Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [78]
Attempts to poison the lions with the contaminated carcasses of dead transport animals failed. (‘The wily man-eaters would not touch them, and much preferred live men to dead donkeys,’ wrote the colonel later.) Patterson built a platform in one of the trees and settled down to wait for a shot at the lions, but when one of them appeared he realized to his horror that the animal was stalking him. Eventually, of course, high-velocity rifle defeated four-legged beast, at which point labourers poured out of the camp and threw themselves at his feet in gratitude. The colonel shot dead the second lion some time later, but only after narrowly escaping the same fate as the District Officer’s sergeant and scores of others.* How many people had been taken by the lions is unknown – the only figure established with any precision was the total number of ‘coolie’ Indian labourers eaten by the lions, which was twenty-eight.
In the late 1890s, over 30,000 Indians had been brought to Africa on three-year contracts specifically to build the railway. British admiration for their railway-building skills was soon offset by anxieties about conditions in the camps in which they lived. There was, some of the white colonists claimed, a worryingly high proportion of thieves among them, who were introducing Africans to crime. The camps were alive with venereal disease and frequently sizzled with tension between Hindus and Muslims. They were crowded with ‘prostitutes, small boys and other accessories to the bestial vices so commonly practised by Orientals’. To make matters worse, many of the coolies had passed themselves off to their recruiters in Punjab or Gujerat as having skills they turned out not to possess. Yet from this small army of Indian workers emerged not only one of the most impressive railways ever built, but also one of the most economically productive – and politically discriminated against – communities in Africa. Imperial British feelings towards these workers were always ambiguous. In the hierarchy of races that the British imagined to exist, the Indians sat higher than poor Africans. But the station-master babu, with his sonorous English, was considered a comical figure. (One of them was supposed to have sounded the alarm about another man-eating lion with the telegraph message: ‘Pumping-engine employee wickedly assassinated by fractious carnivore. I unable pacify it. Situation perilous. Implore you alleviate my predicament.’)
Yet the British could also see how one part of the empire might nourish another part and encouraged more Indians to migrate to the region: ‘Indian trade, enterprise and emigration require a suitable outlet. East Africa is, and should be, from every point of view, the America of the Hindu,’ said the British Special Commissioner in Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, in 1901. During the First World War, Indian soldiers were deployed to combat the guerrilla war being fought from German East Africa, and at war’s end prominent Asians argued that, since they had been just as active as the British settlers in developing Kenya, why should they not have similar rights to vote and to acquire land? The Colonial Office cooked up a characteristically inadequate compromise – limited representation on the legislative council, while, for the sake of their health, the highlands of the country