Chronicling Kenyan Asian diasporic histories: ‘newcomers’, ‘established’

migrants, and the post-colonial practices of time-work

Abstract:

Recent studies of international migration have observed its increasing

complexity. Circular, return and temporary migration between India and Kenya,

arising from the economic and political multi-polarities of increasing South-

South partnerships, is one example of such complexity. These flows are distinct

from the migration patterns of the longer-established Kenyan Asian diaspora,

who settled under the auspices of the British Empire from the 1890s until the

beginning of the 1960s. This paper explores how these transformations are

negotiated through the dynamics of Kenyan Asians’ ongoing post-colonial

liminalities and ambiguities of citizenship, focusing in particular on the temporal

production of distinctions between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, even

when in practice these distinctions are much more fluid. This article highlights

the regulatory practices of ‘time work’ that that enfold the migratory

chronologies of ‘established’ migrants into the time of the nation, whilst

excluding those of ‘newcomers’. It explores the selective remembering,

forgetting and reworking of the colonial past, a process informed by the

dynamics of modernity, diaspora, nation and postcoloniality in contemporary

Kenya. It argues that whilst distinctions between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’

migrants might reflect different positionings in transnational social fields,

differences are also negotiated in contradictions between the experiences,

meanings and understandings of time. This demonstrates how space on its own

is itself a inadequate conceptual lens with which to examine relationships

between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, and that further research is

needed that attends to the temporal dynamics mediating the temporal

dissonances of contemporary transnational social fields.

1. Introduction

Since the 1990s, the elastic labour demands of India’s economic

liberalization have resulted in increasingly complex forms of circular and multi-

sited migration flows (Xiang, 2007). Whilst the vast majority of this

heterogeneity can be found in the flows to and from OECD countries and the

Middle East, there is a smaller multi-directional flow between India and East

Africa. Temporary Non-Resident Indian (NRI) labour in a diverse range of low

and high-wage occupations across the telecommunications, light industries,

horticulture and energy sectors (Puliyel, 2009) has arisen from the strategic

strengthening of India-Africa economic partnerships over the last decade

(Mawdesley and McCann, 2011). In 2012, approximately 10,000 1-year work

permits were issued to NRIs (KNBS 2012) and an estimated 35,700 NRIs reside

in Kenya (MOIA, 2012), though undocumented and informal migration may bring

this number closer to 50,000. The temporary nature of this migration is manifest

in the colloquial term “rocket”, used by Kenyan-born Asians to denote the ways

in which NRIs seemingly utilise Kenya as a ‘launchpad’ (Puliyel, 2009) to the

United Kingdom and North America.

Recent NRI flows are distinct from previous patterns of kin-chain patterns

from rural Gujarat, Goa and the Punjab that dominated under British colonialism

in the region between the 1890s and the 1960s and established a largely settled

population referred to in popular parlance as “Kenyan Asian” or “South Asian

Kenyan” (See Herzig, 2006 and below for a fuller discussion of these terms). In

contrast, migrants arriving since the 1990s have tended to be temporary

independent labor migrants and entrepreneurs from urban centres across India.

Onward migration of the original Asian settlers and their descendants to the UK

and North America, particularly following Kenyan decolonization, is reflected in

a numerical decline of this population from 176,000 in 1962 (Herzig 2006: 30) to

46,000 in 2009 (KNBS 2010). The literature exploring Asians’ triple identities, as

constituted through transnational relationships spanning Kenya, South Asia and

Britain (Warah 1998), is longstanding and ongoing, but lacks engagement with

how Kenyan Asians are negotiating new NRI migrations. This gap is significant

because of ongoing anti-Asian sentiments (McCann 2010) that, as current events

suggest (Hindustan Times 2007), are being exacerbated by India’s economic

presence in the region. This paper seeks to show how ‘established’ Kenyan

Asians define the category of ‘newcomer’ in context of negotiations over their

contemporary post-colonial Kenyan subject positionings. In order to do so, it

examines the temporal production of distinctions between ‘newcomers’ and

‘established’ Asians as categories of difference.

International migration is increasingly temporally complex; the new ‘age

of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 2009) is characterized by a multifaceted and

contingent range of movements that are “more likely to be transient and

complex, ridden with disruptions, detours and multiple destinations’’ than

permanent (Lorente et al, 2005: 1). There is growing interest in how these

transformations build on and complicate previous migration patterns, and in

particular, the implications for relations among ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’

migrants of common national ancestries, including the second and subsequent

generations (Reynolds, 2012). The role of place in mediating relationships

between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants is central to these discussions

(for example, Yeh, 2007), but there is less explicit theorization of the role of time.

Nonetheless, time, as a mode of regulation within communities, is deeply

implicated in questions of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ (Bastian, 2014) and can

thus can also be a useful analytic in exploring such relationships. The overall aim

of the paper is not to describe the distinction between ‘newcomer’ and

‘established’ migrants, but to identify the dynamics of modernity, diaspora and

nation—themselves temporal constructs—that are mobilized and deployed to

constitute and normalize ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants as categories of

difference between those differently positioned in the multiple layers of Kenya-

India transnational social fields.

The paper begins by reviewing the analytical use of space and place to

explain relationships between ‘newcomer’ and ‘established’ migrants, and then

traces recent explorations of time in migration studies. The paper then discusses

the historical context of Kenyan Asians’ changing transnational social fields -that

is, the multiple interlocking transnational networks of social relationships (Levitt

and Glick-Schiller, 2004)- before offering evidence of the ways that discourses of

modernity, nation, and diaspora are deployed to establish differences between

‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants. It illustrates that such discourses are

used as way of embedding Kenyan Asian chronologies in the history of Kenya

whilst excluding those of NRIs. The paper shows how the embedding of Asians in

Kenyan historical time scripts ‘newcomers’ as outsiders in relation to the

‘established’ Kenyan Asian diaspora and to postcolonial Kenya. The paper

concludes by calling for further research that attends to the temporal dynamics

mediating ideas of migrant communities in contemporary transnational social

fields.

2. Migrant social fields in transnational times

Scholars working from the critical tradition have long problematized the

homogenizing tendencies of scholarship that uses national framings of migrant

groups as a coherent analytical lens (McAuliffe 2008, Bauder 2013). In particular,

scholarship has taken an interest in the complex matrices of diasporic identities

and subjectivities that arise from embeddedness in “the multiple sites and layers

of … transnational social fields” (Levitt and Jaworsky, 2007: 130). Rather than

reproduce the now somewhat clichéd concept of transnational life as a rootless

space of flows and a space ‘in-between’, this work has sought to ground migrant

identities in the “actual topography” (Khagram and Levitt, 2008: 28) of

transnational social fields and multi-scalar processes of migrant place making

(Ehrkamp, 2005, Ralph and Staeheli, 2011). In doing so, there is now a nuanced

literature that explores the multidimensionalities of space and place in mediating

differences within migrant communities.

The literature on the relationship between ‘established’ migrants and

‘newcomers’ also gives prominence to the mediative role played by space and

place. For instance, commonalities of country of origin can help newcomer

migrants access the social capital embedded in the social fields of migrant

communities (Zhou & Bankston, 1998). While the presence of ‘established’ co-

nationals is largely treated as a positive force in policy and academic literature,

structural inequalities and unequal social relations can also be exacerbated

(Kilduff and Tsai, 2003). ‘Newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants can be

differently located in the complex layers of transnational social fields, affecting

the ability of ‘newcomer’ migrants to access and mobilize social capital (Ryan et

al, 2008). For example, different waves of migrants arriving in the UK from the

Caribbean at different times possess different cultural codes of behavior that

intersect with gender, race and class to inform intra-ethnic boundaries

(Reynolds, 2012). Furthermore, relationships between ‘newcomers’ and

‘established’ migrants involve complex navigations around the multiple symbolic

meanings of home and common national ancestries (Gray, 2006; Galasińska,

2010; Brown 2011). Different degrees of emplacement in new settlement

contexts can also prevent those with common geographical ancestries from

engaging with each other owing to transformations in political and economic

regimes of migration governance, as Yeh’s (2007) study of exiled Tibetans

showed. Taken together, these studies have provided significant geographical

interventions that further trouble the assumed naturalness and homogeneity of

diasporic communities by pluralizing its ambivalent and multifaceted

dimensions.

Whilst the role of space and place has now become central to

theorisations of identity work within contemporary patterns of cross-border

flow, there is a growing impetus to explicitly theorise the role of time. This has

arisen from wider recognition of the complex temporalities of migrant life

(Griffiths et al, 2012) and the significances of the lifecourse to patterns of

migration (Giralt and Bailey, 2010; Conlon, 2011; Andrucki and Dickinson,

2015). Indeed, migration involves a varied set of experiences of time, including

waiting and slowness as well as oft-described simultaneity and speed

(Shapendonk and Steel, 2014). Cwerner’s (2001) explication of the six-fold times

of migration -strange, heteronomous, asynchronous, remembered, collage,

liminal, diasporic and nomadic-, which he deploys to capture the temporal

dissonances, ruptures and re-workings brought about by migration, has been key

to these re-theorisations. Studies have looked at temporal dissonances in many

different kinds of migration contexts, from the material qualities of migrants’

travel (e.g. Crang and Zhang, 2014), to longer-term temporal transformations

across generations (e.g. Crul and Doomernik, 2003).

As well as revealing and de-naturalizing the temporalities of migration,

there are also calls to more explicitly theorize temporal dissonance as a practice

of inclusion and differentiation (Griffiths et al, 2012). For Bastian (2014: 149),

ideas of ‘shared time’ are a cornerstone of the very idea of community (however

defined), such that “‘sameness’ is associated with being in time with the

community and ‘difference’ is associated with being out of time with the

community”. Diasporic communities are themselves constituted through the

ideas, practices and imaginaries of shared time (Gilroy 1997). Rituals of

commemoration, constructed around selective narratives and memories of the

past (Alexander 2013), lie at the very heart of diasporic cultural identities,

serving as a process of claims-making in the present (Hall 1990). Generating –

and indeed contesting- common temporal frames of reference within migrant

communities involves practices of ‘time-work’, what Flaherty (2003: 19) defines

as “one’s effort to promote or suppress a particular form of temporal

experience”. One example of this is Golden’s (2002) study of recent Soviet

migrants to Israel, which explored Israeli state efforts to enfold ‘newcomers’ into

a shared national time through the temporal sequencing of an immigrant

narrative from beginning to end. Further, drawing on Flaherty specifically, Cheng

(2014)’s study of student migrants demonstrated their use of ‘time work’ in

Singapore to both accrue cultural capital and subvert temporal norms and

expectations. These examples illustrate the need for research that illustrates the

ways in which temporal discourses are deployed to manage, rework and

reimagine the dissonances brought about by cross-border mobility.

3. Methodology

This article draws from a qualitative study conducted as part of a research

project focused on the relationships between established Kenyan Asians and

newcomer NRIs in Nairobi, designed to explore the importance of diasporic

heritage. It was conducted from 2009 to 2010, using a qualitative methodology

that used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with both ‘newcomers’ (NRIs

who had been in Kenya for 2 years or fewer) and ‘established’ Kenyan Asians,

(second and third-generation descendants of migrants who arrived in Kenya

under the auspices of British colonial rule.) The twelve NRIs interviewed worked

in a range of high and low-wage occupations on temporary contracts, with

questions focusing on their migratory histories, motivations, occupations, social

life and everyday experiences in Nairobi. Seventeen interviews were conducted

with ‘established’ Kenyan Asians; all worked, or had worked, within small family

businesses. This group’s particular privileges included access to financial capital,

which afforded them greater mobility, including trips to India, the UK, or the

USA. Kenyan Asian interviews revolved around their family biographies of

migration and their perceptions of ‘newcomers’. Interviews were analyzed using

a narrative approach (Plattner and Bruner, 1984), which involved examining the

ways respondents portrayed themselves and others, and how individuals

constructed past and future life events. Discourse analysis of newspapers,

websites, online blogs, discussion groups and Kenyan Asian family

(auto)biographies supplemented interview data.

4. Historical transformations in Kenyan-Indian transnational social fields

Migration between South Asia and East Africa has been documented since

1 AD, although Portuguese, and, later, British colonization expanded and

intensified what were scattered and sporadic movements (Gregory, 1971).

Between the 1890s and 1960s, the majority of South Asian settlement arose via

kin-chain networks linking East Africa with villages, towns, and regions in South

Asia (Mangat, 1969). The literature examining Kenyan Asians’ transnational

socio-economic fields that developed in the colonial-era has a tendency to

homogenize these fields as both static and regulated by Asian ethnic

characteristics, behaviors and traits, despite evidence of flux (Oonk, 2004).

However, internal boundaries around caste, class and gender underwent

significant transformation as a result of evolving marriage, reproductive,

associational, educational and business practices that shifted social orientation

away from South Asia towards East Africa (Herzig, 2006). This was also in part

the result of restrictive policies on investment and trading (Himbara, 1994).

Under Africanization policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, post-colonial

transformations resulted in the diversification of Kenyan Asian business

ownership and occupational roles, from a field dominated by petty trading and

manufacturing that used India as a source of trading partnerships and cheap

labour (Oonk, 2004: 12), towards business ownership and employment in

professional services such as accountancy, IT and healthcare (Sian, 2007; Adam,

2012).

The colonial conditions under which India-Kenya transnational social

fields developed have long-circumscribed an anticipatory relationship to Britain.

In the early 1900s, members of the National Indian Congress encouraged Indians

to seek freedoms abroad under the opportunities provided by access to a shared

global British empire, whilst settlers sent stories home about the prospects for

émigrés under British colonial expansion into East and Southern Africa (Metcalf,

2007: 2-20). British colonial political structures positioned Asians as a

‘middleman minority’ in the colonial administration of Africans. In practice, this

ranged from accruing economic and political advantage (Gregory, 1971),

inheriting mannerisms and dress (Salvadori, 1989), to the enforced use of

English in Asian education (Oonk, 2007). Furthermore, aggressive post-colonial

Africanization policies that restricted Asian employment, citizenship and

commerce led to an exodus of 59% of the Asian population by 1969 to Britain

and, less so, North America (see Rothchild, 1973). Evidence from interviews

suggests that even for families who chose to stay in Kenya, one or more members

hold a British passport ‘just in case’ as a flexible strategy for managing future risk

(M. Shah, personal communication, 12th August 2009).

Amongst Asians that stayed, commercial restrictions forced Asian

businesses to employ Africans rather than rely on India as a source of labour

(Himbara, 1994). Nonetheless, because of the shortages of skilled workers across

those sectors formerly dominated by White and Asian minorities (Gatheru,

2005), NRIs, many of them male extended relatives of Kenyan Asians, continued

to arrive in Kenya, often on an undocumented and irregular basis. The United

States’ Immigration Act of 1990 that facilitated NRI’s acquisition of US work

permits when applying from Kenya supported ongoing migration from the

subcontinent and indeed led to the coining of the term “rocket” to denote the use

of Kenya as a ‘launchpad’ for careers in North America (Y. Ghai, personal

communication, 1st August 2009). However, in practice, some of these migrants

settled permanently, married local Kenyan Asians, acquired Kenyan citizenship

and started new businesses (Warah, 2011), often themselves now employing

‘newcomers’. India’s economic liberalization since the 1990s also supported the

further migration of NRIs entrepreneurs, many lacking pre-existing ties either to

Kenyan Asians. The newer cohort of short-term migrant entrepreneurs and

expatriates arriving over the last decade –closely associated with the recent

growth of Indian-Kenyan political and economic partnerships- is much smaller

demographically. In contrast to the migrants arriving in the early to mid-

twentieth century, interviews with members of this newer cohort suggest that

their ambitions are to send remittances and acquire skills for career progression

in India.

The above transformations are manifest in different naming conventions

that connote explicit temporalities of belonging in a similar way that the term

“Fresh off the Boat” is used to describe newcomer Asian Americans (Pyke and

Dang, 2003). As well as denoting the use of Kenya as a short-term ‘launchpad’ for

eventual transit elsewhere, the term “rocket” implies a lack of rootedness in

established Kenyan Asian transnational social fields. Kenyan Asian journalist

Rasnah Warah (2011), for instance, describes “rockets” as “people who landed

from nowhere”. Although “rocket” has been in use since the 1970s to refer

specifically to transit migrants bound for the US, it now refers to all recent

migrants from the Indian subcontinent regardless of length of stay, citizenship

status or migration and settlement intentions (see for example its use in

newspaper articles such as Bindra, 2007). “Rocket” is also used to distinguish

‘newcomers’ from the descendants of colonial-era Asian settlers, for whom East

Africa is a more permanent home (Mamdani, 2011). The term “Asian” is itself

deeply entwined with colonial Asian settler identities, as the British used it as a

descriptor for all ethnic South Asians in Kenya. Kenyan Asians, like their

counterparts in Tanzania (Anand and Kaul, 2011), have appropriated the term

“Asian” to signify commonalities as a minority Kenyan community distinct from

Africans and Europeans. Furthermore, the once derogatory Kiswahili term for

Asians –“wahindi”- has also been reclaimed by Kenyan Asians to emphasise the

interminglings of South Asian belongings with colonial economic histories of

settlement in Kenya (see Bindra, 2006). The different naming practices not only

denote temporal asynchronicities between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’

migrations, but also erect boundaries around Kenyan Asians as a group

embedded in the national chronologies of Kenya.

5. Chronicling Kenyan Asian history

Despite their long histories of settlement in East Africa, Asians remain

very much on the margins of Kenya’s national(ist) historiography (Odhiambo,

2007). Not only have their contributions to anti-colonial political struggles been

downplayed, but nationalist politicians actively manipulated a disdain for their

contributions based on their apparent dual, or even triple, geographical

identifications (Theroux, 1997). From published accounts of ordinary Asian

families’ migration and settlement histories (Kapur-Dromson, 2007),

biographies of Kenyan Asian political figures (Patel, 1997), magazines such as

Awaaz (www.awaazmagazine.com), to public exhibitions

(http://www.asianafricanheritage.com), different Kenyan Asian communities

have attempted to remedy such absences through stories and narratives of

migration and settlement. Discussing the 2000-2005 Asian African Heritage

Exhibition, the director general of the National Museum of Kenya asserts that

“The Asian African Community in Kenya has a rich history dating

back to the 1900’s, which needs documentation so future

generations appreciate the role played by this community in the

making of the Kenyan nation, and the larger East African

community” (Asian African Heritage Trust, 2012: 2).

Numerous online sites, listservs, forums and blogs are also dedicated to

documenting this history (e.g. www.namaskar-africana.com).

A key theme in historical narratives of Asian settlement (and academic

literature) is of ‘success under duress’ (Ranja, 2006). The past treatment of

indentured Asian labourers occupies an important aspect of this chronology. As

in the quote above, chronologies of Asian settlement often begin in the early

1900s, as this is when Indian labour from the Punjab was indentured to work on

the construction of the Ugandan railway. The railway (and its Asian construction

workers, train drivers, clerks and administrators) was instrumental in the

development of Nairobi from a railway depot into the capital of British East

Africa in 1907 and Kenya in 1963 (Adam, 2012). Photographs depicting

indentured Asians toiling on the construction of the Mombasa-Ugandan railway

whilst overseen by their colonial masters are commonly used to illustrate this

settlement history (e.g. Chandan, 2007). Despite the perpetuation of indentured

chronologies, very few Kenyan Asians are descended from railway labourers, as

the majority returned to the Punjab upon completion of their contracts

(Mattausch, 1998). Instead, indentured Asian labour functions as an “origin

story” (Nash 2008) that contributes to fostering commonalities of colonial

struggle and disenfranchisement with Africans whilst emphasizing the

contributions of Kenyan Asian blood and sacrifice to the economic foundations of

the country.

The long trading traditions and entrepreneurial successes of Kenyan Asians,

especially of Gujaratis, has come to overshadow indentured labour as the

foundational moment in the history of Asians in East Africa (Mattausch 1998), in

part because Gujarati traders reference a longer clock-time of settlement going

back to at least the 1860s (Mangat 1969) and also because it partially de-centres

the role of the British colonial authorities in Kenyan Asian chronologies of

settlement. For example, Pheroze Noworojee, Chairperson of the Asian African

Heritage Trust states that

“the Trust moved away from the colonial, racial and sectional labels

of the past… after more than 200 years of settlement and many

generations in the country, we had become African” (Asian African

Heritage Trust 2012, 2).

Many contemporary historiographies of the Kenyan Asian community begin from

Gujaratis’ pre-colonial involvement in the Indian Ocean dhow trade. For example,

the 2001 Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (one

produced in collaboration with key Kenyan Asian community leaders) begins the

story of East African settlement in 1AD as a way of de-centering the role of Britain

in South Asian settlement histories (Dickinson 2012). Any challenges are

articulated as eventually overcome by supposed Asian ‘values’ of fortitude, hard-

work and the close-knit structures of Asian extended families and communities

(e.g. MOIA, 2001; Madhvani and Foden, 2009). Often missing from historical

accounts are the ways that Asian’s East African trading networks were reshaped

first through collaborations with the Omani Sultanates of Seyyid Said (Mattausch,

1998) and then through collaborations with British colonial regimes (Gregory,

1981). Both allowed Asian businesses to flourish in entrepreneurial endeavors

and professional occupations. These are the kinds of forgettings that arise from

the ways that broader political contexts shape the processes of chronicling

history (Chakrabarty, 1992). The temporal trope of pre-colonial traders long-

embedded in ancient maritime trading networks is a key element in a narrative

repertoire mobilized in holding together a singularized Kenyan Asian history, one

that allows Kenyan Asians to assert their contributions to building the modern

Kenyan nation.

6. Defining ‘newness’

Although the chronology of entrepreneurial successes homogenizes differences

and performs a singular ‘Asian’ category, as this section explores, this

historiography forms a narrative against which ‘newcomers’ are read, judged and

understood. This section explores the ways that ‘newcomers’ are perceived to

trouble the historical and contemporary inhabitation of the social category ‘Asian’

by bringing to light some of the contradictions, inconsistencies and contestations

of Asian historiographies, and as a result, generating effects of inclusion and

exclusion.

Defining ‘newcomers’ in the present

A key modality of ‘newness’ is perceived rupture, rather than the continuity, with

the kin-chain patterns of migration that dominated in the past. The contemporary

routes by which ‘newcomers’ arrive in Kenya are perceived as different from the

prior chronologies described in the section above, as Ismail1 (late 50s), who owns

a manufacturing company, explains:

“My father used to employ many Asians in the 1950s. Cousins,

second cousins, uncles, friends and all that. Now when I try to find

people in Gujarat to work for the family business, it is so hard…the

connections aren’t there any more”

It has become increasingly difficult for Kenyan Asians to draw on extended family

as a source of labour because of the declining importance of kin-chain patterns

and marriage practices, which resulted in almost all extended family members

settling in East Africa (Oonk, 2007). Whilst some NRIs in the study do continue to

rely on pre-migration social ties to established Kenyan Asians, particular those

migrants who settled after Kenyan independence, interviews with NRIs suggested

that it was becoming increasingly common to utilize migration brokers as a

means of securing work. Many Kenyan Asian business owners interviewed also

advertised positions in local newspapers in large cities such as Mumbai or

Ahmedabad. In these contexts, some respondents noted that it was increasingly

complex, expensive and difficult to secure NRI labour, particularly under the

increasingly restrictive immigration policies of the Kenyan government aiming to

limit Indian and Chinese temporary work permits (Olopade, 2012). For instance,

Madhavan (a Nairobi restaurateur, early 40s) estimated the cost of visas, wages,

airfare, accommodation and work permits to employ NRIs at 2 million Ksh

(USD$23,000), which he claimed was “before you pay off the official”.

Whilst the entrepreneurial success of colonial-era family migration

dynamics has become part of a wider collective narrative emphasizing Kenyan

Asian contributions to national teleologies of development, ‘newcomers’ are also

excluded because of a supposed inability to reproduce the internal cultural traits

and values of prior migrants. For example, Jaffer, an Ismaili Bohra whose

grandfather arrived in Kenya in 1909 as small-scale shop owner, described the

different relationships that Kenyan Asians and newcomer NRIs have to Kenya:

“my grandfather … was part of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee’s …

network … This is a basic stage that our ancestors went through

when they moved to Kenya. We struggled over time to make our

lives here and in the process developed this county to the one

you see now.… The newcomer Indians …have succeeded

immensely, like we did in the 1900s…but it is for themselves”

Although historians have shown that Asians acted quite strategically in

exploiting the new opportunities opened up by British expansion into the

interior (Gregory, 1971), Jaffer believed that his grandfather practiced Asian

trade in East Africa with a benevolent intent in comparison to newcomers. The

respondent’s weaving of his family chronology with that of AM Jeevanjee (a

prominent Gujarati merchant celebrated for his contributions to the

development of Nairobi) further contributes to the wider collective Kenyan

Asian chronology whilst excluding and de-legitimizing ‘newcomers’ successes.

Furthermore there is a clear temporal partitioning at work, with Asians defined

as those with genealogies that can be traced back to the colonial-era and who

contributed to the colonial modernization project.

Whilst the above account normalizes ‘newcomers’ as perpetual foreigners

only seeking individual gain, for others this was perceived to have emerged from

the vicissitudes of modern India, offering a further discursive script of temporal

dissonance based on the asynchronicities of past and present flows:

Mukul: “Rockets… only collect and save as much of their

income as possible before flying off to the UK”

Mukul is here referencing the twin dynamics of contemporary Indian

emigration patterns elaborated on by Xiang (2007): remittance saving, and the

temporary and multi-sited nature of Indian workers’ transnational career

strategies. The contemporary migration patterns of ‘newcomers’ as arising from

financial gain are scripted as antithetical to narratives of Kenyan Asian economic

contributions to Kenyan modernization, even when many of the ancestors of

‘established’ Asians were themselves engaged in dynamic circulatory and

temporary migrations that led eventually to a permanent stay.

Whilst ‘newcomers’ troubled linearized narratives of Asian history, others

contested the perceived incompatibilities between the Indian and Kenyan

present because of the ability of ‘newcomers’ to contribute to Kenya’s

modernization, as demonstrated in both of the quotations below:

Sally: “India is now the main player globally in IT….there are good

opportunities for them here. For me, the expertise is there, not in

Kenya”

Madhavan: “I’m all for those that come and can help develop

Kenya [using] the skills we don’t have”

Both Madhavan and Sally (late 40s, telecommunications business owner)

reference the well-documented skill shortage amongst young Africans that has

left them unable to compete in the demands of the global job market (Wamalwa,

2014), despite a range of government initiatives over the last thirty-five years

(Sian, 2007). Simultaneously, there is an excess of globally flexible skilled labour

in modern India (Xiang 2007) that is able to meet the demands of modern

Kenyan Asian entrepreneurial environments. For both Sally and Madhavan, the

potential contributions of NRIs to the capacities of individual businesses (Sally)

and the wider Kenyan economy (Madhavan) justify their continued employment

even when, as recent national public discourses surrounding restrictions on both

NRI and Chinese work permits suggests (Olopade, 2012), it is becoming

increasingly untenable to do so. Nonetheless, both these articulations rely on

temporal constructs of Indian modernity that positions NRIs outside of Kenyan

modernity, and further enacts temporal differences between ‘newcomers’ and

the ‘established’ diaspora.

Embodying ‘newness’ through the past

Despite attempts to write Asian history into the very fabric and timescale

of East Africa through the performance and circulation of a historical

entrepreneurial narrative, the lives of East African Asians, as Joseph (1999) has

argued, continue to be mediated through a conditional citizenship somewhere

between citizens and non-citizens. In Kenya, this emerged from Africanization

policies and post-colonial nationalist discourses of the 1960s and 1970s that,

whilst never resulted in the forced expulsions seen in Uganda, nonetheless drew

on and fomented similar stereotypes about Asians as an exploitative and

exclusive community engaged in unscrupulous business practices for short term

profits (Theroux, 1997). These stereotypes were themselves based upon the

‘divide and rule’ techniques of British East African colonial governmentality that

propagated a view of Asians as exploiters of Africans in order to elide blame

(Ocaya-Lakidi, 1975). Kenyan Asian business practices do have a history that is

rooted in norms of wealth distribution and trust in extended families (Himbara,

1994) but the stereotypes that continue to mark the category of ‘Asian’,

particularly during times of national conflict (see Kalan, 2013), emerge from

intersections between techniques of colonial governmentality, post-colonial

nationalist discourses as well as of Asian business practices.

The ways in which the category of ‘Asian’ is inhabited in contexts of these

stereotypes mediates the temporal scripts of ‘newcomers’. Questions of trust, for

example, are a key attribute against which newcomers are judged, ones that are

contingent upon the different temporal contexts in which trust is read and

understood. In reference to NRI employees, Sally justified her continued

employment of NRIs in terms of perceived cultural attributes rooted in shared

Indian ancestries: “we know that we can trust them, since they know our culture

and way of working”. This cultural reading of trust references long-standing and

relatively static ideas of the norms and traits connecting people from the Indian

subcontinent in spite of spatio-temporal dissonances. In contrast, Oonk (2004)

found that Kenyan-born Asians perceived to lack trust in Indian business

associates owing to the competitive business environment of modern India and

the weakening of transnational social fields that had previously circumscribed an

entrepreneurial context founded on extended family bonds. When articulating

and reading trust through contemporary post-colonial national discourses of

anti-corruption currently circulating as a result of the 2007 post-election

violence and 2008 Anglo-leasing scandal (in which prominent Asian

entrepreneurs had a role – see McCann, 2010), newcomers were felt to resurrect

the anti-Indian tropes circulating after decolonization. This is demonstrated in

the following two quotes:

Mohilal: “It’s known that most rockets are illegal immigrants…it’s

giving Asians a bad name”.

Mahendra (late 70s, retired teacher): “Most of them don’t even

bother to learn English never mind the local tongue Kiswahili…

this is what got Asians in trouble [in the 1960s]”

Even though it was not explicitly acknowledged by both respondents that they

were subjecting ‘newcomers’ to same stereotypes as ‘established’ Asians (despite

little evidence that such alleged illegal practices exists), both respondents

articulate a fear of ‘established’ Asians’ continued stigmatization through a racial

association with ‘newcomers’ behavioral practices (as another example, see

Bindra’s 2007 article ‘The Diamond Plaza phenomenon: the best of us, the worst of

us”). When read through contemporary national discourses surrounding the

etiquette and behavioral codes of trust, ‘newcomers’ trouble in the present

Kenyan Asian’s colonial histories which Asians have tried so hard to silence

through the temporal performances described in section 5, above.

The potential for ‘newcomers’ to disrupt carefully weaved historical

narratives resulted in disapproval of the ‘established’ Asians whom they believed

aided NRIs. For example, Mahendra stated:

“Let’s not forget that the local Asians are participants in the rocket

migration. They slip money to the relevant person in the

government and magically they have two or three of them

working under them”.

Madhavan also disapproved of the practice on the grounds that “It is our duty

(his emphasis) as Kenyan citizens to prioritize locals for the jobs”. This narrative

show how scripts of ‘newcomers’ are mediated by the idea that they re-presence

the colonial era through their racial embodiment of Asians’ stereotyped past,

whether that is in terms of cultural traits, exclusiveness or unscrupulous

practices.

The above narratives also index ‘newcomers’ as embodiments of Kenyan

colonial traditions rather than agents of progress and modernity. East African

historians suggest that Asians gradually lost embodied markers of ethnicity

during the colonial period owing to taking on the language and mannerisms of

Britishness, particularly through educational practices that scripted ideas of

Britain and its empire as the epitome of modernization and civilizational

heritage (Oonk 2012). This was another function of the techniques of colonial

governmentality that constituted the three-tier colonial racial hierarchy within

which Asians were supposed to act as intermediaries and representatives of the

colonial government in their dealings with Africans. Thus the enforced use of

English was aimed at strengthening Asians as arbiters of colonial modernity,

transforming them into respectable and loyal British subjects. Alongside this,

some Asian cultural associations perceived Kenya as more modern than India,

and encouraged members to adopt British customs (Salvadori 1989). For

instance, in his memoirs, the Aga Khan III, spiritual leader of Ismailis, writes that

his followers in East Africa “encountered a society in process of development

which is, if anything, European African. To have retained an Asiatic outlook…

would have been for them … a dead weight of archaism in the Africa of the

future" (Shah, 1954: 190)2.

This history, one that also encompasses onward migration to (and return

from) the former imperial metropole, has deeply inscribed an imaginative

relationship to Britain in East African Asian identity (Warah, 1998) and further

mediates the temporal production of ‘newcomers’ as embodiments of Indian

tradition/backwardness. This is demonstrated in the quotes below, where

modernity and tradition is read from the bodily comportments of newcomers:

Jamila: “They [NRIs] like paan (betelnut)… that seems uncivilised

to our modern eyes”

Mahendra: “[women’s] hair is usually tied back in a long plait the

traditional way. You can tell them [NRIs] from the Asians…Asians

also dress differently, like Westerners”

Herzig (2010) argues that the embodied traits associated with the category

“rocket” reflect class differences, in particular NRIs’ lack of cultural capital. This

explains the viewpoints of those who described NRI professionals working for

multinational corporations more favourably than other NRIs as (for example)

“well-mannered like us” (Hafisa, early 50s, retired teacher) whilst describing

those NRIs on low-wages who lacked the ability to speak English and possessed

few professional qualifications as “typically” Indian. Nevertheless, they also echo

stereotypes relating to South Asian appearance, sanitation, and customary

practices commonly applied to Asians in Kenya by the colonial government

(Otiso, 2009) and reference the embodied traits associated with notions of

civilization that under wider British colonial governance systems were

counterposed by assumptions about a lack of development (Fischer-Tiné &

Mann, 2004).

The above quotes also hold onto a temporal belonging that ‘newcomers’

may never be able to achieve because of the independence movement of the

1950s and 1960s that eventually displaced the British colonial regime and

attempted to dismantle race-based systems of colonial governmentality.

Mahendra’s quote below is a reminder of how, as a result, ‘newcomers’ may

never be able to be the same as Kenyan Asians:

“The culture here was very different under the British. Most

Kenyan Asians learnt in British schools … we were forced to

in those days…but this improved the lot of the Asians who

moved here…what I mean is that they taught us how to

speak English properly, they gave us manners and their way

of thinking, which helped us enormously to progress our

culture”

Here language and education comes together in the account above in ways that

indicate the impossibility of ‘newcomers’ ever achieving equal status within the

temporal norms of Kenyan Asianness because of the ways that Kenyan Asianness

was constituted through past processes and transformations that are now

forever out of reach. The temporal specificities of Kenyan Asian progress and

modernity allows newcomers to be labeled as perpetually “Indian”, whilst

simultaneously establishing respondents’ own spatio-temporal distance from

contemporary South Asia, and by implication, South Asians, further inscribing

differences between them.

7. Conclusion

This article explored the practices of ‘time work’ through which

distinctions are produced between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ Indian

migrants in Kenya in the context of heterogeneous historical and contemporary

migration flows between India, Kenya and Britain. The dynamics of modernity,

colonialism and postcoloniality underpin and inform the boundaries between

‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ Indians/Asians in ways that elide the slippery and

contested definitions between them. Time-work in this sense becomes a way of

regulating the complex subjectivities that arise for Kenyan Asians still

negotiating geographical liminalities and ambiguities of belonging. I have

suggested that time-work encompasses chronological discourses that turn on

appropriations and reworkings of the past in order to index a fit between

‘established’ Asians’ migratory histories and the political temporalities of Kenyan

modernity. The paper showed that ‘newcomers’ disrupt these chronologies by

bringing to light some of the contradictions involved and, through their very

embodiments, re-presence some of the silenced and hidden elements of Kenyan

Asian colonial chronologies of settlement. Thus whilst the distinction between

‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants might be reflected through differences in

migration and settlement patterns, this study suggests that the differences are

also negotiated in contradictions between experiences, meanings and

understandings of time.

This paper also shows that legacies of British colonialism in East Africa

inform the production of categories of ‘established’ diaspora and ‘newcomer’

migrants. Whilst Kenyan Asians use a number of different naming practices that

index Kenya as their primary locus of identification, this is made possible by

different historical embeddedness in global regimes of empire that have

circumscribed class and citizenship positionings. This (re)produces differences

from contemporary NRI migrants, particularly those (like their counterparts in

the Middle East) trapped in low-wage occupations, subject to familial and social

pressures and expectations surrounding remittance-savings and who might be

undocumented or irregular. These differences are manifest in the circulation of

rumors and stereotypes about ‘newcomers’ (as described above); and also in

‘newcomers’’ everyday mundane encounters with ‘established’ Asians in, for

example, spaces of worship, leisure clubs, cultural associations, and other

localities that are a long-established feature of East African Asian social life (see

Frenz 2013). Thus ‘newness’ can intersect with other categories of difference

such as class, ethnicity, religion, regional origin and gender to produce complex

effects of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, much more research is needed into the

specific experiences of ‘newcomers’ in such spaces, particularly to understand

how the disciplining nature of time-work is navigated.

Whilst the literature continues to insist on the role of space in mediating

the relationships between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, this paper

suggests that space on its own is an inadequate conceptual lens with which to

examine this relationship. The study showed that spatial histories are constantly

being adjusted, adapted and called on to inform norms and expectations of

‘newcomer’ migrants. This is particularly the case for migrants in postcolonial

contexts where political borders and boundaries are themselves constantly

shifting (Wang et al, 2014), giving the use of the territorial nation-state as a

framing device for conceptualizing human mobility an unstable and contingent

quality (Bauder 2013). The binary assumptions that continue to underpin the

definitions of a ‘newcomer’ (such as temporary/permanent, refugee/economic

migrant, citizen/non-citizen) themselves rest on temporally contingent socio-

political territorial configurations (Robertson, 2014). Taking this into account is

needed to begin to understand how different layers of migration over time are

negotiated, and the multi-faceted power dynamics that condition the process.

Notes

1. All interviewees have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

2. According to the Ismaili belief in ibn waqt (‘children of the time’), the Aga

Khan is a living Imam who interprets Shariah law according to

contemporary customs (Salvadori 1989: 232).

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