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Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Michael Twaddle
Michael Twaddle*
Affiliation:
Institute of Commonwealth Studies
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 309 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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References

Notes

1. C. F. Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 6 September 1920, quoted in Chaturvedi, B. and Sykes, M., Charles Freer Andrews: a Narrative (London, 1949), 155.Google Scholar This paper has been written in its present form in honor of Hugh Tinker, the historian of South Asian settlement in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, and of race relations worldwide.

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8. Ibid., 423.

9. Ibid., 145.

10. Indians in Kenya: Memorandum, London, July 1923, Cd 1922.Google Scholar

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15. Quoting both the English translation and Luganda words of Walser, F., Luganda proverbs (Berlin, 1982), 441.Google Scholar The proverb was published earlier in Engero za Baganda (1902) by Henry Wright Duta. Charles Hattersley was a close colleague of Duta, publishing with him Luganda Phrases and Idioms for New Travellers in Uganda in 1904.

16. Sturrock to Chief Secretary, Entebbe, 20 June 1921, on Northey to Governor of Uganda, 19 June. Entebbe Secretariat Archives, Uganda [ESA], SMP 6812.

17. The Leader, 15 November 1919.

18. East African Chronicle (hereafter EAC), 23 April 1921.

19. EAC, 30 April 1921.

20. See further Natsoulas, T., “Harold G. Robertson: an Editor's Reversal From Settler Critic to Ally in Kenya, 1922-1923,” IJAHS, 5 (1972), 610–28.Google Scholar

21. Rosberg, /Nottingham, , Myth of Mau Mau, 361.Google Scholar Kariuki would seem to have bad a good memory of these events in later years (Spencer, , Kenya African Union, 80Google Scholar). Rosberg and Nottingham's account is followed here rather than King's “Nationalism,” 54n18, which confusingly telescopes two memorials against wage reduction around this time.

22. EAC, 11 June 1921; East African Standard (hereafter EAS), 9 May 1921, quoted in King, Kenneth, “The Young Baganda Association: Some Notes on the Internationalisation of Early African Politics in Buganda,” Journal of African and Asian Studies XX(1969), 13–14.Google Scholar

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24. Officer in charge, Bombo, 7 April 1921, enclosing Major Salmonson to KAR Bombo, secret, 11.1.21, end. copy of Watkins to CS Kenya, 7.1.21, ESA, SMP 6812.

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28. Ibid., 27 December 1919.

29. Ibid.

30. The texts are reproduced in Low, D. A., The Mind of Buganda (London, 1971), 51–54.Google Scholar

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33. EAC, 11 December 1921, quoted in Delf, G., Asians in East Africa (London, 1963), 18.Google Scholar

34. English translation enclosed by Uganda High Court to CS, Entebbe, 14 April 1921, ESA, SMP 6812. My English quotations are from this version, which is a good and on the whole a fairly literal translation; Luganda quotations are taken from Sekanyolya newspaper.

35. “Internal grievances” is the translation in the High Court version of the general sense rather than the literal meaning of the Luganda text at this point in the newspaper; Luganda is not always easy to translate into English absolutely literally.

36. The standard study of the first of these developments is still Low, D. A. and Pratt, R. C., Buganda and British Overrule (London, 1970)Google Scholar; for missionary education, see Watson, Tom, “A history of the Church Missionary Society High Schools in Uganda: the education of a Protestant elite” (PhD., Makerere University, 1968).Google Scholar Schools started by Roman Catholic missionaries at this time still await their historian.

37. King, , “Young Baganda Association,” 19–20.Google Scholar

38. I hope to develop this point at greater length elsewhere.

39. EAC, 28 May 1921.

40. King, Kenneth makes this point, “Young Baganda Association,” 23.Google Scholar

41. The best study of this subject is in Hansen, Holger Bernt, Mission, Church And State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda, 1890-1925 (London, 1984), chapters 11-13.Google Scholar See also Twaddle, Michael, “The Ending of Slavery in Buganda” in Miers, Suzanne and Roberts, Richard, eds. The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988).Google Scholar

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43. Duckworth to Commissioner of Police, 19 October 1921, copy encl Duckworth to Entebbe, same day, ESA, SMP 6812.

44. The fullest account of Sentongo's early life comes from the obituary composed by his friends, “Eby'obulamu no Kufa kwo Mwami Zefaniya Katumba Sentongo, omukang'anya wa “Njubebirese” Ebifa mu Buganda (July 1925), 173–76.Google Scholar

45. EAC, 16 July, 6 and 20 August 1921.

46. Thuku, Harry, An autobiography (Nairobi, 1970), 20–23.Google Scholar

47. See Spencer, , Kenyan African Union, 47–53, for the fullest account.Google Scholar

48. Tinker, , Ordeal of Love, 188.Google Scholar

49. Nairobi Baganda Union to Chief Secretary of Kenya, 10 June 1921, quoted in King, , “Nationalism,” 42.Google Scholar

50. Kamulegeya to Khandwala, 22 July 1921; reprinted in EAC, 6 August 1921.

51. King, , “Young Baganda Association,” 13–14.Google Scholar

52. King, , “Nationalism,” 42.Google Scholar

53. “Report of the Uganda Missionary Conference, June 1904,” CMS Archives, University of Birmingham Library, UK, G3A7/1904b.Google Scholar

54. “Syphilis in Uganda,” Uganda Notes, November 1908.

55. This is another topic I hope to discuss in more detail elsewhere.

56. Weekend editions of The Leader, 25 June and 2 July 1921.

57. Bonner, P., “The Transvaal Native Congress, 1919-1920: the Radicalisation of the Black Petty Bourgeoisie on the Rand” in Industralisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870-1930, ed. Marks, Shula and Rathbone, Richard (London, 1982), 272.Google Scholar

58. This is the most likely story, on which I hope to elaborate elsewhere.

59. King, , “Nationalism,” 45, 47–52.Google Scholar

60. King, , “Young Baganda Association,” 23.Google Scholar

61. Walser, F., Luganda Proverbs, 171Google Scholar, translates Gakyali mabaga as “We are only at the beginning,” and notes it as a popular response to the common greeting Weebale.

62. The Leader, 22 June 1922.

63. Spencer, , Kenyan African Union, 35.Google Scholar

64. Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (3d ed.: London, 1966), 3Google Scholar, quoted in idem., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York, 1970), 28.

65. Apter, David E., The Political Kingdom in Uganda: a Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, 1961), 166.Google Scholar

66. This is the view of Scotton, James, “The First African Press in East Africa: Protest and Nationalism in Uganda in the 1920s,” IJAHS, 6 (1973), 213.Google Scholar I am indebted to Dr. Scotton for much early help with the subject matter of this paper.

67. It survives nowadays among the Coryndon Papers in Rhodes House Library, Oxford: CP, folios 200-204, 3/1.

68. This appeared in the April 1921 article against Indians in Sekanyolya. Europeans in Buganda appeared more friendly titan those in Kenya. Sentongo's attitude towards the latter in this article is distinctly ambiguous.

69. These are words used by C. N. Connolly to describe white Australian racist attitudes during anti-Chinese riots in New South Wales in 1860-61—riots sparked off by seemingly trivial incidents. Connolly, , Who are our enemies? Racism and the working class in Australia, ed. Curthoys, Ann and Markus, Andrew (Neutral Bay New South Wales, 1978), 47.Google Scholar

70. SirZimmern, A., in Bailey, S. D., ed., Parliamentary Government in the Commonwealth (London, 1951), 12.Google Scholar

71. Rosberg, /Nottingham, . Myth of Mau Mau, 359Google Scholar, quotes these estimates from C.E. Spencer, Report on the census of non-natives, 24 April 1921.

72. King, , “Nationalism,” 45.Google Scholar

73. Rosberg, /Nottingham, , Myth of Mau Mau, 38.Google Scholar

74. Tinker, , Ordeal of Love, 203.Google Scholar

75. See Tinker, Hugh, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1920-1950 (London, 1976)Google Scholar, chapter 2, for references.

76. Quoted in Lugard, Lord, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (4th ed.: London 1929), 320n1.Google Scholar

77. T. Mason, “Intention and Explanation: a Current Controversy About the interpretation of National Socialism,” summarized by Kershaw, Ian in The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 1985), 69.Google Scholar

78. This is the view of Scotton, , “First African Press,” 213.Google Scholar

79. Ibid., 215.

80. This again is Scotton's, view, “Growth of the Vernacular Press in Colonial East Africa: Patterns of Government Control” (PhD., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 111.Google Scholar

81. The best account is in Hansen, Mission, Church, and State, chapters 12 and 13.

82. This is something I intend to write about more fully elsewhere.

83. Sentongo died on 6 April 1925 in Mengo Hospital: Ebifa mu Buganda (May 1925), 107.Google Scholar

84. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), 49.Google Scholar

85. Kenneth King comments on this more fully in Pan-Africanism and Education: a Study of Race, Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar