ArtCaffe was on the ground floor of the Westgate Shopping Mall, a favorite destination for successful Nairobians, many of whom, like Vidyarthi, are not African by ancestry but South Asian. Kenya has one of the largest and longest established Indian populations in the world outside India; Vidyarthi's family has lived there for five generations. People like Vidyarthi, who helps to manage a family-owned commercial printing company, have been essential to the country's development.
Yet many black Kenyans, especially poorer ones, would still consider him an interloper, a muhindi, even a kind of economic colonialist. Although a minority, Indians control many Kenyan businesses, big and small, and much of its urban real estate. Walk into a store in Nairobi, and it's a good bet you'll find an Indian behind the register and a black Kenyan stocking the shelves. The domestic making my tea was, it goes without saying, black, not Indian.
