The Gurdwara at Makindu

The railway

The Uganda Railway was driven inland from Mombasa between 1896 and 1901, and it was built largely by labourers and artisans brought from British India — a great many of them Sikhs from Punjab, working as masons, carpenters, platelayers and engine drivers. Makindu was a service point on the line.

The men there kept a Guru Granth Sahib in a tin-roofed hut and read from it daily. A permanent gurdwara followed in 1926, and a larger one opened on 27 April 1930 before about a hundred and fifty Sikhs gathered from across East Africa.¹

Langar taken literally

Makindu stands on the main road between Mombasa and Nairobi, and what has made it locally famous for a century is not the building. It feeds and houses anyone who stops — of any faith or nationality, free, around the clock. Truck drivers, travellers and people simply stranded have relied on it since before Kenyan independence.^2,3

This is not a special local custom. It is langar as Guru Nanak instituted it at Kartarpur — food shared without first asking who anyone is — applied without qualification to a highway in East Africa.

What happened to East African Sikhs

The community that built Makindu was substantial. It largely no longer lives there: Africanisation policies across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the late 1960s and 1970s pushed most East African Asians out, and Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion order from Uganda was the sharpest edge of it. Most went to Britain, which is why the Sikh populations of Southall, Leicester and Birmingham contain families whose route to England ran through Nairobi or Kampala rather than direct from Punjab.

Makindu’s own congregation is now small. The gurdwara is maintained substantially for the travellers rather than for the congregation — which, given what it was built for, is a reasonable outcome.