By AMOS KAREITHI

It was as easy for penniless Indians to go past the customs officials as the biblical camel passing through the eye of the needle.

However those who unwittingly crossed the poverty line were received with open handcuffs.

A quick trial and six months in the humid jail at Fort Jesus was enough to convince poverty-stricken speculators to give Mombasa a wide berth.

Thanks to the Distressed British subjects’ Act, upon completion of the short shocking sentence, those convicted of poverty were then deported to Bombay.

These stringent measures were meant to ensure only those with financial resources qualified into the privileged life of a settler in Kenya and could lord it over Africans and Asians.

But the settlers’ best laid plans went awry and their dreams of transforming Kenya into a white man country torpedoed.

While the British settlers, shortly before the First World War, dreamt loudly, their understudies, the Indians, who had been at Kenya’s coast half a century earlier, were secretly plotting.

The efforts of transforming Kenya into a white dominion reached its apex immediately after 1919, when the then commissioner, Major General Sir Edward Northey, established Soldier’s Settlement scheme.

Northey rewarded the British soldiers and whites with huge swathes of land and cheap labour in the white highlands, where 4,560 square miles had been reserved for their settlement.

He issued the Northey circulars ordering chiefs to conscript their villagers into the services of the settlers in their locations. Those who failed to recruit enough labourers were punished.

Earlier, in a bid to stamp their authority in East African Protectorate, the British colonial government had shifted the administration headquarters of the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi.

Second India

The first Commissioner, Charles Elliot, had in 1902 gone out of his way encouraging settlers from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Britain and America to move to Kenya.

He advertised the white highlands in the far countries and gave away huge chunks of land, ultimately costing him his job.

Northey too landed in hot soup when Indians, who he had treated as second fiddles, found sympathetic ears in Britain and started agitating for their political rights.

There was a belief then that Kenya was like a colony for India, owing to the huge number of Asians in the country to the extent that the Indian Rupee was being used as a currency.

Johnson Harrison, then a Special Commissioner for Uganda, is quoted by Bethwell Ogot in Zamani, A Survey of East African History, saying: "East Africa should be the America of Hindu, although the White Highlands are admirably suited for a white man’s country."

AM Jevanjee also thought this possible. "I would go as far as to advocate the annexation of Kenya to Indian Empire with the provincial government under Indian Viceroy. Let it be opened to us and in a few years it will be a second India," he said.

In 1921, The East African Chronicle, which was serving the interests of the Indian Congress in Kenya, visualised the country being administered from India, just as Dutchmen from the Netherlands were ruling South Africa.

That the Indians were more than the white settlers was not in doubt for in 1898 alone, 13,000 coolies were employed by the Imperial British East Africa Company to construct the railway.

Emboldened by the reception they had got from London, the Indians stepped up pressure for the scrapping of racial segregation in urban and residential areas.

"The Indians also wanted to be allocated land in the white highlands, which the government treated as enclave for the white settlers," Dr Peter Waweru, a historian at Laikipia University College, explains.

At the time, Nairobi, as Waweru explains, was burning as racial tensions were very high especially after Northey, whom the white settlers regarded as an ally, was removed and replaced by a new governor, Robert Corydon.

Corydon, who had served in Uganda, had no sympathies for the settlers as demonstrated by a private letter he dispatched to the then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill.

Transvaal elements

"I believe I shall be able to handle the settlers, largely by laughing at them a little and by getting them to use sense of proportion in their outlook. I shall push native development and native crop. I am confident of the future of the whole."

Such attitude did not endear the new commissioner to the settlers who had been dictating to the East Africa Protectorate administration.

Disgusted by the apparent betrayal by one of their own, the settlers, led by Lord Delamere, planned a coup where they were to overthrow the London backed governor.

The colonialists, according to Robert Maxon, author of Struggle for Kenya: The loss and Reassertion of Imperial Initiative 1912-1923, planned to teach Corydon a lesson.

"The Convention of Associations planned to kidnap Corydon, seize all the government arms, take over the railway station, repatriate all the Indians and take over the post office," Waweru adds.

The historian elaborates that the extremist colonialists of Lord Delamere’s ilk were planning to invite Boers from Transvaal in South Africa to show the colonial government how Africans and Asians ought to be treated.

Scholars are in agreement that the Transvaal elements had inspired some laws like the 1906 Master’s Ordinance, which provided for payment of labour in kind and breach of employment contract by the worker punishable by jail sentence.

As they grabbed the white highlands locking out locals in native reserves and prohibiting Asians from owning lands, the colonialists extended the land leasehold from 99 to 999 years.

During a visit to Nairobi in 1907, Winston Churchill had promised the white settlers the highlands would be reserved for them as long as they remained as a race and nobody else would be allowed to settle there.

Back to the coup, as the extremists sharpened their daggers, waiting for an opportune moment to seize the governor and topple his government, word reached Corydon, who briefed London.

Corydon was hastily called to London where a conference was organised so that the grievances by the settlers and Asians could be addressed.

When the feuding parties made their presentations before the Duke of Devonshire, a report, later popularly known as the Devonshire White Paper of 1923, was prepared.

Monthly stipend

The paper craftily quelled the feuding without granting autonomy to the whites as they wanted and declined to concede the white highlands to the Indians.

It resolved that primarily, Kenya was an African country and decreed that should the rights of the natives and those of the settlers and Indians conflict, those of the locals should prevail.

Consequently Indians won representation in the Legislative Council while segregation in urban areas was stopped, although the Africans were represented by Bishop Arthur, a white man.

Historians argue that although the planned coup was forestalled, the agitation for political rights by Indians and Africans continued boiling down to open rebellion and climaxing with the Mau Mau uprising.

Corydon did not last long as a governor and became the only other chief executive officer of the country after Kenyatta to die in office.

When he died in 1905, an ordinance was passed and endorsed by his successor, Edward William Grigg, awarding his wife and four children monthly stipend in recognition of his service to the colony.

Each of his three sons were to draw a 200 sterling annual allowance while his daughter was to get 100, and the widow 500 pounds.

The colonialists’ attempt to kidnap the governor and chase away all the Indians had flopped but they would later invade Government House, now known as State House.

Michael Blundell, member of the Legislative Council who witnessed the colonialists invasion of Government House, describes the altercation in his book, A Love Affair with the Sun.

On Monday, January 25, 1953, a group of protesting settlers forced their way into Government House and attempted to enter as police and other civil servants watched helplessly.

"I saw the long ten foot doors bending and shaking as the crowd outside thudded and thumped against them behind the tables, two African orderlies and European stenographers were pushing to hold the doors in their place.

All the while the then governor, Evelyn Barring was at his desk reading while the rioters demanded to be addressed by him following the killing of a white family in Kinangop.

Political development

Although he had been denigrated by the protesters who contemptuously sang God Save the Queen, Barring refused to address them insisting that doing so would encourage others to make similar demands in future.

Although Indians’ claim for land ownership flopped, their imprints are all over Kenya’s history as some covertly opposed the colonial administration and inspired the formation of political outfits like Young Kikuyu Association and Young Kavirondo Association.

But as Waweru explains, "The Indians played a crucial role in the political development of the country but seem to have been edited out of the script when Kenya got independence in 1963."

akareithi@standardmedia.co.ke