Author: Neera Kent-Kapila
Publisher: Kenway Publications
Reviewed by Muchugu Kiiru
In the course of the past 100 years, several writers have tried to chronicle the building of the Uganda Railway also known as the Kenya-Uganda- Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Kisumu.
Curiously, the bulk of the writings have mainly been from the perspective of the British colonialists.
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And it is this sometimes one-sided narrative about the epochal project that a new book by Neera Kent-Kapila sets out to correct.
The book, Race, Rail and Society, with a foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, endevours to show the little talked about contribution of the Indian subcontinent to the construction of the railway and with it the making of modern Kenya.
Race, Rail and Society endeveours to reconstruct the tale of the Uganda Railway construction, restating that the project, often wholly credited to the British occupiers, wouldn’t have been possible without skilled and unskilled labour offered by Indians.
As Ngugi also states in the foreword, it is the Indians who provided commercial services during that critical period and the emergence of major towns in Kenya owes largely to their entrepreneurial spirit and energy.
In the 294-page book, Kapila also recounts the horrendous experiences the builders, who could not terminate their contracts midway, underwent while undertaking the project.
As it has been documented in other accounts, Asian manual labourers were constantly subjected to racial segregation, geared towards shoring up the image of white people as the "superior race."
While white staff were accommodated in tents, the predominantly brown labourers had to make do with open grounds during the initial stages of the project.
Later, there would be permanent housing for white staff and temporary "lines" for brown labourers.
And whereas authorities jailed white offenders, without chaining them, on the airy upper floor, dark skinned prisoners were herded into crowded cells where the death rate ranged between 25 per cent and 75 per cent.
The book also celebrates engineering feats achieved during the construction of the railway such as building of bridges and viaducts on a terrain typified by escarpments, floods, forests and rock.
The book also reproduces images of train collisions and derailments that give a visual commentary on the story of the fabled construction of the railway.
Yet, indiscretions of style, errors in punctuation and material that is needlessly repeated are some of the flaws.
These are however few and far and between. All in all, the book is a more balanced account of the role Indians played in the construction of the railway as well as their involvement in the administrative and security organs and commercial life of the country it would transform.
