Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi

Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi (1910 - 31 July 1985) was a Kenyan journalist and an early pioneer of the free press in Kenya. He was the first journalist charged with sedition in Kenya.

Biography Vidyarthi was born in Nairobi to a Punjabi Hindu family. In 1930 he began the trilingual weekly magazine, Mitro, in English, Hindi and Urdi. In 1933, he co-founded the Gujarati-English newspaper, The Colonial Times with A.C.L. de Souza. That same year he started Kenya's first privately owned Kiswahili language newspaper Habari za Dunia ("News of the World") to cater for the African audience. His son Anil Kumar Vidyarthi followed him into the media trade, and was the last person in Kenya to be charged with sedition in 1998.