Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connections

Abstract

The article addresses African and Indian newspaper networks in Kenya in the late 1940s in an Indian Ocean perspective. Newspapers were important parts of a printing culture that was sustained by Indian and African nationalist politics and economic enterprise. In this period new intermediary groups of African and Indian entrepreneurs, activists and publicists, collaborating around newspaper production, captured fairly large and significant non-European audiences (some papers had print runs of around ten thousand) and engaged them in new ways, incorporating their aspirations, writings and points of view in newspapers. They depended on voluntary and political associations and anti-colonial struggles in Kenya and on links to nationalists in India and the passive resistance movement in South Africa. They sidestepped the European-dominated print culture and created an anti-colonial counter-voice. Editors insisted on the right to write freely and be heard, and traditions of freedom of speech put a brake on censorship. Furthermore, the shifting networks of financial, editorial and journalistic collaboration, and the newspapers’ language choice – African vernaculars, Gujarati, Swahili and English – made intervention difficult for the authorities. With time, the politics and ideologies sustaining the newspapers pulled in different directions, with African nationalism gaining the upper hand among the forces that shaped the future independent Kenyan nation.

Politicians in Newspaper News: Who Attracts Coverage in Kenyan Politics

“…The African press during the colonial era was politically motivated, mostly focusing on the issue of political independence (Ali 2009). Similarly, Indian press content reflected anti-colonial resistance throughout the British Empire, which worried the colonial government (Frederiksen 2011).…”

Crafting Sport History Behind Bars: Wrestling with State Patronage and Colonial Confinement in Kenya

“…85 Beyond the written works of famous political ethnographies such as Facing Mount Kenya, scholars have yet to adequately mine the wide variety of vernacular publications (from newspapers to amateur histories) for the ways sport and leisure filtered into debates about ethnicity, gender, and other forms of social identity. 86 Offering a different perspective to the imperial descriptions of "native sport" in the settler dominated press, vernacular publications such as Muigwithania and Ramogi provided both a political voice to their respective ethnic communities but were also important forums for debating a variety of social issues from the 1920s through the 1950s. 87 Outside of these Kenyan examples, digital collections offer further insight into the potential sources available to investigate wrestling's colonial past beyond East Africa.…”

“… 86 Bodil Frederiksen, “Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connections,” Africa 81–1 (2011), 155–172; Shiraz Durrani, Never Be Silent: Publishing and Imperialism in Kenya 1884–1963 (London: Vita Books, 2006); Fay Gadsden, “The African Press in Kenya, 1945–1952,” Journal of African History 21–4 (1980), 515–535.…”

Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia

“…A related reason was settler pressure on the administration to maintain the segregation of white and African education. Colonial Zambia also lacked a sizeable Indian business community, which had been a significant sponsor of newspapers in Tanganyika and Kenya (Brennan 2011; Frederiksen 2011). The vastness of the colony, much of which was rural, also posed a challenge to communications and the distribution of print material.…”

“…Andrew Roberts has recently remarked on the dearth of research on the variety of ways in which “Africans made themselves heard” in colonial Zambia (2011: 19), notably through vernacular presses and broadcasting. Government-sponsored publications in African languages, in Zambia as elsewhere in colonial Central and East Africa, have attracted little more than cursory comments on their alleged tendency to “help keep Africans ‘native’” (Primorac 2012: 61) and on their efforts to “capture the hearts and minds” of African subjects (Frederiksen 2011: 163). Such assumptions foreclose investigation of the insights these publications can provide into issues of concern to both Africans and their colonial masters (Hunter 2012).…”