The Indian heroes who built railway

Kenyans have been celebrating their Heroes Day (now Mashujaa Day) for 49 years, but the people who opened up the country and the East African region for commerce and trade by building the Kenya-Uganda Railway, have never been recognised.

The Indian men, who toiled and lost their lives to the man-eating lions of Tsavo and hostile warrior communities, ought to be included in the list of heroes as Kenya prepares to unveil the National Hero’s Acre.

The railway was a huge logistical achievement. It became strategically and economically vital for both Uganda and Kenya.

It was also useful in the suppression of slavery, as the anti-slavery crusaders could move with speed and catch up with captured slaves.

Again, the railway allowed coffee and tea to be exported, and encouraged colonial settlement and other types of commerce.

The British colonial government started large-scale importation of cheap labour from India, referred to derogatively as Coolies, for the construction of the railway in 1895.

The East African Protectorate was considered as a province of the British India. For instance, the currency used was the Indian Rupee, while the legal system was an extension of the Indian law. So it was only natural for the British to look to India for cheap labour.

Of the original 32,000 contracted labourers, about 6,700 stayed on after the end of indentured service to work as dukawallas (shopkeepers), artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, lower-level administrators.

Their decedents went to occupy a central position in the economies of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

However, the railway construction was not easy. The Indians paid with their lives, as the railway construction met local resistance on various occasions. A major incident was the Kedong Massacre, when the Maasai attacked a railway worker’s caravan, killing around 500 people after two Maasai girls were raped.

Again at the turn of the century, the railway construction was disturbed by the resistance of the Nandi people, led by Koitalel Arap Samoei.

But the events for which the construction of the railway may be most famous are the grisly killings of a number of construction workers by lions in 1898, during the building of a bridge across the Tsavo River.

Hunting principally at night, a pair of mane-less male lions stalked and killed at least 28 Indian and African workers. Some accounts put the number of victims higher.

The lions, named “the Man-eaters of Tsavo,” were eventually shot and killed by the bridge construction supervisor, Colonel John Henry Patterson.

He had their skins made into rugs before selling them, some years later, to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for a sum of $5,000.

Today, the Indian material culture found all over East Africa could not have happened without the Kenya-Uganda Railway, even though there were further migrations later on from India.

Demand for various services was created at the outposts, and hundreds of Indian merchants, mainly from Gujarati and Goa in the form of tailors, shopkeepers and barbers, arrived in Kenya and to some extent Uganda to take up economic opportunities that were still alien to the indigenous communities.

Later migrations from India were traced to settlers who, having established themselves, sent for their families. By 1911, the Indian population in Kenya stood at 12,000 compared to 3,000 Europeans.

Despite the 1906 order that barred non-Europeans from owning land in the “White Highlands”, the Indians were not hampered. They concentrated on their trade in urban centres like Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru, Kitale, Eldoret, Thika and Meru.

By independence in 1963, very few of them took the option of moving to Britain. But between 1968 and 1969, the Jomo Kenyatta government introduced the economic Africanisation programme, which led to the replacement of many Indians from the civil service.

The 1969 Trade Licence Act also barred Indians from operating businesses in remote areas, but the Indians interpreted it as an issue of being sacrificed at the altar of promoting indigenous enterprises.

As a result, there was an exodus of close to 20,000 Indians, who left Kenya for Britain and other countries like Canada, Australia and the US.

Though Indians pervade every facet of East Africa’s commercial life, their presence in this region remains far less known compared to East Africa’s white settlers, who imported them.

It was the dukawalla— not European settlers— who first moved into new colonial areas, laying the groundwork for the colonialist economy based on cash for food and goods.

But even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania, especially in Zanzibar, numbering 6,000 by 1875.

While many black East Africans have learned the art of business, Indians still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kenya, as do ethnic Indians in Uganda and Tanzanian cities.

The five East African Community (EAC) countries are currently running modern economies, with a combined GDP of $80 billion, the foundation of which was laid by the Indian railway workers.

The biggest blow to Indians in the region came in 1972, when Idi Amin, gave the nearly 75,000 Ugandans of Asian descent 90 days to pack their bags and leave the country. These descendants of the dukawallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 per cent of the population.

Their businesses were nationalised and given to Amin’s cohorts, only to be plundered and ruined. Some 27,000 Ugandan Indians moved to Britain, another 6,100 to Canada, 1,100 to the United States, while the rest scattered to other Asian and European countries.

Today, however, many of these same ethnic Indians have returned.

Some extended families — the backbone of the Indian ethnic group — are prospering under Uganda’s new openness.

Two extended Indian families, the Mehtas and Madhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda, while in Kenya; the Manu Chandaria is a household name.