Book in celebration of Kenyan pioneering (wo)men of letters

There are times when a cliché is a book reviewer’s best friend. A cliché may come in handy when one reads a book as absorbing as Zarina Patel’s, The In-Between World of Kenya’s Media: South Asian Journalism 1900-1992 (Colourprint, 2016).

I would, therefore, begin to comment on this book by saying that it is an utmost and apt addition to the archive on the contribution of Kenyans of South East Asian origin to the making of this country.

This cliché doesn’t say much about the literary, historical, journalistic, cultural or sociological wealth that this book, which Zarina Patel dedicates “to all those journalists who keep the torch of press freedom alight,” carries. This book is also another significant addition to several books that Zarina has written, edited and published, besides co-editing Awaaz magazine over the years. 

One cannot gainsay the value of the archive in Kenya today. It is in the archive that we find stories about ourselves. Our stories and histories in the periods that we variously call pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial are kept in the records in the archives. But the archive isn’t a place of ‘dead’ documents, people and ideas. The archive is a living thing. For the stories in there are always contesting what we know or are told today.

So, if today Kenyan-Asians are hardly visible publicly, we may tend to imagine that this is the way things have always been. The archive will tell a different story.

It will remind those who bother to visit it that what we call Kenya has been made and continues to be made by peoples of different races, ethnicities, beliefs, cultures and thinking. South East Asians — the people the rest of Kenyans call Indians or Kenyan-Asians — have always been part of the story of Kenya’s evolution into a modern state, way before mzungus arrived on the shores of the Indian Ocean to colonise the land.

But the archive is alive in the sense that it is always being made and remade. What Zarina does in The In-Between World of Kenya’s Media is to not only invoke the centrality of Asians in the making of Kenyan news, but also to celebrate their being at the centre or the two extremes of blacks and whites during colonialism and after.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY

The individuals that she memorialises in the book — print journalists, radio journalists/broadcasters and photo journalists — working in the Kenyan media since the beginning of the 20th century all told, in various languages, images and styles not just the stories of Asians in Kenya but of other Kenyan races, the region, continent as well as the world.

Beginning with print journalists, Zarina shows how the Kenyan media have significant roots in the African Standard, a newspaper that was established in Mombasa by Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, then a very successful businessman, originally from India. Jeevanjee also launched Mombasa Times and Uganda Argus. These papers weren’t just set up to compete with those that covered the interests of the Europeans, they would later on become quite critical to the anti-colonial struggles.

By writing about race, racism and inequality in the country, these newspapers set the tone for the struggle for equality in the country. Besides the African Standard, you will meet several Indian writers writing for and in papers including Indian Voice, Democrat, East African Chronicle, The Kenyan Chronicle, Daily Chronicle, The Colonial Times and Kenya Daily, among many others.

For many Kenyan non-Asian readers, today starved of their history, not many of the names of the Asian journalists would ring a bell. Maybe some still remember Gayatri (Syal) Sagar, described as ‘the first South Asian woman journalist in Kenya’; Jasmer Singh; Joe Rodrigues, described by Cyprian Fernandes in this book as ‘arguably the finest South Asian journalist in Kenya’; Kul Bhushan ‘the first business editor’ at the Nation; Lorraine Saldanha (Alvares), Narain Singh; Norman Da Costa; Olinda Fatima Fernandes; Pio Gama Pinto; Rashid Mughal; Salim Lone; Saude George; Shamlal Puri; Yusuf Dawood Kodwavwala and Zoeb Tayabjee, among others. These have been beat journalists, editors and columnists, with Yusuf Dawood’s ‘Surgeon’s Dairy’ being one of the longest running column in a Kenyan newspaper.

I am not so sure that the photo-journalists in this book would register in the memory of the majority of Kenyans, except Mohamed Amin of Camerapix and Mohinder Dhillon of Africapix.  Mohamed Amin is the famous photographer and cameraman who brought to the attention of the rest of the world the 1984 Ethiopian famine. Mo, as he was fondly remembered, died in 1996, a victim of the hijacking of an Ethiopian airliner that was forced to crash in the Indian Ocean. Mohinder is a renowned photographer, filmmaker and painter.

There are also the Asian voices on radio such as Allaudin Qureshi, who also writes in the Nation; Chaman Lal Chaman, who worked for Voice of Kenya till 1974; Sajjad and Darshi Shamsi; Tochi Chaggar described as “Kenya’s first South Asian woman broadcaster” and Visho Sharma.

These are just but some of the names that the Zarina has extracted from the archives or from the stories of other journalists talking about their peers or relatives.

The In-Between World of Kenya’s Media: South Asian Journalism 1900-1992 was launched in Nairobi on Tuesday, April 19, 2016.