The Development of South Asian Communalism in Kenya

This paper examines the development of South Asian ‘communalism’ in Kenya in the 1940s. In contrast to India, manifestations of (religious) communalism in East Africa were not greatly marked by violence, yet divisive discourses emanating from India did have impacts, producing one of the most vociferous periods of ‘Asian’ political activity in East African history. This paper will analyse these developments through scrutiny of lobbying for representation within colonial administrative structures and examination of the vibrant local ‘Asian’ press. The paper will argue that once formal institutional separation occurred, notably after the formation of the ‘Muslim Central Association’ in 1943, various other ‘communities’ energised their own institutional claims so as not to be ‘left behind’ in the established atmosphere of competitive official petitioning. The pace of communal separation was then rapid and telling, sometimes reifying ‘communities’ which had been conspicuously fragmented. This also crippled the hitherto most significant pan-South Asian political body, the East African Indian National Congress, which had drawn on agitational nexuses in India and South Africa to champion Indian parity with white settlers. At least in political senses, ‘East African Asians’ were therefore further sundered from their ‘homeland’; a state of affairs Nehru did little to remedy to the chagrin of many. The paper will hold that the flow of political ideas across the Indian Ocean in the colonial period was more marked than has often been noted, but that the quantum was temporally highly uneven. Despite increasing political distance from India among many ‘Kenyan Asian’ communities, the flux of the 1940s created conditions for the utilisation of political idioms from India; yet for remarkably localised grievances. Finally, the paper will note how developments impacted colonial governance in a period of growing African political consciousness, and speculate how these South Asian concerns affected African political imagination.