India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms

3. Shops and Stations: Rethinking Power and Privilege in British/Indian East Africa

77 3 Shops and Stations Rethinking Power and Privilege in British/Indian East Africa Savita Nair It is not as imported labour that I advocate the introduction of the Indians [into East Africa], but as colonist and settler. —Frederick D. Lugard, 1893 When Frederick Lugard, captain in the British East Africa Company, goes from England to East Africa in 1889 to explore and establish the company ’s claim to East Africa, he recommends that “the Indian” be used in multi-tiered, somewhat contradictory, ways. Eventually, Indians are imported as indentured laborers to build the Uganda Railway—the practical and symbolic heart of imperial power—and Indians indeed are recruited to settle and help develop these newly established British lands. Among the many tiers of Lugard’s proposals is the assertion that the British development of East Africa was good for Africans and good for the British. It is in this particular instance that Lugard endorses the use of Indians: “If the laziness of the [African] natives should make it impossible for us to reap advantage, we must find means to do so in spite of them” (Lugard 1893: 497). Among other things, Lugard heralds the Indian laborers as “more civilised settlers” and as potential examples for the “extremely imitative” African . Most significantly, he argues that Indians be imported as colonists and settlers and “not as imported coolie labour,” and that Indians give a much-needed impetus to trade. Though appalling today for its racism and 78 self-interest, his reasoning had logic at that time. Lugard speculates that if the Indians brought commercial gains to East Africa for the British, then it would be an automatic success for the African as well. He defends this position by citing the successful, centuries-long history of Indian traders along the coasts of Africa (488–89). Just over a decade later, in 1908, Winston Churchill praises and defends the Indian community in East Africa by stating: The Indian was here long before the first British Official. He may point to many generations of useful industry of the Coast and inland as the white settlers , especially the most recently arrived contingents from South Africa . . . can count years of residence. Is it possible for any Government, with a scrap of respect for honest dealing between man and man, to embark on a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from regions in which he has established himself under every security of public faith. (Churchill 1908: 34; emphases mine) Parallel to Churchill, Lugard, and the imperial government, Indians justify their East African presence on precedence, utility, and rights when facing imperial uncertainties. The historical record indicates that if Indians had civic equality, Kenya would have, in effect, functioned as an Indian colony. Thus, the position of Indians in colonial Kenya has unique features when compared to other British colonies with a history of Indian indenture, although scholarship tends to belie this fact. The question of how to negotiate the role of British Indian subjects in other British colonies looms large especially when the population in Kenya is not primarily an indentured or post-indentured one. As a historian of modern South Asia, my aim is to explore local and under-explored levels of contact between individuals, most broadly grouped as Asian, European, and African, by examining a small sample of colonial East African court records from 1918 to 1920. Of the dozens I examined, a handful stand out as revealing and representing defiance, insecurity, marginalization , and perceived superiority among the various players. The Court of Kenya was established in Mombasa in 1902, was moved to Nairobi in 1905, and was known as the Supreme Court, and later as the High Court (IFLA/FAIFE 2006); Muslim personal law and customary laws were applied. Like in India, the colonial Kenyan court had parallel legal systems in place. The shining “jewel” in the British Crown may have been losing its luster by the early part of the twentieth century with the rise of Indian nationalist movements swaying from more-to-less moderate, but the institutional and policy development of British India would be spliced and implanted into British East Africa, such as the Indian Penal Code and acts of Evidence and Contract (White 1990: 65; Mangat 1969: 63).1 Savita Nair Shops and Stations 79 By 1919, indentured labor in East Africa had been phased out for a decade , with only remnants of those who...