The Victorians were obsessed with three things: masturbation, railways and the Empire. Soon enough, an idea was born to combine two (while, I’m sure, doing and denying the third at every opportunity) in the form of the Kenya-Uganda Railway. For this was the age when European colonialism was in full swing and Britain was looking for ways to protect her Cape to Cairo coloniesfrom her grasping rivals (France being a bit cross to discover that her new territories in West Africa – supposed to be the jewel in her crown to rival British India – had turned out to be mostly desert).
Now, as a former student of British Imperial History, I know all the arguments against colonialism. The audacity of the Europeans in carving up a map of Africa and dividing the ‘countries’ among themselves; the disregard for pre-existing geographical, tribal and linguistic boundaries; the systematic exploitation of minerals and peoples; the reservation of the best land for white settlers; the design of infrastructure to meet external demands rather than internal needs…
Which perhaps makes it unfortunate that my overriding thought after those years of study is: what jolly good fun it all must have been!
Take the Kenya-Uganda railway. In the 1890s, the British East Africa Company persuaded Parliament to finance, to the eventual tune of £5 million, the construction of a single-track railway line from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa in British East Africa, all the way to Kisumu on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. The argument for such a foolhardy enterprise? Britain would finally make a profit from her East African territories; secure her hold on the River Nile – which had its source at Lake Victoria in Uganda, then an impossible territory to administer given its landlocked nature; troops could be rapidly transported from the coast to the Great Lakes region in defense of the Empire; and it could even hasten the end of slavery by removing the need for humans in the transportation of goods.
Because of the enormous expense and effort required to build the line, the radical British MP Henry Labouchere led protests that the whole endeavour was madness, claiming that the railway was ‘naught but a Lunatic Line’. But the Victorians were always loath to give up in the face of adversity: building began in Mombasa in 1896 and concluded at Lake Victoria in 1901, mostly carried out by the 32,000 labourers brought in from British India. Many towns developed along the line, including Kikuyu, Naivasha and Nakuru. The small outpost of Nairobi was initially known only as Mile 329, the halfway point where workers stopped to set up camp, but it soon became capital of the newly formed British East Africa – thus, more by convenience and a lack of alternatives than any definite planning on behalf of the Government, an approach which characterises the expansion of the city even today.
The railway was a huge logistical achievement and became strategically and economically vital for Britain’s East African territories. But construction was not without its horrors…
The man-eating lions of Tsavo and other awful deaths
Construction of the railway was arduous, to say the least. Hundreds of Indian and African workers perished thanks to famine, malaria, war with the angry Masaai (excuse me, said the Masaai before attacking a railway caravan and killing 500 people, could you please stop raping our women – and while we’re at it, you do know that this is our land you’re building that Iron Snake through?), and the sheer back-breaking work of ploughing a route through inhospitable forests, endless scorching plains and steep ravines. What has entered folklore, though, is the tale of the man-eating lions of Tsavo.
Bridging the River Tsavo in what is now Tsavo National Park was scheduled to take two months. Instead, it took nearly a year, as two angry lions stalked and killed dozens of workers, halting construction. An early casualty was Charles Ryall, a policeman who unfortunately fell asleep in his carriage while on a mission to catch the pair and was dragged through the window and chomped to bits. Within months there was a £100 bounty on the big cats and the camp was overrun with soldiers, opportunists and wealthy hunters. The naughty lions were eventually shot and killed, and their skins made into rugs, by the bridge supervisor Colonel John Henry Patterson, firing from the safety of his tree in December 1898. Poor things.
Last orders!
The Kenya Railways Corporation still runs passenger trains along the Lunatic Line; most iconic is the 14 hour sleeper between Mombasa and Nairobi. This snail-paced journey, which grounds to a halt every twenty minutes to blast elephants off the line (with horn, not gun), offers faded grandeur and a sense of adventure to the white tourists in the optimistically named ‘upper class’, and the cheapest route to the coast to those in third. From being summoned to dinner with the bleat of a dying gong, to eating soup and beef stew on chipped crockery embossed with a fading ‘KRC’ logo in the dining car, to retiring to one’s bunk room complete with rusting sink and flickering light bulbs, to looking out over Tsavo National Park at dawn and spotting wildebeest, everything reminds one of better times – of a time when the romance of safari adventures was evoked in tales by everyone from Roosevelt to the Queen and stirred the West’s fascination with ‘the exotic’.
But could it soon be just that – a memory? President Kibaki recently promised that the railway will be upgraded to modern standards, cutting the journey to three hours in the process. Although work has not yet started, tall tales abound that it will be completed by 2016. Whether or not you believe this (frankly groundless) optimism, this might yet signal the end of the slow, meandering journey from the Indian Ocean to the ‘heart of darkness’. But perhaps it doesn’t matter, as the history books and tales will always be here to tell the story of this feat of engineering, achieved against all odds by thousands of British, Africans and Indians. To end with the words of Churchill, ‘The British art of “muddling through” was here seen in one of its finest expositions. Through everything – through the forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating Parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway.’
Great post Aurelia!
I’ve just come across this on the BBC website and thought it might be of interest, very timely to your post; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12992540
nice one! remind me to loan you M.G. Vassanji’s “The In-Between World of Vikram Lall”. you might like.
[…] men who, when heaving heavy loads of sleeper blocks and iron rails during the construction of the Lunatic Line, would chant ‘har, har, ambee!’ (praise, praise to Ambee mother – a Hindu deity). Kenya’s […]