Publications
Partners
It is just after sunset, and Ali sails into the darkness, alone in his dhow, the way his forefathers did for centuries before him. He uses the stars and experience for navigation.
I am in Mombasa, a city that was founded around 900 AD and, according to my GPS, it is about 440km from Nairobi. That is about the same distance as the journey between Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg.
I arrived this afternoon, on the new train called the Madaraka Express. The journey took just over five and a half hours, which is about the same time as it takes to drive from the City of Gold to the green hills of the Midlands.
Kenya provides proof that railways are the wheels of economic growth, because they ease the movement of people and goods.
The Nairobi-Mombasa railway was made famous by Charles Miller in his book The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism, which is about the building of the Uganda-Kenya Railway, and the challenges that came with it.
For starters, the railway was named after its final destination, Uganda, even though 660 miles of it were in Kenya. The British built it to protect their interests from the Germans. Among Uganda’s treasures is the source of the Nile; and there is an old adage that whoever controls the source of the river, controls its mouth too and so, for Britain, controlling the source of the Nile meant controlling Egypt, where the mouth of this majestic river is situated.
“Perhaps the most difficult part of the railway’s construction was the 330 miles that lay between Mombasa and Nairobi. A section that was plagued by untold misfortune, among them; diseases, drought, desertions, and most infamously, man-eating lions,” complained the then chief engineer, George Whitehouse.
I got to travel on this mythical railway, courtesy of the managing director of Kenya Railways, Atanas Maina, who first told me about Miller’s book.
Maina has a disarming sense of humour. You never see it coming and it is always accompanied by a mocking smile, especially when he talks about Miller’s book and the problems the constructors faced.
You can tell that he had his own share of challenges when proposing and building this line. He carved himself a place in the history of the development of Africa, as the Madaraka Express was unveiled on June 1, Kenya’s Independence Day.
It was not a celebration of the past, but a confirmation of a bright future, because the train has carried more than 440 000 passengers so far. The hostess in my coach was Monica Achieng and her beaming smile was as natural as her helpfulness.
I didn’t see any lions on the way, but I did see elephant, wildebeest and buck. I fell in love with a place called Kibwezi, which is a baobab paradise. Here you see them in all their glory, some fatter than others, some shorter, and some dead and lying on the ground.
It is amazing that so many Africans die without ever seeing a baobab tree with their own eyes, yet there are children who have half a dozen of them in their back yard. After the train had just passed Miyasenyi, I saw a stunted baobab that was completely misplaced among acacia trees.
It is no longer only the dawn of optimism that is lighting up Africa. We’ve had that before, only to be disappointed by the dust of instability and political infighting.
Africa has now delivered younger leaders like Maina and others, who are delivering Africa’s future by the trainload.
Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency
* Sign up to Fin24's top news in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TO FIN24 NEWSLETTER
