Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  The Kenya Pioneers Errol Trzebinski.

  Nairobi’s best-known, best-loved and at times most-dreaded doctor was Roland Burkitt, an Irishman who started a general practice there in 1911. At a time when few Europeans escaped attacks of malaria, he was famous for his cold water cure.

  A story, which illustrates the determination of the man, is told of a mother who was convinced that if the slightest cold reached her baby while its temperature was high, it would assuredly die of pneumonia. Dr Burkitt placed it naked in an open-work basket, which he hung in a doorway for the sake of the extra draught and sprayed it with a watering can. The determined efforts of the mother to rescue her child were met only with quiet restraint and confidence. Unable to stand it any longer she rushed from the scene of what she was convinced was murder and locked herself in a bedroom from where she showered threats on Dr Burkitt’s head of what she would do to him if anything happened to her child. All this he took with quiet calm, and, when the child’s temperature had reached normal, he knocked on the door and invited the mother to come and see what cold water could do.

  Another tale, illustrating his belief in increasing heat loss, is told of a very big woman whom he went a distance into the country to see, and found her with a very high temperature. He decided to bring her into hospital in Nairobi. Her relatives wanted to wrap her up in blankets, afraid she would get cold, but Burkitt refused. Instead he insisted that she should travel naked in the back of his open Ford car. On the way in he stopped and took her temperature. He found it was dropping, so he took off his coat and wrapped it round her. As the story goes, the patient eventually reached the hospital dressed in all Burkitt’s clothes, while he arrived naked.

  During the influenza epidemics and in the malarial seasons, which in those days were common but now are happily things of the past, Dr Burkitt had patients all over the town in cold baths, under wet sheets, being sprayed with watering cans or merely being sponged, while he hurried from one case to another checking temperatures. Woe betide the relative or nurse who abandoned treatment before the desired result was obtained, but some people were not above setting an African servant on watch to give warning of the doctor’s approach so that a comfortable bed could be abandoned for the bathroom. Prominent and worthy citizens, men holding high executive posts and large employers, in response to a warning from the watcher, could be seen rushing in their pelts along passages to the bathroom and plunging into a cold bath, while the doctor’s Ford car chugged up to the house. When he found the temperature still up Dr Burkitt would shake his head and exclaim, “This is a terrible bad case.” He was utterly guileless that his treatment was not being rigorously followed.…

  He was an early riser, and every morning he was up at or before dawn reading in his study wrapped in a warm Jaegar dressing-gown over his pyjamas. In cold weather he put on socks and sometimes a muffler. For two hours he divided his time into bible study and reading scientific medical journals or books. If an urgent call came during those hours or in the night he would set off to see the patient in this unconventional garb, surmounted by a sun-helmet.

  At 6 o’clock his African servant brought him a large pot of tea and he drank several cups well sweetened. The tea was intended to wake him up, and the sugar to give him energy. If he had guests staying in the house it gave him great pleasure, if they would join him at this hour and listen to his discourse on some abstruse theosophical problem. The study of the scriptures and the origin and history of words used in the Bible was a constant source of interest to him.…

  At 7.30 o’clock he shaved and every morning of his life in Kenya he took a cold bath, with the exception of one week after I had shot a wild pig and he and Colonel Guinness decided to pickle it in the bath. None of us had a bath for a week.

  Once he killed a puff-adder on the lawn of Mr Claud Watson’s house where we were all having tea. He brought it home and skinned it carefully, saving the meat to make a savoury. Next day he told the cook to chop the meat up and serve it for luncheon in scrambled egg. That day he invited Mrs Philip Percival, Miss Percival, Miss Hughes his nurse, and other friends. When we had finished the savoury, he enquired how his guests had enjoyed it. The mischievous look on his face immediately aroused Miss Hughes’ suspicions, and she demanded to know what was in it. When he told her it was puff-adder she immediately went outside and was sick. This amused him immensely as the amount of snake flesh among the egg was infinitesimal.…

  He never entered a cinema except once and that was only to please Miss Hughes, who insisted that he should go to see the Martin Johnson film of big game life in East Africa. Miss Hughes was his surgery nurse, of whom he was very fond, and I do not believe anyone else could have prevailed on him to go. She had a job keeping him in his seat while the supporting programme was run through. He refused to admit he enjoyed the film, and I think he did not, because he was so firmly convinced that all cinemas were of the devil.

  Under the Sun J. W. Gregory.

  Dr Burkitt was not the only eccentric doctor about. One of them, Dr John Gilks, kept a tame leopard which he took with him when he went visiting his patients. It was called “Starpit”. The Africans thought that was its name as they had heard Dr Gilks saying “Stop it, stop it,” to it. One of Dr Gilks’ patients who was ill in bed with a liver complaint claims that she was cured by sheer fright when the leopard came in behind the doctor and leapt straight on top of her in bed.

  We Lived on the Verandah Suzanne Fisher.

  In February 1900, Dr Rosendo Ayres Ribeiro, Nairobi’s first private medical practitioner, made his appearance. His tubby, Goanese figure became familiar as he rode his tame zebra about the Bazaar or along Station Street. He pitched his tent where the bakery later stood in Whitehouse Road. Wearing a stetson, his black beard trimmed neatly, his buttons looking as if they would pop off his waistcoat at any moment, Dr Ribeiro visited the sick among all communities. He became famous in Nairobi for his special malarial cure, which he patented and which was sold to an international pharmaceutical company eventually. For six months he and his assistant, Mr C. Pinto, shared a tent as home and practice. In the evenings, by the light of a candle and a kerosene lamp they made up prescriptions of the young Goanese doctor’s invention. He cured many grateful settlers of fever with his nameless, grey powders; the first dose induced vomiting which produced a lot of green bile but that was the extent of discomfort. After completing the course his patients were assured of freedom from fever for many months.

  As the Indian Bazaar expanded Dr Ribeiro moved into more luxurious quarters and their next surgery was built from the packing cases in which his drug supplies had been shipped from England. A tarpaulin, borrowed from the railway, provided temporary cover and when it was reclaimed he practised with no roof, like Aesculapius in the Sacred Groves, receiving many a tough native chicken in lieu of payment for his cures. It was Dr Ribeiro who, in 1902, had diagnosed bubonic plague in two Somali patients and reported it. The Medical Officer of Health, with no experience of tropical diseases, panicked at the news, ordered the Indian Bazaar to be evacuated and burned it to the ground. Dr Ribeiro’s surgery went up in flames with the rest. This drastic measure cost the Government £50,000 but Dr Ribeiro fared rather well out of the disaster. He was compensated for the loss with the gift of a domestic plot near the station. There he built the usual‘Dak’ bungalow on stilts, from which he carried on with his work and, in 1903, was given a concession of sixteen acres behind Victoria Street by the Government in recognition for services rendered over his report on the plague.

  The Kenya Pioneers Errol Trzebinski.

  I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race

  Tennyson

  I had one adventure with a Kikuyu maiden who could not have been more than sixteen years old. I had ridden far into the forest when suddenly here she was before me, a young native, bending over a water-hole filling a gourd. I reined in my pony. She started with a cry as soon as she saw me. I was the first white man she had seen at suc
h close quarters. I began talking to her in Swahili, but she did not understand a word of that language. However, she soon lost her nervousness, and with the confidence of her sex when they know they are beautiful, stood laughing there before me.

  She wore a thin strip of leather across her loins. Except for this she was naked. Her brown skin, the colour of an oak-apple, was smeared over with the oil they extract from a eucalyptus-smelling berry. I rode by her side until she reached her hut, a round kraal hidden in a forest glade. I found her father there, busy with his mealie plot. He knew a few words of Swahili and I had some talk with him. After that I rode away. But try as I might I could not get the memory of this forest-child out of my mind. The long, lonely years I had passed in Africa had made my whole being cry out for something to love, for some romance, for it is exactly this that is lacking in the great dark continent.

  For several months after this event, whenever I was free in the late afternoon, I would ride up to the forest and stand waiting by the water-hole till Wamboy came. We used to sit side by side under a great forest tree, and I would try to teach her to pronounce certain English words and tease her when her curved lips found difficulty in stammering out the unfamiliar syllables. She was proud and evasive and in every way inaccessible. The sound of her laughter was the prettiest thing I have ever heard in my life. It was clear as the cry of a widgeon on a frosty January morning, clear as the sound of wind in a tall unpollarded poplar-tree. The more I saw of her the more impossible it seemed that I should ever be able to rid myself of the spell she had cast over me. I began to contemplate marrying her. Why not? After all, we have only one life, and surely, I thought, I could spend mine in many worse ways than living in the forest with this lovely creature. I also, like her father, could occupy my time in cultivating a mealie plot, letting all the vulgar importunity of the modern world go to the devil. Other white men had deliberately abandoned civilized life and taken to living with black people; why should not I? I made overtures to the father. He seemed more than agreeable, and told me that if I gave him fifteen goats, ten sheep and one heifer, I could take the girl away whenever I wished. As soon as our plan reached Wamboy’s ears she grew frightened. She had been willing to laugh and play, but when she understood that I was really serious a new scared look came into her eyes. It would hardly be true to say that this was altogether unpleasing to me; however, on the whole, it seemed best to avoid meeting her any more. For more than a month therefore I refrained from riding up to our trysting place.

  At the end of this time the old man came to see me. His avarice had evidently been roused. “Take her,” he said. “I myself will bring her to you by force any evening you name. When she has lived with you she will come to love you and be no longer frightened.” It was, indeed, a most tantalizing proposal, but the pathos of the girl’s alarm and the whole inarticulate grace of her personality made it impossible for me to carry negotiations further. I told the old man to go back to his mealies, and never again looked into the provocative eyes of this rare hamadryad of the African forest.

  Black Laughter Llewelyn Powys.

  William Northrup McMillan, who hailed from St Louis, Missouri, bought land near the mountain Ol Donyo Sapuk north-east of Nairobi and settled down with his wife Lucie to develop a self-contained estate. He was knighted for his services to Britain during the First World War.

  The estate was called after two West African images brought to Kenya by Northrup McMillan and known as Ju and Ja. Numerous superstitions surrounded them, and eventually Lady McMillan buried them somewhere in the Ndarugu Valley, but she never disclosed where. One of the superstitions was that the images would bring bad luck to the idols’ owners, some of whom would die at sea. Sir Northrup McMillan died at sea off Mombasa on a return journey from England.

  In 1905 the pre-fabricated sections of Juja House arrived from England, ending their journey by mule-cart from Nairobi. Juja was soon a thriving community with an area of one square mile enclosed in a ten-foot fence on three sides, with the river as the fourth protection to keep out wild animals. Within the compound was a post office and a telegraph office, and housing for a European staff consisting of a manager, a chauffeur, two gardeners, a groom, a storeman and Lady McMillan’s maid. There was stabling for twenty-six horses, which were carefully netted in at night against the dreaded tsetse fly. Each horse had its own syce who slept and ate with it and ran alongside when it was ridden out, ready to take the reins at any time.

  Juja House was surrounded by formal gardens and approached by an avenue of trees, plants and flowers. Below the house were large fruit and vegetable gardens, also grain and maize. Attempts were made to farm ostriches, pigs, cattle and sheep, but all were more or less defeated by disease. However, a slaughterhouse, bacon factory, dairy and cheese factory were built, also an elaborate block of stone pig houses. From this ran a light railway to facilitate cleaning out the pig houses. Juja was famed for its hospitality and there was a camping site set aside for any passing safaris. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was on one of these safaris, and stayed at Juja for some time.

  From 1914 to 1918 Juja House was a hospital and convalescent home for British officers. Having attempted all kinds of farming without success, Sir Northrup sold the estate in 1919 to Mr F. N. Nettlefold, a wealthy Englishman, and went to live at Donyo Sabuk House, which he had recently built. He became enormous, weighing, it was said, over twenty stone. When sitting in an ordinary motor car, one leg and almost half the rest of him overflowed. The National Bank of India had a seat made specially to hold him.

  He was buried on Ol Donyo Sabuk. The hearse was made with skis on the bottom and a tractor pulled it up the hill, followed by the mourners. Many cars burned out their clutch-plates, and when the tractor eventually reached the shoulder of the hill it also stopped, so the burial took place there instead of at the top, which had been the original plan. Oak trees were planted by the grave.

  Pioneers’Scrapbook, eds. Elspeth Huxley and Arnold Curtis.

  Odd men out.

  The next morning, having out-distanced the wagon, I sat down under a tree to enjoy the scene, when the silence was broken by a tinkle of bells, and I saw a neat little wagon drawn by sixteen donkeys trotting down the track towards me. The good-looking, bearded Englishman sitting in front, seeing me, jumped down and came forward to meet me. He was a highly-cultured gentleman, who had served in the British Army, but eventually, weary of the complications of civilized society, had cleared right off the map and lived a pleasant nomad existence in this delightful country, with his well-equipped little wagon as his home. He outspanned and told me his history while his boy prepared a meal native fashion, for he despised European stores. Later, when my wagon came up, he dined with me, and we sat talking far into the night as men will who meet by chance and will probably never see each other again.

  At dawn we went our different ways with mutually pleasant recollections. Afterwards I heard that he had been in trouble with the authorities over some question of trading ivory with the natives, and believe that he packed up and trekked off farther afield again, away from the inevitable restrictions of man-made laws.

  At the very farthest point on the edge of the forest we came across an old Scotchman quite alone. He lived in a dilapidated grass hut without even a native boy to fetch wood and water for him. Near his hut lay the body of a zebra which had been half devoured by lions. He had only a very old-fashioned rifle and four rounds of ammunition. He said that he was not afraid of the natives, they never interfered with “Old Sam,” or of the lions that had killed so near his hut. His only trouble apparently was “Those blamed hogs” which came and rooted up his mealie patch. He told me that he had pioneered in every new country as it opened, and generally sold out after sitting on his claim for a few months. Surely he was the most lonely old man in Africa, and seemed to want nothing so much as to be left in peace.

  Havash! W. Lloyd-Jones.

  The unimportance of time

  In early 1914 the spirit of the white
highlands in the East Africa Protectorate was one of unbounded optimism, of faith and a great love. The pioneers were out of the ruck, all set for the making of a new heaven on a new earth. In the Native Reserves, by which white settlement was immediately surrounded, peace, trust and goodwill prevailed. Tribal entities were absolute; there was no semblance of a dream of nationhood. Perhaps the greatest blessing, which was shared by all, was the supreme unimportance of time. The sun set and the sun rose. It was just a matter of night and day.

  Nakuru, at this time, was regarded as being the capital centre of the European farming community – the hub of the inviolable sanctuary of the white highlands. Every settler was the lord of a manor, no matter whether his holding were great or small – his homesteads built of stone or mud. His rights were sacred and inalienable for all time and his dominion within the boundaries of his farm was feudal. His loyalty to the Crown was absolute, but his attitude towards Government was a mixture of resentment and contempt. He came in quest of freedom and independence, determined that the land of his adoption should yield him a livelihood. Every one of them considered himself a pioneer regardless of his length of residence and, in a sense, he was justified, as there was no great amount of experience behind anyone. They also believed they could govern the country in a proper manner and bitterly resented the meagre representation allowed them. Perhaps they were right in their belief; there were certainly very able men among them.…

  Government regime was despotic. Tribal resistance had been quelled. There was a tremendous sense of security. Except in the remote north, law and order prevailed in a remarkable degree. Benevolent despotism was the order of the day, but the white highlands had no use for despotism in any shape or form.