Asia and Asians in the Making of Kenya: A Take from the National Museum in Nairobi

Paper Abstract: As many other countries born out of colonialism, Kenya has had to come to terms with sub-national as well as transnational social identities shaped by the colonial experience, defined by European nineteenth-century notions of “race” and “tribe”, which oriented colonial sensibilities, policies, and law, and ultimately were appropriated by local populations as a basis for political mobilization. Since colonial times, “Asians” have been construed as a single broad category encompassing a number of groups with quite different histories before and after coming to Kenya. “Asians” were not “natives” but also not “civilized” enough to be granted the same legal status as Europeans. Although most “Asian” political leaders in Kenya objected to the colonial rule and sought alliances with “African” (Black) nationalists, “Asians” were kept out of the national founding myth, as the liberation struggle came to be represented fundamentally as a push to retake ancestral land that African “tribes” had been stolen by White settlers. The Nairobi National Museum is a privileged space to interrogate this historical narrative, and to unveil the fragmented and subsidiary ways Asia and Asian intersect with it. This paper will dive into three of the twelve museum galleries – History of Kenya, The Aga Khan Hall, and the Central Bank of Kenya Numismatic Exhibition – to track and analyze the ways Asia and Asians are portrayed as taking part of and at the same time not fitting in the making of Kenya as a modern nation.