Free It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong Page A

Rooted in the country’s experience as a British colony, Kenya’s acute ethnic self-awareness, far from being an expression of ‘atavistic tribal tensions’, is actually a fairly recent development. While no one would claim that colonialism created the country’s tribal distinctions, it certainly ensured that ethnic affiliation became the key criterion determining a citizen’s life chances.
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    Some time towards the end of the nineteenth century, the story goes, a great Kikuyu medicine man, Mugo Wa Kibiru, woke up trembling, bruised and unable to speak. When he recovered his voice, he issued a terrible prophecy. There would come a time of great hunger, he said, after which strangers resembling little white frogs, wearing clothes that looked like butterfly wings, would arrive bearing magic sticks that killed as no poisoned arrow could. They would bring a giant iron centipede, breathing fire, which would stretch from the big water in the east to the big water in the west, and they would be intent on stripping his people of all they possessed. His people should not fight these strangers. They must treat them with caution and courtesy, the better to learn their ways. The strangers would only depart once they had passed on the secrets of their power.
    His prophecy was an uncannily accurate description of the railway that would eventually stretch more than a thousand kilometres from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It would never have existed had it not been for William Mackinnon, a Scottish magnate with an evangelical agenda and a romantic appetite for empire, whose imagination was fired by reports brought back by Livingstone and Stanley. The lush kingdom of Buganda, nestling on the shores of Africa’s giant freshwater lake in what is today southern Uganda, was blessed with gum, ivory, copra, cotton and coffee. Opening up the hinterland would not only allow its riches to be tapped, it would also, Mackinnon maintained, mean the eradication of the vile Arab slave trade, saving the region for Christian missionaries.
    The magnate and his politician friends applied a broad brush when it came to geopolitics, their rough imaginary strokes stretching across half the globe. The recently opened Suez Canal, they argued, held the key to the British Empire’s all-important trade with India. If that waterway were to be guaranteed, then the headwaters of the Nile must be secured, and that meant establishing a link between Lake Victoria–source of the Nile–and the coast, controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar. Above all, a railroad would shore up Britain’s position in its long race for regional supremacy with Germany, whose agents lusted after the promised ‘new India’ just as ardently as Mackinnon.
    In 1888, Mackinnon won Queen Victoria’s permission to set up a chartered company, the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA), to develop regional trade. But constructing the ‘Lunatic Line’, as the railroad’s critics dubbed it, proved beyond IBEA’s capacities. By 1895 the company was bankrupt, and Mackinnon handed over responsibility to Whitehall, which announced the establishment of the British East Africa protectorate. Government surveyors set to work, importing hundreds of Indian coolies, thousands of donkeys and camels, and the millions of sleepers required for this monstrous engineering project. The colony that would come to be baptised ‘Kenya’ was created almost inadvertently, a geographical access route to somewhere seen as far more important.
    The railway also played a role in ensuring that Kenya became a settler colony. As construction costs mounted, London became convinced it could only recoup its losses by developing the land alongside the track. ‘[The railway] is the backbone of the East Africa Protectorate, but a backbone is as useless without a body as a body is without a backbone,’ wrote Sir Charles Eliot, the