The print media in the construction of contemporary South Asian identities in Kenya: The Asian Weekly and AwaaZ

ABSTRACT

This article reads The Asian Weekly and AwaaZ, two cultural magazines that are widely associated with Kenyans of South Asian ancestry, as emblems of cultural/ political reconfigurations of contemporary racial identifications in the context of national(ist) contestations in Kenya. Following a tradition similar pan-Africanist magazines of the late colonial to post-colonial Africa, the magazines aspire to create pan-Asian identities in specific geographic and temporal zones while acknowledging the links with India and its European and North American diasporas. I argue that The Asian Weekly and AwaaZ are, firstly, popular cultural discursive spaces that are used to reify the labour, intellectual, and social heritage that Kenyan South Asians are heirs to; secondly, that these magazines bridge the gap between the past and the present, media and literature, by simultaneously archiving emerging and old memories while imagining new ones.

KEYWORDS:

• The Asian Weekly
• AwaaZ
• Kenyan Asians
• media
• pan-Asian
• community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Godwin Siundu is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature of the University of Nairobi in Kenya, and Research Associate of the English Department, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has published academic articles in refereed journals that include Research in African Literatures, Journal of African Cultural Studies, PMLA, and English Studies in Africa. He is currently co-editor of East African Literary and Cultural Studies, published by Taylor & Francis Group.

ORCID

Godwin Siundu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2081-4338

Notes

1 Numerous studies on the South Asian population in eastern Africa (Coupland, 1938; Delf, 1963; Desai 2011) have highlighted religious, economic, historical and other differences among a people largely seen by black Africans as ‘a community.’ What is clear now is that the South Asian population in Kenya is usually an amalgamation of many different cultural and religious entities who happen to share histories and geographies in the ancestral Indian subcontinent.

2 As recently as 2013, the portrayal of South Asians as oriented to itinerant and mercantile trade was common, as evidenced by Gaurav Desai’s book, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination.

3 The charge of insularity among Kenyan Asians is common, and has been dealt with extensively in literary (creative and critical) works and journalistic pieces. For instance, a recent story of a Kenyan Asian in western Kenya eloping with her father’s labourer re-ignited a media debate on Asian-African marriages. See ‘The love story that’s captivated Kenya’, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-28568701. [Accessed 26August 2014]. The Asian-African debate was first raised in the context of the Idi Amin expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972, and has since been captured in a wide array of literatures, notably Peter Nazareth’s novels, (1972, 1991).

4 All images used in this article are by this author.

5 The details of such involvements fall beyond the scope of this article, but they are well captured in Zarina Patel’s biography of Makhan Singh, Unquiet (2006), Nazmi Durrani and Shiraz Durrani’s Liberating Minds (2017).

6 Yash Pal Ghai, ‘Interpreting Kenya’s Transformative Constitution.’Awaaz Voices, Volume 11, Issue 2, pp. 14–17. Ghai’s involvement in social justice campaigns has been a long one, actually a life-time calling. After a stint as the Chairman of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission, Ghai started the Katiba Institute that has published numerous works to raise awareness on the promises of and threats to Constitution of Kenya (2010). See, for instance, Ghai and Ghai (2011). Ghai and Ghai (2013). As at the time of writing this piece, Katiba Institute had, under the directorship of Ghai, organised a ‘Kenya Beyond 50’ public discussion on the issue of devolution in Kenya.