The Iron Snake Ronald Hardy.
1909
Nairobi has one charm that should not be denied it. That is the fine broad, well-metalled main street that runs for more than a mile straight from the railroad depot to the Norfolk Hotel.
I cannot fancy any other mile of roadway in semi-civilized Africa so interesting. Farmers, Boers, civil officers, and soldiers very smartly dressed, in well-fitting canvas or khaki, and last, but by no means least, the rare Englishwoman, far more admired and petted here than she ever is at home, in every sort of dress and undress and on every sort of “mount” – pony, mule, donkey, bicycle, in rickshaw or wagon, motor-car or camel cart – passes ceaselessly up and down.
There is movement and colour everywhere. Smart black women, often with very fine figures, in their most picturesque cotton togas, stand in groups at many a corner, laughing and chaffing the idle native porter as he saunters by, while hundreds of their more virtuous (let us hope), and much more naked sisters, stand in companies or squat on the ground outside some Indian’s store or contractor’s office, a black baby in an unspeakably oily bag at their breast, and sixty pounds of mealy meal, tightly bagged, slung by a headstrap, and carried low down behind their shoulders. Yes, I never can get tired of sauntering in Nairobi main street.
The Europeans, whose bungalows dot the wooded hills that on two sides surround the town, have a fine view over the Athi plains. With Zeiss glass it is still possible to see immense herds of game – harte beste, zebra, gnu, Grant’s and Thompson’s gazelles – feeding. Thirty miles away stands Donyea Sabuk – a partly wooded precipitous hill; rising some three thousand feet, and round its base – within a circle of a few miles, I suppose it is no exaggeration to say, that twenty white men have been killed or mauled by lions.
The flowers in Nairobi are a delightful surprise and wonder. Even in the dusty streets of the town they are plentiful. In poky little ill-kept gardens, or on unsightly corrugated iron roofs they climb and twine. When some pains are taken with them, and they are tended and watered in drought, they bloom and flourish as Italian roses do, only instead of blooming as these, for a few weeks only, at Nairobi roses bloom nine months in the year. Roses, passion flowers, pomegranates, orange trees, Bougainvillea, and many more, make scores of cheap little houses seem bowers of delight.
The Land of the Lion W. S. Rainstord.
Government House, 1920–2
One solemn duty of loyal subjects out on a spree is the writing of their names in the book at Government House. It is no longer the adventure it was when Sir Edward Northey’s Zoo were for the most part at large in the grounds, and the startled visitor might meet a wart-hog or hyena in the porch.
Meals at Government House were most exciting for the same reason. I have often longed to propound it as a social conundrum to the lady dealing with such matters in Home Chat: “What should one do at a big dinner-party, when something with claws seizes one’s leg, tearing one’s stockings – and in the case of a gentleman, his trousers – and the host noticing a disturbance, calls down the table, ‘It is only the cheetah’?” My love of wild nature failed me for a moment on another occasion when we were staying there, and a half-grown lioness bounded into the room. She was only looking for tit-bits, some fat ham or curried beef, but I followed her with a nervous eye as she frisked hoydenishly round the room. The Governor was absolutely without fear, and had a wonderful gift for handling wild animals: he would stroke the leopards growling uneasily on their chains near the flagstaff in the dusk, and go into the lion’s house, a solid structure of cement and iron bars, to make friends.
Race Week, 1926
The thrill of my first polo tournament dwarfed for me every other event of that week. The groups of ponies belonging to the different clubs, some first-class imported animals, some country-breds, a very few carefully picked Somalis, were all wonderfully well turned out, the muscles under their shining coats rippling as they moved in the sunlight. The KAR band were wrestling, wonderfully successfully, with a new foxtrot near the tea pavilion; the little buglers, supremely conscious of immaculate smartness, sold programmes up and down the long line of cars. On the ground itself a breathless struggle was taking place in the finals of the Connaught Cup, the blue shirts of Njoro and the yellow-coated, yellow-martingaled Nyeri men striving hotly to score a goal in the last minutes of the last chukker. When the excitement over Nyeri’s win had died down a little, there was a rush for tea, a sumptuous affair in the transformed pavilion, – usually a dreary shed, open on one side, the dusty repository of a few broken chairs. Then the Governor’s wife gave away the cups before she and HE and some of their house-party stepped into the big Government-House car flying a tiny Union Jack from the bonnet, and were whisked down the dusty road, followed a moment later by a stream of cars of every make and age, from a baby Austin and a rattling old Ford to a Hudson super-six and a Rolls-Royce….
Every night in Race Week is a gala night at Muthaiga, the low stone-built club (low architecturally, of course) four miles from the centre of Nairobi. Usually deserted except at lunch time and in the evenings, the club is thronged all that week, every bedroom and annexe is booked months ahead, the drives are blocked with cars. We had a large party one year for the New Year’s Ball, several friends from home all deliciously apprehensive of what the night would bring forth. With all its respectability, Muthaiga has managed to acquire among the uninitiated a darkly-intriguing reputation for bacchanalian revelry. Dinner was an invigorating preliminary, in the long, crowded dining-room and its annexes beyond, specially built for the occasion, of interwoven papyrus stems, and lit with Chinese lanterns. We were still sitting over coffee and cigarettes when the band struck up. We adjourned hastily to dance while there was still room to move in the ball-room. There was a thrill in the air born of the feeling that every one was determined to enjoy themselves to the full, making the most of every moment until beer and bacon and eggs should take the place of morning tea. In the olden days in Kenya every one knew every one else; now that our white population has risen to over 12,000, that is scarcely possible any longer, yet at a Muthaiga New Year’s Ball you feel instinctively that your neighbour is your oldest and dearest friend. Denser and denser grew the crowd till the crowning moments just before midnight when all the lights were put out. There was a breathless pause in the babel of voices, and then as the light flashed on again, showing the hands of the clock at twelve, we all linked hands in swaying ecstatic circles while we sang the old year out and the new year in. Then a rush for the wide gravel space outside. Chinese lanterns and fairy lights swaying in the tall clumps of feathery papyrus, where the towering bonfire, twenty feet of paraffin-soaked logs, was being lit…. A week of Muthaiga nights, sandwiched between the strenuous days, make most people thankful for a breathing space if they are going on to any of the polo tournaments that follow the one in Nairobi, and they are only too glad to settle down again on their farms if they are not polo players, and are dependent on the farm earnings for bread and butter and their passages home.
Kenya Days Aline Buxton.
1929
The train stopped for us to eat a very unpalatable dinner at a station. We got to Nairobi about 8 am next morning and, on Mr Dobbs’s advice, I went to the New Stanley Hotel. It was dirty and inefficient and full of white tykes. For almost the first time in my travels I was “annoyed”, in the legal sense, by men on the stairs and in sitting-rooms. Rowdy groups were always drinking and hanging about the entrance-hall. Indeed, my expectation that all the people of Kenya, if politically wrong-headed, were socially impeccable, got a rude shock. As far as I could see Nairobi was largely peopled with young men wearing corduroy plus-fours or shorts, lurid green, orange, blue and purple shirts, and Stetson hats. Some had revolvers in their belts. They imparted a certain reckless Wild West atmosphere to the town but some of them, to judge by their looks, would have to be very careful if they were not to become “poor whites” in the almost technical South African sense.
Nairob
i itself is a most disappointing town. I had expected something rather smart and well-built. It is one of the shabbiest and shoddiest towns I have seen in my travels, which is saying a great deal. There are hardly any pavements and the roadway itself is most primitive. You either stumble through mud or are blinded by gritty dust. The only decent public building is the railway office. (Government House is outside the town). Most government offices are tumbledown tin shacks: the Supreme Court is like an abandoned warehouse.
East African Journey Margery Perham.
1930
The Nairobi my wife and I first looked upon had not given any thought to style or permanence, though the ambitions of those for whom it served as capital were already high-ranging. Far from matching such ambitions, its prevailing characteristics were shoddiness, paltriness in building, and for ways of movement either adhesive mud or choking dust. For a British Colony with a decisive rôle to play in Africa this Buffalo Bill frontier-post setting seemed to me bad; instead of teaching the young to value themselves and the heritage they were born to improve and enrich, it encouraged hand-to-mouth, poor-white sloppiness and sloth which spelt degradation for the unfolding promise of youth. I made up my mind within a week of my arrival to revolutionize all this. There was a loan fund available, a minor part of which had been allocated to a new Government House in Nairobi, before we came out. A splendid Government House in a sordid capital and unschooled Colony would not, however, do what seemed imperative for Kenya or Kenya’s youth. So I got leave to build schools, law courts, hospitals and offices, as fast as local facilities would permit. But not on Public Works Department lines; Kenya deserved and needed beauty and dignity in what man raised upon her soil equal to her own spacious loveliness. Lord Delamere was always sympathetic in this, and in this direction I also had the strong support of my Secretary of State.
As Governor accordingly I spent more on building than any Governor before or after me, and I regret only that my successors did not follow my example while building was cheap as we reckon costs to-day….
So far as I know, Kenya soon lost the feeling that I had built too much. There is now a second large Boys’ School in Nairobi…. There is the MacMillan Library, the new building for Legislative Council, the Highlands Cathedral approaching completion, the Aga Khan’s Mosque, large bank buildings, blocks of flats, imposing hotels, arcades and shops, wide, well-kept streets, and a statue of Lord Delamere. Nairobi has now received the charter of a City.
Kenya’s Opportunity Lord Altrincham.
1931
We arrived in Nairobi a little before lunch time. I took a taxi out to Muthaiga Club. There was no room for me there, but the secretary had been told of my coming and I found I was already a temporary member. In the bar were several people I had met in the Explorateur Grandidier, and some I knew in London. They were drinking pink gin in impressive quantities. Someone said, “You mustn’t think Kenya is always like this.” I found myself involved in a luncheon party. We went on together to the Races. Someone gave me a cardboard disc to wear in my button-hole; someone else, called Raymond, introduced me to a bookie and told me what horses to back. None of them won. When I offered the bookie some money he said in rather a sinister way, “Any friend of Mr de Trafford’s is a friend of mine. We’ll settle up at the end of the meeting.”
Someone took me to a marquee where we drank champagne. When I wanted to pay for my round the barman gave me a little piece of paper to sign and a cigar.
We went back to Muthaiga and drank champagne out of a silver cup which someone had just won.
Someone said, “You mustn’t think Kenya is always like this.”
There was a young man in a sombrero hat, trimmed with snake skin. He stopped playing dice, at which he had just dropped twenty-five pounds, and asked me to come to a dinner party at Torrs. Raymond and I went back there to change.
On the way up we stopped in the bar to have a cocktail. A man in an orange shirt asked if we either of us wanted a fight. We both said we did. He said, “Have a drink instead.”
That evening it was a very large dinner party, taking up all one side of the ballroom at Torrs. The young lady next to me said, “You mustn’t think that Kenya is always like this.”
After some time we went on to Muthaiga.
There was a lovely American called Kiki, whom I had met before. She had just got up. She said, “You’ll like Kenya. It’s always like this.”
Next morning I woke up in a very comfortable bedroom; the native boy who brought my orange juice said I was at Torrs….
Another Nairobi scene; an evening picnic in the game reserve from Government House. We consist of the Acting-Governor and his wife; the ADCs, an agricultural expert from England, and the race-week house-party; the latter includes a whiskered cattle rancher, very tall and swarthy, in the clothes of a Mexican bandit; oddly enough he is called “Boy”; his wife is slight and smart, with enormous eyes and an adventurous past; she once rode alone from Addis Ababa to Berbera; she too has a queer name – Genessie.
We drive to a place called Lone Tree, disturbing herds of zebra and wildebeeste; their eyes flash bright green, dazzled by our spotlight. We make a detour and see some hyenas – but not as close as the one at Harar – and little jumping creatures called diks-diks. Meanwhile, the servants have lit a great bonfire and put motor cushions round it. We sit down and eat supper, the ADCs doing all the polite drudgery that makes most picnics hideous; presently most of the party fall asleep….
Already, in the few days I had spent at Nairobi, I found myself falling in love with Kenya. There is a quality about it which I have found nowhere else but in Ireland, of warm loveliness and breadth and generosity. It was not a matter of mere liking, as one likes any place where people are amusing and friendly and the climate is agreeable, but a feeling of personal tenderness. I think almost everyone in the highlands of Kenya has very much this feeling, more or less articulately. One hears them grumbling about trade conditions, about the local government and the home government, but one very rarely hears them abuse the country itself as one hears Englishmen abroad in any other part of the world…. People were insistent that I should not regard Race Week as typical of the life of the country, because “the Happy Valley” has come in for too much notoriety in the past. No one reading a book about smart people in London or Paris takes them as representing the general life of the country; but it is exactly this inference which is drawn when a book is written about smart people in Kenya. Even in the set I met at Muthaiga, only a small number are quite so jolly all the year round. “Boy,” for instance, owns the largest cattle farm in the country and, incredible as it sounds, knows almost every beast individually by sight. Of the settler community in general, the great majority are far too busy on their farms to come to Nairobi, except on an occasional predatory expedition to the bank or the Board of Agriculture.
Remote People Evelyn Waugh.
1963
Nairobi used to be one of the nastiest capitals in the world: dirty, dusty, squalid and at the same time pretentious, a frontier town whose sprinkling of flashily over-dressed safari visitors, minor film stars and local glamour-types, imitating celluloid white hunters, gave it an air of bogus Hollywood or failed St Tropez. Now it has become one of the most attractive and certainly the most flowery of capitals. Those banks of cherry-red and flaming orange bougainvillaeas, of ramping golden shower and other flowering shrubs and trees, which you pass through as you drive along the Princess Elizabeth Way (now Uhurn Avenue) must present one of the finest approaches to any city in the world, or at any rate on this continent.
Nairobi teems with bluebell-flowering jacarandas; hibiscuses and beds of succulents lurk in every spare corner. Most of the former stuffy little wooden rabbit-hutch-like buildings with rusty corrugated iron roofs have been replaced by glittering modern concrete towers of dubious merit but a good deal of dash, inventiveness and often colour, which goes well in this bright and brittle montane atmosphere.
The streets are lined with su
n-reflecting, eye-assaulting parked cars and, at rush-hours, choked with opulent-looking traffic; every empty lot is a car-park crammed with vehicles and the scene of savage encounters around eight in the morning, when offices open, among converging commuters in search of parking space. In places, segments of empty lot have been fenced off, for some reason; and here, overshadowed by off-white, or light grey, or speckled concrete towers, little plots of maize have sprung up, tended by bare-footed Kikuyu women in their shapeless cotton dresses, bent industriously over their hoes among the modern buildings.
There’s still, of course, plenty of squalor. Just off-centre, those grubby narrow streets lined with Asian shops smelling of spices, second-hand clothing and sweating humanity, and the narrow alleys, designed as sanitary lanes for night-soil collecting and smelling of urine, haven’t changed; and, on the perimeter, there’s still a vast, ever-growing, subsistence-level African population packed into accommodation that remains, for the most part, depressingly sordid – ugly little bare boxes dumped down on a hot, flat, treeless kind of wasteland, spattered with sentry-box latrines.
The City Council keeps re-housing people as fast as its rate-payers can manage, and all sorts of benefactors are weighing in with aid; but Nairobi is a magnet drawing Africans from the Ethiopian border to the shores of Lake Nyasa, from Zanzibar to the Mountains of the Moon, and the Council keeps pounding along behind the population statistics like a Kafka-type figure trying to catch a train that’s perpetually just pulling out of the station….
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 32