Gujarati Patels in Kenya

A 1936 record of my grandfather, Shankerbhai Madhavdas Patel (b. 1899, Nisraya, India) in the Official Gazette of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. Amongst the first wave of Gujarati Indians to emigrate to Kenya, he worked as a customs clerk on the island of Lamu. His decision to leave India was certainly guided by the desire to leave poverty, which he accomplished. My father and I were born in Nairobi. We are Kenyan Gujarati Charotar Patels, part of a generational legacy of silent, thankless infastructure building that was met with mixed feelings by the native tribal populations. We left Kenya 9 years after the coup of 1982, with many other Indians. A decade prior, Idi Amin had led the wholesale expulsion of Uganda's Indian population. The post-colonial, nationalist policy making that regarded us as a sort of invasive species – an insular middle between British colonists and pillaged original peoples – more or less ensured that my sister and I would not be granted college admission. We still consider ourselves Kenyan, and consider the government differently from the many families and friends – indigenous Kenyans, Sikhs, Muslims, Parsis, Sindhis – we lost touch with.