3
First Impressions
The pioneer days had ended with the nineteenth century, and the first dozen years of the twentieth had set the pattern for future development. The Protectorate of British East Africa had been proclaimed in 1895 and, seven years later, the boundaries had been enlarged so as to include certain territory previously administered from Uganda. The seat of government had been moved to Nairobi, and executive and legislative councils had been set up. Peace had been established among the East African tribes and pledges had been given concerning the reservation of an area in the highlands for European settlement. The country had been mapped into provinces and districts, and effective administration had been established. It was a good time to be looking round.
One day in December 1911, there arrived at Kilindini by the little Union Castle steamer Guelph nine new administrative cadets for East Africa, fresh and raw from Oxford and Cambridge. Not a very significant event in the history of East Africa, it was a thrilling moment for the nine concerned, the point of first impact. Our ignorance of the country until that moment was profound. One had an uncle who had been a judge in Zanzibar and another, a brother in Somaliland, but the rest of us started with no more than the three weeks' instruction we underwent before sailing, the precursor of a far more elaborate full-time course. It was limited to short lectures on law (good), tropical diseases (frightening), the colonial system of accounts (adequate but uninspiring) and plane table surveying – on Saturdays and mostly skipped.
There were no alongside berths at Kilindini in those days so we were rowed ashore to the rudimentary steps and landing stage. There, those cadets who were bound for Uganda left by train for upcountry, and the remainder of us proceeded by trolley car the two miles to Mombasa. The trolley on rails was then one of the island's more eccentric features. Until it was removed during the war to support the army's advance, it served to connect house and office as well as Kilindini and the town; and, alongside the track, where sisal had been planted, uncomfortable upsets at sharp bends were a common experience.
For three or four days after our arrival we enjoyed the hospitality of the chief justice, Sir Robert Hamilton, and of Judge Bonham Carter. The seat of government had been moved to Nairobi some five years earlier, but the High Court remained in Mombasa for the time being. In tribute to the old capital an annual session of legislative council was held at Mombasa, and this happily coinciding with our arrival, we were fortunate to meet some of our future superior officers in congenial surroundings.
After attendance at the magistrate's court in the mornings there was leisure time to wander around the town. Fort Jesus then dominated the Mombasa scene even more than it does now. It had been built at the end of the sixteenth century by the Portuguese and, except for a short period, was held by them continuously for just on 100 years until, after a siege which lasted three years, it was taken by storm by Omani Arabs after the garrison had been decimated by plague. It seemed a good justification for Mombasa's alternative name of M'vita, war, in contrast to that other port to the south in German East Africa, Dar es Salaam – haven of peace.
Mombasa port and harbour – not to be confused with Kilindini1 – was reserved then as now for dhows, and presented an animated and colourful scene. The Old Town, with its narrow streets, teemed with the exotic variety of its people, hamali carts, goats and chickens and a pervasive smell which was mostly copra. The population appeared predominantly Arab and Arab-type Swahili, with Indians next. It was estimated at some 33,000, compared with 19,000 in Nairobi. The Europeans in Mombasa numbered about 300. There were few up-country Africans to be seen in the town but many were, no doubt, employed on the railway and at the port.
The first part of the 300 miles of the train journey to Nairobi was uninspiring, except for the majestic sight of Kilimanjaro some 60 miles away on the German side of the border. Once the palm fringe of the coast belt lay behind us, the land rose through the red dust and scrub of the Taru desert over which night was falling. It was in the early morning that the thrilling scene opened out over the wide plains of the highlands, revealing herds of antelope and, for background, the abruptly rising hills of the Akamba and Masai. Yet the abiding thought which the journey left in my mind was not the game or scene; it was the closeness of Kilimanjaro and the German border. It was the year of the Agadir incident and there was much speculation on the chances of war.2
Arriving in Nairobi a few days before Christmas, we lodged at the Norfolk Hotel, then a single storey building of modest appearance, but renowned as the meeting place of settlers and already rich in diverting stories. Nairobi had a makeshift look then and contrasted sharply with the historic town of Mombasa, where even the houses of officials were substantial coral-built dwellings. Little more than a decade had passed since it was an advanced railway headquarters depot where, construction having temporarily caught up with the survey, there was a prolonged halt while the difficult route ahead was being determined. It was at the very end of the plains before the land rose into the hills and forest fringes of the Kikuyu country. There had been nothing but pasture land on the site before, intermittently grazed over by Masai herds before they had been decimated by rinderpest.
The encampment had grown gradually until, with the arrival of government headquarters there in 1907, the place began to show evidence of a town to come. It was laid out spaciously with streets and avenues, planned and marked out with angle irons, but, so far as actual construction went, there was very little. Offices and officers' bungalows were of wood and corrugated iron raised on stilts to keep out vermin. Shops, with very few exceptions, were no better than ramshackle dukas to be found in any little Kenya township. I doubt whether, in 1911, there were as many as a dozen really substantial buildings of two or more floors high. Hired transport was by rickshaw. There were also mule carts, some horse-drawn traps and hand-pushed hamali carts for luggage. All longer-distance road travel was by ox-cart. No motor cars were to be seen, though I learnt afterwards that Sir Percy Girouard, the governor, had one. Nairobi was a jog-trot town then; scarcely that. Yet there was a distinct impression of liveliness about the place and a conscious air of ‘going to be’.
After Christmas, and now alone, I travelled on by train through the highlands and, after a night stop at Nakuru in the heart of European farmland, I proceeded for a further 100 miles to lake level at Kisumu, the railway terminus and headquarters of Nyanza Province.3 It matched Nakuru for size. Both were small towns a long way behind Mombasa and Nairobi, but in purpose and development they were strongly contrasted. Nakuru served and depended upon the European farmers, while Kisumu depended entirely on African production and its position as the centre of the lake transport to Uganda.
The original intention had been to carry the railway on further into Uganda, but an outbreak of malaria and sleeping sickness among the construction workers forced the management to alter the plan and make for the nearest feasible point on the lake. The point was at the head of the Kavirondo Gulf.4 A suitable site for a moderate-sized town was found in the neighbourhood, and, fortunately, it was uninhabited, although there were many Africans in the surrounding area. It was therefore possible to lay out the town in an orderly way. There was time to plan and, to this day, Kisumu has a neat appearance. By the time of my arrival it had developed to an extent that there were five steamers on the lake, plying to Uganda ports and the German ports at Mwanza and Bukoba. They had been pre-constructed in England and reassembled locally; the docks and workshops were already impressive for so young a port.
The total number of Europeans in Kisumu at that stage was about 130. Nearly all were officials, of whom the railway and marine were about half. There were adequate administrative, police and medical services but, except for one Jamaican,5 there were no educational or agricultural officers in the whole province of 12,000 square miles with a population of more than a million. As for the Asiatics, they considerably outnumbered the Europeans. Practically all the trade and clerical posts were in their hands and it was not until after the First World War that Africans participated beyond the level of interpreters and domestic servants. Nevertheless, the whole town depended for its existence on African produce and African labour.
The name Kisumu given to the town was that of the surrounding Luo clan.6 It was no bad place for a young man to begin his administrative career, under one of the most renowned of East African administrators, John Ainsworth.7 It was the headquarters of a fertile province which, at that time, was almost entirely African. The people were numerous, friendly, and trusting and there was a straightforward job of steady development to be done.
***
It was noticeable how very recently even senior officers had come to East Africa. Still more recent comers like myself would hang on their lips as if they were oracles as they told of doings away back in what, between ourselves, we irreverently called ‘the prehistoric days of nineteen hundred and eight’. It was, though, a time of extremely rapid change. Quite how rapid this change had been was brought home to me within my first days at Kisumu, when I was asked by Ainsworth to accompany him to the station to bid farewell to an old stager who was leaving the country for the last time. It turned out to be James Martin, the former Maltese sailor who had travelled with Thompson on his momentous journey of exploration through Masai and the highlands less than 30 years before.
That such extraordinary changes had been effected during these years owed a great deal to the work in the 1890s of a few remarkable pioneers. Most notable of these were the efforts of Ainsworth in Akamba and Hobley in Nyanza.8 Kikuyu was more of a joint enterprise: the early work of Lugard was consolidated by Hall, and useful connections were also established by the trader-adventurer, John Boyes, eastwards towards Mount Kenya.9
As an example of their enterprise and of the life of a district officer in the 1890s, one need only consider the brief career of Francis Hall. He was born in 1860 and lived the life of a rover during his early adult years. In 1892 he arrived in East Africa as an employee of the IBEA Company and by the middle of the next year was in charge at Fort Smith. On his arrival at the fort he found the Kikuyu so hostile that at times he felt himself almost a prisoner in his own station, yet by the end of his first tour of duty, with very limited resources, but with great patience and force of character, he had won the confidence of both the Kikuyu and the Masai in the neighbourhood, had virtually put an end to local traffic in slaves, could move about more freely, and by the making of roads and in other ways had greatly extended his influence. He had also made safe the route for well-conducted caravans and saw to it that food and labour were provided. All this was accomplished at no little risk to himself, and he had indeed been ambushed in a shower of poisoned arrows, gored by a rhino and mauled by a leopard.
Hall's second tour of duty was more peaceful and he put to good use the farming, veterinary and medical skills he had acquired in his roving days. He experimented with crops and livestock at Fort Smith, organised a vaccination campaign against smallpox to keep the caravan route open, and provided relief for the Akamba in the famine of 1898. Later he established a new station at Murang'a but, in February 1901, returning from a small punitive expedition, he caught fever and dysentery and died. He was a resolute man and may have been severe at times, but that his word was well respected there was no doubt. Thirty years later when I was at Kiambu I found that a land dispute could generally be settled at once if it could be shown how Hall had decided on a similar matter.10
By 1912 things were very different. Peace and order had been secured and the basics of government, public services, farming and trade had been established. Yet pioneering work did not disappear overnight, and I was to have some experience of it myself as government penetrated into the remoter regions. Shortly after the outbreak of war I was posted to Kisii, where a battle had taken place only two weeks before my arrival. Situated on the border of German East Africa, the Germans remained in occupation of about a third of the district, and for the next year and more I was to serve there under W.F.G. Campbell, one of the country's ablest district commissioners. From Kisii I was then sent to remote North Turkana to set up a station. To this end the caravan of 40 porters which I took with me on the long walk north11 included 16 who were carrying a safe. I had nothing like a station to go to, however, not even a hut so, with the help of a police officer, I chose a site at Lokiriama on which to build.
Turkana was a vast land, sparsely inhabited, and with a resident staff consisting of a single interpreter and a handful of askaris there was not much that one could reasonably achieve other than to see that order was maintained. Indeed that was the essential part of the job, for at that time the Turkana were about the most bellicose tribe in the country, and their constant raids on their southern neighbours, the Samburu and the Suk, had meant that an expedition had recently been sent against them when forces could ill be spared. Although the expedition had only gone into southern Turkana, the problem of lawlessness was general, and very much exacerbated by the extensive activities of Abyssinian and Swahili gun-runners. Nor should it be imagined that it was merely a local matter, for the Turkana were capable of raiding over literally hundreds of miles and they sometimes stole thousands of head of cattle in a single raid. Shortly before my arrival a post had been established at Kalosia on the river Kerio and, once the post at Lokiriama had also been built, more concerted efforts could be made to contain the problem. It was a problem, though, which could not be resolved until more resources were available to check the activity of the Abyssinians crossing the northern frontier. For this reason it was frustrating work, and, on top of the uncertainty and danger, one had to cope with the relentless heat, the monotony of food and landscape, and months on end without speaking a work of English. Finally, cut off through no lack of effort on my part from the momentous events happening on the world stage in 1916/17, my isolation felt complete, and after a year I returned to be sent home on sick leave.12
Fortunately, there was not much field work of so uncompromising a nature, and if it was often hard, there were always many compensations, as I learnt from my earliest days in Nyanza. Office work was not arduous, and about two thirds of my time was spent on tour in the district. Travel was by head-load porterage and I generally walked along with the porters, but those who preferred could ride one of the station mules or use a bicycle. All rather hot work in the Nyanza sun, but one soon got used to it, liked it and kept very fit. For those who didn't like safari it would have been better to give up the job altogether.13
Having got the district commissioner's covering instructions, one was allowed and encouraged to use imagination and ingenuity in carrying them out, learning meanwhile about the tribes around, preaching the gospel of cotton planting, road making or something of the kind, making ludicrous mistakes, laughing them off, and plodding happily on. Even an unpleasant task like collecting hut tax could be a colourful experience, for, when taxpayers used to come into camp from early morning onwards, they literally danced and sang and brandished their tally tickets which they held in cleft sticks.14
One soon learnt, however, that the specific object for which a safari had been undertaken was seldom the most valuable part of it. The overriding duty was to keep in close touch with the people, note what was going on, be available to listen to any grievance or matter that might be causing concern, explain the reasons and remove misunderstandings. That was the most essential work, and the method was by discussion with the headmen and elders both in baraza and outside. General contact too was easy, for the district was densely populated by the Nilotic Luo tribe in the areas nearest the lake and the Bantu Maragoli, Kisa and Tiriki further inland.15 They thronged around, a seemingly happy and carefree people, especially the Luo, clad in their bare skins and little else. At set meetings, however, they made more of a spectacle, for many of the elders were arrayed in ostrich feathers and hippo ivory ornaments on their cowrie-covered caps. Quite a number also had ear-fringes with jade insets which their ancestors had brought with them from the Nile.
The chiefs in Nyanza were disposed to be friendly and helpful. Ruling as they did over large compact clans, often from 20,000 to 50,000 strong, they measured up pretty well to one's preconceived ideas of what an African chief might be. Though they owed their appointments to government recognition, many had also hereditary claims and could count their ancestry through several generations.16 I expect allowances were made for newcomers like myself and the path made easy. At any rate, a junior officer had the one great advantage: that he did not cause inhibitions, so he learned much in casual conversation about tribal customs and the like, which would not have been so readily forthcoming later on.
1 Mombasa harbour, used for centuries, was along the northern shores of Mombasa Island. Kilindini docks, which were built in the twentieth century – and now generally called the Mombasa docks – run along much of its southern shore.
2 The ‘Agadir crisis’ of 1911 was indeed one of the successive international crises that prepared Europe's leaders to accept the likelihood of war. In 1911 the French had taken greater control over Morocco – ostensibly in order to protect its Sultan from rebellion – than had been previously agreed between Germany, France and Britain. Germany sent the gunboat Panzer to Morocco's Atlantic port of Agadir in order to persuade France to reconsider. There was fresh talk of European war – temporarily postponed by negotiations over a Franco-German re-division of insignificant stretches of western Africa.
3 The lake was Lake Victoria.
4 Now called Winam.
5 Henry Holder, agricultural assistant, the best cricketer in the province and on that account doubtless known to the cricketing Fazan.
6 A more common view is that Kisumu means a place of hunger.
7 For whom, see R. M. Maxon, John Ainsworth and the Making of Kenya (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980).
8 Ainsworth, who retired to South Africa in 1920, never wrote a memoir. C. W. Hobley's Kenya, from Chartered Company to Crown Colony (London: Witherby, 1929) is still worth reading, despite his reticence about some of the major disagreements he had with his superiors over the general direction of Kenya's pro-settler development. As he warned in his Preface: ‘no old controversies will be revived, all the decencies will be preserved, and I shall not even abuse the Government I had the honour to serve.’
9 See Perham and Bull, Lugard Diaries. Fazan's praise for John Boyes, self-proclaimed ‘King of the Wa-Kikuyu’, is somewhat surprising. Boyes was an ivory trader and a bit of a brigand, charged with but cleared of banditry in 1900.
10 Hall's ‘severity’ cost scores of Kikuyu lives in a number of ‘punitive expeditions’.
11 Approximately 160 miles, 250 kilometres.
12 Fazan understates the violence that marked this period and place in his career, when both Turkana and British were mobilising larger forces against each other – for which see Lamphear, The Scattering Time. The Earl of Lytton's The Desert and the Green (London: Macdonald, 1957) is a vivid memoir of soldiering in the Turkana area in the early 1920s, in conditions similar to Fazan's.
13 District officials had to make an annual return of their days spent on safari, away from their desk. In these early years they were expected to spend at least half their time away from the office – in an era not only long before mobile telephony but also, in many cases, before the official motorcycle, let alone car.
14 Those taxpayers who chose to turn up may have danced; other former colonial officials remember seeing villagers running from their homes before their tax-collecting safari arrived. The skill of Kenyans in tax evasion (as well as British underestimates of the number of children in African families) was proven when the first official African census of 1948 showed that the population was about 30 per cent larger than had been estimated from the previous tax registers.
15 The district in question appears to be Central Kavirondo, later Central Nyanza.
16 Kenya's historians agree that Luo colonial chiefs had better claims to a hereditary status than the chiefs appointed among other peoples in the colony whose traditional leaderships were not so closely related to lineage position.