Who Do You Think You Are - Adil Ray 27th Jul

[kiterunner]

On BBC1 at 9 p.m. and repeated next Mon / Tue night at midnight.

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I'm on holiday at the moment so will be watching this when I get home.

[kiterunner]

Episode summary:

Adil Ray's mother, Nargis Din, was born in Kenya. She came to England in the 1960's and married Adil's father, a labourer from Pakistan. Her mother, Aisha, was an African orphan.

Adil went to see his mother, who lives near him in Birmingham. She had some photos from her childhood, including some of their big house in Kenya. Her father, who came from India, ran a company called Dean Bros there. After Kenyan independence in 1963 many Asians, including Nargis and her family, left Kenya and came to the UK.
Nargis said that her father, Meraj Din, arrived in Kenya in 1912 from Lahore, which was then in British India and now in Pakistan, to work as a railway clerk. He later sent for his wife to join him, and became a community leader and organised the building of a mosque. After the death of his first wife, by whom he had seven children, he married Aisha, a Ugandan who was then aged about 13-14, and they went on to have seven children of their own, including Nargis.
Nargis said that Aisha's father, Moidin was a Turkish Muslim missionary, her mother Razia was Ugandan, but she was brought up in an Indian family so spoke the same language as Meraj. Nargis said that Razia was widowed when her children were young and she couldn't support them on her own, so she took them to the mosque in Uganda and gave them up for adoption or fostering. Razia was supposedly from the family of the Kabaka, rulers of the Buganda area of Uganda.
Adil went to Nairobi in Kenya. In 1896, work began on a massive railway from Mombasa to Kisumu via Nairobi. Thousands of Indians went to Kenya to work on it. Meraj's passport showed that he was born on the 1st Mar 1896, and was only 16 when he went to Kenya. His father had died by then but Meraj had not inherited any of his father's wealth, and went to Africa to make a better life for himself.

Adil met an historian who showed him the electoral register in the Kenya Gazette including Meraj Din, Aisha Bibi (his wife) and Hajian, his mother, all at Kisumu. When the railway was completed, many of the Indian workers stayed in Kenya, many of them in Kisumu, and brought their families over. Meraj became a tinsmith, specialising in water tanks, around the time of the First World War. Some of his tin lamps are still around in Kenya. The historian said that it was quite common at that time for girls to marry young in Kenya, but not for Indians to marry Africans.

A local guide in Kisumu showed Adil where Meraj's first shop was, now a cafe and guest house. At the back was a courtyard where he would have done his tin-smithing. Adil went to visit the mosque which Meraj helped to build. He met some people who knew Meraj Din when he was an elder at the mosque, and remembered his funeral.
Adil then went to see the house which the Din family built in the 1950's, where Nargis grew up, now the HQ of a construction company. The house was built from the wealth of the "Dean Brothers" - Meraj's sons.

Adil then went to Kampala, in the Buganda area of Uganda. He had been given information about some of Razia's relatives (two of her nieces and a nephew, i.e. Aisha's cousins), who live three hours' journey from Kampala, and he went to visit them. They showed him a photo of Razia and her brother, their father. They said that Razia's father was Zaidi Kirwana, a Muslim trader in town, who met a trader from India or Turkey, Moidin, and gave him his daughter Razia in marriage. When Moidin died, Razia and the children were expected to return to Uganda, and some Asian men in Kenya took her children from her and told her to go back to Uganda without them. Her father found out where the children were and took Razia to visit them in secret, but as they grew up they were unable to talk to Razia as they had no language in common. Adil visited Razia's grave.

Adil asked whether it was true that Razia was related to the Kabaka, and they confirmed this. Kamanyiro Magimbi, her grandfather (Zaidi's father), was a chief in the African tradition and brother of Muganzirwazza, the mother of King Muteesa I.

Adil went back to Kampala to find out more about Kamanyiro. He read an article which Sir John Gray wrote in Feb 1890 about meeting Kamanyiro, which said that Kamanyiro tore out one eye from each of his drummers. (The article said Kamanyiro Kauta, the cousin of King Mateesa I.) Adil went to a traditional Bugandan village and met a local historian who showed him some drawings, including one of King Muteesa I with some chiefs who would have included Kamanyiro, and one of Muteesa's mother.

Muteesa died in 1884. Kamanyiro never became Muslim or Christian but stuck to the traditional religion. The historian said that the story about tearing out eyes was probably an exaggeration to add shocking colour to the article. In 1894, Uganda became part of the British Empire and the chiefs lost their powers. Adil went to visit the tomb in a nearby village, now a place of pilgrimage, where Kamanyiro and his brother are buried.

[kiterunner]

I would have liked them to explain why the article by Sir John Gray referred to Kamanyiro Kauta, a cousin of the king, instead of Kamanyiro Magimbi, the king's uncle. Presumably they're sure it is the same Kamanyiro? Also I would have thought they could find out whether Moidin was Indian or Turkish, and a trader or a missionary, as there seemed to be some confusion there.

[Olde Crone]

This episode left me cold. Too much emphasis on oral history and little in the way of fact at the end. Oral history can be correct but it needs testing and they didn't test.

Again, this was a documentary and there was little explanation of which sources they had used.

OC

[kiterunner]

I would have liked them to explain why the article by Sir John Gray referred to Kamanyiro Kauta, a cousin of the king, instead of Kamanyiro Magimbi, the king's uncle. Presumably they're sure it is the same Kamanyiro? Also I would have thought they could find out whether Moidin was Indian or Turkish, and a trader or a missionary, as there seemed to be some confusion there.

Googling for Kamanyiro Kauta, I found a book "New Light on Dark Africa", by Dr Carl Peters, leader of "the German Emin Pasha expedition" of 1890, which has it as Kamanyiro Kanta. I probably misread it when watching the episode. On page 355 of that book it says he was "the cousin of the late King Mtesa, and uncle of Muanga".

(Wikipedia says that Muteesa was born in 1837 and ruled from 1856 to 1884, and was succeeded by his son Mwanga II.)

The book seems to be the source for the bit in Sir John Gray's article about Kamanyiro's one-eyed followers (either that or it confirms it! but I think the wording is the same as in the article), and also says that "he had had a whole village flogged, simply to give us an idea of his power". It also mentions that he had slaves, "who one and all hated him from the depths of their souls". He is several times described as an old man, but that doesn't really help with settling which king he was uncle to. So I'm still not sure that he is the same person as Kamanyiro Magimbi, (or Magimbi Kamanyiro as some of Adil Ray's tweets etc have) but they certainly seem to have skipped over a lot of the information about him on the programme, and having read through the stuff about him in the book, the one-eyed followers bit doesn't seem particularly unbelievable.

[kiterunner]

Ah, finally found a link to the Sir John Gray article which confirms that it is the same Kamanyiro - Kauta was his job title late in life, and Magimbi actually part of his name:
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00080855/00069/119

And it does include quotes from the Carl Peters book, but also from other people who met Kamanyiro - for instance, on page 246, Sir Frederick Jackson is quoted as saying that "He was a cheerful ruffian, and from his own showing must have been a dreadful barbarian from the way he demonstrated, by dumb show, the cutting off of ears and noses and gouging out eyes, etc" and Ernest Gedge as noting that his high-handed treatment of his people "makes them obedient or it is probably a case of mutilation".

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00080855/00069/119

[Olde Crone]

How wonderful to be related to such a man. Said no one ever.

I didn't understand why the children and their mother spoke different languages so could not communicate with each other, if she went to see them regularly as was implied.

OC