Sri Guru Singh Sabha Nairobi

This guide to Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Nairobi tells how the city's Sikh community set out, in the late 1950s, to replace their small temple with something to match the Golden Temple at Amritsar, and how the job went instead to George Vamos, a Jewish architect with no gurdwara to his name, who translated that vision into plain grey concrete rather than gold leaf. Construction ran from around 1959 until November 1963, just weeks before Kenya's independence, with the dome's tiling supervised by Tarlochan Singh Sagoo and the courtyard terrazzo laid by Phuman Singh Sahota. Look for the stone lion above the old entrance gate, an unlikely guardian for a faith with no lion among its symbols.