KENYA

CHAPTER 1

I was born under the equator in Africa, at Nairobi in what was then the British Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. The “Protectorate” was a ten-mile-deep coastal strip that nominally belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar. Within it none but the blood-red banner of the Sultan, who was descended from the royal house of Oman, could be flown from a flagstaff set in the ground, while the Union Jack of Great Britain might be displayed only from buildings. (When Kenya achieved independence in 1963, she ended this quaint anachronism by simply annexing the coastal strip.)

The East African coast has always been under Arab influence. From time immemorial Arab dhows with their huge, triangular lateen sails have traded down the coast with the northeast monsoon. Reaching the muggy delta of the great Rufiji River, the dhows’ crews would load mangrove poles in the sweltering, humid heat or, in the old days, perhaps take on slaves and ivory in Zanzibar, and then scud home to Aden or Muscat or Kuwait when the winds changed to the south in late March. Mangrove poles were a valuable cargo in Arabia and the Persian Gulf, where there exists no native timber suitable for house building.

The dhows would come into the Old Harbor of Mombasa with banners and pennants flying and drum beating, sailing close under the cannons of Fort Jesus, a classical Portuguese fortress of immense strength. It was so strong that it was never taken by storm during the turbulent three hundred years when the island, on which the town is situated, earned the name Mvita, the island of war. They would unload carpets, Arab chests, and dates at the Customs House, and sneak contraband ashore in canoes. Afterward they would often be beached at high tide so their bottoms could be cleaned and given fresh coats of hot beef fat and lime. Actually, camel fat was preferred, but it was not readily obtainable in Mombasa.

Then they would slip out of the harbor with the early morning offshore breeze, or, if that failed, the crews would have to resort to the oars. I wonder how many people still living have watched a great, deepwater, commercial sailing ship being towed out to sea by her longboat? I have, and I treasure the memory.

The graceful, nodding, white sails of Arab dhows are still to be seen cutting the horizon off the East African coast during the kaskazi, the northeast monsoon. But they are few now, and they all have diesel engines.

The coast of Kenya is as paradisiacal as any in the tropics. Miles of white-sand beaches are fringed by tall coconut palms dancing to a fresh onshore breeze, while a quarter-to a half-mile offshore the blue oceans swell froths on the barrier reef, leaving a calm and protected lagoon between the reef and the shore. Shark attacks on bathers are unheard of along this coast.

Beyond the reef there is deep water almost immediately, so that sailfish and marlin may be caught less than a mile offshore. There are wahoo and yellowfin tuna, bonito, rainbow runners and kingfish, flying fish and the swift schools of dolphin fish that feed on them. Porpoises play with the boats, and turtles, whale sharks, and huge, batlike manta rays are occasionally seen, while clouds of terns and gulls wheel and swoop, until they suddenly close their wings to dive-bomb seething shoals of skittering baitfish. In the dawn fleets of lateen-rigged fishing canoes waft out through the breaks in the reefs with the land breeze, and come foaming home in the evening with the full force of the monsoon and the seas behind them.

I love the sea! It remains our greatest untamed wilderness. If I had grown up in a different environment my life would have been involved with sails and ropes and rigging, with celestial navigation, coastal cruises, and ocean passages, instead of plains and mountains and thornbrush, guns, elephant, deer, and elk.

Finn’s father Yngvar Aagaard (right) with Harry Heppes.

Inland there is generally a narrow strip of rain forest, but it quickly gives way to dreary thorn and Commiphora scrub that stretches away into the desolate, heat-shimmering distance. This is the dreaded Taru Desert of the caravan days, when many a porter succumbed to thirst on the several-days’ waterless crossing between the brackish springs at Maji ya Chumvi and the transitory water holes on Maungu Hill. If the latter were dry, as frequently happened, it was another desperate twenty-mile march to permanent water at Voi.

Beyond Voi and the Tsavo River the country becomes more hilly, with the Athi River and the wall of the Yatta Plateau beyond it to the north and mighty Kilimanjaro visible just across the border in Tanzania to the south. The country is still wooded, and the grotesque, leafless, elephantine baobab trees with their enormously thick trunks are a characteristic feature of it. Then the abrupt Ulu Escarpment leads up to the open Kapiti and Athi plains, and beyond to the city of Nairobi, the “place of cold water,” lying at 6,000 feet altitude at the foot of the formerly forested highlands of the Kikuyu country. A hundred miles to the north, its glaciers almost bisected by the equator, rises the jagged black and white fang of 17,000-foot Mount Kenya, the ruins of an ancient volcano whose name derives from the Kitui Kamba word for a cock ostrich.

The central highlands are cleft by the Great Rift Valley, which has its beginnings in the Jordan Valley, runs under the Red Sea and through Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania to join its western branch at the head of Lake Nyasa in Malawi, and thence to the Indian Ocean through the Shire and lower Zambezi Valleys. In Kenya it is generally one thousand to two thousand feet deep and twenty to thirty miles broad and contains a string of lakes, both fresh and alkaline, and a series of dormant volcanoes, hot springs, and steam jets. Both the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee are Rift Valley lakes, and the fish that Peter was catching when Jesus called him were likely of the same genus, Tilapia, as those commonly found in Kenya’s lakes and ponds. The western highlands beyond the Rift eventually descend to the thickly populated Nyanza basin, and finally to the hot, humid, and fertile former kingdom of Buganda, where the Nile tumbled out of Lake Victoria over the Ripon Falls to begin its thirty-five-hundred-mile journey to the Mediterranean.

The northern two-thirds of the country, roughly everything north of Mount Kenya and the Tana River, consists of a pitiless, arid waste of monotonous thorn scrub, bare earth and stones, dry, sandy watercourses, and sharply crenated rocky hills wavering in the heat haze. It is a land of elephant and dik-dik, of the javelin-horned oryx, the giraffe-necked gerenuk, the fabulous kudu, lean, fierce, and maneless lion, and of the wild, hardy, and warlike desert tribes. We commonly referred to it as the Northern Frontier District, or the NFD.

Masailand occupies the southern portion of Kenya, stretching from the high, well-watered trans-Mara country in the west through the Loita Hills, across the Rift Valley, and on to the dry, dusty plains of Amboseli and Loitokitok close under Kilimanjaro. (Actually, two-thirds of the tribe lives in Tanzania.) In former times the Masai dominated a vastly larger territory that extended through the central highlands to include the Laikipia plateau to the west of Mount Kenya, and there are records of bands of morani (young warriors) raiding all the way down to the coast.

The British reluctantly declared a Protectorate over what became Kenya in about 1895. They had absolutely no interest in acquiring what was then a howling, godforsaken wilderness, but they were deeply concerned to forestall German moves in Uganda, where lay the source of the Nile, whose flow was vital to British-controlled Egypt. Furthermore, partly as a measure to help suppress the slave trade, they were committed to building a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria through 581 miles of rough country, up and down the walls of the Rift Valley and across nine-thousand-foot mountain ranges. Inevitably the railway ran at a heavy loss. Troops, supplies, missionaries, and government officials traveled up on it to Uganda, but little paid freight came down. Long sections of it ran through apparently unpopulated country in the fertile and healthy highlands, spurring creation of a policy of encouraging European settlement in this region in order to produce a visible economy to support the railroad.

White settlement got going in about 1903, and was greatly augmented by grants of land to ex-soldiers after World War I and World War II. Many settlers, but by no means the majority, were members of the English upper class or of the aristocracy, and had little practical knowledge of farming. Harebrained schemes were tried, unknown diseases decimated herds of imported livestock, droughts and swarms of locusts devastated crops, and there were many failures. Gradually, however, those who persevered learned how to manage the land, and eventually thriving plantations of coffee, tea, and sisal, as well as cattle ranches, dairy herds, and farms growing wheat, corn, pyrethrum, and other crops were established all across the highlands.

In the course of settlement the teeming zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, and other antelopes and gazelles were of necessity practically eliminated from the farming areas; the lion were killed off and the leopard greatly reduced. But in Masailand and other sparsely settled parts, and on some of the ranches, the great herds survived in Pleistocene splendor, and the forests and bamboo thickets of Mount Kenya, the Aberdares, and the Mau range gave sanctuary to buffalo, bongo, small-tusked forest elephant, giant forest hogs, and large, dark-pelted leopard. Big elephant and rhino ranged all across the NFD and down the length of the Tana to the sea, and through all the vast Tsavo and Galana country. They were to be found in parts of the coast province, in the outlying district of Ukambani, and in much of Masailand from the border of Tsavo National Park through Amboseli to the Loita Hills and the Mara Game Reserve. Game laws were promulgated from the first, but there were no closed seasons, and the bag limits were quite generous. Even up to the middle of the 1970s the country remained a hunter’s paradise.

Masai warriors in all their finery: spears, ostrich headdresses, and buffalo-hide shields. (Photo courtesy of Col. Dennis Behrens, USAF retired)

Large-scale commercial poaching has now almost completely wiped out the rhino population, leaving only sad remnants in a few heavily guarded sanctuaries, and has eliminated elephant from much of their former range. But there are still great numbers of buffalo and plains game, and one can still stand on a knoll on the Loita plains at certain times of the year and encompass several thousand wildebeest and zebra in a single glance.

My father emigrated from Norway to Kenya in 1927, and my mother, his high-school sweetheart, followed two years later. When he got out of college he had found that there were no jobs for foresters in all of Scandinavia, and none were available in Canada either. He was considering going to New Zealand, where he had heard that there might be job openings, when he met a Norwegian settler from Kenya who offered him a job helping to run his sisal and coffee plantation at Ruiru, some fifteen miles from Nairobi. That sounded interesting, and my father accepted, thinking that he could always return to Norway and get back into forestry when the economy improved. Of course he never did go back other than to visit, and remained in Kenya as a planter and rancher all his life.

The local white settlers had built a clubhouse where they would often gather after work and on weekends to play tennis, hold dances, talk, drink, and in general socialize. My father was probably still embarrassed by his schoolboy English, and in any case had no money for that sort of thing. Instead he spent many evenings hunting in the sisal. Agave sisalana, a relative of the century plant, was grown for its fiber. It was planted in tight double rows about ten feet apart, and the tall grass and brush growing between the rows provided perfect havens for reedbuck and duiker.

My Old Man would kick them out of their beds and more or less wingshoot the reedbuck as they jumped the rows. At first he used a shotgun with buckshot, but found that too easy and so graduated to the rifle. If there was a better way to learn fast and accurate close-range rifle shooting, I do not know what it might be, and he soon became quite deadly at it. He tried to get them at the top of their leap and told me that although he might once in a while miss with the first shot, he would always grass his game if given two shots.

His rifle was a long 7x57mm Mauserwerke sporter with a 28-inch barrel. It remained his only rifle throughout most of his active hunting career. How many head of game he killed I do not know, but certainly many hundreds, and perhaps a thousand or more, as he was encouraged to provide meat to help feed that large labor force on the plantation.

On weekends he and Harry Heppes, the senior manager, would go farther afield. They were up in the Ithanga Hills once while my father was still very new in the country. He came across a large, horselike antelope with curving horns, of a species he did not recognize, and shot it. Harry was utterly horrified when he saw it. It was a roan antelope, which even then was strictly protected in Kenya. They cut it up on the spot and buried the hide and hoofs, but my father took the chance of keeping the horns, which hung on our veranda over the living-room door for many years.

They hunted a lot on the open plains as well, taking eland, zebra, wildebeest, kongoni (hartebeest), and gazelle at ranges that were perforce sometimes quite long, especially for open sights. Harry Heppes was a South African who had been raised in the old Boer tradition in which a boy was sent out with a rifle and two rounds of ammunition. He was expected to bring back meat or both cartridges, else he risked a licking. It was a harsh schooling perhaps, but it did teach a fellow to make sure of his aim, and to conserve his ammunition. Harry was an extremely fine shot who later represented Kenya at Bisley, which is a prestigious shooting range in England. One of his favorite tricks was to wait on an anthill until he had two gazelle lined up so that he could drop both with one round. My father swore that he had seen Harry lie down, set the sight on his 6.5x58mm P Mauser for six hundred yards, and nail a little Thomson gazelle that was walking directly away with its nervous tail going like a windshield wiper. (The 6.5x58mm had been the Portuguese military cartridge. It drove a 157-grain bullet at 2,570 feet per second, and Mauser chambered sporter rifles for it between the wars.)

My father never got that good himself, but by becoming thoroughly familiar with his rifle and its trajectory he was able to do creditable work with it at quite long range, despite its roundnose 175-grain bullet and modest 2,300-fps velocity. The bullet had a lot of lead exposed at the nose. It expanded well, but retained enough weight in its shank to penetrate deeply and was a reliable killer on anything up to and including eland, which weigh as much as a moose. I cannot remember the Old Man—or anyone else for that matter—ever complaining of a failure that could honestly be attributed to that load in the 7x57mm.

He never hunted elephant or rhino, and killed only one buffalo, but he did bag a couple of lion with the Mauser, down on the Yatta Plateau. He killed a zebra for bait and tied it to a tree; in those days lion were still considered to be vermin, and it was common practice to build an impenetrable thorn boma (enclosure) in which to sit up for them, and to shoot them at night. My Old Man did not do that. He came back at dawn, crawled up over a little rise fifty yards from the bait, found a lion and lioness on it, and took them both with one shot apiece.

He started teaching me to shoot with a Diana rifle when I was four or five years old, and I took my first piece of meat, a dove, with that gun. I can still vividly recall the pride and satisfaction I felt in being able to contribute to the family larder as I carried it home. A little later he continued my education with a Winchester M67 single-shot .22 rimfire, and at the same time he started to let me fire his F. N. “Browning’s Patent” .32 Auto, under close supervision, of course. We were totally ignorant of the need for hearing protection, and that noisy little pistol would leave my ears hurting and ringing for hours. The Browning resided in his bedside drawer all through my growing up, but because I was allowed to shoot it, my curiosity about it had been satisfied. I knew what it could do and realized that it was no toy, and thus I was never tempted to play with it, or even to touch it without permission. I raised my own children the same way with regard to guns. It is by far the best scheme, but unfortunately it is no longer possible in most urban environments.