KENYA IN BLACK AND WHITE
The Kenya Robert Ruark saw on his first safari in 1951 was the last glimmering of a unique and tiny civilization that existed in East Africa for barely half a century. Yet in that time it managed to capture the world’s imagination out of all proportion to its size.
It was a civilization made up of an exotic combination of wild animals and glorious mountains, forbidding deserts, vintage wine under the stars, Mozart on gramophones, man-eating lions, and poverty-stricken younger sons of the nobility, trying to create a working farm from dangerous bush and coming into town to beg more loans from the banks and get drunk at the Norfolk Hotel. It was a civilization that welcomed Scottish gamekeepers, Jewish peddlers, Polish soldiers of fortune, and the Prince of Wales. Its denizens inspired literature, created literature, and set a standard for rampant adultery that has never been equalled. Given its huge reputation, it is amazing to realize now just how small and short-lived that Kenya actually was.
Kenya Colony, as it was known for most of its transition from untamed bush to uneasy independence, was unlike any other British colony. The country was different, the native tribes were different, and the white settlers were different. It was a candle that burned with a very special flame, but like all candles that burn too brightly, it did not last long.
Many histories have been written of Kenya, from many points of view. A history written from a native viewpoint would be vastly different than one from an impoverished white settler, from a liberal social historian, or from a member of the upper class. Depending on what picture the writer wishes to present, various aspects of Kenya’s kaleidoscopic history can be magnified and others ignored. An apologist for black terrorism of the 1950s might concentrate on the degeneracy of the white settlers, as exemplified by the inhabitants of “Happy Valley,’’ the drug-taking connoisseurs of serial adultery who gave Kenya much of its scandalous reputation. Yet that would ignore the suffering, privations, and exhausting efforts of the average white settler in the highlands, far from the bright lights of Nairobi. An anthropologist enthralled with Kikuyu customs would describe a different country than would an expatriate English gentleman, in the mold of Lawrence of Arabia, who worshipped the wild ways of the unspoiled Masai.
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To a European or American the modern history of Kenya really begins with the explorations of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, searching for the source of the Nile in the 1850s. Until then, the region was populated exclusively by primitive black tribes and throngs of wild animals, with the occasional Arab trader working established routes inland from the sea. Along the coast, there were Arab settlements that dated back a thousand years. The Portuguese, especially, had battled back and forth with the Arabs for hundreds of those years. The coastal city of Mombasa, with its white walls and palm trees, was already old when Burton landed, and of course, the island of Zanzibar, to the south, was a long-established slave-trading center. Inland much beyond the first line of hills, however, was terra incognita. Columns of shackled slaves wended their way down to the Indian Ocean, and the slave traders disappeared back into the bush, but few outsiders ventured more than a few miles from the sea.
The journeys of Richard Burton and John Speke, and later of Henry Stanley and Samuel Baker, and the books they wrote about their travels and the country they had seen, with its black tribes, its herds of animals, and the wonders of the Mountains of the Moon and the Nile River and the great inland lakes, stirred the imaginations of people in England and Scotland. The years from 1860 to 1900 saw the initial flowering of the great age of books. For the first time in history, people were widely literate and books were available in large numbers. They rolled off printing presses with seeming abandon, heavy volumes bound in leather to last forever. Everyone who went anywhere, it seemed, returned home to write a book about it. Young ladies devoured books, both novels and nonfiction works about far-off lands, wild tribes, exotic plants, birds, animals, you name it. To look at some of these books today, one wonders what the publishers saw in them or who, exactly, they expected to buy them.
One such is a two-volume work titled The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World, being a Comprehensive Account of Their Manners and Customs, and of Their Physical, Social, Mental, Moral and Religious Characteristics, written by the Reverend J.G. Wood, M.A., F.L.S. It was published in 1877, totalled 1,530 pages, and purported to deal with every “uncivilized” tribe on the globe. The book is surprisingly comprehensive, including extensive tracts on tribes which, at the time it was written, were still in the process of being discovered and catalogued. The great African explorer, missionary, and self-promoting egotist, Dr. David Livingstone, published his Travels and Researches in South Africa in 1857, and the book became and stayed an all-time best-seller. Africa was still the Dark Continent — “dark” in the sense of being unknown — and there was great public curiosity about it. Names like “The Mountains of the Moon” (Uganda’s Ruwenzori Range, although that was not known at the time) pervaded conversation. King Solomon’s Mines were a reality, in the public’s mind if not in fact, and readers eagerly gobbled up any and all stories about them that could be published.
The source of the Nile was a mystery that had enthralled men for thousands of years. Where, exactly, did this river of life originate? Attempts to navigate the Nile from Egypt to its source had ended, sometimes in tragedy, but always in failure. Expeditions up the Nile compounded the mystery rather than solving it. The major physical obstacle was the great inland swamp called the Sud in central Sudan. A boat might get as far as the Sud, but once in this vast, spreading marsh, with visibility limited by its towering reeds and little or no discernible channel of flowing water, explorers could get no farther. Add to this the intense heat, mosquitoes, malaria, hostile tribes, madness, and death. Even years later, explorers who knew where the Nile began and ended and how to get through the Sud, in theory at least, had difficulty actually doing it.
When Richard Burton and John Speke landed in East Africa, their plan was to cut inland in search of a great lake that would prove to be the source of the Nile. Such a lake existed in mythology and was even marked on ancient maps. Once into the interior, Burton reasoned, such a lake would be well-known by the inhabitants. The story of Burton and Speke, their enigmatic relationship, and subsequent betrayal (by Speke) and tragedy, laced with triumph that turned bitter for both men, is one of the great real-life dramas of all time. In Victorian England, with all its contradictions, with its prudery and love of erudition and fascination with the occult and the mysterious and the frankly erotic, the rivalry between these men assumed Shakespearean proportions. It was more than merely a cause célèbre that provided conversation at Victorian breakfast tables, however; the saga of Burton and Speke cast a spell that drew people to East Africa for decades after both were dead.
The story of what actually happened is well known. Richard Burton was one of the greatest Victorian heroes, a man of such erudition and accomplishment that it defies belief. He was perhaps the greatest linguist of all time, a man who acquired new languages “like other people change socks,” according to one biographer. Eventually, he spoke three dozen languages and dialects; he could gain a working knowledge in a couple of weeks and be fluent in a month. Burton combined this extraordinary ability with a far-ranging curiosity and scholarship, and a love of adventure that was right out of Boys’ Own Annual. After a brief military career in India, he set out to explore Africa. Penetrating forbidden cities was almost a specialty, and he accomplished this both in his famous expedition to Mecca, disguised as a Persian physician, and later to the Abyssinian city of Harar.
On one of his early expeditions he took on John Hanning Speke, another young British Army officer, to replace a member who died unexpectedly. Speke was as unlike Burton as it is possible to get: A man of limited intellect but overwhelming ambition, he was blond where Burton was dark and satanic, he spoke no language but English, and wanted to explore to gain fame, not to learn. To Burton, the journey was more important than the end; to Speke, the end was everything.
In 1857, they set off into the interior of East Africa in search of the mythical lake thought to be the source of the Nile. After months of hardship, they found Lake Tanganyika (not exactly a discovery, since it was known to the Arabs from their trading activities) and Burton suspected it might be the source of the Nile. On their return journey Burton fell very ill and they halted for several weeks to allow him to recover. Natives told of a great lake to the north of their camp, and Speke set out alone to find it. What he found was Lake Victoria — Victoria Nyanza. On nothing more than intuition combined with wishful thinking, Speke decided he had found the real source of the Nile — as indeed he had. He returned to tell Burton of his find. Speke’s blurted, bald announcement that he had discovered the Nile’s source — “the Nile is solved!” he is reputed to have said — infuriated Burton. Speke had no real scientific evidence, much less definitive proof. Had he circumnavigated the lake? No. Had he seen a great river flowing out of it, or even a small one? No. Well then, Burton said, you have seen a great body of water from a distance, and that’s all you have seen. Speke, however, was adamant. Their relationship, already strained, deteriorated further over the next several months as they struggled across Tanganyika. They were barely on speaking terms by the time they made it back to the coast and boarded a ship for England.
Burton’s health did not improve, and he was forced to stop over in Aden to recuperate. The two explorers made an agreement that neither would make any announcement about their findings until they could do so together and let them be judged on their merits. As soon as he landed in London, however, Speke went straight to the Royal Geographical Society to announce his discovery. Burton eventually returned to find Speke the lion of the hour, heralded as the man who had discovered the source of the Nile.
Burton continued to champion Lake Tanganyika, and the two men became bitter enemies. Speke returned to Africa to enlarge on his explorations and did, in fact, follow the Victoria Nile from its source at the Uganda town of Jinja. Burton, meanwhile, went on to other things. The argument continued to rage, however, and in 1864 they were scheduled to meet in a debate to settle who was right; on the eve of the event, Speke died in a shooting accident — an accident many still contend was suicide. His death inflamed passions on both sides, and Burton himself was distraught with grief for the man who had been, at one time, like a brother. Public fascination with the controversy and its tragic ending has kept the story of Burton and Speke alive for 140 years, and transferred itself from the men to the country they had explored.
Burton lived another twenty-six years — he died in Trieste in 1890 — and wrote many more books (forty-three in all) on such disparate subjects as swordsmanship (he is considered one of the greatest swordsmen in history), falconry, the Mormon settlement in Salt Lake City, and classic Eastern eroticism. Burton was truly one of the great intellects of all time. It is said that if each of his published books were placed in a pile, the stack would be four feet high; if books written about him were added, the stack would be forty feet high. His two most influential works on East Africa were First Footsteps in East Africa (the story of the Somali expedition) and The Lake Regions of Central Africa. The latter dealt with the exploration for the source of the Nile that led to both Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, and while his conclusions were incorrect about which lake drained where, the overall account of the journey, and what they discovered along the way, has become one of the great classics of African literature. Like Livingstone’s book, Lake Regions has been printed and reprinted for more than a century and played a great part in inspiring people to visit East Africa, and even to settle there.
The inspirational value of literature in the settling of Africa went beyond tales of the explorers. By the 1860s, all kinds of hunting books were also being published. The first was William Cornwallis Harris’s The Wild Sports of Southern Africa. Harris hunted in South Africa during the time of the Great Trek and was in the vicinity of what is now Zimbabwe when the Afrikaner Voortrekkers came into conflict with the Matabele, an offshoot tribe of the Zulus. Harris’s book inspired other men to emulate him, and they too returned home to write books that encouraged others. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, a wild Scot if ever there was one, wrote A Hunter’s Life in South Africa. William Cotton Oswell came out to hunt and stayed to finance Livingstone’s journey across the Kalahari to locate Lake Ngami. Oswell wrote sections of The Badminton Library series on big game hunting. After that came Frederick Courteney Selous, the most famous hunter and author of them all. While most of this activity was in southern Africa — what is today South Africa and Zimbabwe — it spilled over into East Africa when that area opened up in the latter half of the century.
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By this time, South Africa had been settled for more than two hundred years, and the great game herds were being killed off rapidly. The European countries were engaged in what history now refers to as the “Scramble for Africa,” planting their flags up and down the continent. From unproductive goat paradises like Somalia, to the fever-ridden coastal swamps of Mozambique, to the mineral-rich Belgian Congo, there was a frantic drive to colonize every square inch of the Dark Continent. When the scramble was over, Africa had been divided up among Great Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy and Belgium.
The greatest single power was Great Britain, which ruled the Cape of Good Hope and points north as far as the Zambezi; it controlled Egypt and the Sudan, and British East Africa, as well as Nigeria and other parts of west Africa. The same European rivalries that led to the colonization of Africa played a part in the first world war, although what was cause and what was effect is still being debated. In his book The Scramble for Africa, English historian Thomas Pakenham summed up the unseemly party:
In half a generation, the Scramble gave Europe virtually the whole continent: including thirty new colonies and protectorates, 10 million square miles of new territory and 110 million dazed new subjects, acquired by one method or another. Africa was sliced up like a cake... By the end of the century, the passions generated by the Scramble had helped to poison the political climate in Europe, brought Britain to the brink of war with France, and precipitated a struggle with the Boers, the costliest, longest and bloodiest war since 1815 — and one of the most humiliating in British history. As for the pieces of the colonial cake, they have now become, ninety years later, for richer or for poorer (mainly for poorer) the forty-seven independent nations of Africa.
Today there are more than forty-seven independent nations, and it would be pointless to even state a number. By the time this book goes to press, there will almost certainly be more. The artificial boundaries that were drawn by the colonial powers have imposed unbelievable hardship on native African peoples in the forty years since they began embracing independence, mainly by dividing homogenous tribes between two neighboring countries. The Masai of Kenya and Tanganyika are a classic example. A line on a map, drawn in London or Berlin or Paris, or wherever the latest treaty was negotiated, means little to a Masai herdsman in search of fresh pasture, or to a wandering goat, or a migrating elephant.
Many conflicting interests motivated the scramble, although the whole episode is still puzzling to historians, much like the South Sea Bubble or the Dutch tulip mania of the 1700s. Bismarck referred sardonically to the whole affair as Kolonialtummel — the colonial whirl — as in, “give it a whirl.” To a great extent, the motivation of newly united countries like Germany and Italy was the desire to be seen as the equal of other European states, traditional colonial powers like Britain and France. Britain itself had a mix of motivations, some of them highminded (at least at the beginning), some purely avaricious, and a few strategic. Starting out with that mix, a politician can always find some excuse that is acceptable to a majority of the electorate.
To start with the strategic, Britain as a great sea power, with colonies spanning the globe, had a vital interest in keeping the sea lanes open — hence its interest in Egypt and the Suez Canal at one end of the continent, and the Cape of Good Hope at the other. Its high-minded subjects, including such ego-driven do-gooders as David Livingstone, felt it was Britain’s responsibility to halt the slave trade, a traffic in black Africans that had existed for thousands of years. Slaves were shipped from both coasts, some heading west to the Americas, others east to the Arab emirates. The Sudan was then (and is today) the focal point of that trade, and Britain was drawn into a lengthy war with the Arab slavers of the Sudan that led to the death of General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon at Khartoum, the eventual defeat of the Mahdi by Kitchener at Omdurman, and a colonial administration in the Sudan that lasted until 1956. Coincidentally, there was the exploration of the Nile, both up from its mouth and down from its source, involving such luminaries as Henry Stanley and Samuel Baker as well as Burton and Speke. This determination to stop the slave trade drew Britain and the Royal Navy into such disparate locales as the Gold Coast of west Africa and Zanzibar on the east coast, both of which were slave-trading centers.
The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in the 1880s, and the great diamond strikes in southern Africa, eventually led to the activities of adventurers such as Cecil Rhodes, the Boer War (the greatest armed robbery of all time), and the penetration of British soldiers of fortune into Bechuanaland and the Rhodesias. Where British adventurers led, the British government inevitably followed — either to protect them from the inhabitants or to protect the inhabitants from them. As a rule, especially under Liberals like Gladstone who were essentially anti-imperial, the British government did not want to add colonies; they were expensive and few contributed anything to the treasury. The Sudan, for example, was a money-sink, imposing endless costs with little to show except frustration and failure. The problem was, there always seemed to be some good reason for getting involved — whether it was the slave trade, gold mines, diamonds, or protecting settlers — and never sufficient reason to pull out. Great Britain did not set out to colonize the world. Mostly it just happened.
The third great item of trade in African history, after slaves and gold, is ivory. Elephant tusks have been used as currency for millenia, and there has been a thriving ivory trade from East Africa to the Far East almost as long as there has been trading. By 1900, the great elephant herds were gone from South Africa, and the Belgian king, Leopold, had locked up the heart of Africa and the ivory trade down the Congo River. That left the elephants of East Africa. Their ivory was not the prime motivating force for Britain becoming involved in Kenya, but once there, ivory played a pivotal role in the region’s colonization.
Although there were all kinds of motivating factors, the European invasion of Africa was always one of people. Colonies require settlers; otherwise they remain merely conquests, lonely flags planted on distant shores. The Portuguese and the Dutch began the white colonization of Africa in the 1500s and 1600s. The largest and most enduring white settlement was that of the Dutch Boers of South Africa, who first landed at the Cape in 1652. So entrenched did they become that they eventually became known, and largely accepted, as a “white tribe” of Africa, with their own culture, language (Afrikaans), and traditions. The word “Boer” is Dutch for farmer, and farming was (and is) their primary focus. The Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique tended more toward mining, hunting, trading, and plantations, while the old-world farming of the Boers centered on cattle.
Where the British went, they went to hunt, farm, explore, mine, and trade. Often they were led by visionaries, whether of the David Livingstone missionary stamp, determined to save the heathen and eradicate slavery, or of the Cape-to-Cairo imperialism of a Cecil Rhodes. There always seemed to be some eccentric, magnetic Brit out in front, waving a flag, wearing a tie to dinner in the middle of the jungle, or mowing down hordes of savages in the name of Christ. The image of “mad dogs and Englishmen, out in the midday sun” is more than just a music hall parody. A more accurate image, however, is the kind of men who defended Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus in 1879. In her colonial wars, Britain more often than not faced overwhelming odds, and preferred to depend upon the resourcefulness of one man to win through, rather than sending a dozen battalions. For one thing, it was cheaper. And if the one resourceful man failed and paid with his head, as Chinese Gordon did at Khartoum, the government could always depend on the newspapers to whip up public opinion to approve of sending the big battalions later.
As foreign policies go, it was one of the more successful, and certainly most economical, in history. Occasionally, the resourceful visionary would cause unwelcome problems for the government by stirring up public opinion when it was not wanted, but that is one of the risks of trying to run an empire on a budget.
In the scramble for Africa, Britain was different from the other European powers in one significant way: It was a democracy, with politicians who were both pro- and anti-imperial. During the late 1800s, the Liberal Gladstone was in and out of power, alternating with Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, and finally Lord Salisbury, Tories all, who were more or less pro-imperial. And so, as governments changed, a period of imperial expansion would be followed by one of contraction or neglect or fretful hand-wringing, either by the civil servants at the Exchequer at the enormous cost of saving the heathen, or by missionary societies at the evils of slave traders and the other, less enlightened, European powers. Germany immediately comes to mind in that regard. Germany seized two large chunks of territory — German South-West Africa (later Namibia) and German East Africa (later Tanganyika). These colonies were governed with the fairness and enlightenment for which the Germans later became famous in Belgium, Poland, and the Ukraine. The image of the shaven-headed, bull-necked German overseer, lashing slaves to build roads and bridges, is no more far-fetched than the effete Englishman dressing for dinner in ninety-five-degree heat. Both existed. Fortunately, the English model prevailed.
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It is difficult to write a brief history of Kenya because it was a most unlikely colony that grew out of a series of unlikely events, each of which needs to be explained if the rest is to make much sense. One of the most improbable factors was the building of the Uganda Railway — the “Lunatic Line” — in the 1890s. This was an expensive, controversial venture undertaken to accomplish one particular goal, but not completed until some considerable time after the reason for building it in the first place had already disappeared. Like so many odd occurrences in British history, it came about because of the death of one of the “resourceful men” upon whom Whitehall habitually depended to save the day. In this case, it was the death of General Gordon at Khartoum. Gordon had been dispatched by Gladstone with orders to evacuate the city, which was being threatened by a fanatical Muslim force under the Mahdi. In 1885, Khartoum fell to the Mahdi, Gordon was killed, and his head severed and put on display, enraging the British public. They demanded a relief force be sent to re-conquer the Sudan. The ensuing war was pursued sporadically until 1898, when a British expeditionary force under General Kitchener defeated the Mahdi’s forces at Omdurman. In the thirteen years between Gordon’s death and the Mahdi’s final defeat, however, various approaches had been suggested as alternatives to sending an army up the Nile from Egypt, which was a difficult and expensive undertaking and one that was anything but a guaranteed success.
One suggestion was building a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria to carry troops, weapons, and supplies, which would then be shipped down the Nile into the Sudan, to invade the territory from the south. There were other reasons for building the railway, but this was a major one. Over all opposition, on August 13, 1896, a bill was passed in the House of Commons authorizing construction. Over the next five years, the project would cost five and a half million pounds and the lives of hundreds of workers, many of them killed by the infamous man eaters of Tsavo. By the time the line was finished, however, the war in the Sudan had already been over for three years. The British were left with a railway going, essentially, from nowhere to nowhere. There were no products to be carried out from Lake Victoria and no trade goods to be sent in. The government was left with a costly white elephant for which it now needed a use. The answer? Create a colony, settle the land, and give the rail line a reason to exist.
The five-year construction project had produced more than merely a railway. The man-eating lions that delayed its construction by killing and eating the Indian coolies working on it had finally been killed by Col. J.H. Patterson, and Patterson wrote a book about the ordeal. The book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, was published in 1907. It became one of the best-selling African hunting books of all time and ignited the imaginations of thousands of young British men and women, many of whom settled in Kenya.
Meanwhile, in 1897, a young hunter named Hugh Cholmondely (pronounced CHUM-ley), later Lord Delamere, came to Africa to hunt in Somaliland and almost accidentally wandered into the highlands of Kenya around Laikipia, north of what is now Nairobi. He was entranced by the mountains and streams and returned to England determined to settle in British East Africa. In 1903, he and his wife, Lady Florence Cole, arrived and established Equator Ranch. A few other white settlers were already in Kenya, but Delamere was one of the very few who had enough capital to finance a serious venture; as well, he was a man of great energy and vision, and utterly ruthless in getting what he wanted, whether the enemy was the tsetse fly, the Kikuyu, or the British Colonial Office. Delamere became a legend in East Africa. The main street of Nairobi was named Delamere Avenue, and there was a statue of him at the head of the street near the Stanley Hotel. Today, the street is Kenyatta Avenue, and a statue of Jomo Kenyatta stands in Delamere’s stead. But that does not lessen Delamere’s contribution.
Nairobi was founded in 1899 and became the capital in 1905. Its location was chosen because the railway passed through; otherwise it was situated in about as inhospitable a spot as is imaginable. The settlement was established in a swampy area renowned for its mosquitoes and fever. Dr. Boedeker, one of the earliest settlers who later became a government medical officer, skirted the area on his trek to Fort Smith and described it as “the worst possible choice for any sort of urban center by virtue of its swamps alone.” He pointed out that the early Arab trading caravans had given it a wide berth for that reason. Regardless, Nairobi took root, grew, prospered, and is today one of the major cities of Africa, known (by name at least) to people who otherwise have only the vaguest idea where Kenya is.
At a height of 4,000 feet above sea level, however, Nairobi had other virtues. Its climate is very pleasant most of the year, and mosquitoes aside, it is not as congenitally fever-ridden as such coastal areas as Dar es Salaam. By 1901, the East African Protectorate, as Kenya was originally known, had a coastal port (Mombasa), a 582-mile rail link from Lake Victoria to the sea, and a city (Nairobi) taking shape in the interior. All it needed, in the eyes of the British government, was people.
Of course, the region already had people. It had several dozen black tribes, including the two largest that would play a major role in the events that were about to unfold: the Kikuyu and the colorful, photogenic Masai. With their red cloaks, their haughty good looks, and their free-spirited lifestyle, the Masai seized the romantic imaginations of many Europeans. The Kikuyu, mortal enemies of the Masai, fought a brief war with the British which ended, predictably, with their defeat. Kikuyu, Masai, and European then entered into a long period of settlement, resettlement, and mounting resentment, most of it based on land or the lack thereof. As in South Africa with the Boers and the Zulus, land ownership was to play a pivotal role in shaping Kenya Colony. In the case of the Masai, land is largely communal property, held by the tribe as a whole but grazed by everyone. For the Kikuyu, land ownership is also a tribal concern but in a different way; not being a tribe of nomadic herdsmen, they require individual plots of ground to raise crops. One man may have several wives, and each wife requires her own shamba on which to raise her crops. When the British arrived, to a great extent they put an end to inter-tribal warfare, and over the course of the twentieth century black populations increased dramatically. As the number of people rose, demand for land became greater, and that, in turn, became a source of friction.
When he first arrived in the 1890s, Lord Delamere saw the highlands north of Nairobi and dubbed it “white man’s country.” This phrase was seized upon over the next few years as an indication of racism — that Delamere intended Kenya to be for white people only. In reality, the term stemmed from the fact that the highlands were country in which a white person could survive, unlike the fever-ridden lowlands or coastal areas. There was a great European fear in those days, almost a supernatural dread, of the tropical sun’s effect on northern peoples. This is the reason you see, in old photographs, men and women bundled up without a square inch of skin showing, wearing huge hats and solar topis. They treated the sun almost as a living adversary, and it was many years before most Europeans dared to venture outdoors in the tropics without a hat.
The first settlers came to Kenya and followed the railway inland, settling in the “white highlands” north and west of Nairobi. They established towns whose names became famous in books and novels — Thomson’s Falls, Fort Hall, Nyeri. They lived a hard life. Although they were allotted land by the government, there were mixed feelings about the benefits of settlement. Some government officials supported the idea of white colonization; others felt the land belonged rightly to the Kikuyu, Masai, and other tribes. The colonists, led from the start by Lord Delamere, fought a running battle with the colonial administration. The Kenya settlers gained an early reputation for being combative, quarrelsome, even mutinous. At times, it seemed the colonial administration was practically at war with its own people, and this antagonism and mistrust would play a significant role decades later.
The appearance in 1907 of The Man-Eaters of Tsavo was a milestone for the protectorate. The book received rave reviews: The Times Literary Supplement called it “overpoweringly dramatic;” The Spectator said the tale was “simply amazing.” The book was reprinted twenty-six times by 1945. It was required reading for anyone “going out” to East Africa, and one of its greatest admirers was Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States who, in 1908, passed up the chance for a second term in the White House in order to go to Kenya and fulfill a lifelong dream: a full-scale African safari. The Roosevelt safari was one of the pivotal events in early Kenya history because it helped put the place on the map. Already Kenya was becoming known as a shooter’s paradise, with a seemingly endless supply of big game of every kind. Roosevelt’s arrival and the subsequent publication of his book, African Game Trails, set more hunters’ hearts aflutter. The company that arranged Roosevelt’s safari, Newland & Tarlton, set a standard for opulence that stood for years.
In the early part of the century, men in Kenya hunted for many reasons. The most obvious was food, and game meat was a staple on many of the farms being hacked out of the highland forests. They also shot lions and leopards to protect their cattle, and Cape buffalo, elephant, and rhino to protect their crops; zebras and wildebeeste were shot by the thousands to remove their grazing mouths from land needed for cattle and goats. As well, money could be made directly from animals like the elephant. There was a continuing demand for ivory, and a hunter could make serious money coming back into Nairobi with a long string of porters, weighed down with tusks. Men like Karamoja Bell and Arthur Neumann hunted elephant professionally, but many farmers hunted elephant in their spare time to pick up cash, which was then used to buy equipment, seed, or to pay off a bank loan.
From there it was a short step for farmers to use their hunting skills and fieldcraft to guide visitors from abroad who came to Kenya to go on safari and hunt. Roosevelt’s guides were also farmers, and the civilian farming industry of the East African Protectorate grew alongside the commercial safari industry, each feeding off the other.
In 1913, there was another literary milestone: the arrival of Karen Blixen and her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. They purchased a coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, southwest of Nairobi, in what is now the town of Karen. The Baron became a famous white hunter, Karen became the lover of another hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, and eventually the author of the book that will forever be associated with Kenya, Out of Africa. The tangled multiple love affairs of the Blixens et al were just a part of what became practically a national trait; two of the affairs became famous, and later played a part in the further unfolding of the literary history of Kenya, through the works of Ernest Hemingway.
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Life in the East African Protectorate changed in 1914 when it was forced to go to war with its neighbor to the south, German East Africa. The war was fought almost entirely on Tanganyikan soil, after British forces invaded. The first battle was on the plain between Mount Longido and Kilimanjaro, and the outnumbered forces of the German general, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought a legendary campaign of hit-and-run which only ended in 1918, with von Lettow’s surrender after a fighting withdrawal to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The most noteworthy event of the war, from a hunting and literary standpoint, was the death of F.C. Selous, in 1917, shot by a German sniper. On hearing the news, Kaiser Wilhelm, an admirer of Selous, sent a note of condolence to the British.
The war ended with German East Africa in British hands and from 1918 onwards, Kenya, Tanganyika, and to a lesser extent Uganda and the southern Sudan, were the hunting Mecca of the world.
For Kenya, the war brought one bounty: more people. Under the Soldier Settlement Scheme of 1920, demobilized British soldiers came out from the United Kingdom by the boatload. Many were given land in the highlands, and Nairobi grew quickly. By this time outfitting safaris was a major industry, and publishing safari books was a minor but influential offshoot. The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age had their effect on Kenya in the sense that a society that had always been iconoclastic exhibited a tendency toward outright lawlessness. The so-called Happy Valley Set became notorious as far away as London and New York, with newspaper articles appearing that gave all the delicious, devilish details of their drug-taking, bed-hopping, weekend parties. There was the famous hostess who interpreted “dressing for dinner” as meaning removing every stitch of clothing before making her entrance, to the delight of her guests. Another uttered the memorable line, as she rose with the latest in a series of crushing hangovers, walked out onto her bedroom terrace, and snarled: “Another goddamned beautiful day.” Eventually, there was a standing joke in London: “Are you married, or are you from Kenya?”
Such behavior was not typical of British colonies. Kenya was different, and it was different because of the people it attracted. It is over-simplifying to say that it was settled by the nobility, while other colonies attracted lower-class or middle-class Englishmen, but to a great extent it is true. Rhodesia, for example, presented a distinct contrast with Kenya. Both were settled in the immediate aftermath of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and both drew their early settlers from South Africa and from veterans of that war, both British and Afrikaner. Eventually, Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) had a white population of about a quarter-million. They were storekeepers, railway men, drovers, engineers, ranchers, hunters, miners, prospectors. Many of them were drawn from the working classes of industrial British cities like Sheffield and Birmingham, and most skilled jobs were filled by white settlers, not by natives or Asian immigrants.
Kenya, on the other hand, took its tone from Lord Delamere, who was heir to a substantial estate in Cheshire. Kenya was a place to go to shoot, to be a landowner, a gentleman farmer (although most quickly found that life was anything but gentlemanly, for the most part). Although the white highlands eventually were carved up into large, white-owned farms, the total white population of Kenya never exceeded 60,000 people. Kenya also had a large Indian population. At one point, there were 35,000 Indians employed building the Uganda Railway, and many stayed on in East Africa. The Asian population developed a vibrant community in its own right, and Indians formed Kenya’s major commercial class. Asian businessmen became a third pillar upon which Kenyan society was built; if the white farmers and professional ivory hunters were the men who killed the elephants, the Asians were the people who provided the market for the ivory.
During the 1920s a rash of safari books appeared, written by men who had traveled to East Africa after the war. In those days a safari was typically three months or more, not counting the many weeks spent in transit. A shooter might board a ship in Southampton for a lengthy cruise through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, then down the coast to Mombasa with stops along the way at such intriguing places as Port Sudan or Aden, unaffectionately known as the “Coal-Hole of the East.” By the time a big game hunter disembarked at Mombasa, he had likely been at sea for several weeks. He would then board the Uganda Railway for a journey of several days up-country to Nairobi. Altogether, a safari was a major undertaking involving great sums of money and vast amounts of time. Only the very serious, or the seriously wealthy, could contemplate doing it.
When Roosevelt hunted in East Africa in 1908, the camp and supplies were carried by a long string of porters, five hundred or thereabouts, and the organizing and marshaling of these men was a full-time job. There were porters to carry the camp, askaris to guard the porters, and hunters to provide game meat to feed them all. Needless to say, this was not cheap. From the beginning, an East African safari was a considerable financial commitment. By the 1920s, foot safaris had given way to vehicles, much to the chagrin of some traditionalists, who pronounced it “the end of the game.” They predicted the motorized safari would bring ruin, but it had the advantage of providing greater mobility at lower cost and offered the possibility of reaching areas that otherwise would have been out of the question. As with so many things technology changed safaris, but it did not wipe them out and in many ways made them more accessible.
In 1927, for example, an American physician, Thomas Arbuthnot, arrived in Kenya with two young friends for a safari. Their guides were the Trichardt brothers, Carl and Fannie, Afrikaners who had emigrated to Kenya after the Boer War. Over the next several months they hunted throughout Kenya and Tanganyika. The finale, after the hunting was over, was a drive to the headwaters of the Nile, where they embarked on a river steamer for the long voyage down river to Khartoum; from there they travelled by boat and railway to Cairo, and from there back to the United States. In 1954, Arbuthnot published an account of the journey called Grand Safari. Neither the safari nor the book is particularly noteworthy except for the fact that the trip took place, Dr. Arbuthnot wrote a book about it, and publishers in several countries saw fit to publish it. No one was killed, no one was eaten, and nothing new was discovered, but it was a great adventure all the same, and the world agreed.
In 1928, the Prince of Wales went to Africa on safari and was guided by Denys Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen. Naturally, the event was one of the social highlights of the year, covered in detail (if at a distance) by all the London newspapers.
The glitz and glamor of safari life, as reported by the Daily Mail, tended to obscure the colony’s less newsworthy daily life, which consisted largely of a struggle to survive by the farmers who had settled the highlands. For them, life was an endless round of crop failures, unexplained livestock deaths, problems with recalcitrant labor, battling the strange religious beliefs of the tribes living on and around their land, watching children come down with various diseases, and making once- or twice-yearly trips to Nairobi to buy supplies and beg a further extension from the bank. To read books like Out of Africa, you would think the Kenya settlers lived permanently on the brink of bankruptcy, and to an extent this was true. While the highlands were spectacularly scenic, with Mount Kenya jutting its snow-covered fist to the skies, the land itself was not particularly well adapted to growing anything anyone wanted to buy. Experiments with cash crops like coffee, tea, and wheat had a boom-or-bust quality; chances are the crop would fail, eaten by some heretofore unsuspected fungus, or if there was a bumper crop the market would collapse. At which point, Father would pick up his .470 Nitro Express and head off into the bush to hunt ivory, to make ends meet, while Mother supervised the planting of next year’s failure.
In 1933, a young American writer named Ernest Hemingway disembarked at Mombasa, accompanied by his second wife, Pauline. Hemingway was recognized even then as one of the most significant modern novelists. He was only thirty-four but had already published two of his best works, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, as well as several collections of short stories and an enigmatic non-fiction masterpiece on bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon. A hunter and fisherman since childhood, Hemingway had dreamed of going on safari for many years, and now here he was, in spite of the onset of the Great Depression, with the great (and expensive) adventure bankrolled by Pauline’s wealthy Uncle Gus. Their professional hunter — still called a “white hunter” in those pre-politically correct days — was Philip Percival. The term “white hunter,” by the way, came into being very early in the game; at one time, there were two professional hunters employed on a particular ranch to control predators and crop-trampling herbivores. One hunter was white, the other black. The white one, believe it or not, was named Alan Black, who became the very first “white hunter,” to differentiate him from the “black hunter.” Or so the story goes. At any rate, Philip Percival, brother of Kenya’s long-time chief game warden, Blayney Percival (author of A Game Ranger’s Note Book) was a renowned professional hunter even before he became associated with Hemingway.
Hemingway hunted with him for the better part of three months, then took ship from Mombasa with his head filled with memories of Africa and plans to come back. These ideas spilled out later onto the pages of Green Hills of Africa, one of the modern classics of safari writing. More important than Green Hills, however, were two short stories Hemingway wrote. One, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, may be, from a technical point of view, the finest short story ever written,. It is a tale of a classic love triangle involving a wealthy American client, his beautiful straying wife, and their white hunter, Robert Wilson. The client, Macomber, finds himself but loses his life, shot by accident or design by his lovely wife as he faces a charging Cape buffalo. The plot is loosely based on an actual incident Percival related to Hemingway. It involved J.H. Patterson, killer of the maneaters of Tsavo, when he was guiding an Englishman and his wife on safari. The Englishman shot himself with a revolver (or did he?) after which Patterson and the wife blithely continued with the safari. The affair caused a monumental scandal, and Patterson left the colony in disgrace. He died in 1947. When Hemingway was there, the affair was still a cause célèbre, a current issue rather than an ancient incident. He took the theme and made it into a great short story, which was read by millions of Americans. It was later made into the usual dreadful movie, as with so many of Hemingway’s works, but the movie reinforced the general rather distorted (albeit romantic) view of life in Kenya.
There was an indirect connection with another love triangle — that of the Blixens and Finch Hatton. Robert Wilson, the PH, was modeled on Bror Blixen (a renowned philanderer), and Hemingway armed him with Blixen’s favorite rifle, a .505 Gibbs. This also served the purpose of distancing Wilson from Philip Percival, who always used a .450 No. 2.
The other important short story was The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Although it takes place in Africa, it is not about Africa in any overt sense. A writer is dying of gangrene, after being scratched by a thorn during a safari. He and his rich wife are in camp, waiting for a plane to take him to a hospital in Nairobi. The writer, Harry, reflects on his life and all the things he failed to do, all the responsibilities he had neglected, preferring to travel in his wife’s circles, on his wife’s money. Regardless of its plot, the story captured imaginations. At the beginning, there is a reference to a “dried and frozen carcass of a leopard” found near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and the statement that no one knew what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. If Macomber fixed forever the public’s perception of safari life, Kilimanjaro cemented the image of the snow-capped volcano dominating the horizon, looking out over the African plain, and the notion of mystical adventurers coming to Africa to seek if not to find.
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Behind the glamor of safari life, Kenya Colony, as it had become in 1920, was a developing society that combined the real hardships and dawn-to-dusk labor of farmers battling the elements with undercurrents of racial tension. There was never a formal system of apartheid in Kenya as there came to be in South Africa, and never the race-based antipathy of Rhodesia. In the early days, however, there was at least a partial color bar — places where blacks were not allowed to go — but it never became a major issue on the scale of apartheid.
Kenya was settled about the time of the first major international conference on game conservation, the International Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa, which convened in London in 1900. The colonial authorities moved quickly after that to ensure that the great game herds of East Africa did not go the way of the springbok and the quagga of South Africa. Over-hunting and outright policies of game extermination in South Africa had eradicated the huge migrating herds of springbok, and driven a few other species to extinction, and by the early 1900s wildlife in much of South Africa was but a memory. The Cape Province, the Orange Free State, Natal, and much of the Transvaal were farmland, as devoid of wild beasts as if they had never existed.
In Kenya, huge tracts of land were set aside early as national parks, in name or in fact, and a game department was established with strict licensing provisions and bag limits. These measures did not have the same impact on the native peoples as a similar system would have on, for example, the Cheyenne, if all of South Dakota had been set aside as a park and the shooting of bison had been prohibited. Major tribal groups in East Africa did not depend on hunting for survival; there were a few individual hunters who lived by snaring or shooting animals for the meat, but they were not a large consideration, political or economic. The Kikuyu were farmers, the Masai were herdsmen, and both could get along quite nicely without man-eating lions, goat-eating leopards, or maize-trampling elephants. What they could not do without, however, was land. Land set aside for wild animals was land that could not be tilled or grazed. Game preserves and parks became one more bone of contention in what was already a serious issue: the availability of land for a growing black population.
The British and the colonials have always pointed out the benefits they brought to native people. One was medical care, and the other an end to tribal warfare. The end result of both, however, was population increase. Infant mortality rates dropped, but fertility rates did not, and without raids back and forth to thin out the adult warrior population, numbers naturally increased. Tribal raids were not light-hearted outings; they were bloody affairs costing many lives. In his memoirs, Philip Percival noted that had the British not arrived and put an end to tribal warfare, the Kikuyu “might easily have been exterminated by the warlike Somalis from the north and the Masai from the South.”
Had this happened, Percival said, “Kenya would have lost its hardest working tribe, but might have been spared a lot of political headaches from which we now suffer.”
The Kikuyu had a highly formalized social structure even before the British arrived, and like most aboriginal societies, it was both pragmatic and practical. A man could have as many wives as he could afford, each of which would bear children; he would spend time with each wife, week by week, and in between his visits, they would each cultivate their own crops, raise their own children, herd their own goats, make their own beer. Brides were purchased, and a daughter’s future bride price was a significant part of a man’s social security. As populations increased, so did the need for land to provide a shamba for each wife. As land became harder to come by, because of strictures imposed by the colonial government, young Kikuyus drifted away to the towns and cities. Nairobi developed a large native quarter to go along with its Asian quarter, its market quarter, and so on. At the same time, more and more young Kikuyu and other blacks were attending mission schools, becoming educated, and even going to university. Some went to England for their education. One such was Jomo Kenyatta, who studied at the London School of Economics and later wrote a book, Facing Mount Kenya. Very early he became involved in some of the budding nationalist movements advocating a policy of Kenya for the Kenyans — meaning black Kenyans — and the overthrow of white rule.
These pressures were building in every colony and protectorate in the British Empire during the 1930s. Kenya was no different than any other colony, except it was one of the few where the British government (albeit half-heartedly and sporadically) had encouraged settlement by whites. In Uganda, by contrast, there was very little European settlement and no land restrictions on blacks, and hence no political pressure from settlers to keep blacks from wielding power. Even in India, the crown jewel of the Empire, there was no significant white voice in the move to independence, which was achieved in 1947. In colonies like Kenya and Rhodesia, however, the settlers were a force to be reckoned with — a thorn in the side of the colonial office, whose servants came to wish, fervently, that the settlers did not exist, and a thorn in the side of the black nationalists, who wanted them off the land and out of the country.
Aside from their social structure, the Kikuyu were highly political and politicized, and both accepted and embraced formal education. Although they resisted white settlement, they were defeated in a series of short, sharp battles and thereafter settled down to be ruled by the British colonial authorities. Very early on, however, the Kikuyu began to organize politically. One of the first groups was the Kikuyu Central Association; Jomo Kenyatta became secretary general of this group in 1928 and went to London in 1931 to represent the KCA at the Colonial Office. He lived in England for the next fifteen years, studying, writing, and lecturing, and even married a white woman.
The disintegration of the British Empire began in a major way with the first world war. The financial cost of that horrible conflict ate up much of Britain’s wealth. The process continued with the second world war, but for another reason. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain called up troops from almost all her colonies and overseas possessions and deployed them in far-flung battlefields against the Germans and the Japanese, from Europe to Burma and everywhere in between. The native troops saw things they had never suspected, including the neardefeat of the heretofore invincible British. If they could come so close to defeat at the hands of the Japanese, it was reasoned, then they could just as easily lose to the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Malayans — and the Kenyans. Many young Kenyan men, including the Kikuyu, were called up to serve in the army, mainly in the King’s African Rifles (KAR). The KAR was organized along traditional British regimental lines, which meant there was one regiment, with one set of colors, badges, insignia, and so forth, but it could have anywhere from one battalion to a dozen. The KAR was the catch-all regiment for British East Africa, with battalions drawn from Kenya as well as other parts of the region.
Between 1939 and 1945, KAR battalions were sent around the world and saw combat in many theaters of war, especially the bloody hand-to-hand jungle fighting against the Japanese in Burma. Having been given their initial military training by their British officers, KAR soldiers then received post-graduate courses in jungle warfare, guerrilla tactics, and survival, with the Japanese as unwitting tutors. As well, the KAR soldiers saw that their white officers were human, just as they were, and not at all invincible. The Kikuyu veterans of the KAR returning to Kenya at war’s end were an invaluable asset for a movement that sought to use military force, if necessary, to liberate Kenya from British rule.
Kikuyu tribal organization is built around traditions and customs, among which are the circumcision ceremonies for both young men and women. Young men of the same age, who are circumcised at the same time in the same ceremony, share a special bond. A class of young men, later known as “The Forties,” were those who had been circumcised together in that year, and many of them joined the KAR, saw wartime service, and became, on their return, a mainstay of the black Kenyan liberation movements.
The second world war brought major changes to Kenya, for many reasons. Between 1939 and 1941, the British not only fought the Germans in North Africa, they also fought the Italians, who had conquered Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. The initial tank battles in North Africa were between the British and the Italians, and only when the Italians had been decisively defeated did Adolph Hitler despatch the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel to bail them out. Meanwhile, the British had been busy dislodging the Italians from Ethiopia, with invasions mounted from the Sudan to the west and Kenya and Somaliland to the south and east. Many of the Kenyan white hunters were involved in these military adventures, including John “Pondoro” Taylor, Donald Ker, and Sydney Downey. Thousands of Italian soldiers taken prisoner in the battles in the desert, and in Ethiopia, were incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps in Kenya for the remaining years of the war. They were put to work building roads and bridges, among other things, and more than one Kenyan noted it was not until then that the colony enjoyed anything like a respectable road system.
Because Kenya also produced commodities, mainly agricultural, the war brought prosperity for its farmers. Many a Kenyan farmer who had been hanging on the lip of bankruptcy through the 1930s found himself, for the first time, persona grata with his bank manager. When Kenya’s soldiers returned home in 1945, the young white men found family farms prospering and bank balances bulging. The young black soldiers saw things differently: They now looked at their homeland with eyes that had seen other ways of life. They now saw prosperous white farms on what once had been their tribal land; they looked at the prosperity around them with a large measure of resentment combined with a new sense of nationalism and self-confidence, and a determination to take back what they saw as a heritage that had been stolen from them. Far from bringing an end to conflict, for Kenya 1945 was really just the beginning.