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Permanent Way Vol 2 The Story of the Tanganyika Railway By M F Hill Hard Cover
Permanent Way Vol 2 The Story of the Tanganyika Railway By M F Hill Hard Cover East African Railways and Harbours 1957 300 pages
PART I
East Africa before the Building of the Railways
I The Arabs: the Portuguese: and the Great Explorers3
II The German Intervention28
PART II
German Rule and the Building of the Railways
1891-1914
III From Tanga to Moshi. The Usambara Balm, later named the Ost57
Afrikanische Nordbahn
IV From Dar es Salaam to Kigoma. The Mittelland Bahn84
PART III
The Campaign in East Africa
The End of German Rule
V Repulse at Tanga109
VI From Defence to Invasion132
PART IV
The Mandate and the Trust The Years of British Rule
1916-1948
VII Reorganisation and the Hammond Report173
VIII Deficits and Profits194
IX The Great Depression and the Drift to War227
X The War and the Aftermath252
Appendices
Appendix A281
Appendix B282
PREFACE
IT is hard to realise that fourteen years have slid by since it was decided that someone should write a history of the Kenya and Uganda Railway. One afternoon in the June of 1943 I met Sir Reginald Robins, quite by chance, outside the Memorial Hall in Delamere Avenue, Nairobi, and he asked me if I would undertake the task. At first it was hoped to publish the book to commemorate the Jubilee of the Railway in 1945. All sorts of difficulties arising from the war, and the amount of research necessary before I could start the writing, caused a long delay. Eventually I finished writing Permanent Way, 'The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway,' in the February of 1949.
There were still difficulties to be overcome. It had been planned to publish the book in two volumes. Printers and publishers also had their difficulties and I had to reduce thy length of the story so that it could be published as a single volume. The result was a long and heavy book. It is certainly heavy to hold, and I have heard it described as heavy to read.
In the November of 1954 Sir Arthur Kirby invited me to write the history of the Tanganyika Railways as a companion volume to the story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway. I began the task a year later, although very little was written until 1957. The first problem was to decide where to start. The building of a railway from the Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes arises from a chain of events and motives. Sir Reginald Robins and I thought that the story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway should start from the time of the first Arab settlements down the East African littoral. In the process of reduction from two volumes to one volume, the first chapter went into the discard, and in the book as published the story started with the last days of the great Arab ruler, Seyyid Said, who died in a856.
For this book, which I decided to call Permanent Way, Volume II, 'The Story of the Tanganyika Railways,' I re-wrote the discarded chapter with the kind and generous aid of Mr. James Kirkman, whose knowledge of the early history of the East African coast is far greater than mine. Mr. Kirkman not only checked my script but added over 4,000 words which I have incorporated in the text.
The struggle between Great Britain and Germany for control over the territory between the Indian Ocean and the Great Lakes was described in the first volume of Permanent Way. Here I have dealt with those aspects of the struggle which more particularly concerned German East Africa. Everyone who writes about these events must be
immensely indebted to Sir Richard Coupland, whose two books East Africa and its Invaders, published by the Oxford University Press in 1938, and The Exploitation of East Africa, published by Faber and Faber in 1939-are outstanding contributions to our, knowledge and understanding of East Africa's history. Apart from being great works of historical scholarship, these two books are of fascinating interest and delightfully written. My own debt is fully acknowledged with deep respect for a great historian and a very fine writer.
I could not have tackled the period of German rule in East Africa without access to the German files held in safe custody in Dar es Salaam. His Excellency the Governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining, and the Chief Secretary, then Mr. R. de S. Staple-don, gave me all possible assistance and ensured that the relevant documents were released to me. I was also greatly aided by Mr. Malcolm Archer, the Public Relations Officer of the East African Railways and Harbours, and by Mr. F. Steel, the Chief Office Superintendent of the Secretariat at Dar es Salaam.
Mr. J. Waldman kindly prepared a list of the German files in the possession of the Railways at Dar es Salaam and an invaluable precis of the key file dealing with the building of the Nordbahn from Tanga to Moshi. A number of files selected by Mr. Waldman were then brought to Nairobi, and the extracts that I needed were admirably translated by Mr. Val Braun, to whom I am greatly indebted.
During a tour of the Tanganyika Railways in the August of 1956 I was given much aid and most hospitably entertained by Mr. C. W. Leverett, the Regional Representative of the East African Railways and Harbours in Tanganyika, by the District Traffic Superintendents and the District Engineers on the Central and Tanga lines, and by the Provincial Commissioners at Mwanza, Tabora, Dodoma and Tanga, and the Deputy Provincial Commissioner at Kigoma. I must also acknowledge my great debt to the late Mr. C. Gillman, C.B.E., who wrote 'A Short History of the Tanganyika Railways' for Tanganyika Notes and Records of 1942. For thirty-two and a half years Mr. Gillman was connected with the Tanganyika Railways, and his excellent 'Short History' was based on personal knowledge and experience and a close study of the German files.
In the writing of the two chapters dealing with the terrible campaign in German East Africa during the First World War I have mainly relied on Military Operations, East Africa, compiled by Lieut.-Colonel Charles Hordern as part of the official History of the Great War prepared by the historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. It is a great pity that the volume compiled by Lieut.-Colonel Hordern was published in 1941 when men's minds were more concerned with a war raging than a war past. It is a fine piece of military history which points many lessons that remain relevant to-day. It is a book which every young officer serving with the King's African Rifles and every member of the Kenya Regiment should read and mark. In addition, I have had the advantage of several relevant German files, of Lieut.-
General von Lettow-Vorbeck's book, My Reminiscences of East Africa, and of the extraordinary memory of Lieut.-Colonel G. A. Swinton-Home who played a distinguished part in the campaign. In the writing of the last chapters I was greatly aided by Mr. J. R. Farquharson, who was General Manager of the Tanganyika Railways in the years immediately preceding the amalgamation and is now General Manager of the East Africa Railways and Harbours.
In more general terms the Handbook of Tanganyika, edited by Mr. G. F. Sayers and published by Macmillan & Co. in 193o, and Tanganyika, A Review of its Resources and their Development, prepared under the direction of Mr. J. F. R. Hill and edited by Mr. J. P. Moffett, have been of invaluable aid, more especially in the checking of many facts and figures.
I realise that this book will be criticised because so much of it may well seem remote from the story of the Railways of Tanganyika. I wrote in the Preface to the first volume of Permanent Way that a railway in East Africa cannot be treated as a 'thing apart' from the land and the peoples that it serves. I maintain that the story of the Railways of East Africa must lose significance unless it be written against the march of events which were, in fact, so often greatly influenced by the very existence of the railways.
Once again I must make an appeal for greater care in the preservation of documents of historical interest. Many irreplaceable documents concerning the Tanganyika Railways have been lost, damaged or destroyed by men with no feeling for the past nor sense of historical values. A people and a country cannot create traditions and a history without taking reasonable care to preserve the records of the deeds, the policies and the thinking of their forbears who laid the foundations and the first courses of the building of a civilisation in the wastes of East Africa.
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