Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1519725
I can hear you all already: "Li- ons? Tsavo? What the heck is he on about this time?" To which, as always, I reply: "Patience, friends! It may take a while to get to our destination; but – like the Kenya-Uganda Railway, built by the British in 1898 – this digression is going somewhere, promise!" And with that out of the way: let's begin our time-travelling ad- venture, shall we? Our first stop is the Tsavo riv- er-valley in eastern Kenya, 1898. It seems that the British Colonial Government had this wonderful idea of connecting Uganda to the Indian Ocean by means of a railway: a project which involved, inter alia, building a bridge across the river Tsavo. You may already be familiar with what happened next, as the incident was made into a (not- very-good) movie in 1998: 'The Ghost and the Darkness', starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. But to give you a rough idea: in the end, the bridge took around nine months longer to complete, than originally planned… for the simple reason that workers kept getting themselves devoured by lions – only TWO (2) lions, please note – until a point was reached where the entire project had to temporarily shelved. That's right, folks: incredible as this may sound, the entire march of British Colonial progress in Africa – at a time, when the Brit- ish Empire was arguably at its zenith – was halted abruptly in its tracks, by nothing more than a couple of mangy old cats, in a remote, dusty corner of Eastern Kenya. Even more incredible, how- ever, was the sheer scale of devastation left in their wake. Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson – the man who even- tually killed the two man-eaters – claimed that their victims liter- ally 'ran into the hundreds'. Mod- ern estimates, however, suggest that the death-toll was closer to a more modest (and certainly more believable) '28-31'. But there was more to the problem, than just the number of casualties. As time wore on, the two lions grew ever bolder. It may have started out as 'one or two workers disappearing, every other week'… but it quickly grew into an almost daily occur- rence: with the lions sometimes dragging their victims out of their tents; and eating them right there, in the middle of the camp itself (seemingly oblivious to ri- fle-fire). As you can imagine, this situa- tion also proved highly embar- rassing, to an Empire which still called itself 'GREAT Britain', at the time. In a nutshell: something had to be done about those drat- ted lions… and fast! And indeed something WAS done… but I'll come back to that later, as otherwise we'd miss our next stop: Malta, in 2024… where we are likewise hounded by an epidemic of construction-re- lated fatalities: only involving 'collapsing buildings', instead of 'man-eating lions'. [Note: From the perspective of those who've already lost their lives, however… it matters little if Death took the form of a 'wild animal attack', or (quite literally, in some cases) 'a tonne of bricks.' The effects are just as fatal, either way...] But back to contemporary Mal- ta. This week, two Albanian con- struction-workers were grievous- ly injured, when the ceiling of an adjacent house collapsed after (for reasons that remain some- what unclear) they 'jumped onto it from next-door'. Mercifully, the workers them- selves survived the ordeal (albeit badly hurt)… and the residential home that was demolished, hap- pened to be devoid of human in- habitants at the time. But others have been less fortu- nate. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Albanian construction worker – Bari Balla – became the latest fatality in a spate of com- parable accidents: which also claimed the life of Jean Paul Sofia last year; Miriam Pace, in 2020; and an arguably unquantifiable number of (overwhelmingly for- eign) construction workers, over the past few decades. Ah, but… how much does the Malta scenario really have in common with Tsavo: beyond, of course, the fact that they both in- volve 'accidental deaths/injuries on construction sites'? To answer that, we must brief- ly return to 19th century Kenya. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of those two lions' (recorded) vic- tims, were Indian nationals who had been brought over to Africa specifically for that one project. And this, in turn, raises another question: considering that Britain controlled enormous swathes of Africa, at the time: why did they have to go as far afield as India, to find workers for this particular job? Why did they not just recruit their workforce, from the local, indigenous populations of Kenya, Uganda, etc.? Well… it turns out that those local, indigenous workers just didn't WANT to work on that Tsavo bridge. The East-Kenyans, in particular, knew full-well that the area was simply too danger- ous…. but even workers brought in from other parts of Africa were quick to assess the risk. In practice, this meant that – with every fresh attack – the work-camps lost not just the li- ons' actual victims … but also, around two-thirds of the local work-force, who simply deserted the place in droves. It was to fill these vacancies that Britain was forced to employ hundreds (if not thousands) of workers from India. And while those Indians were no doubt fa- miliar with the specific dangers of working in their own homeland… they were hopelessly unprepared, and ill-equipped, to read all the 'warning signs' in their new, un- familiar environment. Now: admittedly, much of what I'm about to say hinges on more than a century's worth of hind- sight… but looking back, it is safe to say that many (if not most) of maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 APRIL 2024 10 OPINION What the Tsavo lions can teach us about our construction industry Raphael Vassallo