Khoja Newspapers

The Khoja Doost, the first newspaper of the Khojas was established in 1850's in Bombay.

Tanzania’s first Indian newspaper, the weekly Samachar, was established in Zanzibar in 1900 by Fazal Janmohamed Master, Khoja from Jamnagar, Kutch. Samachar began as a single-sheet Gujarati paper dealing only with communal affairs, and began to cover politics and print English-language items only in 1918. The Samachar ran for over 62 years, silenced only by the Revolution in Zanzibar.

"The Ismaili Voice", 19 August 1936: The Ismailia Council, however, disowned the paper and it was denied approval for further publication. See TNA 12915 f.108

In particular, Ismailis took offence at an article that attacked the Aga Khan for assisting the British in dividing India through communal franchise.

Another short-lived Indian newspaper, the Ismaili Khoja-owned Africa Sentinel, had been launched in 1940 amidst these tensions. Kassum Sunderji Samji, the leading Ismaili figure in Tanganyika, explained that ‘the patriotic and pro-British sentiment of the Khoja community found no proper representation in the local Indian Press, and that the community wished for this to be rectified’. 77

77 Letter to A.C.S., 19 June 1940, TNA 28798 f.2.

Africa Sentinel was succeeded by another Ismaili-owned Anglo-Gujarati paper, Young Africa, which remained in print into the 1950s, though few copies survive.

A weekly newspaper, Northern News owned by Sultan Jessa and Abdul Dewji, circulated in Moshi and Arusha, 1969.