Book Commentary about Africa
White Mischief by James Fox
The British Government had official taken over the country, as Kenya Protectorate, 1i 1895, to compete with German imperial expansion in East Africa. The Germans were building a railway into the interior from the port of Tanga. The British raced ahead and built their own line, 580 miles long, from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. It took five and a half years and was completed in 1901, to great acclaim.
Before that, any journey inland was an Arab slaving expedition to Uganda or a grueling Rider Haggard romance undertaken by a lonely white man, a Thompson or a Livingstone, with an army of deserting porters and under continual threat of attack by the nomadic Masai.
The Indian railway workers imported by the British died in great numbers, not on the spears of the Masai Moran (young warriors), who seemed to accept the railway and the superiority of the British weapons, but from the dysentery, malaria, Blackwater fever, tsetse fly and from the heat itself. Many others fell prey to the man-eating lions of Tsavo, who held up the work for several weeks and seemed for a time to be invincible.
The railway was a splendid and ambitious piece of engineering undertaken in appalling conditions and with truly Victorian confidence. The track crossed deserts, wound up mountains, descended escarpments and cut through forests and across swamps. It Rose from sea level to almost 8,000 feet.
The British Government had official taken over the country, as Kenya Protectorate, 1i 1895, to compete with German imperial expansion in East Africa. The Germans were building a railway into the interior from the port of Tanga. The British raced ahead and built their own line, 580 miles long, from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. It took five and a half years and was completed in 1901, to great acclaim.
Before that, any journey inland was an Arab slaving expedition to Uganda or a grueling Rider Haggard romance undertaken by a lonely white man, a Thompson or a Livingstone, with an army of deserting porters and under continual threat of attack by the nomadic Masai.
The Indian railway workers imported by the British died in great numbers, not on the spears of the Masai Moran (young warriors), who seemed to accept the railway and the superiority of the British weapons, but from the dysentery, malaria, Blackwater fever, tsetse fly and from the heat itself. Many others fell prey to the man-eating lions of Tsavo, who held up the work for several weeks and seemed for a time to be invincible.
The railway was a splendid and ambitious piece of engineering undertaken in appalling conditions and with truly Victorian confidence. The track crossed deserts, wound up mountains, descended escarpments and cut through forests and across swamps. It Rose from sea level to almost 8,000 feet.
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