In the closing years of the nineteenth century, thousands of Punjabis crossed the Indian Ocean to build a railway through the highlands and plains of East Africa. They came as labourers, blacksmiths, masons and clerks, and many stayed to raise families, open shops and found gurdwaras. Their descendants would spread further still, scattered by a sudden expulsion in 1972, until the East African chapter became one of the most remarkable threads in the wider story of the Punjabi people abroad.
The Lunatic Line
In 1896 the British began laying a railway inland from the port of Mombasa in British East Africa. Its goal was the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, reached at Kisumu in 1901. Critics in London mocked the costly project as the "Lunatic Line," doubting it would ever pay for itself. To build it, the colonial administration turned to India, where workers already had experience constructing railways across the subcontinent.
Over the years of construction, roughly 32,000 Indians were recruited for the work. Recruitment was managed largely from Karachi, with Lahore serving as a centre for sourcing men from Punjabi villages. A great many of these recruits were Sikhs, valued for their skills in tracklaying, ironwork and stone masonry.
Building Under Hard Conditions
The work was brutal. Crews pushed through thornbush, fever-ridden swamps and waterless plains, often short of food and medicine. Of the tens of thousands who came, around 2,493 are recorded to have died in East Africa and more than 6,000 were severely injured. The man-eating lions of Tsavo, which preyed on the camps in 1898, passed into legend and later into books and films.
When the line was finished, most of the surviving workers returned to India. But several thousand chose to stay, and this small group of skilled, determined settlers became the seed of a lasting community.
A Community Takes Root
Those who remained quickly moved beyond the railway. Punjabi artisans set up workshops, traders opened dukas (small shops), and others took up farming, building and the professions. By the 1930s, Sikh and other Indian businesses had become a major part of commerce across Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika.
Where Punjabis settled, they built places to gather and pray. A simple tin-roofed gurdwara rose at Makindu in Kenya, on the railway between Mombasa and Nairobi, in 1902, replaced by the larger temple still standing there from 1926. Around the same time, early gurdwaras appeared in Nairobi near the rail yards. As anywhere in the world, the gurdwara became far more than a house of worship: a school, a meeting hall and a kitchen offering food to all.
Wherever the line went, the langar followed, and a stranger of any faith could find a meal and a place to rest.
Faith, Language and Festivals
Life in East Africa carried the rhythms of Punjab across the sea. Families marked births and weddings with the singing of hymns, observed the festivals of the calendar, and taught their children Gurmukhi alongside Swahili and English. The traditions that bound them, the daily reading of scripture, the shared meal and the gathering of the sangat (congregation), kept Punjabi identity strong far from home.
These communities were diverse. Alongside Sikhs there were Punjabi and Gujarati Hindus, Muslims and others, and they often worshipped near one another in a spirit of mutual respect. This shared experience of migration and settlement is woven into the larger account of the Punjabi diaspora, which by then already stretched from Africa to North America.
The Expulsion of 1972
The settled world of East African Asians changed abruptly in 1972. In early August, the President of Uganda, Idi Amin, ordered the expulsion of the country's Asian minority, giving them ninety days to leave. At the time there were about 80,000 people of Indian descent in Uganda, including roughly 23,000 whose Ugandan citizenship had been processed and accepted.
Families who had lived in Uganda for generations were forced to abandon homes, shops and savings and depart with little more than they could carry. Within months, a community built over three quarters of a century was scattered across the world.
A New Beginning Abroad
Many of the displaced held British passports and made their way to the United Kingdom, where close to 40,000 Ugandan Asians arrived in the months that followed. They settled in towns such as Southall in west London and Leicester in the Midlands, places that became enduring centres of Punjabi and wider South Asian life in Britain. Canada took in more than 6,000 in late 1972, part of a deliberate resettlement effort, and others moved to India and beyond.
Their journey echoed earlier passages of the Punjabi diaspora, including episodes such as the Komagata Maru voyage decades before. From the East African railway to the high streets of Southall and Leicester, the story of these families is one of migration met again and again with resilience, faith and the quiet rebuilding of community.