The meter gauge railway built by British colonialists in East Africa in 1896-1901, emblematic of Western civilization's expansive reach, piped white settlers to the African continent in pursuit of adventure and colonial conquest and witnessed Kenya's awakening process and struggle for independence.
NAIROBI, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- "It is not uncommon for a country to create a railway, but it is uncommon for a railway to create a country," Sir Charles Eliot, then commissioner of British East Africa, made the bold statement in 1903.
Eliot, "who initiated the policy of white supremacy in the British East Africa Protectorate (now Kenya)," according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica website, was referring to the meter gauge railway built by British colonialists in East Africa between 1896 and 1901.
The railway, emblematic of Western civilization's expansive reach, piped white settlers to the African continent in pursuit of adventure and colonial conquest and witnessed Kenya's awakening process and struggle for independence.
"There are those who praised it (the railway) as a key component in Kenya's birth, or we called the birth of a nation, and those who are more of saying that it played a role in colonizing Kenya," Dennis Munene, executive director of the China-Africa Center, told Xinhua in a recent interview.
"We're celebrating now our independence 60 years. And we will always continue to look behind on what happened. We are going to heal from the wounds and now push for Kenya to attain more development," Munene said.
To tighten control over the "British East Africa," the British government laid a railway to control the entire Nile River basin originating from Lake Victoria.
However, the project earned much resentment in the British parliament and media as its estimated cost of 5 million pounds was deemed exorbitant. British politician Henry Labouchere even wrote a poem mocking the railway as a "lunatic line."
Yet, in the eyes of the colonizers, it was all worth it. The construction of the railway was not only a step in the partition of Africa but also a part of building the imperialistic colonial system.
"Whatever power dominates Uganda masters the Nile, the master of the Nile rules Egypt, the ruler of Egypt holds the Suez Canal," wrote Charles Miller in his 1971 book The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism, from which the railway derived its well-known nickname.
In the eyes of the local tribes, the Lunatic Express was an "Iron Snake." An ancient tribal prophecy said the iron snake would someday cross their land and be a bad omen, creating trouble as it went.
In the main exhibition hall of the museum, a row of wood-framed photographs reproduces the birth of the "Iron Snake": British engineers and officers in helmets, uniforms and riding boots standing on the roof of the locomotive, surrounded by ragged, barefoot laborers.
The railway's construction was far more complex than the British had imagined, while the actual cost of life was immeasurable.
Without the assistance of machinery, the 931 km-long railway was built by workers holding simple tools. Supplies such as construction materials and fresh water had to be transported from elsewhere. Man-eating lions wandering in the savanna, tropical diseases like malaria and attacks by locals resisting the "Iron Snake" invasion all became the Death Reaper.
According to the museum, 2,493 workers had died by the time the railway was completed or four deaths for each mile of track laid.
This would probably surprise the British noblemen who later boarded the trains to chase fun as depicted in railway advertisements in the 1920s, one of which bid East Africa the "winter home for aristocrats."
Setting foot on the African continent, the settlers aspired to turn the vast fertile land of Kenya into a "white man's paradise," racing horses and hunting on the rolling green hills and lush forests. They also established plantations of cash crops such as coffee and tea to process and sell in Europe.
Local pastoralists, such as the Maasai, were affected the most by the colonial expansion, and their resistance was brutally suppressed. In her book Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, British author Lotte Hughes describes how many Maasai were forcibly moved into two reserves and robbed of the best part of their land. It was the same fate for the Kikuyu, another prominent tribe in the region.
This colonial economy has left a lasting impact on Kenya, and the pain is still felt.
In 2022, a group of Kenyans filed a case against the British government at the European Court of Human Rights over colonial-era land theft, torture and mistreatment, claiming that the local tribes from Kericho county were forcibly evicted in the early 20th century from their ancestral lands, a major tea-growing region farmed today by large multinationals. "The UK Government has ducked and dived, and sadly avoided every possible avenue of redress," said the group's lawyer Joel Kimutai Bosek.
"There is blood in the tea," said Godfrey Sang, a historian whose grandfather's land was doled out to white farmers.■
