Steel Tracks and Social Change: African and Asian Railway Workers, Racial Labour Hierarchies, and the Making of Colonial Kenya's Railway Towns, 1895–1963

Abstract

This study examines how the construction and staffing of the Uganda Railway (1895–1901) institutionalised racial hierarchy in colonial Kenya’s labour market and urban geography, while distinguishing the railway as infrastructure from the specific colonial policies that enabled African land alienation along its route. It draws on railway personnel files, wage registers and staff establishment lists, as catalogued and analysed in the historiographical literature, alongside published primary sources, including the 1904 and 1911 Anglo-Maasai agreements and the 1913 legal challenge, and secondary scholarship on European, Asian and African experiences of the railway. Because these records were compiled for administrative purposes, they provide unusually precise evidence of occupational grade, wages and race but offer limited and uneven insight into workers’ experiences and displaced communities; this asymmetry is treated as a methodological constraint. The findings show that the staff establishment formalised a racial division of labour: Europeans occupied supervisory and technical grades; Asians held clerical, artisan and intermediate technical positions of considerable internal variation; and Africans were concentrated in unskilled and semi-skilled manual work. This hierarchy was reflected in wages, housing and promotion, although African and Asian workers exercised constrained forms of agency and occupational mobility. Railway towns, including Nairobi, Nakuru and Kisumu, reproduced these divisions through segregated residential geographies. Land alienation, particularly among the Maasai, resulted from specific agreements and administrative decisions that the railway facilitated rather than from the infrastructure itself. The study demonstrates the value of railway administrative records for integrating Kenya’s labour, urban and land histories while identifying the need for further consultation of original archival series.