Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [77]
Perhaps the most openly imperialist railway line of all was the link built in the 1890s between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria in east Africa. It is now a rackety, dirty, unreliable thing, a wholly inadequate memorial to the 2,498 workers who lost their lives building it. At different times this remarkable route carried a young Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. The latter in 1909 spent most of the time when he wasn’t either eating or sleeping sitting on an observation platform at the front of the locomotive. ‘This embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today’, he wrote, ‘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 late Pleistocene.’ Now, as you rattle out of Nairobi you are advised to shut the window, because if you don’t there’s a good chance someone will lob a pile of human shit through it. The train passes through Kibera, the biggest shanty town in Africa, home to perhaps a million people, which formally doesn’t exist yet whose cardboard, wood and corrugated-iron shacks probably house a third of the population of the capital – not that anyone ventures in to take an accurate census. But then the whole of Nairobi was an accident – it just happened to have the last bit of flat ground where colonial engineers could turn around a locomotive before the line they were building snaked its way up through the highlands towards Lake Victoria. The ugly mess of a city which grew up on the swampy ground has nothing much to commend it, even a century later.
At the time, the newspapers called this ambitious piece of engineering the Lunatic Line and even when it was finished the commissioner appointed by London to ‘look after’ east Africa admitted he had really no idea what its purpose was. The truth was that the motive for the line lay in the recently created German colony next door (now Rwanda, Burundi and the mainland part of Tanzania). The Uganda Railway, to give it its formal title (although almost its entire length lay within modern Kenya), was an imperial gesture, a giant metal spike nailing together British territory and providing a direct link between the Indian Ocean and the lake which was the source of the Nile. And the hardships they had to overcome to build it! Over a million railway sleepers had to be laid in relentless heat, yet it reached such an altitude that – on the Equator – it serviced what was said to be the coldest railway station in the British Empire. From here it plunged down into the Great Rift Valley on an incline so steep it was initially considered impossible for any railway line. Angry tribespeople fought to prevent the line crossing their land. In the single month of November 1896 a total of 27½ inches of rain fell, making work impossible. The following February, malaria swept through the camps. Dysentery struck repeatedly. Tropical heat and poor sanitation turned scratches into sores. Biting flies laid eggs which grew into maggots under the skin. Pneumonia struck down those with weak chests. There were even outbreaks of bubonic plague. An Indian army officer, Colonel J. H. Patterson, the engineer who had been given the task of overseeing work on the railway, dealt with the first of these outbreaks by putting a match to the camp.
This exceptional man also had to tackle the most dramatic hazard of all, during the building of a bridge at Tsavo. ‘Our work was soon interrupted in a rude and startling manner,’ he recalled later. ‘Two most voracious and insatiable man-eating lions appeared upon the scene, and for nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and all those connected with it.’ Night after night the two lions stalked the camp, picking off a man here, another there, dragging them into the bush