A Kenyan Journey: Pheroze Nowrojee’s book exposes the politics of belonging

Nobody should be fooled by the somewhat generic title of Pheroze Nowrojee’s new book, A Kenyan Journey (Transafrica Press). Its prose is far from bland. PHOTO| WILLIAM OERI

What you need to know:

  • The coup brings another familiar experience — the “othering” of Indians. “Whose shops are being looted?” “And why no-one else’s?”

  • These questions prompt Nowrojee’s long look at the whys and hows of a people who left everything and developed “a testamentary affection and duty for this foster country”.

  • The next chapter plunges into 1896 and a clinical analysis of the logic of the British Empire which brought the author’s grandfather, Driver Pheroze Nowrojee, to the colony.

Nobody should be fooled by the somewhat generic title of Pheroze Nowrojee’s new book, A Kenyan Journey (Transafrica Press). Its prose is far from bland.

It has a captivating, elegant diction that builds into a haunting poetry in which literally every sentence carries the weight of five paragraphs of philosophical contemplation.

The overall meaning of this book is portent. It unpacks the contradictions of Asian African heritage and details the politics of belonging for the Indian coolies who came to the East African Protectorate.

Their choices about whether to stay, how to stay or whether to go back were never easy, and their descendants continue to grapple with these choices in a land that intermittently questions their loyalty to the economy and their stake in the heritage and the politics.

Nowrojee’s prose matches that intermittent turbulence by breaking into weighty polemical punches.

His writing is far removed from the cautious probing of Pally Dhillon whose uncelebrated fictional account of the coolies — Kijabe: An African Historical Saga (2000) — used the popular genres of romance, murder mystery and political thriller to enrich the personal diaries that were written by Dhillon’s grandfather.

The structure of Nowrojee’s book is refreshing. He avoids that sleep-inducing staple of Kenyan biographies, which predictably open with “the early days” and routinely regurgitate the mythical origins of a tribe. Whatever they add, opening a biography with these myths robs it of all literary merit because they bring neither variety nor surprise.

Mercifully, A Kenyan Journey opens with a moment of action — a cryptic telephone conversation during the 1982 coup.

Nowrojee listens to the caller with a deep sense of humiliation at “the banality of this African experience” of violent fracture.

'OTHERING' OF INDIANS

The coup brings another familiar experience — the “othering” of Indians. “Whose shops are being looted?” “And why no-one else’s?”

These questions prompt Nowrojee’s long look at the whys and hows of a people who left everything and developed “a testamentary affection and duty for this foster country”.

The next chapter plunges into 1896 and a clinical analysis of the logic of the British Empire which brought the author’s grandfather, Driver Pheroze Nowrojee, to the colony.

The Empire “imported” 31,983 indentured men from India to build the Uganda Railway. Official correspondence spoke of them as if they were chattels!

Nowrojee revisits Indian Ocean chronicles and discounts the fictions that the British built to cement their hold over the colonised by claiming that they “discovered” the ocean and the African interior.

The dictionary has a new word for this practice of white men thinking they discovered something when that thing has existed centuries — “columbusing” (clearly ridiculing Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer).

Nowrojee’s discoveries about the life of Driver Pheroze and other Indian coolies are gathered from some fascinating sources — stamps, photographs, letters and stories narrated by his grandmother. Press reports, advertising posters, recorded legal notices from the Official Gazette and minutes from meetings of Uganda Railway are added.

A Kenyan Journey is also a family history. It dramatises a growing trend in scholarship where critical or theoretical material is grounded in the personal.

Nowrojee’s politics is the politics of inclusion. He reminds us that the 2,493 coolies who died building the railway are “unacknowledged in our history” yet they are the embodiment of the sacrifices that the Indian community has made in the making of Kenya. But in the portrait of his grandmother, Dinoo, Nowrojee’s progressive history shifts from the sacrifices of dead men to the dynamism of Indian women.

The release of this book is timely, even godsend. We currently have a new cast of railway builders whose residency will not be fleeting and we must prepare for the consequences. Additionally, we are in the grips of an existential war in which the word “alien” is increasingly conflated with extremism. What are the rights of newcomers? What confers upon them a sense of belonging? One is legal, the other is cultural and sometimes it is political.

Nowrojee makes it clear that recurring moments of rejection, such as the near-statelessness of Indians at independence, the 1982 coup and the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda, create a tenuous bond. “The relationship of a newcomer to his adopted country is not a marriage. It is a love affair. It may be passionate, it may be resentful. It is sometimes both”.

Having redeemed the memory of his grandfather and his contribution to Kenya, Nowrojee’s epilogue turns to the role of his father, Eruch Nowrojee, in the Mau Mau trials. This is the role that the British Historian, David Anderson reduced to a mere footnote in his 352-page Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.

If the (sub)version of history from below counts for anything, Eruch’s role is something that Nowrojee will never hear in the folklore of the Kikuyu because “the essence of Kikuyu storytelling about (the Emergency) is silence. Silence about the means. Silence about the self.”

At this point, the doctrine of logical assumptions suggests that Nowrojee has set himself up in a very awkward conundrum about rights and belonging.

If the Indian’s claim to belonging in Kenya emanates primarily from the sacrifices of building the railway, given the collective punishment they suffered at the hands of the British — a suffering that Nowrojee details in technicolour as he describes the injustices he and his father witnessed at the Lari trials and gallows in Githunguri in 1953 — where then does the Kikuyu claim over Kenya end?

Nowrojee does not answer the implicit question raised by his curious epilogue.

Still, his account explains why Kenyans have a disdain for the justice system we inherited at independence. Colonial rule exposed us to contrived verdicts. What hope could there be, thereafter, for us to see justice in courts as anything but malleable and buyable?

BENEFACTOR AND ANTAGONIST

Today, our country’s relationship with the coloniser is as tortured as it was for Eruch Nowrojee who knew the King Emperor as both benefactor and antagonist.

Indeed. Britain is currently reeling from her inability to make inroads with the current government. Her scholars — buoyed by the colonial records that the empire continues to cling on to — write weekly bulletins with something akin to a proprietary right to interpret our society and determine our realities.

These patronising pronouncements have many roots, including the age-old tension between imperial history (what those with power record) and popular memory (what the others remember).

The old empire tiptoes around local memory, unwilling to know what the colony thinks of it.

It is equally slow to embrace scholarship that outlines what post-colonials think of their own circumstances and how they want to shape their destiny. 

Still, I would hope that Nowrojee will get a chance to launch his important book at universities like Oxford and Warwick, and the Royal African Society, with its motley crew of ancient DCs and aspiring Africanists, because this is as much a story aimed at lifting their ignorance about the past as it is one targeted at local enlightenment about the making of Kenya(ns).