Out of England
Somewhere over Sudan from the window of my VC10 I saw the coming of day from six miles high. This chill mineral dawn was a thing of wonder to me, its bloodless purity bearing an intimation of the cosmic. Appreciate that I had never flown before. Here was a daybreak that had nothing of the familiar anchoring world about it -- no dawn chorus of birdsong, no horizon at eye level, no trees silhouetted against the brightening. Just the silent music of the spheres. Only could I submit to whatever incomprehensible forces were spinning my globe towards the rays of a yet unseen sun. Only to imagine if invisible gravity were to lose its hold on my plane. I felt so utterly at risk. Yet also a liberation of sorts. Let go. Did astronauts Lovell and Anders also experience a like wonder the very next month, when as the first humans ever to see the earthrise as they returned from the far side of the moon?
I had never flown before. In autumn 1968 Voluntary Service Overseas, the British version of the Peace Corps, pitched me from Heathrow to Bujumbura. I was magicked from an urban life in the world's longest-industrialized economy to a profoundly rural life in arguably the world's least-industrialized one.
I was 21. I had just got my degree in geography, a subject I loved. I was eager for new sights. Let me, please, then do just one year abroad? Somewhat by chance that year took me to Burundi, a little-known country where a vast and murderous “tribal” catastrophe was already simmering. My one-year sojourn there became two. Then, somehow, I never stopped traveling and so returned to Africa a few years later, to live in another severely troubled and more familiar country. This second country, South Africa, was being bruised in far less bloody fashion by an efficient racial (some have termed it “tribal”) oppression. This memoir is focused upon these two lands.
Turn the page to January 2008. Three middle-aged persons are conversing in the calm of an English village where they turn over their recollections of the frightful violence in the Burundi in which they had lived. Thirty-five years have passed, and Lucie and Paul, plus I who am visiting them, are conscious of just how distant the horror can seem now. We sit in the unobtrusive coziness of their retirement bungalow on the Isle of Wight, as the rain sweeps over Tennyson Down to come splattering in against the windowpane. As young Anglicans, Paul and Lucie – he a teacher, she a nursing sister -- each had “heard the call” to work for the Ruanda Mission of the Church Missionary Society. They had met there in Central Africa and had been in Burundi for some years when I arrived in autumn 1968. They had a firm moral commitment to a lengthy stay. My case was different. I had no such intent. I was a venturesome bird of passage, envisaging no long-term commitment whatsoever. I wanted travel and I got what I wanted for. I wanted adventure; I encountered massacre.
Into Africa
On this same BOAC flight in 1968 were members of the Uganda Olympic team returning from the Mexico City Olympics. An unassuming young man, Leo Rwabwogo, sat next to me. We chatted. He turned out to have won the bronze in flyweight boxing. His chum three rows in front had landed the bantamweight silver. This pair had just won their country's first ever medals. On arrival at Entebbe Airport all the athletes got off first. There was a welcoming jamboree as they came down the stairway. Music, hubbub, pride in a nation having only six years previously launched out from colonial status to independence. Lots of waving of the striking Uganda national flag: black, red and gold bars with the crowned crane at center. Public joy. I'd never seen anything quite like this before.
Then after a short wait we were motioned to deplane. From the noncommittal, pressurized atmosphere of the fuselage I was instantaneously met at the door by a curtain of tropical air. It was thick, bearing the odor of vegetation, of both bursting growth and slithery decay. Such humidity, such encompassing warmth, such sensuousness. Forgive, please, the strenuous attempt at description that perhaps oozes stereotype of White Boy Meets the Exotic. At university in England the world opened up around me. I was an inexperienced 21-year-old from a pebble-dashed semidetached house in Margate, hardly a major cosmopolitan city. The furthest I had ever travelled was to the cold lands of Scandinavia and Switzerland. In retrospect I suppose that this Entebbe landing must have been the moment when my Kentish life now began to evade some of the structures ordained by others, those predestinate grooves of family, education, and nation. My older sister Margaret, nine years my senior and having observed me over so very many years, judged “You always wanted more from life, John."
Down the stairs at Entebbe, and with that it had started. My first step touches the tarmac. Oh my, the map says I'm right on the equator -- I'm in Africa!
The British Council man, Mr. Hamer, drove his new delivery of four VSOs into the city along a bright black tarmac band whose hard laterite shoulder was of a color never before met, a really sharp red-brown. And the greens of the vegetation seemed more florid, glossier, greener, than any I had ever met. I’m being pounded by all these extraordinary new experiences. First a dawn seen as never before. Then the smashing smiles in a joyful throng of black faces, at the same moment as I come up against a wall of tropical heat and smell never met before. Then the vividness of the colors in the strong sunlight, altogether more assertive than in the moist maritime air of my home on the North Sea.
Mr Hamer squired his neophyte VSOs around Kampala a little. Here was Makerere University. Here was the king of Buganda's Mengo Hill, access blocked off by armed guards since his overthrow in a coup two years previously. Here was the Apolo luxury hotel, surely recently renamed to bear the name of the coup's instigator, the new dictator Apolo Milton Obote? Ah, then we drove past the railway station. This for me provided one more striking encounter. To put it in context I should come clean right at the start. For trains are to play a major role throughout this memoir. I was a trainspotter as a boy and as an early adolescent. I was consumed by this fixation. Steam locomotives captivated me, as for so many other boys of those times. This odd and seemingly pointless obsession of collecting engine numbers broadened into a more general and lasting enthusiasm for railways, and that becomes altogether consequential in the context of modern Africa. Colonialism attempted to bully Africa into the shape these uninvited White foreigners desired. Railways were the very ligatures of colonialism, whether their purpose was to promote White settlement, or to facilitate exploitation of minerals or agricultural products, or to secure imperial strategic interests. Against the will of Africans, railways irreversibly transformed their societies both materially and culturally. This memoir will richly document such transformation.
The cause of my own attachment to this boyhood number-taking affliction was that our house overlooked all the activity going on in the Margate freight yard. I knew the look of the various locomotives switching there extremely well. Now at Kampala station I could see these Ugandan locomotives had a recognizably British look. But of course, they were British. All made for export to the Empire by such concerns as the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow, or by Robert Stephenson's of Darlington, or by the Vulcan Foundry of Newton-Le-Willows. The Ugandan engines simply ran on track only two-thirds the size of our British 4-foot 8 ½ inches Standard Gauge. That is, they ran on the Metre Gauge, 3-foot 3⅜ inches. Otherwise, there wasn’t much difference apart from the addition of headlamps and cowcatchers and sundry other details. Ah, but there was a great exception, and it provided the source of one more striking impression on that first day in Africa. Something close to inconceivable -- a double-ended steam locomotive that pointed both ways: a Pushmi-pullyou. One set of driving wheels faced left; the second set faced right. A marvel. An articulated contraption of length and complexity such as I had never seen. They were known as Beyer-Garratts and they were manufactured by the company that held the patent in Gorton, Manchester. Only 34 ever worked on British Railways and then only for about 30 years, all being scrapped by early 1958. They however populated many colonial railways in Africa, not only British systems but also French and Portuguese ones. In this memoir Garratts will be encountered in operation in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and most particularly in South Africa. They amazed me.
Into Burundi
Our Kampala visit was just a brief stopover. Two days later we were flown the short hop over Uganda’s southwestern Kigezi region, over the thousand hills of Rwanda and Burundi, and descended to the capital Bujumbura. It was clear that these regions were the densely populated heart of Africa. I rather unsuccessfully tried to take a geographer’s color slides as we flew over the circular family compounds dispersed across the hillsides. Right next to each thatched house , the rugo, would be the clump of banana trees. Then, close by, the vegetable gardens where the women labored to produce beans, peas, sweet potatoes, sorghum. Plus the small geometric, often 6 x 6 plots of coffee bushes introduced by the colonialists as a cash crop, both for export revenue and for generating tax-paying potential among the peasantry. And furthest from the dwelling would be the open hillbrows and tops where, free of tsetse fly at this altitude, grazed the beautiful cattle. Ah, so beautiful these cattle with such great lyre-shaped horns, watched by the men and especially, it seemed, by the small barefoot boys who also served as goatherds and few of whom were ever to see the interior of a classroom.
After two or three days in a tropical Bujumbura lying at 2,500 feet altitude in the Great African Rift Valley’s western arm, we were dispersed to our various posts. Mine was on an Anglican mission station named Matana. We reached it by an at least three-hour drive over a bone shaking dirt road. The earlier portion was dramatic and in one lengthy stretch single lane as it grappled its way up the side of the Rift. We then gained the pastures of the upland plateaus where the elegant cattle seemed to be the signature of our region, Bututsi. On we rattled to Matana, this gentle eminence the mwami (king) had offered to the British missionaries in the 1930s -- Did not this upland spot seem some kind of Tutsi idyll, a homeland of cattle and kingship and dominion? To greatly oversimplify, the Hutu people, accounting for 85% of the population, were subsistence cultivators, working the soil with hoes. The Tutsi, the 15% minority, had customarily been the rulers and raised cattle, source of wealth. So here in the Bututsi landscape garden plots were less visible. This was not the land of the coffee plots of the Hutu peasant who had via Belgian colonial taxation been strongarmed, in Bronislaw Malinowski’s words of 1930, “to labor on products he did not want to produce so that he might satisfy needs that he did not wish to satisfy.” It does stretch the imagination to envisage Hutus sipping coffee on the Burundi hills as their recreational drink of choice. Around Matana, unlike neighboring regions just to the north, coffee plots were infrequent. Cattle were indeed the thing. On being asked by the schoolboys about the life he had left behind to come to teach in Burundi, my VSO colleague Hamish excited some disbelief when he, evidently a man of some status, revealed that in fact he did not possess any cows back in Britain.
One imagines that if outsiders possess any knowledge of Burundi whatsoever it is likely to concern the country’s internal political strife. It has usually been oversimplified as some bred-in-the-bone, long-established contention between two “tribes”, Hutu versus Tutsi. I shall pass over this matter here because the contention became utterly violent after my departure, and whose after-effects I encountered in person only upon my return to Matana in 1975. I shall relate in great and terrible detail what I at that time directly learned of the 1972 ethnic cleansing later in this memoir.
How far away it all felt! I had only ever lived in southern England and you might say I was pretty much a kid. My work in this oh-so-different land was being done in French, a foreign language. Ninety percent of those around me spoke yet another language, and one as yet utterly unintelligible to me. When would I ever have heard even one word of Kirundi? It took me a long time to really start learning it. I wasn't one to plunge in and push forward. I was reticent; at first I felt inadequate for I had no training as a linguist. And John Hughes, with his Oxford degree in Modern Languages, did all the talking in Kirundi on behalf of our VSO household of three or four young Englishmen. "Hughes" became "Yuzi" in Kirundi. My name became something altogether wondrous: "Yohani Y’uburengirazuba.” Yohani was John, nothing special -- but "Y’uburengirazuba "? Unpack those polysyllables and one finds that Kirundi is designating me to be John "from the place where the sun has gone." Western … but transformed through the prism of African poetics. The Kirundi language had flair; it imaginatively created an onomatopoeic name for the wondrous flying machine the President used, a helicopter: kazhuga-zhuga. Just say it out loud. Another choice example, an oil drum. Imagine it being rolled along a hardened, uneven dirt surface, as with a fretted Burundi road or at our Matana marketplace: ingunguru.
This would be my isolated home for two years. It was a very constricted life. Work was the thing. It had to be. I labored very hard at my teaching, especially as at first my French needed to get up to speed. We lived in austerity and moral seriousness at Matana, whose tone was set by the missionaries. My admiration for the medical missionaries remains great. A teacher doesn't need too much equipment: a room with desks, a blackboard, and some colored chalk sufficed; that’s all we VSOs had. Whereas effective healthcare demands all kinds of supporting materials. Yet the doctor and the handful of missionary nurses at Matana Hospital had to work with very little. For example, as a matter of course we re-used syringes sent out from British hospitals which then we sterilized; presumably this was before heroin use became widespread, and certainly prior to AIDS. Anesthesia was rudimentary; simply facemasks onto which chloroform and ether were dripped. Knowing virtually nothing of anatomy, inquisitiveness prompted me to request to be present at surgery, and Dr Geoffrey Stanley-Smith allowed me to come and view a number of operations.
The first of them all was a Caesarean delivery. I felt I was present at a miracle. The incision parted the fit-to-burst flesh of the petite woman's belly and an instantly crying perfect baby was lifted out. On a couple of occasions I was actually useful, being instructed to clamp down on the thighs of the sedated patient to stop them from twitching as the surgeon worked. One of these operations was a gastroenterostomy; another involved opening up a lower leg and scraping away at the bone; it seemed to resemble carpentry. These latter ops may have been with Geoff’s successor, Dr Marion Turner, who while I was there actually had a short paper published in The Lancet: "Pharyngeal Leeches." Imagine: a woman goes down to the river to get water in a big gourd, which she head-carries back up to the homestead. Here she decants the water into various vessels, and maybe from one she takes a drink without paying full attention. There are leeches from the river in there, and down into her gullet they go. Marion’s Lancet piece was about how to get them out.
On another occasion the facilities of the hospital, despite being so rudimentary, were directly able to aid me in teaching. Our VSO superiors in London had said they were among other things looking for “resourcefulness.” Consider the following. One is teaching in Burundi, 4° south of the equator, and in the worn colonial-era Belgian geography textbook provided, up pops the topic of glaciers. Glaciers. Evidently, none of the students had ever seen them -- indeed I their teacher had only seen them one time, in Switzerland -- and there can be no word in the Kirundi language for the concept of "a river of ice." Nor is there really a word for "ice." Down in the capital, for example, the Coca-Cola bottling plant advertised its wares on a big billboard: Buvez Coca-Cola glacé/Nimunywe Coca-Cola ikanye cane. "Drink Coca-Cola iced," the French language encouraged, whereas "Drink Coca-Cola very cold" was all that could be offered by Kirundi. No literal translation is possible. Now, Matana hospital did have a small refrigerator, which must have run on paraffin or whatever. The refrigerator held such items as anti-snakebite serum. I asked if I could come and take some ice from its freezer to show my physical geography class. I sped with a handful from the hospital to the school, hardly any melted on the shortish distance, and as I ran into the classroom shouted out "This is what a glacier is made of!" Then I lobbed some of it to a student sitting in the back row: "Nahimana, catch!" Nahimana cupped his hands, caught it, and forthwith threw it to the floor. "It burns!" he cried out.
What might be as unknowable as the world of ice? How about industrial capitalism and the cities which it engendered? This also was on my obligatory syllabus. How in my history and geography classes to describe Manchester, let alone a London with twice as many inhabitants then as the entire country of Burundi? How also to get across the gist of the great political currents framing life in those cities: capitalism as opposed to socialism as opposed to communism? Despite what was written in the dog-eared Belgian history textbooks (I do recall that one of them furnished the immaterial, indeed for rural Burundi surreal, fact that the national anthem of Belgium was La Brabançonne) certain of the students were receiving a resoundingly different ideological viewpoint. What about the reasons for the current divide between the rich and the poor nations of the world? A number of students passed around illustrated propaganda mailed from the People’s Republic of China. Even if colonialism was done, the color-printed magazine asserted, neo-colonialism was pervasive. There was just one day, I remember, when something had gone wrong in the class preceding mine, and there was a surly mood when I walked in. Two or three students soon accused me of being a colonialist. I responded heatedly, protesting righteously, oh no, not I, I am not here to exploit you. Other students came to my aid to defend me then and there, and the moment passed. It was the only time in two years that anything of that nature occurred.
I did not dwell on their accusations. It was only decades later that I began to ask myself if I had been an unwitting agent of some species of soft neocolonialism? Truly, I do mean unwitting. I was a naif, trusting as did some other VSOs in Nyerere’s “African socialism”. We built hopes on Frelimo in Mozambique, and as a geographer from Africa of my generation said to me in France forty years later, “We believed in ‘Development’.”
Evening entertainment was Scrabble at nurse Marjorie Wheeler’s bungalow. If the montane climate was agreeably cool, the romantic temperature was Absolute Zero. Nary a hint of eroticism. Loneliness was the greatest trial. Communication with one’s previous life was extremely limited, because rudimentary. There were no cell phones then, no international telephone up there plus the once-weekly postal service had to deal with that single-track dirt road we termed "The Barrier." There was one gate barring the top, and a second at the bottom. In the rainy season this precipitous section might turn into close-to-impassable mud or even wash away. Thereby the mail lorry might not get up for two or even for three weeks. This was deprivation indeed. There's a Simon and Garfunkel song released at that very time that has always resonated with me, one I take to be an Ode to the Lonesome Peace Corpsman: "Why don't you write me, I'm out in the jungle, I’m hungry to hear you… A letter would brighten my loneliest evening."
Surely, receiving the mail was one of the highlights of our little lives. My sister in Manchester had arranged for me to receive the airmail (thus on very thin paper) Guardian Weekly. I do recall on only one occasion another of the VSOs opening the newspaper to read the latest. I remember being irritated that he had done this but held my tongue and merely stewed inwardly at what I felt was a certain presumption. Somewhere subsequently I know I have read a short story -- likely Somerset Maugham’s? -- where a violent row explodes over some similar tiny incident in a cramped and isolated male colonial household. I am also reminded of how I became irritated by a footling issue, just the manner of another of my three colleagues. When we were apportioning various small tasks among ourselves down in Bujumbura -- for example, which of us would be the one to stop by the Regideso, the water authority -- he said “I’m commissioning you to….” Perhaps all he meant to say was “Would you mind being the one to go there, please?” But commissioned? I remember thinking it was just a little bit lordly of him. Maybe he had a Cadet Corps kind of background, but still I felt a subaltern’s resentment. I held my tongue.
High on the skyline to the southwest was the distant silhouette of a Roman Catholic station, Rumeza, where missionary priests of the White Fathers of Africa worked. Pent-up energy seethed within me, so I decided to walk there, up hill and down dale by, you might say, Zenning it. It worked. I cannot recall what time I had started out, but I know I arrived feeling I had been venturesome. I felt wondrously alive, covered in fast-drying sweat, having surged up that last steep slope from the valley bottom beneath their mission station.
I may have previously met one of the two Rumeza Pères Blancs at Matana’s neighboring Catholic mission of Butwe. But on this occasion my arrival at their door was a moment of intense surprise: unfamiliar White faces simply did not appear out of the deep valley below their solidly built redbrick compound. Nor would any White face ever appear without the accompaniment, long-announced over the quiet, machine-free hills, of the sound of a motor. The quiet was one of the signatures of Matana life. On a number of occasions on moist and still early mornings, the atmospheric conditions were such that we could watch two men conversing with each other across a shallow valley. Let’s say a quarter of a mile apart, without raising their voices.
The Rumeza pères’ coffee was welcome, with it came conversation, and time ran away agreeably. My companionship was a diversion. I had assumed I could make it back by dark, but now I was urged to stay for an early supper enhanced by a modicum of communion wine. It became evident that one of them was to take me back to Matana by the dirt roads as pillion on his indestructible-looking Triumph motorbike. I still remember, all these years later, the deep noisy power of the big black beast, the springiness of the suspension, the odd sensation of comfortable insecurity. I hung on to his waist as his outdoor robes blew out behind. Was he also wearing heavy-duty aviator goggles, to complete the cameo? For jouncing along those unlit rutted tracks as dusk fell, he must have looked a sort of ecclesiastical Lawrence of Arabia.
Just before leaving the school in the summer of 1970, I had felt I had come to know my headmaster Aimable Nibishaka well enough to broach the ever unspoken. Unspoken literally, for the names of the two ethnic groups were not ever to be used. We were all Burundians. Yet clearly a division existed in some salient way. (In 1972 it was to be the Tutsis who were the killers.) I did wonder who among our Matana schoolboys was Hutu, who Tutsi? Given the stereotypes which I'd been fed -- solidly-built Negroid sons of the soil versus fine-featured (!), oh-so-tall cattle-herders -- some of my students’ ethnicity announced itself. Ndabuhutu Félix contrasted clearly enough to Ruhinga Emmanuel, for example. But just as I know that the vision I carry in my head of the husky blond German or the sparer, freckled, Scots redhead does not apply to even a tenth of the persons of those nationalities, so in Burundi visible physical features were not any reliable guide to ethnicity. Aimable, a Rwandan Tutsi refugee, could tell. Ndabuhutu, by his very name, would assuredly be killed. So would Harararwe Oscar, whose father, Aimable informed me, was one of the relatively few high-echelon Hutus in government. Simazekabiri Onèsphore, the school’s best football player to whom I gave my claret football shirt when I was leaving, was also to die. Yet he was Tutsi. I was to learn how upon my return in 1975.
Out of Africa, via Uganda & Kenya
In July 1970 VSO flew me out of Burundi to Entebbe. In Kampala I left most of my heavy luggage at Constance’s house, a VSO friend who did social work out of Mengo Hospital. I hitchhiked off to do a touch of touring before returning to England, whence I was to go on to Canada to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Western Ontario in the city of London.
Having announced at the beginning of this memoir that it was to be largely composed around tales of my beloved steam engines, trains received no mention in the preceding section. The reason is both straightforward and ironic. The memoir proceeds chronologically and the first of my postings was to Burundi, a country that happens to be one of the score or so that has no railways. Thus, the only times I encountered trains was when we Burundi VSOs headed for vacations in East Africa. Such travels variously took us to Kenya via Kampala and thence onward by train, or southward into Tanzania via Kigoma and thence onward by train. On the occasion of this final trip from Burundi into East Africa however, I chose a third route, hitchhiking to Kisumu in Kenya.
At Kisumu I found somewhere to stay and wandered down to the harbor on Lake Victoria to watch a burly 4-8-2 North British-built tank engine, number 1312, shunting/switching wagons from the quayside onto the train ferry that went around Lake Victoria, connecting Tanzanian, Ugandan, and Kenyan ports. The next morning, July 30, 1970, I walked along very early to the rather down-at-heel engine sheds. There was the usual gunk and clutter as at the well-remembered London steam depots in which I had trespassed in my adolescence. The difference was that in Britain they had always been impregnated with coal dust, and grimly if for me romantically monochromatic, ranging through innumerable shades of grey from slate to black. In East Africa, however, the surface of the locomotive yards was of a brighter color, a kind of orangey pink, smudged with spilled oil. At the Kisumu depot "Tribal" class number 3117 Banyoro, built by the Vulcan Foundry in Newton-le-Willows in 1955, was being prepared for duty, giving off noxious smoke as the driver/engineer arrived for work with his billycan. Also on shed with Banyoro were two Garratts, numbers 5802 and 5804, likewise constructed in Lancashire but in Manchester by Beyer-Peacock but six years earlier than Banyoro. Their wheel arrangement was 4-8-4 + 4-8-4, which means that as you look at these steam engines flat on, you’d see sixteen wheels on the side towards you. Leviathans indeed; in all my trainspotting years in Britain I never saw a locomotive-plus-tender with more than ten wheels.
Number 5804 was to head my train, the daytime third-class-only passenger to Nakuru. I have the cardboard ticket still. The single cost me 7½ East African shillings, the equivalent of about one US dollar then. A geographer can quickly appreciate that this was going to be some journey. From Lake Victoria at 3720 feet, a 4600-foot ascent awaited over the Kenya Highlands, a climb higher than Ben Nevis. A descent followed, into the eastern arm of the Great Rift to terminate at an altitude of exactly 6000 feet.
This line is the original Uganda Railway, a monument of “The Scramble for Africa." The British expeditiously pushed it inland from Mombasa, the port for the cake-slice of East Africa they appropriated, in order to forestall any German presence moving upcountry from the port of Dar es Salaam in their cake-slice of East Africa. The British goal was to establish the link to the strong, strategically desirable Kingdom of Buganda. Once their railway had attained the shores of Lake Victoria in 1903, they could get directly across the lake to the Ugandan king’s capital at Mengo-Kampala. On that far side Port Bell (named for a British colonial administrator) was established, to which the train ferry mentioned in the previous paragraph plied; the railway terminus on this the Kenyan side of the lake was Kisumu. A few years afterwards Colonial Under-Secretary Winston Churchill rode the train, and in turn Teddy Roosevelt, no longer U S President, turned up in 1909-10 with a Smithsonian Institution-supported scientific expedition. Roosevelt was a bona fide conservationist, for example establishing the United States Forest Service, and also an enthusiastic big-game hunter. The Uganda Railway provided the setting for him and three other grandees to set themselves on a bench on the front of a locomotive, throne-like. Roosevelt is at left, somehow a monarch. Next to him his royal courtiers: Sir Frederick Jackson, Lieutenant-Governor of the East African Protectorate and ornithologist; then it’s FC Selous, famed big game hunter and lepidopterist; at right is EA Mearns, surgeon, ornithologist, and naturalit.
Of the Uganda Railway Churchill bubbled "You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the top there is a wonderful new world." Churchillian hyperbole notwithstanding, the first few miles east from Kisumu were not particularly wonderful, being hot and steamy and in the hollow occupied by the great lake itself. Here were extensive plantations of sugar cane through which we trundled. After a while, however, the line started to climb, and soon enough the oil-burning engine stopped for water, panting. You can't run a steam train without water, so pretty regularly along the line of rail, supply depots had to be established. Such was Koru station. Churchill's description again: "Every few miles are little trim stations, with their water tanks, signals, ticket-offices, and flowerbeds complete and all of pattern, backed by impenetrable bush. In brief, one slender thread of scientific civilization, of order, authority, and arrangements, drawn across the primeval chaos of the world." Many colonialists must have genuinely thought that the Africans, vouchsafed this portal to the order of the modern world, surely would soon enough come to be appreciative of such liberation from their primeval chaos in the “impenetrable bush.”
Not so. The people of the locality, the Nandi, were less than grateful for this gift of British rule for which they had made no request. That is, by the time we had arrived at Koru, my train was already inside the former lands of the Nandi, territories that became the Kenyan “White Highlands”. Here, from the first decade of the 20th century onwards, the British colonial government arranged to put land aside for settlers of European origin for cattle ranching or various plantation crops. The Nandi, however, already lived there. This was their place, but. commercial agriculture was to be established. Rail transport was essential to such colonial projects, for in this pre-road era it facilitated both the provision of supplies and access to markets. Just as I was to see on a far vaster scale in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, intrusive plans for economic development necessitated a significant proportion of local people be pushed off their land. They were in the way. In Kenya it is the experience of the Kikuyu people that is perhaps the most resonant, for it eventually gave rise to the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s and its brutal suppression by British armed forces.
The Nandi, a less numerous ethnic group, nevertheless suffered comparably. As the British moved them away from the line of rail in 1905, they refused to go quietly. The Nandi had spears, but hardly any firearms, likely lifted from Europeans’ houses anyway. They were up against the trained troops of the King’s African Rifles led by British officers. What the colonial government termed a “punitive” expedition was indeed a piteously unequal contest. The result was a foregone conclusion. The Nandi lost perhaps 8% of their population, their huts were burned and smashed down, their crops destroyed, much of their wealth -- in the form of cattle and other livestock -- expropriated. At what was supposedly a truce meeting, their spiritual leader, Koitalel Arap Samoei, was assassinated, shot dead, by Col Richard Meinertzhagen in a manner allegedly both duplicitous and swinish. Once thus “punished”, in 1906 the Nandi were moved into a reserve. If these people had been animals, today we might term their loss “habitat reduction.”
The British had bullied them safely out of the way of the railway line. Sixty-four years later, here I was indulging myself in a delightful steam train adventure at the very site of such shameful deeds. Yet of these deeds, taking place at the precise time of my own parents’ births, I was of course oblivious. Colonial railways were the agents of robbery, of dispossession. Hence this memoir rides a tightrope, namely the intersection of my affection for trains with the encounter with rough politics. Yet how to celebrate the former without in the process trivializing the latter?
Meinertzhagen was a truly intriguing character, remembered also for being the reputed originator of the “haversack ruse” used successfully during the Palestine campaign against the Ottomans in 1917. Fake, superbly crafted top-secret documents are intentionally made to fall, apparently by mishap, into the hands of one’s military adversaries, who then plan their strategy on the basis of misinformation taken to be genuine. In the Second World War this same technique was to deceive German intelligence over the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, as portrayed in the first film I recall that my parents ever took me to see, The Man Who Never Was.
The halt at Koru gave me the chance to leave the slatted wooden seat in my crowded compartment. I had been among mothers with babies on their backs swathed in brightly patterned cloths, many small children, aluminum saucepans (isaforiyas) containing wrapped food prepared for the journey, umbrellas, assorted bundles, and a good number of chickens, legs tied. Down I jumped to the lineside, where a throng of locals were selling snacks: hot corn on the cob, samosas, bananas. Along to the simmering engine, where soon, noting my eager interest, the driver invited me up to visit the cab. He gave me to understand I might stay if I liked. Oh my, yes please!
Part of the wonder of steam engines is that once you get right alongside them, they are so damned big. Number 5804 towered above me. Affixed to its metal flanks at head height were hefty, no-nonsense "E A R & H" brass letters: "East African Railways and Harbours." Up I had to climb to join the driver, and we were off. It had been years since I had last been in the cab of a moving steam engine. It was tremendous. We hauled up through the Kenya Highlands. Near Fort Ternan we crossed a rather flimsy-looking trestle viaduct on a gradual bend, where one could clearly see how the lengthy Garratt locomotive, its portions linked by swivels, articulated itself around the curve. Then through a tunnel, such an expensive rarity on a hastily constructed colonial railway that they simply named the adjacent station "Tunnel." We passed huts and their gardens next to the line. Both adults and children waved. One little boy ran alongside trying to keep up with the train’s moderate pace as it labored upgrade. He pumped his arms back and forth in emulation of the connecting rods rotating with the wheels. It recalled that dance of my adolescence, Little Eva’s "The Loco-motion." People do love trains.
Soon to a station named Lumbwa. Allegedly, when the British were first finding their way through this area along a ridge with the aid of Maasai guides, they asked, who were those people over there? "Lumbwa," replied the Maasai. Thereby the locality, and then the railway station, were officially named Lumbwa by the British, and with cartographic scrupulousness inscribed as such on the maps. The Maasai, it seems, had replied in their tongue, "Mere cultivators -- frankly, the scum of the earth: lumbwa"! Or so the story goes.
At Lumbwa I got down from the cab, for there was the possibility of an inspector at Mau Summit, where we were soon to arrive. On the station platform two public urinals stood side-by-side. In sunken letters in the concrete, still visible though whitewashed over, could be glimpsed "Europeans" and "Non-Europeans." A detail to ponder, seven years after the country's independence from the white rule of the British Empire. Unbeknownst to me at that moment, this was the kind of sign I was to see again, not in the least disguised but instead openly displayed by intent. I was to live in South Africa just a few years later.
At that moment, however, apartheid South Africa seemed as distant to me as Communist China. Yet in retrospect I can link the Uganda Railway to both these lands via a famed British imperial project, Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a Cape-to-Cairo railway. What possible Chinese connection could there be? Well, five years later I was to travel on the just-completed railway built by Mao’s regime from the center of southern Africa in Zambia, north through Tanzania to the Indian Ocean at Dar es Salaam. This line of rail now affords uninterrupted travel from Cape Town as far as East Africa, thereby fulfilling at least the southern half of Rhodes’ project.
In 1975 on that same journey originating in Cape Town I had stood admiring the single most dramatic symbol of the Cape-to-Cairo project, the Victoria Falls railway bridge leaping across the Zambezi gorge from what was then white-ruled Rhodesia into African-ruled Zambia. Rhodes’ route was to have continued north, passing inland via the Great Lakes region and thereby maybe clipping Burundi, into Uganda and eventually on to Cairo. The Uganda Railway upon which I was traveling this July day in 1970 would thus have afforded a connection to the port of Mombasa, all linked into this grand Imperial railway network conceived to hold the African possessions together. One of the Empire’s more enthusiastic grandees, Sir Lewis Mitchell of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, wrote in 1906: "I see, as in a vision, a thread-like serpentine double rail athwart the entire continent. South to North I see the coloured races being conveyed to and from labor centers in health and comfort…." Yes, we British will build it, and then you can work for us. “A racket” decided George Orwell.
The Cape-to-Cairo project was never completed, and one does not know to what degree the rulers of the British Empire truly believed this all might ever become reality -- in the manner that, say, the Canadian Pacific Railway was certainly willed to become reality so as to hold Canada together from sea to shining sea. I was to find a symbol of this African imperial shortfall decades later at Mafikeng. Here at South Africa’s northern border I stood in 2003 at a station through which the Cape-to-Cairo rails pretty much arrowed straight north-northeast for hundreds of miles, off into Botswana and on into Rhodesia (by then Zimbabwe) en route to the Victoria Falls bridge. As always, I wanted to visit the Mafikeng engine sheds, where until just a few years previously steam locomotives had been serviced. The depot, announced by a sign employing the old orthography "Mafeking Loko 1897" was round the back of the station. Anticipated equipment such as the depot’s big, red-painted water tank remained, and adjoining, an enormous ugly coaling tower, now silent. Unanticipated, however, next to some siding, goodness, here was a statue of the Great Imperialist himself, Cecil Rhodes! Yet this was a much-diminished Rhodes. He must have now been intentionally removed to so sequestered a spot. His stance remained determined; one foot planted forward. His face was firm, if not slightly pugnacious. But on his low plinth he had no view, he seemed to be facing nowhere in particular among sundry railway memorabilia: an old-fashioned upper-quadrant red semaphore signal; a small four-wheel worker’s trolley; a staff bungalow with corrugated tin roof and veranda. I couldn’t imagine he received many visitors.
To get back to 1970. Not long after Lumbwa we rumbled to a halt at Mau Summit, altitude 8322 feet, almost a mile higher than Kisumu. Here the locomotive took on water for the descent into the Rift Valley, over 2000 feet down. I sidled up to the engine again. “No inspector,” called Jacob the driver, “It’s fine, come on up. There won't be any from now on, so stay with us to Nakuru.”
We were just restarting. People were clambering aboard, having again been buying snacks at the lineside. A friend of Jacob briefly appeared with something more than a snack: a side of freshly slaughtered sheep. It was heaved up into the cab and chopped into bloody chunks a little larger than shish kebab size. The firebox door and surrounds were hosed down with much hissing of steam, and then the meat was grilled. I had not eaten all day -- it was by now getting on in the afternoon -- and my share of the chunks tasted soo good, chewed off the end of the knife with which we stuck them. And then the coup de grace: a large tea can appeared filled with maize beer. This was balanced on the shovel, the firebox door was opened, the shovel carefully held in for a few seconds. Then out with it. Just like watching a pizza being retrieved from the oven. What a hot and pleasurable brew it was! I hate to think what safety regulations were being flouted and I can't really say how potent it was or was not, but I do know that bonhomie abounded. Our train clattered down the escarpment slope without exertion, and we drew into Nakuru’s modern station as the sun sank lower into the eucalyptus trees.
Four days later, after my first two years in Africa, I was sitting on the familiar sofa in my parents’ front room in Margate. I had apparently picked up some colonial habits, for during that first week back my father caught me out. One day after lunch I unthinkingly eased away from the kitchen table towards the front room to read. "Haven’t you forgotten something, John?" he said in a meaning tone. I must have looked blank. "The washing up?" he asked. "I see you’ve been living a life with servants."