In January shearing would begin, and the long rough shed which for the rest of the year remained closed and empty, like a deserted church, would now suddenly become the centre of the farm work. Sheep would baa, natives would chatter, shears would click, the old wool-press would creak, and all would be stir and bustle. It was my business to class the wool, and as fleece after fleece was carried to me I would allocate them to the various bins according to the quality of the staple. There were bins for fleeces, for bellies, for first pieces, for second pieces, and for locks. And the contents of each bin in turn would be baled up and the bales, when they had been stencilled, would be placed on a bullock wagon and hauled to the Uganda railway, to be eventually transported to the London market, there to be ripped open by indifferent merchants, unmindful of the far-distant thickets from which the burs had been caught up, those burs which they so casually noticed deep embedded in the soft crinkled wool.
I would have my breakfast and lunch brought over to the shearing shed and would work there from sunrise to sunset; and often as I stood sharpening the shining knives against the framework of a pen, polished to a rich mahogany brown by countless black fingers greasy from handling sheep, I would look out through the open door and see the wide African country stretching away, mile upon mile, outlandish, unkempt, to where the high mountains rose, upon whose terraces the heavy-limbed marauders slept, their gibbous, gently heaving, obscurely spotted bellies warm in the sun.
And so the long years passed slowly by. I saw little of the neighbouring settlers. My life became reduced to one unending struggle with the material world. To deal with it at all required enormous concentration of energy. My mind alone remained free. That, at any rate, could not become completely subject to an alien domination. Riding along great valleys with a hundred eland before me, riding across open clover-grown plains with ostriches zigzagging out of my way, my mind still retained its accustomed detachment.
Black Laughter Llewelyn Powys.
Five beautiful lions and a fig tree.
We decided to form a little company which we christened by the somewhat grandiloquent name of Sisal Ltd. The original members were, besides myself: Alan Tompson and his cousin Ronald Tompson, who both fell in France, my brother-in-law Mervyn Ridley, and Donald Seth-Smith who had just left Oxford where he had been a distinguished athlete. Mervyn and Seth-Smith were to be joint managers, and rare good ones they were to prove. The former had already had six months of most valuable pupilage at the hands of our early friends Swift and Rutherfoord, and Seth-Smith was well acquainted with local conditions, and was a born farmer and sportsman.… The first thing was to select a site for our house. We owned between us some 25,000 acres, and that’s nearly 40 square miles and takes quite a lot of exploring. A considerable proportion of the area was plain, but there were thousands of acres among the foothills and it was cut up by a number of wooded gullies. Permanent water was, and is, none too abundant, though we did not at first realize how much is required to run a sisal factory. We made a standing camp with grass huts in a central position, and from it explored our territory on horseback and on foot in every direction. In the evening we would meet and weigh with the fiercest argument the merits of various house and factory sites. The latter was the easier problem. We knew enough to appreciate that the sisal leaves must, as far as possible, come downhill to the decorticator, that there should be available as much water as possible in the vicinity of the latter, and we rightly conjectured that the rich red loam rather than the black clay soil would give the better results in cultivation.
There was, in fact, only one site which really fulfilled these conditions; but for the homestead it was different. We all of us wanted a view, we mostly wanted shade, good drinking water was essential, and my wife was insistent on the best of soil for the garden. All these desiderata could be obtained in a greater or lesser degree in various places, and it appeared unlikely that we should ever make our decision. However, one day two of our party saw a nice eminence with a large fig tree standing imposingly thereon. They rode up to investigate, passing a nice little spring on the way up. On the top they found seated under the tree five beautiful lions who rose and trotted off into the long grass in dignified fashion. That settled it. It was unanimously felt that what was good enough for five lions should be good enough for us five. The next day we started erecting a grass hut, and my wife laid her first plans for the garden. Rightly eschewing the obvious name of Simba (lion), we christened our new home Makuyu, the native name for fig tree. The site faced a long undulating vista over the Kikuyu Reserve to Mount Kenya, its peak usually wreathed in clouds save at dawn or nightfall during the rainy season. Behind us rolled plains on which herds of game fed, the zebras barked and the lions grunted, till in the distance rose the square mass of El Donya Sabok. On our right sloped the bush-clad Ithanga Hills. It was a pleasing spot in 1907. Today the house is surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of blue-green sisal and dark-green coffee, not a buck or zebra is left upon the remnant of the plain, and from the verandah of the house the electric lights of some forty bungalows can be seen twinkling in the night. Magnificent progress indeed, but it contains, as always, its elements of sadness. We, who are in part responsible, cannot fail to appreciate the latter.
Kenya Chronicles Lord Cranworth.
The Van Rensburg trek to the Uasin Gishu plateau.
The trek started in June, 1908, from three stations on the Pretoria-Delagoa Bay line. There were forty-seven families in all, and three single men, making a total of between two and three hundred souls. All the families but two brought their own wagons, and more than half of them brought a horse, or several horses: but no oxen, as these could be procured in East Africa.
Mr van Rensburg, the Kommandant, had chartered a German boat, the Windhoek, for £1,750. She sailed from Delagoa Bay and reached Mombasa in seven days. The railway provided five special trains. The passenger accommodation consisted of trucks with wooden benches on which mothers bestowed their childen as best they could.…
A few families got off at Athi River to settle there. The rest continued to Nakuru, and arrived on 18 July, with 72 horses, 42 wagons and 2 predikants. They established their camp about five miles outside the town, near the site of the present airfield.
A meeting of the men decided to send ahead immediately a party of horsemen, with a light cart and oxen, to reconnoitre the ground and choose a path for the heavier wagons to follow. Those who stayed in camp were to train the raw oxen, none of which had ever seen a yoke before, bought at a sale of cattle arranged by the District Commissioner.
The party rode out to Eldama Ravine and followed a native track, probably first made by elephants, up the steep escarpment through cedar forest to Timboroa. Here, from a hill on what became known as Farm One, they could see across the Plateau to the landmark of Sergoit Rock. There lay the promised land – flat, treeless, swarming with game, empty of humans: like the high-veld near to Bethel, but without settlements; and their hearts were glad.
They trekked on for three days and looked across the Elgeyo border where the van Breda brothers and John de Waal were settled, and there they spied out the land. They saw no Africans, but all the rifle-fodder they could want, and they returned well pleased. After their account, four families turned back. The rest started their trek on 4 August, 1908.
Such a sight had never before been seen in the Protectorate – upwards of fifty wagons, (the newcomers had bought more locally), each with a span of sixteen oxen, jolting along a barely marked track that wormed among trees and bush, the bearded men with long whips cracking like rifle-shots beside them, horsemen riding ahead and at the flanks with rifles in their hands. The wagons were of the old Dutch type, half-covered, with a tented portion at the back which the women and children shared. At night the wagons were drawn up in a defensive ring around the cooking fires, and a boma of thorn bushes built for the oxen, and the men slept beside their wagons under the stars.
The trekkers travelled in two columns. Ten wagon
s went ahead in the first column, which crossed the Rongai river on the second day. On the third day they crossed the Molo river and on the fourth they reached Eldama Ravine. Here they camped for three days to rest the oxen and give the women a chance to wash clothes, and to bake bread. To make an oven, they scooped a hole in the side of an ant-heap or a river-bank, lit a fire and placed in the hot ashes big cast-iron pans, brought with them for the purpose, containing dough.
One more day’s trek brought them to the forest’s edge on the steep escarpment rising above Ravine. Here they halted for five days while the men widened a track through seven miles of forest. This track was wet. The first column managed the seven miles in one day but the wagons in the second and larger column came to grief in the mud and took four days to get clear. Meanwhile, the men of the first column cut a track through the bamboos and made a causeway over the swampy patches with the canes.
After struggling through the first belt of bamboos, both columns rested for two days; but there was a second belt to tackle, harder than the first. To get heavily-loaded wagons up this steep escarpment along the rough, narrow, treacherous track, with inexperienced oxen and in a wet year, was a truly remarkable feat, and only Afrikaners could have performed it. At last, after prodigious effort, they reached the top and pitched camp at a place they called Brugspruit, near Timboroa. Here they could at last look out over the promised land.
Next day, all the men went out shooting for the pot and brought back kongoni. Not a scrap was wasted; the fat was melted down for lard, the hides tanned for shoes, the offal fed to dogs. That night, they had their first tragedy. A two-year-old girl died, probably from pneumonia, and was buried next morning under a big cedar tree.
Both columns started off again together through the area now known as Burnt Forest, and reached Sugar Vlei. Here they encountered a swamp, infamous in years to come, and fifteen of the wagons stuck so badly that each one needed three teams – forty-eight oxen – to pull it out.
On the following day the going was so heavy and the climb so steep that they covered only five miles. Once again they halted while the men built causeways with brushwood and sods over two more swampy places. Another day of sticking and straining, heaving and hauling, brought them to better ground where the road to Kipkabus now leaves the main road, just south of Plateau station. The going was easier now, and one further day’s trek brought them to the Sosiani river. They crossed the Sosiani and camped the next night at John de Waal’s.
From Sergoit, all the Afrikaners fanned out and each man picked the piece of land that pleased his eye. A simple survey had meanwhile been made, mainly by Piet van Breda, and angle-irons planted in the long grass to mark the corners of blocks demarcated in units of 900, 1,400, 2,600 and 5,000 acres, at an annual rental of 18, 12, 6 and 3 cents (of a rupee) respectively. It was a condition of the lease that a sum equal to forty times the rent must be spent on development within five years, and no leases were to be granted until this had been done. In all 104 farms were demarcated on the Uasin Gishu and offered on these terms.
Most of the trekkers had brought with them small ploughs and they began in earnest to break the veld, and then to work it down with harrows made from triangles of thorn-tree logs spiked with pegs cut from the tough olive. As they had no nails, they did without. Theirs was an economy of self-sufficiency and barter that seldom called for money. But ammunition they needed, and a few clothes: to get the necessary cash they sold buffalo or kongoni hides, and sometimes the young men went off to work as ox-drivers for English settlers. Perhaps they would return with enough to buy not only a shirt and trousers (which could be had for Rs. 3/50 the two) and some cartridges but a Nandi cow (for Rs. 15/-) to lay the foundations of a herd.
Londiani was rail-head. The distance was sixty-four miles from the Sosiani river at the point which subsequently became Eldoret, and the return journey took thirty days if you were lucky, and up to twice as long if your wagons stuck, as they so often did, in the appalling mud. The longest time recorded for the single journey was twenty-eight days. The swamps became infamous, particularly one known as Campi Nyasa or the Red Sea, at Mile 32 from Londiani, where oxen in their traces were known to drown. “Where the mud moves, there are oxen” was a saying of those days. Six span – ninety-six oxen – were sometimes hitched to a single wagon to haul it through. It was a common hazard for wagons to sink into mud up to their rails. Dissel-booms and wagon-chains constantly snapped and had to be repaired then and there by the trackside, while the oxen waited up to their bellies in mud.
No Easy Way Elspeth Huxley.
Their first crops failed: the Akrikaners persisted. A sample exhibited at the agricultural show at Nakuru in 1909 was the first wheat grown on the Uasin Gishu plateau. Thirty years later, the plateau was known as the bread-basket of Kenya.
Throughout March and April a dozen or more puffs of dust could be seen curling up from the plain below the homestead, where ox-teams dragged heavy ploughs through the grass-encrusted loam. For the veld it was a christening of steel. The discs cut keenly through matted grass roots, leaving a brown gash on the pale surface of the plain. Native ploughmen hung tightly to the handles to prevent the plough from bucking out of its furrow as it encountered some hidden stone or stump. The air was thick with sharp raucous cries imitated from Dutchmen and with the cracking of the long hide whips.
Never before, through the immeasurable ages of geology or the shorter centuries of man, had this particular piece of soil been carved into by the discs, thrown on its back to expose its accumulated plant food and its microscopic life to the glare of the sun, beaten into clods and pulverized into a soft, even seed-bed. To the mind of the pioneer there was something peculiarly satisfying in the surrender of virgin country. It gave him a satisfaction born of the consciousness of a job well done and of the reflection that here, where zebras had roamed over wasted pastures, a million ears of wheat would slowly fill into golden pips of gluten worth so many shillings the bushel in the world’s markets.
Possibly, also, it filled some aesthetic need in a nature left unsatisfied by the pioneer’s crudity of surroundings – mud huts, furniture knocked together out of packing-cases, cattle bomas, corrugated iron, a cracked gramophone and a few tattered copies of illustrated papers from London.
Pioneers like Delamere often seem to have a dead side to their natures. They seldom appear to take any interest in music or art, or to look for beauty in existence. They cannot afford to do so. They must not admit the need for such spiritual stimulants in the midst of the raw, prosaic realities which surround them; they must force themselves to be content to live out of contact with art and intellect.
Some may have few finer wants, a low standard of intellectual living. Others, perhaps, may find some aesthetic satisfaction in this arduous business of taming new land and imposing the order of man’s design on nature’s apparent chaos. These men exercise their imagination by creating waving wheat-fields out of veld and bush; see beauty in the lines of a ram or a bull perfect of its kind; hear music in the swish of the reaper.
Pioneering itself may be a sort of art, in its own way as creative as the painting of a picture. Has not the artist a landscape for his canvas, ploughs for brushes and axes for a scalpel? Daubs of brown go in with broad sweeps of the brush, to be changed again, here to green and there to yellow; buildings appear to give the composition balance; forests are erased in one corner and added in another; sheep bring contrast to the pastures; roads add proportion to the design. And at the end, when the macrocosmic artist surveys his canvas, he may see a grace in the homesteads with their gardens and their solidarity that his mind has conjured out of scrub, just as the painter knows that he has created beauty out of the pigments in which he has clothed his inspiration.
White Man’s Country (Vol. I) Elspeth Huxley.
First aid.
In 1910 anyone living in the Kiambu district was twenty miles from the nearest hospital. Dorcas Aubrey, the niece of Isabella Beaton and married to an early coffe
e planter at Ruiru, like everyone relied on ox-transport which was unbearably slow. When she received word that a Kikuyu was dying on the path below her house she found that he had had a fight with another African and his intestines were spilling from a gaping hole in his abdomen. He could not be moved until his guts had been replaced. Unless she could think of some means of saving him herself he would certainly die. She removed a string from her violin and threaded it through a sacking needle to sew the man up where he lay on the path. A litter was made from branches of trees to carry him up to her house, where she nursed him back to health. Innovation such as this went on in every homestead.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 14