Squeezing Indians Out of Government Medicine

Abstract

Things altered very much for the worse for Indians in the Kenyan colonial medical department during 1922 and 1923; simultaneously the early enthusiasm for the employment of Indians in all departments of the British Colonial Service in East Africa dramatically waned. Winston Churchill (hardly an advocate of Indian colonial rights) anticipated the dilemma this would throw up with uncanny accuracy as early as 1908:

Is it possible for any Government with a scrap of respect for honest dealing between man and man, to embark upon a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from regions in which he has established himself under the security of public faith?²

Also in the realms of the Colonial Medical Department, suddenly, and largely without any satisfactorily documented explanation, the work of Indians no longer figured in the Annual Medical Reports. Similarly, within the colonial archives, discussions over the Indian members of the colonial medical service—neither supporting nor bemoaning their presence—almost completely dried up after 1923. Although evidence indicates that about a third of Indians continued to work as government doctors in outlying regions until 1940, their presence was barely acknowledged.³ Indians had been completely eliminated from official discourses about government medicine in Kenya.

[The Indian] deprives the African of all incentives to ambition and opportunities of advancement.¹