About 32,000 indentured labourers were brought from India to build the Uganda Railway from Mombasa inland between 1896 and 1901. A large proportion were Punjabis, and among them were many Ramgarhia artisans, carpenters, blacksmiths and masons.
Around 6,700 stayed on at the end of their contracts. They were joined by free migrants, mostly Punjabi and Gujarati, who took up the skilled trades, the public works and the commerce of the three territories.
Gurdwaras were built at Kilindini, Nairobi, Kampala and Makindu. The Makindu gurdwara, in open country on the railway line, has served travellers of every religion since 1926 and is still functioning.
In 1972 Idi Amin expelled the Asian population of Uganda, about 80,000 people, at ninety days' notice. Most went to Britain. Kenya's Africanisation policies had a similar if slower effect.
The Ramgarhia gurdwaras of Britain, in Leicester, Birmingham, Southall and elsewhere, are the direct institutional descendants of that East African community, which is why they are separate from other Punjabi gurdwaras in those towns.
The Uganda Railway was built between 1896 and 1901 with indentured labour from India, a large part of it Punjabi, and the survivors who stayed founded the communities.
Punjabi contractors, artisans, clerks and traders followed, and the Sikh gurdwaras at Nairobi, Kampala and Mombasa date from the first decades of the century.
The expulsion from Uganda in 1972 and the departures from Kenya and Tanzania sent most of them to Britain, which is why so much of the British Punjabi population came by way of Africa.