Our latest “Document of the Week” was chosen by our Senior Curator, Dr Mary Wills. It is an extract from an annual administrative report of the East Africa Protectorate (broadly present-day Kenya), concerning the construction of railways by indentured workers.
During British colonial rule, Indian labourers travelled to Kenya under indentured labour schemes. Such schemes were conceived as a way to fill labour gaps in the British empire after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, as South Asian and the Indian subcontinental communities were regarded as a “cheap” source of labour. Invariably driven by poverty, nearly half a million Indians left their homes to start new lives in various British territories under indentured labour contracts that lasted three to five years.
British-owned railway construction was an area of labour need: workers from British India, largely Sikhs from the Punjab, constructed the 600-mile railway that linked Uganda and the port of Mombasa (in Kenya) on the Indian Ocean. The line became a financial burden to the British, but there was a political and strategic urgency to complete it. This led to officials seeking to cut costs wherever possible, including labour relations.
The conditions experienced by indentured labourers in Kenya were poor. The majority experienced impoverishment, withheld wages, and gruelling hours as regular features of their day-to-day lives. Of the total 32,000 or so workers who migrated from India over the course of the railway’s construction, 2,493 are reported to have died in East Africa.
Such conditions led to efforts to organise against unfair treatment. This example, lifted from one of the annual reports produced by A. William Reid, the Chief Storekeeper of the Uganda Railway, describes a strike by Indian employees in July 1914. They lobbied against taxation, for better conditions and equal treatment, highlighting the “inferior quality of rations supplied to them”. The rations were inspected by the Chief Sanitation Officer but deemed satisfactory. The workers were instructed not to complain again.
Where to find this document
This report features in our collection, Kenya Under Colonial Rule, in Government Reports, 1907–1964, containing papers from the British colonial government in Kenya. British Online Archives (BOA) hosts extensive British colonial government records from a number of African countries, providing unique insights into the lives of citizens under colonial rule. If you would like to learn more about the lives of indentured Indian workers, an excellent article, “From the Archive: The Indian Diaspora in British Colonial Africa”, written by our former Editor, Alice Broome, is available on our website.