Murdered by My Father and Sherwood actor Adeel Akhtar was born in London on 18 September 1980 and is 45 years old. As he says at the start of his episode of Who Do You Think You Are?,his father Humayan was from Pakistan and his mother Mumtaz was from Kenya. He knows about his father’s family, but he says he’s “very fascinated” to learn about his Indo-Kenyan roots because he knows “nothing”.
Immigrant ancestors
To start, Adeel visits his mother. She left Kenya for Britain at the age of just 17 so she doesn’t know much about her family history, but she says that her mother’s family was “the second or third richest family in Nairobi” and that their family name was Suleman Verjee.
To find out more, Adeel flies thousands of miles to Nairobi and meets his cousin Shelley. She tells him that Suleman Verjee was their ancestor, who emigrated from India to Mombasa on a dhow.
In Mombasa, which Adeel remembers visiting as a child, he meets historian Dr Kalandar Kamalkhan. He tells him that Suleman was Adeel’s 3x great grandfather. He travelled to Kenya in 1885 with his 15-year-old son Kassam, Adeel’s 2x great grandfather. An account of the family’s history shows how Kassam helped his fellow passengers and crew when the ship was caught in a storm.
In Mombasa, Suleman started a shop. He was soon able to send for the rest of his family, including his other sons, Hussein and Madatally.
A connection to Nairobi
In 1896, the colonial British government began building the Kenya-Uganda railway, starting in Mombasa. The Suleman Verjee family set up bazaars to sell goods along the railway route. The modern city of Nairobi was originally built as a staging post for the railway. The Suleman Verjees continued to run a business there, with Kassam taking over after his father died.
“[My family] have been there for as long as Nairobi existed,” Adeel says.
"An early form of segregation"
He returns to Nairobi, where he meets Professor Kenneth Ombongi to find about the next step in his family’s story. The Indian community in Nairobi faced regular outbreaks of bubonic plague. Kassam helped lead community efforts to clean up the Indian bazaar and combat the epidemic. In 1918, Suleman Verjee gave evidence to a commission enquiring into the plague about the overcrowding that was causing the plague.
“It strikes me as a colonial struggle,” Adeel says, “in the sense that the dominating powers are always going to blame the people and the people very clearly see the systemic problems within that, and they know how to address those problems but nobody really listens to them.”
However, in 1919, British public health expert Sir William Simpson published a report calling for “a division into separate quarters for Europeans, Asiatics and Africans” to control the spread of disease. Adeel is shocked that the British considered an “early form of segregation” in Kenya.
The proposal for segregation wasn’t implemented, but Adeel’s family continued to face prejudice. Adeel’s 3x great uncle Hussein was president of the East African Indian National Congress, which campaigned for Indian rights in British East Africa. Adeel reads a speech Hussein gave, asking why the British were discriminating against Indians after Indian soldiers fought for the Empire in the First World War.
Adeel says he’s proud of his ancestors: “Up against every obstacle, my great great grandfather and his brothers managed to overcome it with sheer will and tenacity.”
Adeel is also able to meet Inayat and Basharat Suleman Verjee, the great grandsons of his 3x great uncle Madatally. They tell him that the family were of the Ismaili branch of Islam and donated money to build a Jamatkhana centre for the Ismaili community, in Nairobi. Kassam also left money to set up a girls’ school in the Jamatkhana. Adeel’s grandmother Kulsum was one of the pupils at the school.
Adeel also finds out more about his 2x great grandmother, Kassam’s first wife Ziada, who was from the Giriama people of Kenya and would have converted to Islam to marry Kassam.
Adeel says he’s moved by everything he’s discovered: “I can’t believe the vastness of this story.”
