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| Company type | Government-owned corporation |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1895 (1895) |
| Defunct | 1929 (1929) |
| Successor | Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours East African Railways & Harbours |
Key people | Sir George Whitehouse |
TheUganda Railway was ametre-gauge railway system and formerBritish state-owned railway company. The line linked the interiors ofUganda andKenya with theIndian Ocean port ofMombasa in Kenya. After a series of mergers and splits, the line is now in the hands of theKenya Railways Corporation and theUganda Railways Corporation.
The official approach, British and local, to both slavery and free porter labour included a genuine belief that the man doing the work had real interests which deserved concern and protection. No such concern was evident among parliamentarians, missionaries or administrators for those at work on the construction of the Uganda Railway. It was decided to build the railway as quickly as possible; its construction was viewed almost as a military attack—casualties were inevitable and might be large if the objective were to be attained and momentum not lost.[1]
Before the railway's construction, theImperial British East Africa Company had begun theMackinnon-Sclater road, a 970-kilometre (600 mi) ox-cart track from Mombasa toBusia in Kenya, in 1890.[2]
In July 1890, Britain was party to a series ofanti-slavery measures agreed at theBrussels Conference Act of 1890. In December 1890, a letter from theForeign Office to the treasury proposed constructing a railway from Mombasa to Uganda to disrupt the traffic of slaves from its source in the interior to the coast.[3]
With steam-powered access to Uganda, the British could transport people and soldiers to ensure dominance of theAfrican Great Lakes region.[4]
In December 1891Captain James Macdonald began an extensive survey which lasted until November 1892. At the time there was only one caravan route across the length of the country, forcing Macdonald and his party to march 4,280 miles (6,890 km) across unknown routes with limited supplies of water or food. The survey led to the first general map of the region.[5]
The Uganda Railway was named after its ultimate destination, for its entire original 1,060-kilometre (660 mi) length actually lay in what would becomeKenya.[6] Construction began at theport city of Mombasa inBritish East Africa in 1896 and finished at the line's terminus,Kisumu, on the eastern shore ofLake Victoria, in 1901.[2]
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The railway is1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in)gauge[7] and virtually allsingle-track withpassing loops at stations. 200,000 individual 9-metre (30 ft) rail-lengths and 1.2 millionsleepers, 200,000fish-plates, 400,000fish-bolts and 4.8 million steelkeys plussteelgirders forviaducts andcauseways had to be imported from India, necessitating the creation of a modern port atKilindini Harbour in Mombasa. The railway was a huge logistical achievement and became strategically and economically vital for both Uganda and Kenya. It helped to suppressslavery, by removing the need for humans in the transport of goods.[8]
| Uganda Railway Act 1896 | |
|---|---|
| Act of Parliament | |
 | |
| Long title | An Act to make provision for the Construction of a Railway in Africa, from Mombasa to the Victoria Nyanza, through the Protectorates of Zanzibar, British East Africa, and Uganda. |
| Citation | 59 & 60 Vict. c. 38 |
| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 14 August 1896 |
| Other legislation | |
| Repealed by | Statute Law Revision Act 1950 |
Status: Repealed | |
In August 1895, a bill was introduced atWestminster, becoming theUganda Railway Act 1896 (59 & 60 Vict. c. 38), which authorised the construction of a railway from Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria.[9] The man tasked with building the railway wasGeorge Whitehouse, an experienced civil engineer who had worked across theBritish Empire. Whitehouse acted as the Chief Engineer between 1895 and 1903, also serving as the railway's manager from its opening in 1901. The consulting engineers wereSir Alexander Rendel of Sir A. Rendel & Son and Frederick Ewart Robertson.[10]
The construction of the Uganda Railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria relied heavily on imported labour fromBritish India. Recruitment was overseen fromKarachi, withLahore serving as the main centre for sourcing workers from Punjabi villages.[11] More than 30,000 labourers were contracted, the majority fromPunjab andGujarat, particularlySikhs andGujaratis.[12] Officials turned to Indian labour because African recruitment was limited by resistance to colonial mobilisation and by the perception that Indians possessed more experience in railway construction.[13]
Contracts nominally promised wages of twelverupees per month, rations, medical care, and return passage.[11] In practice, historians emphasise that the working environment was extremely harsh. Aalders notes that the railway was built under "extremely harsh conditions", exposing thousands of Indian workers to disease,famine, and hostile terrain.[12] Aselmeyer similarly describes "deplorable living conditions, low wages, and hazardous working conditions", and argues that colonial commemoration of the line as an engineering feat obscured the suffering it entailed.[14] Long hours, inadequate rations, overcrowded housing, and exposure to diseases such asmalaria anddysentery led to widespread illness and mortality. Accidents such as landslides, explosions, and falls added to the toll, as did attacks from wildlife, most famously theTsavo lions.[11] Historians estimate that several thousand Indian labourers died during the construction period.[14]
Labour relations were marked by coercion and resistance. Ruchman notes that desertion was common and considered a major threat to progress, prompting administrators to impose repressive measures including surveillance and restrictions on workers' movements.[13] Colonial reports also recorded high rates of desertion, illness, and breakdowns under the pressure of indenture.[13]
The railway's employment system entrenched aracial hierarchy that shaped the colonial economy. The Europeans occupied senior management and technical posts, the Indians worked as clerks, artisans, and supervisors, while the Africans were forced to carry out the hardest and least remunerated tasks.[15] Scholars argue that these divisions not only structured the construction workforce but also shaped the colonial labour market for decades afterwards, embedding inequalities that outlasted the railway itself.[14][15] The arrival of Indian workers also laid the foundation for a permanentIndian community in East Africa, as many remained after their contracts expired, establishing themselves as traders, artisans, and clerks.[12]
To maintain law and order, the railway instituted a police department. The force was uniformed and drilled and armed withMartini-Henry rifles.[16] The force was composed of Indians and two officers were lent by the Indian government to drill and superintend the force. A maximum of 400 constables were recruited, and the force was handed over to the Protectorate government on completion of the railway.[16]
At the turn of the 20th century, the railway construction was disturbed by the resistance byNandi people led byKoitalel Arap Samoei. He was killed in 1905 byRichard Meinertzhagen, ending the Nandi resistance.[17]
The incidents for which the building of the railway may be most noted are the killings of a number of construction workers in 1898, during the building of a bridge across theTsavo River. Hunting mainly at night, apair of maneless male lions stalked and killed at least 28 Indian and African workers – although some accounts put the number of victims as high as 135.[18]
The Uganda Railway faced a great deal of criticism in Parliament, with many parliamentarians decrying it asexorbitantly expensive. Whilst the concept of cost-benefit analysis did not exist in public spending in theVictorian Era, the huge capital sums of the project nevertheless made many sceptical of the value of the investment. This, coupled with the fatalities and wastage of the personnel constructing it through disease, tribal activity, and hostile wildlife led the Uganda Railway to be dubbed aLunatic Line:
What it will cost no words can express,
What is its object no brain can suppose,
Where it will start from no one can guess,
Where it is going to nobody knows,
What is the use of it, none can conjecture,
What it will carry, there is none can define,
And in spite ofGeorge Curzon's superior lecture,
It is clearly naught but a lunatic line.
— Henry Labouchère, MP,[19]
Political resistance to this "gigantic folly", asHenry Labouchère called it,[20] surfaced immediately. Such arguments along with the claim that it would be a waste of taxpayers' money were easily dismissed by theConservatives. Years before,Joseph Chamberlain had proclaimed that, if Britain were to step away from its "manifest destiny", it would by default leave it to other nations to take up the work that it would have been seen as "too weak, too poor, and too cowardly" to have done itself.[21] Its cost has been estimated by one source at £3 million in 1894 money, which is more than £170 million in 2005 money,[22] and £5.5 million or £650 million in 2016 money by another source.[23]
Because of the woodentrestle bridges, enormouschasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men infected by the hundreds by diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night, the name "Lunatic Line" certainly seemed to fit.Winston Churchill, who regarded it "a brilliant conception", said of the project: "The British art of 'muddling through' is 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."[24]
The modern termLunatic Express was coined byCharles Miller in his 1971The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism. The termThe Iron Snake[25] comes from an oldNandi prophecy by Orkoiyot Kimnyolei: "An iron snake will cross from the lake of salt to the lands of the Great Lake to quench its thirst.."[26]
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Disassembledferries were shipped from Scotland by sea to Mombasa and then by rail toKisumu where they were reassembled and provided a service toPort Bell and, later, other ports on Lake Victoria (see section below). An 11-kilometre (7 mi) rail line between Port Bell andKampala was the final link in the chain providing efficient transport between the Ugandan capital and the open sea at Mombasa, more than 1,400 km (900 mi) away.
Branch lines were built toThika in 1913,Lake Magadi in 1915,Kitale in 1926,Naro Moro in 1927 and fromTororo toSoroti in 1929. In 1929 the Uganda Railway becameKenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours (KURH), which in 1931 completed abranch line toMount Kenya and extended the main line fromNakuru toKampala in Uganda. In 1948 KURH became part of theEast African Railways Corporation, which added the line from Kampala toKasese in western Uganda in 1956.[27] and extended to it toArua near the border withZaïre in 1964.
Almost from its inception the Uganda Railway developed shipping services onLake Victoria. In 1898 it launched the 110 tonSS William Mackinnon at Kisumu, having assembled the vessel from a "knock down" kit supplied byBow, McLachlan and Company ofPaisley in Scotland. A succession of further Bow, McLachlan & Co. "knock down" kits followed. The 662 tonsister shipsSS Winifred andSS Sybil (1902 and 1903), the 1,134 tonSS Clement Hill (1907) and the 1,300 ton sister shipsSS Rusinga andSS Usoga (1914 and 1915) were combined passenger and cargo ferries. The 812 tonSSNyanza (launched afterClement Hill) was purely acargo ship. The 228 tonSS Kavirondo launched in 1913 was atugboat. Two more tugboats from Bow, McLachlan were added in 1925:SS Buganda andSS Buvuma.[28][29]
The company extended its steamer service with a route acrossLake Kyoga and down theVictoria Nile toPakwach at the head of theAlbert Nile. Its Lake Victoria ships were unsuitable for river work so it introduced thestern wheel paddle steamersPS Speke (1910)[30] andPS Stanley (1913)[30] for the new service. In the 1920s the company addedPS Grant (1925)[30] and theside wheel paddle steamerPS Lugard (1927).[30]
As the only modern means of transport from the East African coast to the higher plateaus of the interior, a ride on the Uganda Railway became an essential overture to thesafari adventures which grew in popularity in the first two decades of the 20th century. As a result, it usually featured prominently in the accounts written by travelers in British East Africa. The rail journey stirred many a romantic passage, like this one from former U.S. PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, who rode the line to start hisworld-famous safari in 1909:
The railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today, was pushed through a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild beast, does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the latePleistocene.[31]
Passengers were invited to ride a platform on the front of the locomotive from which they might see the passing game herds more closely. During Roosevelt's journey, he claimed that "on this, except at mealtime, I spent most of the hours of daylight."
After independence, the railways in Kenya and Uganda fell into disrepair. In summer 2016, a reporter forThe Economist magazine took the Lunatic Express from Nairobi to Mombasa. He found the railway to be in poor condition, departing 7 hours late and taking 24 hours for the journey.[23] The last metre-gauge train between Mombasa and Nairobi made its run on 28 April 2017.[32] The line between Nairobi andKisumu near the Kenya–Uganda border has been closed since 2012.[33]
From 2014 to 2016, theChina Road and Bridge Corporation built theMombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) parallel to the original Uganda Railway. Passenger service on the SGR was inaugurated on 31 May 2017. The metre-gauge railway is still used to transport passengers between the new SGRNairobi Terminus and the old metre-gauge train station in Nairobi city centre.
Research has shown that expectations and hopes for the transformations that the Uganda railway would bring about are similar to contemporary visions about the changes that would happen once East Africa became connected to high-speed fibre-optic broadband.[34]
A documentary on the construction of the line,The Permanent Way, was made in 1961. John Halkin's 1968 novel,Kenya, focuses on the construction of the railway and its defence during the First World War. The construction also serves as the backdrop to the novelDance of the Jakaranda (Akashic Books, 2017) by Peter Kimani, and appears early in the novelA History of Burning by Janika Oza (2023).
The Tsavoman-eating lions at Tsavo feature in a factual account byPatterson's 1907 autobiographical bookThe Man-eaters of Tsavo. They are part of the plot of the 1956 filmBeyond Mombasa,The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996, andChander Pahar, a 2013 Bengali movie based on the 1937 novel byBibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.
Several other films have featured the Uganda Railway, includingBwana Devil, made in 1952. In addition, the 1985 filmOut of Africa utilizes its railway equipment in several scenes, albeit out of place.
I am opposed entirely to this sort of railway in Africa, and I have been opposed to this railroad from the very commencement because it is a gigantic folly. . . . This railroad has been, from the very first commencement, a gigantic folly.
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