The Line That Cost 2,500 Lives
Between 1896 and 1901, the British colonial government shipped roughly 32,000 workers from India, most of them from Punjab and Gujarat, to build a railway across 900 kilometres of East African terrain. They called it the Uganda Railway. Winston Churchill, who visited the finished line in 1907, called it the Lunatic Express, a name that stuck, though it was not his workers who had died building it. About 2,500 Indian labourers did not survive the construction. Malaria, dysentery, and the two man-eating lions of Tsavo that killed dozens of workers near the Athi River in 1898 took them. The lions are now mounted in the Field Museum in Chicago. The workers have a small plaque in Nairobi's railway museum and a history that most Indians in India have never read.
