Mohamed Kassim Lakha

Children

His son Mohammad was also employed by Alidina Visram as a manager of the Kisumu branch.
The eldest, Mohamed, left his employment with Allidina Visram’s firm and set out independently with his brothers to start a business that involved the purchase of various agricultural products and hides and skins to be sold initially to European businesses in Kisumu for export".
The brothers set up stores all around Lake Victoria in Kenya and Tanganyika (now Tanzania), for the purchase of various commodities, and employed Khoja families to run them.72 Significantly, over time the family business made a transition from trade to industrial processing, with investments in cotton ginning and a coffee-curing factory outside Kampala which was the ‘largest’ factory in Uganda.73 In 1915, Hassan, the youngest of the brothers, who was working for a British firm, Bousted & Clark, left the company to enter the cotton business.74
Within three years the family had set up several ginneries in Uganda. Then in 1919 Mohamed set up a ginnery in Samia in western Kenya, in partnership with a Captain Gordon Small.The ginnery operated under the name Small & Company, retaining that name even after Gordon sold his share of the business to the Kassim Lakha family.
A striking feature of the Kassim Lakha investments in cotton ginneries was their remote locations, underlining the extraction of commodities by Indian commercial enterprises deep in the hinterland of East Africa. These ginneries purchased cotton from small-scale African producers and processed it in the ginneries.The cotton was brought by foot or on bicycles to the ginneries or to one of the many small depots spread throughout the interior.
One of the ginneries that I visited on a few occasions with my parents and uncle Abdulrasul and his family was the one located in Samia (western Kenya). It was extremely isolated, and the closest settlement to which it was connected by an unsealed road was Sio-Port, a small place that was a relatively short drive from the ginnery. The ginnery was set in a compound surrounded by bush, with the accommodation lacking electric lighting, relying mainly on kerosene lamps.
I remember my father, Sadrudin, suffering a serious bout of malaria as a consequence.The ginnery’s isolation and threat of malaria, however, did not daunt my uncle Abdulrasul, who reminded us that his forebears had travelled all over the interior riding a bicycle.
As the business enterprises of the Kassim Lakha family and other Indians demonstrate, the economic role of Indians in East Africa was not confined, as is commonly imagined, to running retail shops, though that sector was dominated by them during the colonial period.
Their foray into industrial production was a significant feature of the colonial economy. For example, the statistics for Uganda show that by 1938 the number of ginneries owned by Indian firms far surpassed those owned by British or European owners.75
The second generation of the family, including my father, his brothers, and their cousins were all recruited to manage and operate the various enterprises.
Notable among them was Mohamed Kassim Lakha, one of the leaders of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Eastern Africa set up in 1932 to oppose the discriminatory marketing legislation proposed by the colonial administration for Uganda and Tanzania.
Notably, Mohamed was nominated a member of the Legislative Council in Kenya in 1923, and his brother Rahemtulla also gained a seat in the Legislative Council. 80

The Making of a Diasporic Muslim Family in East Africa-Salim Lakha-Location 209-260