Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The Uganda Railway begins at the Indian Ocean and climbs over some of the roughest parts of the African continent before it ends at Lake Victoria, one of the two greatest fresh-water lakes of the world. Leaving the seacoast, the rise is almost continuous until it reaches the high plains of Kenya Colony. Here at Nairobi, where this chapter is written, I am more than a mile above the sea, and, about fifteen miles farther on at the station of Kikuyu, the road reaches an altitude seven hundred feet above the top of Mt. Washington. From there the ascent is steady to a point a mile and a half above the sea. Then there is a great drop into a wide, ditch-like valley two thousand feet deep. Crossing this valley, the railway again rises until it is far higher than any mountain in the United States east of the Rockies. It attains an elevation of eighty-three hundred feet, and then falls down to Lake Victoria, which is just about as high as the highest of the Alleghanies. The line was built by the British Government in less than five years and has cost altogether some thirty-five million dollars. It has a gauge of forty inches, rails which weigh fifty pounds to the yard, and tracks which are well laid and well ballasted. In an average year almost two hundred and fifty thousand tons of goods and five hundred thousand passengers are carried over it, and its earnings are more than its operating expenses.

It does not yet pay any interest on the capital invested, but it is of enormous value in the way of opening up, developing, and protecting the country. It was not constructed as a commercial project but to combat the slave trade which flourished beyond the reach of the British warships. To-day the Uganda line is the dominant influence of Kenya Colony.

Among the most interesting features are the American bridges, which cross all the great ravines between Nairobi and Lake Victoria. Every bit of steel and every bolt and rivet in them was made by American workmen in American factories, and taken out here and put up under the superintendence of Americans. This was because of John Bull’s desire to have the work done quickly and cheaply and at the same time substantially. While he had been laying the tracks from here to the sea our bridge companies had surprised the English by putting up the steel viaduct across the Atbara River in the Sudan within a much shorter time and far more cheaply than the best British builders could possibly do. Therefore, when the British Government asked for bids for these Uganda bridges, they sent the plans and specifications to the English and to some of our American firms as well. The best British bids provided that the shops should have two or three years to make the steel work, and longer still to erect it in Africa. The American Bridge Company offered to complete the whole job within seven months after the foundations were laid, and that at a charge of ninety dollars per ton, to be paid when all was in place and in working order. This price was about half that of the British estimates and the time was less than one third that in which the eight bridges already constructed had been built, so the American company got the contract. It carried it out to the letter, and had the government done its part, the work would have been completed in the time specified. Owing to delays of one kind and another, it really consumed five months longer, but it was all done within the space of one year, which was just about half the time that the British contractors asked to get their goods ready for shipment.

The English were surprised at how easily and quickly the Americans carried out their contract and how little they seemed to make of it. A. B. Lueder, the civil engineer who was sent out to take charge of the construction, was little more than a boy and had graduated at Cornell University only a year or so before. There were about twenty bridge builders and foremen from different parts of the United States, and a Pennsylvania man named Jarrett who acted as superintendent of construction. Arriving at Mombasa in December, 1900, these men had completed their work before the following Christmas. They acted merely as superintendents and fancy workmen. All the rough labour was done by East Indians and native Africans, furnished by the British. When the road was started, the government planned to use only Africans, but finding this impossible, they imported twenty thousand coolies from India. The coolies came on contracts of from two to five years, at wages of from four to fifteen dollars a month and rations. The native labourers were paid about ten cents a day.

Before the workmen from the United States arrived here a large part of the bridge material was already in Mombasa. The Americans left one man there to see that additional materials were forwarded promptly, and came at once to the scene of action. They put up the bridges at the rate of something like one a week, and constructed the longest viaduct in sixty-nine and one half working hours.

What they did forms one of the wonders of civil and mechanical engineering. The bridge material was so made that its pieces fitted together like clockwork, notwithstanding the fact that it was put into shape away off here, thousands of miles from the place of construction and in one of the most uncivilized parts of the world. The materials in the viaducts included about half a million feet of southern pine lumber and over thirteen million pounds of steel. The steel was in more than one hundred thousand pieces and the heaviest piece weighed five tons. The average weight was about one hundred pounds. The greatest care had to be taken to keep the parts together and in their own places. Every piece was numbered and those of different bridges were painted in different colours. At that, it was hard to keep all the parts together, for, since most of the natives here look upon steel as so much jewellery, it was all but impossible to keep them from filching some of the smaller pieces for ear bobs and telegraph wire to make into bracelets.

Besides all the other tremendous difficulties in building this road, there were the wild beasts. There are a hundred places along it where one might get off and start up a lion. Rhinoceroses have butted the freight cars along the track, and infest much of the country through which it goes. I was shown a station yesterday where twenty-nine Hindus were carried off by two man-eating lions. Night after night the man-eaters came, taking away each time one or two of the workmen from the construction camp. They were finally killed by an English overseer, who sat up with his gun and watched for them.

It was not far from this station of Nairobi that a man was taken out of a special car while it stopped overnight on the side track. The windows and doors of the car had been left open for air, and the three men who were its only inmates had gone to sleep. Two were in the berths while the other, who had sat up to watch, was on the floor with his gun on his knees. As the night went on he fell asleep, and woke to find himself under the belly of a lion. The beast had slipped in through the door, and, jumping over him, seized the man in the lower berth and leaped out of the window, carrying him along. The other two men followed, but they failed to discover the lion that night. The bones of the man, picked clean, were found the next day.

An interesting “by-product” of the construction of the Uganda road has been the development of the native labourer. Twenty years ago the saying was: “Native labour is of little value, no dependence can be placed upon it, and even famine fails to force the tribesmen to seek work.” To-day that opinion has yielded to the belief that, if he is properly trained and educated to it, the native can supply labour, skilled and unskilled, for all manufacturing and industrial enterprises of Kenya Colony. Remarkable progress in industrial education is shown by the nine thousand African workers on the Uganda line.