Timeline of Sikhs in East Africa

Who: Sikh police, soldiers, railway workers and artisans, and the traders, trade unionists and families who followed them to Kenya and Uganda.

What: The main dates, with the sources' differing figures where they differ.

• 1895: a Sikh contingent is brought to Mombasa to police the Uganda Railway and the caravan routes into the interior, according to the Sikh Heritage (UK) pages, which draw on Cynthia Salvadori's book We Came in Dhows.
• 1896 to 1901: the Uganda Railway is built by about 32,000 Indian labourers, and the line reaches Lake Victoria at Kisumu in December 1901.
• 1898: Sikh soldiers are brought to deal with the Kabaka's uprising in Uganda (Sikh Heritage pages).
• 1910 and 1911: there are about a hundred Sikhs in Nairobi in 1910, and a gurdwara there is inaugurated in 1911, with Sikhs coming from Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and other towns (Sikh Heritage pages, quoting Panesar).
• 1913 and 1914: the Ghadr paper is distributed to East Africa, among many other places (Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).
• 1926: the gurdwara at Makindu on the Mombasa road is built, though its roots are believed to go back to the railway years (Sikh Heritage pages).
• 1927 to 1961: Makhan Singh comes to Nairobi in 1927 and becomes a founder of Kenya's trade union movement. He is arrested on 15 May 1950 and held until 20 October 1961, according to the Sikh Heritage pages. They date his Labour Trade Union to 1937; Wikipedia says 1935 and calls the detention the longest political detention in Kenya's history.
• 1972: Idi Amin orders Uganda's Asians out, and Wikipedia, which gives no breakdown by religion, says about 27,200 went to the United Kingdom and about 6,000 to Canada.
• Since 1972: the British Sikh Report of 2017 found that 8 percent of British Sikhs were born in East Africa (Wikipedia's article on Sikhism in the United Kingdom).

Where: Kenya and Uganda, from Mombasa on the coast along the railway to Makindu, Nairobi, Kisumu and Uganda.

Why it mattered: The Sikh Heritage pages say the building of the Uganda Railway brought a large influx of Sikhs, most of them indentured workers, and that those who stayed built gurdwaras and Khalsa schools wherever they settled.