Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa
East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.