,” “borne on the waters between India and Africa,” as a eulogy. Five de-
cades pass before the second play, Exodus, picks up in 1967. The political
convulsions leading to nationhood in India and Kenya, the proximity and
distance of Indian and African politics, and the ruptures within the dias-
pora get no mention in the memories culled from East Africa’s South Asians
living in Britain in the twenty-first century. While the territorial and gen-
erational claims of Indians to Kenya are recalled in the form of the railways,
Nairobi bazaar, and religious shrines, Genesis focuses on the moment of
arrival, framed as “escape” from Indian poverty. In this narrative, the his-
torical origins of Indians in Kenya appear to be more significant than their
settlement there emphasizing the enduring importance of India as the
civilizational homeland of Indians a century later.
Exodus opens with a second origin tale. Manyoki, an African friend
of Kala Singha’s grandson Ranjit, announces, “Independence came four
years ago—but what did independent do for us Africans, eh? . . . We
don’t own shops like Muindi here. We don’t have office jobs like Muindi
here. This is independent Kenya, but the Muindi here live with India in
their hearts. . . . This is Kenya— our Kenya! The Mazunga [Europeans]
brought the Muindi [Indians] here long ago to build their railway. Presi-
dent Kenyatta won independence from the Mazunga four years ago—let
the Mazunga take their Muindi back with them to Britain.” The play
makes a brief mention of the confusion and fear caused by “Africanization”
as the great-grandchildren of the indentured laborers, all born in Kenya,
struggle with defining “home.” The refrains of the chorus are heard in the
background:

Home. Home. Home.

We’ve built our homes
On the reddest of earths
And red mists now rise around
Our veyldas [verandahs], anger dances in
The air and new words like fire flies
Leap across the sky!2
298 Indians in Kenya

Despite the evocation of territorial claims to their Kenyan homeland and

its red soil, what is central to the narrative in Exodus is not Indians’ depar-
ture from Kenya but their moment of arrival in Britain. The play follows its
protagonists as they struggle to assert their right to entry at airports, attend
schools where their English language skills set them apart from other im-
migrants, and find jobs in factories, hinting at their colonial privileges and
access in Kenya but never explaining it. In Britain they confront their East
African legacy in the process of distinguishing themselves from South Asians
who migrated there directly from the subcontinent. In the closing scene of
Exodus, Ranjit tells the Britons he meets “I’m not from India—I’m African.”3
Ranjit’s claim to being “African” is a narrative device that underscores the
murkiness of diasporic identity. Despite the allusions to racial assimilation
in the statement “I’m African,” in choosing Ranjit, the great-grandson of a
Masai woman, to deliver this dialogue, Exodus recognizes the fluidity and
limitations of race consciousness. However, it leaves unexplored Indian ra-
cial thought and practices in Kenya. While Ranjit proclaims that he is “Af-
rican,” this identity was itself shifting, signifying difference differently
across time and space. Indeed, what constituted being “Indian” and “African”
in diasporic consciousness changed temporally and geographically as dem-
onstrated in this book.
Revelations, the third and final play in the trilogy, ends with a critique
of British multiculturalism. Referring to the “schizophrenia of immigrants,”
it highlights the changing civilizational, religious, territorial, generational,
and national affiliations and languages of belonging of Britain’s South Asians
from East Africa. The chorus calls into question the assumed singularity of
diasporic identity thrust upon them in the name of multiculturalism:

Into this multi-culti age

is born a multi-culti Kam.
Part Hindu, part Muslim,
the mingled son of Sita and Liaquat [immigrants from Kenya]
is part Indian, part Pakistani
Part African, part English
a hyphenated Brit
for a hyphenated age!
. . . Jihad or Crusade—
choose the side
there’s no other choice
 Epilogue 299

compatriots tell me
from all sides.4

Revelations invokes contemporary concerns about religious extremism, with

its reference to “Jihad or Crusades,” and the challenges of multiculturalism
for South Asians living in Britain. However, the chorus reaches back in time
to the deep history and legacy of Indians’ sojourn in Kenya—the origins of
the “mingled” son’s hyphenated civilizational, territorial, racial, and national
identity in the preset-day “hyphenated age.” Choosing the Swahili phrase
roho tabu (wandering spirit) to describe the diaspora’s journey to the West,
in which Kenya was merely a serai, Revelations frames diasporic conscious-
ness as untethered in their places of arrival: “Roho tabu. Wandering soul.
They lifted their feet out of their homes, and now always roam.” Perhaps
this explains the absence of the history of Indian settlement in Kenya de-
spite the evocation of Indians’ generational, territorial, and racial affiliation
with its East African homeland throughout the trilogy.

Wandering souls roam simultaneously between many histories, laying down

discursive and territorial anchors, albeit temporarily. The shifting diasporic
discourses that Journey to the West characterizes as roho tabu were in fact
grounded in time and space for Indians in Kenya at particular historical
conjunctures as Indians in Kenya has argued. It is these moments that
create hyphenated, diasporic consciousness.
The diasporic rearticulation of the homeland’s cultural norms has been
the predominant concern of diaspora studies. This is evident in writer M. G.
Vassanji’s autobiographical travelogue A Place Within: Rediscovering India.
Vassanji is a Gujarati Khoja whose great-grandfather migrated to Nairobi
in 1885. He lived in Dar es Salaam before moving to Canada. Although Vas-
sanji was twice removed from India, on his first visit there in 1993 he found
the streets of Delhi similar to those of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam: “so fa-
miliar as to take the breath away.” He recalled “a certain ease, a sense of
homecoming, quite another kind of nostalgia” than he felt for Tanzania, his
birthplace. During each subsequent visit he “sought” India “more, as intensely
as ever.” This intensity, he believed, “seemed to do something for the soul.”5
The enduring affiliation of Indians with their civilizational homeland evi-
dent in Vassanji’s “deep communion” with India draws attention to the In-
dian moorings of the wandering souls of the diaspora. This has been explored
in scholarship on the Indian diaspora.
300 Indians in Kenya

The centrality of immigrants’ cultural construction of “Indianness” in their

places of arrival has been the preoccupation of these works, leading to two
historiographical assumptions about diasporic consciousness.6 First, the en-
dogamous social patterns of settlement have been used to explain the insu-
larity of Indians who resist cultural assimilation. Second, this distance has
positioned diasporas as marginal and liminal in the nations they reside in,
resulting in a teleological, analytical bind that creates a binary between a
singular homeland—their place of departure—and their host land—their
place of arrival—in which immigrants are permanent outsiders. This framing
freezes the diaspora’s relationship with the former as a cultural and ahis-
torical imagined relationship, while rendering it politically marginal in the
latter. The absence of the story of diasporic settlement in Kenya in Journey
to the West reflects this bind, obscuring the multiple political claims, racial
discourses, and languages of belonging of Indians in East Africa. While India
is “a place within” for Vassanji, the majority of his works are located in East
Africa, sometimes routed through India. Most of his protagonists are twice
migrants who literally and imaginatively inhabit their East African home-
land in his novels. The diaspora’s return to this homeland in Kenya and Tan-
zania, physically or through memory, is central to Vassanji’s narratives.7
Without eliding the importance of his Indian civilizational homeland, his
books serve as a reminder of the historical and historiographical importance
of Indian settlement and politics in Kenya for both Indians who remain in
East Africa, and those who journeyed to the West.
In an essay written in 1994, Frederick Cooper made a call to historians
to rethink the territorial scope of colonial African history to include a wide
range of political responses that did not fit into narrowly defined geograph-
ical or ideological boundaries such as the nation-state and anticolonial na-
tionalism. He highlighted the need to “analyze the culture of politics and
the politics of culture by constantly shifting the scale of analysis from the
most spatially specific . . . to the most spatially diffuse . . . and examine the
originality and power of political thought by what was appropriated and
transformed from its entire range of influences and connections.” Indians
in Kenya considers the politics of diaspora from this perspective to reveal
the connected history of India and Kenya. In doing so the book shows that
diasporic politics emerged out of the entanglement of Indians’ changing af-
filiations with their civilizational homeland, India, in making claims in their
territorial homeland, Kenya. By examining diasporic consciousness as teth-
ered to two homelands Indians in Kenya liberates diaspora studies from the
 Epilogue 301

aforementioned analytical bind and opens up a path to recovering its po-

litical history, which was simultaneously “spatially specific” and “spatially
diffuse.” It shows how deeply contested these politics were among Indians
and Africans. Indeed, Indian politics in Kenya was articulated through
shifting discourses of racial identity that were constituted in particular so-
cioeconomic moments and interracial spaces, emphasizing the historical con-
tingency of diasporic consciousness, which simultaneously created moments
of interracial solidarity and discourses of racial difference across the Indian
Ocean.
South Asians continue to be a large and visible diasporic presence in former
colonies and the metropole long after the sun finally set on the British Em-
pire. The enduring legacy of colonialism that inextricably links these post-
colonial states through their shared South Asian minority is a reminder of
the historical past of present-day multicultural nations. According to the 2009
census, approximately 71,891 Indians currently live in Kenya, of whom 46,782
are citizens, reflecting the continuing reluctance of Indians to take up
Kenyan citizenship.8 They remain prominent in the commercial sector,
running shops, businesses, and large-scale manufacturing industries. The
Westgate Mall siege in September 2013 made visible their presence in Nai-
robi, as a third of the shops there were owned by Indians, who were at the
forefront of rescue efforts as armed Indians—members of well-equipped pri-
vate security groups, with walkie-talkies, handguns, and protective gear—
joined African civilians in bringing the dead and injured out of the mall as
described in the Introduction.9 In that moment of national crisis, “Kenyans”
came together, irrespective of their color or citizenship. The origin of these
vigilante groups, however, highlights unresolved racial and class friction, and
a more complicated specter of everyday violence located in the past and
present. The conspicuous wealth of Indians, especially in Nairobi, has been
the target of carjacking, petty thefts, and organized burglaries. In moments
of political instability and uncertainty, especially during an attempted coup
in 1982 and in the immediate aftermath of the 2007 elections, Indian busi-
nesses have been on the receiving end of organized violence and sponta-
neous looting across the country. This has resulted in community policing
to protect Indian homes and workplaces. Although during the Westgate Mall
siege this security expertise served to bring “Kenyans” together, this vigi-
lantism has fed a racializing discourse about violence, victimhood, and na-
tionhood that continues to resurrect racial boundaries between Indians and
Africans in Kenya today. At the same time, Britain, with its large immigrant
302 Indians in Kenya

population, also faces the challenge of reconciling multiple territorial, ra-

cial, civilizational, and nationalist affinities that are often poised against one
another. Present-day concerns in the United Kingdom about the success and
failure of multiculturalism overwhelmingly focus on diasporic religious dif-
ferences and transnational affiliations with their singular homelands in South
Asia: Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. This approach obscures the compara-
tive and connected history of Indian civilizational, racial, and political dis-
courses among those who left the shores of India more than a century ago
to settle in East Africa where they negotiated similar moments of diasporic
distance and belonging. Indians in Kenya makes visible this entanglement.
Although its story is located spatially and temporally in colonial Kenya, it is
a local history that resonates contemporarily and globally.
 Notes

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

EAC East African Chronicle

EAS East African Standard
IOR India Office Library Collections, London
KNA Kenya National Archives, Nairobi
NAI National Archives of India, Delhi
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi
RHL Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at
Rhodes House, Oxford
SOASL School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London
TNA The National Archives, Public Records Office, London
UNL University of Nairobi Library, Nairobi

I N T RO D U C T I O N

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “What Is Asia to Me? Looking East from Africa,”

World Literature Today 86, no. 4 (July/August 2012): 14; Shiva Naipaul,
North of South: An African Journey (London: Penguin Books, 1978),
109–111. Emphasis in original.
2. Abdul Haji NTV interview, http://ntv.nation.co.ke/news2/topheadlines
/son-of-former-minister-abdul-haji-recounts-the-westgate-attack. See also
http://ntv.nation.co.ke/news2/topheadlines/westgate-attack-asian
-communities-band-together-to-help-each-other; http://news.national
geographic.com/news/2013/13/131004-nairobi-westgate-mall-kenyan-indians

303
304 Notes to Pages 2–4

-gandhi-kikuyus-world; www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-24331999; www

.thehindu.com/news/international/world/indian-diaspora-caught-in-kenya
-mall-carnage/article5168317.ece.
3. Kenya Population Census, 1962, vol. IV, Non-African Population (Nairobi:
Statistics Division, Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, 1966);
Kenya Population Census, 1969 (Nairobi: Statistical Division, Minister of
Finance and Economic Planning, 1970); Education, Health and Overseas A,
September 1925, 1–92, NAI: India Office report by R. B. Ewbank on
Indians and the economic development of East Africa, February 1925.
4. See, for example, Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story
of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Daniel
Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil
War and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and
the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Bruce Berman and
John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London:
James Currey, 1992); Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial
Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990);
Gijsbert Oonk, Settled Strangers: Asian Business Elites in East Africa,
1800–2000 (London: SAGE Publications, 2013); David Himbara, Kenyan
Capitalists, the State and Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,
1994); Paul Vandenberg, The Asian-African Divide: Analyzing
Institutions and Accumulation in Kenya (London: Routledge, 2006);
Savita Nair, “Moving Life Histories: Gujarat, East Africa, and the Indian
Diaspora, 1800–2000,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001;
John Irving Zarwan, “Indian Businessmen in Kenya during the Twentieth
Century: A Case Study,” PhD diss., Yale University, ProQuest, UMI
Dissertations Publishing, 1977, 7727839. Robert G. Gregory, Quest for
Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900–1967 (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1993) and Dana A. Seidenberg, Uhuru and Kenyan Indians: The
Role of a Minority Community in Kenyan Politics, 1939–1963 (New Delhi:
Vikas, 1983) are among the few published studies of Indian politics in Kenya.
5. See, for example, Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial
Africa,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Fredrick
Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in
a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of
Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tony
Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender,
Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Champaign:
 Notes to Pages 4–6 305

University of Illinois Press, 2009); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its

Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the
Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge
of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
6. For details see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of
Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Hansib, 1974); Marina
Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius 1834–1874
(London: Oxford University Press, 1995); Madhavi Kale, Fragments of
Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor in the British
Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); John
Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial
Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Gaiutra
Bahdur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014); Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi
and His Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011); Ramachandra
Guha, Gandhi before India (New York: Knopf, 2014).
7. See Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and
the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013); Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean
Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Robert
Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, East Africa and the Middle East
1858–1947 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Nile Green, Bombay
Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sugata Bose, A Hundred
Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pamela Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr,
and Michael Pearson, eds., Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian
Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010); Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic
Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism
for the Global South-Literary and Cultural Perspective,” Social
Dynamics 33, no. 2 (2007): 3–32; Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press:
Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013).
8. Susan Bayly, “Imagining Greater India: French and Indian Versions of
Colonialism in the Indic Mode,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004):
703–744; Bose, Hundred Horizons, 31; Guha, Gandhi. Other works that
look at the extraterritorial scope of Indian anticolonialism include Maia
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Chartered Global
Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011); Nico Slate, Colored
306 Notes to Pages 7–13

Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States

and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Mrinalini
Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
9. Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the
Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 8.
10. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 2005), 109.
11. Report by His Majesty’s Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of
Uganda, 1901, in G. H. Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents,
1884–1923 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978), 320.
12. An Inquiry into Indian Education in East Africa (Nairobi: Government
Printing Office, 1948).
13. Kenyanization of Personnel in the Private Sector (Nairobi: Government
Printing Office, 1967).
14. Harry A. Frederick Currie, General Manager, East African Railways,
evidence presented to Sanderson Committee, April 1909, Report of the
Committee on Emigration from India to Crown Colonies and
Protectorates, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of
His Majesty, June 1910 (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1910) (henceforth
Sanderson Commmittee), Part II; John Kirk evidence, May 1909,
Sanderson Committee, Part II; Cynthia Salvadori and Judy Aldrick, eds.,
Two Indian Travellers: East Africa 1902–1905 (Mombasa: Friends of Fort
Jesus, 1997), 134–138. There are very few archival records of Indian and
African marriages in Kenya during this time. This remains an
underresearched topic in South Asian and Kenyan historiography.
15. Isabel Hofmeyr, “Africa as a Fault Line in the Indian Ocean,” and Thomas
Blom Hansen, “The Unwieldy Fetish: Desire and Disavowal of
Indianness in South Africa,” all in Gupta, Hofmeyr, and Pearson, eds.,
Eyes across the Water; Hofmeyr, “The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian
Nationalism: Reporting the Diaspora in the Modern Review,” South
African Historical Journal 57 (2007): 60–81; Hansen, Melancholia of
Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also Lelyveld, Great Soul,
chapter 3; Nile Green, “Africa in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian
Settlement in East Africa,” Journal of African History 53, no. 2 (July
2012): 131–150.
16. Antoinette Burton, Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of
Postcolonial Citation (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2012); Dilip
Menon, “Bandung Is Back: Afro-Asian Affinities,” and Antoinette Burton
response, Radical History Review 119 (Spring 2014): 241–245; Felicitas
 Notes to Pages 14–22 307

Becker and Joel Cabrita, “Introduction: Performing Citizenship and

Enacting Exclusion on Africa’s Indian Ocean Littoral,” The Journal of
African History 55. No.2 (2014): 161–171. See also Vijay Prakash, The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The
New Press, 2008); Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire:
The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2010); Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism. Jon Soske’s work
is among the few that look at the range of African and Indian political
engagement in a similar context in South Africa. See Soske, “ ‘Wash Me
Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu
Natal,” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2009.
17. James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 6, 58, 82–83.
18. Jon Soske, “Navigating Difference: Gender, Miscegenation and Indian
Domestic Space in Twentieth- Century Durban,” in Gupta, Hofmeyr, and
Pearson, eds., Eyes across the Water, 207; Brennan, Taifa, 7; Oonk,
Settled Strangers, 2.
19. See Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The
Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950,” American
Historical Review 116, no. 4 (2011): 987–1013, for an expanded discussion
of how my work on diasporic politics engages with diaspora studies.
20. Ken Walibora Waliaula, “The Asian ‘Other,’ ” Frontline 29, no. 16 (August
11–24, 2012).
21. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Asia in My Life,” Pambazuka News, May 17, 2012.

1. F RO M T H E A M E R I C A O F T H E H I N D U
TO W H I T E M A N ’ S C O U N T RY

1. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, An Appeal on

Behalf of Indians in East Africa (Bombay: A. M. Jeevanjee & Co., 1912);
John Kirk, evidence, June 25, 1909, Report on the Committee on
Emigration from India to Crown Colonies and Protectorates, Presented
to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, June 1910
(henceforth Sanderson Committee), (London: Eyre and Spottiswode,
1910), Part II.
2. Historians have debated the impact of European imperialism in this
realm. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese
Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1990); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy
and Civilization in the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rajat Kanta Ray, “Asian Capital
308 Notes to Pages 23–27

in the Age of European Expansion: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914,”

Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (1995): 449–554; Michael Pearson, The
Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003); Sugata Bose, A Hundred
Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pedro Machado, “Clothes of a New
Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of Exchange and Cloth Zones of
Contact in Africa and India,” in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds.,
How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles,
1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
3. Royal Charter, September 3, 1888, and Uganda Railway Committee
Report, February 22, 1904, in G. H. Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 1884–1923 (Nairobi: East African Publishing
House, 1978), 22–28, 409–410; Zarina Patel, Challenge to Colonialism:
The Struggle of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee for Equal Rights in Kenya
(Nairobi: Publishers Distribution Ser vices, 1997), chapter 2.
4. Education, Health and Overseas A, September 1925, 1–92, NAI: India
Office report by R. B. Ewbank on Indians and the economic development
of East Africa, February 1925; Report on the Census of Non-Natives,
24th April, 1921 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1921). Sugata Bose uses
the term “intermediary capitalists” to describe merchants operating in
the interregional realm of the Indian Ocean. For details see Bose,
Hundred Horizons.
5. Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of Uganda, Report, 1901, in
Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 320.
6. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
7. Imperial British East Africa Company Founder’s Agreement, April 18,
1888, Royal Charter, September 3, 1888, and Report of Court of
Directors to Founders of the Company, June 1, 1889, in Mungeam, ed.,
Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 19–28, 33–39.
8. M. G. Visram, Allidina Visram: The Trail Blazer (Mombasa, Kenya:
M. G. Visram, 1990), 15; Allidina Visram Obituary, July 15, 1916, The
Leader of British East Africa, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical
Documents, 445–446; Cynthia Salvadori and Judy Aldrick, eds., Two
Indian Travellers: East Africa 1902–1905 (Mombasa: Friends of Fort
Jesus, 1997), 102; Ewbank Report; David Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists,
the State and Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 39;
Letters from Superintendent and Accountant of IBEAC dated May 10,
1892, and September 23, 1892, cited in Patel, Challenge to Colonialism,
11; Kirk evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II.
9. Uganda Railway Committee Report, February 22, 1904, in Mungeam,
ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 408–409; Frederick J. D.
 Notes to Pages 27–34 309

Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Uganda
and Nyasaland (London: W. Blackwell & Sons, 1893), 1: 382–490.
10. Lugard calculated this based on an official survey. Rise of Our East
African Empire, 471–472.
11. Kirk evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II. See also Caroline Elkins,
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New
York: Henry Holt, 2005), 2–3.
12. For details, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of
Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Hansib, 1974); Marina
Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius 1834–1874
(London: Oxford University Press, 1995). The term “coolie” has become a
pejorative term that is sometimes used as a racial slur. I have used this
term descriptively to separate indentured laborers from other kinds of
Indian workers and laborers employed in British East Africa.
13. Uganda Railway Committee Report, February 22, 1904, “Report of the
Activities of A. M. Jeevanjee,” The Leader of British East Africa, May 7,
1910, all in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 409–
410, 440–441; Kirk evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II; Sanderson
Committee, Part I; Ewbank Report; Patel, Challenge to Colonialism,
chapter 2; Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, 39.
14. See Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism
(London: Penguin, 1971), 319; John Henry Patterson, The Man-Eaters of
Tsavo and Other African Adventures (London: Macmillan, 1908), 20.
15. Miller, The Lunatic Express, 286.
16. CO/533/97, TNA: Colonial Office to London All-India Muslim League,
January 1911.
17. Lugard, Rise of Our East African Empire, 397, 489. In the eighteenth
century, the Bengal Army of the British East India Company recruited
heavily from agriculturalists in the region, and these soldiers returned to
peasant life when their units were periodically disbanded.
18. Author’s correspondence with Eric Wainaina, June 2014; Eric Wainaina,
“Subhaa,” Twende Twende, 2006. For details on the harambee
controversy see Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa,
India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013), 214–215.
19. Eliot-Lansdowne correspondence, June 18, August 27, 1901, January 5
and 21, 1902, and Special Commissioner to Uganda Report, all in
Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 86, 89, 320, 322,
455–456. Emphasis added.
20. Edward Buck instructions, and J. Montgomery, Commissioner for Land,
Minute on Indian Immigration, May 8, 1907, Sanderson Committee, Part
310 Notes to Pages 34–38

III; Lansdowne to Donald Stewart, July 8, 1904, in Mungeam, ed.,

Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 96.
21. Lugard, Rise of Our East African Empire, 397; Special Commissioner
Uganda Report, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents,
320–321. See also John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau:
Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce
Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and
Africa (London: James Currey, 1992).
22. Report of the Commissioner on the East Africa Protectorate, April 18, 1903,
Committee of Europeans to Eliot regarding January 4, 1902, meeting, and
Colonists’ Association pamphlet, 1908, all in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 93–94, 456–457, 470–441; CO/533/97, TNA:
Colonial Office to London All-India Muslim League, January 1911.
23. Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of State, August 23, 1905, and
Land Committee Report, 1904, all in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 329–333, 457; Harry H. Johnston, Capt. Ewart
Scott Grogan, and Lord Hindlip evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II.
24. Land Committee Report, 1904, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 329–333.
25. For details, see Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” especially
383–384.
26. Land Committee Report, 1904, Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of
State, August 23, 1905, all in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical
Documents, 329–333, 457.
27. Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of State, August 23, 1905, in
Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 457–463.
28. See Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean
Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007),
especially the introduction and chapter 1.
29. Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of State, August 23, 1905, in
Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 457.
30. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
31. Hardinge’s Administrative Proposals, July 6, 1895, in Mungeam, ed.,
Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 69–76; Hardinge’s Report to
Secretary of State, 1898, cited in Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 171;
“Indians in East Africa: Amazing Action of the Colonial Office, Suicidal
Policy,” Daily Chronicle, September 1, 1910; Salvadori and Aldrick, eds.,
Two Indian Travellers, 24, 62.
32. I am grateful to James H. Sweet for alerting me to the significance of this.
33. Howley and Ainsworth’s note on Colonists’ Association, October 1905,
and Elgin to Sadler, July 17, 1906, and March 19, 1908, all in Mungeam,
 Notes to Pages 39–43 311

ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 464–465, 333–334, emphasis

added; W. McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within: A Short Political History
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), 301.
34. Lugard Papers, Box 76, File 1, RHL: Montgomery to Sadler, 1907.
Emphasis added.
35. Lugard Papers, Box 76, File 1, RHL: Sadler to Secretary of State, January
17, 1908; D. Waller, Note to Acting Commissioner, Nairobi, February 8,
1907, and J. Montgomery, Minute on Indian Immigration, May 8, 1907,
Sanderson Committee, Part I; CO/533/219, TNA: cited in “Audi Alteram
Partem Indian?” (pamphlet).
36. Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1908), 33–34; Allidina Visram Obituary, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 445–446.
37. Minutes of Legislative Council meeting, August 16, 1907, in Mungeam,
ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 98–99; Capt. Ewart Scott
Grogan evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II; Sadler-Marques of
Crewe correspondence May 19, 1908, and August 27, 1908, Sanderson
Committee, Part III.
38. Sadler-Marques of Crewe correspondence June 4, 1908, August 27, 1908,
and April 12, 1908, Sanderson Committee, Part III.
39. For details see John Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and
Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991); Brij V. Lal, “Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations,” in
Jayasankar Krishnamurty, ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival,
Work and the State (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 162–179.
40. Girourad to Crewe, May 26, 1910, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 111–113.
41. See Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of the Mau Mau,” 319–320; John Iliffe,
A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), chapter 10.
42. Ewbank Report; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
43. Salvadori and Aldrick, eds., Two Indian Travellers, 102.
44. CO/533/294, TNA, cited in Zarina Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai: The
Stormy Petrel (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2010), 16–17; Ewbank Report;
Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; Girourad to Crewe, May 26,
1910, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 111–113.
45. Kirk and Grogan evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II.
46. “Report on the Activities of A. M. Jeevanjee” and “Philip Drunk and
Philip Sober,” The Leader of British East Africa, May 7, September 17,
1910, all in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 441;
Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 66–67, 237.
312 Notes to Pages 44–52

47. CO/533/79, TNA: Under-Secretary of State for Colonies to London

All-India Muslim League, March 30, 1911; Asian Records, Microfilm 1,
KNA: London All-India Muslim League to Under-Secretary of State for
Colonies, October 13, 1910; L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Daily
Chronicle, September 1, 1910; Johnston evidence, Sanderson Committee,
Part II.
48. Johnston evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II; Churchill, My African
Journey, 33–34.
49. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Articles in Daily Chronicle, Wednesday
Review, and Manchester Guardian, September 1, 2, 12, 21 and October
18, 1910. For a discussion of imperial citizenship in India, see Sukanya
Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian
Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
50. For details see Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His
Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011); Kelly, Politics of Virtue;
Lal, “Kunti’s Cry”; Kale, Fragments of Empire; Sumit Sarkar, The
Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1973).
51. Kenya, Census Office, East Africa Protectorate: Census Return, 1911
(Nairobi: Government Press, 1911). In 1911, the Indian population in
Kenya consisted of approximately 6,000 Muslims, 3,000 Hindus and
Sikhs, and 1,000 Christians.
52. L/E/7/162, I&O 814/1922, IOR: London All-India Muslim League to
Under-Secretary of State for Colonies, October 13, 1910.
53. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Daily Chronicle, September 1, 1910.
54. CO 533/79, TNA: Colonial Office to London All-India Muslim League,
January 1911.
55. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Jeevanjee, Appeal on Behalf of Indians
in East Africa.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian Association to District
Commissioner, Nairobi, July 31, 1919.
59. These are the titles and descriptions used by authors of a handful of
Gujarati and Urdu travelogues from the early nineteenth century. For
details see Salvadori and Aldrick, eds., Two Indian Travellers; Nile
Green, “Africa in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian Settlement in
East Africa,” Journal of African History 53, no. 2 (July 2012): 131–150;
Desai, Commerce with Universe, especially chapter 4.
60. Salvadori and Aldrick, eds., Two Indian Travellers, glossary (especially
jungli and washenzi), 237, 238.
 Notes to Pages 52–61 313

61. Ibid., 132.

62. Ibid., 37.
63. Ibid, 133. See also Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Madras: Ganesh,
1909).
64. Author’s interview with Mahmudah Basheer-ud-Deen, Nairobi, June
2006.
65. L/PO/1/1 (A), IOR: T. M. Jeevanjee presidential address, March 7, 1914,
and The Indian Voice of East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, June 23,
1911; Mss Brit. Emp. 365, Fabian Colonial Bureau Papers, Box 117, File
2, RHL: K. D. Travadi note on Common Roll, n.d., probably 1959–1960.
66. L/PO/1/1 (A), IOR: T. M. Jeevanjee presidential address, March 7, 1914.
67. CO/533/136, TNA: Governor to Secretary of State, May 1, 1914.
68. CO/533/146, TNA: Colonial Office-India Office correspondence, July 29,
1914.
69. Professor W. J. Simpson, Report on Sanitary Matters in the East Africa
Protectorate, Uganda and Zanzibar, 1914, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select
Historical Documents, 481–483; “Nairobi’s Plague Spot,” EAS, January
10, 1915.
70. The Indian Voice of East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, May 24 and July
19, 1911; CO/533/219, TNA: Jeevanjee, Shams-ud-Deen, Suleman Virji,
and C. J. Amin to Secretary of State for India, Montagu and Colonial
Secretary, Milner, August 15, 1919.
71. Crown Lands Ordinance, 1915, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical
Documents, 324–325; Sadler evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II.
72. CO/533/219, TNA: Note on exclusion of Indians from Mombasa 1918,
Indian Association to Secretary of State, August 29, 1918, and Montagu to
Milner, August 15, 1919; Currie, Sadler, and Montgomery evidence,
Sanderson Committee, Part II.
73. Grogan evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II; Economic Commission
Report, 1919, cited in C. F. Andrews, The Indian Question in East Africa
(Kenya Colony: Swift Press, 1921).
74. Economic Commission Report, 1919, cited in Andrews, The Indian
Question in East Africa; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921;
Ewbank Report; EAS, July 25, 1914.
75. Salvadori and Aldrick, eds., Two Indian Travellers, 165–167.
76. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Mangal Das to Governor Bowring,
March 22, 1922.
77. EAS, July 25, 1914.
78. Ibid.; CO/533/136, 157, TNA: Governor to Secretary of State, May 1,
1914, December 22, 1915, and General Manager Uganda Railways to
Chief Secretary, Nairobi, November 9, 1915.
314 Notes to Pages 61–67

79. For details see Jane Singh, “The Ghadar Party: Political Expression in an
Immigrant Community,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East 2, no. 1 (1982): 29–38; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia:
How the Ghadar Movement Chartered Global Radicalism and
Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011).
80. CO/537/773, TNA: “Sedition among Indians in British East Africa,” note
by J. W. Nelson, Personal Assistant to the Director of Criminal
Intelligence, Simla, May 4, 1916.
81. CO/533/219, 146, TNA: Indian Association Mombasa and Nairobi
petition, August 29, 1918, and Colonial Office note, August 1914; Cynthia
Salvadori, We Came in Dhows (Nairobi: Paperchase Kenya, 1996), I:98,
99, II:36–37; Robert G. Gregory, Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in
East Africa, 1900–1967 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), 35, 40;
Patel, Stormy Petrel, 6; Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian
Association Resolution, February 1917 and Chief Secretary, Kenya, note,
August 25, 1919.
82. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Das to Bowring, March 22, 1919;
CO/533/219, TNA: Montagu to Milner, January 25, 1919.
83. The Indian Voice of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, March 8,
1911; CO/533/231, TNA: Congress presidential address, November 15, 1919.
84. CO/533/217, TNA: Hussenbhai Virji, President Indian Association
Nairobi to Secretary of State, November 17, 1918, and Abul Rasul
Allidina to Bowring, December 6, 1918; Department of Commerce and
Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: London All-India Muslim
League to Colonial Office, January 14, 1919. For details on the
colonization scheme, see Metcalf, Imperial Connections, chapter 6.
85. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian Association-Shams-ud-Deen
correspondence, January 29, 1920, and May 1920, Indian Association to
District Commissioner, Nairobi, July 31, 1919.
86. CO/533/219, TNA: Bowring to Milner, January 6, 1919, J. L. Montgomery
note, December 3, 1918, W. C. Hunter and P. H. Clarke speeches in
Legislative Council, December 9, 1918, and Resolutions of the
Convention of Association Meeting, December 18, 1918; Department of
Commerce and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI:
Montgomery to Colonial Office, December 3, 1918; Mss Afr s.584
Convention of Associations Papers, Box 1, RHL: Resolutions passed
1920–21, June 1921.
87. Johnston evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II; CO/533/219, TNA:
Bowring to Milner, January 6, 1919, and Tanga Elders to District
Commissioner, Tanga, December 17, 1918; Department of Commerce
 Notes to Pages 67–73 315

and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: Montgomery to

Colonial Office, December 3, 1918.
88. Department of Commerce and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17,
NAI: Legislative Council debate, December 9, 1918.
89. Montgomery and Lord Hindlip evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II.
90. Hofmeyr, “Africa as a Fault Line in the Indian Ocean,” Mark Frost, “In
Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey across the
Indian Ocean from Singapore to South Africa: 1870–1920,” all in
Pamela Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson, eds., Eyes across
the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010),
88; Hofmeyr, “The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian Nationalism: Reporting
the Diaspora in the Modern Review,” South African Historical Journal
57 (2007): 60–81, especially 75–78; Green, “Africa in Indian Ink”;
Lelyveld, Great Soul.
91. Quoted in Hofmeyr, “Idea of ‘Africa,’ ” 76.
92. L/E/7/162, I&O 814/1922, IOR: London All-India Muslim League to
Under-Secretary of State for Colonies, October 13, 1910; The Indian Voice
of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, March 1, 1911; Asian Records,
Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian Association, February 1918; EAS, July 25, 1914.
93. The Indian Voice of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, February
15 and July 26, 1911; CO/533/231, TNA: Congress presidential address,
November 15, 1919.
94. EAC, August 21, 1920; CO/533/230, TNA: Bowring to Milner, February
28, 1920; L/E/7/1328, E&O 336/1924, IOR: Milner to Governor, May 21,
1920. Emphasis added.

2 . “ C I V I L I Z AT I O N ” I N K E N YA

1. For details see Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia:
History, Culture, Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 1998),
110–114.
2. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 24th April, 1921 (Nairobi:
Government Printer, 1921); Education, Health and Overseas A,
September 1925, 1–92, NAI: India Office report by R. B. Ewbank on
Indians and the economic development of East Africa, February 1925.
3. Ewbank Report; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; Kenya
Census Office, Report on the Non-Native Census Enumeration Made in
the Colony and the Protectorate of Kenya on the Night of 6th March,
1931 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1932); Education, Health and Lands,
Overseas A, July 1924, Nos. 1–65, NAI: Private secretary note to Viceroy
of India, December 25, 1923; CO/533/242, TNA: Bombay Chambers of
316 Notes to Pages 73–80

Commerce to Government of Bombay Revenue Department, June 5,

1919, and Indian Merchants Chamber and Bureau to Government of
Bombay Revenue Department, July 16, 1919.
4. Education, Health and Lands, Overseas A, September 1925, Nos. 1–92,
NAI: Corbett Report, August 22, 1924; CO/533/242, TNA: Note by
Major H. B. McKerrow, Deputy Controller, Textile Supplies, Indian
Munitions Board, October 18, 1918.
5. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
6. International Missionary Council Africa (henceforth IMCA) Papers,
Box 241, File E, SOASL: John W. Archer, The Graphic, May 19, 1923;
Ewbank Report; Corbett Report.
7. Harry Thuku to Acting Colonial Secretary, Colony and Protectorate of
Kenya, July 19, 1921, in Harry Thuku, An Autobiography (Nairobi:
Oxford University Press, 1970), especially 17–24; IMCA Papers,
Boxes 236, File D, 241 and 247, SOASL: Hooper to Andrews, n.d.,
probably 1922, Memorandum of Grievances, June 24, 1921; CO/533/280,
TNA: Koinange wa Mbiu, headman Kiambu, statement regarding
February 13, 1922, meeting, recorded by Magistrate Juxon Barton,
February 17, 1922.
8. Ewbank Report; Corbett Report; Hindlip evidence, Report of the
Committee on Emigration from India to Crown Colonies and
Protectorates, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of
His Majesty, June 1910 (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1910)
(henceforth Sanderson Commmittee), Part II.
9. Ewbank Report; Corbett Report; Hindlip evidence; Sanderson
Committee, Part II.
10. CO/533/255 TNA: Jeevanjee to Lloyd George, December 11, 1920.
11. CO/533/259, TNA: Northey– Secretary of State correspondence, May 7,
11, and 14, 1921.
12. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Jeevanjee to Milner, September 3, 1920.
13. See photographs of Desai in Zarina Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai: The
Stormy Petrel (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2010).
14. Thuku, Autobiography, 17–19; Zarina Patel, Challenge to Colonialism: The
Struggle of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee for Equal Rights in Kenya (Nairobi:
Publishers Distribution Ser vices, 1997), 20; EAC, October 30, 1920.
15. EAC, August 21 and October 2 and 23, 1920.
16. L/PO/1/1(A), IOR: Indian Overseas Association to India Office, April 1,
1921.
17. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Das to Northey, March 22, 1919.
18. CO/533/242, TNA: Press clippings, July-August 1920.
19. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; L/PO/1/6 and L/E/7/1295,
I&O 191/1923 IOR: Aga Khan to Lord Peel, May 3, 1923, and
 Notes to Pages 80–85 317

Memorandum by Kenya Indian Delegation to Secretary of State for India,

May 22, 1923.
20. CO/533/242, TNA: India Office to Colonial Office, August 17, 1920;
Department of Commerce and Emigration, February 1921, Nos. 4–36,
NAI: Montagu to Chelmsford, October 21, 1920; L/E/7/1174, File I&O
11/1921, IOR: Memo by Chelmsford, November 1, 1920.
21. CO/533/259, TNA: Northey to Churchill, May 14, 1921.
22. Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Associations Papers, RHL: Memo on the
claim to equality of status in Kenya, n.d.; IMCA Papers, Box 241, SOASL:
Memorandum on the Case against the Claims of Indians in Kenya,
Nairobi, September 1921; EAC, August 6, 1921.
23. Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1908), 33–34; CO/533/270, TNA: Minutes of meeting between Churchill
and Indian delegates, August 9, 1921, and G. L. Corbett to Churchill,
August 4, 1921; Eur Mss D545/20, Sir John Walton Papers, IOR: John
Walton, The Kenya Question, 1923.
24. L/PO/1/1(A), IOR: Minutes of meeting between Colonial Office, India
Office, and Kenya delegates, April 24, 1923.
25. CO/533/231, TNA: Note on Congress meeting, November 15 and 16,
1919; Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian Association statement,
January 24, 1920.
26. Manilal Desai in EAC, August 27, 1921, cited in The Indian Problem in
Kenya: Being a Selection of Speeches, Articles, and Correspondence
Appearing in the East African Press, April– October 1921 (Nairobi: n.p.,
1922).
27. Ibid.; IMCA Papers, Box 241, SOASL: Memorandum on the Case against
the Claims of Indians in Kenya, Nairobi, September 1921, quoted in
Indians Abroad, Bulletin No. 5, May 1923.
28. IMCA Papers, Box 241, SOASL: Memorandum on the Case against the
Claims of Indians in Kenya.
29. EAC, August 14, November 13 and 27, December 11, 1920, and January
29, February 12, May 7, 1921.
30. IMCA Papers, Box 241, SOASL: Memorandum on the Case against the
Claims of Indians in Kenya; Department of Commerce and Emigration
A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: Acting Governor C. C. Bowring to
Colonial Office, January 30, 1919.
31. Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Associations Papers, RHL: “The
Thermopylae of Africa: Kenya Colony’s responsibility in the conflict of
the primary races: The Asian Problem,” n.d., no author, probably early
1923.
32. CO/533/219, TNA: Congress to Governor General of India, April 3, 1919;
Department of Commerce and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17,
318 Notes to Pages 86–91

NAI: Robertson report on the proposed settlement of Indian

agriculturalists in Tanganyika, August 4, 1920, and C. F. Andrews, “A
Memo on the Lowlands Proposal,” Imperial Indian Citizenship
Association, Bombay, May 21, 1925.
33. EAC, September 4, 1920; C. F. Andrews, “From the Indian Standpoint,”
March 10, 1923, quoted in Indians Abroad, Bulletin No. 5, May 1923.
34. EAC, October 30, December 11, 1920, and January 29, 1921.
35. Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of
Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1968), 2: 71–80; W. McGregor Ross, Kenya
from within: A Short Political History (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1927), chapter 12. See also Wambui Mwangi, “Of Coins and Conquest:
The East African Currency Board, the Rupee Crisis, and the Problem of
Colonialism in the East African Protectorate,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 43, no. 4 (2001): 763–787.
36. Ross, Kenya from within, chapter 12.
37. CO 533/230 and 242, TNA: Northey to Milner, February 28, 1920, India
Office to Colonial Office, March 12, 1920, and Jeevanjee and Sitaram
Achariar to Milner, August 14, 1920; EAC, August 14, 1920, and April 1,
1921.
38. CO/533/264, TNA: Northey to Churchill, October 1, 1921.
39. CO/533/242, TNA: India Office to Colonial Office, February 26, 1920.
40. EAC, September 18, 1920, and June 25, 1921.
41. CO/533/264, TNA: Northey to Churchill, October 1, 1921.
42. EAC, August 14, October 30, 1920, and February 5, February 19, April
30, May 28, June 4, 1921.
43. EAC, April 23, June 4, 1921; The Leader of British East Africa, June 24,
1921, in G. H. Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents,
1884–1923 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978); Report of
meeting held in Eldoret, September 2, 1921, in The Indian Problem in
Kenya: Being a Selection of Speeches, Articles, and Correspondence
Appearing in the East African Press, April– October 1921 (Nairobi:
East Africa Standard, 1922); Report on the Census of Non-Natives,
1921.
44. Thuku, Autobiography, 22, 81; EAC, June 3, 1921; IMCA Papers,
Box 236, File D, SOASL: Memorandum of Grievances, June 24, 1921.
See also Makhan Singh, A History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement to
1952 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), chapters 2 and 3.
45. For details see Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of the “Mau
Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1967), chapter 2;
Anthony Clayton and Donald C. Savage, Government and Labour in
Kenya 1895–1963 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), chapter 4.
 Notes to Pages 92–96 319

46. IMCA Papers, Box 236, File D, SOASL: Memorandum of Grievances,

June 24, 1921; EAC, July 23, 1921; CO/533/264, TNA: Governor to
Churchill, October 1, 1921; Thuku, Autobiography, Document V,
Resolutions of the East African Association, 82. See also John Lonsdale,
“The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in
Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale,
Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey,
1992), especially 361–362.
47. CO/533/263 TNA: Northey to Churchill, August 16, 1921.
48. CO/533/280, TNA: Statements to Magistrate Juxon Barton by Warohuja
wa Kungu, sub-headman, Ruiru district, regarding January 26, 1922,
meeting, Reverend Father Cayzac, Mangu Mission, Mahoho wa
Kuthechu, headman, Kibichichi, Cannon Harry Leakey, and Richard E.
Dent, February 16, 1922, March 7 and 10, 1922, statements to Magistrate
Fred O. Gamble by Reverend Paulo wa Mbatia, Chief Jacob wa Makeri,
Kikuyu headman, Waweru wa Mahoi, and Joshua Karuri, March 6, 1922,
and G. V. Maxwell to Northey, March 9 and 13, 1922; EAC reports,
August to December 1921.
49. IMCA Papers, Box 236, File D, SOASL: Memorandum of Grievances,
June 24, 1921; Harry Thuku to Acting Colonial Secretary, Colony and
Protectorate of Kenya, July 19, 1921; Thuku, Autobiography, 17–24; EAC,
June 25, July 30, and December 17, 1921.
50. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
51. Thuku, Autobiography, 29; IMCA Papers, Box 326, File D, SOASL:
Letter from member of East African Association to Canon Burns,
March 14, 1923.
52. Thuku, Autobiography, Document V, Resolutions of the East African
Association, 25–26, 82; IMCA Papers, Box 236, File D, SOASL: H. D.
Hooper, “Development of Political Self- Consciousness in the Kikuyu
Native,” n.d., probably February or March 1922; EAC, June 11, July 6 and
October 29, 1921.
53. CO/533/280 and 264, TNA: Koinange wa Mbiu, headman, Kiambu,
statement regarding February 13, 1922, meeting to Barton, February 17,
1922, and Northey to Churchill, October 1, 1921.
54. Thuku, Autobiography, 17–24; EAC, August 6, 1921.
55. IMCA Papers, Box 241, File A, and Box 326, File D, SOASL: Hooper
“Memorandum on the Case against Indians” and “Development of
Political Self- Consciousness in the Kikuyu Native,” and Hooper to
Oldham, January 24, 1922; CO/533/264, TNA: Northey to Churchill,
October 1, 1921.
56. For details, see Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of Mau Mau.”
320 Notes to Pages 96–101

57. CO/533/280 and 262, TNA: Statements to Barton on February 15 and 17,
1922, by Waweru wa Mahoi, headman, Kiambu District, Warohuja wa
Kungu, sub-headman, Ruiru District, Koinange wa Mbiyu, headman,
Kiambu regarding January 13 and 26, 1922, and February 13 meetings,
minutes of meeting of Akikuyu Association at Thika, July 25, 1921.
58. CO/533/262, TNA: Minutes of meeting of Akikuyu Association at Thika,
July 25, 1921; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921.
59. CO/533/262 and 264, TNA: Resolution passed at mass meeting held in
Nakuru on July 24, 1921; Hooper to Oldham, February 24, 1922; EAC,
July 24 and 25, 1921; Thuku, Autobiography, 26.
60. EAC, June 11, 1921; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; IMCA
Papers, Box 236, File D, SOASL: Letter from Gideon Gatere, Tumutumu,
March 17, 1923, and Kikuyu chiefs to Coryndon, March 17, 1923; Mss Afr
633, Coryndon Papers, File 1, RHL: Coryndon note on meeting with
Kinyanjui, March 22, 1923; CO/533/447/3, TNA: J. B. Pandya
memorandum, 1934.
61. CO/533/262, TNA: Resolution passed at mass meeting held in Nakuru on
July 24, 1921, EAC, August 6, 1921.
62. IMCA Papers, Box 241, File C, SOASL: Indian vs. Native Claims,
Supplement to Sekanyolya, July 1, 1921, Nairobi.
63. CO/533/262, TNA: Meeting resolutions chaired by Harry Thuku on the
Kiambu Road sports ground, Nairobi, July 10, 1921; IMCA Papers,
Box 236, File D, SOASL: “An Unsolicited Letter,” EAC, July 16, 1921.
64. EAC, August 21, July 16, 1921; Thuku, Autobiography, 25–26.
65. CO/533/264, and 262, TNA: Northey- Churchill correspondence, August
16 and October 21, 1921, Indian Association resolution, Nairobi, July 10,
1921; EAC, August 6, 1921.
66. East Africa: Papers Relating to Native Disturbances in Kenya,
March 1922 (London: HMSO, 1922): J. C. Bentley, Acting Commissioner
Kenya Police, to Colonial Secretary, March 16, 1922, and Northey to
Churchill, April 11, 1922. For details see Audrey Wipper, “Kikuyu
Women and the Harry Thuku Disturbances: Some Uniformities of
Female Militancy,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
59, 3 (1989): 300–337.
67. East Africa: Northey to Churchill, July 16, 1922, and J. Latham, Major,
3rd King’s African Rifles, “Diary of Events during Civil Disturbance
March 14–15, 1922”; CO/533/276, TNA: Maxwell to Northey, March 11,
1922.
68. Thuku-Desai correspondence, March-May 1922 in Thuku,
Autobiography, 38, 42, 53, 91–92, and Documents X-a, b, c; EAC,
January 29, 1922. See also Keith Kyle, “Gandhi, Harry Thuku, and Early
 Notes to Pages 101–106 321

Kenyan Nationalism,” Transition 27 (1996): 16–22; Michael Twaddle,

“Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa,” History in
Africa 24 (1997): 309–336.
69. “Harry Thuku of Kenya,” Young India, December 5, 1924.
70. IMCA Papers, Box 236, File D, Box 241, and Box 247, SOASL: Hooper to
Oldham, March 4, 1922, Hooper to Andrews, n.d., and Hooper to
Maclennan, March 11, 1923; CO/533/280, TNA: Father Cayzac to
Barton, March 10, 1922, and Hooper to Arthur, July 10, 1923.
71. Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Association Papers, Box 1, RHL: Churchill’s
speech at the East Africa dinner, January 27, 1922, emphasis added;
L/E/7/1213, I&O 701/1921, IOR: Churchill to Northey, August 26,
1921.
72. Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai, 142.
73. L/E/7/1174, I&O 11/1921, IOR: East Africa Indian deputation to
Churchill, February 9, 1922; Mss Afr s.2304, C. Kenneth Archer Papers,
Box 2, File 2, RHL: Convention of Associations statement, November 23,
1921; CO/533/291, TNA: Delamere to Churchill, February 20, 1922.
74. L/E/7/1268, I&O 1276, IOR: Wood-Winterton Agreement, July 14, 1922,
and Viceroy note, August 31, 1922.
75. L/E/7/1268, I&O 1276, IOR: Coryndon to Churchill, September 21,
1922; Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Associations Papers, RHL: Memo on
the claim to equality, n.d., probably 1922.
76. L/E/7/1295, I&O 191/1923, IOR: The European and African Traders
Association, May 25, 1923; Mss Afr s.2304, C. Kenneth Archer Papers,
Box 2, File 2, and Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, Box 5, File 2, RHL:
Minutes of Conventions of Associations Meeting, November 14, 1921, and
Nyanza Trading Company to Coryndon, January 5, 1924; IMCA Papers,
Box 214, SOASL: “Kenya,” Indians Abroad bulletin, no. 5, May 1923.
77. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; L/E/7/1329, E&O 377/1924,
IOR: India Office Report, January 1926.
78. Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Associations Papers, RHL: “The
Thermopylae of Africa,” n.d., no author, probably ca. early 1923;
L/E/7/1295, I&O 191/1923, IOR: Convention of Association meeting
resolutions, January 25, 1923.
79. Northey was sacked because he was unable to either resolve the Indian
question or put right the colony’s precarious finances. For details see
Robert M. Maxon, Struggle for Kenya: The Loss and Reassertion of
Imperial Initiative, 1912–1923 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1993), chapter 6.
80. Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, File 5, RHL: Coryndon to Duke of
Devonshire, January 11, 15, and 23, 1923.
322 Notes to Pages 106–111

81. Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, File 5, RHL: Coryndon to Duke of
Devonshire, February 1, 3, and 19, 1923, note on Convention of
Associations meeting, February 26, 1923.
82. L/E/7/1295, I&O 191/1923, and L/PO/1/6 IOR: Shams-ud-Deen to Polak,
January 21 and 25, 1923, and minutes of meeting, May 4, 1923, Desai,
Jeevanjee, Virjee, B. S. Varma, Yusuf Ali, A. K. Jeevanjee, and Tayab Ali,
to Stanley Baldwin, July 18, 1923, and Secretary of State for India to
Viceroy, July 13, 1923.
83. L/E/7/1264, File 867/1922, IOR: Parliamentary paper draft by Duke of
Devonshire, July 20, 1923.
84. L/E/7/1295 I&O 191/1923 and L/PO/1/6, IOR: Minutes of meeting, May
4, 1923; Education, Health and Lands, Overseas A, July 1924, Nos. 1–65,
NAI: Andrews to Ewbank, July 28, 1923, Congress to India Office, July
31, 1923, Government of India Resolution, August 18, 1923, and Viceroy
to Secretary of State, July 28, 1923.
85. L/E/7/1264, File 867/1922, IOR: Parliamentary paper draft by Duke of
Devonshire, July 20, 1923.
86. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya, 145;
CO/533/380/5, TNA: Note on training African artisans, PWD circular,
April 5, 1928; Ewbank Report.
87. CO/533/380/5, TNA: Note on training African artisans, PWD circular,
April 5, 1928; Ewbank report.
88. Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, Box 5, File 2, RHL: Association of
Chambers of Commerce of Eastern Africa, Nairobi to East African
Governor’s Conference, April 1932. See also E. A. Brett, Colonialism and
Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change
1919–1938 (New York: NOK, 1973), 146.
89. CO/533/447/3, TNA: Pandya memo, 1934. See also Lonsdale, “Moral
Economy of Mau Mau,” 355–362.
90. Memorandum on Native Policy in East Africa (London: HMSO, 1930).
91. Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, Box 5, File 2, RHL: Association of
Chambers of Commerce of East Africa, memorandum, April 1932, and
Department of Agriculture, Nairobi, note, May 28, 1924; Report on the
Non-Native Census, 1931.
92. L/E/7/1328, E&O 336/1924, and L/P&J/8/246 108/19B, IOR:
Immigration Regulation and Employment Ordinance Bill, November
1923, Governor to Secretary of State, May 18, 1935; Education, Health
and Lands, Overseas A, July 1924, Nos. 1–65, NAI: Private Secretary to
Viceroy, December 25, 1923; CO/533/447/3, TNA: Colonial Secretary to
Government of India, July 17, 1934.
 Notes to Pages 112–117 323

93. CO/822/55/10, TNA: Memorandum of European Farmers’ Association,

December 28, 1932.
94. CO/822/55/10 and 533/242, TNA: Memorandum by Mombasa Chambers
of Commerce, December 28, 1932; Note by Major H. B. McKerrow,
Deputy Controller, Textile Supplies, Indian Munitions Board, October
18, 1918; Education, Health and Lands, Overseas A, July 1924, Nos.
1–65, NAI: Report by Commerce Department for Secretary of State for
India, November 21, 1923.
95. L/E/7/1925, I&O 191/1923, 1329, E&O 377/1924 and 1328, E&O
336/1924, IOR: Congress to Colonial Office November 1923, Ewbank
Report; IMCA Papers, Boxes 241 and 247, SOASL: Hooper to
Maclennan, March 11, 1923, John Archer, The Graphic, May 19, 1923,
and C. F. Andrews, The Indian Question in East Africa (Nairobi: Swift
Press, 1921), 54–90.
96. CO/533/447/3, TNA: Pandya memo, 1934; K. P. S. Menon, Report on
Marketing Legislation in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya (Delhi:
Government of India Press, 1934).
97. CO/533/425/14, TNA: J. B. Pandya Presidential Address, July 9, 1932, and
FICCI memorandum; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921;
Report on the Non-Native Census, 1931.
98. L/P&J/8/245, 108/19A, IOR: Secretary of State to Indian members of
Legislative Council, February 14, 1934; CO/533/438/10, and 447/3, TNA:
FICCI memorandum, 1934, February 27, 1933, Trade Licensing
Ordinance, December 6, 1933, Acting Governor to Secretary of State,
November 17, 1933.
99. L/P&J/8/246, 108/19B, IOR: Governor of Kenya to Secretary of State for
Colonies, May 14 and 18, 1935, and Pandya to Chief Native
Commissioner, March 14, 1935. See also Michael Cowen and Scott
MacWilliam, Indigenous Capital in Kenya: The “Indian” Dimension of
Debate (Helsinki: Institute of Development Studies, University of
Helsinki, 1996); David Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, the State and
Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), chapters 2 and 3;
Frank Furedi, “The Development of Anti-Asian Opinion among Africans
in Nakuru District Kenya,” African Affairs 73, no. 292 (1974): 350.
100. Andrews, Indian Question in East Africa, 54–90.
101. CO/533/262 TNA: Northey to Churchill, July 24, 1921.
102. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “What Is Asia to Me? Looking East from Africa,”
World Literature Today 86, no. 4 (July/August 2012): 15.
103. Mss Afr s.633, Coryndon Papers, File 311, RHL: Letter to editor from a
Muganda of Mengo, Sekanyolya, March 1924.
324 Notes to Pages 118–125

3 . P O L I T I C A L H O M E L A N D S AC RO S S T H E I N D I A N O C E A N

1. For details see Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya:
The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990); Bruce
Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and
Africa (London: James Currey, 1992).
2. Kenya Census Office, Report on the Non-Native Census Enumeration
Made in the Colony and the Protectorate of Kenya on the Night of 6th
March, 1931 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1932); Report on the Census
of the Non-Native Population of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya
Taken on the Night of 25th February, 1948 (Nairobi: Government
Printer, 1953).
3. Report on the Non-Native Census, 1931; Report on the Census of the
Non-Native Population, 1948. In 1931, of the 41,423 Indians living in
Kenya, only 13,897 were born in the colony. The remaining 27,526 were
born outside, primarily in India.
4. See, for example, Sunil Amrith, “Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of
Bengal,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (June 2009): 547–572;
Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean
Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
5. L/E/7/1329, E&O File 466/24, IOR: Congress resolutions, 1930;
CO/533/376/2, TNA: Governor to Secretary of State, January 10, 1928.
6. U. K. Oza, The Rift in the Empire’s Lute: Being a History of the Indian
Struggle in Kenya from 1900–1930 (Bombay: Advocate of India Press,
1931), 1, 2. Emphasis added.
7. Ibid., 1–4, 101.
8. Ibid., 102, 121–122.
9. Sarojini Naidu, “Address to East African Congress,” in Speeches and
Writings of Sarojini Naidu (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1925), 392–402.
10. Oza, Rift in the Empire’s Lute, 124–130. It is worth noting that for Oza,
African self-determination was “a very remote contingency.”
11. Ibid., i, ii, 34–35.
12. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Governor’s Office, 1928–42, KNA:
Report of meeting, December 18, 1927.
13. Oza, Rift in the Empire’s Lute, ii, 1, 2. For a firsthand account of the
importance of this event in Gandhi’s life, see M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha
in South Africa (Ahmadabad: Navajivan, 1950).
14. Oza, Rift in the Empire’s Lute, 17, 35, 126–128. Emphasis added.
15. Oza found employment as an insurance agent in Kenya and
subsequently became the editor of English-language Indian newspapers
published in East Africa. He was one of six Indians selected to give
 Notes to Pages 126–129 325

evidence to the Colonial Office to examine the land question in Kenya

in 1932–1933, where he condemned the existing land policy of
alienating the highlands to Europeans and restricting Africans to
reserves. For details, see Robert R. Gregory, South Asians in East
Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890–1980 (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1993), 101, 434–435.
16. L/E/7/1497, E&O File 1453 1(a)/1927, IOR: Congress presidential
address, December 25, 1927; Colony and Protectorate of Kenya,
Governor’s Office, KNA: Confidential report of the Commissioner of
Police on Indian meeting in Nairobi, February 5, 1928.
17. L/E/7/1497, E&O File 1453 1(a)/1927, IOR: Congress presidential
address, December 25, 1927; L/E/7/1329, E&O File 466/24 IOR:
Congress resolution, June 1930. See also MAK/A-3 correspondence,
fols. 161–315, UNL: Kenya Daily Mail, March 29, 1938.
18. L/E/7/1328, E&O 336/1924, IOR: “Memo on proposed formation of an
Indian reserve in Lowlands in Kenya,” April 27, 1925, Coryndon to
Secretary of State, March 29, 1924; Department of Commerce and
Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: C. F. Andrews, “A Memo on
the Lowlands Proposal,” Imperial Indian Citizenship Association,
Bombay, May 21, 1925.
19. Education, Health and Overseas A, September 1925, 1–92, NAI: India
Office report by R. B. Ewbank on Indians and the economic development
of East Africa, February 1925; Report on the Non-Native Census, 1931.
20. MAK/A/2, fols. 130–261, UNL: Makhan Singh to Kenya India
Conference, 1935.
21. MAK B/1/1, fols. 1–147, UNL: Note on meeting, Nairobi, December 16,
1934. See also Makhan Singh, A History of Kenya’s Trade Union
Movement to 1952 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969),
chapter 6, and Anthony Clayton and Donald C. Savage, Government
and Labour in Kenya 1895–1963 (London: Frank Cass, 1974),
chapters 5 and 6.
22. Makhan Singh was arrested and detained on the grounds of being an
“undesirable person” in May 1950 and was released from detention in
October 1961. MAK B/2/6, UNL: various; author interview with Hindpal
Singh, son of Makhan Singh, Nairobi, July 2007.
23. MAK/A/2, fols. 130–261, UNL: Makhan Singh to Kenya India
Conference, 1935, and Trade Union Bulletin, 1935.
24. Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 53, 59; MAK B/1/3,
fols. 1–172, B/1/1 fols. 148–290 and A/3, fols. 1–160, UNL: Singh to Chief
Secretary, Nairobi, December 14, 1938, and Labour Trade Union
handbills, various.
326 Notes to Pages 129–133

25. MAK B/1/2, fols. 1–271, B /1/3, fols. 1–172 UNL: Handbill dated July 18,
1937, District Commissioner, Mombasa, to Provincial Commissioner
Coast, January 10, 1939, and Singh to Chief Secretary, Nairobi,
December 14, 1938.
26. MAK A/2, fols. 130–261, B/1/2, fols. 1–271 and B/1/1, fols. 148–290, UNL:
Sheth Abdul Hussein Kaderbhoy, presidential address, Kenya Indian
Conference, Nairobi, November 2, 1935, Labour Trade Union memos and
handbills, 1935–1938; CO/533/490/4, TNA: Congress resolutions, 1938;
Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 55, 66, 61.
27. MAK A/6, fols. 1–132, UNL: Singh evidence to Commission of Enquiry,
October 4, 1939. See also Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront:
Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), chapter 3; Singh, History
of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, chapters 6 and 7; Zarina Patel,
Unquiet: The Life and Times of Makhan Singh (Nairobi: Zand Graphics,
2006), 81.
28. For details see John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau:
Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce
Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and
Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), especially 316; J. Murray, “The
Church Missionary Society and the ‘Female Circumcision’ Issue in
Kenya, 1919–1932,” Journal of Religion in Africa 8, no. 2 (1976):
92–104.
29. This was the beginning of what historians refer to as the “cultural
nationalism” of Kenya’s “nationalist” political organizations. See also
Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” 348, 365; Jomo Kenyatta,
Facing Mount Kenya (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), chapter 6.
30. Quoted in Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 35, 77.
31. CO/822/1222 and 533/502/4, TNA: Inquiry into Origins of the Mau Mau,
“Land Commission Report, 1939,” Confidential dispatch from Governor
of Kenya to Secretary of State for Colonies, April 6, 1939; Singh, History
of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 35, 77.
32. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour, 220–221.
33. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948; MAK A/6,
fols. 1–132, UNL: Evidence to Commission of Enquiry, 1939; “Annual
Report of 1937,” Native Affairs Department, quoted in Singh, History of
Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 64–65.
34. Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 78.
35. CO/533/507/2, TNA: Labour Department to Chief Secretary, Nairobi,
August 9, 1939. See also Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour in
Kenya, chapter 6; Cooper, On the African Waterfront, 45–50. Cooper
 Notes to Pages 133–138 327

concludes that the organizational origins of the Mombasa strike are

unknown.
36. CO/533/507/2, TNA: Letter to Chief Secretary, Nairobi, August 9, 1939.
The colonial state’s desire to place blame on the Kikuyu rather than
acknowledge the protest of 2,000 Kamba and members of other ethnic
groups who participated in the strike resulted from the colonial discourse
on Kamba loyalty, which administrators emphasized in contrast to Kikuyu
“agitators.” For details see Myles Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya:
Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially 128–132.
37. MAK B/1/3, fols. 1–172, UNL: Handbills, various.
38. Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 82.
39. MAK A/6, fols. 1–132, UNL: Evidence to Commission of Enquiry, 1939;
EAS, October 9, 1939.
40. In his work on African and Indian relations in Dar es Salaam, James
Brennan has argued that the mistreatment of African servants in Indian
households, where they were made to use separate utensils, contributed
to the anti-Indian racial discourse in postwar Tanganyika. See Brennan,
Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2012), 75, 76.
41. Patel, Unquiet, 81.
42. MAK A/3 fols. 1–61–315 and A/7/1947 UNL: Singh-Kenyatta
correspondence, August 19–26, 1939, and Singh to Personal Secretary to
Jawaharlal Nehru, September 3, 1947; CO/537/3646, TNA: Colony and
Protectorate of Kenya Political Summary, September– October 1948;
Patel, Unquiet, 105–106; Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour
in Kenya, 235.
43. Annual Report of 1937, Native Affairs Department, quoted in Singh,
History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 64–65; CO/533/502/4, TNA:
Indians and the Kenyan Highlands, 1939.
44. Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 77; Patel, Unquiet, 83.
For details on Dass’s involvement see DS/MKS/10B/15/1, KNA:
Superintendent CID to District Commissioner Machakos August 1, 16,
and 24, 1939, cited in Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire, 131, footnote 114.
45. For details see K. Lal, ed., The Trial of Balwant Rai and Others
(Leicester: Baleaga, 1984).
46. CO/533/502/4, TNA: Indians and the Kenyan Highlands, 1939.
47. For details see John Lonsdale, “KAU’s Cultures: Imaginations of
Community and Constructions of Leadership in Kenya after the Second
World War,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2000):
107–124; Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” 426, 427.
328 Notes to Pages 138–144

48. Mss Brit. Emp. 365, Fabian Colonial Bureau (henceforth FCB) Papers,
Box 117, File 2, RHL: Congress Resolutions, October 1945.
49. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Gichuru speech at Congress meeting,
October 1945.
50. CO/537/5935, TNA: Intelligence summary, June 1950. See also Lonsdale,
“KAU’s Cultures.”
51. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya, 276–277, 326.
52. Ibid.; Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948.
53. For details, see Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” 354–357, and
Lonsdale, “KAU’s Cultures.”
54. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Congress Standing Committee
meeting minutes, August 5, 1951.
55. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Governor to Secretary of State, February
28, 1946; CO/537/5762, TNA: Shahane to MEA, July 6, 1949.
56. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, 11, KNA: A. H. Mohammed speech,
Congress meeting, September 6, 1946, and KAU to Congress, August 12,
1948; CO/822/125–4, TNA: Congress meeting report; S. G. Amin,
speech, September 1946, cited in J. M. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black
Country: A Peep into Kenya’s Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings
Publications, 1981), 101.
57. MAK A/71947, fols. 1–154, UNL: Koinange and Mbotela speeches at
Congress meetings, 1947; Baraza, August 9, 1947.
58. CO/822/125–4, TNA: Congress presidential address, October 17, 1945;
L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: Intelligence summary, September 29,
1948; Robert G. Gregory, Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East
Africa, 1900–1967 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), 75–79.
59. CO/822/125–4, TNA: Congress to KAU, 23 January 1947; MAK A/9, fols.
117–260, UNL: Report of Kenya Youth Conference, December 25–26,
1947.
60. MAK A/9, fols. 117–260, UNL: Shah and Ahmed opening address to the
Kenya Youth Conference, December 1947. Emphasis added.
61. Gregory, Quest for Equality, chapter 8; AII/1–96/51, NAI: Biographical
notes on important personalities in East and Central Africa; Cynthia
Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 2 (Nairobi: Paperchase Kenya Ltd.,
1996), 89.
62. CO/533/412/3, TNA: Minutes of evidence, Professor Leakey to the Joint
Parliamentary Committee on Closer Union, 1931; Gregory, Quest for
Equality, 172. For details on Achariar see Gregory, Quest for Equality,
169–180.
63. CO/537/4659, TNA: Extract from Kenya Press Commentary Summary,
and letter from Attorney General Kenya to Colonial Office, September 7,
 Notes to Pages 144–146 329

1949; L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, October

1947. For a detailed history of the Indian press in Kenya see Bodil Folke
Frederiksen, “Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya:
African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connection,” Africa:
Journal of the International African Institute 81, no. 1 (2011): 155–172.
64. CO/537/4659, TNA: Extract from Kenya Press Commentary Summary
Articles in Daily Chronicle, October 27 and November 19, 1947.
65. L/P&J/12/663, IOR: Intelligence summary, February 1947.
66. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, November 1945
and April 1946; Gregory, Quest for Equality, 172.
67. CO/537/3589, TNA: Articles in Daily Chronicle, July 31 and November 7,
1947, Mitchell– Secretary of State correspondence, May-June 1948, and
memorandum by Foster Sutton, member for Law and Order, April 22,
1948.
68. CO/537/3589, TNA: Mitchell– Secretary of State correspondence,
May–June 1948; L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C1, IOR: Intelligence summary,
April 1946.
69. CO 533/502/4 and 537/5920, TNA: Land Commission Report, 1939, and
Kenya Africa Command Fortnightly Newsletter, May 1, 1950. For
further details on the Aga Khan and his political message to Ismailis in
East Africa, see Gregory, Quest for Equality, introduction; Salvadori,
Dhows; Cynthia Salvadori et al., Settling in a Strange Land: Stories of
Punjabi Muslim Pioneers in Kenya (Nairobi: Park Road Mosque Trust,
2010).
70. For details see Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim
League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence,
Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
71. See for example, J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa c.
1886–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Dana A. Seidenberg, Uhuru
and Kenyan Indians: The Role of a Minority Community in Kenyan
Politics, 1939–1963 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983); Gregory, Quest for
Equality. The term “communalism” in South Asian history and
historiography has been used to characterize the rise of Muslim
separatism in India as the dichotomous, binary “other” of secular
nationalism, a duality that has been criticized by Ayesha Jalal. See Jalal,
“Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South
Asia,” in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, eds., Nationalism, Democracy and
Development: State and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998).
330 Notes to Pages 147–150

72. CO/533/417/12, TNA: Bakash to Byrne, October 31, 1931, Byrne to

Secretary of State, February 5, 1932. Gujranwalla ended up on the
Pakistan side of Punjab and witnessed violence on a very large scale
during partition. See also Salvadori et al., Settling in a Strange Land,
93–97.
73. Report on the Non-Native Census, 1931.
74. CO/533/417/12, TNA: Bakash to Byrne, October 31, 1931.
75. I borrow the term “expatriate patriotism” from Sugata Bose, A Hundred
Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
76. CO/822/110/21, TNA: Governor to Secretary of State, October 13, 1942;
Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Congress to Indian Association
Kisumu, January 23, 1945, and Indian Association, Nairobi, circular
notice, October 11, 1945.
77. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1 and L/P&J/12/663, IOR: Intelligence summary,
October 22, 1945, November and December 1945, and March 1947;
GH/7/4, C S 2/8/62KNA: Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Governor’s
Office, Indian Association, Political Movements, Community: 1942–1950,
Information and propaganda: Suppression of Information, Correction to
Incorrect Statements, 1941–54, Nazir Ahmed, Honorary Secretary
Muslim Association, Majengo to Chief Secretariat, Nairobi, March 31,
1946; Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Indian Association, Mombasa,
October 18, 1950.
78. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, October 22,
November, and December, 1945; C S 2/8/62 and GH/7/4KNA:
Correction to Incorrect Statements, 1941–54, Report of meeting of
Indian Muslims in Mombasa, September 7, 1946; Asian Records,
Microfilm 10, KNA: Allah Ditta Qureshi to Indian Association,
December 17, 1945.
79. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Indian Association Resolution,
Mombasa, April 1946, Indian Association Kakamega to Congress
September 10, 1946, F. K. Sethi to Indian Association, Nairobi,
November 13, 1946, A. H. Ismail to S. G. Amin, November 7, 1946,
Congress executive committee meeting minutes, 9 November 1946.
Significantly, several Punjabi Muslims within the Congress were offered
its presidency, but they refused. Some Muslims, including Amin and Abul
Rehman Cockar, a Punjabi member of the Nairobi city council, remained
within the Congress. See also Salvadori et al., Settling in a Strange Land,
166–167.
80. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1 and L/P&J/12/663 IOR: Intelligence summary,
June and December 1946; Asian Records, Microfilm 7, KNA: Zafr-ud-
Deen Papers, Shams-ud-Deen, “An Asian Political History,” n.d.
 Notes to Pages 150–154 331

81. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948; Kenya

Population Census, 1962, vol. IV, Non-African Population (Nairobi:
Statistics Division, Ministry of Economic Planning and Development,
1966).
82. Asian Records, Microfilm 7, KNA: Shams-ud-Deen, “An Asian Political
History,” n.d.; CO/533/541/2, TNA: Intelligence summary, June, July,
September, October 1947 and February 1948.
83. CO/533/417/12, TNA: Intelligence summary, December 1945;
L/P&J/8/311, 108 35 A, L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1 and L/P&J/12/663,
IOR: Intelligence summary, April, September and December 1946, and
Governor Mitchell to Wavell, September 24, 1946; GH/7/4, KNA: Colony
and Protectorate of Kenya, Governor’s Office, “Indian Association,
Political Movements, Community 1942–50.”
84. CO/533/417/12, TNA: Bakash to Byrne, October 31, 1931. Emphasis
added.
85. Salvadori et al., Settling in a Strange Land, 78, 94, 169–170.
86. L/P&J/12/663, L/P&J/8/246 and 248, L/E/7/1558, l/PO/1/10(i) IOR:
Intelligence summary, March 1947, December 1945, July 10, September
10, October 10, 1947, and February 1948, Mitchell to Creech Jones,
December 22, 1947, Aga Khan to Byrne, September 27, 1932, Byrne to
Secretary of State indicating that loyalism should be encouraged, January
14, 1933; Mss Afr s.596 European Elected Members Organisation
Papers, Box 120, File 4, and Box 46, File 1, RHL: Alla Ditta Qureshi
letters, November 23, 1950, and July 28, 1951; AII 1950 File 2–27/50,
NAI: East African Star, reported in note by M. D. Shahane, January 17,
1951; CO/537/4718, TNA: Intelligence summary, February 1949.
87. CO/533/541/2, TNA: Mitchell- Cohen correspondence, April 19, 1948.
See also L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, July,
September, and October 1947, and February 1948, and Mitchell to
Secretary of State and Patel, various 1947–1948; Asian Records,
Microfilms 10 and 11, KNA: Proposals for communal settlement by
Indian Elected Members and Congress executive committee meeting
minutes, Nairobi, November 9, 1946; AII 1950, File 2-27/50, NAI: Apa
Pant-MEA correspondence, July-September 1951 and Congress Petition
to Disallow Separate Electorates, February 1952.
88. CO 533/541/2, TNA: Mitchell to Creech Jones, February 14, 1948;
L/P&J/12/663, IOR: Intelligence summary, March 1948; FCB Papers,
Box 120, File 2, RHL: Biographical notes.
89. CO 533/541/2, TNA: Legislative Council, Representation of Indians
1945–8 and Mitchell- Cohen correspondence, April 19, 1948.
90. AII 1950, File 2-27/50 and AII/1-96/51, NAI: Elector Union’s Newsletter,
March 9, 1951, and Apa Pant to MEA, August 2, 1951, Rameshwar Rao to
332 Notes to Pages 154–158

MEA, July 10, 1951, and Biographical notes on important personalities in

East and Central Africa; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 2, RHL: “Has Dr
Rana Struck a Deal with the Europeans?,” Daily Chronicle, January 18,
1951, and Congress Petition to Disallow Separate Electorates, February
1952; Mss Afr s.596, European Elected Members Organisation Papers,
Box 46, File 1, and Box 120, File 4, RHL: Alla Ditta Qureshi to Major
Ward, July 28, 1951, Alla Ditta Qureshi to European Elected Members
Organisation, November 23, 1950.
91. L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: Intelligence summary, July 1948;
Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 143; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 2,
RHL: Congress to Speaker’s Committee on Indian Representation,
October 8, 1948, and Congress Petition to Disallow Separate Electorates,
February 1952.
92. FCB Papers, Box 115, File 2, RHL: Congress letter, December 30, 1947;
MAK A/11, fols. 1–122, UNL: Congress Bulletin March 1, 1949.
Emphasis added.
93. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Nehru’s message to Africans and
Indians in Africa, May 16, 1947.
94. 50–100/48OS IV and 20–20/48 OS I, NAI: Nehru-Pant correspondence,
April 29, 1948, and Pant fortnightly report, August 27, 1948;
CO/822/3387, TNA: Intelligence summary, October 15, 1948.
95. 20-20/48 OS I, NAI: Pant-MEA correspondence, January–March 1949;
L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: Intelligence summary, November 1948;
CO/537/5762, 537/593 and 822/143/6 TNA: Report of activities of Pant,
July 4, 1950, and intelligence summary, 1950, report by Humayun Kabir
and Nirmal Kumar Sidhanta on establishment of Gandhi Memorial
College in Nairobi, March 13, 1950.
96. EAS, April 25, 1950.
97. CO/537/3387 and 4718, TNA: Intelligence summary, October 1949,
Secretariat, Government of Kenya, Nairobi, to Colonial Office, February
15, 1949; L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary,
September 10, 1947. See also Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA:
Congress-KAU correspondence August 1948; Mss Afr s.1675, Corfield
Papers, RHL: Biographical notes.
98. CO/537/4715, TNA: Quoted in intelligence summary, August 1949.
Emphasis added; AII 18(68) 1949 and 19(1) 1949, NAI: various
newspaper reports in India, August 1949.
99. AII 19(1) 1949, and 54/5561/31, NAI: Pant to MEA, May 19, 1949, Pant’s
note for Nehru on anti-Indian propaganda in East Africa, November 6,
1954; Mss. Afr s.596, European Elected Members Organisation Papers,
Box 57, RHL: correspondence, March 1951; CO/537/5762, TNA:
Correspondence between Mitchell, Commissioner of Police and Secretary
 Notes to Pages 158–162 333

of State, July 1950, Acting Governor of Kenya to Secretary of State, April

15, 1950.
100. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, October 1946;
Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Mbotela to Amin, August 19, 1948.
101. MAK A/7/1947, fols. 1–154, UNL: Peter Koinange speech, “Indians Have
Lifted Africans Economically and Politically,” reported in Kenya Daily
Mail, September 20, 1946; CO/537/4715, TNA: Quoted in intelligence
summary, August 1949.
102. MAK A/13–15/1951, fols. 201–326 and MAK A/7/1947, fols. 1–154. UNL:
Deportation orders and correspondence regarding denial of entry and
Memorandum of Appeal submitted to Privy Council by D. N. Pritt, (n.d.)
c.1950; CO/537/3646, TNA: Note on Makhan Singh, intelligence
summary September-October 1948; author interview with Hindpal Singh,
son of Makhan Singh, Nairobi, July 2007.
103. MAK A/7/1947, fols. 1–154, UNL: Singh letter to Chief Secretary,
Nairobi, February 22, 1947.
104. Ibid.
105. CO/537/3646, 5920, 4715, 4718, TNA: Intelligence summary, July-
October 1948, June-October 1949, July/August 1948, February 1949;
L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: Intelligence summary, October 1948 and
September 29, 1948; MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100 and A/7/1947,
fols. 1–154, UNL: Memo on Labour Problems in Kenya, November 23,
1949, and Committee Meeting of EALTUC, Nairobi.
106. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100 and A/7/1947, fols. 1–154, UNL:
Memo on Labour Problems in Kenya, November 23, 1949, and
Committee Meeting of EALTUC, Nairobi.
107. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Memo on Labour Problems
in Kenya, November 23, 1949.
108. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Meeting regarding the VUP
Ordinance, Kisumu, January 15, 1950.
109. CO/537/4715, TNA: Daily Chronicle, October 30, 1948, and February,
12, 1949, quoted in intelligence summary, December 1948, February
1949; MAK A/13–15 fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Daily Chronicle,
March 12, 1948, March 12, 1950, Ransley Thacker, Judge of Supreme
Court of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya to Acting Governor of
Kenya, May 27, 1950, Memorandum of appeal submitted to Privy Council
by D. N. Pritt, (n.d.) c. 1950.
110. MAK A/13–15 fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Daily Chronicle, March 12,
1948, March 12, 1950, Ransley Thacker, Judge of Supreme Court of the
Colony and Protectorate of Kenya to Acting Governor of Kenya, May 27,
1950, Memorandum of appeal submitted to Privy Council by D. N. Pritt,
n.d., c. 1950; Mss Afr. s.1675, Corfield Papers, RHL: Biographical notes.
334 Notes to Pages 162–168

111. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Patel, speech in Mombasa,
August 28, 1948, quoted by Singh in letter to editor, Daily Chronicle,
September 9, 1949; CO/537/4715, TNA: Intelligence summary, August
1949.
112. CO/537/3646 and 5935, TNA: Intelligence summary, July and August
1948 and June 1950.
113. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Ransley Thacker, Judge of
Supreme Court of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya to Acting
Governor of Kenya, May 27, 1950, and Makhan Singh’s personal diary,
April 30, 1956.
114. CO/537/4718, TNA: Intelligence summary, October 1949, and Baraza,
August 9, 1947.
115. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Indian Association meeting, Nairobi,
July 4, 1946, and joint resolution of the KAU and Congress, April 23,
1950.
116. Ibid.; Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Notice for joint meeting of
KAU and Congress in Nairobi, December 16, 1950, and joint resolution
of EAINC and KAU, December 10, 1951; CO/537/7223 and 4718, INA/
Intelligence summary, February 1949 and May 1951; AII/2–27/50, NAI:
Rameshwar Rao to MEA, May 3, 1951.
117. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Daily Chronicle, March 21,
1930. Reported in memorandum of appeal submitted to Privy Council
by D. N. Pritt, n.d., c. 1950; Mss Afr s.1675, Corfield Papers, RHL:
Biographical notes; CO/537/5920 and 5931, TNA: Intelligence summary,
May 1950; EAS, April 24–25, 1950, emphasis added.
118. EAS, April 24–25, 1950.
119. Ibid.; CO/537/5920, TNA: Intelligence summary, May 1, 1950, and East
Africa Command Fortnightly Intelligence Newsletter; Asian Records,
Microfilm 10, KNA: Joint resolution of KAU and Congress, April 1950;
EAS, May 19, 1950.
120. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 2, RHL: Joint statement of KAU and Congress,
drafted by J. D. Otiende, General Secretary, KAU, and Chanan Singh,
Honorary General Secretary, Congress, December 10, 1951;
CO/822/143/3, TNA: Congress presidential address, Eldoret, August 5–7,
1950, emphasis added.
121. Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Congress-Senior Superintendent of
Police, Nairobi correspondence, April 1952.
122. FCB Papers, Box 118, File 2A, RHL: Memo by Awori and Gichuru,
1945.
123. See Frank Furedi, “The Development of Anti-Asian Opinion among
Africans in Nakuru District, Kenya,” African Affairs 73, no. 292 (July
 Notes to Pages 169–174 335

1974): 355; Furedi, “The Social Composition of the Mau Mau Movement
in the White Highlands,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 4 (1974):
486–505; Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography of Oginga
Odinga (Nairobi: Heinmann, 1968), especially Chapter 5, 89.
124. FCB Papers, Box 118, File 2A, RHL: 1952 Nyeri Annual Report and
Awori and Gichuru memo.
125. Ibid.; MCI/6/783, KNA: Chief Native Commissioner, November 6, 1950,
quoted in Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, 79; Report on the Census of the
Non-Native Population, 1948.
126. W. Robert Foran, “Indian Trading Practices in East Africa, A Bad
Reputation, Long Sustained, in Dealings with Natives: Effects on
Africans and Europeans,” The Crown Colonist, May 1949, 268–269;
EAS, October 22, November 19, December 10, August 7, September 3,
and September 17, 1948; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Baraza,
January 29, 1952.
127. FCB Papers, Box 118, File 2A, RHL: Memo by Awori and Gichuru, 1945
Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: James Gichuru speech, October 6–8,
1945.
128. EAS, October 22, November 19, December 10, August 7, September 3,
and September 17, 1948.
129. CO/537/3646 and 7223 TNA: Intelligence summary, December 6, 1948,
September 29, 1949, and June 1951; EAS, August-November 1948,
especially November 19; MAK/A/11 UNL: Madan report to Congress,
January 18, 1949; AII/54/5561/31, NAI: Pant note for Nehru, November
6, 1954; L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: Intelligence summary, September
1948.
130. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948.
131. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Gichuru speech, October 6–8, 1945;
L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3, IOR: James Beauttah at Congress meeting,
1948, intelligence summary, September 29, 1949; CO/537/7223
and 822/12222, TNA: Tom Mbotela at Indian Association meeting,
Eldoret, intelligence summary, June 1951 and Corfield Report, p.79; FCB
Papers, Box 118, File 2A: Memo by Awori and Gichuru, 1945, and Annual
Report on the Central Province, 1952.
132. EAS, September 3, 1948; CO/537/5931, TNA: Intelligence summary,
October and December 1950; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL:
Baraza, January 19, 1952.
133. CO/533/561/14 and 5920, TNA: Mitchell to Secretary of State, October 20,
1950, Mbotela to John Hynd, MO, April 27, 1950, and East African
Command Intelligence fortnightly reports; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3,
RHL: Baraza, January 19, 1952, and Muthamaki, January 17, 1952.
336 Notes to Pages 174–179

134. 20-20/48 OS I, NAI: Pant report August 27, 1948; FCB Papers, Box 117,
File 3, RHL: Habari za Dunia, November 21, 1946.
135. CO/537/7223, TNA: Intelligence summary, April 1951; Asian Records,
Microfilm 10, KNA: Nehru’s message to Africans and Indians in Africa,
May 16, 1947.
136. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 170–172; AII/53/6492/3101, NAI:
Puri to Nehru, September 25, 1953, and Pant to MEA, September 26,
1953.
137. Oza, Rift in the Empire’s Lute, 131–133, 149, emphasis added; Daily
Chronicle, December 12, 1949.
138. Gregory, Quest for Equality, 75–79; L/P&J/8/250, 108/19C/3 IOR:
Intelligence summary, September 29, 1948.
139. Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Congress presidential address May
22, 1951.

4. BETWEEN REBELLION AND SUPPRESSION

1. Brian MacArthur, ed., The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches

(London: Penguin, 2000), 286.
2. For details see John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau:
Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce
Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and
Africa (London: James Currey, 1992).
3. John Lonsdale, “KAU’s Cultures: Imaginations of Community and
Constructions of Leadership in Kenya after the Second World War,”
Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2000): 118.
4. CO/537/5935, 5931 and 7223, TNA: Intelligence summary, May and June
1950, Tom Mbotela at KAU meeting in Nakuru, August 4, 1950, Tom
Mbotela at KAU meeting, Limuru, February 25, 1951, and report by
Assistant Superintendent of Police on Kenyatta speech at KAU mass
meeting in Nyeri, July 26, 1952; F. D. Corfield, Historical Survey of the
Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London: HMSO, May 1960), Annex F;
Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom 1921–1963: The Autobiography of
Bildad Kaggia (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975), 87–115.
See also Bethwell Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood, The Untold Story,”
in E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and
Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration (Oxford: James Currey,
2003), chapter 1, esp. 16–19.
5. For details, see Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of Mau Mau”; Lonsdale, “KAU’s
Cultures,”; Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of
Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); David Anderson,
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
 Notes to Pages 180–184 337

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Marshall S. Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs:

History, Memory and Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998),
especially chapter 4; Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya:
Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); Myles Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire
in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the
Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
6. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population of the Colony and
Protectorate of Kenya Taken on the Night of 25th February, 1948
(Nairobi: Government Printer, 1953); Kenya Population Census, 1962,
vol. IV, Non-African Population (Nairobi: Statistics Division, Ministry of
Economic Planning and Development, 1966).
7. According to the 1948 census, the Indian (including Goan) population
was 3,247 in Nakuru, 731 in Nayuki, 559 in Meru, 384 in Gilgil, 593 in
Karatina, and 604 in Nyeri.
8. Pio Gama Pinto, “A Detainee’s Life Story,” in Ambu H. Patel, comp.,
Struggle for Release for Jomo and His Colleagues (pamphlet) (Nairobi:
New Kenya Publishers, 1963); Fitz de Souza, “Goa’s Liberation,” and
Muinga Chitari Chokwe, “Early Days,” in Pio Gama Pinto: Independent
Kenya’s First Martyr (pamphlet) (Nairobi: Printcraft East Africa, 1966);
Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 99–102; CO/822/696, TNA: Baring to
Lyttelton, December 31, 1953.
9. Selma Carvalho, Into Diaspora Wilderness: Goa’s Untold Migration
Stories from the British Empire to the New World (Panjim: Broadway,
2010), chapter 35; Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Congress report,
January 10, 1952; Joseph Murumbi, “An Appreciation,” in Pio Gama
Pinto; Fitz de Souza, “Unadulterated Idealist,” in Cynthia Salvadori,
We Came in Dhows, 2 (Nairobi: Paperchase Kenya Ltd., 1996), 180;
CO/822/447, TNA: Commissioner of Police report week ending
November 27, 1952; AII 1–96/51, NAI: Biographical notes; Mss Brit.
Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, Fitz de Souza
interview, November 1984.
10. See Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 99–102; Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru:
The Autobiography of Oginga Odinga (Nairobi: Heinmann, 1968), 25;
Odinga, “General Politics,” and Kaggia, “A Friend,” both in Pio Gama
Pinto, emphasis added.
11. Asian Records, Microfilms 11, KNA: Congress statement, 1952.
12. Asian Records, Microfilms 11 and 13, KNA: Congress presidential
address, October 11–13, 1952, and Standing Committee meeting
minutes and resolutions, February 7, September 27, and November 1953;
AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Congress Executive Committee statement,
December 1952.
338 Notes to Pages 184–188

13. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Congress Executive Committee statement,

December 1952.
14. CO/822/447, TNA: Commissioner of Police report for week ending
December 4, 1952; Apa Pant, Undiplomatic Incidents (Hyderabad:
Sangam Books, 1987), 14.
15. Pant, Undiplomatic Incidents, 26–28.
16. AII/54/1642/3101, 52/141/3101, and 1641/3101 NAI: Apa Pant and Indian
High Commission, Nairobi, correspondence with MEA, July 2, 1953,
December 17, 1952, and August 2, 1952.
17. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Rahman note and Krishna Kumar report on tour
of Kikuyu reserves, December 18 and 23, 1952.
18. AII/52/141/3101, and 54/1642/3101, NAI: Apa Pant fortnightly report for
November 1–15, 1952 , Pant-MEA correspondence, December 23, 1952,
various between December 29, 1953, and January 14, 1954.
19. For details see http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22790037.
20. 50–100/48OS IV, AII/52/141/3101 and 53/5331/3, NAI: Pant to Nehru,
April 29, 1948, MEA Directive to All India Radio for the guidance of its
news and external units on Mau Mau trouble in Kenya and about East
Africa, Nehru’s minute on the Emergency in Kenya, December 7, 1952,
and Nehru letter to Commonwealth Secretary, November 28, 1952;
CO/822/447 and 448, TNA: Intelligence summary December 31, 1952,
UK High Commissioner in India to Baring, November 4, 1952, and Times
of India and Hindustan Times reports quoted by UK High Commissioner
in India to Baring, October 24, 1952.
21. Nehru to Pant, quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A
Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2: 167–168;
CO/822/465 and 440, TNA: Commonwealth Secretary note, April 17,
1953; Lyttelton note on interview with Nehru, June 11, 1953; Mss Afr.
s.1675, Corfield Papers, RHL: Biographical note on Apa Pant in Growth
of Mau Mau, Appendices.
22. AII/52/1641/3101, NAI: Dewan Chamanlal interview, Colonial Times,
December 1952. Chamanlal was accompanied by two colleagues from
India who were detained on arrival and eventually allowed into the
colony only for a fortnight, on the condition that they not go anywhere
near where the trial was taking place. One of these colleagues was
Krishna Kumar, who undertook a tour of Kikuyu reserves and wrote a
report, mentioned above, that exposed the atrocities being committed
against ordinary Africans. For details, see CO/822/448, TNA.
23. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948.
24. De Souza, “Unadulterated Idealist,” 180–181; Harry Thuku, An
Autobiography (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970), 55; A. R. Kapila,
 Notes to Pages 189–192 339

“Saved by a Dhow!” in Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 3: 184–185;

CO/822/447, TNA: Intelligence summary, December 31, 1952.
25. CO/822/447 and 448, TNA: Lyttelton to Baring, November 7, 1952,
intelligence summary December 31, 1952; Mss Brit. Emp. 395, Fabian
Colonial Bureau Papers, Box 120, file 2, RHL: Biographical notes.
26. This point was made by Pherowz Nowrojee in an interview with the
author in Nairobi, July 2006.
27. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952;
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 104–107.
28. See, for example, “Mau Mau Oath Ceremonies,” Candour Supplement,
July 22, 1960; author interview with Chamanlal Chaman, London, June
25, 2008; Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview
transcripts, de Souza and Kapila interviews, November 1984.
29. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de
Souza and Kapila interviews, November 1984. See also Elkins, Imperial
Reckoning.
30. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de
Souza interview, November 1984; Report on the Census of the Non-
Native Population, 1948; AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Rahman to MEA,
December 9, 1952.
31. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952; Mss
Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de
Souza and Kapila interviews, November 1984.
32. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de
Souza and Kapila interviews, November 1984. See also Elkins, Imperial
Reckoning, 42–44; Montagu Slater, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (London:
Heinemann, 1975), 242–244; de Souza and C. B. Madan interviews by
Dana Seidenberg, quoted in Seidenberg, Mercantile Adventurers: The
World of East African Asians 1750–1985 (New Delhi: New Age
International, 1996), especially 165; Kapila, “Saved by a Dhow!,” 184–
185; EAS, August 23, 1961; J. M. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country:
A Peep into Kenya’s Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings Publications,
1981), 174.
33. See, for example, Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 89; Anderson, Histories of
the Hanged, 104–107.
34. EAS, September 12, 1953, and May 29, 1953; Mss Afr. s.1675, Corfield
Papers, RHL: Note on Peter Mbiu Koinange, Growth of Mau Mau,
Appendices.
35. Oginga Odinga, Dweche Ariyo e India, translated into English as Two
Months in India (Nairobi: New Kenya Publishers, 1965), 18; CO/822/461,
TNA: Note from Colonial Office to Foreign Office, July 7, 1953. Pant
340 Notes to Pages 192–196

himself did not know what had caused the transfer at the time. See
AII/54/1031/31, NAI: Press clippings, January 1954, and Pant,
Undiplomatic Incidents, 22.
36. AII/54/1191/3101(141), NAI: Tandon to MEA, April 24–25, 1954;
CO/822/796, TNA: Government House East Africa to War Office London,
April 24, 1954, Governor’s letter, April 26, 1954, and EAS, April 1954.
37. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes and letter
to Congress dated February 22, 1955; CO/537/5931, TNA: Intelligence
summary, various 1950.
38. CO/822/438, 440, 445, 465, TNA: Teeling, MP, to Lyttelton, October 22,
1952, Baring to Colonial Office, November 7, 1952, Colonial Office notes,
February 16 and March 18, 1953; AII/54/5561/31, NAI: C. J. M. Alport,
“Challenge to Nehru,” Comment, August 19, 1954; Asian Records,
Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes, April 18, 1953.
39. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 2, RHL: Nathoo press conference, May 19,
1953; CO/822/445, TNA: Maxim Barton note, November 12, 1952, Baring
to Colonial Office, November 7, 1952, Secret Performa for intelligence
reports and O. J. Jeffries to Harold Scott, November 28, 1952.
40. CO/822/447, TNA: Commissioner of Police Reports, Situation
Appreciation for weeks ending December 4 and February 11, 18, and 25,
1953; Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948.
41. CO/822/692, TNA: Baring to Lyttelton, October 29, 1952; MAK/B/2/6
fols. 144–298, UNL: District Commissioner Maralal to Makhan Singh,
October 13, 1959; 11/1/7/11A, vol II/57, KNA: Commissioner of Prisons
to Secretary of Defense, Nairobi, May 6, 1954, and Detn 10/12 KNA:
Advisory committee on detainees to Governor of Kenya, August 13, 1954.
I am grateful to Zarina Patel and Zahid Rajan for bringing these two
KNA sources to my attention. See also Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 251, and
Carvalho, Diaspora Wilderness, chapter 29.
42. Asian Records, Microfilm 6 and 7, KNA: Yacoob-ud-Deen letter, April 26,
1954, Kenya Muslim League Constitution, 1953, S. Ahmed Omar,
Secretary African Muslim Association, Nyanza Province, to Zafr-ud-
Deen, November 19, 1954, and Nyeri Muslim League letter regarding
Yacoob’s disappearance from Karatina, December 7, 1955; author
interview with Mahmudah Basheer-ud-Deen, Nairobi, July 2006.
43. Author interview with Benegal Pereira, son of Eddie Pereira, New
Hampshire, July 2011; Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan
South Asian History, October 2003; Report on the Census of the
Non-Native Population, 1948.
44. Madatally Manji, Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron (Nairobi: Kenway, 1995),
20–26.
 Notes to Pages 197–205 341

45. Corfield, Growth of Mau Mau, 224; Report on the Census of the Non-
Native Population, 1948; Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire”
interview transcripts, Fred Kubai interview, November 1984;
CO/822/447, TNA: Commissioner of Police reports for weeks ending
January 7, 1953, and February 25, 1953.
46. Corfield, Growth of Mau Mau, Chapter XI; AII/54/1031/31, NAI: Article
in Daily Express, January 16, 1954; Struggle for Release of Jomo,
209–210; EAS, September 24, 1954.
47. EAS, September 10, 1954; author interview with Qayyam Dar, Nairobi,
June 2006.
48. Author interview with Qayyam Dar, Nairobi, June 2006.
49. Satish Watson, “On the Side of the Mau Mau,” in Salvadori, We Came in
Dhows, 3: 182–183.
50. Dedan Kimathi, “A Speech,” appendix 1B in H. K. Wachanga, Swords of
Kirinyaga: The Fight for Land and Freedom (Nairobi: Kenya Literature
Bureau, 1975); Waruhiu Itote, Mau Mau General (Nairobi: East African
Institute Press, 1967), prologue.
51. For details see Elkins, Imperial Reckoning.
52. Author interview with Mahmudah Basheer-ud-Deen, Nairobi, June
2006.
53. Author interviews with Neera Kent Kapila, Nairobi, June 2006, and
Vilasbehn, Wembley, London, August 2008.
54. Author interview with Gitu wa Githengeri, spokesman for Mau Mau
Veterans Association, Nairobi, July 2007; “The Asian African Heritage,
Identity and History,” National Museums of Kenya, The Asian African
Heritage Trust, Nairobi 2000; AII 1–96/51, NAI: Biographical notes;
Ambu H. Patel, Secretary’s Report, October 20, 1963, in Struggle for
Release of Jomo, 225; Zarina Patel, “An Inspiration,” in Salvadori, We
Came in Dhows, 3: 186.
55. Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood: The Untold Story,” 34.
56. Odinga, “General Politics,” and Kaggia, “A Friend,” in Pio Gama Pinto.
57. MAK/B/2/6: Correspondence, Kubai note addressed to “My Comrade,”
December 7, 1963.
58. M. G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (New York:
Random House, 2003).
59. Nazmi Ramji, “A Time of Emergency,” Nairobi, 1986. English translation
by Sudha Mehta, August 2011. I am grateful to Shiraz Durrani for giving
me an original copy of the play.
60. Ibid.
61. See, for example, Carl Rosenberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of
“Mau Mau” (New York: New American Library, 1966); Dana A.
342 Notes to Pages 206–210

Seidenberg, Uhuru and Kenyan Indians: The Role of a Minority

Community in Kenyan Politics, 1939–1963 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983);
Branch, Defeating Mau Mau; Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 110.
62. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Madan and Patel Speeches, April 19,
1953; AII 52/141/3101, NAI: Congress statement December 1952.
63. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes, June 11,
1953; CO/822/447 and 465, KNA: Intelligence summary, December 4,
1952, Baring-Lyttelton correspondence, January 21 and March 4, 1953;
AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952, and
Times of India newspaper report, December 11, 1952.
64. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Letter from Indian Retail Traders Association of
Kenya Colony to Commissioner of Police, Nairobi, December 1952.
Interestingly, KAU members intercepted this par ticular written request
and passed it on to Rahman, Apa Pant’s first secretary.
65. CO/822/465, TNA: Baring to Lyttelton, December 29, 1952, Press Office
handouts, May 22, 1953, and November 12, 1955; Asian Records, Microfilm
13, KNA: Indian Association meeting, Nakuru resolutions, May 21, 1953;
AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952.
66. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: British Information Ser vices, Office of the UK
High Commissioner in India, “Situation in Kenya: A Review,” December
23, 1953, Apa Pant to MEA, December 17, 1952; AH/19/119, KNA:
L. D. A Baron, Treasury to Labor Department, Nairobi, April 1, 1954;
Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948; FCB Papers,
Box 120, file 2, RHL: Biographical notes.
67. EAS, April 19, 1953, and July 9, 1954.
68. FCB Papers, Box 120, file 2, RHL: PRO circular, April 1953;
CO/822/696, TNA: Intelligence summary, November 20, 1953; Asian
Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Rogai Trading Company, December 2,
1952, and Congress meeting notes, early 1953.
69. EAS, July 9, 1954. The population of Africans decreased from 120,000 to
85,000 in Nairobi. According to the 1948 census, the Indian (including
Goan) population was 3,247 in Nakuru, 731 in Nayuki, 559 in Meru,
384 in Gilgil, 593 in Karatina, and 604 in Nyeri. See Report of the
Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948. See also AII/52/141/3101,
NAI: Fortnightly review of public opinion on East and Central Africa for
the period November 16–30, 1952.
70. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: MEA note, December 13, 1952; CO/822/465, 447,
TNA: Baring to Lyttelton, December 29, 1952, intelligence summary
December 4, 1952, and February 25, 1953; AII/54/1642/3101, NAI: Pant
report for period ending December 31, 1953; Joram Wamweya, Freedom
Fighter (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1971), 48–50; author
 Notes to Pages 210–214 343

interview with Sumati Shah, Ratilal’s wife, London, Wembley, July 2008;
Asian Records, Microfilm 12 and 13, KNA: Indian Association, Nakuru,
resolutions, May 21, 1953, Ruiru Indian Association to Congress, April 17,
1953, and Rogai Trading Co. to Congress, December 2, 1952; Report on
the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948.
71. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Rogai Trading Co. to Congress,
December 2, 1952; CO/822/447, TNA: Police commissioner report,
December 31, 1952.
72. Diwan Chamanlal Papers, Individual Collections, “Papers relations to
political trials of Kenya’s leader Jomo Kenyatta and his subsequent
release, 1952–1965,” File no. 114, NMML: Kenyatta to Nehru, March 4,
1953, and Walter Odede, speech quoted in Evening News press clipping,
November 28, 1952; AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Rahman to MEA, December
18, 1952, Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952, MEA notes on
Krishna Kumar tour, December 23 and 30, 1952, and Pant fortnightly
report, November 15, 1952; CO/822/447, TNA: Intelligence summary,
February 25, 1953.
73. Diwan Chamanlal Papers, Individual Collections, “Papers relations to
political trials of Kenya’s leader Jomo Kenyatta and his subsequent
release, 1952–1965,” File no. 114, NMML: Kenyatta to Nehru, March 4,
1953; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: PRO circular, April 12, 1953.
74. Itote, “Mau Mau” General, 33–34. Emphasis added.
75. CO/822/692, 696, 447, 465, TNA: Kiambu Central Mau Mau Committee,
September 15, 1953, minutes of meeting from minute book in
possession of the Special Branch, intelligence summary, November 20,
1953, February 25, 1953, and Baring to UK High Commissioner in
Pakistan, January 7, 1953; Wachanga, Swords of Kirinyaga, 47–50;
AII/54/1642/3101, NAI: Tandon note, May 12, 1954, Pant fortnightly
reports for January-March 1954, Times of India Report, December 11,
1952.
76. Gen/3/25, KNA: H. R. Walker, Assistant Commissioner of Police,
Criminal Investigation Department to Ministry of Defense, Nairobi,
January 5, 1956; CO/822/696, TNA: Intelligence summary November 20,
1953.
77. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Pant note, December 17, 1952.
78. Ibid.; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: PRO circular, April 12, 1953.
79. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: C.B. Madan quoted in PRO circular,
April 12, 1953.
80. Ibid.; Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Patel at Congress standing
committee meeting, February 7, 1953, and Patel speech at Indian
Association meeting, Nairobi, April 19, 1953.
344 Notes to Pages 214–219

81. This point is confirmed by the Indian High Commission. For details see
AII/54/1521/3101, NAI: Tandon to Pant, 28 August 28, 1954; FCB Papers
Box 117, File 3, RHL: Note on N. S. Mangat by Apa Pant, August 25,
1954. For details on the law society, see Yash P. Ghai and J. P. W. B.
McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the
Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present
(Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970), 386.
82. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, July
31–August 2, 1954.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.; EAS, August 10, 1956.
85. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, July
31–August 2, 1954.
86. Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Mangat to European Electors Union
August 1954; EAS, August 10, 1956.
87. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 187.
88. CO/822/843, TNA: Intelligence summary, August 1–31, 1956.
89. AA1/103, KNA: Congress presidential address, April 4–6, 1958;
CO/822/1339, TNA: Activities of Congress; Nazareth, Brown Man, Black
Country, 187.

5 . N E G OT I AT I N G N AT I O N H O O D

1. For details see John Lonsdale, “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau
and Remaking Kenya” Journal of African History 31, 3 (1990): 393–421;
Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag
in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), chapters 9 and 10.
2. See Bethwell Ogot, “The Decisive Years,” in Bethwell A. Ogot and W. R.
Ochieng’, eds., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993
(London: James Currey, 1995); David Anderson, “ ‘Yours in Struggle for
Majimbo’: Nationalism and the Party Politics of Decolonization in Kenya,
1955–64,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (2005): 547–564;
Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography of Oginga Odinga
(Nairobi: Heinmann, 1968); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau,
Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Tom Mboya, The
Challenge of Nationhood: A Collection of Speeches and Writings (New
York: Praeger, 1970).
3. Lennox-Boyd, “Future Policy in East Africa,” April 10, 1959, in R. Hyam
and R. Louis, eds., Conservative Government and the End of Empire
 Notes to Pages 220–225 345

1957–1964, Part I (London: HMSO, 1994); Statement of the African

Elected Members, November 13, 1957, “Our Pledge, Our Goals and Our
Constitution,” June 29, 1958, Congress Resolution, April 4–6, 1958, and
Colonial Office Communiqué on Lennox-Boyd’s meeting with the
delegation of the constituency elected members, May 1, 1959, all quoted in
J. M. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country: A Peep into Kenya’s Freedom
Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings Publications, 1981), 246–247, 263, 269, 291,
and appendix S; AII54/1642/3101, NAI: Apa Pant note, July 7, 1954.
4. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress standing committee
meeting, February 1953; AII/54/1521/3101, NAI: Congress resolutions,
July 31–August 2, 1954.
5. Mss Brit. Emp. s.365, Fabian Colonial Bureau Papers, Box 117, Files 2
and 3, RHL: Nathoo Press Conference, May 19, 1953, Congress
presidential address, August 1954; Asian Records, Microfilm 12 and 13,
KNA: Patel at KIC standing committee meeting, February 7, 1953, and
resolution of Nakuru Indian Association, May 21, 1953.
6. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Patel speech, September 27, 1953.
7. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes and
statement February 6–7, 1953. Emphasis added.
8. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress statement; FCB Papers,
Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, August 1954.
9. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, 13, NAK: Congress policy statements
February and September 1953 and March 1955.
10. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Congress policy statement, November
23, 1954.
11. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress policy statement
March 1955, meeting minutes September 27, 1953; EAS, August 6,
1954.
12. EAS, August 10, 1956.
13. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, NAK: Congress policy statement February
6, 1953.
14. Quoted in Channan Singh, “Later Asian Protest Movements,” thesis,
University of Nairobi Library.
15. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, 13, NAK: Congress statements, 1953–1955.
16. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, August
1954; EAS, August 6, 1954.
17. AII/54/1642/3101, NAI: Tandon to MEA, March 11 and 12, 1954. See
also D. F. Gordon, “Mau Mau and Decolonization: Kenya and the Defeat
of Multi-racialism in East and Central Africa,” Kenya Historical Review
5, no. 2 (1977): 275–286.
346 Notes to Pages 225–229

18. AII/54/1642/3101, NAI: Patel statement, March 11, 1954, and Tandon to
MEA, March 18, 1954; Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Congress to
Coutts Commission, 1954.
19. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, August
1954; EAS, August 6, 1954.
20. EAS, August 6, 1954.
21. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: “Asian Political Bickerings,” Daily
Chronicle, April 4, 1957; AII/54/1521/3101, 1642/3101, NAI: Tandon to
Pant, August 28, 1954, Tandon to MEA, March 11, 12, and 25 and April
11, 1954.
22. CO/822/843, TNA: Intelligence summaries for February–August 1956,
Tom Mboya’s statement, March 25, 1954; Diwan Chamanlal Papers,
Individual Collections, File no. 114, NMML: “Papers relating to political
trials of Kenya’s leader Jomo Kenyatta and his subsequent release
1952–1965,” Odhiambo Ohello to Jawaharlal Nehru, November 19, 1959;
H. K. Wachanga, Swords of Kirinyaga: The Fight for Land and Freedom
(Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975), 50.
23. Statement of the African Elected Members, October 18, 1957, quoted in
Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, appendix H, 466–467.
24. For details see Branch, Defeating Mau Mau.
25. Colonial Office note, “Future Constitutional Development in Kenya,”
May 1957, in Hyam and Louis, eds., Conservative Government and the
End of Empire, 12–13.
26. For details see Michael Blundell, So Rough the Wind: The Kenya
Memoirs of Sir Michael Blundell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1964).
27. See David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya
and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Frank Furedi,
“Creating a Breathing Space: The Political Management of Colonial
Emergencies,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no.
3 (1993): 89–106; Frank Furedi, “Britain’s Colonial Wars: Playing the
Ethnic Card,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 28,
no. 1 (1990): 70–89; Branch, Defeating Mau Mau; Ogot, “Decisive
Years”; Anderson, “Yours in Struggle for Majimbo.” The concerns voiced
by the Masai and Kalenjin were similar to M. A. Jinnah’s in the run-up
to independence in the 1940s as he supported various constitutional
schemes to ensure equal representation for India’s numerical
minorities—Muslims—in the emergent state. For details see Ayesha
Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the
Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985).
 Notes to Pages 229–238 347

28. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview, Oginga
Odinga, November 1984. The slogan “Africa for Africans” was popular-
ized by the Kenya African National Congress, the first national party
formed after the emergency in 1955, during the presidency of C. C.
Argwings-Kodhek, a lawyer who had defended Mau Mau detainees.
29. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 358–365.
30. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population of the Colony and
Protectorate of Kenya Taken on the Night of 25th February, 1948
(Nairobi: Government Printer, 1953); Kenya Population Census, 1962,
vol. IV, Non-African Population (Nairobi: Statistics Division, Ministry of
Economic Planning and Development, 1966).
31. Congress resolutions, July 18, 1958, and African Elected Members
Statement, October 13, 1958, quoted in Nazareth, Brown Man, Black
Country, 291, 263.
32. CO/822/2106, TNA: Asian Elected Members constitutional proposals,
January 1960; Nazareth interview on BBC program, “Matters of the
Moment,” January 21, 1960, and Nazareth speech, January 29, 1960, all
quoted in Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 395, appendix CC.
33. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 187.
34. Singh, “Later Asian Protest Movements.”
35. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: K. D. Travadi, “Common Roll for
Kenya,” n.d., probably 1959; Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 169–171.
36. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 448–449; Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru,
164.
37. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 520.
38. CS/5/1/Vol II, KNA: Reports on Congress, 1959–60; Diwan Chamanlal
Papers, Individual Collections, File no. 114, NMML: “Papers relating to
political trials of Kenya’s leader Jomo Kenyatta and his subsequent release
1952–1965,” Odhiambo Okello to Jawaharlal Nehru, November 19, 1959.
39. For details, see Ogot and Ochieng’, eds., Decolonization and
Independence.
40. EAS, January, 27, 1960.
41. Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 113.
42. EAS, November 20, 1959, January 27 and 29, 1960.
43. EAS, January 11, 1960.
44. EAS, January 7, 1960, emphasis added; Asian Records, Microfilm 13
KNA: Statement of the Thirty One, issued on January 21, 1960; Singh,
“Later Asian Protest Movements.”
45. EAS, August, 19, 1960.
46. EAS, August 19, 1960, March 23, 1961, and July 23, 1962. See also Report
of Kenya Constitutional Conference, 1962 (London: HMSO, 1962); Dana
348 Notes to Pages 239–251

A. Seidenberg, Uhuru and Kenyan Indians: The Role of a Minority

Community in Kenyan Politics, 1939–1963 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983), 163;
Ogot, “The Decisive Years”; Anderson, “Yours in Struggle for Majimbo.”
47. EAS, February 5 and April 19, 1960, September 15, 1961.
48. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 71.
49. EAS, December 24, 1959.
50. Ibid.
51. EAS, January 7, 1960. Emphasis added.
52. EAS, February 17, 1960.
53. EAS, January 14, 1960.
54. EAS, January 6, 12, and 13, February 17, 1960.
55. EAS, March 14, 1960.
56. EAS, March 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, and 21, April 5, 6, 7, 8, 1960.
57. EAS, various, March–April 1960.
58. EAS, March 16, 18, 19, and April 5, 1960.
59. EAS, December 24, 1959, March 16 and 18, 1960.
60. EAS, December 24, 1959.
61. EAS, December 24, 1959, January 13 and 28, 1960.
62. EAS, January 13, 14, and 28, 1960.
63. EAS, February 15, 1960. Othieno’s critique of civilization was much like
Gandhi’s elaborated during his time in South Africa in Mohandas K.
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Madras: Ganesh, 1909).
64. Jon Soske, “ ‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian
Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu Natal,” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2009,
chapter 5; James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban
Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012).
65. EAS, January-March 1960, especially January 7, 19, 20, February 12
and 18, 1960.
66. EAS, November 20, 1959, March 15 and 17, 1960.
67. EAS, March 18, 1960.
68. Afr II PQA/198/61, NAI: Statement of G. P. Akoko Mboya, Secretary-
General Kenya African Chambers of Commerce and Industry, reported
in Daily Nation, October 18, 1961, and Muliro speech at annual meeting
of Indian Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, October
14, 1961. See also Frank Furedi, “The Development of Anti-Asian
Opinion among Africans in Nakuru District, Kenya,” African Affairs 73,
no. 292 (July 1974): 347–358.
69. EAS, January 12, 1960, August- October 1961, especially September 15,
1961; Clyde Sanger and John Nottingham, “The Kenya General Election
of 1963,” Journal of Modern African Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1964): 33.
 Notes to Pages 251–262 349

70. See EAS, 1959–1961.

71. EAS, January 12, 1960, and August 15, 1961.
72. EAS, January 12, 13, 30, February 18, March 21, April 2, 9, and October 9,
1960, and August 28, September 12, 18, 19, 22, 28, and October 18, 1961.
73. EAS, September 18 and 28, 1961.
74. EAS, September 14, 1961.
75. EAS, September 22, 1961.
76. EAS, March 19, 1960.
77. EAS, September 18 and 28, 1961.
78. EAS, January 13, 1960.
79. EAS, January 12, 13, April 2, March 21, 1960; CO/822/2099 TNA:
Congress presidential speech, October 9, 1960.
80. For details, see David Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, the State and
Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Paul Vandenberg,
The Asian-African Divide: Analyzing Institutions and Accumulation
in Kenya (London: Routledge, 2006); Madatally Manji, Memoirs of a
Biscuit Baron (Nairobi: Kenway, 1995).
81. EAS, October 18, 1961, August 28, 1959.
82. EAS, August 26 and 28, September 12, 18, 19, 22, and 28, October 18,
1961.
83. EAS, September 19 and 28, 1961.
84. EAS, March 16 and 21, 1960, and September 16, 1961.
85. EAS, September 5 and 16, 1961.
86. EAS, September 19 and 20, 1961.
87. EAS, January 30, 1961.
88. EAS, February 15, March 16, 1960.

6 . U H U R U A N D E XO D U S

Epigraph: J. M. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, A Peep into Kenya’s

Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Tidings, 1981), front matter.
1. Paul Theroux, “Hating the Asians,” Transitions 33 (1967): 46–51.
Emphasis added.
2. See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the
Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); B. A. Ogot and
W. R. Ochieng’, eds., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya
1940–1993 (London: James Currey, 1995); D. P. Ghai, Portrait of a
Minority (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970); J. S. Mangat, A
History of Asians in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1969); Donald
S. Rothchild, Racial Bargaining in Independent Kenya: A Study of
Minorities and Decolonization (London: Oxford University Press, 1973);
350 Notes to Pages 263–266

Rothchild, “Kenya’s Africanization Program: Priorities of Development

and Equity,” American Political Science Review 64, 3 (1970): 737–753;
Rothchild, “Kenya’s Minorities and the African Crisis over Citizenship,”
Race 9, no. 4 (1968): 421–437; Vincent Cable, “The Asians of Kenya,”
African Affairs 68 (1969): 218–231.
3. Jomo Kenyatta, Harambee! The Prime Minister of Kenya’s Speeches
1963–1964: From the Attainment of Internal Self-Government to the
Threshold of the Kenya Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2.
4. See Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny” in Brian MacArthur, ed., The
Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches (London: Penguin, 2000),
234–237.
5. Jomo Kenyatta, “One Party System,” August 13, 1964, in Suffering
without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation (Nairobi: East
African Publishing House, 1968).
6. Jomo Kenyatta, “Kenyatta Day Speech,” October 20, 1964, in Suffering
without Bitterness; Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography
of Oginga Odinga (Nairobi: Heinmann, 1968), 257–267, 302; Kaggia,
letter of resignation, quoted in Bethwell A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’,
eds., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya.
7. Mboya and Kaggia debate, Kenya National Assembly, April 30, 1965, in
House of Representatives Official Report (Nairobi: Government Printer,
1963–1965). See also Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 268–269, 284–297; Pio
Gama Pinto: Independent Kenya’s First Martyr (pamphlet) (Nairobi:
Printcraft East Africa, 1966); Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of
Kenyan South Asian History 1 (2005).
8. Bildad Kaggia, “Land and the Dispossessed,” February 26 and March 26,
1965, in C. J. Gertzel, M. Goldschmidt, and D. Rothchild, eds.,
Government and Politics in Kenya: A Nation-Building Text (Nairobi:
East African Publishing House, 1969), 129–137; Jomo Kenyatta,
“Madaraka Day Speech,” June 1, 1965, in Suffering without Bitterness;
Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 266.
9. See Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of
Neo- Colonialism 1964–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975); Oginga Odinga, “Resignation Statement,” April 15, 1966, in
Gertzel, Goldschmidt, and Rothchild, eds., Government and Politics in
Kenya; David Thorup and Charles Hornsby, Multi-Party Politics in
Kenya: The Kenyatta and Moi States and the Triumph of the System in
the 1992 Election (Oxford: James Currey, 1998); Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru,
248; Daniel Branch, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963–2011
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), chapter 1.
10. AII/REP-1, NAI: K. P. Shah Speech, June 23, 1960.
 Notes to Pages 266–270 351

11. Kenyanization of Personnel in the Private Sector: A Statement on

Government Policy Relating to the Employment of Non-citizens in Kenya
(Nairobi: Government Printing Office, 1967); Kenya Population Census,
1962, vol. IV, Non-African Population (Nairobi: Statistics Division,
Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, 1966); H1/1012/61/65,
NAI: Indian High Commission, Nairobi (henceforth IHC), reports August
and October 1964. See also Bildad Kaggia, parliamentary debate on land
ownership ceiling in the former white highlands, March 26, 1965, in
Gertzel, Goldschmidt, and Rothchild, eds., Government and Politics in
Kenya, 129–137.
12. Tom Mboya, “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya,”
speech delivered in Parliament, May 4, 1965, in Challenge of Nationhood,
88; H1/1012/61/65, NAI: IHC, monthly report, June, 1964.
13. H1/1012/61/65, NAI: IHC monthly report, June 1964.
14. For details, see David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to
Forget (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1982), 279–280; Mboya, Challenge of
Nationhood, 97; Mboya, “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning
in Kenya,” in Challenge of Nationhood. Although in public Mboya criticized
Indians, he had close personal relationships with individual Indians on
whom he had depended for several of his nation-building projects, including
the airlifts to America to train Kenyan public officials that were funded by
Indian traders, travel agents, and the Aga Khan, who contributed more than
£5,000 toward this endeavor. Mboya himself acknowledges the role played
by Sumant Patel and P. K. Jain of Equatorial Travels Limited in organizing
the 1959–1961 airlifts to America. For details see Tom Mboya, Freedom and
After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 138, 146. It is also quite significant that
Mboya was killed in 1969, allegedly on Kenyatta’s command, while visiting a
pharmacy owned by an Indian couple, Semhi and Mohini Channi, who were
close family friends. For details, see David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: The
Man Kenya Wanted to Forget, 279–280. See also Mboya, Challenge of
Nationhood, 97; Mboya, “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning
in Kenya,” in Challenge of Nationhood.
15. FCO/31/41, TNA: C. Njonjo, Attorney-General Kenya, September 19, 1967,
and Ministry of Commerce and Industry Press Statement, April 5, 1967.
16. FCO/31/41, TNA: Ministry of Commerce and Industry Press Statement,
April 5, 1967; FCO/31/250, TNA: National Assembly speeches, July 1967.
17. CO/31/41, TNA: Edward Peck, British High Commissioner to Kenya, to
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, February 17, 1967; H1/1012/61/66,
NAI: IHC reports, February and March 1966.
18. Voice of Kenya transcript, August 16, 1966, in Gertzel, Goldschmidt, and
Rothchild, eds., Government and Politics in Kenya.
352 Notes to Pages 270–276

19. H1/1012/61/65, NAI: IHC report, June 1964; FCO/31/41, TNA: Mboya,
address to Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, January
1967.
20. H1/1012/61/67 and 65, NAI: IHC reports, June 1964 and June 1967.
21. FCO/21/250, TNA: Voice of Kenya transcript, September 11, 1967.
Emphasis added.
22. H1/1012/61/67, NAI: IHC report, October 1967.
23. For details see Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial
Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 2011); James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban
Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), chapter 5; Mahmood
Maundani, From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain
(Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011).
24. National Assembly Debate, July 7, 1967, in Gertzel, Goldschmidt, and
Rothchild, eds., Government and Politics in Kenya.
25. Ibid. After his release in 2003, thirty-seven years later, Mutua insisted
that he had not killed Pinto. For details see G. G. Kariuki, Illusion of
Power: Fifty Years in Kenya Politics (Nairobi: Kenway Publications,
2001), 44. See also E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau
Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration (Oxford: James
Currey, 2003), 25; Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 286–297; Branch, Kenya,
chapter 1; contributions by Dennis Akumu, Mwinga Chokwe, and Bildad
Kaggia in Pio Gama Pinto and Awaaz 1 (2005).
26. February 24, 1965, and March 2, 1965, in The National Assembly, House of
Representatives Official Report (Republic of Kenya, 1965). See also
parliamentary debates on political assassinations March 6, 1970, November
12, 2003, October 8, 2008, and December 15, 2010; Branch, Kenya, 44–47.
27. Piyo Rattansi, “Rebel with a Cause,” Awaaz 1, 2004; Nazareth, Brown
Man, Black Country, 10–12; H1/1012/61/66, NAI: IHC reports, July and
August 1966.
28. FCO/31/246 and 245, TNA: Kenyatta to Edward Peck and Peck to
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, July 13, 1967, Moi statement, July 6,
1967, and Edward Peck to FCO, July 10, 1967.
29. FCO/31/245 and 246, TNA: Peck-FCO correspondence, July 12, 13,
1967.
30. FCO/31/245 and 246, TNA: Peck-FCO correspondence, July 7, 1967; debate
in National Assembly, December 1966, quoted in Nazareth, Brown Man,
Black Country, 4–5, 14; H1/1012/61/67, NAI: IHC report, January 1967.
31. Rothchild, “Kenya’s Africanization Program.”
32. FCO/31/250, 41, 42 and 351, TNA: Background note, July 1967 and
statement of Kenneth Matiba, Permanent Secretary Ministry of
 Notes to Pages 277–281 353

Commerce and Industry September 15, 1967, quoted in Daily Nation.

Peck to FCO, February 17, 1967, and J. S. Arthur, British High
Commission, Nairobi to East Africa Department, Commonwealth Office,
October 10, 1967, “Citizenship,” Kenya Weekly News, January 26, 1968,
and Matiba statement, November 1, 1967.
33. FCO/31/250, 251 and 42, TNA: Moi and Kiano in National Assembly, July
20, Matiba statement November 1, 1967, Fitz de Souza press statement,
February 1968, and newspaper articles, including “The Exodus,” Kenya
Weekly News, February 9, 1968.
34. Parminder Bhachu has used the term “twice migrants” to describe
Punjabi Sikh immigrants in Britain who emigrated from East Africa. See
Parminder Bachu, Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain
(London: Tavistock, 1985).
35. FCO/29/133, 31/258 and 251, TNA: Commonwealth Office note, Martin
Ennals independent survey, June 14, 1968, and de Souza statement.
36. H1/1012/61/68, NAI: IHC report, February 1968; FCO/50/45 and 46,
31/252, TNA: Daily Nation, February 8, 1968, and British High
Commission Nairobi to Commonwealth Office, February 9, 1968, note of
meeting between Kenyatta and Malcolm MacDonald, February 19, 1968,
and statement by J. N. Karanja in London, February 19, 1968.
37. AII/52/6423/31 and 1/47/56, NAI: GOI note on register for Indian
citizens, February 11, 1952, IHC-MEA correspondence, 1956.
38. DO/175/92 and FCO/41/790, TNA: “Asians in Kenya” note, November
1963, and note by officials regarding “pledge” to Kenyan Asians, n.d.
39. FCO/31/258, TNA: Martin Ennals independent survey; Nazareth, Brown
Man, Black Country, 7; Kenya Population Census, 1962, vol. IV, Non-
African Population (Nairobi: Statistics Division, Ministry of Economic
Planning and Development, 1966); Kenya Population Census, 1969 (Nairobi:
Statistical Division, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, 1970).
40. Voice of Kenya radio broadcast, September 11, 1967, quoted in Theroux,
“Hating the Asians.”
41. H1/1013/64/64, NAI: Report of Indian delegation to Zambia’s visit to
Kenya and Uganda; FCO/50235, TNA: Note on British Citizens of Asian
Origin in Kenya and Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and 1968.
42. FCO/50235, TNA: “British Citizens of Asian Origin,” pamphlet circulated
in Nairobi, April 24, 1968; Mboya, National Assembly Debate on
Citizenship Bill, 1963, quoted in Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya, 220–221.
43. H/1/1012/61/64 and 61/67, NAI: IHC reports, June 1964 and March 1967.
44. H1/1012/61/66, NAI: IHC reports, July, August, and October 1966;
HO/244/322, TNA: Association of British Citizens Nairobi letter, October
1968; Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 7.
354 Notes to Pages 281–286

45. FCO/50/46, TNA: Statement of Ministry of Commerce and Industry,

February 12, 1968. Emphasis added.
46. Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 17.
47. Although the Indian government criticized Indians in Kenya for being
reluctant to take up Kenyan citizenship, it acknowledged their anxiety
triggered by the Zanzibar coup. For details see H1/1013/64/64, NAI:
Report of Indian delegation to Zambia’s visit to Kenya and Uganda.
48. FCO/50235, TNA: Note on British Citizens of Asian and Commonwealth
Immigrant Acts. This reason was reiterated in my interviews with Indians
who had left Kenya for Britain in the 1960s: author interviews with
Bhadra Vadgama Patel, Wembley, June 2008, and Dilbagh Channa,
Southall, June 24, 2008. See also Bhadra Patel, “In Transit,” Moving
Here: Tracing Your Roots, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk.
49. Sumati Shah, “My Mother,” Babubhai Patel, “It Was a Remarkable
Achievement,” and Jaswant Singh Riyait, “Nine Days to Nine Hours,”
all in Moving Here.
50. FCO/50235, HO 244/322, TNA: Note on British Citizens of Asian and
Commonwealth Immigrant Acts, Association of British Citizens Nairobi
letter, October 1968.
51. Ibid.; FCO/31/251, TNA: Press statement, de Souza, February 1968.
52. Kashiben D. Mistry and Satchachan S. Deora, in Moving Here.
53. FCO/37/19 and 31/250, TNA: EAS, September 5, 1967, quoted by
Edward Peck to Commonwealth Office, September 5, 1967, also quoted
in the Sunday Express, Daily Nation, and EAS, September 10, 1967; note
by General and Migration Department, HMG, September 13, 1967, and
report in Africa Samachar, September 15, 1967.
54. FCO/41/790, 37/19, 31/250, 50/45, and DO/175/92, TNA: Note by officials
regarding “pledge” to Kenyan Asians, memorandum by Secretary of State
for Home Department, entitled “Position of Asians in Kenya,” October
1963, FCO brief, 1963, and Commonwealth Relations Office to British
heads of mission, Delhi, Nairobi, Karachi, Dar es Salaam, and Kampala,
November 5, 1963, EAS, September 5, 1967, and February 7, 1968.
55. FCO/50/44, 43, 45, 46, 97, 98 and 31/251, TNA: Roy Jenkins speech in
House of Commons, November 15, 1967, memorandum by Roy Jenkins,
October 17, 1967, brief prepared by General and Migration Department
for Minister of State, February 12, 1968, General and Migration
Department, Commonwealth Office, February 14, 1968, Praful Patel to
Prime Minister Wilson, February 25, 1968, Commonwealth Office to
British High Commission, Delhi, November 30, 1967, and discussions
between British High Commissioner New Delhi and T. N. Kaul,
Secretary External Affairs, February 1968. See also HO/344/322, TNA:
 Notes to Pages 287–290 355

Pamphlet by Association of British Citizens, entitled “British Citizens of

Asian Origin,” Nairobi, October 1968.
56. FCO/37/19 and 31/251, TNA: Commonwealth Office to British High
Commissions, October 6, 1967, and Edward Peck- Commonwealth Office
correspondence, January 9 and February 14, 1968.
57. Mss Afr s.594, Convention of Associations Papers, RHL: Lecture
entitled “The Thermopylae of Africa: Kenya Colony’s responsibility in
the confl ict of the primary races: The Asian Problem,” n.d., no author,
ca. early 1923.
58. Enoch Powell, April 20, 1968, Wolverhampton, in Reflections of a
Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bewell
Publications, 1991), 373–379. See also FCO/31/251 and 50/43, TNA:
Edward Peck to Commonwealth Office, January 9, 1968, note by officials,
October 16, 1967, Edward Peck to Commonwealth Office, 14 February
1968, and minutes of meeting of Home Affairs Committee, October 19,
1967.
59. James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), 265.
60. FCO/41/790, TNA: Home Office note, “The Need to Legislate in 1968:
Social Consequences of Immigration,” n.d.
61. FCO/50/46, 45 and 31/252, TNA: Note of meeting between Kenyatta and
Malcolm MacDonald, February 19, 1968, statement by J. N. Karanja in
London, February 19, 1968, Daily Nation, February 8, 1968, and British
High Commission Nairobi to Commonwealth Office, February 9, 1968.
62. David Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, the State and Development
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 46–47; FCO/31/51 and 50/43
and 44, TNA: FCO–Home Office–British High Commission
correspondence 1968–1969, General and Migration Department,
Commonwealth Office brief for Commonwealth Secretary, October 24,
1967, and Commonwealth Office to Home Office, December 29, 1967.
Between 1962 and 1969 Nairobi saw a significant drop in the number of
Indians resident there from 86,922 to 67,189. Kenya Population Census,
1962; Kenya Population Census, 1969.
63. FCO/31/252 and 251, 37/19, 50/45, TNA: Callaghan parliamentary
statement, February 22, 1968, Home Office note, September 13, 1967,
Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Annex,
February 12, 1968, and minutes of Cabinet meeting, February 15, 1968.
64. FCO/50/45 and 31/252, TNA: Memorandum by Secretary of State for
Commonwealth Affairs, February 12, 1968, and minutes of Cabinet
meeting, February 22, 1968. See also Randall Hansen, “The Kenyan
Asians, British Politics, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1968,”
Historical Journal 42, no. 3 (1999): 809–834.
356 Notes to Pages 291–294

65. FCO/50/45, 31/523, and 41/790, TNA: Memorandum by the Secretary of

State for the Home Department, February 12, 1968, Callaghan speech
opening the debate on the Commonwealth Immigration Bill, February
27, 1968, and Maudling speech during second reading of Race Relations
Bill, April 23, 1968. See also Callaghan, Time and Chance, 266.
66. HO/376/140, 158, FCO/50/79, TNA: Note by Chairman, Committee on
Immigrations and Assimilation, Home Office, April 1968, Home
Secretary’s note on Race Relations in Great Britain, September 1967;
Race Relations Board note, May 16, 1966; Home Secretary speech, May
23, 1966, and “Report of the Race Relations Board for 1966–67.”
67. FCO/31/252, TNA: Kenneth Matiba at East Africa and Mauritius
Association meeting, February 16, 1968.
68. FCO/50/46 and 31/351, TNA: Statement of Ministry of Commerce and
Industry, February 12, 1968.
69. FCO/50/46, 31/250, and 252, TNA: Commonwealth Office note,
February 22, 1968, quoted in Sunday Nation, October 2, 1967, British
High Commission to Commonwealth Office, October 23, 1967, and
Kenyatta’s speech, February 26, 1968. See also H1/1012/61/68, NAI: IHC
reports, August and November 1968.
70. FCO/50/46 and 31/351, TNA: Statements of Ministry of Commerce and
Industry and Moi, February 12, 1968.
71. FCO/31/42, 379, 251 and 381, TNA: British High Commission to
Commercial Relations and Export Department, Board of Trade,
London, January 27, 1969, J. S. Arthur to Commonwealth Office,
February 13–14 and July 24, 1968, and Kibaki statement, Voice of Kenya,
March 26, 1969.
72. FCO/31/379, TNA: British High Commission to Commercial Relations
and Export Department, Board of Trade, London, January 27, 1969.
73. See Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, 59–65, and Paul Vandenberg, The
Asian-African Divide: Analyzing Institutions and Accumulation in
Kenya (London: Routledge, 2006), 119.
74. H1/1012/61/68, NAI: IHC report, November 1968.
75. Kenya Population Census, 1969; FCO/50/236, and 31/258, TNA: UK
Citizens Committee to Callaghan, May 29, 1968, and Martin Ennals
independent survey.
76. FCO/31/258, TNA: Martin Ennals independent survey, June 1968, and
Vincent Cable, “WhitherKenya Emigrants” (pamphlet), July 18, 1969.
77. H1/1012/61/68, NAI: IHC report, July 1968.
78. CK/3/47, TNA: “How Asians from Kenya Settled in Britain,” Community
Relations Commission survey conducted in Leicester, Brent, Ealing, and
Southall, 1972; author interview with Gujarati women from Kenya, all of
 Notes to Pages 294–300 357

whom took up factory work through job training centers set up by the
local authorities, Neasden, June 2008.
79. Author interviews with Dilbagh Channa, Southall, June 24, 2008 and
Bhadra Patel, Wembley, June 2008. See also CK/3/47, TNA: “How Asians
from Kenya Settled in Britain.”
80. ACC/1888/205, London Metropolitan Archives: Statement by Robert
Carr, Home Secretary, on 18 August 1972. Quoted in Douglas Tible,
“The Ugandan Asian Crisis” (pamphlet), 1972.

E P I LO G U E

1. Jatinder Verma, Journey to the West, Tara Arts, London 2011. I am

grateful to Jatinder Verma for providing me with a copy of this play.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. M. G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Toronto: Anchor
Canada, 2008), x–xii, 4.
6. See, for instance, Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the
Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice 10, no. 3 (1996): 421–447; Amitav
Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Public Culture 2, no. 1 (1989):
73–78; S. Shukla, “Locations for South Asian Diaspora,” Annual Review
of Anthropology 30 (2001): 551–596; Roger Ballard, ed., Desh Pardesh:
The South Asian Presence in Britain (London: C. Hurst, 1994); Peter van
der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South
Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995);
Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec, eds., South Asians
Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Judith Brown, Global South Asians: Introducing the
Modern Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Modern Nation,” in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge, 1990), 291–320; D. Schnapper, “Meaning and Usefulness of
Diaspora as a Concept,” Diaspora 8, no. 3 (1999): 225–254; Partha
Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text 56 (1998):
57–69.
7. See, for example, The Book of Secrets (New York: Picador USA, 1994);
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: Doubleday Canada,
2003); The Gunny Sack (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 1989); The Magic of
Saida (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012); Uhuru Street (London:
Heinemann International, 1992).
358 Notes to Page 301

8. “Ethnic Affiliation,” compiled from a summary of the 2009 census, Kenya

National Bureau of Statistics, www.knbs.or.ke/index.php?option=com
_content&view=article&id=151:ethnic-affiliation&catid=112&Itemid=638.
9. Abdul Haji NTV interview, http://ntv.nation.co.ke/news2/topheadlines
/son-of-former-minister-abdul-haji-recounts-the-westgate-attack.
 Archives Consulted

I N D I A O F F I C E L I B R A RY C O L L E C T I O N S ( I O R ) , LO N D O N

Economic Department Records, including files from Industries and Overseas,

Commerce and Revenue, Economic and Overseas
Public and Judicial Departmental Papers Collections, c. 1930–1947
Private Office Papers, c. 1904–1947
Sir John Walton Papers

T H E N AT I O N A L A RC H I V E S , P U B L I C R E C O R D S O F F I C E ( T N A ) , LO N D O N

Colonial Office Papers

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Papers
Dominions and Commonwealth Relations Office Papers
Home Office Papers
Community Relations Commissions
Moving Here online archives, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+
/http:/www.movinghere.org.uk

T H E LO N D O N M E T RO P O L I TA N A RC H I V E S , LO N D O N

London Council of Social Ser vice and Related Organizations

S C H O O L O F O R I E N TA L A N D A F R I C A N S T U D I E S L I B R A RY ( S OA L),
LO N D O N

International Missionary Council Africa Papers

359
360 Archives Consulted

B O D L E I A N L I B R A RY O F C O M M O N W E A LT H A N D A F R I C A N
S T U D I E S AT R H O D E S H O U S E ( R H L) , OX F O R D

Lugard Papers
Convention of Associations Papers
Charles Kenneth Archer Papers
Sir Robert Thorne Coryndon Papers
Fabian Colonial Bureau Papers
European Elected Members Organisation Papers
Frank Derek Corfield Papers
End of Empire Interviews

K E N YA N AT I O N A L A RC H I V E S ( K N A ) , N A I RO B I

Asian Records, including:

East African Indian National Congress Papers
Shams-ud-Deen Papers
Zafr-ud-Deen Papers
Kenya Freedom Party Papers
Channan Singh Papers

U N I V E R S I T Y O F N A I RO B I L I B R A RY ( U N L) , N A I RO B I

Makhan Singh Papers

N AT I O N A L A RC H I V E S O F I N D I A ( N A I ) , D E L H I

Government of India, Department of Commerce and Emigration, 1905–1920

Government of India, Department of Education, Health and Land, Overseas
Ministry of External Affairs, Overseas and Commonwealth Relations
Department

N E H R U M E M O R I A L M U S E U M A N D L I B R A RY,
( N M M L) T E E N M U RT I H O U S E , D E L H I

Diwan Chamanlal Papers

N E W S PA P E R S

East African Chronicle

East African Standard
The Indian Voice of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar
 Acknowledgments

This book has emerged from over a decade of learning and unlearning, curiosity
and intransigence, verbosity and reticence. The enthusiasm, gentle prodding,
and good humor of my family, friends, advisors, and colleagues supported me
through these transitions and shaped this book in significant ways.
I’ve been lucky to have studied under the most inspiring and supportive scholars
at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, the University of Cambridge, and Har-
vard University, whose pursuit of excellence and love of history and teaching made
my student years challenging and stimulating. Through examples of their own me-
ticulous research and as deeply engaged interlocutors in seminars and supervisions,
Sunil Amrith, Sugata Bose, Richard Drayton, Caroline Elkins, William Gould,
John Lonsdale, and Sivasankara Menon taught me to think historically and write
clearly. For encouraging me to explore South Asian history beyond its borders I am
especially thankful to Sugata Bose. The influence of his scholarship is evident in
this book, and I am very grateful for his boundless generosity, empathy, and sound
advice. His unwavering support of graduate students and junior scholars is equaled
by his championship of women in academia, for which I am deeply indebted.
The idea for this book was sparked by a course I took in Cambridge—John
Lonsdale’s special subject, “Uhuru na Kenyatta.” It was an honor to be introduced
to Kenyan history by him. I completed this journey at the Department of His-
tory, University of Wisconsin–Madison, my intellectual home from 2010–2013,
where my project grew into a book in the company of inspiring colleagues, many
of whom work on transnational history. Jim Sweet’s infectious energy and excite-
ment infused new vision into this project. As my mentor, colleague, friend, and
historian par excellence, I thank Jim for his close reading of drafts of this book
and other articles; the generosity with which he shares his time, wisdom, and
conversations; and for urging me to take the more difficult road to see this work

361
362 Acknowledgments

through. My almost daily exchanges with Neil Kodesh deepened my understanding

of African history, and I am grateful to have benefited from his unassuming bril-
liance. My colleagues at the History Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology cheered me on to the finish line and tolerated my disappearance into the
book during my first semester there. I am especially thankful to Will Broadhead,
Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Malick Ghachem, Chris Leighton, Jeff Ravel, Emma Teng,
and Craig Wilder, who helped me navigate new beginnings.
It took many exchanges and questions for the idea to grow into a research project
and eventually a book. I am grateful for the feedback and insight of Seema Alavi,
Tariq Omar Ali, Neilesh Bose, James Brennan, Antoinette Burton, Ned Burtz,
Shelly Chan, Lalita du Perron, Shiraz Durrani, Dave Eaton, Mark R. Frost,
Durba Ghosh, Jonathon Glassman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Ayesha Jalal, Perben Kaar-
sholm, Vipool Kalyani, Kevin Kenny, Pier Larson, Pedro Machado, Florencia
Mallon, Kris Manjrapa, Johan Mathew, Nathaniel Mathews, David McDonald,
Neeti Nair, Anil Nauriya, Gijsbert Oonk, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Zarina Patel,
Zahid Rajan, Hollis Robbins, Sharmila Sen, Mitra Sharafi, Nico Slate, Jon Soske,
Gaby Spiegel, Julie Stephens, Robert Travers, Andre Wink, and John Zavos.
I especially thank Bilal Butt and Myles Osborne for patiently and promptly an-
swering my many questions about Kenyan history with humor and intellectual
depth from airports and game parks around the world. I am also grateful to the
organizers and audience for the feedback I received from my talks at the Mellon
Seminar and Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University; the Center
for South Asia, African Studies Program and Center for the Humanities, Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison; the University of Witwatersrand; Indiana University–
Bloomington; the Radcliffe Institute; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library; the
Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, Tufts University; the African
studies workshop, Northwestern University; the Diaspora Seminar, Boston Col-
lege; the South Asian Studies Council, Yale University; and the History Depart-
ment, Delhi University, where I presented several iterations of this book. The dili-
gence and reliability of my excellent research assistants Nicholas Abbott, H.
William Warner, Nilufer Duygu Eriten, and Alison Laurence were invaluable as I
prepared the manuscript for submission. I am extremely grateful to the two anon-
ymous reviewers whose in-depth engagement with the manuscript and provoca-
tive comments spurred me to confront the implications of my research and hone
the arguments presented in this book. I am particularly indebted to my editor,
Andrew Kinney, for his enthusiasm for this project and timely reminders to focus
on the story I wanted to tell. His patience and guidance helped steady my gaze as
I finalized the book. I also thank Andrew and Edward Wade’s teams for their won-
derful editorial and production work.
Funding from the South Asia Initiative, Committee on African Studies, the
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Center for European Studies and
 Acknowledgments 363

the Department of History, Harvard University; the Center for South Asia, Af-
rican Studies Program, International Institute, and the Graduate School, Uni-
versity of Wisconsin–Madison; and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social
Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made possible several re-
search trips to India, Britain, and Kenya to conduct research for this book. I am
grateful for the knowledge and help of the staff at the National Archives of
India, New Delhi; the National Archives of Kenya, Nairobi; the University of Nai-
robi Library; the British Library, London; the National Archives, Kew; and
Rhodes House Library, Oxford, who made my time there very productive. I also
thank the Cartography Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which
made the two maps included in this book; Dr. Sudha Mehta, who translated A
Time of Emergency from Gujarati to English (used in Chapter 4); Shiraz Dur-
rani for giving me this script; and Jatinder Verma for providing me with a copy
of Journey to the West. I am grateful to the following journal publishers for giving
me the opportunity to develop my ideas on themes discussed in Chapters 1, 2,
and 3 in earlier articles: “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The
Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya ca. 1930–1950,” American Historical
Review, 116(40), 2011, and “Empire, Race, and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s
Contested Public Political Sphere from 1919–1923,” AFRICA: The Journal of the
International African Institute, 81(1), 2011.
The solitude of research and writing was tempered by the solidarity of friends
whose companionship has sustained me over time and place. Some are fellow aca-
demics on whom I rely to understand without explanation. For speaking the same
language that doesn’t get lost in translation and expanding my horizons beyond
the parochial concerns of my own research with their work, I thank Chanchal
Dadlani, Antara Datta, Deepa Dhume Dutta, Prithviraj Dutta, Miranda Johnson,
Allon Klein, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Jie Li, Leah Mirakhor, Rohan Narayana
Murty, Penny Sinanoglou, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Gitanjali Surendran, and
Daniel Ussishkin. In Boston and Madison, as we celebrated and commiserated
professional and personal highs and lows, they have been my anchor, my family
for which I am grateful. Others have provided much needed respite from the aca-
demic world. Anant Atal, Kelly Jo Bahry, Ashwin and Ambika Batra, Anjana Batra,
Ashima Chander, Radhika Kak, Aftab Kaushik, Roohia Sidhu Klein, Sunil
Lakhani, Dhruv Menon, Shaneel Mukerji, Kamana Muralidharan, Rushad and
Kate Nanavatty, Asin Nurani, Amy Rogers, Suraj Shah, Arjun and Mallika
Singh, John Thangaraj, Nivedita Tiwari, and Suparna Kapoor van Noord gave me
a home away from home on my research trips to London and Nairobi. Those in
Delhi have never let me feel the passage of time or the many miles between us.
The ten years that it took to see this book to fruition coincided with the ex-
pansion of my family. Through personal example rather than instruction, their
strength and individuality have shaped my personal and intellectual life in
364 Acknowledgments

fundamental ways. My father Mani Shankar Aiyar’s stubborn adherence to his

principles and refusal to compromise his integrity have served as my moral com-
pass. My mother Suneet Mani Aiyar’s ability to see deep meaning in the everyday
and her unbounded energy for life have brought balance to our family, and I as-
pire to the elegance and ease with which she celebrates accomplishments and
overcomes obstacles. I learned to laugh, listen, argue, dream, and do from my for-
midable and impassioned sisters, Suranya and Yamini. The debates and monologues
conducted at our family dining table have taught me more about life, history, inter-
pretation, and argumentation than any classroom across three continents. I am for-
ever indebted to Yamini for insisting that I go to America for graduate school and to
Suranya, who reminds me every day of how important it is to be on the right side of
history. Together with Uday and Adarsh they have given me two nieces and a
nephew—Uma, Kabir, and Rukmini. It is to them that I keep returning home to
Delhi.
For someone who doesn’t believe in soul mates, it is ironic that I found mine
living across the hall from me on my very first day in graduate school. For his
disarming ability to love and forgive, mischievous desire to challenge with his sharp
wit and keen intelligence, and exasperating obsession with the mundane func-
tioning of our everyday life, especially optimizing my travel options, I am grateful
to Vipin Narang. Not only has he indulged the Aiyars and our opinionated
eccentricities with humor and a fistful of salt, the Narangs—Inderpal, Sushil,
Sameer, Neha, and Saanya—have ensured that I never feel bereft of family al-
though my sisters and parents live thousands of miles away. Over the past ten
years, Vipin and I crossed many milestones in sync as we started our first jobs
and published our first books. But it is in welcoming our first child, Ishaan, and
seeing in him our universe that we have taken our most meaningful step
together.
My family in Boston, Delhi, and California is a reminder of the expanse of the
world and intimacy of our connected lives. This book is dedicated to them.
 Index
Achariar, Sitaram, 143
Action Group, 226
Adalja, K. V., 141, 252–253
Adamji, Ebrahimji N., 52–53
Africa for Africans slogan, 219, 229, 267
Africanization, 256, 259, 262, 263–277,
276, 297; and exodus of Indians, 283,
284, 285, 288, 294
African Workers Federation, 139, 144,
160, 161, 173
Aga Khan, 40, 80, 81, 82, 146, 149, 152, 281
Ahmed, Haroun, 142, 143, 144, 145, 188
Ainley, Chief Justice, 271–272
Ainsworth, J. D., 37, 38
Alibhai, Adamjee, 37
Allied and Transport Workers’ Union, 139
All-India Muslim League, 47, 65
All-Indian National Congress, 120, 135,
148
All India Radio, 182, 187, 201
America of the Hindu, 8, 24–25, 33, 34,
48, 65, 70
Amin, Idi, 271, 294
Amin, S. G., 141, 142, 145, 163, 188; in
Legislative Council, 149, 154, 183; in
Congress, 154, 158, 183, 216; and Patel,
154; introducing Pant to Kenyatta, 155;
on Mau Mau rebellion, 183; and
constitutional negotiations, 224, 237,
244, 258; on Africanization initiatives,
267–268; and Sheth deportation, 273;
on Kenyan citizenship, 281
Andrews, C. F., 78, 85–86, 94, 107–108,
113, 126
365
Archer, Kenneth, 81, 102, 103, 104
Assimilation, 175, 298, 300
Awori, W. W. W., 168, 170, 172, 182, 186,
188
Bakash, Alla, 147, 152
Baring, Evelyn, 179, 186, 188, 189, 190,
192, 193, 195, 207, 208
Barter system for trade, 37, 52, 75
Basheer-ud-Deen, Mahmudah, 53, 201
Beauttah, James, 142, 156–157, 173
Bharaj, Jaswant Singh, 195, 197
Bill of Rights (Kenyan constitution), 267,
269
Blundell, Michael, 228, 229, 236, 238
Boers, 35, 38, 46, 49, 68, 106
Bose, Subhas Chandra, 148, 204
Bowring, Governor, 57, 64, 66, 70, 85, 89
Boycotts: of Legislative Council, 121, 125,
229; of Indian businesses, 171, 172,
178, 212, 251, 259, 275
Britain: migration of Indians to, 277–295,
298, 301–302; citizenship in, 278, 279,
285–286, 289–290; immigration and
nationality laws in, 278, 285–288,
289–290, 292, 293; multiculturalism in,
290–291, 295, 298–299, 302
British East Africa Company, 23, 25, 26, 45
British East India Company, 3
British Indian Army, 6, 31
Callaghan, James, 287, 289–290, 293
Central Muslim Association of Kenya
(CMA), 149–155, 183
366 Index
Certificates of permanent residence in
Kenya, 279, 283
Chamanlal, Dewan, 188, 189, 190,
191–192, 193, 210, 211
Chania African Dairy, 274
Chelmsford, Viscount, 80, 82
Chiefs, 9, 42, 44, 96; distrust of Thuku,
97, 100; and Mau Mau rebellion, 179,
193
Cholmondeley, Hugh, third Baron
Delamere, 35, 36, 40, 57–58, 77, 81,
102, 103
Churchill, Winston, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48,
81–82, 94, 99, 100, 102; and Wood-
Winterton Agreement, 103, 106; and
Indian immigrants, 105
Circumcision of Kikuyu women, 131
Citizenship, 294; of Indians, 3, 20, 234,
235–237, 255, 270, 276, 277, 278–281,
283, 285–286, 301; Kenyan, 20, 233,
276, 278–281, 283, 286, 301; Kenyatta
on, 274, 277; British postcolonial, 278,
279, 285–286, 289–290; dual, 278, 285;
revocation of, in Kenya, 279, 280, 281;
non-belongers category in Britain, 289
Civil ser vice jobs: of Indians, 9, 23, 24,
42, 127, 132, 133; racial hierarchy in, 9,
222, 231; of Africans, 75, 139
Colonial Times newspaper, 143, 144,
148–149, 264, 272
Colonists’ Association, 35, 37, 38, 39,
40, 44
Coloured, use of term for Indians, 68, 69
Common franchise, 76–77, 103–104, 232,
236, 237
Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962),
285, 289
Commonwealth Immigration Bill (1968),
290
Communal franchise, 70, 76, 80, 107–108,
218; Devonshire Declaration on,
107–108, 120; opposition to, 163–164;
constitutional negotiations on, 236, 237,
255
Communism, 158, 166, 266
Community Relations Commissions in
Britain, 294
Compulsory Ser vice Bill for Indians, 137
Convention of Associations, 66, 88, 103,
104, 105, 106
Coolie labor, 26, 28–29, 31, 41, 48
Corfield Report, 197
Coryndon, Robert, 106–107
Cotton, 26, 30, 33, 112, 113; labor
required for, 40–41, 44; exports to
India, 73
Council of Ministers, 224, 227
Coutts Commission, 225, 227
Currency, 31, 87–90; Indian rupee as, 5,
37, 73, 74, 87; absence of, 52; shilling as,
74, 87–89; and trade in African
agricultural products, 112; in Mau Mau
rebellion, 196–197
Daily Chronicle, 143, 144–145, 157, 161,
181, 213, 264, 272
Dar, Qayyam, 198–199, 200
Darookhanawala, Sorabji M., 52–53, 59
Das, Mangal, 63, 64, 79, 81, 84, 90; and
Thuku, 94, 97, 101; on African and
Indian relations, 100
Dass, Isher, 124, 125, 126, 132, 133, 141;
and Kamba protest, 136–137; assassina-
tion of, 137; joining British war efforts,
137
Decolonization: legislative and constitu-
tional negotiations on, 218–260
Deportation of Indians from Kenya (after
independence), 273–274, 280
Desai, Manilal, 63, 64, 69, 77, 79, 80, 81,
83, 84, 89, 90, 95, 100–101, 103,
107–108, 121, 204; East African
Chronicle newspaper of, 77, 83, 90, 93,
94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 143; and Thuku,
93, 94, 101, 121
de Souza, Fitz: and Mau Mau rebellion,
182, 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 214; and
legislative and constitutional negotia-
tions, 226, 237, 238; in Kenya Freedom
Party, 237, 264; in Kenyatta govern-
ment, 264; on Africanization initiatives,
267–268
Devonshire Declaration, 107–108, 114,
119–120, 125
Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini ya Jesu
Kristo, 161, 163, 166
 Index
Du Bois, W. E. B., 84
Dukkas and dukkawallahs, 16–18, 23, 24,
37, 73, 75, 76, 87, 89, 90, 97, 104, 105,
110, 111, 113, 115–117; on railway line,
5, 114; in credit and supply network, 5,
11, 73, 74, 88; African customers of, 16,
17, 18, 76, 89–90, 97–98, 113–114;
products sold by, 73, 75, 104, 111, 113,
169; in reserves, 73, 75, 115; govern-
ment regulation of, 111, 112, 115, 276;
African competition with, 168–173; in
Mau Mau rebellion, 209–212; and
decolonization, 251, 279, 281; African-
ization initiatives, 267–268; in
immigration to Britain, 292. See also
Indian businesses
East African Association, 74, 91–96, 99
East African Chronicle, 77, 83, 89, 90, 93,
94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 143
East African Currency Board, 87, 88
East African Indian National Congress:
formation of (1914), 54, 55; on
highlands issue, 55, 62, 103, 121, 132,
136, 138; on racial segregation and
inequality, 55, 56, 62, 71, 77, 83, 84, 93;
on common and communal franchise,
77, 103, 163–164; on kipande system,
138; and Kenya African Union,
138–142, 155, 157, 158, 159, 163–167,
171, 172–173, 174, 180, 181–183, 191;
Muslims in, 146–147, 149; celebration of
independence in India, 148; and Central
Muslim Association of Kenya, 149, 151,
152, 153; Muslim opposition to, 149,
150, 152; opposition to religiously and
racially defined electorates, 154, 155;
and economic inequalities, 171–174; and
Mau Mau rebellion, 180–189, 195, 197,
200, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213, 217,
219–220; renaming as Kenya Indian
Congress (1952), 183; Mangat as
president of, 214, 217; constitutional and
legislative negotiations, 219, 226, 233,
245; dissolution of (1962), 238; historical
records of, 271
East Africa Protectorate, 5, 29, 32, 41
East African Standard, 105, 242, 285
367
East African Trade Union, 127, 128, 130,
135, 195. See also Singh, Makhan; Strikes
East African Trade Union Congress, 160,
161, 162, 166, 173, 178. See also Singh,
Makhan; Strikes
East Africa Star newspaper, 152
Economic Commission Report (1919),
57–58, 64, 67
Economy, 2–3, 8, 16–20, 22–23, 108, 117;
racial hierarchy in, 9–10, 16–20,
132–133, 171–172; civilizing claims of
Indians in, 17, 19–20, 31, 116, 175, 248,
253–260
Elections: Lyttelton Plan on, 224–227;
one man, one vote policy in, 233, 234,
237, 238, 271. See also Common
franchise; Communal franchise;
Hindus; Legislative Council; Muslims
Elgin, Lord, 38, 45, 77
Eliot, Charles, 32, 33, 34, 36, 70
Emergency: detention camps, 180, 186,
189, 192, 201, 220, 239; civil liberties,
183, 186–187, 189–190; Asian call-up,
197, 207, 208, 210. See also Chamanlal,
Dewan; East African Indian National
Congress; Indian High Commission;
Mau Mau rebellion; Pant, Apa
Employment: of Indians, 9–10, 23–24, 42,
58, 72, 119, 126–127, 132–133; racial
hierarchy in, 9–10, 132–133, 135, 231;
of Africans, 75, 109, 132–133, 139; and
legislative and constitutional negotia-
tions, 231, 233, 257–258, 259; in
decolonization and independence,
266–267; of Indian immigrants in
Britain, 293–294
European and African Traders Associa-
tion, 104
Farming: in highlands, 8, 18, 24, 34–36;
by Africans, 9, 36, 40, 41, 109–112, 115,
126, 138, 140; Indians prevented from,
9; labor required for, 9, 36, 40–41, 44;
land ownership for, 9, 15, 34–36; by
Indians, 23, 31, 33–34, 48, 126; village
community system in, 34, 39; by
squatters, 211. See also Highlands;
Land ownership
368
Federation of Indian Chambers of
Commerce and Industry (FICCI), 114,
121, 127, 129, 207, 223, 256, 260
First World War, 59, 61, 63, 65, 124
Florin coin, 87–89. See also Currency
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 4, 6, 38,
50, 68, 71–72, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86,
124–125, 148–149, 204; nonviolent
protests of, 44, 124, 204; agitation
against Black Act, 46; Hind Swaraj, 53;
and Khilafat/noncooperation move-
ment, 79; and Thuku, 94, 101; Quit
India movement of, 148
Gandhi Memorial Academy, 156
Garvey, Marcus, 83
Gathani, Bachulal, 207, 223
Gautama, R. C., 145, 154, 191, 256, 258
General China (Waruhiu Itote), 191, 198,
200, 211–212
German East Africa, Indian settlement
proposed in, 65, 66, 67
Ghadr Party, 61–62; and deportations and
hangings in Kenya, 62
Gichuru, James, 138–139, 141, 158, 168,
170, 172, 178, 238
Githaka deeds, 92, 102
Greater India, idea of, 6, 12, 14
Grogan, Ewart Scott, 40, 43, 57–58, 67, 77
Guests, Indians in Africa as, 174, 211, 212,
261–262
Habari za Dunia (News of the World),
143
Harambee, 32, 263, 264, 265, 266
Harcourt, Viscount, 55
Hassan, S. G., 207–208, 212, 236, 237,
245
Highlands: European farmers in, 8, 18,
24, 34–36, 39, 177–178; Indians
excluded from, 9, 24, 34, 35–36, 38, 39,
55, 120; African claims to, 14, 15, 131,
132; as white man’s country, 34, 57;
squatters in, 36, 48, 140, 177–178, 264,
265; Devonshire Declaration on,
107–108, 120; and Mau Mau rebellion,
177–178, 179, 184, 205, 208, 211;
legislative and constitutional negotia-
Index
tions on, 220–222, 228–231, 234;
resettlement plan of Kenyatta,
264–265. See also Farming; Land
ownership
Highlands Policy Ordinance (1938), 136
Hindus, 14, 47, 108; political representa-
tion of, 14; population in Kenya, 119,
121, 150; and Muslim community, 147,
149, 150–154; Muslim opposition to
domination by, 150, 151. See also
Muslims; Pakistan
Home Guard, 180, 198, 207, 208, 210, 211
Hooper, H. D., 95, 102, 113
Hut taxes, 48, 74, 75, 89, 90, 91, 108, 126
Immigration laws: of Kenya, 276, 277,
279, 283, 285, 291, 292; of Britain, 278,
285–288, 289–290, 292, 293; of India,
288; British quotas in, 289–290, 293
Imperial citizens and citizenship, 12, 46,
47, 50, 51, 54, 59, 63, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74,
78, 83, 93, 124, 125, 230
Imperial Indian Citizenship Association,
77–78
Inamdar, I. T., 237, 242, 258
Indentured laborers, 4, 11, 28, 41, 44, 46,
127; railway workers as, 5, 23, 28–29, 30
Independence of India (1947), 119, 148,
155, 278; KAU and Congress sup-
porting, 166–167; Nehru on, 263
India-African Council, 191
Indian Associations, 94, 108, 149; of
Nairobi, 63, 79, 90, 94, 124; of Kisumu,
66; of Mombasa, 82, 148; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 206–207, 210; in Nyeri, 243,
244
Indian businesses, 4, 5, 8, 16–20, 38,
113–117, 301; precolonial, 5, 8, 22–23,
48, 121; trade networks of, 11, 22,
72–74, 111, 113, 116; African customers
of, 17, 18, 67–68, 75–76, 84–85, 89–90,
97–98, 113–114, 116, 169–171; price
negotiations in, 17, 75, 113, 116,
170–171; in Mau Mau rebellion, 19,
195–202, 207, 208–213, 226–227; on
railway line, 23, 29, 37, 51–52; of
Jeevanjee, 25, 26, 29, 42, 43, 54; of
Visram, 25–26, 29, 35, 37, 39–40, 42,
 Index
63; currency in, 37, 87–90; profits of,
38, 76, 98; African competition with,
58, 67, 169, 171; in reserves, 73, 75, 110,
115; boycotts of, 104, 171, 172, 178, 212,
251, 259, 275; European competition
with, 104–105, 113; purchasing African
crops, 110–112; government regulation
of, 111–112, 167; union efforts on
working conditions in, 128–129, 130,
134; accumulation of wealth, 170, 172,
254; food prices of, 170–171; Kenya
African Union concerns about, 170–174;
and decolonization, 222–224, 231–232,
233, 250–253, 256–258, 259; in Indian
nationalistic claims, 253–260; capitalist
policies of, 266; Africanization
initiatives, 267–270, 271, 276; Kenyatta
policies on, 267–271, 273–277; and
deportations of Indians, 273–274;
exodus of, 288–289, 291–292. See also
Boycotts; Currency; Dukkas and
dukkawallahs
Indian High Commission, 157, 185–186,
188, 192, 193, 195. See also Pant, Apa
Indian Overseas Association, 78, 107
Indian Penal Code, 36–37
Indian Retail Traders Association of
Kenya Colony, 207
India Office, 82, 103, 107, 113
Indo-African Literary Society, 156
Interracial marriage, 11, 297
Jallianwallah Bagh, 65–66, 79, 82, 83,
124, 127, 187, 214
Jamidar, Arvind, 188, 214, 218
Jeevanjee, Alibhai Mulla, 22, 25, 26, 31,
35, 42–51, 56, 58, 61, 63, 68, 76, 77, 81,
84–87, 89, 90, 94, 107, 121, 124; as
subimperialist, 24, 50, 86; businesses
of, 25, 29, 42, 43, 54; in Uganda
Railway project, 29, 43; in Legislative
Council, 43, 45, 55; and East African
Indian National Congress, 54; on
Indian colonization of German East
Africa, 65; and Milner decision, 76, 81,
82, 84
Jeevanjee, Tayabali, 54–55
Jeevanjee Market, 42, 43–44, 49, 56
369
Jenkins, Roy, 286, 287
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 146, 148–149,
151. See also Hindus; Muslims;
Pakistan
Johnston, Harry, 24, 32–33, 34, 44
Kaggia, Bildad, 139, 140, 159, 160, 163;
and Mau Mau rebellion, 178, 179,
181–182, 190, 203; and decolonization,
228; and Kenyatta, 264–265, 266, 273;
in Lumumba Institute, 265, 271;
socialist policies of, 265, 266; on Pinto
assassination, 272
Kamau, Johnstone, 131. See also Kenyatta,
Jomo
Kangethe, Joseph, 133, 142
Kapila, A. R., 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 214
Kapila, Neera Kent, 202
Kariuki, Jesse, 133, 136, 142, 160, 188
Kenya African Chamber of Commerce
and Industry, 250
Kenya African Democratic Union
(KADU), 235, 245, 254, 264
Kenya African National Union (KANU),
235, 238, 245, 251, 254, 258, 259, 265,
266; and KFP, 238; on Africanization
initiatives, 268; and deportation of
Indians, 273, 274; and Indians, 280;
and national loyalty, 280; and political
donations, 292–293
Kenya African Union (KAU), 138–145,
155–159, 163–176, 264; and East
African Indian National Congress,
138–142, 155, 157, 158, 159, 163–167,
171, 172–173, 174, 180, 181–183, 191;
and economic conflicts with Indians,
170–174; and Mau Mau rebellion, 177,
179, 180, 181–186, 190, 191, 195, 202,
205–206, 210, 211, 218; ban on, 182,
183, 201; and Indian High Commission,
192; and decolonization, 220
Kenya Freedom Party (KFP), 237–238,
242, 245, 264; undiluted democracy
policy of, 237, 242, 258; merger with
KANU, 238; socialist policies of, 266
Kenya Immigration Bill (1967), 276, 277,
279, 283, 285, 291
Kenya Independence Movement, 229, 230
370 Index
Kenya Land Commission, 131
Kenya Muslim League, 195, 258
Kenya Police Reserves (KPR), 186, 197,
201–202, 212, 213
Kenyatta, Jomo, 263–277; as prime
minister, 32, 191, 269, 271, 275; in
Kikuyu Central Association, 131, 132,
135, 138, 159; and Singh, 135, 139, 159,
166, 178, 203, 264, 280; in Kenya
African Union, 138, 139–140, 141, 143,
155, 156, 158, 163, 166, 174, 177, 178,
179, 264; on land rights, 138, 140; and
Pant, 155–158; on boycott of Indian
businesses, 171, 172, 178; and Indians,
172–174, 262; arrest and detention of,
177, 179, 182, 187–188, 202, 238, 245;
and Mau Mau rebellion, 177, 178, 179,
185, 187–191, 193, 210, 211, 263; legal
defense of, 187–191; and decoloniza-
tion, 228, 238, 245, 258–259; in Kenya
African National Union, 235; one-party
system of, 264; and emigration of
Indians, 288, 289, 291–292
Kenya Youth Conference, 142
Khaderbhoy, M. T., 47
Khilafat/noncooperation movement, 79,
80, 82, 95
Kiano, Julius, 218, 228, 230, 231, 232,
245, 264, 276
Kibaki, Mwai, 263–264
Kibos, Indian agricultural settlement at,
33, 48, 297
Kikuyu, 10, 40, 53, 69, 74, 75, 98, 131,
138, 156, 174, 218, 228; in highlands,
36, 120, 140, 178; as squatters, 36, 140,
178, 211, 229, 264; and Thuku, 95,
96–97, 99; and land ownership, 96, 110,
131, 138, 139; oaths taken by, 177, 178,
179, 180, 185, 189, 198, 200; and Mau
Mau rebellion, 177–217, 218; Home
Guard, 180, 198, 218; and legislative
and constitutional negotiations, 228,
229, 235
Kikuyu Association, 91, 96, 97, 99
Kikuyu Central Association (KCA),
130–136, 137, 159, 188
Kimathi, Dedan, 199, 200
Kipande laws, 91, 92, 126, 138
Kirk, John, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 43
Kiswahili, as national language, 175
Koinange, Chief, 96, 97, 138, 141, 155,
157, 158, 184
Koinange, Peter, 141, 142, 155, 157, 158,
171, 264
Kubai, Fred, 163, 165, 166, 167; in labor
union movement, 139, 140, 159, 160, 162;
and Mau Mau rebellion, 178, 179, 182,
188, 190, 197, 203; in Study Circle, 182
Kumar, Krishna, 185, 186, 210, 211
Labour Trade Union of East Africa, 160,
178. See also East African Trade Union;
Singh, Makhan; Strikes
Lancaster House constitutional negotia-
tions, 230–237, 238, 248, 258
Land ownership: in highlands, 8–9, 15,
24, 34–36, 131–132; racial hierarchy
and segregation in, 9, 14–15, 18, 34–36,
38, 39, 57, 221–222; for farming, 9, 15,
34–36; of Europeans, 24, 34–36;
Indians excluded from, 33, 35–36, 38,
45, 57; of Boers, 35; of Africans, 92, 93,
96, 101, 110, 131; githaka deeds in, 92,
102; of Kikuyu, 96, 110, 131, 139;
Kenya African Union concerns about,
138, 139; and Mau Mau rebellion,
177–178, 179, 183–184, 205, 208,
211; and decolonization, 220–222,
223, 228–231, 234; in Kenyatta
resettlement plan, 264–265. See also
Highlands
Lari, killing of loyalists in, 180, 190, 191,
193, 194
Lawyers, and emergency, 188–189; in
Kenyatta defense, 188–191
Legislative Council, 14–15, 56, 127;
Europeans in, 8, 24, 67, 102, 153;
Indians in, 13, 43, 45, 54–55, 63, 70,
102–103, 121, 141, 183, 218–219, 227;
religious representation on, 14, 146,
147, 149, 150–151, 153, 183, 196, 208;
Jeevanjee in, 43, 45, 55; boycott of, 121,
125, 229; Patel in, 140, 141, 153–154,
162, 183, 206, 212, 220; Africans in,
141, 153, 178, 215, 216, 218–219, 227;
and Mau Mau rebellion, 180, 195, 205,
 Index
206, 213, 214; and decolonization, 219,
220, 224–232, 236, 239, 242, 243, 245;
Kenya Freedom Party members in,
237–238
Lennox-Boyd, secretary of state, 227–228
Liddar, Jarnail Singh, 193
Lugard, Frederick, 25, 26–28, 29, 30–31
Lumumba Institute, 265, 271, 272
Lunatic Express, 30
Luo, 41, 75, 76, 132, 168, 169, 263; and
legislative and constitutional negotia-
tions, 227, 228, 229, 235
Luo Thrift and Trading Cooperation, 168,
169
Lyttelton, Oliver, 187, 224–227
Madan, C. B., 171, 183, 188, 206, 208,
210, 214, 241, 244
Majimbo principle, 229, 235
Majoritarianism, 269, 271, 275, 277, 280,
289, 295
Man-eating lions (Tsavo), 30, 296
Mangat, N. S., 214–217, 220, 222–223,
224, 225, 226, 227, 232, 241, 246
Manguru, Benjamin, 142, 163
Manji, Haider, 257
Manji, Hassanalli, 196–197, 199, 256
Masai, 11, 41, 68, 75, 91, 97, 98, 182, 264,
297; land of, 34, 36, 140, 178; treaty
with colonial state, 34; and decoloniza-
tion, 229, 235
Mathenge, J. P., 259
Mathu, Eliud, 138, 166, 171, 193, 226
Matiba, K. S. N., 276, 291, 292
Mau Mau rebellion, 19, 177–217, 218, 263;
and Indians, 15, 180–217; anticolo-
nialism in, 179, 184, 187, 189, 195, 199,
200; as civil war, 179–180; detention
camps in, 180, 186, 189, 192, 201, 220;
suspension of civil liberties in, 183,
186–187, 189–190; reparation suit
related to, 186; and Indian lawyers,
188–191; Asian call-up during, 197, 207,
208, 210; Corfield Report on, 197;
weapons in, 197–198, 210; oral histories
of, 199–200; freedom fighters in, 200,
203, 204; and decolonization, 218–221;
defeat of, 220
371
Mbingu, Samuel Muindi, 137, 142
Mbotela, Tom, 141, 142, 156, 158, 165,
173, 178, 179
Mboya, Akoko, 250, 253
Mboya, Tom: in Legislative Council, 218,
226, 227, 232; and legislative and
constitutional negotiations, 218, 226,
227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236; on
Lyttelton plan, 226; and Kenyatta, 263,
265, 266, 270, 271; on Africanization
initiatives, 267, 268, 270; on citizenship
requirements, 279
McKenzie, Bruce, 264, 292–293
Menon, K. P. S., 113
Milner, Alfred, 64, 70, 81; policy decision
on Indian question, 70, 71, 72, 76, 78,
79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 102
Minimum wage, 128, 129, 134, 135
Mitchell, Philip, 145, 152, 153–154, 157,
161, 162, 184, 192
Moi, Daniel arap, 218, 230, 231, 232, 234,
276; in Kenya African Democratic
Union, 235, 264; and Kenyatta, 264,
265, 266, 273; and Sheth deportation,
273; and emigration of Indians, 292
Montagu, Edwin Samuel, 64, 80, 82
Montgomery, J., 38, 39, 66–68
Morrison, Theodore, 65, 66
Muigwithania (Reconciler), 143
Muliro, Masinde, 251
Multiculturalism (Britain), 290–291, 295,
298–299, 302
Multiracialism, 228, 229, 236, 291, 294
Murumbi, Joseph Zuzarte, 182, 188, 192,
211, 264, 265, 272
Muslim Association, 146, 147, 149
Muslim League, 68
Muslims, 14, 22, 47, 108; political
representation of, 14, 149, 150, 151,
153, 154, 163–164, 182–183, 208;
population in Kenya, 47, 80, 119, 121,
150; and Pakistan, 146, 149; political
activities of, 146–155; diversity of, 147;
and Hindu community, 147, 149,
150–154; in Central Muslim Associa-
tion of Kenya, 149–155, 183; marriage
recognition, 150–151; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 195–196, 207–208, 212–213
372 Index
Naidu, Sarojini, 123
Naipaul, Shiva, 1, 2
Nairobi, 15, 16, 249–250; Westgate
shopping mall siege in (2013), 1–2, 20,
301; population of Indians in, 2, 42, 58,
73, 180–181; Jeevanjee Market in, 42,
44, 56; plague outbreaks in, 43, 56;
racial segregation in, 43–44, 48–49, 55,
56, 63; strike in (1914), 59, 60; Mau
Mau rebellion in, 181; River Road
incident (1959), 239–242, 247, 248, 249
Nathoo, Ibrahim, 236–237, 244, 245; in
Congress, 153; in Legislative Council,
153, 194, 206, 225, 226; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 194, 206, 207, 210, 214, 220;
on Lyttelton plan, 225, 226; in New
Kenya Group, 228, 236
National Assembly, 265, 267; and African-
ization initiatives, 268, 271; and
majoritarianism, 269, 277; views on
Indians in, 270, 271; investigation of
Pinto assassination, 272; immigration
bill (1967), 276, 277; Trade Licensing
Bill (1967), 276, 277
Native Lands Trust and Crown Lands
(Amendment) Ordinance (1938), 131
Nazareth, J. M., 163, 166–167, 176; and
Kenya African Union, 141, 164, 166,
167, 176; opposition to Patel, 141, 154;
in Congress, 154, 166; on Indians as
guests, 174, 261–262; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 176, 181, 183, 188, 191, 214,
216; in Legislative Council, 218; and
legislative and constitutional negotia-
tions, 226, 227, 230–238, 241, 242,
245, 248, 255; and River Road incident,
241; and Sheth deportation, 273; on
Kenyan citizenship, 281
Ndegwa, George K., 133, 135, 136
Ndisi, Meshak, 139, 159, 173
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 148, 149, 155, 156,
157; on Indians as guests, 174, 261; and
Mau Mau rebellion, 184, 186, 187–188,
210; on independence of India, 263
Nene, D. D., 165, 166
New Kenya Group, 228, 236, 238
Ngei, Paul, 190, 267
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1, 2, 19, 117
Njonjo, Charles, 268, 293
Northey, Governor, 79, 81, 83, 99,
100,103, 106; on Milner policy, 76, 82,
84; on communal franchise, 77;
segregation policy of, 84; currency
regulation by, 87, 89; on wages for
Africans, 88; on Thuku, 92, 93, 95
Nyanza Trading Company, 104–105, 113
Nyeri murder (1960), 243–246
Nyeri Traders’ Association, 259
Oaths of Kikuyu, 177, 178, 179, 180, 185,
189, 198, 200
Odinga, Oginga, 168, 280; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 182, 192, 203; and decoloni-
zation, 218, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232,
234; and Kenyatta, 263, 264, 265, 273,
288; in Lumumba Institute, 265, 271;
socialist policies of, 265, 266; on Pinto
assassination, 272; and Sheth, 272
Ofafa, Ambrose, 166
Ogot, Bethwell A., 202
Oneko, Achieng’, 190, 265
One man, one vote policy, 233, 234, 237,
238, 271
Operation Anvil (1954), 181, 192, 209
Operation Jock Scott (1952), 181, 209
Othieno, Michah W., 248
Oza, U. K., 121–125, 129, 175
Pakistan, 14, 20, 146, 148–149, 151, 196,
277, 278
Pandya, J. B., 114–115, 121
Pangas (machetes), 250, 252–253, 255;
Mau Mau use of, 197, 243, 245; in
Nyeri murder, 243, 244, 245
Pant, Apa, 155–158, 188, 219; and Mau
Mau rebellion, 174, 184–185, 186,
187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 213. See also
Indian High Commission
Partition (1947). See East African
Indian National Congress; Hindus;
Independence of India (1947); Jinnah,
Mohammed Ali; Muslims; Pakistan
Passports, 278; British, 279, 281, 282, 284,
285–287, 293
Patel, Ambalal Bhailalbhai: in Congress,
140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 165, 183, 206,
 Index
210, 214, 216–217, 220, 227; and Kenya
African Union, 140, 141, 145, 165, 166,
206, 210, 220; in Legislative Council,
140, 141, 153–154, 162, 183, 206, 212,
220; on Indians and Africans in
government, 140–141, 214, 220; on
Muslims in Legislative Council,
153–154; and Singh, 162, 165, 166; on
Indians as guests in Kenya, 174; and
Mau Mau rebellion, 206–207, 212, 214;
and legislative and constitutional
negotiations, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226
Patel, Ambu H., 202, 204
Patel, Bhadra, 282
Patel Brotherhood and Mau Mau
rebellion, 194
Patriotism, 2, 274; expatriate, 146, 148,
149, 151, 155, 167
Patterson, Lt. Col., 30
Peasants Union (Kisan Sabha), 158
Pereira, Eddie, 183, 196, 199, 200
Phadke, V. V., 63, 64, 70, 84, 103, 114, 121
Pinto, Pio Gama, 271–272; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 181–182, 183, 184, 188, 192,
194, 195, 201, 203, 204, 211, 214; arrest
of, 226; in Kenyatta government, 264;
in Lumumba Institute, 265, 271;
assassination of, 271–272, 274, 280
Pirbhai, Eboo, 154
Planters and Farmers Association, 35
Polak, H. S. L., 78
Poll taxes, 48, 74, 75, 89, 90, 91, 108, 126
Powell, Enoch, 286, 287
Pritt, D. N., 190
Puri, Devi Dass, 142, 174, 175, 183
Quit India movement, 148
Quotas, immigration to Britain, 289–290,
293
Qureshi, Allah Ditta, 150, 152
Race Relations Act (1968), 290
Rahman, Mohammed Altour, 185, 192,
194, 210
Railways and Public Works Department,
60, 62, 109, 130
Railways, 23, 26–32, 60, 296–297;
indentured laborers in, 5, 23, 28–29,
373
30; Indian businesses along, 23, 29, 37,
51–52; Indian employment in, 23, 24,
28–29, 30–31, 127, 250; African
employment in, 27–28, 29, 109, 250;
cost of construction, 29; Jeevanjee
involvement in, 29, 43; Lunatic
Express, 30; and man-eating lions, 30,
296; racial segregation on, 55, 124–125;
living conditions for workers in, 59–60;
strike of workers in, 60
Ram, Balwant Rai Dhanna, 137
Ramji, Nazmi, 204
Ramogi (Ancestral Father), 143
Rana, Mohamed Ali, 146, 149, 152, 153, 154
Rawal, Govind Dayalal, 145
Reserves, African, 36, 41–43, 85; Indian
businesses in and around, 73, 75, 110,
115; education in, 108; cultivation of
crops in, 110, 115; in legislative and
constitutional negotiations, 221
Ritch, L. W., 60–62
River Road incident (1959), 239–242, 246,
247, 248, 249
Sadler, James Hayes, 33, 38, 39, 41, 57
Sanderson Committee (1909–1910), 41,
43, 44, 46, 57, 67
Sandys, Duncan, 278, 286, 287
Sauti ya Mwafrika (African Voice), 144
Sawmill owners, 195–196, 198–199, 213
Second World War, 17, 135, 137, 169, 278
Sedition charges, 61, 62, 143–145, 188
Sekanyolya, 98–99
al-Shabaab, 1. See also Westgate mall siege
Shah, K. P., 142, 224, 237, 238, 260
Shah, Sumati, 282
Shahane, M. D., 157, 185
Shams-ud-Deen, 103, 151, 195, 201; in
Congress, 63, 64, 81; in Indian Associa-
tion, 63; visit to India (1919), 65; on
common and communal franchise, 76,
108; on loyalty of Muslims, 80; on Milner
decision, 81, 84; on European labor
practices, 90; supporting Thuku, 94, 101;
on African and Indian relations, 100;
criticism of Coryndon, 107; no confidence
vote in governor, 121; as Muslim, 147; on
Muslim and Hindu interests, 149–150
374 Index
Sharda, D. K., 143, 144, 181, 182, 188,
226
Sheth, Pranlal, 143, 144, 264, 272–273
Sikhs, 5, 150, 162, 207, 274, 297; in British
military campaigns, 23, 39, 197; in
railway construction, 29, 32, 60, 296; in
Ghadr movement, 61; on Jallianwallah
Bagh massacre, 65–66; businesses and
occupations of, 119, 121, 126; popula-
tion in Kenya, 119, 121, 150; in labor
union movement, 127, 129, 162
Simpson, W. J., 55–56, 57
Singh, Chanan, 141, 145, 155, 183, 188,
191, 208; in Kenya Freedom Party, 237,
264; and legislative and constitutional
negotiations, 237, 238; in Kenyatta
government, 264
Singh, Jaswant, 175; and Mau Mau
rebellion, 183, 188, 193, 195, 204, 208,
214; arrest of, 226
Singh, Jaswant (carpenter), 197–198
Singh, Makhan, 127–136, 155, 158–167,
173, 174, 175; and Kenyatta, 135, 139,
159, 166, 178, 203, 264, 280; and
demand for uhuru, 166, 203; and Mau
Mau rebellion, 178–179, 188, 190, 204;
arrest of, 195. See also East African
Trade Union; East African Trade Union
Congress; Strikes
Sohan, W. L., 143–144, 158
Squatters, 48, 177–178; Kikuyu as, 36,
140, 178, 211, 229, 264; and Kenya
African Union, 140, 159, 178, 179;
Singh on, 161; eviction of, 179, 180, 211;
and Mau Mau rebellion, 211, 264; in
Kenyatta resettlement plan, 264, 265.
See also Farming; Highlands; Land
ownership
Strikes, 128–129; in 1914, 59–61, 69; in
1934, 132; in 1939, 133–134, 148; in
1938, 136; in 1947, 139, 160, 164; in
1949, 160; in 1959, 250; in 1960, 250.
See also East African Trade Union; East
African Trade Union Congress; Singh,
Makhan
Subimperialists, Indians as, 3, 8, 12, 24,
45–55, 83, 85, 96–97
Swadeshi movement, 48, 50, 77, 82
Tanganyika, 65, 86, 165–166
Taxes, 9, 10, 14, 32, 37, 38; in World War
II era, 17; on Indians, 34, 38, 59, 60; on
Africans, 40, 44, 48, 70, 74, 75, 76, 89,
90, 108; on indentured laborers, 46; hut
and poll, 48, 74, 75, 89, 90, 91, 108,
126; and Thuku, 95, 108
Thacker, Ransley, 163, 190, 192
Thuku, Harry, 74–75, 91–102, 108, 116,
121, 125, 188, 193
Trade Licensing Bill (1967), 276, 277, 283,
284, 291, 292
Trade Union Congress of East Africa. See
East African Trade Union Congress
Trade Union of East Africa. See East
African Trade Union
Travadi, K. D., 188, 214, 218, 234, 236,
255
Uganda, 282, 289; cotton from, 26, 40;
Nile headwaters in, 27, 33; strategic
importance of, 27, 33; expulsion of
Indians from, 271, 284, 294
Uganda Railway, 23, 26–32; Indian
businesses along, 23, 29, 37, 51–52;
Jeevanjee involvement in, 29, 43; as
Lunatic Express, 30
Ukamba Members Association, 136,
137
Varma, B. S., 63, 64, 94
Vassanji, M. G., 203–204, 299,
300
Verma, Jatinder, 296
Vidyarthi, Girdhari Lal, 143, 144, 145,
148–149, 188
Virji, Hussenbhai, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 82,
85, 94, 107
Virji, Suleman, 63
Visram, Abul Rasul, 54, 63, 64, 65, 70, 86,
94, 103; and Gandhian movement, 78,
82, 84, 85
Visram, Allidina, 31, 52, 54, 63, 296–297;
businesses of, 25–26, 29, 35, 37, 39–40,
42, 63
Voice of Kenya, 269, 270, 279
Voluntarily Unemployed Persons
Ordinance (1949), 160–161, 164
 Index
Wachanga, Henry Kahinga, 212, 226
Wages: racial hierarchy in, 9, 10, 42,
132–133, 135, 159–160, 171–172, 222,
231; of Africans, 9, 40, 88, 89, 109, 113,
132–133, 134, 135, 171–172, 222, 231;
minimum wage, 128, 129, 134; labor
union concerns about, 128–130,
132–133, 134; Mombasa strike on
(1934), 132; of Indians, 132–133, 135,
171–172; trade test determining,
160–161; in decolonization and
independence, 267
Wainaina, Eric, 32
Waruhiu, Senior Chief, murder of, 179
Watkins, Colonel, 92, 98, 99, 101
375
Watkins, Frank, 35, 36, 37, 38
Westgate mall siege (2013), 1–2, 20,
301
Wood-Winterton Agreement, 103, 106
Work permits in Kenya, 283–284, 292
Yacoob-ud-Deen, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201,
204
Young Kikuyu Association, 91. See also
Thuku, Harry
Zafr-ud-Deen, 195–196, 218, 237, 238,
244, 245
Zanzibar, 271, 282, 289; sultan of, 23, 25,
49, 51