Bitter-sweet railway tales

Kibigori station.

What you need to know:

  • The sugar belt stretches for miles on end, from Kibos to Muhoroni, and borders the famed Nandi Hills.
  • Having seen the different models of locomotives, I can only picture the horrific crash at Kibigori.
  • The two engineers were killed and buried on the platform at Kibigori station, never making it to the final destination, just a few miles away.

The sugar belt stretches for miles on end, from Kibos to Muhoroni, and borders the famed Nandi Hills.

It is a clear, hot day at Chemelil and we drive past green cane fields bathed in warm sunlight on our way to Kibigori.

One can see River Nyando coursing along the hills on its way to Lake Victoria, along with many other rivers flowing under bridges.

I am reading Victoria’s Tin Dragon: A Railway That Built a Nation by Satya Sood and I zero in on the chapters that explore the construction of the railway between Muhoroni to Kisumu.

Less than a century ago, this was a malaria-infested swamp declared inhabitable for the whites — so they offered it to the hardy Indians who, using nothing more than raw energy, built the Kenya-Uganda railway.

They were an experienced labour force, having already constructed the railway in north India.

They came to Kenya via dhows and, like Sood and Neera Kapila, my African-Asian ancestry is linked to the building of the railway.

One of my favourite places is the Nairobi Railway Museum along Haile Selassie Road and Uhuru Highway.

The yard has a collection of immense locomotives — some like the Garrett series, built for a one-metre gauge line to tackle the steep escarpment of the Rift Valley and unique to Kenya.

MODELS FROM HISTORY

Having seen the different models of locomotives, I can only picture the horrific crash at Kibigori.

Kibigori Station (mile 561) was built in the middle of a swamp, while a number of wooden bridges were built over streams between Kibigori and Port Florence, now called Kisumu (mile 584.)

The wooden bridges had to be constantly repaired or rebuilt because of the difficult terrain.

The last few days of building the railway were met with torrential rain.

It was 1901 and the railroad had reached Muhoroni, which became the supply base for the railhead.

It was only 35 miles to the lake — but the heavy downpours turned the terrain into a soggy marsh, making construction difficult — while the builders came down with malaria and dysentery, worsening the scenario.

Up on the hills, the Nandi were not happy with the “new” invaders coming through their land.

The Nandi Laibon (leader), Koitalel arap Samoei, warned of an iron snake and led an 11-year resistance against the railway.

This came to an end when he was invited by the British Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen for a meeting where the colonel murdered him.

The Nandi raided the stores for wire, thus slowing the stringing of the telegraphic lines and frustrating the administrators who could now only send messages through the engine drivers.

HORRIFIC CRASH

A telegraphic engineer called Turner was at his wits’ end and one night he took the train from Muhoroni with his colleague, Nesbitt, a bridge engineer, to investigate the delay.

It was raining furiously and someone at Muhoroni dispatched an unscheduled train to the railhead.

“The two locomotives approached each other like blind dragons and collided at full speed,” reads a paragraph of the very entertaining history book on the railway.

The two engineers were killed and buried on the platform at Kibigori station, never making it to the final destination, just a few miles away.

The modern Kibigori is picturesque with flamboyant trees brightening the sky with orange, red, and yellow blooms.

But there is little of the past to show.

A roadside hamlet boasts motor-bike taxis amid the mitumba kiosks.

The railway station is run down, with nothing to show of the former station platform or where the remains of the two unfortunate engineers lie.

Instead, noxious parthenium — a weed far worse than the water hyacinth — grows along the plantations.

The tragedy, if nothing is done very fast, is that it will render the farm land infertile with its noxious oil.

At the Hindu mandir, the priest talks of the old temple that was built by the fledgling Hindu community in the early 19th century.

When they left, the temple was closed.

Now it has been revived to honour the site built by the early settlers.

Going there is almost like a pilgrimage for many descendants of the pioneers.