Indians in Kenya

Sana Aiyar

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674425927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.Indians' intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians' diasporic identity influenced Kenya's political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and "civilize" East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.

ONE

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

ALIBHAI MULLA JEEVANJEE 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 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), 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, 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.

INDIAN AND EUROPEAN COLONISTS

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 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, industry 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 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 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 capi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. From the America of the Hindu to White Man’s Country
• 2. “Civilization” in Kenya
• 3. Political Homelands across the Indian Ocean
• 4. Between Rebellion and Suppression
• 5. Negotiating Nationhood
• 6. Uhuru and Exodus
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Archives Consulted
• Acknowledgments
• Index