Nairobi: When the Railway was put where it belonged

[John Ashworth]

When the Railway was put where it belonged

By LYDIA MUTHUMA Daily Nation
Posted Thursday, October 25 2012 at 01:00

The ownership of Nairobi was transferred from Africans without any legal, binding agreement. The whole point of establishing a railway line was to usher in British political dominance; to administer East Africa and to secure the headwaters of River Nile from Nairobi. Read (A child of The Lunatic Express)

But on arrival, the government representative, George Elliot, discovered that there was no room for government offices in the prime slot of land — the future Nairobi CBD — since it belonged entirely and absolutely to the Railways.

To the north of the swamp, what we call Ngara today, was where government first pitched its tent. Ngara was outside the Railways territory.

George Elliot was irked by this arrangement and made it clear that “he would not tolerate playing second fiddle to the railway authorities.”

London solved this problem by shifting the affairs of British East Africa (as Kenya was then called) from the Foreign to the Colonial office. The move gave the commissioner precedence over railway authorities.

Once the Commissioner had become the main boss, he was quick to act in the matter of acquiring appropriately sited government offices.

In March 1901, his Sub-Commissioner, John Ainsworth, announced that his office and the other government offices had been removed south of the swamp, the new site being shown by a flagstaff flying the Protectorate flag.

Today, this is the site of Moi Avenue Primary School and the principal’s office is the very building that was erected for this sub-commissioner. The building still bears the East African Protectorate plaque.

In a sense, March 1901 is the legal birthday of Nairobi Township and it was achieved by gazetting the one-mile-and-a-half radius from the august office of the East Africa Protectorate.

Thus the unsuspecting township became a new link in the imperial chain; a new note in the imperial cadence.

The first official step towards establishing Pax Britannica in Nairobi had been taken — irrevocably.

Nairobi’s functions were changing fast. From a cattle watering place it became, in 1899, a campsite for railway men.

It developed into their administrative headquarters in July of the same year. Civil administration moved in shortly after and declared Nairobi a government base in March 1901.

Subsequently, all administrative arms of government — for the Protectorate — were established in this township. The March 1901 legislation claimed this space for the Crown.

The imperial government forgot that no matter how unlettered, the native-settler owned the place.

And in overlooking his illiteracy, it overlooked his lawful claim, the claim over what he had, over the years, domesticated; his fusing of traditions, customs, memories and imaginings.

In short, his life, and, with that space, his claim to Nairobi as cultural place.

Once London was committed to this lunatic line; committed to the East African protectorate; committed, especially, to outdoing the Germans, who were constructing a railway line in Tanganyika, it was quick to make its authority felt.

The British government assumed the onerous rights of a landlord. It declared without any negotiations or other communication with the native settlers that all space in British East Africa, from then henceforth, was under the discretion and protection of the mighty empire. The East Africa Protectorate was now a reality.

Creating a cultural place is not an automatic, immediate action; it grows out of traditions of associations between a people and space.

In fact, Her Majesty’s government was to spend the next 60 years, with a certain measure of success, trying to imbue Nairobi space with British “placeness”.

The British Government had opened immigration to British East Africa Protectorate but not with the deliberate intention (it was recorded) of displacing native peoples, which is precisely what it did.

According to archival records, native reserves were to be established ‘few in number but of large extent and far removed from European centres’, something which, academicians note, might have meant wholesale removals, particularly of Kikuyu.

Consequently, the Kikuyu were swept out of Nairobi and settled on ‘native villages’.

Some were settled on European-settlers’ farms on the basis of cultivation rights in exchange for labour — such natives were [to be] registered and any unregistered one was [to be] removed to the reserves.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, the African experience in Nairobi began with forced removal from this site.

And since ‘white mates black in very few moves’ as Eliot (the second Commissioner) declared, ‘there was no doubt [to him, the imperial government representative] that the native must go under. It is a prospect which I [Eliot] view with equanimity and a clear conscience.’

By 1905, much of Nairobi consisted of Government land by might rather than right, while the European population in the entire country stood at 600 settlers.

The number of Africans is discreetly omitted in official records of those times.

But a 1907 reference (made by Colonel Montgomery to the House of Lords in London) alluded to 2,000 Europeans in this supposed ‘whiteman’s country’ among an estimated population of four million.

In 1907, the British Government, yielding to the political pressure of about 600 European settlers, created a legislative council.

The larger Asian community that was pioneering trade was only nominally represented while the enormous African community was represented not at all.

The Commissioner presided over the sessions of this legislative council (Legco); over this minority-rule council.