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The estimated cost of the construction was just over £3 million, equivalent to over $450 million today.11 The final cost was nearly double.12 Soon after the inaugural plate-laying ceremony on May 30, 1896, the British tabloid newspapers began to call it the “Lunatic Line,” and not without good reason. In order to build the railway, the British shipped in some 32,000 workers from India, conveniently overlooking the paradox of using indentured laborers to build a railway to rid Africa of slavery.13 The workers received a pittance for their labors in intense heat and poor working conditions. Twenty-five hundred workers died during the construction, an average of nearly five deaths for every mile of track laid. The company also imported an additional five thousand educated Indian workers to service the project, including clerks, draftsmen, drivers, firemen, mechanics, stationmasters, and policemen.14 An estimated 20 percent of these workers remained in East Africa, where their descendants form a substantial part of the small Asian community now living permanently in Kenya.
The railway was intended as a modern transport link to carry raw materials out of the Uganda colony and to carry manufactured British goods back in. The senior British diplomat in Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, described the enterprise as “the driving of a wedge of India two miles broad right across East Africa from Mombasa to the Victoria Nyanza.” The British started their railway line at the new station on Mombasa Island, extending to the mainland over Salisbury Bridge—diplomatically named after the British prime minister of the day. Once on the mainland, the first challenge was to cross the waterless Taru plain. The Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson first visited the region in 1878 and was the first traveler to write about the desert:
Weird and ghastly is the aspect of the greyish-coloured trees and bushes; for they are almost destitute of tender, waving branch or quivering leaf. No pliant twig or graceful foliage responds to the pleasing influence of the passing breeze. Stern and unbending, they present rigid arms or formidable thorns, as if bidding defiance to drought or storm. To heighten the sombre effect of the scene, dead trees are observable in every direction raising their shattered forms among the living, unable to hold their own in the struggle for existence.15
As the workers built the railway across the Taru plain, every drop of fresh water had to be transported from the coast to the camps. By 1898, the line reached the Tsavo River, 125 miles from Mombasa, where the construction was delayed for nine months by two lions who hunted together, mainly at night. The lions had developed a taste for human flesh and terrorized the Indian workers, causing hundreds to desert the construction camps. The pair killed at least 28 Indian and African laborers, and some accounts put the number as high as 135.16 Eventually the lions were hunted down and shot by Chief Engineer John Henry Patterson, who sold the skins to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $5,000. The curators laboriously repaired the skins and stuffed the two animals, and they are still on display in the museum today.
Lions proved to be a recurring disruption to construction. A year after Patterson’s successful hunt, a road engineer called O’Hara was dragged from his tent near Voi and killed by a lion, and in June 1900 Police Superintendent C. H. Ryall was sleeping in his observation saloon at Kima station when a lion entered his carriage and killed him, dragging his body through a window and into the bush. In general, man-eating lions are a rare occurrence in Africa; one explanation suggests that many of the railway workers who died of injury or disease were poorly buried, or not buried at all. Scavenging lions, stumbling across an easy meal, developed a taste for human flesh.
By 1899 nearly 300 miles of track had been laid and the line reached the foothills of the Kenya highlands—an area of swampy ground that the Maasai called En Kare Nyrobi. Here, over halfway from the coast to Lake Victoria, the company decided to build a railway depot to facilitate further construction up into the highlands. The railway headquarters relocated from Mombasa, and what started out as a tented encampment built on a fetid swamp soon became a permanent township, with proper houses for the staff. The settlement attracted Asian merchants who supplied goods and services to the workforce, and a year later the spelling of the town was changed to Nairobi. Kenya’s capital city was born.
The railhead finally reached Lake Victoria, 575 miles from Mombasa, on December 19, 1901. The terminal was called Port Florence after the wife of the chief foreman plate layer, who had tenaciously stayed with her husband during the whole of the five-year construction period. (Port Florence was later renamed Kisumu.) Several branch lines followed, and in 1931 the line was extended to both Mount Kenya in the highlands and Kampala in Uganda.
Throughout the construction of the railway, opposition arose from the tribes through whose land the track was being laid. Leading the fight were the Nandi of central Kenya. A subtribe of the Kalenjin, they were known for defending their independence and were particularly fearsome during the late nineteenth century. Many years before the railway line to Lake Victoria was even started, a Nandi orkoiyot or spiritual leader called Kimnyole arap Turukat predicted that a big snake would emerge from the eastern lake (interpreted as the Indian Ocean), belching smoke and fire, and would go on to quench its thirst in the western lake (Lake Victoria). Kimnyole also prophesied that foreigners would one day rule the Nandi lands. These forecasts only reinforced the Nandi’s fear of foreign intervention, and for years the tribe harassed anyone who tried to cross their lands—the Arab caravans generally took a long detour either north or south of Nandi territory to avoid trouble. The Nandi would not even allow individual Europeans to pass through their country without the correct papers, and in 1896 they killed a British traveler called Peter West and his twenty-three porters when he attempted an unauthorized crossing—an event that sparked an eleven-year war between the Nandi and the British.
By 1900, a year before the railhead reached Lake Victoria, the Nandi had a new orkoiyot, supreme chief Koitalel arap Samoei.17 They still fervently believed the railway was the snake from Kimnyole’s prophecy, and they united behind Koitalel to oppose the last stage of the line. They proved to be excellent guerrilla fighters in the dense forests and steep valleys of the Rift Valley, where the superior firepower of the Europeans was less effective. Even after the final track had been laid, the Nandi kept up their harassment and regularly stole the shiny copper telegraph wire to wind around their necks and arms as body ornaments.
Charles Hobley, who had now been promoted and moved to Nyanza, later commented: “The Wanandi [Nandi], with the exception of a few in the vicinity of the station, have all along viewed our presence in the country with veiled repugnance.… We were unwittingly living on the edge of a volcano.”18
The constant provocations were too much for the British, and in October 1905—four years after the line was finished—a military intelligence officer, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, was sent to negotiate with the Nandi leader. Unfortunately, one of Koitalel’s other prophesies—that British bullets would turn to water—proved not to be correct.19 According to tribal legend, as Meinertzhagen moved forward to shake hands with the Nandi leader, he drew his pistol and shot Koitalel dead. This was a signal to British troops hiding nearby to open fire on the assembled tribesmen, killing at least twenty-three more. Some reports claim that Meinertzhagen beheaded Koitalel as he lay on the ground. Other British officers complained, accusing Meinertzhagen of treachery, and the colonel was called before a military inquiry. Meinertzhagen claimed the shooting was in self-defense; the tribunal found him not guilty, although he was later transferred out of the area. In any case, Koitalel’s death had exactly the result the British had hoped for: the Nandi’s resistance was broken, and they were no longer a threat to the safety of the railway.
However, the railway was not the only object of African opposition, and the British found that the imposition of colonial rule was opposed practically everywhere. Between 1895 and 1914 the British organized a number of military raids—“punitive expeditions”—against what they called “recalcitrant tribes.” Everywhere, the Bri
tish used well-armed soldiers and crack-shot mercenaries against the spears and arrows of the Kenyan tribes. For the next couple of decades, British rule in East Africa could be maintained only by the use of force.
In the Luo heartland of Nyanza, the arrival of the British could not have come at a worse time. In the early 1880s the region had been hit by a series of natural disasters that drastically reduced many of the tribal populations in the area, including the cattle-raiding Maasai. When Johann Krapf first encountered the Maasai in 1848, he wrote that the Maasai “are dreaded as warriors, laying all to waste with fire and sword, so that the weaker tribes do not venture to resist them in the open field, but leave them in possession of their herds, and seek only to save themselves by the quickest possible flight.”
But the diseases that devastated East Africa in the 1880s, including rinderpest and bovine lung disease, were particularly hard on those whose livelihoods depended on cattle, such as the Maasai and to a lesser extent the Luo. A generation after Krapf explored central Kenya, the Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann traveled extensively through Maasai lands, and in 1891 he witnessed at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked on the region: “There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of starvation glared … warriors scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders. Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims.”20 By one estimate, two-thirds of the Maasai died during this period. Weakened by disease and famine as well as the loss of their cattle, the Maasai never recovered their numbers.
In western Kenya, the Luo too were suffering. The livestock diseases were joined by a succession of locust invasions between 1885 and 1890 that devastated the crops in Luoland and brought the onset of the ong’ong’a famine of 1889.21 These devastating pressures on the population created a virtual civil war throughout Luoland, as clan fought neighboring clan over cattle, land, and grazing rights.
Although no Europeans were present to witness the catastrophic effects of disease and famine, among the Luo the memory of such traumatic events has been faithfully passed down by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. John Ndalo, a close Obama relative from Kendu Bay, vividly recalls the stories of cattle plague and famine that his father and grandfathers had experienced:
Many homes lost their family. People were fighting, and if you had even a little food, people would come in a great number and invade your family and take everything away. For those whose cattle survived, we organized raids and went in big numbers with spears and arrows … and bring back all their cattle.
When we had exhausted the food within the other clans of the Luo, we went to attack other tribes, including the Luhyas, who are our immediate neighbors, and even some of the cattle we got from the Maasai …
The famine also led to more wars and the invention of the buffalo shield. The buffalo skin was very strong, and we knew it would resist any spear, so it led to a lot of rearmament in the African society. So we were looking everywhere for the buffalo, everywhere, because there used to be many more here in this area. So the young men had to kill them.
Weakened by famine, the Luo were struck down by smallpox, which had also ravaged the Maasai. The death rate in Luoland was so high that it led to widespread depopulation throughout the lake region, forcing thousands of people to reconsolidate and move to new areas. This migration reintroduced the tsetse fly in areas previously free of the insects, spreading an epidemic of human trypanosomiasis that killed at least 250,000 people between 1902 and 1908. John Ndalo remembers the days when trypanosomiasis was common around Kendu Bay:
The sickness name in Dholuo is called nyalolwe—sleeping sickness. We were taught to clear all the bushes where the animals were, because the tsetse fly was in the bushes and if they bit the cattle, the cows would die.
When a tsetse fly bites a human being and you are out there tending your cattle, you fall asleep suddenly, and when you are sleeping all the cattle will just wander off!
In 1895, the year that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama was born, the British appointed Charles William Hobley to be the new regional colonial administrator in Nyanza. Hobley was becoming an old hand in Kenya, having worked in Mombasa for the IBEAC since 1890. Hobley soon established his administrative headquarters in Mumias, about forty miles north of Winam Gulf, where he found mixed attitudes toward colonization among the Luo.
Hobley believed that the British could only control the region through force: “The reaction of a native race to control by a civilized Government varies according to their nature, and to their form of government, but in every case a conflict of some kind is inevitable, before the lower race fully accepts the dictum of the ruling power.”22 Starting in 1896, Hobley mounted a series of vicious punitive expeditions against the Luo clans who opposed British rule. He referred to the Luo as “the Kavirondo,” and on several occasions between 1896 and 1900 the British confronted what they called “recalcitrant Kavirondo sections” in open battle. The Luo’s arrows and spears were no match for the Maxim machine gun and the Hotchkiss cannon, and several hundred Luo warriors were killed in each clash. Usually the British followed up their attacks by confiscating the livestock and destroying the houses of the Luo. In this way the British established a form of colonial dictatorship, imposed and maintained by violence, and totally indifferent to the needs or wishes of the Africans.
Not all the Luo clans were hostile to the British, and the colonists became adept at “divide and rule” as they pitted clan against clan. (The Luo have a saying for it: Kik ilaw winy ariyo—“Don’t chase two birds at once.”) Those groups who accepted colonial authority were treated as “friendlies” and received special privileges. British policy called for colonial administrations to be based on indigenous political systems, so the new administrative borders were designed to mirror the boundaries of the pinje, or Luo clan system. However, unlike the traditional Luo ruoth, who acted as guardians of traditional laws and customs, the newly appointed chiefs signed up by the British were effectively African civil servants, paid for and given their wide-ranging powers by the imperial authority. In this way, the colonial administrators recruited local labor to impose control in the region and to collect the taxes that were beginning to be levied on the Africans.
One such chief was Paul Mboya, who governed the Kendu Bay area when Hussein Onyango was living there in the 1930s. An important man in the community, Mboya had been the first Luo to be ordained as a pastor in the Seventh-Day Adventist church. Later the British made him chief in Karachuonyo in south Nyanza, and then secretary of the regional African District Council.23 Sarah Obama’s youngest brother, Abdo Omar Okech, said that his brother-in-law made an enemy of Mboya by standing up to him over forced labor:
Onyango wanted Africans to walk freely. So he had this argument with Paul, because during those times, there was forced labor, which was introduced by the white men. The chief’s representatives would come around and take you to work on the farms. Paul organized this because he was the chief, but Onyango opposed this. Paul was misusing his power. If somebody said they were sick and could not go out and work for the white men, Paul would just take you forcefully because he was a powerful man.
Another favorite of the British was Ng’ong’a Odima, the chief in charge of the whole of the Alego region, north of Winam Gulf. A reliable and enthusiastic supporter of British rule, Odima grew wealthy and powerful from the benevolence of the colonial administration; like many of the new breed of African officials, he also abused his position. The chiefs, who were frequently employed as hut counters and tax collectors, often overcharged villagers, refused to issue them receipts for payments, and forced people to feed them during the course of their administrative duties.24 The Luo historian Bethwell Ogot believes this early form of patronage ultimately led to the normalization of dishonest profiteering in Kenyan society:
Thus new allies were co-opted by the British and new pivots of patronage were created at different levels of t
he social and political system. In this way, corruption began to manifest itself [in Kenya] in various forms such as nepotism, bribery, looting and gradually it became entrenched and tolerated as an essential ingredient of governance.25
The system worked effectively, and within a very few years the Luo were pacified, becoming loyal supporters of British rule in Kenya. According to Hobley, the great advantage of the “Kavirondo” was that:
Once they were beaten they readily made peace and, once they had made peace, it was peace, for within a few hours the women were in camp selling food, and one had no anxiety about a subsequent treacherous attack either at night or on the road. Under these circumstances mutual respect gradually supervened and we became great friends.26
Having quelled the opposition of the Luo and other tribes by the early twentieth century, the IBEAC turned its attention to the finances of the railway. The final cost of over £5.5 million was 80 percent over budget, and the British realized that the line had no chance of paying for itself.