Public Relations, The Lunatic Express And The Iron Snake

In 1894 the British decided to build a railroad in East Africa. It would go from the Kenya coast to the shores of Lake Victoria, from thence the rail cars would be sent by ferry to Uganda. The Africans were informed after the fact and they called it The Iron Snake; they knew it as a bad omen. It would require a terrific job on the part of the British Government to change that image, and in that lies a lesson in public relations.

First of all they had to convince everyone that even though it was obtrusive, it was for the Africans’ own good. And it was legal, after all, it would make its way across land that followed the Right of Way, a tract granted by the Queen’s Government to what was then called the Uganda Railway.

Resistance from Africans was sporadic and no sooner had they turned their back, the city of Nairobi, a colonial bastion, was established on a patch of swampy grassland. Once this mile-high frontier town was in place, the line moved on. More intense resistance was encountered in western Kenya but the railroad’s progress was inexorable, the might of the industrial age was no match for the African native. All this made public relations a moot point except in England where the railroad was challenged by the Liberals.

They thought the Government had no right to drive a railway through country owned by the Masai and other tribes. And by what right did England have to assert mastery over thousands upon thousands of unlettered African tribesmen?

Such arguments along with the claim that it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money were easily brushed aside with a grand Tory flourish. After all if England were to step away from its manifest destiny, they would by default leave it to other nations to take up the work which England would be seen as …too weak, too poor, and too cowardly to do ourselves.

Still, Empire reasoning prevailed, and the PR mavens won the day with a spin that would do justice to our present Administration: there was, …the need to ensure protection of the source of the Nile from Britain’s enemies, a great potential market for British goods, a huge traffic expected, and a revolutionary effect in settling the region...

Even so, it was recognized as a gamble. The Empire was taking a considerable chance. These kinds of enormous undertakings had the potential to cause equally enormous embarrassments, a sentiment reflected in the term used by the London tabloids, who described this undertaking as the Lunatic Line.

It would be hard today to escape the feeling that the tabloids were right. The wild nature of it – shaky looking wooden trestle bridges, enormous chasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men dropping by the hundreds from diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night – Lunatic Line and the later term, Lunatic Express, seemed to fit. This early example of negative PR required years to live down, but with a bit of luck and much hard work, the line eventually did put these earlier sobriquets behind it.

Between 1904 and 1914, a slow rise in passengers and freight traffic helped restore confidence at home. Coffee, maize, wheat, soda ash and sisal brought the tonnage moved from the interior to the coast from 6,000 to 77,000 tons, and just before the start of the First WW the railway had almost broken even. Like the Little Train That Could, it had proved it could work. For the Africans, however, the railroad still had little meaning.

There had been a humanitarian gain from a decrease in caravan trade. Porters had been released from the back-breaking labor of earlier days, but this also resulted in a loss of jobs that was not compensated for by the railroad. They continued to use imported Indian labor to build and maintain their investment. Also the majority of goods shifted were produced on white settler farms and plantations. The return in the form of low wages and rural development was not enough to raise the standards of the mostly African population beyond some basic level. Famine continued to be a problem in dry years, e.g., in 1943. The railway scored points because it was used to distribute 120,000 tons of maize and cassava during the relief effort that year and again in 1944 when 100,000 tons of food had to be imported and distributed. But other than this and a rough form of third class travel, the Iron Snake had little to offer Africans.

For the colonial government, the railroad sold itself, especially during the two world wars when it experienced an enormous boost. There were peaks in traffic in 1914 and in 1940’s. Thus by 1943 the total goods carried rose to 2,024,238 tons and 2,745,229 passenger journeys. Between 1940 and 1944 the railway’s surplus rose to over £4,068,000 on a capital account of over £100,000,000. And so, not only did it turn a handsome profit, but the Lunatic Express proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it could be instrumental in moving troops and materiel in the defense of the country and the region.

As a national asset and an essential component of Homeland Security it was an easy sell from the public relations side. And during peacetime it was considered quite an asset because it supported the agricultural economy centered in the White Highlands. The fact that these effects were slow to trickle down meant that the growth in capital investment had little effect on a rapidly expanding rural population, to whom all this was of less importance. The railroad presented some jobs and limited advancement for educated African males, and it provided a line of communication of limited use, it also made available lower-class rail transport cross country from Uganda to the Kenya coast, but this had not changed in degree or style of service for over sixty years.

By the time of independence in 1963, more and more Africans had turned to buses, and "matatus," the free-lance taxis and mini-buses that traversed the region. This competition from cars and buses for passengers, and trucks for freight carriage, resulted in a decline in demand for rail service that was not slowed by regional coordination. That started in 1948 and blossomed further in 1967, lasting another ten years under the East African Community, none of which could halt the decline. Neglect, disrepair and a bloated workforce became common problems exacerbated by a series of horrific accidents from 1993 to the present. Not only had the Iron Snake been brought at last to its knees, the Lunatic Express had reverted to type and no amount of spin by the Government could change it. It was as bad as it gets though it was still running.

In January of this year Karen Allen in an online story for BBC interviewed some of the passengers in economy class on their way from Mombasa to Nairobi. Most of them were railway employees because they get cheap tickets and it’s safer than traveling by road. She felt there was a huge potential demand for rail travel in this region, a fact recognized by the Kenya and Ugandan governments who recently signed a joint agreement to allow privatization of the line. And in September, 2006, the World Bank approved the first grant ($70 mill.) to help. But the question remains, will it change?

The news to date has not been good with railway worker redundancies and wage reductions resulting from the new management The Rift Valley Railways. There is an obvious and profitable opportunity here to create an Orient Express-type luxury train. Anything with the catchy title of Lunatic Express for a train that would whiz tourists back and forth across the game parks would be great fun. But would it be sustainable in the long run? Not unless there is a parallel development of low-cost transport for the small farmer and economy passenger.

The Iron Snake must be client-friendly, or it will never survive.