Never Be Silent: Publishing and Imperialism in Kenya, 1884–1963 (review)

African historians in Kenya have long been familiar with Uhuru and the Kenya Indians by Dana April Seidenberg (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983), and with Robert J. Gregory's India and East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). This volume by Shiraz Durrani will be a very welcome addition to the researcher unfamiliar with the role of South Asians, or "Wahindi," in the struggle for Kenya's independence. It is at once a research document to be used by discerning aficionados and a resource for those not constrained by the lack of strict footnotes. The author tells us in the preface that he has been involved with the Kenyan underground struggles, and much of this detail informs the text. The pages on the banned publications are particularly valuable, for they remind us that the struggles continue, that they did not begin yesterday, and that the spirit of humanity remains uncowed by all those forces dedicated to the suppression of African voices, in the past, present, and in the future.

Where is Shiraz coming from? In Breaking the Culture of Silence he tells us that he is a veteran of the anticolonial struggles, having been initiated while serving as a "progressive" librarian at the University of Nairobi from as far back as 1979, before his journey led him to exile in Britain in 1984. Though he touches on various aspects of his own struggles, his text brings out a masterly record of the broader anticolonial struggles in Kenya. I particularly like the countrywide sweep of his approach, which reminds us that Mwalimu, by Francis Khamisi, was a radical publication in 1946, and that a whole gamut of gramophone records and films were banned by the colonial authorities—works like En Ang'o ma ni e chuny piny ("What is happening [in the middle of ] the world?"), which was banned by the government on July 17, 1954; and John Mwale's Nilisimama River Road, which surely must have offended nobody in his right mind! The author notes that among the films banned were "West of Zanzibar" and "Jhansi ki Rani."

The informants, alive and dead, are important, too. They include Sitaram Acharia, Haroon Ahmed, Amer Singh, Basant Kaur, Chandrabh Bhatt, M. A. Desai, Keshavlal Dwivedi, Amon Gakanga, K. C. Kamau, Victor Murage, V. G. Patel, Merchand Puri, Tirath Ram, G. D. Rawal, Francis Ruhinda, Stephen Ruhinda, L. M. Savle, Goopal Singh, W. L. Sohan, and Temal Singh. We do not know what individual roles these informants played; but as we used to say in my high school: "they also ran."

The net result is a mosaic that rescues Kenyan historians from the condescension of decades of brainwashing into the belief that there are no South Asian heroes to be celebrated in the narrative of Kenya's struggle for uhuru.