In this authoritative and richly documented volume, Aiyar provides a history of the Indian community in Kenya throughout the eighty years of the colonial era and the subsequent decade of what she calls “uhuru [freedom] and exodus” (261). At the center of her argument is the assertion that Indians in Kenya saw themselves as possessing two interlocking homelands, one “civilizational” and the other “territorial” (8, 119). The first involved not only an enduring connection to India but also a consciousness of racial identity that saw Africans as “savages” in need of “uplift” (66). After an initial few years in which the British conceived of Kenya as “the America of the Hindu,” they shifted to making the new colony a “white man’s country” (22). Its Indian residents could never make good a claim to racial equality.
This volume primarily narrates the always tense and ambiguous relationship between Indian and African. For...