Indian labourers build the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria

Who: About 32,000 labourers recruited in India for the British colonial government. Wikipedia says the contracted workers came mostly from Punjab and Gujarat, "particularly Sikhs and Gujaratis", while the Sikh Heritage (UK) pages, compiled from Cynthia Salvadori's book We Came in Dhows, say the recruits were predominantly Punjabi Muslims with many Sikhs and Hindus. The railway's official historian, Mervyn Hill, is quoted there as saying the line could not have been built without Indian labour, artisans and subordinate staff.

What: The Uganda Railway Act of 1896 authorised a line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, and the first rail was laid at Mombasa on 5 August 1896. Lahore was the main recruiting centre; recruits went by special train to Karachi and then by steamer, according to Wikipedia's article on Indians in Kenya. The Sikh Heritage pages say the Government of India agreed to supply labour only if each man, after three years, could renew, go home at the employer's cost or stay in East Africa and give up his return passage, and that labourers were paid a minimum of fifteen shillings a month.

The line reached the site of Nairobi on 5 June 1899 and Port Florence, now Kisumu, on Lake Victoria on 19 December 1901, 582 miles from the coast, according to the same pages. In 1898, during bridge-building at the Tsavo River, two man-eating lions killed at least 28 Indian and African workers, Wikipedia says, though some accounts give far more.

The counts of the cost differ. The Sikh Heritage pages quote an official count of 31,983 labourers imported, 2,493 Asians and five white men dead, 6,454 invalided back to India, 16,312 repatriated or dismissed and 6,724 who remained in East Africa. Another estimate there says 34,400 Asians worked on the line and about 21 percent, around 7,000 men, did not take their return tickets. Wikipedia's article on Indians in Kenya says about 2,500 died, roughly four for every mile of track, and Wikipedia's article on the railway says only that several thousand died.

Where: From Mombasa on the coast of Kenya, then a British protectorate, inland through Tsavo and the site of Nairobi to Kisumu on Lake Victoria.

Why it mattered: It planted the Sikh and wider Indian communities of East Africa. The Sikh Heritage pages say the building of the railway brought a large influx of Sikhs, most of them indentured workers; some went home when it was finished, but the majority stayed, and gurdwaras and Khalsa schools followed wherever they settled. They also say the Makindu gurdwara on the Mombasa road was built in 1926, though its roots are believed to go back to the railway years.