Fort Smith, not the railway, is the city’s oldest edifice

Although Fort Smith looms over Nairobi as evidence of imperial Britain’s hard-power takeover of East Africa, this intriguing landmark still lies shrouded in the mists of time.

Yet when asked, five out six Nairobians either have never heard of the place or cannot locate it on the city map. Could the reason be as simple as columnist Macharia Gaitho’s wry, tongue-in-cheek comment that Kenyans are too busy “paying homage to the imperialists and neocolonialists…”?

Sarcasm aside, might it go some way to explain why the Uganda Railway, not Fort Smith, is still the favoured subject of a continuous flurry of books, newspaper articles and photo exhibits streaming off Kenyan, British and American presses?

Fortunately neither lingering interest in the railway nor constant repetition of history-lite’s foundational flaws have the ability to alter reality. The much-admired railway, always depicted as catalysing Nairobi’s beginnings… as well as Britain’s generous gift to British East Africa needs shelving if city history is to be viewed honestly and accurately.

Recently, I rounded up the usual accomplices for a mini-safari to the generally forgotten fort. Maina Macharia, the former Mau Mau detainee and trade unionist with a stake running deep into Kenya’s quest for social justice, and long-time partner Kimani Gacheru were fellow travellers.

Fifteen kilometres north of the City centre, at the end of an irredeemable eyesore of a shopping centre called Ndumbu-ini in Kiambu County, we discovered the entry to the fort and gate crashed.

“Ndumbu” is grated sugar cane used for brewing honey-wine. Strategically located on the crest of a hill for views stretching kilometres in all directions, a few mature jacarandas fronting the compound attest to its venerable age.

If buildings could cry out for restoration, these would provide a cacophonous chorus. Now a farmhouse in private hands, the place is barely maintained.

Perhaps worse, Nairobi’s first colonial court of law where Kenya’s canonic insurgent leader and national hero, Waiyaki wa Hinga, was tried and sentenced to exile is in a state of shameless disrepair. The structure, built as a rondavel of plastered clay, looks as though it would not survive another heavy storm.

A few square stone pillars are all that is left of a once formidable barricade surrounding the fort. The cell, with its tiny windows where Waiyaki was imprisoned, makes do as a tool shed while, remarkably, a heavily-rusted l9th century water storage unit is still in use. Nearby a lone cow munching grass has little to add.

Unlike Mombasa’s powerfully-built Fort Jesus with its impregnable stone walls, bastions and parapets with cannon built over 300 years before, Fort Smith is more mansion than military garrison.

Built in l888, Fort Smith arrived 10 years before that other Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) venture, the Uganda Railway, a private corporation backed by shareholders. With the full support of the British government, it maintained its own army and chain of command.

In a strenuous journey lasting a minimum of one month on old camel caravan trails, construction materials — heavy corrugated galvanite 24-gauge iron sheets, pre-fabricated doors and glass for windows shipped from British India — had to be carried up from Mombasa by ox-cart and human sweat.

Its vaguely Greco-Roman façade with long structure fronted by a pillared, open-air veranda, mullioned windows and extended entrance complete with pediment, it says: “Welcome… This way for High Tea!”

Why Fort Smith? This sprawling structure is the key to unlocking imperial Britain’s hidden early brutal occupation of East Africa and its planned construction of yet another colonial state with nearby Nairobi adopted later as its upcountry administrative centre.

It was a defensive network of military engineering works extending from Fort Jesus westward up to Uganda’s Fort Lugard.

Fort Smith carried the flag of colonial occupation for rounding out Britain’s Victorian empire encircling the Indian Ocean and the entire globe. Masking this nasty project was imperial Britain’s well-hyped Uganda Railway.

That despite its “engine of progress” narrative with its cast of characters — the man-eaters of Tsavo and guest appearance of former American president, Theodore Roosevelt, it was actually only another banal infrastructural link. In truth, many had already been built elsewhere over equally difficult terrain for speeding up transportation within the closed colonial system.

Worse, obliterating the history of Fort Smith was to erase The Resistance. That is, the beginning of a living mass movement for justice continuing through Mau Mau and against Moi’s peculiar veneration of elite governance structured as neo-colonial despotism.

If war, as the old aphorism goes, is a concentration of politics, Nairobi’s first anti-colonial war had several local militias resisting foreign European infiltration. Nameless men of courage spearheading the incursion risked their lives confronting the IBEAC.

Early success in staving off the British advance took place at Fort Dagoretti, the IBEAC’s initial military post at Kia-wariuwa. Of flimsy mud-and-thatch construction, it was easily attacked and burned.

After Fort Smith was built a few miles away, several bungled attempts at seizing the new fort led to catastrophe. In retaliatory raids, company soldiers went out and razed long-established villages, butchered guerrillas, stole cattle and goats and set fire to homesteads. Needless misery was inflicted on people.

With the resistance collapsing throughout East Africa resulting from the IBEAC’s superior weaponry, wide-ranging, multi-lingual agricultural societies were in retreat. In a reflex atavistic response — more for security than anything else — people cocooned themselves into communal clans predicated on blood ties.

Power relations, too, were altered. Colonial collaborators from each “tribe” became “paramount chiefs” while English language ascriptions formerly used for primitive Early Man or Iron Age societies existing 2000 years ago were the pretexts for imposing an occupation and “civilisation” on people who wanted to be left alone.

That another system existed providing an alternative vision to the capitalist power relations arriving in the confusion of colonial state construction also needs recognition.

Retaining Nairobi’s early history is doomed to failure if its historic landmarks — every city’s most prized archives — become rubble in the wreckage of developers’ bulldozers. Fort Smith is Nairobi’s oldest extant edifice.

This clearly unique structure and its outbuildings are in urgent need of gazettement. If the city’s remaining building heritage with its rich legacy of resistance and struggle is to be preserved for us and future generations, the National Museum and Nairobi County Government officials must act now.

Tell us the interesting things about your town. Send your stories to [email protected]