7/16/98: Up late, demonstration, lunch out, railway museum, lots of walking.
NOTE: The photo above is from the facebook page of The Nairobi Railway Museum.
7/16/23: Our visit to the The Nairobi Railway Museum was quite fascinating. I am not a train-spotter, but the history on display shows how vital infrastructure, like train lines, helped to develop Kenya as a colony, and played a key part in its birth as an independent country. Besides slave and immigrant labor that began to build the rail lines in the 19th century, there were startling stories of danger faced by laborers, engineers and inspectors alike. Sir Charles Henry Ryall was a railway inspector who set out, in June 1900, to hunt a man-eating lion known as The Kima Killer that had been stalking and attacking the laborers. He unwisely used himself as bait in an open rail-way car, but fell asleep and the lion killed him instead, showing that history and danger go hand in hand. The actual rail car in which the attack took place is on display at the museum.
You can read his story in chapter 25 of a book called “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo And Other East African Adventures,” by Lieut.-Col. J. H. Patterson. The author himself, like Ryall, hunted and killed a pair of man-eating lions that was terrorizing railway workers in 1898. Patterson escaped with his life and a story to tell, which was eventually (of course!) turned into a film adaptation called “The Ghost And The Darkness,” starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. The story of the Tsavo lions is of particular interest to me as a Chicagoan, because the skins of both were eventually sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and turned into a display still open to the public today.
After the museum, as we walked through the downtown area to do some curio shopping, we got our own taste of history and danger. We unexpectedly walked right into a protest demonstration by the public-school teachers who were threatening to strike over broken promises for a much-needed pay increase. The riot police were present in full force, and the tension was palpable. We were too nervous to get too close, or stick around for too long, so we walked back the long way around that part of the city center. It was an odd experience to be present in a dangerous event that we later watched on the evening news. In a real sense, we are all walking through history, even if most of us don’t wind up in the news, history books, or tales of adventure.
