Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi (1910 - 31 July 1985) was a Kenyan journalist and an early pioneer of the free press in Kenya.
[1] His father Shamdass Bootamal Horra arrived in East Africa in 1896 to work on the Uganda Railway.
[3] 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.
The editorials in his papers were highly critical of discriminatory government policies, and this led to Habari za Dunia being banned in 1947 and Jicho in 1962.
[4] 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.