The Punjabi in Kenya: Recalling the life and times of Makhan Singh
The writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once fondly wrote about the commitment of Africans and Indians in joining forces to combat empire and racialism in British Kenya. While it was true that the colonial model limited social interaction between the two communities, he affirmed that Indians had made an unmistakable impression in every sphere of Kenyan life, including food and language. They had done so in politics as well. In this respect, Ngũgĩ underscored the name of Makhan Singh, the Punjabi radical who spearheaded the trade union movement in Kenya.
In 1950, Makhan Singh did something unprecedented. In the month of April — while addressing a joint meeting of the Kenya African Union and the East African Indian National Congress at the Kaloleni Hall in Nairobi — he gave a call for Uhuru Sasa, a Kiswahili expression meaning Freedom Now. For the first time, the British were being commanded to grant complete independence to their territories in East Africa.
Singh was, soon enough, arrested for being an “undesirable person” under the Deportation (Immigrant British Subjects) Ordinance of 1949. Defending himself, he averred that his actions were “justified in the circumstances.” He would go on to spend the next eleven years in detention, being moved from one facility to another; his son Hindpal Jabbal writes that during this time his father was not permitted any visitors barring close family. In any event, Singh had been orchestrating boycotts and strikes for a while and his arrest was therefore not unexpected.
The pandemic we are all fighting has, once again, reminded us of the miserable state of political leadership in large parts of the world where callousness is the norm and kindness the exception. That being so, it becomes almost an obligation to commit ourselves to a fearless and more compassionate politics. Makhan Singh, recognising the apathy of the colonising British, devoted himself to opposing injustice in both the land of his birth and adoption. Singh’s determination to lay the basis for a more just politics in India and Kenya is inspiring and encourages us to imagine morally and ethically defensible futures.
Makhan Singh was born in December 1913 and spent most of his boyhood in undivided Punjab. When he was six, his father, like many Punjabis in his time, moved to Kenya to work for their railways. Before he turned 14, Singh, along with his mother and sister, joined him in the new country. By the time they arrived in Nairobi, Singh’s father no longer worked for the railways and was running a printing press, though not full-time. After his school leaving examinations, the young Singh began helping his father out at the press. It was around this time that he began developing an interest in trade unionism and, not long after, organised a labour strike against the printing industry, including his own father who had employed him.
Historian Sana Aiyar has outlined for us the unique placement of the Indian community in Kenya during the colonial period. Unlike Indians in the Caribbean, for Indians in Kenya, returning to their homeland, that is to say, India, from their hostland, that is to say, Kenya, was always a possibility. This meant that they were never completely lopped off from the Indian subcontinent and Singh’s life, too, provides evidence of back-and-forth movement between the two continents. Like Ngũgĩ, Aiyar reminds us that colonial East African society was politically and racially segregated with Europeans at the apex, Africans at the bottom, and Indians caught in the middle.
This arrangement made it incredibly difficult for Indians and Africans to put up a united front against their colonial overlords leading as they were segregated lives where contact with the other racial group was restricted. Indians in British-ruled Kenya, consequently, spoke primarily for themselves and Africans likewise expressed their own narrow interests. What Singh managed to do was transcend this ‘colour line’ and make common cause with the African population of Kenya to take on the British.
The Indian Trade Union was formed in 1934 and Makhan Singh elected its secretary not long after in March 1935. Soon, Singh convinced his nearly 500 fellow unionists to change the name of their association to the Labour Trade Union of Kenya and open membership to all, regardless of race. Singh’s action at both a basic, semantic, and a broader, organisational, level signalled his intent to break free of the political and racial narrowness of daily life in colonial Kenya. Biographer Nazmi Durrani, crucially, stresses that the union, in addition to Punjabi, Gujarati, and Urdu, published its handouts in Kiswahili. This encourages us to believe that Singh’s inclusion of Africans in his trade union activities was not merely symbolic and that he was determined to reach out to as wide a swathe of subjugated racial ‘inferiors’ as possible. Successful strikes on behalf of railway workers and those in other industries followed and the union grew to also include members in neighbouring Uganda and Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania); the Indian Trade Union which had been renamed the Labour Trade Union of Kenya was now the Labour Trade Union of East Africa.
In December 1939, Makhan Singh departed for India to, in his own words, “study working class conditions and functioning of the Trade Unionism in Bombay and Ahmedabad.” Once there, he busied himself with anticolonial activities like addressing mass meetings of strikers in Bombay and attending, as an African delegate, the Ramgarh session of the Indian National Congress. By the time summer arrived, Singh was arrested on the orders of the colonial government and, despite not being charged with anything, moved from one prison complex to another for the next two years. Even after his release from prison, Singh’s movement was restricted within the bounds of his native village in Gujranwala for another two and a half years. Finally, in January 1945, he was set free and, wasting no time, took up work as a sub-editor of Jang-i-Azadi, the Communist Party’s weekly published by its Punjab Committee.
Singh left for Kenya in early August 1947 content with the knowledge that one of his main aims in life which was the liberation of India was in the offing; the second, that is, the independence of East Africa, was still a decade and a half away. No sooner did he arrive in Nairobi than the colonial regime tried, unsuccessfully, deporting him for the radical campaigns he had undertaken in the mid-to-late 1930s. The British took him to be a “life-long fanatical Communist” but sought comfort from their belief that “in the circumstances of Kenya today, it [was] unlikely that a non-African, however fanatical, would emerge as a leader capable of stirring up the masses.”
Singh of course did not share the racialised worldview of his colonisers and returned to Kenyan anticolonialism as a full participant. Among other things, he organised the Kenya Youth Conference, became active, once more, in the workings of the East African Indian National Congress, and — with the African revolutionary Fred Kubai as its president — served as the general secretary of the East African Trade Union Congress; this was, it is worth remembering, “the period when the trade union movement was synonymous with the political struggle.” All along, he encouraged Indians to work in concert with Africans and advanced such progressive suggestions as the setting up of common schools and urging Kenya’s Punjabis and Gujaratis to “[l]earn the language of the people — Swahili.”
It was after Singh was detained for the last time by the colonial government in 1950 that the Mau Mau Uprising broke out. He was freed in 1961, after the British lifted the state of emergency that had accompanied the anticolonial revolt. Once released, Singh, predictably and publicly, reaffirmed his communist beliefs and resolved to continue his politics and trade unionism. Moreover, he aired his support for Jomo Kenyatta who would go on to become independent Kenya’s first head of government. Before freedom came in 1963, Singh joined Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union once membership became open to all races and, shortly after, was granted permanent residency in the country.
In the annals of twentieth century anticolonialism, Makhan Singh’s name remains an example of someone who humbled and overthrew the British in not one but two nationalist movements. He recognised how pivotal it was to challenge a politics of indifference and segregation and, in this regard, carried forward Mohandas Gandhi’s, contributed to Jomo Kenyatta’s, and anticipated Nelson Mandela’s work.
An edited version of this piece was originally published on Scroll.in, 22 January, 2021.
