In Swahili a train is gari la moshi — a wagon of smoke. It is a better name than the one the engineers used, because it describes what people actually saw: a thing that arrived trailing smoke, and changed the shape of the country it arrived in.
Masindi Hotel exists because of that machine. Not because the railway ever reached Masindi — it never did — but because the company that built the railway was never only in the railway business, and the road it ran west from the railhead came through this town.
The line they called a folly
The Uganda Railway was built between 1896 and 1901, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to Kisumu on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria: 1,060 kilometres of metre gauge, almost all of it single track with passing loops at the stations. It was named for a country it did not enter. Every kilometre of the original line lay in what is now Kenya.
In London it was thought ridiculous. The MP Henry Labouchère called the scheme “a gigantic folly”, and the nickname that stuck — the Lunatic Line — came out of the same argument about cost, difficulty and the number of men who died building it.
The rails stopped at the lake. To reach Uganda you changed to a steamer. The main line was not extended from Nakuru through to Kampala until 1931, thirty years after the first train reached Kisumu and eight years after this hotel opened its doors.
Three names for one company
It is worth being exact about the names, because they are often muddled — including, until recently, on our own history page.
- Uganda Railway — the original undertaking, and the operator in 1923, the year Masindi Hotel was built.
- Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours — formed on 26 February 1926, when the railway and the ports were brought together under one administration.
- East African Railways and Harbours — formed on 1 May 1948, by amalgamating the Kenya and Uganda undertaking with the Tanganyika Railway.
So the initials EAR&H, which appear on a great deal of Ugandan memorabilia and in a great many hotel histories, belong to a company that did not exist until 1948. In 1923 the operator was the Uganda Railway. The corporation lasted until 1977, when the collapse of the East African Community broke the network into three national railways — Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
A transport company that happened to own trains
The thing that is easy to miss, looking back, is how little of this enterprise was actually rails. The company ran ships on Lake Victoria, Lake Kyoga and Lake Albert, and on the Victoria Nile and the Albert Nile. It ran the ports. It ran lorries and buses where there was no track. And it put up places for its passengers to sleep, because a journey that took a week needed somewhere to stop.
That is the category Masindi Hotel belongs to. It was built in 1923 as a stop on a route, not as a destination — a night’s rest between the railhead and the lake, on the road that still carries the name of where it was going.
The ship that came through Masindi in pieces
The best illustration of how the whole system worked is a steamer that never touched a railway line in its working life.
The SS Robert Coryndon was built by J. I. Thornycroft at Woolston in England in 1929 and 1930, launched in September 1929, and put into service on Lake Albert in 1930 as an 860-tonne passenger and cargo ship. She could not be sailed there. Lake Albert is 600 kilometres inland, behind an escarpment. So she was shipped in sections and carried overland by lorry, and the size and weight of every single component was limited by what a lorry could take on the road. The road to Butiaba runs through Masindi.
For the next thirty years she worked a fortnightly service out of Butiaba. Winston Churchill is said to have called her “the best library afloat”. Ernest Hemingway, who knew this stretch of country better than he intended to, reportedly called her “magnificence on water”.
She ran aground in 1962, the year of independence, after flooding wrecked the port at Butiaba. Attempts to refloat her failed. She was still visible in 2009; by 2012 salvagers had taken most of her, and what is left above the water are the aft king posts. It is an hour and a half from this hotel, and it is worth the drive.
What is left of it
The wagon of smoke is gone from most of this country. The lake steamers are wrecks or scrap. The corporation was dismantled in 1977 and its Ugandan remnant has spent the decades since being revived and left alone by turns.
What survives, oddly, is the accommodation. Masindi Hotel opened in 1923 for people travelling a route that no longer exists, in a country that had a different name, working for a company that has since been renamed twice and then broken up. The route is gone. The building is still here, on Butiaba Road, still taking guests.
The hotel’s own hundred years are set out on our history page, and the road that made it is the subject of a companion piece: where the rails stopped.