A TALE OF TWO RAILWAY
LINES
The
lunatic line:
More than a century ago, some fellows contrived the
idea of what would later be christened the lunatic line. The idea of
constructing a railway line from the port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria and
subsequently modern day Kampala seemed like sheer lunacy at its best. However,
work began in 1896 but by 1898, the tale of the first railway line begins. The
characters who fanned the events in this tale were actually two man eating
lions. When the railway builders came to Tsavo river bridge section, (my online
sources tell me that the name TSAVO means slaughter) they were faced by two man
eating lions that kept attacking the camps and killing men in wild abandon.
The marauding lions
named the Ghost and the Darkness persisted in their attacks to an extent that
at some point, the workers, locals and
coolies alike, ran away and the work almost stalled. The tale is captured the
book ‘The man eaters of Tsavo’ by Colonel John Henry Patterson (1907). A very
highly exaggerated and largely inaccurate version is the 1996 film “the ghost
and the darkness” starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. Hence the first tale
is the historical events surrounding the man eaters of TSAVO. However, that is
not our story today Our story is the SGR tale!
The
SGR tale.
The construction of the
standard gauge railway line from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi was both a
blessing a curse. It brought with it a flash flood of money and a tornado of
evil. Small towns/ markets situated along the SGR route flourished with
existing businesses thriving with the abundance of money. People who had never
held 10,000 ksh in their hands found themselves handling a fortune vast enough
to feed three generations of their progeny. Yes, 30,000ksh per month among the
locals is a fortune worth writing a will over, marrying the girl of your dreams
as well as settling scores with the old man who beat you to the girl of your
dreams because at that time you were broke.
As it happens, before the coming of mchaina (Chinese) and the SGR, quite a number of young men, had
found themselves on the losing end when it came to the tug of war of hearts. Smitten and endowed
with love enough to revive the Mwene
Mutapa empire a young man might be, but empty coffers do not run empires.
In such a case, the scales of love would most likely be tipped in favour of the
local butcher whose wallet unlike the broke young man’s, holds more than the national id card, a voter’s card and a pack of expired government issue condoms to be found in young
men’s wallets. A pack of condoms that the young man would have put in the
wallet when he was fifteen and now he
would be crowning twenty one. When it
comes to a love contest between the local butcher- the local butcher who wears
a crimson read overcoat that was once white, the local butcher whose tools of
trade range from sharp objects like knives, axes, power saws, burdizzo and the guillotine machine, he who has a
permanent fixture in the name of a tooth pick jutting from his mouth- and a
young man who has nothing but a shy moustache and the telltale signs of a
beard, then the odds would very definitely be stacked against the latter.
The coming of the
standard gauge railway was a god sent event to right all wrongs. Wrongs
committed against young men and by older, wealthier men. It had come to right
historical injustices that reeked to high heavens of the callous nature of
mankind. Wrongs committed on young budding love, wrongs that like an abominable
curse would run from generation to generation. It would hurt, it would cut
deep, torment and embarrass. However,
God perched somewhere in his celestial abode felt the ache in young men’s
hearts and send his only Chinese to come and build the railway line so that whoever
works for them will not be broke but will get money enough to enter the kingdom
of love. With the thirty thousand shillings in your pocket, a pair of second
hand reebok shoes, a faded pair of red jeans, a green shirt and a twenty
shillings ‘gold chain’ around your neck, the gods of love, cupid,eros and
Aphrodite combined are bound to be with you in spite of your mouth stinking like a can of halitosis
and fermented excrement since it lastly
saw a tooth brush during the Russian revolution.
Pita (Peter) was one of
the beneficiaries the great SGR revolution. He was a young man of about twenty
five or thereby for no one cared to record the day, month or year he was born.
Recording some unnecessary details like the date of birth is not one of the
priorities for a woman who gives birth on her way from the river for such were
the circumstances under which Pita was born. Those many years ago, his mother
had gone to fetch water from the river when on her way back, labour pains
struck. The contractions came with the
ferocity of the devil. This was her eighth pregnancy hence there was nothing
new for her to learn. She simply laid down the water pot, undid her kanga and laid it on the grass and went
on with the process of labour. Luckily, her neighbour was not far behind. Once
she caught up with Pita’s mother, they went on with the process and after a
while, a squirming baby boy was born.
Pita had always held
loft dreams about the future. He had been conceived, born und brought up under
the watchful eye of poverty. Poverty, like a faithful guardian angel always
escorted him and his kin wherever they went. However, Pita was a dreamer; he
dreamt of a day when he would have three meals in a day, he dreamt of a day he
would eat without worrying about what the next day held for him. His mind would
wander to far off places, thinking about
times he would eat chapati whenever he felt like it. Chapati was a meal for the
wealthy and beyond his family’s wildest dreams. From a young age he associated
chapati with holiness, salvation and the route to heaven for the only time his
mother prepared chapati was Christmas time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. To
call what his mother prepared chapati, would be not only a misnomer of grand
proportions but also an insult to all generations of cooks traced right from
Eve in Eden. It would be not only an insult but also a curse to all
self-respecting chapati cooks. A curse that would call for fasting, cleansing
and libation poured generously to invoke the intervention of ancestral cooks.
What Pita’s mother prepared
in the name of chapati was nothing more than flattened dough with a generous
sprinkling of stomach upsetting demons sandwiched in between. She remained true
to her annual accomplishments of preparing diarrhoea inducing chapati without
fail year in year out. The rhythm would always be the same, ingesting that rare
delicacy, then the whole family would break in a house × latrine relay akin to
a 4×4 Olympics relay race. The single family latrine could not efficiently
serve the entire clan of 11 children so some would be dispatched off in a half
marathon race to the neighbours’ pit latrines while the rest undertook a cross
country race to the nearby forest. The last group of cross country athletes
would be most spectacular for they would be trailed by a horde of chicken and dogs waiting to
partake of their share of Christmas spoils. What would follow would be a putrid
excretion that would scorch the very soil it landed on forming a hard pan that would require a
nuclear bomb, heat seeking missiles and the fresh blood of a seventy year old
virgin to break.
Now, on this particular
day, Pita was awarded his life changing fortune in the name of a wage. As he
held the 30,000 ksh in his hands he felt like he controlled the economy of the
US, China and Russia combined. He was richer than King Mansa Musa of Timbuktu,
he was, at least in his mind wealthier than John D. Rockefeller. Such
wealth calls for careful handling least one lost it. Pita was not the
kind of guy who believed in wallets- mark you this is not the only thing he did
not believe in. He walked to a nearby washroom, undid his zipper to reveal
his ‘safe’. His ‘safe,’ was an old pair of denim shorts
that had lastly seen water during Noah’s deluge. It was a short fashioned out
of a worn pair of jeans trousers that must have been originally worn by vasco
da Gama. To say it was an ancient pair of shorts, would be an understatement.
Pita loved his ancient
pair of shorts for a myriad of reasons. First, it had a reliable set of pockets
such that, he was always certain that whenever he put anything in the pockets,
it would be safe. Second, he had an unequaled
aversion for boxer shorts or any form of constricting underwear. He belonged to
the school that believed such garments were designed by colonizers to smother the
growth in both girth and length of vital tools of trade. The third major reason
was that, his pair of shorts would without fail always conceal the presence of
the president whenever he declared his stature and strength at the wrong time
or place.
After locking part of
the fortune in his ‘safe’, with a noticeable spring in his stride – here I
picture Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things fall apart-
he left the paymasters office and headed straight to the nearest
watering hole. It was that time of the month when the young and old alike indulged in a ritual of
kuchoma maini in the name of kuambia mwili pole . (loosely translates to
binge drinking after a month of hard work)
The waitress was a woman whose age we cannot
place. For certain we would have to rely on carbon dating to estimate her age
for he looked like an extraction from eons earlier. Her face had numerous scars that made her
look like a survivor of the Hellenic wars, or perhaps due to the pigment of her
skin, we can risk a guess she was a veteran of shaka Zulu’s army. That would be
the most educated and innocent guess of those who do not possess a twisted soul and a broken personality like Pita, you and I.
All imbibers of the
poison she sold in the name of alcohol knew that every mark on her face
represented a serious brawl or a cat fight. Very prominent on her brow was the
chief of all scars. The story goes, the waitress, some centuries earlier, had
gone to claim her dues from one of her
clients. You know, before she had been promoted to the higher office of
a waitress, she was in the business of peddling pleasure. She had a stream of
customers and some of them would partake of the carnal pleasures on credit. The
bills would be settled at the end of the month. One day, she had woken very
early to claim her dues from a client who had enjoyed on credit. Hardly had the
door opened when the client’s wife broke a bottle of white cap on her forehead.
Anyway that is a story for another day.
Pita settled on a low
table and proceeded to down a glass after another of alcohol. Five glasses
down, Mr. president rose to address the nation in a state of nation address.
Remember the office of the president is a very powerful office and more often
than not, the president gets what he desires. Pita spotted a member of the
citizenry and invited her to his table. The alcohol in him opened the orator in
him and he proceeded to lay out his manifesto. She was a busy citizen and in
not so many words, she informed him they should go to her house and sign a memorandum of understanding. To this
Pita agreed without the slightest hesitation. He quickly settled his bill and
the two gaily walked into the darkness giggling. Along the way, Pita felt that
her house was too far and suggested they make do with a nearby green lodge.
They quickly identified a thicket and stripped
to the bare essentials.He was about to pull her into his arms when a nearby
laugh of a hyena shook him to his core. He grabbed his clothes and broke in a
Usain Bolt like sprint. In his rush, he forgot his safe!
photos sourced A TALE OF TWO RAILWAY
LINES
The
lunatic line:
More than a century ago, some fellows contrived the
idea of what would later be christened the lunatic line. The idea of
constructing a railway line from the port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria and
subsequently modern day Kampala seemed like sheer lunacy at its best. However,
work began in 1896 but by 1898, the tale of the first railway line begins. The
characters who fanned the events in this tale were actually two man eating
lions. When the railway builders came to Tsavo river bridge section, (my online
sources tell me that the name TSAVO means slaughter) they were faced by two man
eating lions that kept attacking the camps and killing men in wild abandon.
The marauding lions
named the Ghost and the Darkness persisted in their attacks to an extent that
at some point, the workers, locals and
coolies alike, ran away and the work almost stalled. The tale is captured the
book ‘The man eaters of Tsavo’ by Colonel John Henry Patterson (1907). A very
highly exaggerated and largely inaccurate version is the 1996 film “the ghost
and the darkness” starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. Hence the first tale
is the historical events surrounding the man eaters of TSAVO. However, that is
not our story today Our story is the SGR tale!
The
SGR tale.
The construction of the
standard gauge railway line from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi was both a
blessing a curse. It brought with it a flash flood of money and a tornado of
evil. Small towns/ markets situated along the SGR route flourished with
existing businesses thriving with the abundance of money. People who had never
held 10,000 ksh in their hands found themselves handling a fortune vast enough
to feed three generations of their progeny. Yes, 30,000ksh per month among the
locals is a fortune worth writing a will over, marrying the girl of your dreams
as well as settling scores with the old man who beat you to the girl of your
dreams because at that time you were broke.
As it happens, before the coming of mchaina (Chinese) and the SGR, quite a number of young men, had
found themselves on the losing end when it came to the tug of war of hearts. Smitten and endowed
with love enough to revive the Mwene
Mutapa empire a young man might be, but empty coffers do not run empires.
In such a case, the scales of love would most likely be tipped in favour of the
local butcher whose wallet unlike the broke young man’s, holds more than the national id card, a voter’s card and a pack of expired government issue condoms to be found in young
men’s wallets. A pack of condoms that the young man would have put in the
wallet when he was fifteen and now he
would be crowning twenty one. When it
comes to a love contest between the local butcher- the local butcher who wears
a crimson read overcoat that was once white, the local butcher whose tools of
trade range from sharp objects like knives, axes, power saws, burdizzo and the guillotine machine, he who has a
permanent fixture in the name of a tooth pick jutting from his mouth- and a
young man who has nothing but a shy moustache and the telltale signs of a
beard, then the odds would very definitely be stacked against the latter.
The coming of the
standard gauge railway was a god sent event to right all wrongs. Wrongs
committed against young men and by older, wealthier men. It had come to right
historical injustices that reeked to high heavens of the callous nature of
mankind. Wrongs committed on young budding love, wrongs that like an abominable
curse would run from generation to generation. It would hurt, it would cut
deep, torment and embarrass. However,
God perched somewhere in his celestial abode felt the ache in young men’s
hearts and send his only Chinese to come and build the railway line so that whoever
works for them will not be broke but will get money enough to enter the kingdom
of love. With the thirty thousand shillings in your pocket, a pair of second
hand reebok shoes, a faded pair of red jeans, a green shirt and a twenty
shillings ‘gold chain’ around your neck, the gods of love, cupid,eros and
Aphrodite combined are bound to be with you in spite of your mouth stinking like a can of halitosis
and fermented excrement since it lastly
saw a tooth brush during the Russian revolution.
Pita (Peter) was one of
the beneficiaries the great SGR revolution. He was a young man of about twenty
five or thereby for no one cared to record the day, month or year he was born.
Recording some unnecessary details like the date of birth is not one of the
priorities for a woman who gives birth on her way from the river for such were
the circumstances under which Pita was born. Those many years ago, his mother
had gone to fetch water from the river when on her way back, labour pains
struck. The contractions came with the
ferocity of the devil. This was her eighth pregnancy hence there was nothing
new for her to learn. She simply laid down the water pot, undid her kanga and laid it on the grass and went
on with the process of labour. Luckily, her neighbour was not far behind. Once
she caught up with Pita’s mother, they went on with the process and after a
while, a squirming baby boy was born.
Pita had always held
loft dreams about the future. He had been conceived, born und brought up under
the watchful eye of poverty. Poverty, like a faithful guardian angel always
escorted him and his kin wherever they went. However, Pita was a dreamer; he
dreamt of a day when he would have three meals in a day, he dreamt of a day he
would eat without worrying about what the next day held for him. His mind would
wander to far off places, thinking about
times he would eat chapati whenever he felt like it. Chapati was a meal for the
wealthy and beyond his family’s wildest dreams. From a young age he associated
chapati with holiness, salvation and the route to heaven for the only time his
mother prepared chapati was Christmas time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. To
call what his mother prepared chapati, would be not only a misnomer of grand
proportions but also an insult to all generations of cooks traced right from
Eve in Eden. It would be not only an insult but also a curse to all
self-respecting chapati cooks. A curse that would call for fasting, cleansing
and libation poured generously to invoke the intervention of ancestral cooks.
What Pita’s mother prepared
in the name of chapati was nothing more than flattened dough with a generous
sprinkling of stomach upsetting demons sandwiched in between. She remained true
to her annual accomplishments of preparing diarrhoea inducing chapati without
fail year in year out. The rhythm would always be the same, ingesting that rare
delicacy, then the whole family would break in a house × latrine relay akin to
a 4×4 Olympics relay race. The single family latrine could not efficiently
serve the entire clan of 11 children so some would be dispatched off in a half
marathon race to the neighbours’ pit latrines while the rest undertook a cross
country race to the nearby forest. The last group of cross country athletes
would be most spectacular for they would be trailed by a horde of chicken and dogs waiting to
partake of their share of Christmas spoils. What would follow would be a putrid
excretion that would scorch the very soil it landed on forming a hard pan that would require a
nuclear bomb, heat seeking missiles and the fresh blood of a seventy year old
virgin to break.
Now, on this particular
day, Pita was awarded his life changing fortune in the name of a wage. As he
held the 30,000 ksh in his hands he felt like he controlled the economy of the
US, China and Russia combined. He was richer than King Mansa Musa of Timbuktu,
he was, at least in his mind wealthier than John D. Rockefeller. Such
wealth calls for careful handling least one lost it. Pita was not the
kind of guy who believed in wallets- mark you this is not the only thing he did
not believe in. He walked to a nearby washroom, undid his zipper to reveal
his ‘safe’. His ‘safe,’ was an old pair of denim shorts
that had lastly seen water during Noah’s deluge. It was a short fashioned out
of a worn pair of jeans trousers that must have been originally worn by vasco
da Gama. To say it was an ancient pair of shorts, would be an understatement.
Pita loved his ancient
pair of shorts for a myriad of reasons. First, it had a reliable set of pockets
such that, he was always certain that whenever he put anything in the pockets,
it would be safe. Second, he had an unequaled
aversion for boxer shorts or any form of constricting underwear. He belonged to
the school that believed such garments were designed by colonizers to smother the
growth in both girth and length of vital tools of trade. The third major reason
was that, his pair of shorts would without fail always conceal the presence of
the president whenever he declared his stature and strength at the wrong time
or place.
After locking part of
the fortune in his ‘safe’, with a noticeable spring in his stride – here I
picture Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things fall apart-
he left the paymasters office and headed straight to the nearest
watering hole. It was that time of the month when the young and old alike indulged in a ritual of
kuchoma maini in the name of kuambia mwili pole . (loosely translates to
binge drinking after a month of hard work)
The waitress was a woman whose age we cannot
place. For certain we would have to rely on carbon dating to estimate her age
for he looked like an extraction from eons earlier. Her face had numerous scars that made her
look like a survivor of the Hellenic wars, or perhaps due to the pigment of her
skin, we can risk a guess she was a veteran of shaka Zulu’s army. That would be
the most educated and innocent guess of those who do not possess a twisted soul and a broken personality like Pita, you and I.
All imbibers of the
poison she sold in the name of alcohol knew that every mark on her face
represented a serious brawl or a cat fight. Very prominent on her brow was the
chief of all scars. The story goes, the waitress, some centuries earlier, had
gone to claim her dues from one of her
clients. You know, before she had been promoted to the higher office of
a waitress, she was in the business of peddling pleasure. She had a stream of
customers and some of them would partake of the carnal pleasures on credit. The
bills would be settled at the end of the month. One day, she had woken very
early to claim her dues from a client who had enjoyed on credit. Hardly had the
door opened when the client’s wife broke a bottle of white cap on her forehead.
Anyway that is a story for another day.
Pita settled on a low
table and proceeded to down a glass after another of alcohol. Five glasses
down, Mr. president rose to address the nation in a state of nation address.
Remember the office of the president is a very powerful office and more often
than not, the president gets what he desires. Pita spotted a member of the
citizenry and invited her to his table. The alcohol in him opened the orator in
him and he proceeded to lay out his manifesto. She was a busy citizen and in
not so many words, she informed him they should go to her house and sign a memorandum of understanding. To this
Pita agreed without the slightest hesitation. He quickly settled his bill and
the two gaily walked into the darkness giggling. Along the way, Pita felt that
her house was too far and suggested they make do with a nearby green lodge.
They quickly identified a thicket and stripped
to the bare essentials.He was about to pull her into his arms when a nearby
laugh of a hyena shook him to his core. He grabbed his clothes and broke in a
Usain Bolt like sprint. In his rush, he forgot his safe!
