• Nowrojee, Pheroze. • Civil rights lawyers –Kenya –Biography. • Uganda Railway. A Kenyan Journey centres on the story of a Parsee railwayman from Billimora, Gujarat, who made this land his home when a new country was being imagined and its peoples went on to call themselves 'Kenyan'. The railwayman was Pheroze Nowrojee (1879-1936), the author's grandfather, after whom he is named. But Kenyan lawyer Pheroze Nowrojee is too sophisticated to inflict a self-indulgent family history on his readers. Journey is an ambitious work, not easy to categorise. It is a fascinating example of a subaltern study; it is a rumination on nation-building that is not about politicians but about the heroism of ordinary people quietly doing extraordinary things; in places it reads like an anguished love letter; its approach is that of a committed work, with the explicit agenda of asserting the right of a people to speak for themselves and to record their own histories. It is not, however, a study of a ghetto, and thankfully it avoids cliched and embarrassing talk about ‘the Asian contribution'.