They camped at the edge of the forest on the top. That night there were trumpetings and crashings in the forest and a herd of elephants passed within a hundred yards or so of the tents. There was a great turmoil in the camp and little rest.
The next day they marched on to a part of the new Zion. Here they encountered a column of Masai, some way from their usual beat. They were dressed in full war kit, with tall ostrich feather plumes waving in the wind above their curiously painted faces, barbaric anklets of black and white Colobus monkey fur, bare limbs glistening with castor oil and red ochre, and naked spear-blades glittering in the sun. The moran surrounded the party with every demonstration of ferocity, brandishing their spears and long narrow shields painted with heathenish emblems, and shouting hideous war-cries.
The settlers reasoned with them and they drew off, but only to perform a war-dance. As the rhythm quickened their gestures grew fiercer and their faces became distorted with apparent rage. The commissioners gazed with distaste on this savage medley of red, fat-smeared whirling limbs, demented ostrich plumes and flashing spears. Finally the Masai retreated, but a double guard was placed round the camp that evening and the settlers took it in turn to sit up all night with a rifle over their knees. There was little sleep in the camp that night either.
No native attacks occurred, but lions were grunting outside the ring of fires round the tents, and next morning the commissioners were shown pug-marks approaching uncomfortably close to the tent in which they had slept. The Jews were told the story, famous by now, of the man-eaters of Tsavo.
The commission only stayed about three days on the plateau. They returned to England and reported the district to be, on the whole, unsuitable for the settlement of fugitives from Russia.
Opposition to the scheme from the true Zionists had, in any case, won the day among the Jews themselves. They preferred “to continue to risk massacre and mutilation rather than to endanger the attainment of their ideal by permitting the movement to be shunted into a siding. Zion, and Zion alone, was their goal.”
In August 1905 the East African commission reported to the Zionist congress at Basle and the offer of the British Government was, with sincere thanks, rejected.
White Man’s Country (Vol. II) Elspeth Huxley.
Sea Captain Ernest Fey, his wife Mary, his son Jim and two daughters set out from Naivasha station in 1906 to climb to the forest’s edge on the Kinangop saddle of the Aberdare mountains. His grandson Venn recalls the occasion.
To reach their chosen destination they used a bullock cart which they brought with them from India, and engaged one hundred porters under the leadership of a young Kikuyu warrior called N’jiri Karanja, who was later to become famous as the Senior Chief of the Fort Hall Kikuyu people. His own village at Kinyona contained the huts of over fifty of his wives and offspring.
My grandmother travelled in a sedan chair, a wicker work contraption with roof and side curtains, mounted on four stout bamboo poles which they also brought from India.… The bullock cart and team of oxen were laden with the heavy travelling trunks of the times, which contained personal effects and breakable possessions, the allotment of headloads to the assembled army of porters. Swahili and Indian domestic servants possibly stood aloof, away from the sweating gang of crude humanity. My grandfather and my father would be in the vanguard with firearms shouldered; my two aunts, in their early twenties, dressed in ankle-length khaki skirts and blouses with mutton-chop sleeves, double terai wide-brimmed felt hats, and spine-pads to ward off the treacherous tropical sun that was reputed to cause insanity to anyone who ignored adequate precautions. I see the raising onto stalwart shoulders of the sedan chair in which my diminutive grandmother sat imperiously!
There is the dust and clatter and shouts, the crowd of interested spectators. Just ahead, beyond the few tin-roofed Indian shops and the offices of the British Administration, was the grey-leafed Ol-leleshwa bush, and beyond that the dark line of the forest edge, through which there wound the rough and dusty track made by the Maasai and their herds of cattle and sheep when they moved from the Rift Valley floor to the grass plateau above, and where now there is a tarred road, and all memory of that epic setting forth into the wilderness has long since been forgotten.
The name of this locality in which my grandparents settled was called by the Wa Kikuyu “eN’Chappini”. This name was derived from the sound made by feet walking across grassland during the rains when much of the plains were inundated. “Chappi, chappi, chappi, chappi” described the splashing, squelching sound of feet treading wet ground. Hence the name eN’Chappini, translated literally, “In the place of chappi, chappi.”
And so my grandfather named his farm, “N’Jabini,” a misspelling that remained to the end, as did so many other original Kenyan place names.…
They travelled first through forests of cedar and wild olive that were full of buffalo and rhino, lions, and leopards besides other animals of the forest, which terminated on the eastern escarpment of the Rift Valley. After a climb of about two thousand feet the country opened out into a wide and mainly flat plateau, the habitat of literally thousands of zebra, hartebeeste, eland, and gazelle. It was an area dominated by the Maasai people, who carried on a sporadic warfare with the forest-dwelling Wa Kikuyu who also cultivated the eastern slopes of the Aberdare range.…
My grandfather became friendly with both Kikuyu and Maasai alike, and although he and his young family lived at N’Jabini for three years before other white settlers arrived on the scene, they were never molested. Their house was built from the timbers of giant cedars pit-sawn on the lower slopes of the mountain. I still have two “monk’s benches,” red-brown with age, that were made from timber extracted from the first cedar to be felled on the farm. They were placed one on either side of an ingle-nook containing a huge fireplace in the drawing room. As a child I sat on a stool by the fire using a monk’s bench as a table and ate my supper whilst a bedtime story was read to me.
Behind the house was the heavily forested mountain. South and westwards stretched the great plateau. In the morning the sunlight first fell on the far rim of the plateau, quickly advancing toward the mountain. Once a week, as the first rays and golden disc of the sun rose over the eastern shoulder of the mountain, my grandmother wound and reset all the time pieces at 7 am precisely.
Since we were on the Equator, the variation in the time of sunrise throughout the year was a mere half-hour.
If you stood on the big lawn in front of the house on a clear sunny morning you could see the great sweep of the mountains and the vast expanse of the plateau bathed in golden sunshine, truly, in every direction, a wide horizon.
Wide Horizons Venn Fey.
Hopes unrealized, 1907.
As one rides or marches through the valleys and across the wide plateaux of these uplands, braced by their delicious air, listening to the music of their streams, and feasting the eye upon their natural wealth and beauty, a sense of bewilderment overcomes the mind. How is it they have never become the home of some superior race, prosperous, healthy, and free? Why is it that, now a railway has opened the door and so much has been published about them, there has not been one furious river of immigration from the cramped and insanitary jungle-slums of Europe? Why, most of all, are those who have come – the pioneers, the men of energy and adventure, of large ambitions and strong hands – why are they in so many cases only just keeping their heads above water? Why should complaint and discontent and positive discouragement be so general among this limited class?
I have always experienced a feeling of devout thankfulness never to have possessed a square yard of that perverse commodity called “land”. But I will confess that, travelling in the East African Highlands for the first time in my life, I have learned what the sensation of land-hunger is like. We may repress, but we cannot escape, the desire to peg out one of these fair and wide estates, with all the rewards they offer to industry and inventiveness in the open air. Yet all around are men possessing thousands
of fertile acres, with mountains and rivers and shady trees, acquired for little or nothing, all struggling, all fretful, nervous, high-strung, many disappointed, some despairing, some smashed.
What are the true lineaments concealed behind the veil of boundless promise in which this land is shrouded? Are they not stamped with mockery? Is not the eye that regards you fierce as well as bright? “When I first saw this country,” said a colonist to me, “I fell in love with it. I had seen all the best of Australia. I had prospered in New Zealand. I knew South Africa. I thought at last I had struck ‘God’s own country.’ I wrote letters to all my friends urging them to come. I wrote a series of articles in the newspapers praising the splendours of its scenery and the excellence of its climate. Before the last of the articles appeared my capital was nearly expended, my fences had been trampled down by troops of zebra, my imported stock had perished, my title-deeds were still blocked in the Land Office, and I myself had nearly died of a malignant fever. Since then I have left others to extol the glories of East Africa.”
My African Journey Winston Churchill.
God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.
Wordsworth
“I started to grow wheat in East Africa,” Delamere wrote, “to prove that though I lived on the equator I was not in any equatorial country.”
In 1909 over 1,200 acres of wheat were sown in a single field. Delamere pinned all his hopes to this crop. It was to wipe off his overdraft, pay for the thresher which he had bought on credit, and prove wheat to be a sound foundation for farming in East Africa. From week to week he calculated the yield it would give when the reapers and binders went in to bend the hollow stems over the knife with their flails and leave the severed plants in rows of yellow bundles on the stubble. He was counting on well over 2,000 bushels.
But a new disaster, perhaps the most disheartening of all, descended upon Equator ranch. Another rust fungus – yellow rust, which destroys the ears it infects – attacked the wheat. It swept through the 1,200 acres like a flame and left it withered, not worth the harvesting. Over half the wheat had to be ploughed in.…
In England and in Canada the rust menace had been met by the scientific breeding of rust-resistant wheats. Delamere decided to adopt the same tactics.
An obvious difficulty was that there were two distinct kinds of rust which attacked wheat at Njoro. It was subsequently discovered that black stem-rust, a warmth-loving species, was usually found at altitudes of 7,000 feet and below, whereas yellow rust, the European kind, could only flourish in the colder districts at 7,000 feet and above. It was unfortunate for Delamere that at Njoro, at an altitude of almost exactly 7,000 feet, the two rusts overlapped.
There was also a third variety, known as orange leaf-rust, which was found all over the country. This one was less severe.
There was another serious difficulty.
Wheat which was resistant to one rust was usually particularly susceptible to another. Thus, while Rietti (the Italian wheat) stood up well against black stem-rust, it succumbed very easily to the yellow species. Gluyas (the Australian wheat) was fairly resistant to yellow rust but an easy prey to black stem-rust. The scientist was faced with the complicated problem of breeding a wheat resistant to all three species at once – or, if that was impossible, at least to the two more important kinds.
The eventual solution of this problem and of the complications which later arose out of it is considered to be an exceptionally fine piece of plant-breeding work.
Delamere started it by importing twelve different varieties of wheat from New South Wales. These were grown in plots at Njoro. His idea was to cross them with Rietti in the hope of combining in the progeny a certain amount of resistance to both black and yellow rust and, at the same time, of obtaining a wheat with a shorter growing season than Rietti.
He engaged a young man, Mr G. W. Evans, who had been a pupil of the famous plant-breeder Professor Rowland Biffen of Cambridge, to do the hybridizing. A rough laboratory was erected at Njoro. By a piece of good fortune Rietti flowered at the same time as the Australian wheats, and it was possible to cross-fertilize them. Had one type of wheat flowered a month later than the other, hybridization would have been impossible.
Rietti was crossed with the different Australian wheats and the progeny were grown and carefully studied. More wheats were obtained from all over the world – India, Egypt, South Africa and Canada. The Canadian wheat Red Fife, an ancestor of nearly all the famous prairie varieties grown to-day, was crossed with Rietti and promising offspring resulted.
At one time there were over 2,000 samples of different hybridized wheats growing in little cages made of amerikani cloth at Njoro. Most of these were abandoned, but about thirty-two varieties were grown in bulk.
All this applied scientific work was done at Delamere’s own expense and the Government at first took no part.
White Man’s Country Elspeth Huxley.
Nyasore, the thin man.
Sometimes, as thoughts about the future churned through my mind, I would go to Ndabibi and wander round the fifty-thousand-acre neighbouring ranch that had belonged to my father’s old friend Gilbert Colvile. He had become a legendary figure because of his relationship with the Maasai, and his spirit seemed to linger everywhere.
His solitary grave lies on a small hillock rising about the plain, beside that of his stillborn child and his faithful dog. Before he died, he told the Maasai that he would never leave them and would watch over them and his herd, even after he was gone. The small fever tree planted on the site never rose more than six or seven feet. It never grew, but neither did it die.
One day, when Dorian and I were buying bulls at Ndabibi, we met Raua, the Colviles’ old cook, and three other old retainers, on the road. They had been sitting up near Colvile’s grave.
“What were you doing at Nyasore’s grave?” Raua asked us inquisitively.
“We just went to visit him,” we answered.
The four Maasai veterans piled into the car and we drove with them back to Colvile’s wooden house, now empty and silent, but not abandoned. The doors and windows were closed and the wooden slats on the walls had turned a dark brown colour with age. The red paint had peeled off the faded corrugated iron roof. A gnarled acacia tree spread its leafy branches like an umbrella over the sparse, well-tended space that had once been a garden. Bushes and creepers with great leaves grew in disarray around the house. We peered through the glass panes in the windows. The room was cool and dim. The interior was swept clean, two old armchairs and a faded sofa were still neatly set out around the empty fireplace as they had been on the day he died. A threadbare carpet lay in the same place on the floor in front of the hearth.
“Nyasore was a Maasai like us. There has never been another white man like him,” Raua began telling me. “When he first came here his land was covered with many wild animals. There were thousands of Tommy gazelles and impala everywhere. They ate much of the grazing for the cattle and we had to shoot them so that they would move away. Nyasore hunted them on horseback. There were also many lions lying in the bushes during the day and at night they prowled around among the cattle killing the calves and young steers. Nyasore would get very mad because he loved his cattle, just like we do. He hunted the lions with his dogs and guns, accompanied by our warriors with spears. There were all kinds of skins piled up in heaps in his house and many of his clothes were made from lion and Tommy skins. When Nyasore was hunting he could walk all day with only a cup of tea and an egg in his stomach. You would never think he was so strong when you looked at him. We called him ‘Nyasore’ – the thin man – because he was so lean.”
He started with eight Boran cows, two of which were sterile. He added to these with cattle bought from Somalis, or seized in raids, and twenty years later ended up with ten thousand head.
African Saga Mirella Ricciardi.
How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!
William Blake
This business of
looking after fourteen thousand sheep was no joke. I came to hate these animals, with their round woolly backs and obstinate selfish mouths. To prevent scab I was always having to dip them. At certain intervals they would be put through a long bath filled with a solution of Cooper’s dip which, when first mixed, was a bright yellow colour, but later would become a foul brown. I and two natives stood at the edge of the channel and with our plungers pressed the head of each animal under water as it passed.
The sun would beat down upon us, the dust from the yard would rise in clouds over the fences, and the procession of sheep as they clambered up to the dipping pens would seem endless. Once in the pens the animals would shake themselves, and as I counted them out with the round yellow sodom-apples, which I used as tallies in my hands, my nostrils would be filled with the fumes of the arsenic, sickly warm fumes mixed with the ammonia which rose from the steaming brown backs. On such occasions it would seem to me that I was under the influence of some strange hypnotic trance, and I would bitterly curse my fate, the miserable monotonous fate of a scurvy shepherd superintending the washing of his flocks.
It was better in the lambing season. This always took place in October, so that the ewes might have the advantage of the fresh grass springing up with the falling of the light autumn rains. I would arrange the lambing camps in different parts of the farm, and pleasant enough it was to come upon these centres of ovine life, with the anxious mothers fitfully nibbling at the creeping grass and the lambs snow-white, long-legged, long-tailed, frisking about on the open veldt. As soon as the lambs were six weeks old I could go from camp to camp ear-marking, castrating, and tailing them. I made a point of doing this in the very early morning, so that the coldness of the air would lessen the bleeding. I became completely hardened to this occupation and would sear off the long appendages of these little symbols of salvation with expert deftness, and as I handled the red-hot copper implement a long thin ray of light would suddenly come slanting across the blood-stained, scorched board at which I worked, and immediately the nervous barking of the impala would cease and the first birds begin to call. When the affair was over I would kneel down and count the lambs by the number of severed tails which lay in a heap at my side, recording the total in my notebook with bloody, sacrificial hands. A dozen or so of the fattest tails I would take back with me, and Kamoha would fry them and serve them up for breakfast like a dish of eels.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 13