Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora 9780674425903

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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 2. “Civilization” in Kenya

71

3. Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean 4. Between Rebellion and Suppression 5. Negotiating Nationhood 6. Uhuru and Exodus

261

Epilogue 296 Notes

303

Archives Consulted

359

Acknowledgments

361

Index

365

218

177

118

22

Fort

Gilgil

Fort Hall Kiambu Machakos

Kikuyu Reserve

Highlands

Mombasa

Kui

EAST AFRICA PROTECTORATE

Gulf of Aden

O C E A N

Goa

Bombay PRESIDENCY

BOMBAY

0

INDIA

Amritsar PUNJAB

KUTCH GUJARAT

SINDH

KATHIAWAR

Karachi

I N D I A N

s ile 3 m es 76 l i 2 7m sa: 87 ba 2 m ar : Mo zib yan ba Z m Bo ay mb Bo

Gulf of Oman

PAKISTAN

Lahore PUNJAB

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

Zanzibar

Mombasa

Nairobi

Highlands

KENYA

TANGANYIKA (TANZANIA)

Lake Victoria

UGANDA

Railway Tsav o R . International Boundary COAST Colonial Provincial Boundary

SOUTHERN

Nairobi

NYANZA Ternan

Victoria

CENTRAL Kibigori Elementeita Kibos Lake

RIFT VALLEY

NORTHERN

Gujranwala

250

500 km

N

Provincial boundary/princely state in British India

Disputed border

International boundary (present day)

N

NORTHERN

Kapenguria

Kitale

RIFT VA L L E Y CENTRAL

Eldoret Kakamega

Thomson’s Falls

Nanyuki

ts eM ar rd be

a Kisumu Elburgon tori Nyeri L a k e Vic A Kericho Nakuru Gilgil N YA N Z A Kisii Naivasha

Kijabe Githunguri Limuru

Meru Mt. Kenya Karatina Murang’a Fort Hall Makuyu

Thika Ruiru Nairobi NjiruDandora

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 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 reflected, “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. “ I H A D N OT P L A N N E D

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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 Darji’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 entanglement of political, economic, and racial concerns over the changing meanings of “Indian,” “African,” and “Kenyan” during the half century before independence. This book makes visible these entanglements by analyzing 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, engineers, 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 affiliations that framed Indian-African encounters and created a public political 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 activism, and postcolonial assertions of citizenship over six decades. In so doing, it reveals competing and contradictory political claims that simultaneously 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, administrative, 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 century 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 preoccupied with classifying a multitude of often overlapping social, religious, and occupational groups into distinct singular caste and racial categories, while it

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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 “native” 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 required 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 discursive 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 settlement 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 arrived 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 Africans, 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 region. These merchants were joined by small-scale traders, civil servants employed 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 artisans 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 hometowns 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 commercial 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 (including tea, sugar, rice, and oil), and consumer goods into Kenya. The largescale 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 liation of Indian immigrants with their homeland was articulated in several tangible ways. This connection has been the subject of many recent works that remap South Asian history to include these extraterritorial experiences and exchanges. Over the last decade, several scholars have used the Indian Ocean to highlight the material, ideological, and political

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Indians in Kenya

connections that shaped the imaginary of South Asians beyond the territorial boundaries of India. Thomas Metcalf and Robert Blyth, for example, have conceptualized the western Indian Ocean as a sphere of Indian influence. 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 developed by Indian labor in new colonies. Moving beyond this imperial emphasis, Sugata Bose, Sunil Amrith, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Nile Green have highlighted the mediations of colonial subjects, material goods, nascent nationalists, 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. Focusing 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 expatriate patriots.7 These journeys, imaginaries, and connected routes have primarily led back to the same destination—a singular “homeland,” India. Susan Bayly has emphasized 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 experiences of so many people in colonial and other diasporas.” In his influential work, Sugata Bose characterizes the Indian Ocean as an interregional arena, between the national and the global. From this perspective, he argues that anticolonialism “as an ideology was both tethered by the idea of a homeland while strengthened by extraterritorial affi liations.” Most recently, Ramachandra Guha has suggested that Gandhi’s critique of colonialism, 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 historiographical arguments about South Asians who mediated in this space. First, these works highlight a cosmopolitan, globalist ethos of ideas that constituted 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 oceanic networks. Scholars have shown that as universalist affiliations conflicted with the economic and political realities of territorial and racial articulations 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 twentieth century, these works emphasize the inward-looking diasporic consciousness 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 homeland, 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 existence 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 political 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

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and material connections that evoked both India, their civilizational homeland, and Kenya, their territorial homeland. It was in this encounter that universalizing ideas of civilization, citizenship, equality, and solidarity circulating 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 colonial 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 capital 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 developments. 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 century, 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 civilization and modernity in Africa. By the First World War, colonialism in Kenya was premised on a state that distinguished between its colonial subjects, creating a racial pyramid in which Europeans were on top with political 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 “natives,” Africans, whose political and economic engagements with the colonial state were severely circumscribed. African “chiefs” were appointed as local authorities, although they had no autonomous power over the communities 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 exportoriented enterprises by serving on them as laborers, and to join the colonial monetary economy by cultivating their own land and selling their surplus 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 Europeans 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 contract, 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, Christian 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 missionary-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 toward 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

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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 Africans within the government. Outside the purview of the state, Indians and Africans set up privately funded schools. These were also racially separate. From 1906 onward Indian merchants financed Indian schools that were aimed at spreading education among the trading community in Nairobi 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 economic 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 attend colleges and universities in India and to earn professional degrees, a journey Africans joined only in the late 1940s, when the postcolonial government 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 occupations 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 articulated in racialized discourses. The economic, educational, and employment 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 employees hired for skilled jobs and receiving higher salaries than unskilled African 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 Africans 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 miscegenation was reflected in the Swahili term chotara, used by colonial officials to refer to “half-breed” offspring of such marriages. This disapproval was also recorded in the excommunication of a young Punjabi laborer-turnedshopkeeper in Kisumu from the Punjabi settlement in the area when he married 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 shopkeepers, all of whom were Indian. Big business and petty trade were familyrun 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 historical 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 racialized 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

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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 positioned themselves as subimperialist colonizers, asserting their rights as imperial citizens to gain parity with European settlers in political representation 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 highlighting 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 emphasized 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 coincided 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 carried 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, particularly 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 racial 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 intimately linked to African politics as brown and black non-Europeans pushed against the racial hierarchy of the colonial state while constituting racial frontiers in their claims and languages of belonging. This engagement arising from specific, local economic and political concerns is analyzed in Chapters 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 mutually exclusive. Few consider the simultaneous coexistence of solidarity and friction in constituting this relationship. This paradoxical coexistence is central 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 alignments 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, underscoring the need to “hold cosmopolitan practices in tension with exclusionary dynamics.” Antoinette Burton has also warned against too easy a celebration of the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity, which glosses over simultaneous 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’ solidarity, 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 reverberated 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 transitions in the 1930s diversified the occupational, religious, and class concerns 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 representatives within the Legislative Council tempered this radicalism, as did

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Indians in Kenya

Indian employers. The division of the diaspora’s Indian homeland along religious lines in 1947, when India and Pakistan became postcolonial nationstates, 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 immigrants 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 affiliations simultaneously opened up and closed off spaces of interracial collaboration—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 powerful 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 underpinnings” 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, institutional 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 political representation for all non-Europeans, including Africans. Since the desire to acquire land in the highlands motivated Indian merchants to initially question the racial hierarchy of colonialism in Kenya, in their criticism 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 political 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 agriculturalists, 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 Africans 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 occupied 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 nationhood dominated political debates. These are discussed in Chapters  4 and 5. Although the Indian political leadership continued to rhetorically support Africans’ ambitions to self-governance, the interracial alliance was stretched to its limit as the urgency and radicalism of the rebellion determined the direction and pace of decolonization. Within and outside the Legislative 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 endogamy resulted in anti-Indian nationalist discourses in East and South Africa. 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 domestic 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 marital 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 collaborations. 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 anticolonial rhetoric of equality and the lived economic reality of colonial privileges. 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 ambitions were abandoned in favor of nationhood. At the threshold of independence, Indian entrepreneurship, with its past contributions and future vision of economic development, was evoked in territorial and generational assertions as Indians made a nationalist claim to their Kenyan homeland. In the 1960s, Indian shopkeepers and businessmen continued to retain their position in the economy as traders and industrialists who ran family-owned ventures. Their political stake in the new nation emphasized their rights as citizens 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 considers Indian proximity to and distance from African politics as it resulted from this economic framing of their civilizational genus and genius. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, in particular, explore the diversity of Indian and African politics 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, further racialized impoverishment. African customers encountered this poverty 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 conditions 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 monopoly over the production of cash crops, and Indians who, with their endogamous 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 agricultural exports from the colony, the administration encouraged the establishment of “native” businesses in market centers under its supervision. With high licensing fees, restrictions on the quality and kinds of goods these entrepreneurs 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 imagery 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 shopkeepers and ordinary marketgoers, who boycotted Indian shops and criticized 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 specific 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 economically, which Indians framed as nationalist assertions during the 1950s and 1960s, were no different from the colonizing ambitions of early twentiethcentury Indian colonists. Within a few years of independence it became clear that freedom had not brought material change in the lives of ordinary Kenyans; 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 subordinate to the interests of the indigenous citizens of the nation, as determined by the state. The continuing affiliation of Indians to their civilizational homeland, 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 organized 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 shopkeepers 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 reaction to the political discourse of indigeneity that from the mid-1940s threatened to treat them as unequal citizens in postcolonial Kenya and to being on the receiving end of everyday violence. On the other hand, Indians underscored their civilizational difference from Africans by claiming that their

20

Indians in Kenya

material profits were evidence of their nationalist endeavor to develop Kenya’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 considered 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 approximately half of the Indian population did not take up Kenyan citizenship. In 1968 many of them became twice migrants, departing for Britain. Being “African,” “Indian,” and “Kenyan” signified historically specific affiliations 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 territorial, racial, and national affiliations that this book calls into question, I use “Indian” and “African” as descriptive group categories. While I am cognizant 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 nationhood as Pakistan at the same time. Historically, immigrants from the Indian 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 descriptive 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 possibilities of interracial coexistence. Sandeep Vidyarthi and Vipul Darji’s references 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 solidarity serves as a reminder for us to take seriously the possibilities and limitations 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 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.” Jeevanjee’s claim to the territorial and material development of Kenya was a colonizing one that predated British rule in the region. This had been acknowledged by John Kirk, Scottish explorer, botanist, and companion of David Livingstone, who visited Kenya in 1866 as the British vice-consul in Zanzibar. 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 Significantly, 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 A L I B H A I M U L L A J E E VA N J E E

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 Imperial 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 themselves 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 opportunities 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 interregional colonial economy across the Indian Ocean. In the absence of freely available, reliable local labor, between 1895 and 1903 close to 40,000 indentured 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 government recruited low-level Indian clerks to serve in the administration, employing about 1,500 by 1911. A small minority of fifty-four agriculturalists 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 protectorate (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. Between 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 service. 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 administrators in Kenya and Britain, who accepted the underlying principle of the settlers’ argument about the racial and civilizational difference between 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 perspective 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 subjects were Indian traders. Within a year, the Company, whose members included 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 “protection” of British rule. This was encouraged by the Company, which hoped that these “energetic traders” would avail themselves of the business opportunities 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 Allidina 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 eventually ventured further inland, where he found an abundance of local products 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), groundnuts, 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. Jeevanjee 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 colonization 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 markets. 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. Diplomatic attempts to gain access to the area were unsuccessful, as the Kabaka ruler of Uganda rebelled against both Lugard, who had gone there as a British agent, and Christian missionaries. The railway scheme thus became 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 constructing 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 highlands 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 metropole. 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 region 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 Majesty’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 population 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 including 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. Consequently, he believed that with no scarcity of land, Africans did not feel the “pressure of existence” and therefore had no incentive to offer themselves 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 porters, 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 alternative supply of labor and established a system of indenture wherein men, and eventually families, were recruited from India to work on the plantations. Eager to shake off the legacy of slavery, the colonial government of India and Her Majesty’s government stipulated that these laborers sign contracts 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 colonies 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 demand 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

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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 Mauritius, 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 capital 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 territories in East Africa—known as the East Africa Protectorate—were transferred 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 coolies 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 contracts, 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

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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 suggested 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 economically by connecting the fertile highlands and the cotton-growing region 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 AntiSlavery 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

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the Uganda Railway but also to develop East Africa by settling Indians permanently as agriculturalists and “Asiatic colonists.” He had proclaimed, “It is not as imported coolie labour that I advocate the introduction of the Indian 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 “increasing 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. Anticipating a dynamic that came to determine the structural relationship between Africans and Indians in the mid-1930s, Lugard also predicted “competition” 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 perspective, Indian merchants, retailers, and agriculturalists would be indispensable 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 develop the protectorate’s economy, which was geared toward the export of local produce. Indian merchants such as Jeevanjee and Visram readily positioned themselves as agents of modernity bringing civilization to East Africa. 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

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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 interracial 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” triggered 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 contested etymological origins serve in popu lar discourse to emphasize racial 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 administration 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 prosperity of some of the up-country stations.” Echoing Eliot’s concern about the need to generate more revenue was Harry Hamilton Johnston, a prominent 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

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philanthropic”—for holding Uganda. He underlined the strategic importance of the Nile headwaters, commenting, “We take particular interest in the welfare 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 political 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 identified, 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 recommended bringing families to the lowlands between the coast and Kiu and

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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 cultivation 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 parallel 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, extending 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 reasons, 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 completion of the railway line. As early as January 1902, Eliot, while exploring the possibility of Indian settlement to boost the protectorate’s economic development, 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 colonists 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.”

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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 protectorate 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 settlement because of its climate and fertile soil and asked His Majesty’s government 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 “entirely 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 recommendations 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’ Association of British East Africa, an organization of 200 members founded to “advance the development of . . . [Kenya] as a white man’s colony.” Six hundred 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 European 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 settler without sufficient means” would not put the necessary capital into developing 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

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across the protectorate. Arguing, as Eliot had, that the areas suitable for European settlement were “comparatively small,” they suggested that Indians 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 highlands. Therefore, a second set of recommendations sought to resolve the labor problem by encouraging Africans to live in “small villages” on European 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 Kikuyuland in the Central Province into the Rift Valley, where they cleared forested areas and grazed Masai land before some of this region was included as part of the highlands (see Map 2). From 1918 onward, the expansion 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 administration 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 radiated 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 philosophies and practices. Once codified, Indian civil and criminal procedures were exported across the Indian Ocean, initially to the Malay Straits

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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 Colonial 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 predominance 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 medium 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 caravans 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

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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 effort, likely made colonial officials predisposed to supporting Indian merchants 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.” However, the commissioner of lands, J. Montgomery, and the secretary of state, Lord Elgin, believed that Indians needed to be restricted from the highlands, 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” suitable 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 consonant with the views of His Majesty’s Government to impose legal restriction” 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 Africa generations before Europeans had; that Indian labor had built the Uganda Railway; that the trading wealth in the protectorate was Indian; and

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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 economic and political demands of the European farmers against the reality of their lack of productivity, especially in the face of the success of Indian merchants and agriculturalists, as Sadler and Montgomery were uncertain about the permanence of Europeans in the protectorate. The imperial government was not ready to promote the interests of these farmers at the cost of alternative ways of ensuring the economic development of East Africa. Despite 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 settlement in Kibos. He came back empty-handed, however, and recommended instead that the government import indentured labor from India and provide 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 invite 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 settlers, 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 “honorable 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 “everything 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

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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 fulfilled the Colonists’ Association’s demand for political representation. A Legislative Council was set up to oversee the local administration of the expanding 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 undertakings 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 successful in getting the desired result. By 1909, settlers reported the steady flow of Kikuyu laborers from the Central Province into the highlands. Kikuyu 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 legitimate 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,

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Sadler was apprehensive about using forced labor and appealed to the Colonial 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, especially 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 recommendations 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 interconnected imperial policy between Britain’s Indian Ocean colonies. These three concerns were simultaneously contradictory and complementary, making administration quite ad hoc. However, they anticipated the direction of colonial 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 distinct group, divided into “tribes”—some created, others reinvented, including Kikuyu, Masai, Luo, Kalenjin, Kamba, and so on—and put into “native reserves,” where they were expected to cultivate crops for sale and enter the

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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 authority 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 population rose from 5,000 in 1902 to 16,000 in 1910. During this time, the population 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 merchants and railway workers lived in Mombasa and transient indentured laborers 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 Europeans.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 permanent market, called the “Jeevanjee Market,” before returning to India for a four-year sojourn. Visram also purchased land here. In 1908, the government announced that no extensions would be made because the area bordered 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 important role Indians played within the colonial administration as “subordinate 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, stationmasters, 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,

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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 Indian and you may shut up the protectorate.” Grogan also acknowledged that Indians were a “fundamental factor” because of their small scale of operation. He admitted that “if any attempt were made to remove him [the Indian] 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 objections raised by some farmers, Jeevanjee was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1909 on Churchill’s recommendation as a reward for his pioneering 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 “approximating 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 economically 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

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in the commercial realm. In 1910, Europeans opened a market in Nairobi for the use of Europeans only, claiming that the Jeevanjee Market was unsanitary 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 authorized 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 European economic productivity. The need for labor was crucial to their enterprises 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 Europeans 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 entire 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, especially from Transvaal and Natal, to “assume a rather too-slave holding aggressive 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 officials were worried about the spread of the racialized politics of South Africa in its new protectorate by settlers from the south who encountered Indian traders and laborers in Kenya.

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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 Protectorate in which the Europeans, who were in a numerical minority, were at the top, benefiting from the prized highlands and limited political representation despite being the least productive economically; Indian merchants, shopkeepers, and clerks were placed in the middle, and the colonial administration tried to protect their existing economic rights without expanding them; and at the very bottom were Africans, who, as the numerical majority 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 interview 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 contributions made by Indians, in whose hands nearly 85 percent of the colony’s monetary trade remained, he accused European settlers of deliberately 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 twentieth 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

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the imperial project. He emphatically announced that he was a “proud citizen of the British empire.” Moreover, he proclaimed that if Indian enterprise 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, including 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 coincided with the publication of the Sanderson Committee’s report, which affirmed the material advantage of Indian immigration to East Africa and endorsed 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 European 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 produced upon demand, had catalyzed into a mass movement there. This together 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 Sanderson parliamentary committee on Indian immigration to all crown colonies and protectorates. Clearly, events taking place in one part of the empire resonated with people in India and Britain who were beginning to organize protests against specific imperial policies. Within India, the partition of Bengal in 1905 for “administrative convenience” was seen by sev-

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eral political leaders as a thinly veiled strategy of the colonial administration 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 Britishmade 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 administration, 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 prejudices 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 imprisoned. 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 legislation and administration of East Africa cannot fail to have most unfortunate 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

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careful to distance himself from the politics of Indian nationalists. The economic 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 appointed 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 connections while still recognizing Indians’ “value,” Dingwall made a distinction between Indian merchants whose influence predated colonial rule by several 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 progress 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 development 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 Europeans, although he reiterated Elgin’s pledge regarding the desirability of preserving the area for European cultivation. As for the European market in Nairobi, which Indians were prevented from entering, he saw no inherent

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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 further 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 civilizing mission of educating Africans had indicated that “contact of the natives 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 Indians by the white population in East Africa. In a series of newspaper articles published in London and Kenya, Jeevanjee pointed to the “colourhatred” 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 audience 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 affirming his political alignment with the imperial project, which included India and Kenya. Rather than appealing to a humanitarian discourse regarding Indian indentured labor across the British Empire, Jeevanjee portrayed Indians as subimperialists in East Africa and claimed that the Indian case in East Africa was entirely different from that of Indians in other colonies. Emphatically inserting Indian trading intermediaries into the history 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. Highlighting 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 settlers 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,

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“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 Empire, Jeevanjee reminded the colonial administration in London that his politics 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 government 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 merchants in Kenya with His Majesty’s government. Despite the distinct territorial 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 rhetorical and material performance of loyalism and positioning Indians as settler 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 Indians. 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-

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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 universalizing aspiration, one that would transcend racial boundaries between Britain’s white and brown settlers in Kenya. However, it was limited to the category of “Indians.” In political discourse, being “Indian” in East Africa acquired a civilizational definition and identity that was located in antiquity, 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 emphasizing the colonizing abilities of Indians, Jeevanjee reached out to precolonial 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, located geographically in India, and their diasporic present, located in Kenya, as the epitome of civilizational progress in demanding their rights as imperial 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 businessmen 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 “Journeys to the Interior,” they encountered an “Africa in Darkness” that was

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simultaneously “weird and wonderful.”59 These were intimate encounters. The coastal language Kiswahili served as the common medium of conversation, 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 beyond 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 Mombasa, traveled inland to Kisumu and Kavirondo (Nyanza) in search of business 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 “Kavirondo” 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 washenzi (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 Indians 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 succeeded in a business transaction, exchanging beads for fresh cow’s milk.62

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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 “elderly” 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 sophisticated [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 intimate 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, selfcentered, 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, before 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 extremely 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 musings 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 highlands 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

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the rights of imperial citizenship because of race. In its encounter with such racial colonial hierarchies, Indian political discourse began to use its civilizational difference to legitimize the demand for parity with their fellow colonists, 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 Jeevanjee’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 European 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 derogation” of the rights enjoyed by Indians in the colony. Echoing the same belief as his brother in the Indians’ right to equality based on their imperial citizenship, Tayabali emphasized Indian loyalty to and pride in being members 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 recognizing that Indians were first and foremost businessmen, in his presidential address Tayabali showcased the Indians’ subimperialist abilities: “To penetrate into strange and savage lands, even with business motives, demands a measure of courage, enterprise, self-denial and general strength of character.” 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,” particularly 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-

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lative Council, which had been absent since 1912, when Jeevanjee voluntarily withdrew from the council. Tayabali attributed this void to the governor’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 confrontational role that he hoped the Congress would play, Tayabali— despite criticizing 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 revealed 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.” Furthermore, 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 recognition 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 Majesty’s subjects resident in the colony.” 68 Yet he refused to acknowledge the discrimination inherent in preventing Indians from acquiring lands in certain parts of the protectorate. In 1914, an official report published by Professor W. J. Simpson on sanitary matters in East Africa gave further endorsement to the principle of segregation, providing Belfield justification for

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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 centers of races of “different customs and habits” had caused unsanitary conditions 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 “neutral 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. Simpson’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 demarcated “Indian” areas—notably on River Road—because of the lack of commercial activity there. Nor did it take into account the state’s paltry financial 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 prevalence 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 latrines. 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. However, 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

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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 prevented Indians from bidding on them. This exclusion was justified as necessary 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 designated 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 introduced 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 Baluchis,” 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

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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, artisans, carpenters, and mechanics, arguing that they created unfair competition 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 selfgoverning 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 population up to 8,473 in 1921, while the new colonial capital was home to smallscale 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, Indian workers from Punjab were contracted by the railways, which provided them with rations and accommodation in “landies,” while private firms employed local Indian artisans and “fundies” (carpenters) in their workshops. Far from being subimperialist merchants who had achieved a level of civilization equal to the Europeans’, the majority of these workers spoke no English, had low levels of literacy and education, and earned wages determined 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

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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 observations 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 limited to the higher class of merchants, who were entitled to economic and political rights based on their literacy, property, and material wealth. Indeed, 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 separate 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 hostilities 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 overcrowding in their landies. Although Darookhanawala had blamed Indians for their unsanitary lifestyles, 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

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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 accommodation 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 Europeanowned 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 attend funerals of their coworkers who “die as foreigners in this land,” often because of poor working and living conditions, and wanted religious holidays 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 Nairobi, 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

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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 Nairobi to take leadership of the spontaneous, local protest in Mombasa and harness growing economic frustrations among Indians throughout the protectorate 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 Indian 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 diasporic 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 surveillance. In fact, a motivation for Ritch and Puri’s deportation was their alleged connections with “extremists” in Kenya who were identified as Ghadr sympathizers. Many such sympathizers were detained, deported, or executed 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 containing issues of Ghadr had arrived in Kenya, five of which were addressed to the secretary of the Punjabi Arya Samaj (a Hindu socioreligious organization) and two to the Sikh temple in Nairobi. Sita Ram, a telegraph signaler from Gurdaspur, Punjab, organized Ghadr activities in East Africa before 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,

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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 “patron,” 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 activist, 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 Mombasa, 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 imprisonment 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 demand 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

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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 Congress began to petition the Colonial Office to intervene on their behalf to remove 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. Hussenbhai Virji, for example, became politically active during this time. Like Visram and Jeevanjee, Virji also belonged to one of the most prominent merchant families in East Africa. In the 1880s, his father, Suleman Virji, an Ismaili 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-udDeen, from Kashmir, joined the Indian Association of Nairobi and the Congress 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 segregationist 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 continued to use Jeevanjee’s language of imperial citizenship to protect their rights. Based on their “honorable and important part” in defending the

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empire, they demanded treatment on equal footing with all of His Majesty’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 colonialism 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 limited 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 discriminatory 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 sitting 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 Congress 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 cooperation” 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 restrictions on land sales, trial by jury, the rejection of a bill aimed at the segregation of races that had been introduced in the Legislative Council, and a condemnation of the European settlers’ effort to restrict Indian immigration 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

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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 profitable 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 establishing 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 government 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 Jallianwallah 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 citizenship. Shams-ud-Deen saw the transition occurring before his eyes as loyal subjects of the crown became anticolonial nationalists, and he quickly realized 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 community of artisans, among whom leaflets circulated describing the killings and

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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 opposition from both the governor and settlers in Kenya. European opposition to the scheme among officials and farmers took the shape of several interrelated concerns regarding imperialism and African colonial subjects. First, Bowring, Lt. Gen. Montgomery, the former commissioner of land, and European settlers within the Legislative Council and the Convention of Associations (the successor to the Colonists’ Association) highlighted the ideological foundations of imperialism in East Africa, which was intended to usher Africans toward modernity and progress. The task of empire in Africa was seen by Europeans as the “gradual uplifting of the African inhabitant 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 Europeans as “savage” and as a “child race,” settlers and officials acknowledged that Indians had a political past and an ancient civilization. However, European 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 enlightenment 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 Associations 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 African opinion on Indians. Bowring and Montgomery were convinced that

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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 Englishman 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 control 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 highlighting African ambivalence toward Indians in general, the pronouncements of officials and settlers pointed to a more concrete realm of racial antagonism: the economic sphere. Building on the report of the Economic Commission, European settlers who wanted to ensure that Indians would permanently 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 created. 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 ignorance. 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,

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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 European 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 notion 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 ancient civilization of India and the semi-barbarous condition and outlook of the Kaffir.” They criticized Europeans for regarding Indian British sub-

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jects as “undesirables and niggers to be boycotted and got rid of.” In February 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 community” 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 civilizational 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 alleged thefts and “pilferages.”92 Even as Indian political activists juxtaposed their civilizational achievements with those of Africans both discursively and materially, they accused Europeans of treating Africans badly. Having learned from the Ravine station 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 government 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 civilization 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 acquired 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 revealed a strong antisettler discourse, directly contesting the Europeans’ claim that Indians were a negative influence on Africans, arguing that if

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the Africans needed to fear anything, it was their “exploitation” by Europeans. Although in 1911 Indians had enthusiastically supported the governor’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 registration as favoring “semi-slavery principles.” He warned that the “development” of Africans was being carefully structured to fall in line with the interest of the white settler that superseded those of the “natives.”93 As the status of Africans emerged as a talking point for Indian and Europeans alike, it became clear to Bowring that “provocative” and “thoughtless” racialized statements were providing a “suitable field in which extreme agitators had been able to sow the seeds of . . . discontent.” With the “position” becoming “acute,” in May 1920 the secretary of state for colonies, Viscount Milner, outlined the Colonial Office’s policy regarding the Indian question. 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 contentious issue of segregation in residential and commercial areas, Milner institutionalized Eliot’s scheme of racially separate spheres of colonial governance. 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.

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R “Civilization” in Kenya

who had positioned themselves as subimperialists in the first two decades of the twentieth century found Viscount 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 civilizational and colonial discourse of the settlers in defending segregation. Through the early 1920s, these merchants-turned-political-activists, who had a material 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

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promise to Britain’s Muslim subjects to protect their holy places in the Ottoman 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. Reflecting the global implications of having an empire over which the sun never set, a united political realm emerged in India and Kenya among Britain’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 Congress 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, tailors, 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, schoolteachers, lawyers, and journalists. A decade earlier, Indians in Kenya had been predominantly engaged in trade, particularly as intermediary merchants. 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 increased 260 percent. By 1931, they were joined by another 11,000—a 365 percent increase within a decade. They included wholesale merchants who

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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 percent 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 population. 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 centers 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, followed 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 another 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 Nairobi and Mombasa, and as large-scale exporters and importers operating

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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 numbers and diversification of occupations and geographical location of Indians in the colony, shaped political discourse in Kenya. In making their subimperialist claims to parity with Europeans, Indians had emphasized their civilizational achievements to distinguish themselves from Africans in an attempt to share the white man’s burden as fellow colonists. As the limits of imperial citizenship revealed themselves, new migrants who were influenced by the anticolonial rhetoric of India settled in the colony, abandoned the demand for parity, and criticized the racial hierarchy of colonial rule in Kenya that invested European farmers with economic and political privileges denied to non-European colonial subjects. The accompanying rhetoric of equality that became the basis of Indian political claims opened up discursive space for the Congress to shift its strategy for attaining parity with Europeans. 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 pertaining 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 European 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 economic interests. A mission-educated Kikuyu, Harry Thuku, organized a public protest against the government’s labor policies through the East African 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 treasury. Exposure to the workings of the colonial administration together with the everyday lived experience of politics, colonial economic policies, and racial structures in the colonial capital framed Thuku’s political orientation. A common enemy—the European settlers—and the transnational resonance

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of the Indian question gave Thuku inspiration and the opportunity to collaborate 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 governor 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 capitalists, and others articulated a discourse of indigeneity as they argued that Indians—as settlers—had no legitimate right to economic or political development 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 simultaneously realized and crushed for ordinary Indians and Africans. In Nairobi and Mombasa the dukkawallahs’ customers were both Indians and Africans who bought food and household supplies as well as clothes and other consumer goods from them. In the reserves, however, the clientele at Indian shops were predominantly Kikuyu, Kamba, Masai, and Luo cultivators 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 quantities, 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 operating with small capital and in small quantities closely watched every business transaction to maximize their marginal profits. Unregulated by the government, 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 purchasing small quantities of produce. As moneylenders, they insisted that

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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 produce 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 Central 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 interracial 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 decision 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 meetings with representatives of both communities, exploring the issues of representation, franchise, segregation, and land ownership. Jeevanjee and Shamsud-Deen demanded an increase in Indian representation in the Legislative

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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 Delamere, 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 commercial 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 apprehensions. 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 experience was prevalent and fundamentally antithetical to the king’s pledge of equality. Manilal Desai, for example, had shared the same ambivalence toward 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 announced that only Europeans were allowed to smoke in the office. Irked by what he considered a racial slur, Desai resigned from the firm. While unemployed, he met other politically vocal Indians in Nairobi and became involved 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

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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 resonance of the racial legislation in Kenya, arguing that the “surge of nationalism” in India made Indians “more acutely conscious of these disabilities than they have ever previously been.” The “racial superiority, colour prejudice 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 recognized “the meaning of the new spirit in India and the aspirations” of its people, the imperial government would be “hopelessly” compromised and discredited.16

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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 movement 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 Association 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 predicted, “Why the Indians cannot freely come, acquire land, have representation 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 newspapers such as the Bombay Samachar, Lokapakari, Desabhaktan, Kathirava, Maharatta, Gujarati Punch, Prakash, Andhrapatrika, and Indian Social 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, newspaper reports, and letters urged the Indian public not to be silent on questions 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 editorials 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

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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] improvement” 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 empire, 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 representation, racial segregation, and land ownership. Fearing the political consequences of legislation on racial lines in India and across the empire, they publicly objected to the Colonial Office’s policy in Kenya that prevented Indians from attaining political equality with Europeans. They also criticized racial segregation in commercial areas as placing Indians at a distinct disadvantage, since the majority of them were traders, and argued that the principle of the communal franchise—that is, racially based political representation—would exacerbate racial antagonism.20 Montagu and Chelmsford’s demand for a common electoral roll based on property requirements 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.

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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 “Memorandum 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 proclaimed, “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 responsibility 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 decade earlier had remarked that it was impossible for a government with “any scrap of respect for honest dealings” to pursue a policy that would undermine the status of Indians in East Africa. In August 1921, he met Desai, Jeevanjee, and Shams-ud-Deen in London and dismissed their developmental claims on Kenya. In complete contradiction to his observation in 1908, in which he had praised India colonials for going where “no white man

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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 emphatically 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 highlighted 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 anticolonial 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 Chelmsford put pressure on Churchill and Northey to appease the moderate demands of Husseinbhai Virji, Abul Rasul Visram, and Jeevanjee and avoid further fueling Gandhi’s movement. However, the India Office underestimated 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 irrevocable 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 meetings 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

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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 criticize 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 following 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 peoples. 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 “emancipation from foreign oppression.” Desai’s editorial on the cable mentioned Garvey’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 imperial citizenship rights based on a hierarchical classification of skin color. While Desai himself had hitherto used Indian civilizational difference to articulate 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 nationalist movement in India and a virulent critique of the racial foundations

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of the British Empire. Das went a step further at a public meeting in Nairobi, 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 nonviolence 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 Legislative 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 withhold 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 altogether. They argued that African development, on which the entire imperial project was premised, was hindered both economically and civilizationally 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 Europeans 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

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“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 Africans had none of the “constructive power” that the Indians possessed. However, he warned, the Indian “invasion” of Kenya was dangerous because the “insidiousness” of Indians could easily instigate agitation among the “imitative” 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 exGerman East Africa for Indian colonization.” Significantly, he believed that the policy of reserving land for any immigrant group was immoral in a situation where Africans were the “rightful owners of the soil.” Such a reservation, 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 argued 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

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work in the colony, Indian artisans and mechanics used African assistants in “actual daily apprenticeship” and thus helped them develop skills. Andrews’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 politics 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 privileges. 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 Chronicle 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 defend themselves against Europeans. Taking Andrews’s advice seriously, the Congress not only abandoned its demand for an Indian colony in Tanganyika but also embraced his emphasis on racial solidarity. An early expression 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 thousands, 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 divide and rule” that the Europeans were following. While Jeevanjee had evoked their precolonial Indian Ocean connection to stake a claim for Indians 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 civilizational discourse of a decade ago, when he had referred to Africans as “savage”

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and in need of “uplift,” Jeevanjee proclaimed that Indians were “in sympathy 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 sterling 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, however, 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 demonetized and an entirely new currency, the East African shilling, was introduced in Kenya and valued at one-half a rupee or florin. At 29 millimeters in

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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 imported 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 continuing 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 argued that the laborer who had been paid Rs 6 per month in 1919 and 6 florins 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 receiving 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 evident as he also claimed that with the introduction of the East African shilling the value of local wages had increased by 50 percent, rendering European 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 shilling 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.

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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 contributor 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 dependent on their clients for the success of their business as their African customers 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 imported 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 maximum 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 dukkawallahs further raised the prices of food and consumer goods in order to

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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 racial 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, arguing that a “great anti-labour conspiracy” had been hatched by the colonial 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 interracial 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 Nairobi passed a resolution strongly opposing the Europeans’ proposal to decrease 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 necessities” was very high. Under these circumstances, Desai argued in the Chronicle, a lawyer was needed to protect Africans against such policies, and Africans should be given elective legislative representation, since they had a “right to a voice in African affairs.” Deliberately pointing out that the antiIndian 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

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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 organization 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 criticize a new labor registration law that the association considered “tantamount” 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 permanent record, and used as “evidence” to document labor contracts and track the employee’s movements. Any man found without a kipande could be prosecuted, 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 proposed 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 authority, 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

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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 alienation of land to European settlers. Significantly, land ownership and tenancy were left undefined, and as a result, there was no distinction made between 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 prepared 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 registration certificates. Refusing to take their argument seriously, Watkins compared 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 Association 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 association. 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

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bite” the Europeans until they left Kikuyu country, imploring Africans to ask the government what became of the taxes they paid, and accusing missionaries 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 police, resulting in deaths and injuries. Thuku’s short-lived movement thus came to a violent and abrupt halt. What made the colonial government so anxious 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 Association, which, in his words, aimed to “combat inhuman behaviour.” Their mutual preoccupation with political agitation became the foundation for an intimate 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 became not just a friend but an advisor to Thuku, helping him draft the memorandum of grievances that his association sent to Britain to 1921.49 The rhetorical 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

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In July 1921, joint meetings of Indians and Africans were held in Nairobi. 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 Andrews “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 Chronicle, Desai gave publicity to these meetings and resolutions, reporting on them at length. W. N. Moyah published a letter to the editor in the Chronicle 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 Thuku’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 political subjectivity that exemplified universalizing aspirations of anticolonialism, 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

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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 exclusively 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 Europeans 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 movement 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 “representative” 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

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precipitated a debate among the Kikuyu in the Central Province that exemplified three overlapping political and economic concerns. First, a generational 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 organization 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 Majesty’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

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misunderstanding—or, at the very least, a misrepresentation—of the Indian subimperialist colonization scheme, which had been abandoned by 1922. However, the belief that Thuku had petitioned His Majesty’s government to allow Indians to rule Kenya evoked the most vocal protest and discussion among the Kikuyu. Furthermore, articulating a discourse of indigeneity, 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: “Indians feted and garlanded him and proposed to pay the expenses of a deputation 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 announced, “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 Central Province, Rift Valley, and Nyanza reserves and in Nairobi began to be voiced against dukkawallahs and Indian artisans in the early 1920s. Expressions 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

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making profits is inherent in men of all races,” administrators, settlers, and spokesmen from the reserves used the recurring trope of the cheating Indian shopkeeper to make their political and economic claims. By 1921, 900 Indians had settled in Kiambu and Fort Hall, where Thuku was most active. Gideon Gatere, an apprentice carpenter who was in government employ, 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 dukkawallahs’ 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 rupees 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 evidence. For example, in Yala in Kavirondo, Indian retailers paid 3.24 shillings 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 establishment 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, announcing 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 political and economic claims, making the public political sphere in Nairobi a deeply contested, interracial one. On July 1, 1921, a vernacular monthly

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newspaper, Sekanyolya, edited by an expatriate Ugandan clerk, Zefiniya Sentongo, published a supplement in English, “for the benefit of European subscribers,” 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 emphatically 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 opinions. 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 argued, but the shopkeepers near the reserves provided an invaluable service by selling small quantities of commodities to Africans, unlike European 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.

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Although Watkins and the European settlers proclaimed that just the opposite 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 indifferent” to Indian artisans and clerks. It was perhaps because of this underlying 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 Europeans 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 ambition 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, demanding 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 unsuccessful 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 twentytwo 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 “native 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 . . . continually in conversation with the mob.” Four Indians carry ing rifles were

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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. Believing 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 Europeans 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 article in his paper Young India: “Poor Thuku! His appeal [to Indian nationalists] . . . 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 limitations 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

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demands for political and economic equality, as Indians continued to protest 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 acknowledge 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 articulated against the allotment of land to Europeans. Just like Desai and Thuku, Hooper criticized the settlers for failing to educate Africans in literacy or vocational skills and warned the government to change its proEuropean 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 Archer 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 administration. Acquiescing to the Europeans on the most emotive issue, the high-

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lands, he recommended that His Majesty’s government make racial reservation 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 inclusion in the Legislative Council. Instead, Visram, Shams-ud-Deen, and Phadke accepted the governor’s nomination in the interim.72 While their demand for a common political franchise had been fulfilled, Indian associations 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 impossible to define legally or accurately “a civilized man” by any framework that would be universally accepted as binding. Poignantly, he noted that Indian “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 created 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 discretion to set the qualifications at a level to ensure that no more than 10 percent 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 reservation of seats in the Legislative Council, ensuring that three of the seven total constituencies would return only European candidates, while two members, an Indian and a European, would be elected from the four other provinces. The plan rejected commercial and residential segregation but empowered the colonial administration in Kenya to impose sanitary and policy regulations at its discretion. Regarding the highlands, the agreement recommended 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 settlement. 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,

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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 January 1923, the Europeans opened a trading firm, the Nyanza Trading Company, which boasted twenty-five carts and a hundred oxen to transport commodities from the African reserves and stimulate trade by circumventing the ubiquitous Indian wholesaler. The firm was welcomed by colonial officials and missionaries. In April 1923, the European and African Traders Association 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 association planned to establish a labor and information bureau in Nairobi to bypass Indian contractors in matters relating to the supply and demand of labor. The Convention of Associations suggested a range of different strategies for boycotting Indian traders and forcing the closure of small dukkas. One involved a legislative proposal to restrict the sale of certain commodities, 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 unable 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. Approximately 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

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regulations confined buying and selling to certain defined areas in the African 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 agitation and arrest, with no immediate policies that alleviated their economic concerns, Africans boycotted the Nyanza Company, fearing that if European 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 “unscrupulous and mendacious anti-European propaganda” among “uneducated” Africans by giving them “doped tobacco.” Furthermore, the Company announced that European stores could not compete with the Indian shops because 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 Office, 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 metropole, 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 European populations, settlers pledged to resist “without reservation” and by every means—including armed force—the enactment or enforcement of any legislation in conflict with the minimum demands of the Convention of Associations to control Indian immigration, impose a racially defined communal franchise, and reserve in perpetuity the highlands for Europeans.78 Furthermore, 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.

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With the rising racist tone of settler agitations, the Colonial Office became 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 vigilantism 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 certain that grave public disturbances, such as extensive hostile demonstrations, boycotts, destruction of bazaars, and the shooting of Indians in district centers, 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 paralyze 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 deescalate 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 informed Devonshire that deportation was not possible, and he refused to declare martial law because the government’s administrators—the commissioner 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 Associations, 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

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both Indians and Europeans that the governor’s sympathies lay at least partially, 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 Overseas 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 declaration 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, Devonshire 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 regarding 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 Devonshire 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 supporters because of the highlands policy and the decision to impose communal representation. Andrews predicted, quite accurately, that the racial

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restriction of the highlands would eventually result in the overthrow of the “mighty empire” in Kenya. The Indian associations and the Congress organized 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 franchise as the “curse of India,” where religiously defined political representation 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 followed 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 protracted deliberations.” 84 INTERPRETING AFRICAN INTERESTS

Having succeeded in ensuring communal franchise that protected their majority in the Legislative Council and asserting their permanent and exclusive right to highlands, the Europeans accepted the new proposals and positioned 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 Declaration 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 direction, 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 protest 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 shillings 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

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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 assistance 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 government 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 between 4 and 10 shillings per month, and skilled artisans took home 20 to 120 shillings depending on their level of training. Governmental supervision 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 government did not have to invest capital in training them, as they arrived in the colony with these skills. Therefore, African technical training was limited 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 solution to this problem was apparent for all to see: increased African productivity reoriented toward export, which would result from changes in agricultural practices and trade policies. However, the proposed reforms were fiercely contested, as they exposed the inherent contradictions in the economic structure and the increasingly apparent fact that African, European,

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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 ownership even more prized. As the profits of agrarian exports kept increasing, landed elders benefited and began to get rid of their clients who had hitherto 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 ownership 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 economic 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 officials 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 Indian 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 purchasing 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 purchases, thus cheating their customers. Furthermore, they bought produce with little attention to quality, resulting in enormous wastage, as exporters

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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 expansion. A decade later, a bill was introduced to reorganize and control the marketing of African produce by issuing trade licenses, which clearly distinguished between buying centers engaged in internal trade and those that were oriented toward export. Its aim was to ensure closer governmental control over trade in the reserves, which had hitherto been unregulated, 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 export 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 encourage them to set up their own shops. In practice, however, the government’s efforts were geared toward export and breaking the network of petty retailers and exporters, so internal trade between Indian shopkeepers

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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 interests. They wanted to get rid of the dukkawallah entirely by involving the government in internal trade. For example, the European Farmers’ Association 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 associations, 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 productivity which required investment in the reserves rather than the highlands, dealing with land scarcity within the reserves, and allowing Africans to produce 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 percent 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-

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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 creating “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 produce irrespective of its quantity. Government officials also argued that the Africans preferred coarse Indian cotton cloth to the lighter variety of Lancashire 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, Indian 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 “exceptionally low” prices of Indian traders, as was evident from the failure of the Nyanza Trading Company to compete against Indian shops. African interests, 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 enterprises 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 bargain.” 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 producers in the Central Province and Nyanza Province going from shop to

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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, particularly 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 aspirations of city-dwelling Indians in Nairobi and Mombasa, it was the upcountry 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 exclusively, as a complement to the political efforts of the Congress. Pandya was a Gujarati businessman from Mombasa who briefly joined the Legislative 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 concern of the Congress. The first session of this Federation of Indian Chambers 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 Africans were the largest consumers of such items sold in dukkas, he argued, protecting European interests would significantly increase their cost of living.

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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 lobbied 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 resale. 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 customer 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 establishment 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 producers and benefit the Indian shopkeepers to whom Africans sold their commodities. The government insisted on distributing licenses for trade in certain 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

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Indians wanting to set up a stall to buy African produce in the reserves. Although 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 internal trade. Despite the efforts of the Europeans to separate retail from export, these shopkeepers simply avoided the licensing issue by having different members of the same family take out separate licenses for internal and external trade.99 Far from facilitating African enterprise, the legislation created further structural impediments to African trade, the repercussions of which were felt in the mid-1940s, as discussed in Chapter 3. Market centers continued to be spaces of intimacy where hopes of material accumulation were fulfilled and frustrated, and where economic and political aspirations were articulated in racialized discourses. For their African clients, the dukka was a space of symbolic and literal dishonesty, as the Indian trader charged different prices for the same commodity to different people and made a profit off those customers who did not have effective 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 defected goods.100 While political leaders such as Thuku were willing to collaborate with the Congress in Nairobi, cultivators in the reserves considered the interests of the dukkawallah as diametrically opposed to their economic 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 became the most visible and immediate obstacles to economic upward mobility 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

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racial solidarity with their fellow non-Europeans. Unconcerned with such expressions of political solidarity, dukkawallahs were preoccupied with maintaining 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’ business 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 manners 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 centers created the rhetorical possibilities and strategies for expressions of solidarity 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

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took place in Kenya and India in the 1930s and 1940s. The global depression of the interwar years caused colonial officials to shift their priorities away from earlier, interregional imperial concerns to focus on local political and economic conditions in different colonies as each struggled to become economically self-sufficient. In Kenya, the governor introduced a dual policy to promote the ostensibly separate-butequal 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 socioeconomic 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 depression 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, T U M U LT U O U S C H A N G E S

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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 diversity 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 including 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, carpenters, textile workers, railway engineers, superintendents, policemen, drivers, office clerks, and shop assistants.3 The changing religious and occupational 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 Indian 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 consciousness that was shaped by events taking place in their civilizational homeland, India, and by being “Indian” in Kenya. Indian independence served as an exemplar to Indian and African political 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

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held steadfast to this exclusive privilege. Second, with communal rolls and seats within the Legislative Council, Kenya’s colonial citizens were separated 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 represented 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 semiskilled work, they sought access to the highlands on the principle of racial equality rather than practical compulsion. For the Kikuyu, whose subsistence 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 asserted 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 negotiating 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 Associations in towns across Kenya worked in close cooperation with it. Open sessions 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

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against the continuing reservation of the highlands and the communal roll, the Congress’s office-bearers boycotted the Legislative Council and refused 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 cooperate. Under the leadership of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, Manilal Desai, and Shams-ud-Deen, the Congress passed a vote of no confidence in the governor, and in March 1928 no Indian came forward to contest in the Legislative 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 political 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 nationalist 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 highlighted the unity of this realm. However, unlike the subimperialist ambitions embedded in early evocations of this unity, Indian politicians underscored 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 children, 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 surprise 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

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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 networks 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, describe 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 contemporary 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 influence 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 consumers of “modern” amenities such as soaps, razors, bicycles, and hurricane lamps that were sold in Indian shops, and who were trained by Indian employers in practical skills such as carpentry, bricklaying, and cart and motor driving. Furthermore, Oza claimed that Kiswahili’s words that were used

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to express “need,” “debt,” and the “acts of clothing and building” had Sanskrit roots.7 Such statements, which emphasized Indian skills and modernity, 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 cigarettes, 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 garments, drinking cheap liquor, and speaking pidgin English—rather than selfreliance and independence. Oza went on to argue that Indians, who were “thrifty,” “God fearing,” and “industrious,” presented an example to Africans, 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 despise his tribesmen.” Significantly, his critique of the specific kind of Western civilization European settlers in Kenya brought with them led Oza to conclude 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, fostered 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 Africans 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

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“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 independence 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 independence” 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 “fraudulent” promises of the colonial state and its violent excesses led Oza to reconsider 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, Jeevanjee made Dass, who had been politically active in London, the secretary 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 Congress 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 orientation 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 empire] 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 vanished,” he wrote. Significantly, this was presented by Oza in a Gandhian rendering. By 1930, Gandhi was using the recurring trope of racial dis-

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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 between 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 nationalist 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 hierarchical 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, including Indians, should “subordinate themselves to the view” that development in East Africa would be in the interest of Africans. Despite his racialized 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 succeeded in pushing the Congress to continue its decade-long boycott of the Legislative Council and began to take up political and economic issues beyond the racially exclusive concerns of Indian legislative representation and commercial enterprise.15 Five years after Harry Thuku’s arrest, Ali announced in his presidential address to the Congress in 1927 that the organization would address specific African grievances, which had little impact

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on the everyday lives of Indians, on the grounds that the interests of Africans 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 representatives 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 government 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 Indian 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 opposed, 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 100,000acre 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 discursive 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

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whom were mechanics, masons, engineers, construction workers, metalworkers, carpenters, shop assistants, and office clerks.19 They were employed by the colonial government (especially in the railways), European and Indian 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 remained 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 representation, 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 depression 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 “permanent” 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 maintenance 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 foundation 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 fifteen 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

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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 European and Indian capitalists.” In particular, he criticized the insecurity of their terms of employment, long working hours that left employees “mentally 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 minimum 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 investigate 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 contained 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 contractors. 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 Contractors 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

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construction. The union led the bricklayers on strike in Nairobi. Construction came to a halt, and within a week the Contractors and Builders Association 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 negotiated 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 Ordinance already being considered was passed in the Legislative Council, making it legal for workers to unionize and make their demands collectively. 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 fiveday strike in Mombasa, securing a 25 percent wage increase, an eighthour working day, and accident compensation.25 The provincial commissioner of Mombasa had entered the negotiations on the side of the employer who was also supported by FICCI and a member of the Congress 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 politics attracted the attention of the new generation of leaders within the Congress. 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

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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 African Trade Union by including African workers in its membership. Influenced 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 Mombasa. In April 1938, Singh sent personal invitations to several political organizations, including the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), formed in 1924 in Murang’a (Fort Hall), and the Kikuyu Land Board Association, to a conference to discuss workmen’s compensation. No representatives of those associations 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 semiskilled Punjabis constituted much of the working-class population in Nairobi and Mombasa and had been the first to organize themselves in a coordinated protest against their working conditions, as described in Chapter 1. Union membership was thus predominantly Punjabi, giving a communitarian 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 construction workers were also employed by Indian firms. It was these private employers 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-

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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 politically 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 introduce 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 community 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 criticizing attempts to ban clitoridectomy in 1929, demonstrating its importance in the social organization of the Kikuyu. At the same time, the KCA highlighted the social and economic significance of land ownership for the Kikuyu, 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 alienated 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) Ordinance decisively reserved the highlands for Europeans only. Several recently formed African political associations, including the North Kavirondo Central Association, Taita Hills Association, and Ukamba Members Association, wrote a joint memorandum to the secretary of state for colonies and governor in protest. The memorandum stated, “Africans can never be content with what is allotted to them under the Ordinance while the

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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, mechanics, 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 Africans 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, Indians received higher wages than Africans. For example, Indian bricklayers and masons earned approximately 400 shillings a month, while African bricklayers took home 53 shillings for the same work. In 1939, Makhan Singh calculated that Africans earned between 6 and 60 shillings a month, averaging 13 shillings, while Indian wages ranged from 60 to 600 shillings, earning on average 80 shillings. The inequities of the private sector were

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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 Indian 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 governor’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 reserves. However, officials were careful to assign the responsibility of organizing 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

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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 government’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 postcolonial 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 identified 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 presentation 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 grievances 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 introduce 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’ solidarity, and he emphasized this principle in his evidence to the commission

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and the public meetings he organized supporting the Mombasa strikers. However, even as he reached out to African workers and political organizations 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 proposals. Moreover, in his evidence Singh admitted to having employed a “boy,” an African domestic servant, whom he paid 15 shillings month. Singh argued 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 hesitated 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-memberstrong 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’ movement. However, when the Second World War broke out, wartime censorship 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

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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’ movement. The potent possibilities of a combined African and Indian front were not only watched anxiously by colonial officials in the Native Affairs department 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 impact on the material and social life of Africans. The Congress had long objected 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 Congress 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, mentioned 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

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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 destocking. 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 artisans 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 motherland and have lived here for years must serve the country and its interests.” Punjabi artisans employed in the railways directly affected by wartime restrictions 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 activists began to question the very idea that they, as colonial subjects, would be treated as equals within the empire. In so doing, an interracial, antiEuropean 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

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policy aimed at benefiting Africans materially and politically. It substantially increased the income of local African authorities, relaxed the ban on Africans growing coffee (a source of profit through export), abolished the kipande 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 decade, Kenyatta assumed the leadership of the KAU. He did so by deliberately 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 consciousness. 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 organization 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 economically profitable cash crops; the abolition of discriminatory pricing of Africanand non-African-grown crops; the lifting of all wartime bans on African political associations; full and direct representation of Africans on legislative 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-

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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 discrimination.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, Kenyatta distanced himself from the militancy that erupted among urban workers in the late 1940s. The rural elite had benefited from the government’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 obligations as patrons to loan land to them. These young men migrated to Nairobi 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 African workers in Nairobi, approximately a third were employed in government 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 government 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. Kibachia moved to Mombasa in 1946 and established the African Workers’ Federation there. In early 1947, the federation successfully organized a general strike of more than 15,000 dockworkers, taxi drivers, and house servants. 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

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his authority as its leader. They were unmoved by the slow pace of the constitutional 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 believed 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 Nairobi, 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 Bhailalbhai 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 African grievances, although he announced that Indians should “identify with [their] legitimate aspirations.” Noting that by force of numbers Africans would

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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 Nairobi, 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 lawyers, 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 December 1945, it set up an African Delegation Fund to collect £500 to finance a KAU delegation to Britain. Within three months, exceeding expectations, 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 extended by the Congress were accepted by a growing number of KAU members, 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 associated 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

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the Executive Council, common franchise, and land. A suggestion to establish an organization to “promote full understanding between Africans and Indians” was also made. In his presidential address S. G. Amin demanded 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 address 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 advancement 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-

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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 Indianowned newspapers. In particular, the Colonial Times and the Daily Chronicle became vehicles for such Indians to criticize government policy, support 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 interventions shaped the anticolonial musings of the Colonial Times. These included 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 Legislative Council by publishing papers for African political organizations, often courting arrest. In 1928, Kenyatta edited the KAU’s Gikuyu-language paper, Muigwithania (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 creating unrest among the Kikuyu. In the 1940s, like Achariar before him, Vidyarthi 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,

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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 Linlithgow [governor of India] should be handed over to an Indian people’s tribunal.” 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 antagonized 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 continue his agitation upon his release, the governor decided to deport him and in October 1947 declared him a prohibited immigrant while he was temporarily visiting newly independent India.63 Sharda, Sheth, Ahmed, and Amlani launched an offensive against the government’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 immigration officers to deny reentry to Indians whom they believed were “undesirable” 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 Chronicle 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 sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in February 1947 for this; Ahmed was also fined £200.65 The articles published in the Daily Chronicle and the Colonial Times were translated into Kiswahili and Gikuyu and printed in African newspapers such as Sauti ya Mwafrika (African Voice), the official organ of the KAU, and Mwalimu (Teacher), edited by Francis Khamisi—both

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of which were published by Vidyarthi after his release from prison. In addition, another paper called Africa Express published articles on similar anticolonial 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. Between July 31, 1947, and April 10, 1948, he wrote seven articles that led Governor Philip Mitchell to conclude that Rawal was a “social evil” who was promoting “dangerous enmities.” In these articles, Rawal criticized the “oppressive imperialist administration” for turning African soil into an arid desert through “primitive and disastrous methods of farming” and “nefarious machinations,” such as setting low wages that “hamper the amelioration of their [African] standards of life.” He criticized the draconian measures 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 campaign 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 interracial 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 support 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

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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 community leader and established the Muslim Association of Mombasa.69 He was simultaneously a member of the Congress and aligned with other Mombasa 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 separate 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 consequence of the birth of Pakistan. Far from being entirely derivative of the divisive 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

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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 councils. 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. Although 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 fundraising 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 population 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 signifier of political identity. Far from being a singular category, Indian Muslims in Kenya were divided by class, region, and sectarian beliefs, including Ismaili Khojas and Bohras from Gujarat and Punjab and Punjabi Ahmadiyyas. In 1931, while 12,117 Indian Muslims identified themselves as “Mohammedan” 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 Association 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 disassociating 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 opportunity to leverage its position.

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In 1939, the All-Indian National Congress that had formed government in several provinces of British India resigned in protest against India’s inclusion 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 government 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 momentum building up in the Indian subcontinent, the Congress celebrated Gandhi’s birthday and “independence day” in Kenya in 1945.76 At its seventeenth 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 decolonization, including the formation of an interim government under Nehru’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 Indian 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 nationhood inspired a desire for the same in Kenya: “Since the independence of our mother-country our responsibility in this country and particularly towards 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-

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stan. For example, Congress member Vidyarthi, the Hindu editor of Colonial Times, published an editorial entitled “On the Verge of Freedom,” which was critical of the policies of the All-India Muslim League and Jinnah. Muslims, 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 constituted 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 Muslims 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 opportunity 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 direction, 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 Muslims declined). Despite this move, the continued veneration of Indian nationalists such as Gandhi and Nehru created deep cleavages between Hindus and Muslims. When the Indian Associations held “National Day” on September 2, 1946, to celebrate Nehru’s interim government in India by saluting the Indian national flag and singing Indian national songs, the majority 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

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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 Muslims. Qureshi was a Punjabi Ahmadiyya who became an alderman in Nairobi 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 Legislative and Executive Councils, Shams-ud-Deen had simultaneously participated 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 immigration 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, Ismailis 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

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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 considered Pakistani nationhood a demand made by “Indians themselves which has saved India from complete annihilation.” Although motivated by different 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 Legislative Council in 1946 after publishing anti-British articles in the local press, the CMA remained staunchly loyal to the administration. Support for Pakistan had heightened diasporic communitarian identity among Muslims of all political leanings in Kenya, but the CMA’s politics were not entirely derivative 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 opposition to “Hindu domination” was less about what was going on across the ocean in the subcontinent and more about local Kenyan politics. The movement 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 anticolonial politics in Kenya. Their demand for separate electorates was accompanied 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 homeland, Pakistan, the CMA accused the Congress of importing subcontinental politics into their territorial homeland, Kenya, and criticized Hindus for unnecessarily referring to politics in India.

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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 Empire (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 administration.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 Ismaili support of the colonial state to extract concessions regarding education 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 Africa Star, was started by Qureshi with the sole aim of enabling the Europeans to “distinguish between friend and foe,” because “we Muslims should not be considered as part and parcel of the dirty Indian propaganda.” 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 subcontinental politics across the Indian Ocean, the association was, in fact, doing exactly the same. The rise of religiously defined political identity was a quintessentially 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 defined electoral communities. As the Congress embraced anticolonial, interracial politics in the late 1940s, the governor attempted to weaken this alliance by legitimizing the demands of those who distanced themselves from anticolonial politics. The violence that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent helped further the CMA’s claim that Muslims and Hindus were distinct political communities.

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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 Nairobi unless the CMA’s demands were met. Although the Congress remained opposed to any kind of division of Indians along religious lines, Patel joined hands with Rana, with whom he had worked closely in Mombasa, 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 anticolonial stance of the Congress. They highlighted the loyalty of the Muslims 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

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(CMG) for his loyal ser vice to the empire in 1948. Subsequently, the governor nominated Sir Eboo Pirbhai, the Ismaili president of CMA (who was knighted in 1952) and one of the richest businessmen in Kenya, to the Legislative 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 petitioned 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 electorates arose from a dual opposition: to the principle of communal politics, especially in the aftermath of the violence of partition, and to the realization 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 demanded 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

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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 signaled 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 expressions of Afro-Asian solidarity, Nehru positioned his new state to facilitate the emergence of “one world where freedom is universal and there is equality of opportunity between races and peoples.”93 He handpicked India’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 Nehru’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

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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 institutions 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 IndoAfrican 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 intermediate college in Nairobi. The government of India contributed financially, 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 Nairobi. 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 Independent African School in Githunguri that was attended by 150 Indian women and 6,000 African women. The women’s association raised 125 shillings for the African Women’s League, which hosted the event. As chairperson 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, “Africans 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. Kenyatta looked forward to the time “when the African would speak the Indian language,” while James Beauttah, one of the first Africans to secure a

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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 Commission 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 industries 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 territorial boundaries of India, he announced, “We East Africans have a desire 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 secret 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 endeavouring 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 independence day parties because Pant had invited “Kenyatta and his African crowd,” and refused to attend a dinner hosted by Pant for Lady Mountbatten, wife of India’s former viceroy who oversaw the transfer of

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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 Congress president Amin on behalf of the KAU in August 1948, Mbotela expressed “thanks . . . for all they [Congress] have done for our people in the way of education.”100 Before embarking on his visit to India, Gichuru remarked on the regular and growing presence of KAU delegates at the annual sessions of the Congress as an illustration of the “extent to which Africans 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 Africans 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 interracial alliance had emerged in the realm of elite institutional politics between 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 release 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

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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 political 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 religious boundaries. Singh returned to Kenya at a time when Indian politicians were fighting over the introduction of separate representation for Muslims, the KAU’s attempt at assuming the leadership of African political activity was being challenged 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 partition in Punjab, his birthplace, he protested against religiously defined separate 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 activity 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 factory 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 demands in the mid-1930s, the revitalization of trade union activity in 1949 reflected several significant changes. First, while in 1939 Singh had demanded different minimum wages for Indians and Africans, on his return he was determined to genuinely integrate the trade union movement, demanding “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

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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 Shoemakers and Workmen Association, East African Press Association, Kenyan Asian Civil Ser vice associations, and delegates from various African organizations such as the Railway African Staff Union, Kenya Houseboys Association, 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 African employees of Indian sweetmeat makers against the Indian Confectioners 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 establishing government surveillance over trade union activity. In 1949, a bill was introduced in the Legislative Council to conduct a trade test for artisans 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 empowered to engage such “voluntarily unemployed” persons to work on its

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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 Unemployed 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 requirement to reregister trade unions, Singh argued, aimed at taking away the collective bargaining rights of already registered unions that were active and successful. Therefore he demanded the repeal of all these measures.107 On January 15, 1950, at a public meeting in Nairobi, Singh referred 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 appointed status as a city. Although the government did not allow the boycott, 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 discriminatory 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 dependence on cheap raw material from Africa and had led to “intensive exploitation 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 proscription of Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini ya Jesu Kristo. These were religious sects that had taken a strong, increasingly violent, anti-European and antigovernment political turn. Governor Mitchell banned them for being “contrary to public interest.” Singh argued that they represented a political upsurge among African squatters and agricultural workers triggered by land

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hunger. In newspaper articles he drew attention to the content of the protests 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 emphasized the claims and rights of Africans as “original man,” thus marginalizing Indian claims to belonging because of their diasporic origins, Singh publicly and wholeheartedly supported them, envisioning Indians in a supporting 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 proportional representation. He acknowledged the predominance of African concerns in Kenya, proposing a resolution at the annual session of the Congress 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 proprietary 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 influence” for the frequent strikes by African workers in the late 1940s. The colonial 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 Indian 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

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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 conclusion, based on the evidence presented by the prosecution and Singh’s cross examination, Judge Thacker was persuaded that Singh’s insistence on supporting 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 “nonEuropeans” in 1950 by organizing public meetings, adopting joint resolutions, 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 nonEuropeans 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 coordinate 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

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electorate, Nazareth, Amin, Kenyatta, Otiende, Kubai, and Kaggia addressed 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 Congress 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 proposed in the Legislative Council. Five years after the Congress extended its first invitation to the KAU to attend its annual meeting, the latter reciprocated. From 1949 on, Congress invitees attended KAU meetings, especially in Githunguri, where in the presence of large numbers of Africans (ranging from 5,000 to 20,000) resolutions regarding political representation, 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, demanding 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 committees 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 objecting 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 predominantly restricted to very specific policies and issues, although they reflected 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 proposals 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

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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 organizers’ 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 opportunity for “non-European communities” to form “a constructive political unit to fight and overthrow the unscrupulous domination which European settlers 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 “Africans and their brothers were not fit for independence,” announcing that Africans had “the right to claim their freedom.” In a rousing call to his audience, Singh rhetorically asked his audience if they were “on the defensive or the offensive.” Taking the offensive, Singh proposed a resolution, seconded 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 governments elected by the people and responsible to the people of these Territories 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

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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 Tanganyika legislation. Ambrose Ofafa, treasurer of the KAU, demanded an explanation for Singh’s reference to “Africans and their brothers,” since the banned Dini ya Mishambwa and Dini ya Jesu Kristo referred to their inducted members 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 answered with a resounding “Hapana” (No). Having reached an impasse, the organizers decided to put the independence resolution to a vote. Patel’s protest 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 independence 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 members 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 meetings, 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,

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but also concerns that were limited to one or the other community, such as religious electorates and the kipande. This underscored the mutual decision 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 negotiating colonial structures that differentiated between subjects on the basis of race served to lay the foundation for such alliances, creating the opportunity, 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 homeland 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 selfgoverning, 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 immediate 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 discussed.121 The administration, however, overestimated the reach of the rhetoric 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.

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As described in Chapter 2, from the late 1930s onward, the colonial government 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 politicization of such African businessmen on issues involving the country’s development 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,” including 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 Cooperation 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 independent 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 legislation to encourage African business, novice traders faced structural impediments, as close administrative supervision hindered rather than facilitated the growth of their ventures. In particular, traders found it difficult to establish their creditworthiness, and they faced interference from the government 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 councils, 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 commissioners 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-

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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 newcomers 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 shopkeepers. 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 frustrations were articulated in an increasingly racialized discourse on the presence of Indians in Kenya. Despite the joint political front of the KAU and Congress, Indian shopkeepers emerged as the most visible and immediate obstacle to African economic 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 smallscale businesses, farmers hoping to make a profit from the sale of their produce and customers buying everyday goods from Indians were frustrated by their encounters with dukkawallahs in the late 1940s. The colonial government had established wartime price controls, import duties, and coupon rationing, especially on maize meal, sugar, potatoes, rice, butter, and ghee—

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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 government 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 itself limited because of “poor packaging” and “rough treatment” in transport. 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 perishable commodities, such as fruits and vegetables, rose as well. In the Nairobi 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 consumers 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, dukkawallahs 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

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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 between shopkeepers and customers sometimes turned violent. In August 1948, Anandji Purshottan Lodhia was arrested and charged with manslaughter 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 boycott 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 intervention of Kenyatta, Peter Koinange, and Mathu to call off the Nakuru boycott, though Kenyatta had initially supported it.128 The political implications 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 organizing their capital on a cooperative basis.129 Through the 1940s, leaders within the Congress tried to transcend racial boundaries in the public political realm but never succeeded in effacing them. Although the KAU and Congress held joint meetings and together

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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 organizations, 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 Indians and Africans had many problems in common, there were some problems that were exclusive to the latter, particularly their economic grievances. As far as he was concerned, “Indians do not come here as missionaries, doctors or teachers, or as administrators but as money coiners.” Therefore, Awori and Gichuru advocated a ban on Indian immigration as the only way to prevent 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 reflected a growing criticism of the accumulation of wealth by Indian shopkeepers and the mistreatment of Africans by Indians in their everyday interactions. 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 employees 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

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could afford to rent rooms to live in. Although the Labour Control Department 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 Africans 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 organization’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, general 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 fellowship to study at Oxford. Tom Mbotela also distanced himself from Singh and his Trade Union Congress, referring to it as “the most ruinous organization I have ever come across in this country.” As a member of the Nairobi African Advisory Council, Mbotela was determined to “remove old undesirable” 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 Africans in the “duty to their country,” and they urged Indians not to meddle

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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 consensus emerged about the right of Africans as first belongers to stake economic, political, and territorial claims in Kenya. This discourse of indigeneity 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 politically—but this cooperation was conditional. At a KAU meeting in April 1951 in Nairobi, Kenyatta announced that Africans wanted Indian friendship 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 tolerate 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 peripheral to Africans’ claims and dependent on African acceptance. Across the political spectrum, Indians were united in not seeing themselves as guests. Nazareth, Makhan Singh, Patel, and Puri objected to Nehru’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, emphatically rejecting the trope of “guests” used by Kenyatta and Nehru and

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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 uncertain and contested. U. K. Oza and Makhan Singh had imagined postcolonial Kenya as a predominantly 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, liveable 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 generation would be as much Africans as [they].”137 In this vein, in 1950 Jaswant Singh, a member of the executive committee of the Congress, suggested that the term “Kenyan” or “East African” be used for Indians who were permanently resident in East Africa, thus moving to sever the territorial 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 “indigenous” population did not mean that they were “complete foreigners and strangers to all that was ‘Indian.’ ”138 Although in his address as Congress 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 between Africans and Indians rooted in different geographical pasts and present economic racial inequalities.

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Beyond the rhetorical possibilities of using these Indian Ocean connections 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 triggered 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 geographical 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 political parties based on ideological affiliations. Characterizing contemporary 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 multiracialism were consolidated over the next decade.

FOUR

R Between Rebellion and Suppression

British prime minister Harold Macmillan announced in the South African parliament, “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness 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 government 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 transition 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 agricultural productivity of the highlands, European settlers mechanized their farms and introduced new labor contracts clearly stating that squatters had

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no ownership rights over the land that they had been cultivating for generations. Approximately 4,000 Kikuyu squatters displaced under these circumstances 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 included 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 educational initiatives away from European missionaries and government oversight. 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, representing 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

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expressed relief when he was detained. Singh’s comrades, Kaggia and Kubai, formed a group within the KAU—the Study Circle—that embraced the radicalism 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 customs, 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 suppression. However, since the 1970s, historical scholarship has placed this at the center of narratives on late 1940s–1950s Kenya. The demands, organization, 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 guerrillas 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 (referred 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

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obligations, authority, and generational conflict. The formation of the Kikuyu Home Guard under government auspices to fight the Mau Mau in the forests 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 ammunition, the government set up a pipeline of detention camps in which thousands of suspects were detained and screened. Those who “confessed” to taking the oath were “rehabilitated” as the state believed that Mau Mau inductees 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 detainees. The rebels targeted the Home Guard, on one occasion killing ninetyseven “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 ordinary Indians and Africans were shaped by the rebellion and counterinsurgency. 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

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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 Nairobi, 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 clientele was African. About 8,000 Indians lived in small towns in the foothills 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 preoccupations, and geographical location shaped Indian engagement with the fighters, detainees, suspects, and state agents, resulting in a diversity of public, intimate, 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 homeland 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 colonial 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.

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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 Congress 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 president. 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 Legislative 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 Congress 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 evidence 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.

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As described in Chapter 3, Muslims who demurred at the interracial, increasingly 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 political activities—and, perhaps, anticipating the emergence of a territorially 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 nomenclature, 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 criticized 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 itself with “extraordinary powers . . . [that were] in opposition to the principles of British law and democracy,” freedom, and justice. The Congress subsequently issued a public statement accusing the colonial administration 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

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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 members but also extended their ideological support to the forest fighters by defending 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 relationships 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 independence. 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 ceremony attended by twelve elders, with Chief Koinange presiding. Pinto communicated 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,

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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 nationalism 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 detailed 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 Europeans 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

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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 government’s “efforts and propaganda” in putting down the rebellion, highlighting 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 shillings per head for killing African “terrorists,” leading to the murder of more than 200 Africans each week. He also learned about atrocities being committed in detention camps from a European farmer working in the Kenya Police Reserves (KPR) at the Athi River camp and discovered that at Bahati 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 government 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 referred 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 government was emphatic that the colonial state was the main perpetrator of violence 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 Africans “the contribution India . . . can make culturally, politically and economically 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 Nairobi” 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 members, the Indian government publicly highlighted the excesses of the colo-

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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 exhibitions of armed might.” Furthermore, they accused the colonial administration 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 deliberately 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 violent 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 repression of Africans who were being denied fundamental human rights” in Kenya. Colonial officials emphatically objected to Nehru’s “violent and inflammatory” utterances. Oliver Lyttelton, secretary of state for colonies, met privately with Nehru to persuade him that similar emergency measures in Malaya 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 imperial strategies. Nehru did, however, get the opportunity to provide some tangible support to those caught up in the emergency. After Kenyatta’s arrest,

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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 Africans had the opportunity to qualify as lawyers, but many Indians did because 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 lawyers 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 deportation. 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 defended 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 connected to politics, especially for Indian lawyers in Nairobi. This legal political activism came in handy during the emergency. Baring had intimated to the Indian members of the Kenya Bar Association 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 Congress members Chanan Singh, Amin, Arvind Jamidar, and Travadi, to defend less well-known detainees, often completely free of charge. Since Kenyatta was defended by an Indian legal team that was financed by Indian residents of Kenya, the colonial administration feared that the trial was fast

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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’ demand 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 . . . atrocities 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 reality of the emergency beyond Nairobi further fueled their anticolonial politics, 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 depravity” 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 Indian 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 constitutional 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 thousands 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

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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 England, and was deeply impressed by the “strength of his feelings against imperialism.” 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 Chamanlal, 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 shopkeeper, 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 counsels faced. Judge Thacker, who earlier had sentenced Makhan Singh and other trade unionists for their political activities, was brought out of retirement 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 allegedly 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, defense 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.

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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 detainees. Kapila and Nazareth served as counsel for seventy-three people accused 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, Nazareth served as an acting judge for five weeks to try Mau Mau cases carrying a mandatory death sentence. Although hesitant about accepting this position, 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 subversion of law by colonial agents, which made him question the government’s emergency measures. In at least one case he successfully acquitted the accused 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 unacknowledged 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

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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 utterances” and his criticism of Judge Thacker at public meetings across the colony, Chamanlal was declared a prohibited immigrant and prevented from returning 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, ostensibly 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 office. Based on reports sent from the governor’s office in Kenya, the Colonial Office in London prepared a note on Pant’s first secretary, Rahman, accusing him and his wife of being “Soviet agents” who were directly connected 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 gunpoint, and arrested all Africans present. Despite the egregious violation of diplomatic impunity, Baring issued an informal apology to the Indian government, stating that “unfortunate words” were used in the “heat of the moment,” 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 therefore sent to “reception camps”—the official term used for detention camps set up across Nairobi—to be investigated further. Baring’s continued suspicion toward the High Commission was evident, as three further raids on the premises were authorized between June and November 1954. The Indian government, meanwhile, officially boycotted a meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentarians Conference hosted in Nairobi in continuing protest against the “colour bar” in the colony.36

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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 administration succeeded in silencing its most vocal Indian critics who were temporary visitors. As Kenya’s Indian residents continued to oppose the emergency 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 immigrant, coincidentally on January 26, 1953, the third anniversary of India becoming a republic. In February 1955, the government got the opportunity 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 October 1952, European settlers, Kenyatta, and Eliud Mathu announced that Indian money and brains, both local and transnational, were behind the organization 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 administration, 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 “sheltering a number of doubtful characters” and indulging in seditious writing and political unrest. Accusing Indians of instigating Africans against Europeans 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 government’s emergency measures, secret intelligence reports indicated that, in fact, “active Asian opinion in Kenya [was] not anti Mau Mau.”38

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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 experience in India and knowledge of Indian languages spoken in Kenya, including Urdu, Gujarati, and Punjabi. Weekly intelligence reports were reorganized 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 Congress 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 Indian residents. The initial intelligence summary of December 1952 reported that generally, 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 involvement. 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

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to secure its rights.”40 These reports reflected abstract and particular engagements 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 intimate, everyday relations. They reveal individual instances of Indian support of the Kikuyu involved in the Mau Mau at the ideological level, as a Punjabi auctioneer, railways employees, and other unnamed Indians interpreted the rebellion as an anticolonial one that “resisted” European “domination.” 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 colonywide African political associations, activists in Nairobi reorganized themselves into a number of different groups, including informal networks of KAU members who communicated with its Legislative Council representatives, the Indian High Commission, the East African Trade Union, the Congress, and Indian lawyers. This group, which Baring referred to as Group Four, included Pinto, who was the liaison between the rebels, detainees, Indian 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 detained without trial in Takwa camp, Manda Island, until July 1959, when his restriction orders were revoked. Pinto was joined by at least five other Indians 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, Babubhai 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

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was a sawmill owner and became president of the Nyeri branch of the organization in 1955. His family had moved away from the Congress due to the religious and cultural bonds they had with Pakistan. Yacoob urged Muslims 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 defined “Arab” seat in the Legislative Council if it merged with Indian Muslims 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 because 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 subcontinent) 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

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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 Corfield 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 communal 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), including 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 provided 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 nonviolence, 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 mandatory Asian call-up (which will be discussed later in this chapter). However, 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

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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 members 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 emergency, 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 supposed 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 deliberate forty-year effort by the postcolonial Kenyan state to marginalize the contribution of the forest fighters in facilitating decolonization and an eventually 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 Mukunga 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 newspapers 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 police, in accordance with the emergency provisions. Dar was put under sur-

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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 hideouts 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 suspicions 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 guerrillas 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 deport 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 political aims and agitation with those that had resulted in India gaining “independence from the British” just a few years earlier. Second, the “cruelty” of the security forces, who “would bring truckloads of Mau Mau, live prisoners and corpses,” and sometimes just a “heap of thumbs,” made him sympathetic 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

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recorded decades later, some by them, others by family members. The passage of time and the postcolonial context in which these oral histories were collected— especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mau Mau was marginalized 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 recurring 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 independence were formative to the development of his political imaginary. According 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 transmitted to me a high regard for cooperation as well as a deepening awareness that I personally wanted to play an active part in bringing Independence to my people.”50 In deploying customary Kikuyu oathing to achieve unity and thus give oaths a new political orientation, Mau Mau leaders underscored the transnational resonance of anticolonial nationalism that was appropriated to organize a local agitation. Second, everyday encounters between forest fighters and Indians highlight 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, individuals such as Dar, Watson, and Pereira encountered the rebels in mundane moments: supervising their sawmills, conversing with their African employees, and riding in their cars. Political, racial, and class considerations shaped the nature of these intimate encounters. As employers who owned

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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 meetings, and the mass dislocation of Africans who were moved through the pipeline of detention camps before being released into government-created villages 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 detention 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-udDeen’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 detention camps. Although the family distanced themselves from the violence of the Mau Mau, they criticized the repressive measures adopted by the government 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

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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 Africans who did not cooperate with them.53 With the restructuring of political intelligence, by 1955 the colonial government was able to detain or deport Indians who had been most active in providing tactical support to the Mau Mau. Those who escaped arrest continued to provide safe houses for African political meetings. J. M. Desay, for example, was a Gujarati Hindu businessman in Nairobi who had sponsored several joint Indo-African commercial enterprises and supported the Kikuyu independent schools in Githunguri by making photographic documentaries 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. Because 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 gathered more than 125 messages from African, Indian, and British leaders supporting 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

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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 rebellion 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 systematically 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 accompanying note to Singh anticipated the erasure of many political activists from nationalist narratives in the postcolonial nation but hoped that historians 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 engagement with the Mau Mau and the emergency, this history has been preserved in the realm of fiction that highlights the intimacy of this encounter, most popularly in 2005 by M. G. Vassanji in his award-winning

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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 activists in Kenya, including Makhan Singh, Pio Gama Pinto, Ambu H. Patel, Jaswant Singh, Manilal Desai, and Yacoob-ud-Deen. Ramji urged his audience to remember and take ownership of the history of these Kenyan “nationalists.” Subtly displacing the assumptions of the racially exclusive narratives 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 landless laborers in India who could not pay the high taxes charged by the colonial

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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 similar manner.” The lesson of interracial solidarity emerging from the experience 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 historical 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 government 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 encounters 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 members, who were predominantly lawyers and journalists and had been at the forefront of the alliance between the KAU and Congress, were vocal in their

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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 organization and urged the Congress to make a public demand for the formation of a colony-wide political party for Africans. They formed the Boycott Committee to distance themselves from the old vanguard. Revealing their belief 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 Nairobi, 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-

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teered to join the security forces. Deprecating the “violence, arson and bloodshed” of the Mau Mau, the Indian Association at Nakuru urged the government to make “fuller use” of Indians who were “over ready to come forth.” The majority of these Indians were petty traders. Serving as their representative was Bachulal Gathani, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers 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 became part of the Home Guard, and 696 joined the police reserves. In May 1953, the government issued a mandatory “Asian manpower call-up,” allowing Indians to join the security forces as storemen, drivers, vehicle mechanics, 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. Although in private he remained skeptical about the position of Indians regarding 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 Province, where he had set up a dairy cooperative for Africans who supplied pasteurized 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

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an ideal colonial official. In 1952 he had joined the Legislative Council representing 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 service 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 exemptions. 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 speculated that this hesitation might have resulted from a campaign by some Indians who were “sympathetic” to the Mau Mau, although the colonial administration 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 deracialization 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 Nakuru demanded that the government issue firearms to Indians for selfprotection. This request was reiterated in July 1954 at an Asian Conference held in Nairobi to discuss the emergency, where Madan and Hassan presented a united front of Hindus and Muslims.68

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When Operation Jock Scott and Operation Anvil cleared Nairobi of approximately 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 exposed. 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 strangled, 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 administration 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 population, 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, completely 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 Indian 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 wristwatches 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.

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Indian shopkeepers who lived in these remote areas joined the Asian call-up to protect their homes and businesses, motivated by security concerns. 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 Aberdare forest, requested that the government take “immediate drastic action” 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 racialized 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 Kenyatta. 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 deterioration of an already ambivalent relationship between Indians and Africans, especially outside Nairobi. Africans in Murang’a complained that 200

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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 Kikuyu 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 businessmen 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,” emphasizing the need for every Indian to “realize the significance of the changed revolutionary situation.”73 Kenyatta’s singling out of the Indian petty shopkeeper 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 emergency 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 smallscale 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 recalled 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 Africans? 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

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earn money we so desperately needed to drag ourselves up by our bootstraps, and to obtain the education we must have if we were to rule ourselves.” 74 Itote’s critique of colonialism emphasized the impoverishment of Africans caused by land hunger, for which he blamed Europeans, and economic deprivation at the hands of Indian traders. This poverty, he believed, would only be alleviated through economic uplift, but his personal experience 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 Africans to sojourning Indians in imagining the nation. Itote’s view of Indians, which resulted from his encounter with the racially 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 economic grievances unrelated to land. Mirroring the 1948 Nakuru boycott discussed in Chapter 3, in September 1953 the Kiambu Central Mau Mau committee resolved to boycott Indian shops and shoot anyone who was caught buying goods from Indians. The strategic politicization involved in specifically targeting Indian shops reveals the resonance of Mau Mau across different socioeconomic spaces, where it combined with the politics of indigeneity. 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 gathering 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 support of the government and as a result were targeted by the Mau Mau. In

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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 neighborhood 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 patrols.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 “African fellow citizens,” who “must clearly understand that they cannot possibly 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 Indians within the Legislative Council who qualified their support of African freedom. In a subtle but significant departure from the efforts of younger members of the Congress to emphasize the violence of the government rather

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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 civilizational progression to self-determination that temporally limited the legitimacy of African political aspirations. This view found resonance among several others within the Legislative Council, who voiced thinly veiled racial concerns as they negotiated matters of political representation and the redistribution 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 contrasting Mau Mau violence with the developmental stages that would eventually 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 selfgovernance, 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, Travadi, 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 retirement, leaving Mangat with an opening to steer the Congress in a new direction at a moment when, in his words, “the country is in a state of ferment, 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 Indians, it was his emphasis on the past that underscored the extent to which

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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 “barbarity” through “the contact of the immigrants.” Likely alluding to the ThukuDesai 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, Africans 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 political 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 Indians were the source of African material progress and political development. 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, corporally smarting, and morally rebellious,” as far as Mangat was concerned. He therefore argued that Africans were not yet ready for self-governance, suggesting 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

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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 dramatically announced, “is to promote an act of self-immolation. . . . [T]oday there are undercurrents in Africa going by the various names of nationalism, Africanism or tribalism. Good luck to any African tribe which is sociologically 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, increased African representation in the Legislative Council, and complete selfgovernance. 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 volteface 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 representatives 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 confidence in Mangat, and at the very next session of the Congress Amin took over as president, publicly dissociating the party from Mangat, his “deplorable views,” and his “gratuitous, unwarranted attacks” on Africans.89 By 1958, Mangat was completely alienated within the Congress, although he remained a member of the Legislative Council. He eventually withdrew per-

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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.

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the military war against the Mau Mau was over. British security forces together with the Kikuyu Home Guard succeeded in defeating Mau Mau platoons and commanders through violent military confrontations, 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 emergency 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 majority 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 BY E A R LY 19 5 5 ,

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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 African 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 “Africa 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 unquestionably 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 “undistinguishable” 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 exposed 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 inhabited 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 members 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 colonial state that it identified as the underlying cause of unrest in Kenya. It also publicly and repeatedly expressed deep concern “at the alarming continuation

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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 pressured 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 demanded 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 attitude 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 Africans. 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 adversaries 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-

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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 highlands 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 repositioned 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 future nation in which Africans and Indians would coexist. In this imagination, civilizational and racial differences separated them as two distinct political 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 “permanent and indigenous inhabitants” of Kenya.8 In so doing, they acknowledged Africans as first belongers in the country—sons of the soil whose historical disadvantage and indigenous rights needed to be recognized in the emergent nation, especially through reform in land policy. While the Congress in its policy statements continued to demand the end of racial discrimination 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 particular interests of a specific community with distinct needs, Congress policy marked Africans as separate from Indians, and revealed a desire to accommodate this difference to the advantage of Africans on the issue of land. Although for the Congress Executive Committee it was in the acknowledgment of this difference and in the deliberate formulation of policies

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emphasizing racial inequities that the structural disadvantages facing Africans would be overcome, at the discursive level, in supporting the principle 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 hospitals. Toward this end, they joined other members of the Congress in advocating the deracialization of schools and hospitals, asked the government to provide housing to migrant laborers in Nairobi, and urged the administration 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 setting 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 special interests of Africans. In the realm of commerce, however, it was Indian racial exclusivity that put Africans at a material disadvantage. As discussed 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 “innovations 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

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many of us, avarice alone is the spur to our industry.” This revealed the class consciousness among professional politicians such as Mangat who believed 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 criticized the “nefarious trading methods” of dukkawallahs, whose “unscrupulous conduct” was the “greatest disgrace” of Indians in Kenya. He particularly 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 reflected a predilection toward European sensibility even as he criticized its exclusivity. More importantly, his ethical and civilizational critique of Indian 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 indigeneity of Africans. The same compunction led the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which represented Indian business interests, to consider ways in which they could conciliate African commercial aspirations. Toward this end, both the Congress and FICCI, whose leadership was often concurrent, enthusiastically supported the government’s promotion of African trade. As businessmen themselves, they identified the lack of credit rather than their racial monopoly as restricting African access 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, including R. B. Pandya, A. H. Nurmohamed, and Bachulal Gathani, made two important policy recommendations. First, assuring African “brothers”

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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 diversify their commercial interests, as “the days of remaining content to be ‘just shopkeepers’ are gone.”14 Indian entrepreneurs with the capital to invest in industry moved into manufacturing. The political and economic Indian 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 oversight. 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 repeatedly urged the government to lift this ban, arguing that political parties 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 nationalism 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 racial 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 consultation 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-

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racial” partnership that would involve Africans and Indians in administrative decisions and responsibilities. Three Europeans, two Indians, and one African were appointed as ministers. While decisively rejecting white selfgovernance in the colony, Lyttelton hoped that multiracialism would be the “midwife in the process of transition from settler colonialism to independent 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 enthusiastically welcomed Lyttelton’s proposals as a “genuine effort” to accommodate African demands. Patel was made a minister without portfolio, while Nathoo became minister of works. Much like the colonial administration, they also accepted the inevitability of decolonization, which they rhetorically welcomed 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 educational 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 “Indians 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 Indian 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 decolonization became a reality, albeit a distant rather than immediate one. The Indian 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 numerical 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 members of the Congress recognized Africans as having the first claim to belonging 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

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consciousness that marked them out as civilizationally distinct as they asserted their right to self-determination by ensuring their inclusion in governance 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 nationhood 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 abstain 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 irreversible 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 recently 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 objected 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

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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 educational, 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 standstill 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 additional 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 premature abandonment of [Britain’s] responsibilities would lead to a decrease

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in the standard of living and discontent.” Therefore, he advocated the principle of “gradualism” to “train Africans” over a period of ten years in political responsibilities, along with “multi-racialism,” which maintained racially 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 impatience 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 recently 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 compatriots 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 colonial 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 Indians and Europeans in the commercial sector, while Odinga and Bildad

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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 marginalize the interests of their ethnically defined communities. In particular, 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 constitutional 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 postcolonial state in Kenya. However, they agreed on two important principles. First, the redistributive aspiration of self-governance was at the center of all visions of the democratic nation-state. Second, self-determination and independence 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 democratic 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 representatives. 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 Africans would predominate by force of numbers, by their right as original belongers, and by state oversight, ensuring the reversal of the colonial racial hierarchy that had placed Europeans on top, Indians in the middle, and Africans at the bottom. They merely disagreed on the particular kinds of initiatives that their state would foster toward this end.

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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 historical and structural legacy of colonialism, was thus ambiguous. This ambivalence 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 political representation, and nation building brought up tensions that had never been resolved but had been glossed over in the utopia of interracial solidarity during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In January 1960, political negotiations at Lancaster House in London over constitutional reforms revealed the deeply racialized political postures of Indian and African elected members 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 proprietary rights to Europeans, while Kiano advocated a “willing-buyer, willingseller” resolution to the land issue. Indians had long supported the deracialization 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 ownership 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 permitted 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 replacement of white racial reservations with black ones, both of which excluded Indians. It was in fact this disagreement over land that had led to

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Nazareth’s expulsion, along with other Indian members, from the Kenya Independence Movement.29 Since the majority of Indians in Kenya were not agriculturalists, differences over the land question were a matter of principle rather than practice. 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 commercial activities in the organized sector of the economy was more than double, they earned on average only 62 shillings a month.30 The colonial government 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 government sectors, but they earned considerably lower wages than Indians. These differences were reflected in the kind of jobs Indians and Africans were employed in, as Indians were predominantly proprietors and managers and engaged in skilled work, whereas Africans were hired as shop assistants and as unskilled workers. For Africans at the threshold of independence, freedom would be meaningful 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 artisans (especially in the railways), government clerks, junior administrators, and accountants—the very occupations that Indians were engaged in. Envisioning this future, Indian Legislative Council representatives feared the ability of the postcolonial state to confiscate Indian property, dismiss Indians from government jobs, and restrict Indian trading activity to correct the historical racial imbalance of colonialism that it would inherit. To protect Indian livelihoods from such excesses of the state, the Congress asked African members to commit to passing legislation that would outlaw the confiscation of property by the state and prohibit racial discrimination in acquiring, holding, and occupying land and in carry ing on trade or business.

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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 beginning of a future in which past economic imbalances caused by nonindigenous 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 maintain 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 refused 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 constitutional changes. The political cleavages between African and Indian members, each claiming to represent the best interests of their racially defined communities, soon became insurmountable. The African delegation, including 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 unsurprising demand. It was the position of the Indian elected members, particularly Nazareth, that marked a dramatic and unexpected change in their political stance. For more than four decades the Congress had been steadfast in its demand for a common electoral roll to undercut the monopoly of Europeans in administrative affairs and transcend racial boundaries in electoral 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 continued 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 racially defined communal rolls and racial reservation of seats for a period of four years.

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In 1956 Nazareth had publicly criticized Mangat for rescinding the Congress’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. Politically, African interests predominated over Indian claims to racially neutral equal citizenship, as the redistributive aspiration of nationhood necessitated 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 legislation 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 citizens on a “footing of equality” irrespective of their race. However, in the midst of talk about restricting access to the highlands and replacing the Indian petty bourgeoisie with an African one, statehood appeared to Nazareth to be substituting European racial predominance with African “racialism.” A state that differentiated citizenship rights on the basis of race would perpetuate colonial policies of racial discrimination against Indians 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 “Africans.”34 In this emergent definition of nationhood, citizenship and race

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were conflated in African political discourse, as being Kenyan was equated with being African. However, it remained unclear whether the term “African” 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 diasporic Indians from the emergent nation. Reacting to Mboya, K. D. Travadi made a generational claim that emphasized territorial affiliation and political loyalty to Kenya, and a willingness 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 indigenous citizens. In building his argument for the common roll, Travadi stated that since Kenya was a “plural society,” its citizens should not bind themselves “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 representatives 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, revealed to Travadi the impossibility of “common citizenship” in independent 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, Africans 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

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Indians to “insignificance,” as their individual vote would have “no practical value.” Nazareth therefore turned his back on his own past demand for immediate, 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 confirmed 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 independence.” 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 minority 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 representatives, 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

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in the tide of immediate, democratic nationalism. The former option was a retrograde one that would continue the colonial practice of race-based representation. 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.” Recognizing the racial principle involved in such a demand, he argued that as long as the political discourse of indigeneity among Africans positioned Indians as “gatecrashers” and political parties remained monoracial, the constitution must recognize “non-Africans” as a politically distinct group.40 This assertion of territorial, national citizenship, however, exposed Hassan’s ambivalence 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 announce that differences had arisen among Indian delegates over the issue of franchise and that he did not support Nazareth’s demand for the continuation 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 November 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

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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 Europeans that an African government would wreak havoc on the economy, arguing 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 delegates 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 “privileges” 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 “safeguards” demanded by Nazareth and Hassan would merely create a “false sense of security” and were not required as long as the constitution contained 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 Legislative 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

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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 Nairobi. 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 deracialization 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 marginalize Nazareth’s retrograde demand for racially defined political representation, 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 dissolved 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 reality of economic inequality exposed tense and increasingly violent negotiations of racialized class dynamics. Different conceptualizations and inherent contradictions in the meaning of rights, freedom, and equality had led to

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the fallout at Lancaster House. As their elected representatives were battling 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 exdetainees who had migrated to Nairobi and Nyeri in search of livelihoods. The emergency and political uncertainty had dried up employment opportunities in colonial building projects and industrial ser vices for almost a decade, 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 employment. 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 arrangements were illegal. Operating under the state’s radar, Indian proprietors 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.

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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 Nairobi’s commercial and Indian residential area. While the man was not seriously 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 Africans 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 control.” Since the intersection of Duke Street and River Road was a predominantly 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 European 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 “disorderly.” 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 balconies and on the street.

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The reverberations from the events of December 20 were felt well beyond 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 longheld 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 predominant: 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 indicate that if he did not agree to the African demands, they would not remain quiet.”50 Furthermore, Mangat used the River Road incident to emphasize the different 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 highlighting 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 revealed “a general hatred against [Indians] for his very face.” He accused Africans 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

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House, used the River Road violence to criticize African politicians for creating 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 forgetting “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 demanding that Indian policemen be posted in Indian areas in Nairobi because 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 distance 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 representation, 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 paternalistic, 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 argument 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 political rhetoric into committing “acts of violence.” Jagdeo illustrated his argument 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-

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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 civilizational argument in public discourse about the difference between Indians 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 Nairobi 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 Indian 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 police 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 attack 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

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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 because he “wanted them to die.” Njunga allegedly advised Bassan to leave his family instead, but the latter would not be convinced. Njunga then introduced 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 gruesome murder was a motivated political act, Indian members within the Legislative Council in Nairobi also alluded to African political complicity, but stopped short of accusing the African leadership of masterminding the attack. Instead, they criticized African representatives for not condemning such violence more strongly. In so doing, they exposed the latent conditionality

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of their support for undiluted democracy. Representing the Congress, KFP, and Kenya Muslim League, Nathoo, Zafr-ud-Deen, Amin, and Madan collectively announced that African political “progress” and “advance” required as a corollary “responsible” behavior. They appealed to the governor for compulsory defense training for Indian youths so that they could protect themselves 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 violence and victimhood in its public statements about the Nyeri murder. Announcing that it was the “duty” of African leaders to call “public meetings” in areas where Indians lived in large numbers, the KFP asked African members of the Legislative Council to explain the “futility and injustice of violence against a peaceful community.” Furthermore, Nathoo threatened to withdraw his support of “undiluted democracy,” warning that African political “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 leadership 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 “lawless” Kikuyu from the Central Province. He announced that with the end of the emergency, the most hard-core African detainees who had not admitted to “taking the Mau Mau oath”—those who had not been “rehabilitated” 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

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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 community, 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 underscored 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 racially 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 obstructing Sahni from executing his duty, Makendia, who had a legal background, 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 resisted 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 impotence 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

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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 Mungoti, 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 inhabited by Indians and Africans whose mediations of the colonial state resulted in racial confrontations that resonated among Nairobi’s residents. This heightened race consciousness was reinforced by administrative structures 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 disproportionately 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 Africans on the basis of their allegedly lower cost of living, thus viewing Africans and Indians as unequal and perpetuating this inequality. It was in negotiating 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 articulated in ordinary, everyday acts of mediation in urban spaces where racial and class boundaries pushed up against one another. Such class divisions were voiced through a racial, increasingly nationalist lens in African

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discourses on the redistribution of wealth that would accompany uhuru. Within and outside the Legislative Council, African skepticism about Indians highlighted three interlinked concerns. First, for many Africans, Indians were nonindigenous, and their presence in Kenya was inextricably linked with the colonization of the country—a position reinforced by Indians’ 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 maneuverings, 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 “selfishness” among Africans who had lived “contentedly and comfortably” before 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 although 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 independence. Nairobi was not exceptional in witnessing this convergence of

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urban discontent, racialized politics, and everyday violence. As Jon Soske has shown in his analysis of the Durban riots a decade earlier, a clash between 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 ambulance 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

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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 Mombasa 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 Africans arising from material inequality was revealed in other avenues of organized 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 “prevent 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 “stumbling” block of African business. Such accusations were not new, as the monopoly of Indian petty traders had been criticized by aspiring African merchants since the 1940s. At the threshold of uhuru, however, this criticism carried with it the possibility of tangible structural change that would affect Indians. Akoko Mboya, general secretary of the African Chamber of Commerce, demanded the complete replacement of the “ubiquitous Indian

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middleman” in postcolonial Kenya, a policy position that found a sympathetic 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 circular 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 bombings 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 transfers 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 neither 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.

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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 Indian 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 pickpocketing, 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 surveillance, 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 largescale 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 instances 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 discovery 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

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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 servants were threatened with pangas by four men who locked them in a bathroom. 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 commercial 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 wristwatches 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 inequality on personal display, since Indians, as a race and a class, owned wristwatches 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 boundaries 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 conflated into a highly racialized discourse among Africans and Indians. For Africans within and outside the Legislative Council, political selfdetermination was inextricably linked with the redistribution of wealth, an entanglement that undermined the economic position of Indians in postcolonial 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 “nationalist” argument made by Indians justified their class status in postcolonial Kenya on the basis of their past and future contributions in the economic development of the country. The majority of such claims equated trade

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and business with a civilizational rhetoric that marked Indians as racially distinct and superior to Africans. This developmental discourse was similar 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 nationalistic claims. Mangal Das, a Nairobi resident whose letters to the editor appeared frequently in English-language newspapers, referred to the “civilising influence” 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 argued 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 between Indians and Africans, as the latter had no interest in engaging in business. In this precolonial history of trade in Kenya, Africans were consigned 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 backwardness of Africans.73 The monopoly of Indians over economic development was used by different Indians to stake a claim of belonging in the emergent nation. While the Indians’ accumulation of wealth under colonial rule placed them outside 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 argument, pointing out that political freedom would “mean very little to the

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common man unless it also brings economic freedom.” 74 This could be realized only with expertise in trade, industry, medicine, and education— professions that Indians occupied. Therefore, like Das, he made a developmental 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 emergency and “ill conceived” desire to bring Africans into the government. Using the “panga slashings” to emphasize the brutality and primitiveness of Africans, 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 skirmishes, 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 future in Kenya as a racial minority needed constitutional safeguards. A similar 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 attachment, 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 underscoring their extraterritorial affiliation that immediately marked their difference 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

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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 replaced 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 commercial sector, K. L. Bhasin, president of FICCI, pointed to Indian indus-

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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 continuing role in developing Kenya’s economy, three Kenya-born Ismaili industrialists 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 manufacturing 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 resonance 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 emphatic that Indians needed to stay apolitical by being loyal to the “government

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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 provided 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 democracy. 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 proclamations, 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 Lancaster 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 temporary racial principle in electoral representation, not the KFP, who tried to delink racial violence from politics. In an effort to deescalate the heightened racial consciousness that had permeated the public realm, Amin, Gautama, 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 masterminding 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, Kenyatta assured them that uhuru was “for all races” and that people who talk

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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 conditional 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 emphasized 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 allegories 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 addressed to a cat to remind it that if it doesn’t perform its duty, it will not receive 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 democracy” 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 developing African business tactics and education.87 Toward this end, Indian businessmen in Nairobi donated £600 to KANU for an educational fund. In

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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 problems 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, president of FICCI, poignantly noted that self-governance was “only the completion 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, J. M. Nazareth objected to the term as situating Indians as permanent outsiders 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

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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 legislative 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, including 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 postcolonial 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. Indians are mostly absent from these analyses, underscoring the historiographical marginality of a diaspora assumed to be historically marginal. This conclusion is interpreted in two paradoxical ways that place responsibility for Indians’ marginality in different directions. On one hand, the endogamous 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, Africanization and the exodus of 1967–1968 appear as the logical end of the history of Indians in Kenya.2

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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 contestations over nationalist politics and economic privilege were increasingly racialized 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 negotiations over nationhood fell apart as differences over political and economic 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 difficulties . . . which now belong to history.”3 At uhuru, like other postcolonial 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 independence 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 generation 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 president, and Tom Mboya; Mwai Kibaki, a young Kikuyu ally of Odinga who went on to become president in 2002 after, ironically, defeating both

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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 McKenzie, 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 parliamentary secretary, and Pio Gama Pinto was elected as a special representative to the National Assembly. Pranlal Sheth, who after serving as editor and journalist for the Colonial Times and Daily Chronicle qualified as a lawyer in London in 1960, participated as an advisor during the constitutional negotiations and became a member of several governmental committees. In August 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. Celebrating the incorporation of the opposition into his administration, he announced that there was no need for a multiparty system that would represent 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 financial compensation to white farmers who left Kenya but also gave Kenyatta’s government the chance to redistribute land without directly dispossessing 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

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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 capitalist 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 accumulation 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 experience in party organization, became its director and secretary. Along with him, Odinga, Kaggia, Murumbi, and Achieng Oneko were active in the institute, using it as a platform from where to push their socialist economic agenda, including, allegedly, putting together a policy document that threatened 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 dismissed 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 international alliances of the Cold War, despite the country’s official policy

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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 debates 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 command, resulting in Odinga’s resignation as vice president.9 In the emergent war between the left and right, Indians were in a precarious 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 politically 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 radical land reform, Kaggia had pointed to rising land speculation in Kenya resulting from the purchase of large tracts by Indian capitalists, a trend that Kenyatta himself criticized. Moreover, approximately 28 percent were employed 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 Africans 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 technical jobs and 4 percent were in supervisory positions, whereas only 1 per-

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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 populations, especially Nairobi, discussed in Chapter 5, the structural privileges in employment and education with which Indians started at uhuru developed 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 postcolonial 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 compromising 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 voluntarily deracialize the commercial sector opened up a public dialogue about the desirability of state-led Africanization initiatives that would institute racially 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

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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 suggested that the government of India advance loans to Kenya to buy out Indian traders, just as the British government had done for the highlands—a scheme that the Indian government did not consider.13 In these circumstances, 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 imbalances” would be corrected. Blaming Indian entrepreneurs for acting as “single clannish groups” rather than as nationalists, he pointed to their refusal to voluntarily make Africans partners in their enterprises, employ Africans 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 business. Therefore Mboya announced that the government would restrict licenses for certain types of trade and business, exposing “a deliberate bias in favour of African applicants.”14 The state thus deployed race as a category 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 Africans 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 industry. 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 infrastructure through banks and criticizing, in particular, the intertwined credit system that Indian traders had access to, a member of the National Assembly 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

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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 expansion [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 substantial changes that would exponentially increase African participation to successfully undermine the Indian monopoly in the commercial sector.17 Instead, between 1964 and 1967, the state articulated a discourse of racial majoritarianism 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 extraneous 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 discourse 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 interrelated 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 deracialize their ventures. Second, they highlighted the nonindigenous, diasporic origins of Indians. Third, the material wealth of Indians was juxtaposed to the general poverty of Africans in two ways: traders were accused of exploiting African customers, and Indians performing skilled and semiskilled work such as engineering, carpentry, clerking in banks, and tailoring were seen as usurping jobs that Africans would otherwise hold. The Voice of Kenya, the government-run radio, took the lead in disseminating 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,

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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 businesses, 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 admitted 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 belonging 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 extraterritoriality of Indians. As the Voice of Kenya put it in broadcasts that resonated 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 independence, and skilled Indian workers remained in private and public employ. However, in placing them outside the nation, these broadcasts deliberately elided the shared history of interracial political protest, arguing that

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“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, racial predominance and solidarity, and history to place responsibility for the failures of independence on the Indian minority at a time when the government 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 companies 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 affiliation 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 presence of his eighteen-month-old daughter. Kisilu Mutua and Chege Thuo were

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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 political activists, including Odinga and Kaggia, believed that Pinto was assassinated 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 minister 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 Pinto’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 politics within just six months of his appointment. In life and in death, Pinto represented much more than the racially defined 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 governmental committees, including the agricultural board, the economic planning 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

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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 deported him to India along with five other Indians. The home minister, Moi, who had overseen the expulsions, met a deputation of Indian leaders, including 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 prohibited 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 doctrine 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.” Zeverrchand 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 “terrorist 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 difficult” 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

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boasted about bribing officials and ministers, was a shop assistant at a supermarket, 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 Kakamega 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 proprietor of a construction company that employed 150 Africans who had unionized. Lakhani too argued that his expulsion was caused by labor difficulties 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 Kenyatta 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 described in Chapter 5, Pinto’s assassination, and the deportations fueled this discourse. The language of national integration and racial harmony that accompanied the expulsions underscored the attempt made by Kenyatta’s govern-

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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 refrained 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 radical reforms. In December 1966 the Nairobi City Council announced it was unwilling “to safeguard the provisions of the constitution to the disadvantage 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 belonging to Indians who refused “to co-operate with us.” Elsewhere in Mombasa 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 Federation 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 majoritarianism between 1964 and 1967 to deflect criticism away from itself, the resonance of its nationalist prose that identified Kenya as a predominantly 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 Africans, 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

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being anachronistic and colonial in their conduct despite uhuru. It also revealed an increasing expectation among aspiring traders that the government 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 carefully 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 entitled 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, irrespective 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 Africans, was restricted entirely to citizens. Noncitizens were required to apply for government authorization to conduct business in these provisions. Indian 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, representing 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 imbalances 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 citizens” to allow Africans to “catch up with them” in managerial and executive positions through policies that promoted “black Africans” over Indians,

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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 colonial government in the 1930s that similarly had aimed to restrict the activities 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 fullblown exodus was taking place. In six short months 18 percent of the Indian 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 Nairobi, Kenyatta pointed to their destination: “Knowing that India and Pakistan 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. Moreover, 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 politicogeographic 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

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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 citizenship 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 discouraged 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 citizenship, and only 500 held Pakistani passports. Since Kenya was not yet independent, 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 residence 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 citizenship rights of white settlers in the empire as the reality of decolonization 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 authorities at the time that Indians were unlikely to take advantage of their changed status from colonial subjects to postcolonial British citizens and migrate permanently 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 Indians 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 constitution also prohibited citizens from holding dual citizenship. Indians with

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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 permanent 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 majoritarianism. 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, several interrelated practical, political, and psychological reasons for the failure of Indians to apply en masse to become Kenyan citizens and choose to immigrate 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. Registering 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 Kenyan 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 original nationality, his country, his people” and “give one loyalty to Kenya and Kenya alone.” 42 For the Indian diaspora, whose political, cultural, and social consciousness had been shaped over five decades, straddling the realms of three countries tied together, ironically, by the territorial reach of imperial power in India, Kenya, and Britain, the singularity of the loyalty demanded 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

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father claimed Kenya as their birthplace were eligible to apply for citizenship. This created bureaucratic hurdles, as not all Indians had birth certificates 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 fragmented 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 livelihoods of the Indian petty bourgeoisie, the discourse of indigeneity that conflated national belonging with racial identity, and the skepticism of Indians about the ability of Africans to govern the nation-state made Indians uncertain 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 “exhibit 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 Kenyatta 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 treatment of Indian political activists and small businessmen in the first two years of uhuru and the government’s declared policy to replace Indian skilled artisans and craftsmen with African workers further stoked this sense of insecurity. Therefore, in 1964 many Indians hesitated to take up Kenyan citizenship 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 shillings to the KANU Headquarters Fund in Nairobi; and a group of businessmen pledged 80,000 shillings to build an X-ray facility in Gatundu Hos-

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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 Kenyatta 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 directly 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 Commerce 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 passports 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 encourage 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 arbitrarily 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 African 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 frustration, 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

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Indians who perceived Kenyatta’s state as a majoritarian one that was rendering them a permanent minority. The violent confrontations and racialized milieu of the early 1960s in Nairobi and their own diasporic consciousness—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 triggered the emigration of close to 6,000 Indians with British passports between October 1963 and August 1967. Dilbagh Channa, a Punjabi Sikh schoolteacher from Kisumu, hesitated to apply for citizenship after the Zanzibar 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 moment 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 Province. 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 backgrounds who settled in East Africa at the turn of the century and quickly accumulated vast quantities of wealth, Shah’s father remained a shop assistant 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 accompanying the call for uhuru served as a catalyst to take advantage of the residential rights that the possession of CUKC passports bestowed them with. Babubhai Patel, whose father had moved to Kenya in 1942 as an employee

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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 recalled 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 unemployed. 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. However, this legislation directly affected as many as 9,000 traders who had not taken up Kenyan citizenship. The bills, together with the cancellation of certificates of permanent residence, put the government in control of issuing work permits with the goal of creating employment opportunities for Africans. 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, carpenters, tailors, and mechanics but also bank clerks and shop assistants.50 For shopkeepers who could afford the hefty application fees, close governmental

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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 directly affected by the legislation, the majority had families who were dependent 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. Indian 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 reluctant yet willing migrants who believed they were being pushed out by “people not ready for independence.”52 Such remembrances create a diasporic narrative that places the blame for the Indian exodus squarely on Africans, who, according to them, forced them out of their country even though the majority 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 dramatic expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1971 shaped an “East African” diasporic consciousness that conflated the events in Kenya and Uganda despite their substantially different contexts. In this telling, Indians held no responsibility 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

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of the exclusionary legislation passed in Nairobi. On September 5, 1967, days after the Kenya Immigration Bill passed, the East African Standard carried 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 singular citizenship was complicated by the existence of a racially distinct transnational 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 culturally altering Britain forced both postcolonial nations to confront their shared imperial history, one fraught with inherited racial tensions that did not disappear 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 postcolonial governments showed an equal commitment to manipulating race relations 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 citizenship, 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

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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 presence 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,” something 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 morality” 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 immigration of Indians from Kenya without acquiescing to the opposition’s legislative 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, however, 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 chestnuts out of the fire,” announcing that Britain must “shoulder its responsibilities 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

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that Britain would close its doors to its nonwhite citizens. Although no concrete 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 whatsoever 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 understood 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 colour 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 nation 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

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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 Indian origin, and Britain threatening to rescind the right of its non-white citizens 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 citizens “without undue friction.” 60 An exodus was clearly under way. For Kenyatta, the voluntary emigration of Indians vindicated his majoritarian nationalist discourse and Africanization policies. He rebuffed pressure 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 derogatory Swahili term that meant “big man” and had been used in colonial Kenya to describe loyalists, especially chiefs, who had supported the colonial 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 Indians who left during the exodus were artisans, clerks, small-scale shopkeepers, 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 entrepreneurs, 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, especially those employed by the railways, and Nairobi-based bank clerks, cashiers, tailors, carpenters, masons, and secretaries who had their licenses canceled and employment permits rejected, thus making them illegal residents. Close to 98 percent of the skilled labor in Nairobi was Indian. Be-

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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 emigration 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 immediately 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 Indian 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 “nonbelongers,” 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 “nonbelongers” would not have the right to unrestricted entry to the United Kingdom. Instead, they were given a “generous” quota of 1,500 entry permits 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 residence 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 postcolonial British state was simply “controlling” the rate of immigration by

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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 unrestricted entry of Indians from East Africa put “great pressures on the social 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 residential rights, Callaghan offered the cabinet the ingenious solution of putting 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 pressures 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 immigration 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” citizen 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, “nonbelongers,” in a waiting room to enter their nation-state, Callaghan offered another legislative bill. He proposed amendments to the existing Race Relations Act that would make Britain a “multi-racial society” in which Commonwealth 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 Immigration 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 decentralized, 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 Relations Act, which laid the ideological and institutional foundations of what came to be known as multiculturalism. In supporting the bill, the deputy

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leader of the Conservative Party, Reginald Maulding, proclaimed, “British people have faced a problem which is quite unique.” Recognizing and mediating “difference” in the discourse and exercise of political rights guaranteed by the state was not, however, something new to Britain.65 Colonial governance within the British Empire had been based on recognizing difference by identifying, categorizing, legitimizing, and reifying “differences” 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 multiculturalism, as the British state recognized difference not to “flatten out” cultural distinctions but to maintain them.66 This, then, became the fundamental 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 convergence of transnational discourses on racial integration, national citizenship, 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 beginning to stanch their exodus. As K. S. N. Matiba, permanent secretary for commerce and industry, candidly stated on February 16, 1968, the government 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

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certain goods, leaving cultivators with no place to sell produce and consumers 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 Kenya’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 implement the trade legislation and minimize any disruption in business, announcing that “unless this change comes in an orderly manner . . . there may be change for worse.” 70 Removing some of the ambiguity that had accompanied the legislative acts, Moi clarified that the immigration bill that canceled work permits would be implemented in a “phased” manner and would apply only to certain kinds of jobs. Irrespective of citizenship, all work permits 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 government, 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 noncitizens could trade, thus giving Indians in small towns and rural areas the opportunity to diversify their stocks and ally with “front men”—African citizens 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 emigrated remained predominant in the retail and wholesale sector for the time being, especially in the capital. By 1971, although the government had ac-

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quired 262 shops vacated by Indians in Nairobi and Mombasa, only sixtythree Africans had applied for licenses to run them, revealing the continuing dependence of the national economy on Indian traders.73 Upcoming elections 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 Indeed, despite Callaghan’s fear that 200,000 Indians from Kenya would migrate 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 nation.75 Two independent surveys taken in the immediate aftermath of the exodus indicated that the majority of Indians considered Kenya their permanent 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 themselves 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 guaranteeing 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 September 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 factories and in clerical and secretarial positions. Having feared destitution in Kenya, these twice migrants showed a readiness to take up work that did

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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 employment 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 experiment with multiracialism was a success in the early 1970s. Based on this experience, on August 18, 1971, less than two weeks after Idi Amin announced his intension to expel Indians from Uganda, the British home secretary publicized the Conservative government’s plan to welcome its Indian 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 regarding the economic and residential rights of their shared South Asian minority. 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

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racialized nationalist discourses. In Kenya, the rhetoric of Africanization justified the state-led redirection of Indians’ past and present economic advantage, 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 interconnected, transnational history of postcolonial subjectivity. Two seemingly distinct 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 homeland framed a racial discourse that aimed to maintain their economic investments 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 imaginations 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 reality 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 “firsthand 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, becoming 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 affiliations 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 recruiter 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

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example was followed by the Punjabi workers who set up agricultural settlements 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 decades 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 diaspora 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 generational 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 historical 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. President 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

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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’ departure 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 immigrants, 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 racial thought and practices in Kenya. While Ranjit proclaims that he is “African,” 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 demonstrated 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

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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 consciousness 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 despite 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 Vassanji 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 familiar 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 evident in Vassanji’s “deep communion” with India draws attention to the Indian moorings of the wandering souls of the diaspora. This has been explored in scholarship on the Indian diaspora.

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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 endogamous social patterns of settlement have been used to explain the insularity 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 ahistorical 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 homeland in his novels. The diaspora’s return to this homeland in Kenya and Tanzania, 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 geographical or ideological boundaries such as the nation-state and anticolonial nationalism. 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 affiliations with their civilizational homeland, India, in making claims in their territorial homeland, Kenya. By examining diasporic consciousness as tethered to two homelands Indians in Kenya liberates diaspora studies from the

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aforementioned analytical bind and opens up a path to recovering its political 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 socioeconomic moments and interracial spaces, emphasizing the historical contingency 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 Empire. The enduring legacy of colonialism that inextricably links these postcolonial 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 Nairobi, 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 private 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 businesses have been on the receiving end of organized violence and spontaneous 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 vigilantism has fed a racializing discourse about violence, victimhood, and nationhood that continues to resurrect racial boundaries between Indians and Africans in Kenya today. At the same time, Britain, with its large immigrant

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population, also faces the challenge of reconciling multiple territorial, racial, 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 differences and transnational affiliations with their singular homelands in South Asia: Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. This approach obscures the comparative and connected history of Indian civilizational, racial, and political discourses 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 EAS IOR KNA NAI NMML RHL SOASL TNA UNL

East African Chronicle East African Standard India Office Library Collections, London Kenya National Archives, Nairobi National Archives of India, Delhi Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London The National Archives, Public Records Office, London 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

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-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:

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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

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

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). Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 8. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 2005), 109. 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. An Inquiry into Indian Education in East Africa (Nairobi: Government Printing Office, 1948). Kenyanization of Personnel in the Private Sector (Nairobi: Government Printing Office, 1967). 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. 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. 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

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

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. James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 6, 58, 82–83. 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. 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. Ken Walibora Waliaula, “The Asian ‘Other,’ ” Frontline 29, no. 16 (August 11–24, 2012). 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

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

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). 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. 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. Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of Uganda, Report, 1901, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 320. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921. 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. 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. Uganda Railway Committee Report, February 22, 1904, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 408–409; Frederick J. D.

Notes to Pages 27–34

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

309

Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Uganda and Nyasaland (London: W. Blackwell & Sons, 1893), 1: 382–490. Lugard calculated this based on an official survey. Rise of Our East African Empire, 471–472. 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. 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. 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. 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. Miller, The Lunatic Express, 286. CO/533/97, TNA: Colonial Office to London All-India Muslim League, January 1911. 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. 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. 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. Edward Buck instructions, and J. Montgomery, Commissioner for Land, Minute on Indian Immigration, May 8, 1907, Sanderson Committee, Part

310

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

Notes to Pages 34–38

III; Lansdowne to Donald Stewart, July 8, 1904, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 96. 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). 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. 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. Land Committee Report, 1904, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 329–333. For details, see Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” especially 383–384. 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. Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of State, August 23, 1905, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 457–463. 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. Colonists’ Association to the Secretary of State, August 23, 1905, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 457. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921. 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. I am grateful to James H. Sweet for alerting me to the significance of this. 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

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

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. Lugard Papers, Box 76, File 1, RHL: Montgomery to Sadler, 1907. Emphasis added. 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). Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), 33–34; Allidina Visram Obituary, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 445–446. 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. Sadler-Marques of Crewe correspondence June 4, 1908, August 27, 1908, and April 12, 1908, Sanderson Committee, Part III. 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. Girourad to Crewe, May 26, 1910, in Mungeam, ed., Kenya: Select Historical Documents, 111–113. See Lonsdale, “Moral Economy of the Mau Mau,” 319–320; John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chapter 10. Ewbank Report; Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921. Salvadori and Aldrick, eds., Two Indian Travellers, 102. 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. Kirk and Grogan evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II. “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

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93.

94.

315

and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: Montgomery to Colonial Office, December 3, 1918. Department of Commerce and Emigration A, March 1921, Nos. 16–17, NAI: Legislative Council debate, December 9, 1918. Montgomery and Lord Hindlip evidence, Sanderson Committee, Part II. 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. Quoted in Hofmeyr, “Idea of ‘Africa,’ ” 76. 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. 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. 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

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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. 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. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921. International Missionary Council Africa (henceforth IMCA) Papers, Box 241, File E, SOASL: John W. Archer, The Graphic, May 19, 1923; Ewbank Report; Corbett Report. 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. 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. Ewbank Report; Corbett Report; Hindlip evidence; Sanderson Committee, Part II. CO/533/255 TNA: Jeevanjee to Lloyd George, December 11, 1920. CO/533/259, TNA: Northey– Secretary of State correspondence, May 7, 11, and 14, 1921. L/E/7/1623, I&O 814/1922, IOR: Jeevanjee to Milner, September 3, 1920. See photographs of Desai in Zarina Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai: The Stormy Petrel (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2010). 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. EAC, August 21 and October 2 and 23, 1920. L/PO/1/1(A), IOR: Indian Overseas Association to India Office, April 1, 1921. Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Das to Northey, March 22, 1919. CO/533/242, TNA: Press clippings, July-August 1920. 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

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

317

Memorandum by Kenya Indian Delegation to Secretary of State for India, May 22, 1923. 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. CO/533/259, TNA: Northey to Churchill, May 14, 1921. 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. 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. L/PO/1/1(A), IOR: Minutes of meeting between Colonial Office, India Office, and Kenya delegates, April 24, 1923. CO/533/231, TNA: Note on Congress meeting, November 15 and 16, 1919; Asian Records, Microfilm 1, KNA: Indian Association statement, January 24, 1920. 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). 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. IMCA Papers, Box 241, SOASL: Memorandum on the Case against the Claims of Indians in Kenya. EAC, August 14, November 13 and 27, December 11, 1920, and January 29, February 12, May 7, 1921. 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. 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. 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

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

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. EAC, September 4, 1920; C. F. Andrews, “From the Indian Standpoint,” March 10, 1923, quoted in Indians Abroad, Bulletin No. 5, May 1923. EAC, October 30, December 11, 1920, and January 29, 1921. 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. Ross, Kenya from within, chapter 12. 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. CO/533/264, TNA: Northey to Churchill, October 1, 1921. CO/533/242, TNA: India Office to Colonial Office, February 26, 1920. EAC, September 18, 1920, and June 25, 1921. CO/533/264, TNA: Northey to Churchill, October 1, 1921. EAC, August 14, October 30, 1920, and February 5, February 19, April 30, May 28, June 4, 1921. 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. 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. 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

69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

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. “Harry Thuku of Kenya,” Young India, December 5, 1924. 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. 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. Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai, 142. 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. L/E/7/1268, I&O 1276, IOR: Wood-Winterton Agreement, July 14, 1922, and Viceroy note, August 31, 1922. 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. 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. Report on the Census of Non-Natives, 1921; L/E/7/1329, E&O 377/1924, IOR: India Office Report, January 1926. 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. 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. 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

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. MAK/A/2, fols. 130–261, UNL: Makhan Singh to Kenya India Conference, 1935. 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. 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. MAK/A/2, fols. 130–261, UNL: Makhan Singh to Kenya India Conference, 1935, and Trade Union Bulletin, 1935. 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

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

327

concludes that the organizational origins of the Mombasa strike are unknown. 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. MAK B/1/3, fols. 1–172, UNL: Handbills, various. Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, 82. MAK A/6, fols. 1–132, UNL: Evidence to Commission of Enquiry, 1939; EAS, October 9, 1939. 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. Patel, Unquiet, 81. 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. 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. 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. For details see K. Lal, ed., The Trial of Balwant Rai and Others (Leicester: Baleaga, 1984). CO/533/502/4, TNA: Indians and the Kenyan Highlands, 1939. 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

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

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. CO/537/4659, TNA: Extract from Kenya Press Commentary Summary Articles in Daily Chronicle, October 27 and November 19, 1947. L/P&J/12/663, IOR: Intelligence summary, February 1947. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, November 1945 and April 1946; Gregory, Quest for Equality, 172. 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. CO/537/3589, TNA: Mitchell– Secretary of State correspondence, May–June 1948; L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C1, IOR: Intelligence summary, April 1946. 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). 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). 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-udDeen 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

91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

98.

99.

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. 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. 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. Asian Records, Microfilm 10, KNA: Nehru’s message to Africans and Indians in Africa, May 16, 1947. 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. 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. EAS, April 25, 1950. 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. 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. 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

100. 101.

102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

333

of State, July 1950, Acting Governor of Kenya to Secretary of State, April 15, 1950. L/P&J/8/248, 108/19C 1, IOR: Intelligence summary, October 1946; Asian Records, Microfilm 11, KNA: Mbotela to Amin, August 19, 1948. 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. 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. MAK A/7/1947, fols. 1–154, UNL: Singh letter to Chief Secretary, Nairobi, February 22, 1947. Ibid. CO/537/3646, 5920, 4715, 4718, TNA: Intelligence summary, JulyOctober 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. 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. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Memo on Labour Problems in Kenya, November 23, 1949. MAK A/13–15, fols. 201–326, 1–100, UNL: Meeting regarding the VUP Ordinance, Kisumu, January 15, 1950. 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. 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

124. 125.

126.

127.

128. 129.

130. 131.

132.

133.

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. FCB Papers, Box 118, File 2A, RHL: 1952 Nyeri Annual Report and Awori and Gichuru memo. 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. 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. 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. EAS, October 22, November 19, December 10, August 7, September 3, and September 17, 1948. 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. Report on the Census of the Non-Native Population, 1948. 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. 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. 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

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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). 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. Asian Records, Microfilms 11, KNA: Congress statement, 1952. 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

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

339

“Saved by a Dhow!” in Salvadori, We Came in Dhows, 3: 184–185; CO/822/447, TNA: Intelligence summary, December 31, 1952. 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. This point was made by Pherowz Nowrojee in an interview with the author in Nairobi, July 2006. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Chamanlal to Nehru, December 22, 1952; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 104–107. 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. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de Souza and Kapila interviews, November 1984. See also Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. Mss Brit. Emp. s.527/8, RHL: “End of Empire” interview transcripts, de Souza interview, November 1984; Report on the Census of the NonNative Population, 1948; AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Rahman to MEA, December 9, 1952. 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. 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. See, for example, Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 89; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 104–107. 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. 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

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

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. 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. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes and letter to Congress dated February 22, 1955; CO/537/5931, TNA: Intelligence summary, various 1950. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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-udDeen, 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. 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. 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 NonNative 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

62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

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. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Madan and Patel Speeches, April 19, 1953; AII 52/141/3101, NAI: Congress statement December 1952. 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. 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. 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. 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. EAS, April 19, 1953, and July 9, 1954. 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. 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. 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

71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

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. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Rogai Trading Co. to Congress, December 2, 1952; CO/822/447, TNA: Police commissioner report, December 31, 1952. 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. 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. Itote, “Mau Mau” General, 33–34. Emphasis added. 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. 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. AII/52/141/3101, NAI: Pant note, December 17, 1952. Ibid.; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: PRO circular, April 12, 1953. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: C.B. Madan quoted in PRO circular, April 12, 1953. 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.

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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

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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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. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress standing committee meeting, February 1953; AII/54/1521/3101, NAI: Congress resolutions, July 31–August 2, 1954. 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. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Patel speech, September 27, 1953. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress meeting minutes and statement February 6–7, 1953. Emphasis added. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress statement; FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, August 1954. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, 13, NAK: Congress policy statements February and September 1953 and March 1955. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, KNA: Congress policy statement, November 23, 1954. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, KNA: Congress policy statement March 1955, meeting minutes September 27, 1953; EAS, August 6, 1954. EAS, August 10, 1956. Asian Records, Microfilm 13, NAK: Congress policy statement February 6, 1953. Quoted in Channan Singh, “Later Asian Protest Movements,” thesis, University of Nairobi Library. Asian Records, Microfilm 12, 13, NAK: Congress statements, 1953–1955. FCB Papers, Box 117, File 3, RHL: Congress presidential address, August 1954; EAS, August 6, 1954. 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 popularized 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

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

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.” EAS, February 5 and April 19, 1960, September 15, 1961. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 71. EAS, December 24, 1959. Ibid. EAS, January 7, 1960. Emphasis added. EAS, February 17, 1960. EAS, January 14, 1960. EAS, January 6, 12, and 13, February 17, 1960. EAS, March 14, 1960. EAS, March 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, and 21, April 5, 6, 7, 8, 1960. EAS, various, March–April 1960. EAS, March 16, 18, 19, and April 5, 1960. EAS, December 24, 1959, March 16 and 18, 1960. EAS, December 24, 1959. EAS, December 24, 1959, January 13 and 28, 1960. EAS, January 13, 14, and 28, 1960. 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). 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). EAS, January-March 1960, especially January 7, 19, 20, February 12 and 18, 1960. EAS, November 20, 1959, March 15 and 17, 1960. EAS, March 18, 1960. Afr II PQA/198/61, NAI: Statement of G. P. Akoko Mboya, SecretaryGeneral 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. 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);

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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. 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. See Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny” in Brian MacArthur, ed., The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches (London: Penguin, 2000), 234–237. Jomo Kenyatta, “One Party System,” August 13, 1964, in Suffering without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968). 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. 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). 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. 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. 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

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

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. 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. 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). FCO/29/133, 31/258 and 251, TNA: Commonwealth Office note, Martin Ennals independent survey, June 14, 1968, and de Souza statement. 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. AII/52/6423/31 and 1/47/56, NAI: GOI note on register for Indian citizens, February 11, 1952, IHC-MEA correspondence, 1956. 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. FCO/31/258, TNA: Martin Ennals independent survey; Nazareth, Brown Man, Black Country, 7; Kenya Population Census, 1962, vol. IV, NonAfrican 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). Voice of Kenya radio broadcast, September 11, 1967, quoted in Theroux, “Hating the Asians.” 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. 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. H/1/1012/61/64 and 61/67, NAI: IHC reports, June 1964 and March 1967. 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

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

355

Pamphlet by Association of British Citizens, entitled “British Citizens of Asian Origin,” Nairobi, October 1968. 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. 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. 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. James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), 265. FCO/41/790, TNA: Home Office note, “The Need to Legislate in 1968: Social Consequences of Immigration,” n.d. 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. 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. 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. 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 Harvard University, whose pursuit of excellence and love of history and teaching made my student years challenging and stimulating. Through examples of their own meticulous 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 History, 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 excitement 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 brilliance. My colleagues at the History Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 Kaarsholm, 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 answering 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, University 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 College; the South Asian Studies Council, Yale University; and the History Department, Delhi University, where I presented several iterations of this book. The diligence 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 anonymous reviewers whose in-depth engagement with the manuscript and provocative 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 wonderful 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, African Studies Program, International Institute, and the Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison; and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made possible several research 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 Nairobi 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 Durrani 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 academics 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 academic 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 expansion of my family. Through personal example rather than instruction, their strength and individuality have shaped my personal and intellectual life in

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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 compass. 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 aspire to the elegance and ease with which she celebrates accomplishments and overcomes obstacles. I learned to laugh, listen, argue, dream, and do from my formidable and impassioned sisters, Suranya and Yamini. The debates and monologues conducted at our family dining table have taught me more about life, history, interpretation, and argumentation than any classroom across three continents. I am forever 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 functioning 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 although 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

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

365

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 WoodWinterton 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; assassination of, 137; joining British war efforts, 137 Decolonization: legislative and constitutional 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 negotiations, 226, 237, 238; in Kenya Freedom Party, 237, 264; in Kenyatta government, 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; government regulation of, 111, 112, 115, 276; African competition with, 168–173; in Mau Mau rebellion, 209–212; and decolonization, 251, 279, 281; Africanization 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 negotiations, 231, 233, 257–258, 259; in decolonization and independence, 266–267; of Indian immigrants in Britain, 293–294 European and African Traders Association, 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

Index

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 movement, 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-

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 representation 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 supporting, 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 decolonization, 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 negotiations, 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 negotiations, 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 decolonization, 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; anticolonialism 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 Association 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 Africanization 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 negotiations, 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 decolonization, 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 Association, 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; population 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