Last week our hero, John Francis Fernandez, had joined the Uganda Railways in 1901 and later taken up a position as head clerk with Geoffrey Archer in the Northern Frontier District. If you missed it, click here.

Africa, that vast, virgin unexplored continent lying below Europe beckoned the British. The coastal regions had been sparsely explored and mapped by the Portuguese but the inlands, the forbidding interiors were an enigma. The dining halls of Victorian England were animated by fanciful stories culled from the few explorers of dubious repute, who had made their way into the interiors seeking gold and glory alike. The Dark continent, they contended, was a land of ghouls and goblins, where tribal massacres and human sacrifice were a daily ritual, where kings like Munza of Monbutto reportedly ate one child a day, women were easy with their favours and the only currency that meant anything were cows and glass beads.

It was into this pavilion of the unknown that British Colonial officers of the early 1900s would lead their forays and with them were Indians employed in various capacities. Geoffrey Archer, who in 1907 was entrusted with building a post at Marsabit, had come to rely heavily on John Francis Fernandez, his head clerk.

John was put in charge of supervising the building of an extensive administrative station at Lake Marsabit, on the Northern Frontier District, which had been largely uninhabited, but the surrounding area home to various tribes including the Rendille and Boran. The project was ambitious consisting of housing Askaris, African local troops, stores, guard-rooms, a hospital and a splendid Residency. By 1912, John was assigned to building a road from Merillah to Marsabit, some 60 miles of the track between Laisamia and Rett, being arid and waterless. On 15th of May, 1912, John commenced the task accompanied by five wagons, coursing through dangerous territory where "large patches of lava and stony ravines had either to be avoided or cleared" and every stone sheltered colonies of scorpions or worse still deadly spiders.

The British might have held the cities of Entebbe, Kampala, Blantyre, Nairobi and Mombasa in their iron grip, but the inlands were another matter altogether. The Northern District of Kenya bordered Somalia, whose proud warriors had maintained their independence through most of recorded history. On one particular trip to Moyale, a town which borders Kenya and Somalia, John watched fearfully as "a thousand or more armed Abyssinians marched across the close proximity of the station into British Territory in defiance of all political considerations and certainly in defiance of the tiny garrison of 50 Kings African Rifles."

John's designation might have been head clerk but his duties were hardly clerical. In 1916, he led a trek from Moyale, transporting some 150 ivory tusks on camels and with the assistance of Somali porters. Ivory-carrying caravans were easy target for robbers who often ambushed them but John managed to carry out his assignment successfully

For his service to the East African protectorate, he was decorated with the General Services Medal and the Nandi Clasp but his position continued to be that of clerk and book-keeper. In 1923, he accepted a transfer to Uganda, where he further distinguished himself in service. Towards the end of his service, he took up cudgels on his own behalf and challenged the colour bar which existed in Colonial East Africa's civil services, putting a ceiling on the upward mobility of Asians. He became a thorn in the side of Uganda's Governor, Sir Bernard Henry Bourdillon, who had taken a great dislike to him, labelling him difficult and refusing him the promotion to Accountant which he so rightfully deserved. Facing intense pressure from England, Bourdillon refused to admit that the denial was racially motivated and insisted that Asians had never been promoted beyond a certain degree because they had failed to produce men of sufficient quality and competence. Ironically, John was estranged from the Indian community as well as he had married an African native.

Perhaps nowhere in the world, had such a heady cauldron of race and racism produced such an entangled web of relationships, power and glory as in Africa.