Lion in the Morning Henry Seaton.
Between the Wars
In 1919 the British Government launched the Soldier Settlement scheme. It was a lottery; each successful applicant drew a number which entitled him, or her in a few cases, to a block of unpopulated and undeveloped bush or veld, of varying size, in the Protectorate’s highlands. The Soldier Settlers and their families, if any, made their way to Nairobi and then set out to find their prizes.
Within a few days the new arrivals had mostly left Nairobi and were scattered in all directions, either to stay with friends or to look for their farms. There were hardly any roads and no particular landmarks, and quite a number of people started operations on someone else’s land – it was all guesswork. The new settlers were nearly all amateur farmers besides being new to the country, and some of them expected their farms to be like English ones, with hedges, fields, buildings and cultivation; and one or two even gave up in despair when shown by a neighbour a mere tract of country as their “farm”.
We left Nairobi at 4 pm, and until dark enjoyed the views of the new country; but it became very cold as we climbed to the higher altitudes, and when we got out at a station for dinner, it was raining hard and blowing a gale.
Few things are more depressing than arriving at a strange place in pouring rain. When the place is a little wayside station and the hour five-thirty in the grey dawn of a morning in the rainy season, wet and cold, a certain amount of courage is needed to face life! …
We had seventy miles to go (by ox-cart) and hoped to do it in a day and a half, and, considering the road was a quagmire most of the way, we got on fairly well. But at 4 pm we had only done twenty miles, and when darkness fell, were in dense forest and a violent storm of rain began.
Oxen cannot work in the rain, the yokes gall their necks; so we stopped and they were outspanned and left to wander about and graze, and we prepared to camp for the night in the cart. There was a hut near by for the boys, to which they thoughtfully carried off our only lantern, and we were left with the candle without which no thoughtful person travels in the blue; but we had no candlestick, and the candle promptly fell over the side of the cart into the mud, and in the darkness took some time to retrieve.
The altitude was in the neighbourhood of 9,000 feet and it was bitterly cold, so we decided that the situation demanded a hot dinner; and had one, with the help of the tea-basket – a handsome three-course dinner of hot tinned soup, fried sausages, bread and jam and tea. Then we turned the dining-room into a wagon-lit, spread the valises and blankets out on the floor, and slept soundly until 4.30 am, when Charles went out and roused the boys.…
The rain had stopped before dawn, and though it was very cold before the sun rose, the early morning start was delicious; and in spite of the hardness of the floorboards of the cart, in that wonderful air we had rested well. The road improved as we got nearer Eldoret, and at each halting place we got down and walked a little way or had a meal if one was due; and there was only a distance of thirty miles left to go when a wheel came off our cart, and it fell over with a crash against a bank – the only place for miles where there was a bank and it saved a bad mishap. The pin of the hub had gone and was lost in the mud, but by the greatest luck a six-inch nail was discovered on the floor of the cart; the wheel was replaced with the nail to act as pin and away we went, praying that the nail might prove a strong one, and that there might be a friendly bank to break the fall next time we went over.
The journey seemed interminable, but at about four o’clock we came in sight of Eldoret – then a little dorp of tin-roofed bungalows and grass huts, with one unpretentious Bank building and a butcher’s shop – we crossed the Sosiani river and rattled up the only street, and turned at the top into the open country, but still on the rutty track that did duty as a main road.…
It was wonderful to descend from that abominable cart and realize I need not get into it again! To go into a comfortable stone house and rest in an armchair, and presently have a bath and a good dinner! – I registered a vow that night that nothing should induce me to leave the Plateau until I could go by train, if the only alternative to that was a post-cart.
Perhaps the most essential tool on every farm was the debbi, sometimes spelt debbe.
It is an oblong tin, fourteen inches high by nine inches square, and comes packed in a deal box holding two. It holds four Imperial gallons of petrol or paraffin, and has become the standard measure for the sale of linseed oil, plough oil, lard, ghee and honey.…
In East Africa many a settler’s house is furnished throughout with kerosene tins and their complementary adjuncts. The tin can be made to serve countless purposes; painted green and filled with earth it is an ornamental flower-pot for the verandah; cut in half longways it is a pan for growing seeds. For every domestic purpose it is invaluable, from an oven to a boiler. Two tins hung over a donkey’s back bring water up from the river, the bath-water is heated in them – hams or bacon are boiled in them when too big for the saucepans. Coffee pickers are paid by the tin-full; tins are used for cleaning and winnowing maize, for carting away rubbish, bringing earth or manure for the garden, beaten as drums to scare off locusts (or the devil). The native name for the tin, and the name we all call it by, is debbi.
If the debbi is invaluable in its original form, it has almost limitless scope in other shapes. With top and bottom cut off and the sides laid out as a flat sheet, it makes a good weather-proof roofing; and the sides, bent upwards, can be used as guttering, or bent downwards, as ridging for the roof. Huts in the native and Indian quarters of many African towns dazzle the eyes with their kerosene-tin roofs, which, when painted red, present quite a distinguished appearance.
But while enumerating the myriad uses of the tin, the box it comes in must not be forgotten. It may be used singly as a hen-coop or in numbers as a box-body for the car: built up in geometrical patterns for wardrobes, writing-tables, dressing-tables, book-cases, pews, and even as reading-desks in bush churches. The floor of many a bungalow is made entirely of the wood from these boxes, and in ironmongers’ stores the cupboards are phalanxes of oil-boxes lining the walls. They may be put up in trees to allure wild bees that would otherwise sojourn under the floor or in the roof; mounted on wheels to produce a perambulator or a wheelbarrow; while out of two cases, cut in an artful manner, a comfortable armchair may be contrived.
The Youngest Lion Eva Bache.
From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.
Roy Campbell
The biggest obstacle to wheat growing at this time and place was not rust or weather but game, especially zebras. Enormous herds still roamed these open plains and ignored the sturdiest of fences. Fields of ripening wheat vanished before them like a dew before the sun. So much damage was done that in 1922 a deputation headed by Mr T. J. O’Shea laid before the Governor of the day, Sir Robert Coryndon, a scheme for exterminating these handsome animals that had become an economic plague. Many of the farmers had emerged from the war in possession of a .256 Mauser rifle of a type taken over from the Portuguese, and the Government held large stocks of ammunition which was due to be dumped into the sea. The proposal was that the Government should issue this ammunition in exchange for zebra tails.
The scheme was adopted and ten rounds issued free; after that, each zebra tail earned two further rounds. At about this time, a process was discovered in the United States for tanning zebra hides, which then became saleable instead of worthless, as had been the case before. These factors together spelt the doom of the zebra. Tens of thousands were slaughtered, and, in the next few years, kongoni, eland, giraffe, wildebeeste and gazelle also paid the price for inconveniencing mankind. The Uasin Gishu was stripped of what had been its greatest glory; but fences stood, and wheat grew.
No Easy Way Elspeth Huxley.
&nbs
p; Lord Delamere on the pioneer spirit.
22 April, 1930
… Lunched at the Avenue with the Cobbs and the Harpers. I am so sorry for the Cobbs. They have been hoping against hope that the rain would stop and let them harvest their crop, but now with the heavy rain of the last week or two the last 700 acres of beautiful barley has simply rotted on the ground. They harvested the rest, a good many thousand bags, and it is hardly worth taking to the station at the price. Mrs Cobb finally deserted her post the day before yesterday and came down to Nairobi to join him. I have never before seen her disheartened, but she says this has really been the last straw after working herself on the harvesters ever since you and I and the Neville Chamberlains went there together.
I’m afraid it means their selling the developed part of their farm and starting again on another bit. Rather hard at Cobb’s age to start all over again, and for her after making their house so nice. But it has happened to all the pioneers in all the countries they have made. Their joy is in the creation of something out of nothing. Cobb has already left one beautiful place, Keringet, into which he put years of his life, and now he is probably going to do it again, leaving a home made out of the bare veld for someone else. And he will probably do it again.
New capital comes in and takes over in a different spirit, investing in proved things.
Cobb has made large profits out of farming, but it has always gone back into increased acreages or something he is trying. The result is the first two or three bad years on end leave him stranded and he starts again. The pioneer mind only sees forward. If it didn’t it would never do what it does. But it seldom consolidates for the same reason.
White Man’s Country (Vol. 11) Elspeth Huxley.
In 1925 Michael Blundell, aged eighteen, abandoned the aim of an Oxford scholarship and sailed in the SS Mariana, bound for a then remote farm-to-be in western Kenya.
I had two tin trunks, one shot-gun and £100 to my name. After I had paid my railway fare and met the Customs dues, I left for up-country with £73 only. The terms and conditions of my job were that I worked for my keep for a year, so I had to count on this £73 for the next twelve months. It took more than forty-eight hours from Mombasa to reach my destination, which was Eldoret, at that time the railhead on the new line being constructed to Uganda.… My fellow passengers were all settlers like myself, excited and enthusiastic over the prospect of making a new country. Showers of advice were poured upon me; to do nothing for a year and see what the country was like, to enter the motor trade which must thrive as the country expanded, to take 1,000 acres of land in the Burnt Forest and to grow wheat which was then the newest industry in the agricultural world. To all this I listened, with excitement too, and I looked out of the windows at the tall greeny grey cedar trees festooned with their beards of grey lichen and wondered what the farm of my employer was going to be like. At Eldoret the train could go no farther as the line from there was still under construction, and my future boss met me in his motor-car. He was a slight spare man of medium height, desperately weak from seven years of colitis; his blue eyes showed up in his sallow, suntanned face, and a tuft of hair on his cheek bones was always left unshaved on either side of his face. The car was a ramshackle black Overland tourer which had a clearance of something like ten inches from the ground, a godsend in the rainy season when the roads largely became mud and quagmire.
I have often wondered about the theory of reincarnation because from that moment onwards everything that happened to me and all that I saw seemed so natural and did not surprise me in the slightest as if indeed I had already been there and had accepted it all in the past. The red dirt roads, the narrow farm tracks branching off from them, with the sections of long grass down the middle between the tracks; the stems of the grass arching themselves across the tracks, with their copper-coloured seeds hanging from the stems like drops of frozen rain, all fascinated me and yet seemed to be part of a pattern to which I was already accustomed. We arrived in darkness, and in the dim lantern light the Africans carried in my luggage – my two trunks and my shot-gun – into the hut which was to be my home for fifteen months. The hut was hexagonal in shape, about fifteen feet across, constructed of mud and wattle, with a grass roof, badly thatched, with a hole in the centre at the top of the apex. Lizards ran across the grass in the roof, and the floor, which was made of murram, rough and uneven, harboured innumerable jiggers and fleas, which attacked my feet if I was foolish enough to get out of bed and walk across the floor without shoes. The furniture was simple and made from white deal petrol boxes, and my bath was a round galvanized iron tub into which the water was poured by hand from a blackened four-gallon tin, while a strong smoky smell filled the air.
My farming day was a simple one. I rose at 6.15 am and went out at 6.30 to set the labour to work, detailing tasks, and seeing them started. This generally took until 8 o’clock, when I returned for breakfast. After breakfast we would ride round the farm looking at the growing crops, superintending the work in progress and exploring the remoter sections to see what was going on. We had two steeds on the estate – one Joe Cobb, a slow lethargic Somali pony whose main object in life was to get through it with the minimum effort to himself, and the other, Rosinante, a highly intelligent self-opinionated mule who was quite determined that she knew the best way to go everywhere and the best manner in which to do it.…
Owing to our distance from the nearest township we had largely to live off the farm, and every evening we would go out shooting for the pot. My boss would take his rifle, I would take my shot-gun, and we would bring back antelope, partridge, guinea-fowl, snipe, duck or lesser bustard, as the case might be. Often we would see forty to a hundred waterbuck in one herd, together with hartebeeste, duiker, reedbuck and oribi. In the evenings sometimes I climbed the steep granite hills and sat on the top watching the habits of the animals as they grazed below me in the long grass. The explosive snort of the waterbuck, the sudden stamp of the hartebeeste as they sensed danger, the whistling of the reedbuck and the clicking of their heels as they leapt through the grass when they tried to escape from any sudden and unexpected contact, delighted me.…
In March as there was a shortage of labour, especially of drivers trained to handle a team of oxen, my employer bought a John Deere tractor. It was a powerful but unpredictable machine, and as he did not trust the Africans to handle it properly, he ordained that I should drive it. Hour after hour I bumped through the hot dusty African fields, ploughing and harrowing the light greyish-brown soil. I got up in the early morning before dawn, primed the monster’s inside with petrol through a small priming cup and swung the great heavy fly-wheel. Sometimes I would swing it for an hour or more until I could hardly turn the fly-wheel over before it would come to life with a few hesitant coughs and snorts. Nevertheless, I had the satisfaction of ploughing, of seeing the long furrows curling out behind me; or, if we were using the large single furrow mould board plough, of holding it steady and feeling it carving through the warm dusty soil so that a long never ending wave of earth constantly turned and fell before me like the waves under the bow of a ship in a placid sea. One day, as I ploughed out my first furrow over a hundred acre field, I saw the sun rise over the edge of the field and tip the grass and clods of earth with gold; the same evening, on my last furrow, I drove the tractor into the full moon, as she in her turn rose above the edge of the field while the hot African evening gave way to the cool of the upland night and the grass and furrows were translated into half seen mysterious silver. The teams of oxen were already passing away, like many other beautiful things. It was a grand sight to see the crops loaded on to six or seven wagons, each eighteen feet long and pulled by sixteen sweating bullocks, all matched for colour; blacks, reds, blues or brindles. The sacks of maize would be neatly stacked along the wagon boards, and to the cries of the drivers and the crack of the whips, creaking and groaning, the wagons would get under way one after the other as the drivers cried out the names of the leaders – “Captain”, “
Sportsman”, “Delamere”, as the case might be.
So Rough a Wind Michael Blundell.
Coffee became Kenya’s most important crop; Karen Blixen (Izak Dinesen) its most famous writer.
There are times of great beauty on a coffee-farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist and the drizzling rain, over six hundred acres of land. The coffee-blossom has a delicate slightly bitter scent, like the black-thorn blossom. When the field reddened with the ripe berries, all the women and the children, whom they call the Totos, were called out to pick the coffee off the trees, together with the men; then the wagons and carts brought it down to the factory near the river. Our machinery was never quite what it should have been, but we had planned and built the factory ourselves and thought highly of it. Once the whole factory burned down and had to be built up again. The big coffee-dryer turned and turned, rumbling the coffee in its iron belly with a sound like pebbles that are washed about on the sea-shore. Sometimes the coffee would be dry, and ready to take out of the dryer, in the middle of the night. That was a picturesque moment, with many hurricane lamps in the huge dark room of the factory, that was hung everywhere with cobwebs and coffee-husks, and with eager glowing dark faces, in the light of the lamps, round the dryer; the factory, you felt, hung in the great African night like a bright jewel in an Ethiope’s ear. Later on the coffee was hulled, graded, and sorted by hand, and packed in sacks sewn up with a saddler’s needle.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 16