From the Land of Pashtuns to the Land of Maa by Muzzafar Juma Khan: book review

In From the Land of Pashtuns to the Land of Maa: Memoirs (2013) Kenyan-born Khan traces his father’s journey from his village in India (now within Pakistan) to Kenya in 1929, alone, at the age of 18 after a family dispute.

Here is the story of migration, of Khan’s father and other Pashtuns (mainly from the Punjab Province of Pakistan), to the Maasai tribal lands in rural Kenya. His father, Juma Khan, raised 18 children from two wives: the first was a Maasai woman who assumed a Muslim name after marriage, and the second was the daughter of a Pakistani father and Maasai mother. It was a time of colonial rule when mixed marriages – and children from them – were regarded with discrimination.

The author, the first son of his father’s second wife, Fazal Noor, was born in 1941. From a mixed marriage, he was not European, nor Asian, nor African. Asians – predominantly Indians – arrived in Kenya as construction workers in 1890 to build the railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Of the 32,000 labourers 7,000 Indians remained and made Kenya their home. Not only is Khan’s father of a different race, he is also of a different religion. Hence this is also the history of Muslim Punjab migrants with wives of African or mixed origins whose children established businesses or entered the public service, the rise of the Mau Mau attacks, and the road to Kenya’s independence in 1963. Khan grew up in Kijabe among “about thirty Asian families engaged in retail trades and transport enterprises and of these, six were Muslim families of the Manjothi clan.” In 1946 his father moved to Naivasha in Kampi ya Somali where the family lived among Somali migrants from the Lasanot and Hargeisa regions of northern British Somaliland (now the autonomous Somaliland).

In 1954, at the age of 13, the family travelled to Pakistan to enable Khan to marry a 13 year-old girl, and after a few months he returned to Kenya to finish his schooling. The arranged marriage would be consummated years later when she travelled to join him in 1962 when she turned 21.

In the meantime, in 1957 Khan began a career with the Kenya Farmers’ Association – the start of a long alliance. So this is also the history of the KFA from 1957 to its demise in 1984. It is the continuation of Elspeth Huxley’s account of the KFA in her 1957 publication, No Easy Way, from its inception in 1923 (and earlier in another form) to 1957. Huxley wrote of its beginning and Khan wrote of its ending. Changes of leadership, and his own promotions until 1984 are told chronologically until the meeting which “witnessed the death of a vibrant and financially strong organisation that had been in existence for sixty years … the KFA was ruined by politicians who held their own vested interests at heart.”  

This novel is more than parallel memoirs – his life, the early history of Muslim Pashtuns in Kenya, and the history of the KFA – because it reads less like an historical novel and more like a history textbook (with footnotes, maps, photographs, appendices, and an index). Nevertheless, having worked in the Punjab region of Pakistan, and in Kenya, I found it interesting, if somewhat unemotional at times.

A deeper understanding of the mixed marriages, the question of heritage and identity, the sense of belonging or isolation within rural communities, and the mechanisms for dealing with life in transition from colonial rule to independence to political and social tensions, would have added a psychological element to the historical descriptions. However, the extensive use of photographs, dating back to 1898, provided a human aspect to the factual narrative. The most emotive and striking photograph – which should be the cover of the book – is the one of his father, Juma Khan, on the day he arrived at the port of Mombasa in June 1929 – the first day of his Kenyan life.