Broken covenant in global conflict that led to birth of Kariokor Market

By Amos Kareithi

The collection of unkempt stalls ringed by the forked tongues of the busy road leading to the city from Pangani look dishevelled. The stalls are famous for selling handicrafts such as traditional baskets and shoes although some makeshift hotels are to be found in the centre.

The noise from the traders advertising their wares combined with the blaring horns and ear-shattering music from Eastleigh bound matatus make Kariokor a nightmare. Kariokor is a corruption of Carrier Corps, a term that was formed during the First World War by Britain.

In this hub where artisans congregate daily, optimistic that each dawn will bring more luck than the previous dusk, hope has never been in short supply.

A changed destiny

Although the area owes its existence to a broken covenant signed by the major European super powers that had vowed that Africa would never be used as a battleground for a World War, all who congregated at Kariokor Market were always hopeful.

During the conference in Berlin that forever changed the destiny of Africa and her people, the super powers attending the meeting convened by Otto Von Bismark, the German Chancellor had all agreed they should never fight within the colonies. Historian Geoffrey Hodges explains in his book, Kariokor, the Carrier Corps that the colonisers feared if they fought in Africa, it would not only upset all their development plans but also provoke revolt among the colonised African communities.

However, the Berlin Act of 1885 was forgotten when its signatories descended on each other in 1914 during the First World War.

This transformed the East African Protectorate (Kenya) under the control of Britain and the neighbouring German East Africa (Tanganyika) into overnight enemies as the hostilities of the events leading up to the First World War had contributed to the establishment of Kariokor, which started as a depot for Africans recruited as carriers or porters to transport food, weapons and other supplies to the soldiers fighting in the war.

“The young men of an entire generation, if they were medically fit passed through the Nairobi depot. They were mainly from Central, Machakos and Nyanza Provinces. This depot was the centre of pay registration where the Carrier Corps were administered by Lt Col O F Walkin,” Hodges writes.

The terrain of East Africa and lack of roads made it impossible to use any other means of transport to ferry the supplies needed at the battlefront.  Some areas were very mountainous and the climate was such that even long distant animals like camels and donkeys could not survive tsetse flies that killed them.

 

High death rate

Faced with these insurmountable transport challenges, the Europeans opted to use porters who would act as mules to carry heavy loads up and down the mountains and act as ambulances ferrying the wounded away from the battlefield.

The work of the carrier historians agree was never meant to be easy and according to witnesses who ventured there, the unarmed Africans at times dressed only in a blanket in chilling weather weaved in and out of the battle zones dodging bullets.

“One can almost visualise the ammunition carrier or stretcher bearers trudging fatalistically from the firing line back and forth, at times courting death,” Hodges explains.

Escaping the enemy’s fire was not a guarantee to a safe return for either the soldiers or the carriers, because diseases decimated those who were not finished off by the canons. It is estimated that during the First World War in Africa, about 4,000 British and French soldiers died.

The number does not include the carriers whose mortality rate was higher than that of the soldiers as majority succumbed to diseases such as dysentery and typhoid as a result of poor diet and sanitation.

So high was the death rate of porters that pioneer Kenyan administrator, John Ainsworth, who had recruited most of the porters christened it, “The porters war”.

The state of the war veterans was such that those who returned were so traumatised and emaciated that the stories they took back home made their relatives fear ever enlisting their services. At one point, the returnees were confined to transition points before being allowed back home to recover.

Hodges captures the misery some of the men recruited from Uganda underwent when they ventured into the Kenyan highlands. Some of the men recruited in Nyanza died in their hundreds when they encountered the chilly weather near Nairobi. They were ill-equipped for the weather, as they were scantily dressed while others died from dysentery and exhaustion.

Hodges estimates during the whole campaign, over 100,000 men were either killed during the war or died as a result of diseases although many more would die after returning home from injuries sustained at the battlefronts or from diseases contracted there. These reports made the recruitment of carriers by chiefs extremely difficult, making some administrators resort to force as the Government imposed quotas.

Owing to the fluid nature of war, the carriers also doubled as builders, interpreters, scouts, intelligence agents, cooks and personal servants. Despite these difficulties Britain still recruited one million porters who were dispatched to serve 58,000 troops in 15 different countries. This indicates how busy Kariokor Market was as it processed porters from Kenya.

A woman’s job

The recruitment of Kenyans from the interior as porters to serve the British explorers administrators and missionaries can be traced to as far back as 1890 when the Sultan of Zanzibar accepted to be placed under British protection and was also compensated by the Germans by giving up part of his East Coast to them.

The sultan forbade all his subjects resident in Zanzibar, Pemba, Mafia and the Coast not to work out of his dominions.

The Sultan’s edict had far reaching effects that shaped the future of the colony and some of the ramifications are still felt today, both at the coastal strip and upcountry. Shortly before the arrival of the British at the Coast of East Africa, the Arabs had dominated the caravan trade into the interior and the Swahili involved in slave trade.

The sultan’s decree cut off the trade relations between the coastal people and the upcountry ones, forcing the Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) Company that was governing the country on behalf of the queen to look for alternative means of transport.

This was at a time when the demand for porters had increased dramatically as it coincided with the construction of the Uganda Railway line. When the IBEA officials tried to recruit porters from some of the interior communities, they were laughed at for the duty of carrying loads was regarded as a woman’s job.

The recruitment of porters from the Kamba community saw the abandonment of the trade routes previously used by the Swahili traders through Taveta.

Instead, the porters started following the old Kamba route through Tsavo and Kibwezi to Kikuyu as the caravans snaked their way to Rift valley and beyond, on their way to Uganda.

In the interior, there had been resistance by the locals to be recruited as porters, a role traditionally assigned to women as men were supposed to engage in heavier manual work and defend their communities.

It is against this background that chiefs were ordered to recruit as many porters as possible from their areas and those who defied were deemed to be anti Government and dismissed. Those who met their targets were given medals.

Hodges captures the antics of one such chief, Wambugu wa Mathangania who duped the Government by pretending to be enforcing the Native Authority Ordinance of 1912 by recruiting his villagers who never made it to the battlefront.

Hodges quotes a clerk at Kariokor, Elijah Kaara who explained that many of the men recruited by Wambugu never submitted their names especially if they had not been circumcised. When they reached Kariokor, they would sneak out of the depot.

The Government had no way of tracing them back and when they returned home, Wambugu would turn a blind eye. There are other accounts of how men would run away from their homes whenever Government agents went to recruit porters in their home areas.

Reminder of war

These are the same routes the railway engineers later followed when they designed the railway line. Unwittingly, the barefoot porters charted the first transport corridor where the railway line and the Mombasa highway would later follow.

All of Kenya’s major towns were later located along the route the railway and the road followed, which is the case even today as the potential of any real estate and agricultural land in Kenya is measured by how far it is from this first corridor.

Although the First World War is gone and all the veterans have since died, Kariokor Market still remains as busy as ever without a hint of the role it played in the global conflict although the bronze statue along Kenyatta Avenue is a physical reminder of the war.

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