The intensification and convergence of Indian and African national, anti-colonial political purpose and activity during the second half of the 1940s have been widely recognized in the literature. The theme is discussed in scholarship on Kenya's political development (Rosberg and Nottingham Reference Rosberg and Nottingham1966; Berman and Lonsdale Reference Berman and Lonsdale1992) and in specialized works on the political role of Asians in East Africa, most importantly in relation to Kenya, by George Delf (Reference Delf1963), J. S. Mangat (Reference Mangat1969), Robert Gregory (Reference Gregory1971; Reference Gregory1993a; Reference Gregory1993b) and Dana April Seidenberg (Reference Seidenberg1983). Political and anti-imperial aspects of ideology and activities have been central in these accounts, which have also stressed how African and Indian newspapers and political pamphlets provided a fulcrum for political action. This article sets out to highlight the connections between Indian and African networks involved in printing and publicist enterprises in the later colonial period. These connections are perhaps best illustrated through the lens of censorship and in historical evidence arising from the suppression of allegedly subversive newspapers.
Specific work on the history of print and media in Kenya has been influenced by nationalist historiography (see Introduction) and more generally by a view of genres and institutions that stressed ethnic, social and linguistic boundaries (Gadsden Reference Gadsden1980; Scotton Reference Scotton1975; Pugliese Reference Pugliese1995; Reference Pugliese, Atieno Odhiambo and Lonsdale2003). As suggested by the work of Gregory and Seidenberg, a closer attention to circulation of ideas and mobility of personnel between African and Indian media platforms, and between India and Africa, may reveal undercurrents of close collaboration, joint political projects and productive conflict, particularly in the late 1940s, a period of intense anti-imperial and nationalist resistance.Footnote 1
In African and Indian newspapers of this period, reports on anti-colonial resistance throughout the British Empire and calls for ‘subversive’ meetings and organizations inside Kenya reached a level of influence that worried the colonial government. Officials countered with repeated but ineffective attempts to censor and close down newspapers. A meeting of Provincial Commissioners in October 1946 decided to send a dispatch to the Minister of State at the Colonial Office, pointing out that ‘the present trend of the vernacular press constituted a menace to the future of the Colony’ and that ‘certain vernacular newspapers were being financed and influenced by seditiously minded Indians and that their object was purely anti-government and anti-European’ (Corfield Reference Corfield1960). This echoed an earlier warning by the Governor, Sir Edward Grigg, in 1926, concerning the progress of the first newspaper in an African vernacular, Muigwithania, edited by the young Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's future President. The paper was an outlet for a new generation of young, Christian Africans, organized in the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), one of the first anti-colonial opposition groupings by Africans.Footnote 2 Initially, the newspaper seemed to want to ‘encourage the Kikuyu to advance on constitutional lines’ but before long it showed ‘baneful influences’ at work: ‘the paper has apparently been captured by the proprietors of the “Democrat” the organ of the Indian extremists, which is owned and edited by the notorious S. Achariar. The July and August numbers … have been published by the Democrat Printing and Publishing Works and a sinister tone is already apparent.’Footnote 3 The Governor goes on to state that, ‘While the movement promoted by the Kikuyu Central Association is at present confined to Kikuyu within reach of Indian influence in Nairobi, there is danger that this emotional and semi-religious propaganda may spread very rapidly among excitable and ignorant natives.’ As it consistently did until 1950, when it was made legal to seize printing presses in cases of conviction of sedition, the Colonial Office discouraged active interference: ‘it seems most undesirable that (unless absolutely driven to it by further developments) the Kenya Govt. should attempt to legislate against the “freedom of the press” ’.Footnote 4
The proliferation of newspapers critical towards the government was the outcome of a process that started early in the twentieth century with the publication of the African Standard, owned by the prominent Asian entrepreneur, A. M. Jevanjee, which became European-owned in 1905 and transformed into the East African Standard; it expanded into Tanganyika in 1930 under the name of the Tanganyika Standard (Ngunjuri Reference Ngunjuri2002: 2–3).Footnote 5 Asian papers in Kenya continued with the Indian Voice (1911–14), the radical East African Chronicle (1921–2) edited by M. A. Desai who supported the African nationalist Harry Thuku, and, after its closure, the Democrat (1923–30), printed and edited by Sitaram Achariar, whose activities were closely watched by the colonial authorities, as noted above Seidenberg (Reference Seidenberg1983: 16).Footnote 6 He was briefly imprisoned and threatened with deportation on the basis of ‘a disparaging editorial on the morals of Kenya white women’, writing that contributed to European disgust with the Asian paper, which was characterized as a ‘scurrilous, and sometimes lewd, publication’ (Gregory Reference Gregory1971: 230). He was also one of several Kenyan Indian journalists who straddled Kenya and India, where he went later to become the editor of a Bombay newspaper, The Sun (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 170). The two episodes of attempted intervention in the freedom of the press demonstrate the colonial government's preoccupation with an emerging non-European public sphere and its uneasiness with African enterprise and organization – particularly its conviction that it would always find Indian militants lurking behind African initiatives.
In Corfield's historical survey of the preconditions for the rise of the Mau Mau nationalist movement, written at the behest of the colonial government, the spread of irresponsible publications was central in the rise of African resistance or subversion. His assessment was shared by the authorities, as can be seen from the Intelligence Services’ close attention to non-European newspapers and political pamphlets. In Corfield's view, Indian ‘dissidents’ egged on the subversive intent and practice of the African papers. Discussing the politics of the African-language newspapers, he singles out the Daily Chronicle, one of the two leading radical Indian newspapers of the late 1940s, as a central political voice: ‘The policy adopted by these vernacular periodicals was supplemented by the efforts of the Indian-owned and edited Daily Chronicle with its blatant bias against both Government and the European, never missing an opportunity of supporting African claims, however fantastic or subversive’ (Corfield Reference Corfield1960: 6; Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 174).
In the 1940s, several prominent Kenyan nationalists were official visitors to India, the respected nationalist leader Mbiu Koinange being one. Back home, he repeatedly at mass meetings held up the ideal of independence in India and brokered a programme of scholarships for Kenyan students at Indian universities.Footnote 7 He was part of the constant traffic across the Indian Ocean of Indian and African publicists, political activists and, now, young people in search of education. Several activists and journalists were moved between Kenya and India; the well-known pioneering trade unionist Makhan Singh returned to Kenya in 1947 after having served a sentence of internment in India, thus contributing to the circular mobility characteristic of Indian Ocean traffic between Kenya and India.Footnote 8
The post-Second World War period saw the rise of a public sphere that was closely connected to Indian nationalist activity in India as well as in Kenya, a space of activism, discussion and politics where African and Indian politicians, journalists and entrepreneurs collaborated, but also regarded each other with scepticism. Interaction between Indians and Africans in trade and enterprise was of long standing. But the groundwork for a joint political project that was a precondition for intensified collaboration around the production, dissemination and reception of newspapers and topical pamphlets – a print culture – was the increasing interaction between Indian and African political activists and publicists and of political associations, in many cases inspired by political agitation in South Africa and India. The important nationalist organizations had their own press mouthpieces. In the case of the East African Indian National Congress in its formative period, the 1920s, it was the Democrat (Reference GregoryGregory 1993b: 170); for KCA it was Muigwithania, as we have seen, and for the leading African nationalist organization of the 1940s, the Kenya African Union, it was the Swahili newspaper Sauti Ya Mwafrika (Gadsden Reference Gadsden1980: 516–18).
Indian and African entrepreneurs and publicists, supported by voluntary and political associations, extended the European-dominated print culture with its interaction between readers and publicists to new African and Indian audiences. Asian and African newspapers and pamphlets became significant partners in a Kenyan civic print culture. A number of English, Gujarati and occasionally Swahili newspapers owned and edited by Asians coexisted with the African nationalist press in English and African vernaculars.Footnote 9 The commercial nature of the papers was clear: in distinction to a number of European publicist activities they did not enjoy state support, and could only live if they were profitable. Many came out irregularly, disappeared and were relaunched under new names, or were short-lived. Publishing enterprises and printing workshops were also unstable, and shifts of proprietors were frequent. The amount and character of advertisements provided a barometer of the newspapers' economic consolidation and profitability. In Indian-owned papers, space taken up by advertisements sometimes exceeded that taken up by news and journalism; in those owned by Africans this was not the case, and the advertisements that were included were directed at the much smaller, emerging African business community, both urban and rural. What was new in comparison to the pre-War period was that at this time large numbers of non-Europeans could afford to buy newspapers which reflected their own concerns more than those of settlers and European officials. Henry Muoria, the publisher and editor of Mumenyereri, the most widely read African newspaper in this period, warned against the falsehood of the European press and emphasized the fairly recent reality of a publications market for a politically alert African readership: ‘Some (papers) are given free and some are sold cheaply because they want the African to read just what they think that the African should know and no more’; however, he added, ‘Africans are wide awake and will not buy papers which have no interesting news … . People are not goats, they cannot buy a worthless thing’ (Mumenyereri, 14 July 1948).
In what follows, I want to emphasize the embedded nature of the publication initiatives, especially in regard to the economic and social background of African and Indian publications. A confluence of entrepreneurial, publicist and didactic skills and convictions was central to the development of both African and Asian political and communication mobilization, and a group of entrepreneurs, journalists and editors – in their interaction with political and economic organizations and institutions – were the carriers. Their ideas and practice contributed significantly to the successes of the anti-colonial resistance. Like activities more directly political, such as the formation of African and Indian political organizations, communication activities, especially the writing, printing and publishing of news copy, took place in a contested field of forces where African and Indian anti-racist and broad nationalist and more narrowly cultural nationalist discourses competed with a state-supported European print culture, and fought and negotiated with colonial supervision and regulation.
PRINT CULTURES IN COLONIAL KENYA
In their historical accounts of the printing revolution and ‘the nature of the book’ in early modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns emphasize the embedded character of the emergence of print and the flourishing of printing culture. Preconditions for the complex processes of fixing and authorizing meaning in forms that could be duplicated were both mechanical, mental and institutional (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein1979: 43–4, 113–7). In spite of being organized predominantly in private, capitalist enterprises, print production and dissemination were closely interrelated with regulatory efforts by the state that were also evaded by secrecy, clandestine printing workshops and attribution of responsibility to others than those in charge of publication operations (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein1979: 22–3; Johns Reference Johns1998: 134–6, 139, 141).
Karin Barber has reminded us that in the colonial context no less than in Europe, the creation and maintenance of a print culture demanded a deliberate investment by creative, innovative individuals (Barber Reference Barber, Peterson and Macola2009: 47). The existence of a printing technology was not sufficient. Such a culture grew out of the initiatives of innovative writers and entrepreneurs, rooted in institutions and literate publics whose nature they understood, and who were willing to contribute and invest time and money.
Those Indians who threw themselves into politics and publicist enterprises often emerged from strata similar to those of the African activists. Like the African nationalists they belonged to a smaller group who in their activities influenced the broader strata of their communities. A new class of African ‘indigenous intellectuals’ and athomi, readers, are at the centre of John Lonsdale and Atieno Odhiambo's interpretations of the intellectual and social reform climate in the build-up to the Mau Mau resistance (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale, de la Gorgendière, King and Vaughan1996; Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo, Ogot and Ochieng1995). With their affiliates, they were the post-war ‘sub-elites’ or ‘neo-masses’, in the words of Atieno Odhiambo. They were the improvers, educators, teachers and preachers, communicators, and parvenu men of ideas, and they energized a broader class of artisans, urban functionaries and rural entrepreneurs. Most were the sons of peasants (rarely, but occasionally the daughters); self-educated, or trained at mission schools, they relied on merit and skills more than on patronage, and saw their futures in urban centres more than on the land (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo and Ogot1979: 223–4; Reference Atieno Odhiambo, Ogot and Ochieng1995: 30–1). Indian activists and publicists shared their ideology of property, accumulation, education and progress (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo, Ogot and Ochieng1995: 29–31).
Gakaara wa Wanjau will serve as an example of African innovators. Gakaara had emerged as a leading figure in African Book Writers Ltd, a specialized outcome of a larger collapsed business initiative, Modern African Trading Co. in Nakuru, the commercial centre of the contested settler-dominated White Highlands, and had established a publishing enterprise, the Gakaara Book Service. As in the case of other African vernacular publications, Mumenyereri, Habari za Dunia and Ramogi among others, Indian printers were central to the endeavour – in this case, the Highlands Printers in Nakuru. As Gakaara told his biographer Christina Pugliese in a later interview on the setting up of the company, ‘We did not know anything about literature. When we saw that we could write, we decided to found a company and sell our booklets.’ His Kikuyu news-sheet Waigua atia? (What's the news?) and fiction and didactic pamphlets in Kikuyu and Swahili sold well, and he made a profit from 1950 onwards (Pugliese Reference Pugliese1995: 40, 41–2, 43; Reference Pugliese, Atieno Odhiambo and Lonsdale2003: 105–6).
Several of the Indians active in the area of print and publications had made their careers in production and services connected to the colony's transport, service and communication infrastructure. They were well situated to exploit the opportunities of new technologies and the new public spheres that were opening up. Many were second-generation Kenyans like Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi, who was the son of a station master. He adopted the name ‘Vidyarthi’, which means ‘student’, as a mark of his didactic endeavour (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 171). The trade union leader, journalist and printer Makhan Singh accompanied his father, Sudh Singh, who had arrived in Nairobi from the Punjab in 1920 under contract as a carpenter on the East African Railways. After some years back in India Sudh returned in 1927 with his wife and son, and working from home at first started Khalsa Printing Press, later renamed Punjab Printing Press. Soon he moved his shop to River Road, the principal Indian business district, offering services that included typesetting in the Gurumukhi script and printing on a letter press in English, Gujarati and other Indian languages, and various African languages. He also printed invitation cards, booklets of poetry and religious texts. In addition, the firm offered bookbinding and the manufacture of rubber stamps (Patel Reference Patel2006: 33–4). Makhan Singh worked in the family firm and also functioned as the secretary of the Press Workers Union, started in 1936, ‘which served eleven presses in Nairobi having a total of 229 employees’, mostly Indian (Patel Reference Patel2006: 60). The family enterprise, Khalsa Press, printed handbills that announced the Union's meetings and were at the same time information and propaganda texts for workers' rights.Footnote 10 Makhan Singh kept up his connections to his family in India, including his brother-in-law, who was a printer and advised him on the ink that should be used for different kinds of publications (Patel Reference Patel2006: 48).
Another fledgling publicist, the young K. P. Shah, arrived on his own in Kenya in 1941, with difficulty found a job as a salesman, and ‘learned to keep accounts in Gujarati and converse in Hindi and Swahili’. He was keen to be heard, bought a typewriter and sent a number of letters to the editor of the East African Standard (Gregory Reference Gregory1993a: 21). This was also how the career of the African newspaper owner and journalist Henry Muoria started (Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006). Chanan Singh, who was first-generation and self-taught, set out as a clerk with Kenya Railways, published a short-lived newspaper, Forward, in 1936, became the leader of the Nairobi Indian Association in 1950, and later a Chief Justice in Kenya (Seidenberg Reference Seidenberg1983: 70; Patel Reference Patel2006: 122). As part of his enlightenment and political project, he wrote a series of articles in the Colonial Times on the history of Indians in East Africa, the first one a survey of historical connection across the Indian Ocean. Here he praised the role of Indians in training Africans ‘in manual occupations’ and emphasized that African and Indian enterprise was mutually dependent and beneficial: ‘Indians have trained more Africans than all the schools and workshops put together. This will be evident to anyone passing along River Road in Nairobi where a large number of Africans are at any time receiving training as tailors, carpenters, black-smiths, shoe-makers, masons, compositors and petty shop-keepers’ (Colonial Times, 9 February 1946). In a later series he accused the authorities of exaggerating the figures of Indians in Kenya, and made the case for unhindered Indian immigration: ‘The presence of Indians in Kenya has always proved an eye sore to the ruling class, because, in political controversies, the Indian sides with the African’ (Colonial Times, 20 September 1947).
Newspapers for Africans and Asians were one of the sites where East African versions of what Karin Barber has called ‘the new genres of a modern colonial sphere of print’ flourished. They came to maturity some thirty years later than the West African publications she has addressed. Indian and African journalists collaborated and produced full-fledged papers – some weekly, some daily – with features, editorials, photographs, advertisements, sometimes cartoons, announcements and summaries of events, letters to the editor, and local and international news coverage. Like the Yoruba texts that are her topic, the newspapers represented new modes of ‘addressivity’, of convening and engaging readers with the texts in particular ways (Barber Reference Barber, Peterson and Macola2009: 32, 41). The publications contributed to creating new active audiences who bought the papers, debated among themselves, and left their imprint on the newspaper texts and genres. The reader influence was most obvious in letters to the editor and the amount of meetings, events and ‘tea parties’ that the papers announced – activities that were central in sustaining the political and voluntary associations. Influence from ‘convened audiences’ was also clear in styles of rhetoric – combative, exclamatory and exhortative, occasionally conciliatory – that reflected the urgent politics of resistance and accommodation, characteristic of both Indian and African nationalist politics of the period. The state was an implied reader: the threat of censorship influenced these styles of rhetoric and occasionally deflected militancy into reformist politics.
As mentioned above, the nature of the putative audiences was also clear from the amount and quality of the advertisements, and the products and services they advertised. The most widely read African paper, Mumenyereri, in the late 1940s marketed agricultural products, bicycles, hotels that served ‘Kikuyu food’, and recent books and pamphlets from its own printing press. It also announced meetings, ‘tea parties’, and occasional film shows at a municipal hall for Africans – all directed at its Kikuyu readership. The Colonial Times, which had a similar circulation (around ten thousand copies a week), addressed and reflected Indian large- and small-scale commercial activities in the whole of East Africa. It included several pages devoted exclusively to advertisements for shipping and insurance companies, car sellers, mechanics, accountants and lawyers’ firms, as well as glowing notices for medical products, hotels, restaurants and – not least – Indian films performed in privately owned cinemas. Mumenyereri was closer to its readership than the Colonial Times, and probably also reached groups of illiterate readers who listened while it was read aloud (see Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006). In his discussion of racial identities in Zanzibari newspapers, Jonathon Glassman describes how in Zanzibar in the 1950s, a period of intense nationalist debates, ‘nationalist intellectuals’ did not only speak to each other – the newspapers that were their platforms were active in creating a new innovative popular culture: ‘Their words were directed at a popular audience, and they were often effective.’ Debates in newspapers spilled over into the streets and villages, and circulated back to influence the cadence of newspaper writing. The outcome was that ‘the political journalism of the time carries traces of many street corner arguments’ (Glassman Reference Glassman2000: 399–400). In the case of Mumenyereri the interaction with the audience and the feedback effect on the paper probably more closely resembled the papers discussed by Glassman than the contemporary, more professional, Indian newspapers. In the Colonial Times, the style of political reportage and discussion was more formal, often conducted in the rhetoric of high, universalist politics, as can be seen below in the discussion of a court case involving the newspaper.
As noted in the Introduction to this collection, many of the Indian Ocean printing enterprises were inward-looking; their activities contributed to keeping cultural and political communities together more than to opening up. Enterprise, publication and politics were linked. This was true of many presses operating in colonial Kenya and reflected the common commercial and cultural networks where the origins of printing were situated. African and Indian consumers of printing services, and their audiences, were often part of smaller linguistic and cultural communities, each with its traditions and institutions. As we have seen, Khalsa Printing Press functioned as a disseminator of Punjabi and Gujarati texts and business. Ramogi Press was established in an effort to unite and make progress for the marginalized Luo population – the two Luo-language papers the press published, Ramogi and Nyanza Times, advertised the varied business ventures of LUTACO, the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation (Ogude Reference Ogude2001). This was one of the multiple business ventures of the Corporation – others were brick making, a store, a flourmill and, of particular interest for this article, a printing press. The main impetus for LUTACO had been the pursuit of Luo unity, and to ‘rebel against Asian monopoly’ in trade and ‘the wider colonial situation’ (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo and Ogot1979: 227, 234–5). The papers also announced meetings and followed the activities of associations and political leaders. What after some time made the publishing and printing enterprise a success and enabled it to publish widely-read newspapers was a second-hand flatbed printing press bought from Asians associated with the radical newspaper the Daily Chronicle, whose editor was G. L. Vidyarthi (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo and Ogot1979: 237–8; Odinga Reference Odinga1967: 110).
The Kikuyu press contributed to creating the Kikuyu as a sub-nation, making Kikuyu speakers aware of a shared destiny with faraway compatriots whom they did not know (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale, de la Gorgendière, King and Vaughan1996: 11; Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006: 286). Gakaara wa Wanjau published mainly in Kikuyu, but like Henry Muoria, the owner of Mumenyerei Press and later co-proprietor of the Ramogi Press, he also published pamphlets in Kiswahili because he wanted the settlers to be aware of African opinion (Pugliese Reference Pugliese1995: 41). A number of newspapers for the small Goan community, among them Fair Play (1927–31) and the Goan Voice (1943–63), were very active both in creating institutions and associations for Goans, and in voicing their grievances in Kenya; the latter paper was a forum for resistance against Portuguese politics in relation to Goa at the time of India's independence. Goan leaders were both communal and at the forefront of the Indian-African nationalist struggle.
The dilemma of the Kikuyu paper, Mumenyereri, was similar but not identical. It was torn by divisions between an emerging cultural nationalism of the Kikuyu population and a simultaneous strong all-Kenyan political nationalism. In this case the choice of publishing the paper in Kikuyu only was probably taken mainly for economic reasons, but at the same time the decision demonstrated the economic and political viability of a political and cultural community on its way up.
The wider Indian Ocean universalist projects of anti-imperial and non-racist politics marked the Indian more than the African newspapers, but were present in both. With time, in the second half of the 1940s, the views of the African and Indian publicists converged in many areas of opinion, a situation that was enhanced by some overlaps of editors and journalists between the African and Indian papers, and changing ownership of printing firms. One example is that of Muoria, whose financial success enabled him to buy the printing press from its Indian owner (Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006: 298).
Colonial Kenya also had a varied European print culture prior to the Second World War. A prominent feature was the well-consolidated European press, mostly controlled by white settlers, but strongly influenced by the government. It had grown out of the exceptional Indian enterprise by A. M. Jevanjee, as noted above (see also Aiyar, this volume). In 1939 the East African Standard was supplemented with a shorter Swahili version, Baraza, meant to capture the hearts and minds of an African audience. The Second World War gave rise to a plethora of media genres and productions meant to boost morale among African soldiers and mobilize civilian Africans for the War effort.Footnote 11 After the war the colonial government began to pay attention to development and welfare for Africans, and launched several educational and edifying publications for Africans in Swahili and vernaculars that were handed out free of charge (Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen1994; Lewis Reference Lewis2000: Chapter Four). This period also saw the launch of the East African Literature Bureau. Propaganda grew and diversified again in the late 1940s as the anti-colonial struggle intensified and took the shape of the Mau Mau organization. With African and Indian nationalism, the Mau Mau revolt and the prospect of independence, Kenya became the site of a virtual information and propaganda war.
When the authorities interfered with the papers – as they did frequently in this period, sometimes inviting editors to friendly talks with the Department of Information, sometimes issuing warnings and threatening prosecution – they set in motion a chain reaction leading to printers being unwilling to take the risk of printing; editors resorting to other techniques such as mimeographing; smaller print runs; fewer advertisements; and, finally, the collapse of enterprises (Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006).
As we have seen, the colonial government regarded the African newspapers as scurrilous and extreme, and the Indian press as being under the influence of communists. In fact, several of the African editors were moderate in their political demands, asking for self-government and not complete independence (Scotton Reference Scotton1975; Gadsden Reference Gadsden1980). Increasingly the Indian press was divided, first along communal or religious lines in the build-up to Indian independence and anticipated partition, and then between moderates and radicals. Editors and journalists disagreed over questions of constitutionalism – whether to accept the representation of different communities in the municipality and central government, whether to keep up Indian representation in the Legislative Council and other official bodies despite the lack of elected African representation – and, more broadly, over how to react to persistent racial discrimination, known in Kenya as the colour bar. The Kenya Daily Mail was the voice of the moderates, while in the mid-1940s the Colonial Times – founded by G. L. Vidyarthi in 1933 in collaboration with leading Goans like A. C. L. de Souza and later Pio Gama Pinto – represented the radicals. The newspaper proudly proclaimed that it was ‘Africa's largest-selling Indian weekly’ and, according to its sub-editor Pranlal Sheth, it had a circulation of around ten thousand (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 171–2). At its height it printed the following letter to the editor, representative of its tone and degree of militancy, by one of the Indian political activists whom we shall meet later, W. H. Sohan:
Anybody outside a Lunatic Asylum can safely perceive the very basis of the Administration in Kenya, namely Colour Bar. We need not bother our heads whether this is practised under the guise of statutory legislation or convenient administrative practices. One wonders if Britain is carrying two faces under one hood. There appear to be two distinct sets of British ideals, one for home consumption and another for export abroad. (Colonial Times, 5 January 1946)
In 1947 Vidyarthi was convicted of sedition (see below) and his brother, who was a moderate, took over as editor. Pinto Gama Pinto and Haroon Ahmed, with other journalists, disagreed with the new line and moved on to found the militant Daily Chronicle (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 172, 174). The Kikuyu African paper Mumenyereri had a similar circulation, as noted above. The Swahili papers Habari wa Dunia (until 1954) edited by F. M. Ruhinda, Mwalimu (1946–8), edited by Francis Khamisi, and the Luo-language paper Ramogi (1945–62), edited by Achieng Oneko, to which Sheth was a regular contributor, were part of a joint Indian–African economic and political enterprise owned, influenced and printed by Vidyarthi at the Colonial Printing Works (Seidenberg Reference Seidenberg1983: 97, 117; Durrani Reference Durrani2006: 64; Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 172; Corfield, Reference Corfield1960: 6; Scotton Reference Scotton1975). Habari closed for a while in 1947 over sedition, but was restarted by H. S. Gathigira, an eloquent advocate of freedom of the press who was on one occasion jailed for having published seditious material (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 172–3).
From the early 1940s onwards, oppositional African and Asian editors and printers exploited particular features connected to what, inspired by Johns (Reference Johns1998: 137, 141), I shall describe as the instability of newspaper text and authorship.Footnote 12 In several cases where the authorities sued on charges of sedition, the collective nature of newspaper production – with its sometimes erratic collection of data and division of labour between editors, printers, reporters, wives and other family members, and the reading public – proved impenetrable for the authorities.
Here I want to suggest that in colonial Kenya the establishment of the print and newspaper industries went hand in hand; that features of printing workshops spilled over into features of newspaper production; that the collective character of newspaper production made authorship uncertain; that experience from Indian master and artisan printers, kept alive by frequent travel, and their collaboration with and training of newly literate sectors of the African population were essential features in the development of both industries; and that editors, journalists and printers of Asian and African papers migrated from one enterprise to the other, keeping up a steady flow of newspapers in very unstable economic and political situations, sometimes assisted by family members and other close associates. The instability and fluidity resulting from these and other factors, like the use of several languages, assisted the survival of an African–Indian print culture from the point of view of contributors, while representing for the authorities a problem that was much resented and problematic to handle.
Several of the newspapers were bilingual. From early on, some of the widely read and influential Indian papers came in two sections, one English, one Gujarati. This was the case with the Indian Voice (1911–1913), the Kenya Daily Mail (1927–64), which was published in Mombasa and emphasized global, Indian and local commercial news, the Democrat (1923–30), the Colonial Times (1932–62) and its later radical rival, the Daily Chronicle (1947–62), where English and Gujarati were interspersed.Footnote 13 For a short period Vidyarthi edited and printed on his own press Mitrom, a trilingual paper in English, Urdu and Hindi (Gregory Reference Gregory1993b: 171). Among the newspapers in African languages, Henry Muoria's Mumenyereri started out in Kikuyu and English. The practice was cumbersome, demanding and expensive. What was the intention? Was this language policy of Asian and African newspapers rooted in the same dilemma as Muoria, between a cultural and a broader political nationalism? Did it reflect a political ambition of uniting broader sections of the African and Indian reading public, or was it a pragmatic measure to capture more readers? Was the practice a heritage of older forms of printing enterprises that were ‘poyglot’ because they had to cater to their multilingual customers, as was the case with Khalsa Press and Ramogi Press, which published in three African languages? Capturing the large and influential Gujarati business community and building up self-confident African sub-nations was certainly central to the viability of the Asian and African press. No matter what the reasons were, the practice of publishing in several languages, thus addressing several putative publics, was one of several factors making the text unstable and opaque to vigilant authorities. The following section will present an analysis of a court case from 1946 in which the owners, editors and a journalist of the Colonial Times were charged with publishing seditious material in English and Gujarati. The case throws some light on the practices of newspaper production and on the difficulties the state had in pinning down responsibility for the text in order to prove divisive intent, necessary for conviction under the sections on sedition of the Penal Code.
A COURT CASE
The Indian newspaper the Colonial Times lived up to its motto, ‘Free, Frank and Fearless’ by quoting from Areopagitica, John Milton's 1644 polemic against the licensing of publications: ‘Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.’Footnote 14 The call for freedom of expression among the other liberties resounded with local African and Indian activists and publicists who used the public sphere and public spaces to combat colonial discrimination, control and use of force. In spite of its oppressive practices in the regulation of public physical and discursive spaces, the British Empire and the Kenya government did not abandon their invocation of the civil liberties, freedom of expression chief among them – and, until the early 1950s, in the build-up to Mau Mau, convictions of Indian or Asian publicists for sedition were few and sentences comparatively mild. The press in Kenya was regulated by the Book and Newspaper Ordinance of 1906, which demanded that publications be registered and that, in the case of newspapers, annual reports stating title of the paper, name and address of the owner, and average yearly circulation figures be returned (Corfield Reference Corfield1960: Chapter 8: 5). As Corfield remarks, this did not give the government much control of the press. Control ‘was exercised by the Penal Code, through the law of Sedition’ (Ibid.). In practice control could be affected only after the fact, after publication and circulation of material.
Like other Indian newspapers, the Colonial Times reflected several tensions: between ambitions of imperial citizenship and Indian left-wing nationalist independence movements; between English-language modernity and cultural belonging to the large Gujarati-speaking community in East Africa. Moreover, economic considerations probably overrode those to do with ideology and politics. Without the capture of a public of advertisers, buyers and consumers, ideas and agitation got nowhere.
The Colonial Printing Press, which published the Colonial Times, was a family undertaking, exploiting ‘free’ labour and conforming to the business model of most Asian and African printing firms in colonial Kenya. It was owned and run by the brothers, Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi and Vanshi Dhar, their father, Sham Dass, and their nephew, Sarya Vrat. Of the three charges of sedition against the editor and owner, two concerned material in English and one the publication of an editorial in Gujarati. The Colonial Times covered the trial fully in January and February 1946, the subsequent appeals in April, and a correspondence between the Indian Association and the government that led to reduction of the sentences from ‘hard labour’ to ‘ordinary prison’ (1 June 1946).
An earlier case against the Colonial Times had been brought under the Defence Regulations in September 1945. Here the editor, G. L. Vidyarthi, was convicted of having published seditious material, an editorial headed ‘Burma Week’, and was sentenced to a fine of ‘100 pounds or three months of imprisonment with hard labour’ (Colonial Times, 19 January 1946). In the present case, as well as in the earlier one, in order to get a conviction of sedition the state had to prove that the material in question was intended to create divisions between various communities or races in Kenya, and this is where the question of language and attribution of responsibility become central.
The editorial now under accusation concerned British rule in India and East Africa under the heading, ‘The Old Deceitful Scheme of Creating Division’. It was written by the editor of the Gujarati section of the newspaper, Haroon Ahmed. After an introduction accusing the British race of ‘blossoming’ on the ‘blood, sweat and tears of the people of foreign countries’, and of being unrivalled in the art of separating people by splitting up and thus creating ‘disunion’ and a ‘rule of terror’ in India, the article went on to describe the ‘longing of the Whites to appropriate the land of the Black men in East Africa and to enjoy exuberantly its green and fertile soil’. However, the presence of Indians in Kenya made this project difficult; they ‘pricked like thorns’, and the British wanted to draw out the thorns ‘when the time comes’ (Colonial Times, 9 February 1946).Footnote 15
Under questioning it became clear that as Vidyarthi, the editor of the English section, did not know Gujarati, Ahmed had assumed responsibility for its publication. It further emerged that this was the normal procedure of dividing labour and responsibility. Seeking to refute the allegation of the publications creating ‘ill will’ between the different communities, the counsel for the defence questioned Mr Motichand, a ‘Nairobi merchant’, to gauge the possible effect of the article. The latter responded that ‘he had not experienced any ill will towards any community after reading it’. Another witness, an inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mr Singh, told the Court that he ‘had never come across a Gujarati-knowing European or African’. Therefore, argued the counsel, ‘no Britisher or African could have been excited by its contents’. Haroon Ahmed himself argued that articles making similarly critical comments were widely available in Kenya, both in Gujarati and English. In support, he read out several passages from The East African Standard, publications from the South African Information Office, and a work called Strangers in India by one Penderas Moonas. In doing so, he also demonstrated that the measures the government took were pitifully inadequate as against the growing tide of publications available in a modern printing culture. The brothers Vidyarthi and Dhar were found guilty and sentenced to either substantial fines or some months of ‘hard labour’.Footnote 16
The second charge concerned a letter to the editor by a political activist, the ex-secretary of the Nairobi Indian Association, W. L. Sohan, which had first appeared in December 1945, comparing the condition of Indians under British rule in India to that of Jews in the Belsen concentration camp during the Second World War: ‘Belsen has never impressed me. For us, the Indians, whole of India has been virtually a big Belsen camp’ (Colonial Times, 9 February 1946). Sohan was not represented and used the courtroom as a political platform. Like Vidyarthi, he was convicted of sedition and sentenced to four months of ‘rigorous’ imprisonment (Seidenberg Reference Seidenberg1983: 91–2). In his statement after the sentence Sohan delivered a vigorous address to the public: ‘I am a British slave myself. That arises from the status of my country at the present moment … . My idea is to spread the spirit of revolt for I believe that there lies the salvation of the suffering and enslaved humanity, brown or black, Asiatic or Occidental’ (Colonial Times, 9 February 1946).
Indian and African communities saw the conviction of Vidyarthi and Sohan as a significant attack on the freedom of the press. The Colonial Times took the opportunity of reaffirming its guiding principles, printing on the front page its John Milton motto, and adding the words of another campaigner for free speech, ‘the great American reformer and journalist, William Lloyd Garrison: “I will be as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice … and I will be heard!” ’ (19 January 1946). The convicted journalists were applauded inside the court room, hailed by a crowd outside it, and accompanied to the jail by hundreds of supporters. The subsequent days saw protests and demonstrations in the streets and community halls of Nairobi, organized by a newly established Civil Liberties Union of Kenya, the Indian Printers Union and other groups. They were fired by the perceived racial and anti-Indian sentiment expressed in the sentence, and by the government offensive against freedom of the press. The conviction was noted in India, particularly in Communist-affiliated circles – the Blitz newspaper sent a telegram, ‘We salute you Martyred Crusader’ – and among individuals and the numerous Indian political organizations in East Africa, whose protests were made public in the Colonial Times (16 February 1946). The organizations included Indian Youth (in Tanga), the Indian Youth League (in Kisumu) and the Youth League (in Jinja). The reaction demonstrated the effectiveness of political and information links across the ocean from India to connected regions of East Africa.
At around the same time Muoria, the owner and editor of Mumenyereri, and the Indian proprietor of the printing workshop that published his paper, H. G. Patel, appeared in a Nairobi court to defend themselves against a charge of sedition. Muoria's defence was that the allegedly seditious report on a strike at a white-owned firm, Uplands Bacon Factory, had been given to the newspapers by one of the contributing correspondents, and that he himself had not scrutinized the piece carefully enough. He was let off with a warning, while his printer received a six-month suspended jail sentence. In the one case the colonial authorities' vigilance and inventiveness was taxed by that of publicists and entrepreneurs; in the other it was surpassed. Complete control of discursive spaces and the circulation of ideas was beyond the ability of officials and politicians.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this article I have discussed some conduits that channelled political and social ideas among, and inspired political action by Indian and African nationalists in Kenya in the late colonial period – indicating, too, the extension of some of these networks across the Indian Ocean. I have discussed the significance of the carriers of the political and publicist activities and demonstrated how the rise of their independent ideas was seen as a threat by the colonial authorities. In my account of the expansion of Indian and African print cultures, I have followed Eisenstein's advice, to concentrate on ‘the changes undergone by groups who were already literate’, and suggested that ‘a fairly wide social spectrum may have been involved’ (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein1979: 61). I have been able to do no more than indicate that there were similarities between the Indian and African social groups active in production and reception of newspapers, that printing and publishing of newspapers had their origins in activities by early capitalist entrepreneurs, mostly Indian, but with time also African, and that patterns of collaboration persisted in the flourishing, late 1940s newspaper production. Further, I have stressed that for groups involved in printing and publicist enterprises there was a close connection to political organizations and a strong didactic element centred on the wish to improve and enlighten. These forces contributed to linking the political and commercial strands of printing and newspaper production. A more thorough social history examination would have to trace the economic and political trajectories of each grouping, their relationship to their constituencies, and their convergence and pulling apart.
The argument I have wanted to make is that there was in fact significant collaboration and mutual awareness between politically active Africans and Indians in Kenya's late colonial period, and that the authorities tried to deal with the effects of this political consciousness in ways that were not very effective, contributing to both common purpose and division beween these communities. The conflicts occurred in a historical situation of British hegemony when ideas of racial hierarchy were prominent but also contested at every step by organizations and individuals across the Indian Ocean who often collaborated with each other. What had been impossible for the state in its long negotiation with the African and Indian press, the suppression of allegedly subversive papers, became a reality in October 1952. With the introduction of the State of Emergency, declared in order to set the preconditions for the suppression of the Mau Mau insurrection, almost all African press publications were closed down. Indian publications, however, were left untouched. A contributing fact to the continued freedom of the Asian press may have been that, at this time, it changed its character to become segmented and less militant. More importantly, in the field of forces made up by the colonial regime and African and Indian opposition, it was now African nationalism that was the danger, whereas Indian politics tended to be muted and divided. Indian politics and print media became less relevant for the African struggle. The Daily Chronicle increasingly emphasized advertisement and writing on Indian and American films, and the Colonial Times continued its moderate, reformist line throughout the 1950s. The violent suppression of African organizations in the early 1950s, which coincided with a fragmentation of Indian politics, also meant that the scope for collaboration narrowed. The voices that were central in the brief, anti-colonial and anti-imperial African and Indian print culture drowned in the clamour of the militant and divisive political conflict known as Mau Mau.
