Sana Aiyar seeks to illuminate ‘the entanglement of political, economic, and racial concerns over the changing meanings of “Indian”, “African”, and “Kenyan” in the first part of the twentieth century’ (2). Trained as a South Asianist, she traces how Indian settlers in Kenya navigated their privileged but precarious position during the era of British colonial rule and the transition to independence. Among the book's many contributions, Aiyar's careful attention to Indians’ constantly shifting political discourses and modes of self-identification is distinctive. No wonder African doubts about solidarity with Indians went beyond class resentment. Indian derision of African civilization was equally or perhaps more damaging. Although Aiyar sees Indian politics as ‘largely unconcerned … with cultural preoccupations’, her work makes clear that Indians assumed and actively politicized African cultural differences (16).
The introduction outlines the political economic significance of the Indian diaspora in Kenya for the British colonial hierarchical structure. The Indian population in Kenya increased dramatically between 1887 and 1968, from about 7,000 to over 175,000. After 1895, when British colonial rule in Kenya formally began, Indian merchants sided with the colonizers. More Indians arrived, many employed by the British to oversee Africans. Even indentured Indian railway workers could profit economically in Kenya (by establishing, for example, dukkas, or shops). These (male) settlers connected their two homelands through business networks by educating their children in India and marrying wives there. Aiyar convincingly shows how these processes contributed to the construction of the colonial hierarchy across territorial boundaries. One weakness, however, is her use of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ (as well as ‘white’) without any analysis of race. She acknowledges she reproduces the ‘murkiness of racial categories aligned with skin color’, but actually these identities appear overly simplistic and static (20). Likewise, Aiyar seems to accept ‘civilization’, without examination, as a hierarchical concept agreed upon by Europeans and Indians and found lacking in Africans. Africanists might challenge this supposition, citing works such as Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya, which contested such civilizational claims.
Chapter One begins with another contested idea, modernity, defined in ‘three interrelated material forms of trade, clothing, and money’, which ‘Indian traders and laborers’ used to advance the British mission in Kenya (51). At first, the British and Indians teamed together to support Indian sub-imperialism in Kenya, but competition between Indians and white settlers in the coveted highlands prompted the British to impose urban and rural racial segregation, which applied to Indians as well as Africans. Aiyar records in fascinating detail the protests of men like Alibhai Mulla Jeevanji, who objected to the lack of equal rights for Indians, but not for Africans. Yet she fails to analyze cultural attitudes with any depth, such as the Indian trope of East African ‘nakedness’ as barbaric (52). Nudity commonly appears in texts written by European and Arab travellers and traders. Did Indians – Hindu or Muslim – bring any cultural baggage with them to East Africa? Without such a historicization of Indian discourses of difference, Aiyar reduces Indian views to an ‘uncritical internalization [of] the white man's burden’ (50). She fails to consider that the cultural hierarchies articulated by Indians that were based on skin color, dress, and religion were not necessarily derivative of European beliefs, but perhaps reflections of Indian cultural norms.
By 1920, Africans’ status ‘emerged as a talking point’ (70). In this context, the British made racist and paternalistic arguments to favor white settlers, ‘protect’ Africans from Indians, restrict Indian representation on the Legislative Council, and maintain racial segregation. Chapters Two and Three trace the intensification of anticolonial agitation in the Indian diaspora from the First World War onward. With new African-Indian alliances forming, dukkas became spaces of economic ‘intimacy’ (75). Harry Thuku and other political leaders worked with Indians, but Africans in the reserves resented the price fixing and other ‘cheating’ that they attributed to dukkawallahs (the owners of dukkas) (98). Even as the possibility of a unified workers’ movement emerged in the 1930s, some Indians were loathe to work with African leaders like Kenyatta. After Indian independence in 1947, interracial solidarity served as the political ideal of Jawaharial Nehru, Makhan Singh, and Kenyatta, but in practice, political organizations remained ‘monoracial’. Too many Indians feared black nationalism.
Chapter Four, focusing on Indians’ divided loyalties during the Mau Mau rebellion, is an original contribution to a well-developed scholarship. Pio Gama Pinto and other younger Indian leaders, along with the Indian High Commission and Kenyan African Union, supported Mau Mau fighters and decried the colonial state's violent suppression. But older Indians often sided with many dukkawallahs in small towns who supported the government crackdown. After the emergency ended, the Congress president Mangat tried to delegitimize all African politics, an effort that failed but which established a poisonous racialism that infected independence negotiations. The final chapter charts political divisions over the shape of modern Kenya, schisms that the British hoped might slow independence. Amid disagreement, ‘Africa for Africans’ best articulated the demand for immediate freedom. Indians, clinging to the idea of equality for their self-preservation, helped bring about the discourse of African indigeneity, which seemed the only way to rectify obvious economic inequality at independence in 1963. Moi's expulsion of Indians in 1967 and Indian emigrations to the United Kingdom presented real challenges for the British. Aiyar insightfully shows that the metropole's immigration politics must also be understood in relation to these extraterritorial dynamics.
The book might have better acknowledged the complexity of African ethnic relations, such as coast-hinterland interactions, which shows that Kenyans were no strangers to indigenous civilizational discourses. A critical eye towards the voluminous documentary sources might also have allowed Aiyar to extend her analysis of historiographical debates, to which she attends only in the Mau Mau chapter. For example, she describes the size and racial composition of the crowds at political rallies often but does not probe or question the documentary record itself to consider the stakes of political reportage, given British fears of Indian ‘influence’ on African nationalists and some African opposition to solidarity with Indians. Minor errors of spelling of Kenyan words and names also appear, as with the Kiswahili word for citizens (wananchi). Transnational history is challenging, yet, given Aiyar's painstaking documentation of colonial hierarchies, a discussion of biases in the sources is needed. These concerns aside, Aiyar's work will undoubtedly motivate scholars to employ oral histories, more commonly used by Africanists than Indianists, to provide alternative perspectives. This book also sets an undoubtedly high standard for future African-Asian studies.
