ugandarailway

All Kenya.

The location is Kilindini - the deep water port at Mombasa. (These collection of Uganda Railway photos were previously classified under Uganda and hence the context of the comment.)

These are a vital series of historical photos in regard to both Uganda and especially Kenya. It documents the building of the Uganda Railway. There are a number of duplicates and more importantly the photos need to be re-ordered to reflect the historical progression of the building of the railway westwards from Kilindini on Mombasa Island in 1896 to Port Florence (Kisumu) on Lake Victoria at Ugowe Bay in 1902. Eventually in 1899 the line reached the swampy plain Nairobi (where the future city would be built). The railway was designed to reach Uganda via Lake Victoria and therefore control of the source of the Nile as well as put an end to slavery. The land through which the railway was built was originally of little interest but it had to be paid for hence the encouragement of white settlement. Indian labour was indentured as the local population had no experience of rail building. Many of these labourers then formed the trading and merchant class in East Africa. I am not going to go into the rights and wrongs of settlement in E. Africa just as I will not do so with the Roman and subsequent invasion of the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons and Normans. These were a fact of historical life just as the Kalenjin tribes displaced the former Sirikwa inhabitants and the Wa-Kikuyu the former Athi inhabitants. In my view the two definitive works on the building of the Uganda Railway are Mervyn Hill's "The Permanent Way" and Charles Miller's "The Lunatic Express".