World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [61]
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These statements reverberate with prejudice, and most Americans would probably be tempted to dismiss them as groundless stereotyping. Unfortunately, they hold more than a grain of truth. Kenya’s roughly seventy thousand Indians, less than 2 percent of the population, are in fact dramatically more affluent as a group than the vastly more numerous black Kenyans around them. While Kikuyu run Kenya’s tea and coffee plantations, “Asians” (as they are known) comprise most of the country’s merchant class and, partly because of their international connections, benefit extremely disproportionately from globalization and market liberalization. They live, clustered and endogamous, in relatively upscale Nairobi neighborhoods like Westlands, where sari-clad women devouring the latest issue of India Today are driven around in Peugeots by black Kenyan chauffeurs. The Indian community has been a major source of funding for both the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Most recently an unfortunate number of Indians have been willing to act as frontmen for Moi and his cronies. Moi currently co-owns extensive businesses with several Indian tycoons.
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It is often suggested—not only by Kenyans but also by Westerners—that Indian economic dominance in Kenya is due to their manipulation of the political process as opposed to any superior entrepreneurialism.
25 There is no doubt that some Indian businessmen are thickly mired in the corrupt cronyism of the Moi regime. The infamous “Goldenberg case,” involving allegations that Indian tycoon Kamlesh Pattni siphoned off $400 million from Kenya’s Central Bank with the connivance of government officials, has been in litigation since 1994. Nevertheless, the suggestion that political cronyism is the sole or even principal explanation of Indian economic dominance in Kenya overstates the case.
Unlike Africa’s white settlers, who came over with guns and the might of Europe behind them, most of Kenya’s Indians descend from “coolie” laborers imported by the British in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya railway. The descendants of these laborers worked as struggling artisans, clerks, or traders. They rose from destitution not through political favoritism, but rather despite discriminatory restrictions by colonial whites on one side and intense animosity from native Africans on the other. As early as 1924 there were a surprising number of Indian doctors and lawyers, almost all self-made. Indeed, in the same year Indians already controlled a stunning 80 to 90 percent of Kenya’s commercial trade. Few of these early Indian businessmen had anything to do with politics.
Today in Kenya, not only Moi’s Indian cronies are successful. Indian merchants, famous for their extreme thriftiness and tiny profit margins, dominate commerce at every level of society. The same is true in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania, Uganda’s capital Kampala, and Rwanda’s capital Kigali.
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Throughout East Africa over the last two decades, the market reforms and globally oriented policies called for by the World Bank and IMF have starkly magnified the economic dominance of the region’s insular and entrepreneurial Indian minorities. In Tanzania, for example, the turn from socialism to markets in the 1980s led to the reemergence of the Indian minority as a powerful economic force. Majority fears that these “outsiders” would “overwhelm and take over everything” led to bitter anti-Indian brutality. Similarly, Zambia’s “very greedy” Indians, who were once accused of purchasing the body parts of mutilated African children, were targeted in bloody mass riots in the mid-1990s.