by James Fox
There were millionaires, too, like the amply proportioned American, Northrop MacMillan, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the fabulous Ewart Grogan, a fiercely chauvinist Englishman who had walked from the Cape to Cairo. There were fugitives, wasters, speculators.
Above all there was the man who became the settlers’ unchallenged leader from the turn of the century until his death in 1931, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, who had first set eyes on the Kenya Highlands in 1897, at the merciful end of a 2,000 mile camel ride from Somalia. He had returned to England for six unhappy years, to look after his estates, but the Kenya bug had infected him too, and he returned in 1901 to buy land.
Lord Delamere was a natural leader of the settlers. He had inherited an enormous estate in Cheshire and vast wealth besides, soon after leaving Eton—where he had distinguished himself as a reckless and unruly boy, untouched by the civilising classics. He was arrogant and wasteful, with a sudden, violent temper; his political instincts were austerely feudal, and physically he was small and muscular, and in no way handsome. But he had the gift of supreme confidence in himself and in his vision of the future for the Colony, which was inspired by an old-fashioned sense of duty to the Empire—the duty, quite simply, being to annex further territory on its behalf.
Kenya was always more fashionable among the aristocrats than Uganda or Tanganyika after the First World War. Uganda was a little too far from the sea, along the railway, and Tanganyika, until then, had been a German colony. The pick of the sites in the Kenyan White Highlands had an English air, almost like the rolling downs of Wiltshire, all on a supernatural scale and under such an immense sky, that when you are first exposed to it, you may be seized both with vertigo—from the sheer speed and height of the clouds—and folie de grandeur. Such grandiose surroundings were irresistible to the English settlers and often went to their heads.
In the earliest settler scheme, a million acres were given away on 999-year leases. The contract required a capital sum to be invested in the first five years and an annual rent to be paid to the Government. Failure to comply meant confiscation.
Delamere was granted the first plot, at Njoro, along the railway line north-west of Nakuru. It was at Njoro that he began the experiment that nearly ruined him, but that almost alone laid the base for Kenya’s agricultural economy.
The distribution of the land was a chaotic process centred on the Land Office in Nairobi. In 1904, the year the Norfolk Hotel was built—soon to be known, from its guest list of English trophy hunters, as the “House of Lords”—the town still resembled a bleak and over crowded transit camp, with its rows of identical huts and its makeshift roads which were either knee-deep in mud, or carpeted with the red dust which hung in a cloud over the town. Prospective settlers pitched their tents near the Land Office and waited, often for months, for their applications to be dealt with by the overwhelmed bureaucrats. The Whitehall plan became a full-scale frontier scramble—appalling fights broke out almost nightly at the Norfolk—and under pressure, the laws protecting traditional African land rights were often loosely observed. The nomadic grazing land of the Masai in the Rift Valley, for example, was considered unoccupied, and stretches of Kikuyu land were added to farms alongside the reserve—a costly political mistake.
The English settlers were often quaintly ignorant about Africa—its history, the tribal distinctions, the wild animals, which were believed to attack on sight and on principle. They would be amazed by the virulence of the diseases that affected crops and livestock—some settled on land that the Masai had known for generations to be bad for cattle—and angry at the difficulties that were bound to arise where Edwardian attitudes met with the more cosmic outlook of the Kikuyu or the Masai. There were simple misunderstandings. Patience and politeness were the very basis of the African disposition, especially towards strangers and guests. But Western forms of gratitude were alien to most of the tribes—there is no word for “thank you” in Kikuyu. On their side the shrieking memsahibs rapped out their commands in pidgin Swahili, with a fierce English accent that sounded grating and discourteous to African ears.
There were notable exceptions. The more feudally minded pioneers like Delamere managed to establish a relationship with the African population that allowed a genuine intimacy, a form of startled mutual respect that was not to be repeated in the next generation.
The European’s greatest fears, however, were reserved for the equatorial sun itself, whose rays were believed to damage not only the spine (hence the boom for the London tropical outfitters in “spine pads”—a thick strip of cotton gauze that stretched from the neck to the buttocks, worn with intense discomfort), but were thought to attack the liver and the spleen as well. Lord Lugard advised the wearing of heavy flannel cummerbunds. Winston Churchill, who took an unofficial tour to Kenya as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, feared its effect on the nervous system, the brain and the heart. If it was necessary to remove the hat, even momentarily, he wrote, “it should be done under the shade of a thick tree.” Some advised never removing it at all, even indoors, since corrugated iron, although a brilliant British invention and a memorable contribution to British colonial architecture, was not considered adequate against the rays. Out of this came the fashion of wearing the double terai, two wide-brimmed, floppy hats, one on top of the other. Removing all this armour was done standing on the bed, well away from the siafu, the safari ants who hunted their prey—anything up to a large antelope—in brilliantly executed pincer movements, travelling in columns often a mile long.
White nerves were not calmed by wearing the hottest uniforms in the high temperatures of Africa. And yet the lengths to which the settlers went to propitiate the sun suggest a more irrational fear than that of sunstroke. They seem to revive the Victorian shibboleth that exposure to the sun was improperly sensual and immodest, and certainly not something that could easily be shared with Africans on an equal basis. Thus taboos were raised against it, the most peculiar reserved for women, who were advised to line their dresses and headgear not with flannel, but with bright scarlet cloth.
Debility, irritability, even nervous breakdown, were warned against, on account of the heat and the altitude, as well as unexpected mood swings from elation to depression. Small grievances would quickly become great ones. “Take plenty of wine after sunfall,” Lord Cranworth prescribed, “more especially Burgundy and Port. These enrich the blood and are an excellent prophylactic.”
The farming of this land was immensely difficult, a heart-rending process of trial and error which tested the very hardest pioneering temperament. Despite their privileged backgrounds, the early settlers turned out to be of the right calibre. Yet most of them were chronically undercapitalised, and without the lessons of Delamere’s energetic experimenting, his ability to match disaster with more and more cash, hope might have died for many of these farmers. Delamere spent almost as much time advising his neighbours as he spent on his own sprawling interests. By 1906 he was fanning 160,000 acres at Equator Ranch—all of it enclosed by 1,000 miles or so of barbed wire fencing. But by 1909 he was broke. The estates in Cheshire were drained and he was forced to sell up there and borrow against what remained of the family trust.
His predicament was typical, if more dramatic than most. He had tried sheep, cross-breeding local ewes with English rams, local rams with New Zealand ewes, and cattle, crossing Hereford and Shorthorn with the local Boran. They were variously struck down by rinderpest, which rots the flesh of a walking beast, pleuro-pneumonia and Texas fever, which claimed the Herefords; by sheep-pox, scabies, swine fever, foot and mouth, and by East Coast fever, the deadliest of all the viruses, borne through the herds by ticks.
Delamere would take his rifle and shoot a whole herd of zebra to prevent the spreading of the viruses. He would dip all his cattle each day, but to little effect. Then he discovered that the land was deficient in minerals, so he switched to barley and wheat, which was wiped out, again and again, by black stemrust. After the
fungus came the locusts, and there was a drought which struck for three years from 1907. He moved his cattle and sheep to Soysambu, Elmenteita, the present headquarters of the Delamere estates on the floor of the Rift Valley near Lake Naivasha. There they began to prosper. He diversified, growing lucerne to improve the grass, and strawberries for the lotus eaters who were gathering in Nairobi. He even tried ostrich feathers, which soon went the way of all fashion, blown away by the motoring boom.
On top of all the problems, the bureaucratic obstruction of the Land Office, which insisted on petty and needless regulations, was intolerable to the farmers. (Written permission was needed, for example, to draw water from the stream that ran through your farm.) The simplest decisions were taken in London, where they were filed away for months. Delamere, as usual, led the fight against them, on one occasion, when his application was refused to build a flour mill on a chosen site, by stacking firewood under the Land Office itself and threatening to set fire to it. The Land Office quickly reversed its decision.
Delamere believed that if the settlers were prepared to take slender profits to open the country, they should not, at the same time, be choked with red tape. Out of these early conflicts a bitter hostility developed between the settlers and Government over the question of land, which was to dominate the Colony’s history until independence.
By 1907 Delamere was an eccentric-looking figure, with his hair flowing around his shoulders as protection against the sun, surrounded by ochre-painted Masai chiefs, who gathered daily at his breakfast table and observed his morning ritual of playing his only record, “All Aboard for Margate,” on his wind-up phonograph. He lived now almost as part of their tribe, admired them passionately and had learned their language. Yet he could never be accused of going native: he was much too grand for that.
The Masai had been the favoured tribe from the days when Delamere first met them, laughing with pleasure and cracking skulls with their long clubs. Only the feudally minded could make allies of them while they were still raiding cattle from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, killing herdsmen and their women and children as a matter of pride. At first the Masai stole mercilessly from Delamere’s herds, practising their belief that all the cattle under God belong exclusively to their tribe and that even Delamere’s imported Hereford bull had been taken from them long ago. (Hence their withering looks when they came to watch the European cattle auctions.)
There is nothing more valuable to the Masai than cattle, and next to that, perhaps, their passion for physical adornment. Because they never ate meat and never slaughtered or sold their livestock, the Masai chiefs that Delamere befriended owned upwards of 50,000 cattle each, and by 1910 the tribe was estimated to own three million head. But they had consistently lost grazing land in the several treaties made with the white man since the setting up of the tribal reservations in 1905. No consideration was given, for example, to their traditional places of retreat in times of drought or pestilence, and by 1914 they were suffering from land hunger.
The Somalis were the fashionable servants, the top “boys” in any household in the early days. They were immensely proud and elegant, the essence of nomadic nobility, with their waistcoats and gold watch chains, their low guttural voices and their strict Mohammedan ways. Many of them, like the Masai, were rich in cattle in their own country across Kenya’s northern frontier. They were linked in fame and fortune with their employers and associated by name, Delamere with Hassan, Berkeley Cole with Jama, Denys Finch Hatton with Bilea, Karen Blixen with Farah. Blixen wrote that a house without a Somali was like a house without a lamp: “Wherever we went we were followed at a distance of five feet by these noble, mysterious and vigilant shadows.”
The Kikuyu, whose land stretched from Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya, who were later to outstrip all other tribes in political ambition, were hired as labourers and domestic servants. At the outbreak of the First World War, they were drafted, with the other tribes, into the King’s African Rifles and the Carrier Corps as porters, and died in their thousands in one of the most shameful campaigns ever waged by a British Army, in which, at the start of hostilities, 250,000 British Empire troops were held down by 10,000 Germans under Count von Lettow Vorbeck, who had to forage for supplies for the duration of the war. When it was over the British force had been reduced to 35,000 and the German force to only 1,300.
As the monuments were put up to the African soldiery, the usual sentiments were expressed. In this case the natives had “responded most loyally to the call by the Government for porters.” In fact, of course, they had little choice. (One of the unremembered battles of that war was between draft-resisting Masai and the British forces themselves.) The Kikuyu, in particular, went unrewarded. After the war, a new scheme was devised to persuade ex-soldiers from Britain to settle in Kenya to swell the European population. The land this time was distributed by lottery. As this new wave of settlers invaded the highlands, more pressure was exerted on the Kikuyu. The farm wage was reduced, hut and poll taxes were levied, and identification cards issued, forcing their dependence on the white wage.
By the early 1920s the general areas of production were set up. Gilgil and Nakuru were the centres of the livestock business, Thika was coffee, Njoro was wheat, Naivasha was sheep and cattle and Londiani, in the west, was flax.
All the land schemes had clearly favoured the European at the expense of the African population. It was a short-sighted policy and the Kikuyu made their first organised protest in 1922, only two years after Kenya became an official Crown Colony.
The settlers now had their own parliament, the Legislative Council, but ultimate power rested with the Governor, who was answerable to London. Tension increased between the two sides. As politicians, the settlers were, to say the least, fractious and arrogant, and lacking in finesse. Their mood was further blackened by the devaluation of the rupee in 1921—which added a third to their overdrafts and ruined many of them, and the simultaneous failure of the flax market, which had been seen as the miracle crop. Their hope was for the same self-government that Rhodesia achieved in 1922. It was they who had made the country viable, they argued, and they who should run it, not meddlesome bureaucrats and young district officers newly arrived from London.
But they were not to achieve it. By now London had turned its attention to the unmentionable question of political rights for the rest of the population. There was pressure on the Government to allow immigration from India to Kenya, and to enfranchise the Asian population already there.
The Colonial Office under the Duke of Devonshire had also declared a policy for the Colony that would pursue “the paramountcy of native interests” over those of the other residents. The incredulous farmers set up a “Vigilance Committee,” headed by Delamere, to oppose the plan for Asian votes. Delamere took a team of settlers to London, installed them in a grand Mayfair house, and lobbied loudly for a change of plan. And at home the settlers began to arm themselves for a take-over, hatching a plan to capture the Governor—a keen fisherman—and isolate him at a remote trout stream until their demands were met. The eventual “compromise” must have pleased the settlers. The highlands were to remain exclusively white in perpetuity; there was to be no Indian immigration and only a very limited representation of Asians on the Legislative Council. Despite the “paramountcy” declaration, the Colonial Office invariably fell in with the settlers’ suggestions for running the country from now on.
The 1920s, thus secured for the whites, were the beginning of a more flamboyant, expansive age. They began to replace their mud and wattle houses with grander designs. They built bungalow mansions in the “Surrey Tudor” style—a design peculiar to Kenya and its Indian builders, straining to imitate Edwin Lutyens—with tiled roofs instead of corrugated iron, with open stone hearths and large, comfortable sitting rooms, and with large verandas supported on brick pillars.
There was somehow a provincial tackiness about them that pervades the residential suburbs of Nairobi to this day—a style th
at journalist James Cameron once described as Equatorial Ealing. The effect is produced, in part, by the universal steel window frames, the smallness of the windows themselves, designed to keep out the dreaded sun, and the gloominess of the greyish-yellow stone, which the Indian craftsmen chipped out of the rock to make walls of formidable barrack-like solidity. In the rain, these buildings look particularly sad.
But the gardens were laid out magnificently. First the lawn was seeded and rolled, then the deep borders were dug, on a scale worthy of Sissinghurst Castle or Cranborne. The earth was rich, there was no dormant season, and the garden always looked at its best, with scarlet canna, frangipani bougainvillaea mingling with the tender English roses, long-stemmed lilies and fuchsias, and as a backdrop, the avenues of jacaranda, Nandi flame and eucalyptus trees. In the air was the scent of jasmine and mimosa. The many garden boys watered and clipped all day, swinging pangas at the blades of thick kikuyu grass that provided the surface for lawns, tennis courts and croquet pitches.
The settlers had brought out the trappings of their civilisation—their silver, their family portraits and prints, their bits of good furniture, their china, whatever could be spared from the attics of the family houses they had left for good. Many commissioned Indian craftsmen to make quite passable imitations of Jacobean furniture.
With their large numbers of servants—to whom orders had to be issued daily—aristocrats and middle-class officials now became enslaved in the ordered rituals of the butlered existence. The table was laid—again and again—with the place mats of hunting scenes, the bowl of bougainvillaea petals, the bottle of piri-piri (an innovation from the Indian Raj), and the sherry, which was taken with soup. The astonishing African talent for cooking European food, in particular hot English puddings, provided undreamed-of comfort. For their part, the Africans were astonished at the number of meals required by Europeans every day, and the quantity of food consumed. Europeans seemed always to be eating.
