Kenya's Indian Question vs the Indian Connection

Dispelling the century-old dilemma

Despite the still contentious Indian Question that was framed against the African by the British imperialists which implied that the real enemy of the indigenous Kenyan peoples was the Indian – who had outnumbered the white settlers three times over by the 1920s –and not the colonialists, Indians continued to side with the African cause to lead Kenya to complete independence.

They not only suffered imprisonments, the gallows and deportations, the Indians inspired the Africans to fight the same colonialists they were grappling with in India. But now that their adopted motherland was Africa, the Indians’ resolve turned the colonialists against them even more, to a point of being unfairly labeled as the arch-rival of the African that they had come to take away their businesses and dominate over the – where in fact, they were simply expressing their traditional and ancestral prowess in trade which they had been engaging with East African for centuries before they even set foot en-mass as indentured labourers in the mid 1890s to help build for the British the historic Uganda Railway (1896-1901) from Mombasa to Kisumu.

Besides fighting for independence, the Indians in Kenya (known later from 1947 as Asians) also helped inspire African nationalism before Kenya found its own voice and method to oust the imperialists in 1963, only sixteen years after India did. The colonial divisive tactic against the Indian in Kenya, however, ended up causing a deep mistrust in the African, and to this day remains largely unaddressed on a national level, but that still does not stop both working hand-in-hand wherever they can to love and build the Kenya their forebears fought for and died for, together.