Verisoph story dossier
The South Asian community that built and ran colonial Kenya and was then squeezed out: the railway labourers, the dukawalla traders, the Devonshire 'Indian question,' and the post-independence exodus.
The South Asian community that built and ran colonial Kenya and was then squeezed out: the railway labourers, the dukawalla traders, the Devonshire 'Indian question,' and the post-independence exodus.
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also in Mombasa and the coast: port, strip, slavery and land
Long before colonial rule, Indian Ocean dhows carried on a monsoon trade that tied Gujarat and Kutch to the Swahili coast. Hindu banias, Kutchi Bhatia traders, Ismaili and Bohra merchants kept resident firms in Mombasa, Lamu and above all Zanzibar. They financed and handled much of the coastal trade in cloth, ivory and grain.
The Kutchi Bhatia merchant house of Jairam Sewji held the lucrative concession to collect the customs of Zanzibar for decades, run on the ground by its agent Ladha Damji. Indian merchant capital and credit underpinned the revenue of the Omani sultanate. This gave a small group of Indian financiers a central place in the coastal economy.
The Omani ruler Seyyid Said shifted his seat from Muscat to Zanzibar and built a plantation economy around cloves. Indian merchant houses advanced the credit that financed the plantations, the customs and the long-distance trade. Their capital made them indispensable to the island's rulers.
Banias in Zanzibar advanced goods and credit to the Swahili-Arab caravans that pushed inland to Tabora, Ujiji and the great lakes. The long-distance trade in ivory ran on this Indian capital. The same credit system also financed the East African slave trade, a link historians document plainly rather than pass over.
The Ismaili merchant Allidina Visram set up dukas and depots along the old caravan routes and later the new railway, reaching deep into Uganda and the lakes region. By his death in 1916 he was the leading Indian trader of East Africa, with interests in produce, transport and manufacturing. His network showed how Indian commerce followed the line inland.
also in Mombasa and the coast: port, strip, slavery and land
Britain began building a railway from Mombasa toward Lake Victoria to secure the route to Uganda and the Nile headwaters. Critics in Parliament mocked the cost and doubtful purpose, dubbing it the Lunatic Line; Hansard later put the total cost at about GBP 5.5 million, against an early GBP 2.24 million estimate and offer. The project would reshape the interior and the makeup of its population.
Because local labour was scarce and resistant, the railway authority recruited nearly 32,000 indentured workers, mostly from Punjab and Gujarat, on fixed-term contracts. Colonial records called them coolies. They laid the track through harsh terrain under heavy discipline, disease and danger.
Two lions preyed on workers building the bridge over the Tsavo river, halting construction for weeks. The engineer J. H. Patterson later claimed the pair killed 135 people, though a scientific study of the lions' remains put the toll closer to 28 to 31. The episode became one of the most retold stories of the railway.
also in Kenya: from the Swahili coast to the republic, Nyanza and Kisumu: lake economy, Luo opposition and state repression
The Uganda Railway reached the shore of Lake Victoria at the port first named Port Florence, now Kisumu, completing the main line from the coast. The railway had cost about GBP 5.5 million and many lives, and to make it pay Britain now pressed to fill the highlands with cash-crop farming and export freight. That pressure drove the settler project and the seizure of African land.
Of the roughly 32,000 indentured workers, about 2,500 died on the project and some 6,700 chose to remain in East Africa when their contracts ended, while most returned home. Artisans and craftsmen known as fundis, along with clerks and small traders, followed the line inland. This settled core became the root of the Indian community in Kenya.
The protectorate used the Indian rupee as its currency, a sign of how closely its economy and administration were tied to British India. A costly switch to the florin and then the shilling in the early 1920s hurt many Indian holders of rupees. The episode fed the community's sense of being treated as second-class subjects.
Aga Khan III directed his Ismaili followers to settle permanently in East Africa and to build schools, clinics, housing and businesses. His guidance produced one of the most organised and institution-rich of the Asian communities. It helped shape a settled, investing minority rather than a purely transient trading one.
Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin gave an informal assurance that the fertile highlands would be kept for white settlers. In practice this shut Indians out of buying farmland in the most valuable part of the colony. It set the pattern for a long political fight over land and status.
Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, a Bohra businessman who had supplied railway labour, built much of early Mombasa and Nairobi and founded the paper that became the East African Standard, was nominated as the first Indian member of the colony's Legislative Council. His appointment gave the community a formal, if junior, political voice. He remained a leading spokesman in the fight for Indian rights.
Indian-run dukas reached nearly every town and rural centre, handling much of the colony's retail trade and the buying of African produce. The dukawalla became the everyday face of Indian settlement across Kenya. This visible role also placed the community between white rulers above and the African majority below, a middleman position that later drew resentment.
Goan Catholic clerks filled government and railway offices while Sikh and Gujarati fundis worked as masons, carpenters, mechanics, tailors and fitters. Different communities, including Ismaili, Hindu, Sikh, Goan and Bohra, tended to cluster in distinct trades and keep their own institutions. Together they ran much of the day-to-day machinery of the colony below the European ranks.
Modeled on the Indian National Congress, the new body became the main political vehicle for Kenya's Asians. It pressed for a common electoral roll, equal rights with settlers, free immigration and an end to segregation. For decades it led the campaign against the colour bar.
Legislation entrenched European control of the highlands and made it effectively impossible for Indians to acquire farmland there. Combined with limits on the franchise and on immigration, it sharpened the contest between settlers and the Indian community. This bundle of grievances became known as the Indian Question.
A British compromise, the Wood-Winterton agreement, proposed to give Kenya's Indians a common electoral roll with Europeans and to ease immigration and highland restrictions. It went further toward Indian equality than any plan before. Kenya's white settlers were enraged, and the plan set off the crisis the Devonshire White Paper would settle.
As the Indian question came to a head, Kenya's settlers threatened armed rebellion. Led by Brigadier-General Philip Wheatley, they laid plans to kidnap Governor Sir Robert Coryndon, hold him at a remote farm, replace the colonial officials, and appeal to white South Africa, even threatening to secede from the Empire. The threat of a settler revolt pushed London toward a compromise.
As Indians pushed for equality with settlers and a common electoral roll, the British government issued a memorandum stating that Kenya was primarily an African territory whose native interests must be paramount. Historians such as Robert Gregory and Sana Aiyar argue the doctrine of African paramountcy was invoked above all to defeat Indian claims to the highlands and the franchise, not chiefly to advance African self-rule. The settlers accepted the language because it blocked their Indian rivals.
Lord Passfield, the Fabian Sidney Webb, issued a new white paper reaffirming that African interests were paramount in Kenya and criticising settler dominance. White settlers erupted, and their campaign, tied to the fight over a closer union of the East African territories, gutted the policy. Like the 1923 pledge before it, paramountcy was proclaimed and then shelved.
The Sikh activist Makhan Singh reorganised the Labour Trade Union of Kenya into the Labour Trade Union of East Africa, pushing a militant, multiracial model of organised labour. He argued that workers should combine across race against colonial employers. He is widely regarded as a father of the Kenyan trade union movement.
After a wave of strikes and agitation in Nairobi, Makhan Singh was arrested and held in remote detention without trial. He was not released until 1961, an internment of eleven years, one of the longest of the era. His refusal to renounce his politics made him a symbol of the shared struggle against colonial rule.
At the Kapenguria trial of Jomo Kenyatta and five others, the defence team included Asian advocates such as A. R. Kapila and the Goan lawyer Fitz de Souza working alongside British counsel. Across the Emergency, Indian lawyers defended many Mau Mau suspects when few others would take the cases. Their role showed part of the community throwing its weight behind African nationalism.
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The Goan Kenyan journalist and activist Pio Gama Pinto organised funds, arms and propaganda for the Mau Mau fighters. Colonial authorities detained him without trial on the coast and outer islands until 1959. He was among the small number of Asians who took direct risks for the armed struggle.
At Uhuru, Kenyan Asians who had been British subjects were given two years to register as citizens of Kenya. Many hesitated and kept their British passports, unsure of their future in an African-ruled state. The community was split between those who committed to Kenya, those who backed African nationalism outright and those who stayed aloof, and the choice later left the passport-holders exposed.
Now a member of parliament on the socialist wing of the ruling party, Pinto was shot dead outside his Nairobi home. It was independent Kenya's first political assassination. His death marked the sidelining of the radical left that had linked Asian and African militants.
The Trade Licensing Act and the Immigration Act reserved many businesses and jobs for citizens and barred non-citizens from trading across wide areas. Thousands of Asian shopkeepers, clerks and craftsmen lost their livelihoods almost overnight. The government framed this as correcting a colonial economy that had favoured the minority; those pushed out saw it as targeting them by race.
As trade licences and work permits were withdrawn, tens of thousands of Asians who held British passports began moving to the United Kingdom through 1967 and 1968. Whole families sold up and left the country their forebears had helped build. The exodus sharply reduced the community's numbers.
Facing the arrival of Kenyan Asians, Parliament rushed through a law that introduced patriality and an entry-voucher quota. It stripped many British passport holders of the automatic right to enter Britain, purely because they lacked a UK-born parent or grandparent. Critics across the political spectrum condemned it as openly racial legislation that trapped people between two countries.
The government formally recognised Kenyans of Asian descent as the country's 44th community, or tribe. The move acknowledged more than a century of settlement and the community's reduced but continuing presence. Supporters called it overdue recognition of a group long treated as outsiders.