Abstract
Despite the perceived advantages of Indian immigration as outlined in the Hamilton Report quoted above, the role of Indians in the East Africa Protectorate was one that was hotly debated. Even when their formidable early role was acknowledged, medical contributions were rarely seen as part of the equation. As Winston Churchill reminisced:
It was the Sikh soldier who bore an honourable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African Countries. It is the Indian trader, who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anyone else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communications. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed.2
Military and political gains represented the glory of British might. A combination of determined coercive strength and tactful diplomacy were fêted as the cornerstones of British colonial success. Although this was undoubtedly an important part of the story, historians in the past 25 years have nevertheless supplemented this picture by concentrating on other rationales behind colonial victories. Most relevantly in terms of the subject matter of this book, science, technology and medicine were put forward as fundamental in providing the necessary infrastructural prerequisites for colonial domination.3
[Indians are] a potent factor in the process of civilising the African1
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Notes
Winston S. Churchill, My African Journey, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1908, p. 49.
Daniel Headrick, ‘Technology, Imperialism and History’, in Daniel R Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 3–14;
Michael Worboys, ‘Colonial and Imperial Medicine’, in Debra Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800–1930, The Open University and Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 211–38.
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993;
Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 2001
Philip D. Curtin, ‘“The White Man’s Grave”: Image and Reality, 1780–1850’, The Journal of British Studies, 1, 1961, pp. 94–110;
Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, Critical Inquiry, 12, 1985, pp. 166–203.
John Langton Gilks, Speech to East Africa Branch of BMA, ‘The Annual Dinner of the Kenya Branch of the British Medical Association’, Kenya Medical Journal, 2.11, 1925–6, pp. 321–5.
For the new-found optimism in the benefits of medical science to aid colonization see: L. Westenra Sambon, ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’, The Geographical Journal 12, 1898, pp. 589–98;
Historians have written widely on the cautious pre-scientific ideas of the disease environment, but see particularly: David Arnold, ‘The Place of “The Tropics” in Western Medical Ideas Since 1750’, Tropical Medicine and International Health, 24, 1997, pp. 303–13;
Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002 [first published 1999].
John Farley, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003 [first published, 1991];
Douglas M. Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Official provision was eventually made legalising mass Indian emigration to East Africa in 1896 with the Indian Emigration Act. See: J.S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa, c.1886–1945, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 32–33;
Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890–1939, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 51.
John Lonsdale, ‘The Conquest State 1895–1904’, in W.R. Ochieng (ed.), A Modern History of Kenya, London, Evans Brothers, 1989, pp. 6–34, p. 10;
Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu and Masai from 1900–1939, Princeton, Guildford, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 6.
W. Lloyd Jones, Havash! Frontier Adventures in Kenya, London, Arrowsmith, 1925, p. 290.
W. Lloyd Jones, K.A.R.: Being an Unofficial Account of the Origin and Activities of the King’s African Rifles, London, Arrowsmith, 1926, p. 64.
Herbert Henry Austin, With Macdonald in Uganda: A Narrative Account of the Uganda Mutiny and Macdonald Expedition in the Uganda, London, Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1973, Appendix A, p. 288.
Edward Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, p. 3; Additionally Paice argues that that Colonial Office suppressed facts surrounding the bloodshed and mortality (and subsequent famines) resultant of these campaigns, p. 393.
M.F. Hill, The Permanent Way: The Story of Kenya and Uganda Railways, Nairobi, East African Literature Bureau, 1961;
Ronald Hardy, The Iron Snake, London, Collins, 1965;
C. Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism, London, Macdonald, 1971; A. Clayton and D.C. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya: 1895–1963, London, Frank Cass, 1974, pp. 10–14; H. Gunston, ‘The Planning and Construction of Uganda Railway’, Transactions of the New comen Society, 74, 2004, pp. 45–71; Satya V. Sood, Victoria’s Tin Dragon: A Railway that Built a Nation, Cambridge, Vanguard Press, 2007; Neera Kapila, Race, Rail and Society: Roots of Modern Kenya, Nairobi, East African Educational Publishers, 2011; Stephen Mills and Brian Yonge, A Railway to Nowhere: The Building of the Lunatic Line, 1896–1901, Nairobi, Mills Publishing, 2012; N. Green, ‘African in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian Settlement in East Africa’, Journal of African History, 53, 2012, pp. 131–50. A fascinating article that is based upon on a rare Urdu travelogue written by a railway worker: although no mention is made of health conditions, this is one of the earliest direct evidence of Indian attitudes towards the new environment of East Africa.
Lord Salisbury quoted in E. Bentley, Handbook of the Uganda Question and Proposed East Africa Railway, London, Chapman & Hall, 1892, pp. 39, 40. See also Cd. 2164, Final Report of the Committee of Uganda Railways, London, HMSO, 1904, p. 4 stated ‘HMG became convinced in 1891 that the construction of Railway was the cheapest and most efficient way of stopping Slave Trade’.
J.R.L MacDonald with a new introduction by A.T. Matson, Soldiering and Surveying in British East Africa, 1891–1894, London, Dawsons, 1973; Austin, With Macdonald in Uganda, pp. 287–89 named: McPherson, McLoughlin, Ferguson, Turner, Standage and Cook in Appendix A.
H. Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920, Oxford University Press, 1974 discusses the debate in the Indian legislature regarding an immigration bill in 1883 when concern was expressed about indentured labour in general; See BL/IOR/L/E/7/444 File 626 for more specific correspondence between Uganda Railway and India, 8 May, 9 August and 2 October 1899 about the plight of returning invalids.
Anna Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine: The Colonial Medical Service in East Africa, London, I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 6.
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© 2015 Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala
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Greenwood, A., Topiwala, H. (2015). Indians, Western Medicine, and the Establishment of the Protectorate. In: Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–1940. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440532_3
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