Veteran journalists, Raila mourn printing guru

Kul Bhushan Girdharilal Vidyarthi [Courtesy]

Only a certain generation of Kenyans know Bhushan Vidyarthi. And after hearing news of his death on Thursday, this select group of people were swept with sadness. Politicians, publishers, businessmen, government officials and activists all united in grief.

But a look at Bhushan’s life indicates that their grief was justified for his and his family’s history in Kenya demands more than a shrug of the shoulder and an acceptance that life must indeed go on.

“I am utterly heartbroken. Bhushan Vidyarthi was the most decent, most caring and most generous person I ever knew. He had a heart of gold and would find a way to help anyone in need,” said Salim Lone, former spokesperson to Raila Odinga.

Lone in his heartfelt obituary went ahead to call Bhushan a ‘pillar of his community.’

His story though, did not begin with Colorprint. It began much, much earlier.

Bhushan’s grandfather, Shamdass Horra, arrived in Kenya in 1896. By that time Indian merchants had been active along the Swahili coast for three centuries, moving ivory, skins, tropical resins, and spices.

“Like thousands of Indian men unable to find adequate employment at home, Horra moved to Kenya to build the railway between Mombasa and Nairobi. The British had entered Africa under the banner of abolition, but Horra and his countrymen were contracted into indentured servitude. Even the educated among them were known as “coolies’, an article in the October 2013 edition of the National Geographic Magazine about Bhushan reads.

Horra, a stationmaster from Pakistan, was tasked for a time with overseeing the spur at Tsavo, now famous for its national park but known then for its man-eating lions.

And with time, the Indians contracted by the British Empire to build the railway diversified into business. Horra, Bhushan’s grandfather was one of them.

In 1933, Bhushan’s father Girdharilal Vidyarthi, founded a radical newspaper, the Colonial Times, which spoke against the treatment of black soldiers fresh from the battlefield fighting to defend a cause they knew little of.  His father also started a private Kiswahili newspaper, but this did not go well.

In 1945, his father was tried for sedition by the British government and subsequently imprisoned.“I used to go and see him in prison,” Bhushan told the magazine. “Someone had to lift me up to the bars.”

Perhaps it is from this close interaction with truth and injustice that he developed his own philosophy of kindness and justice in life.

“As the head of Colorprint, I recall how he would fight to hold on to his workers as new technology was forcing printers to lay off staff in the 1970s,” Lone said in his remembering of Bhushan.

His footsteps in the publishing world touched many men and women of the press.

Salim Lone says it is Bhushan who gave him a job soon after being sacked by a former employer.

“When I was forced out as editor of the Sunday Post in 1974, he asked me to start a new publication he would finance through his printing press – even though he had never met me before. That was what became VIVA magazine,” he says.

Editorial cartoonist Paul Kelemba, popularly known as Maddo says it is Bhushan who gave him a chance at employment.