This 1901 photograph shows rail-laying through ancient rain forest over the 100 miles from Mau summit to Kisumu. It was tough going but allowed a temporary line to reach the North shore of Kisumu Bay on 20 December 1901.
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Kenia C. 1889
The Kenia was an 80-foot long by 21-foot broad stern-wheel steamer built in Greenock , Scotland and re-assembled after shipment of the parts to Mombasa. She was ordered for commercial work on the Tana River on the Indian Ocean coast, but as that waterway had proved to be unsuitable the IBEAC deployed her on the Juba. Her draught when lightly loaded was 18 inches and when fully loaded it was 39 inches. To defend against attacks from local canoes a perforated pipe attached to the main boiler circled the vessel, allowing steam to be discharged when necessary. Her main armament was a Quick-Firing Hotchkiss gun mounted forward on the promenade deck and she carried two smaller Maxim-Nordenfeldt machine guns. Now iron plates, sections of local canoes and bales of trade goods were used by Lewesâ men to protect firing positions on the decks.
he first of these, ordered by the Company from Kincaid & Co. of Greenock, The sternwheel paddle-steamer was dispatched in knocked-down form to Mombasa. She was assembled there and sent up the coast on a precarious voyage to the mouth of the Tana River which an early explorer had assessed and advocated as a large waterway to the interior. Unfortunately the river proved to be unnavigable and pestilential, and the adventure foundered on impracticability. The second vessel was a 70-ton single-screw steamer, specially designed with overland transportation in mind, but it never became practicable during the life of the Company to effect her carriage to Lake Victoria. She remained in Glasgow at the Pointhouse Yard of her builders, A. & J. Inglis, for five years until offered for sale by the liquidator of the now defunct company.
She was removed from her packing-cases, reassembled on shore and purchased by the Crown Agents on behalf of the Uganda Protectorate administration who were by then desperately anxious to have this facility on Lake Victoria. She was bought at her original cost price of 4,456 pounds and reduced to some 3,000 parts and packages. âOnly two engine pieces exceed the porter weight of 60 lbs., a marvel of workmanship and a thoroughly good job in every respectâ. The name S.S. William Mackinnon was retained and she was dismantled, re-marked, and dispatched to Mombasa in 1895. There the real problems began.
Transportation across six hundred miles of equatorial Africa would be by ill-defined trails over desert and tundra, down precipitous escarpments to the Rift Valley, over 10,000-feet mountains and along forest and river trails which as yet had not even been explored. Getting the action started was even more problematical. Most of the packages comprised hull framing, plating, boiler, propulsion machinery, auxiliaries and fittings, and additionally there were the tools and equipment essential to establishing a dockyard on a remote and isolated lake shore. These latter were earmarked for earliest dispatch, and some hundreds did, in the course of the next three years, start on the precarious up-country journey, but many of them stopped far short of their final destination, relegated to corners of grass huts when more vital supplies had to go forward, or abandoned in bush or desert when the human or animal bearers expired or deserted.
Some eventually reached Port Victoria, a grandly named but now almost untraceable shore where the Nzoia River enters the north of the lake, close to the present boundary between Kenya and Uganda
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Safari Hunters in the 1890s
Hunting and shooting was already a very important part of aristocratic and rural British culture back then. The big game available in East Africa was on a whole different scale and it quickly became regarded as the ultimate testing ground for any self-respecting hunter. Untrammelled hunting seriously depleted many species before conservation was taken seriously and game reserves were set up. Initially these reserves were for the benefit of managing hunting for the benefit of Europeans and was often practiced at the expense of local populations. Over time, all stakeholders came to realise the value of maintaining and preserving a space and environment for the impressive East African wildlife.
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Turkana Tribal Policemen from the Kenya Police post at Todenyang near the north-west corner of Lake Rudolf (Turkana) 1959
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Jaramogi Oginga Odinga-June 1969
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Torrâs Hotel - Corner of Hardinge Street and Delamere Avenue - Nairobi - 1920s
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caption this
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16yrs ago, a 20yrs old Ronaldinho made his debut for PSG. The rest is historyâŚ
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Hii tulitumia mwaka ghani? And since polythene papers are burned will we go back to this oneâŚ
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Bolo Yueng sini fossil kaa guka
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wangapi hapa wanatambua Bruce Lee?
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ational Grindlays Bus Stop, Nairobi Kenya 1966
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@Meria Mata, I gave you an assignment to do; look for a certain photo of Mama Ngilu, and you havenât delivered yet. Whatâs up!!
The photo should be in the archives of Daily Nation Newspaper.
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Welcome to +254 kila kitu ni usiku ! RAO did art the mode.
Asante lakini.
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These machines had sleeves , hence their looking life span .
This was a slaughter house !
@meria tutaftie picha ya kisumu riots during kenyatta
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sawa boss
sa sawa
been looking na sijapata
Yes, I am TBT. But I liked it more when you were extinct. Ferkinâ Tasmania.
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