Now that was changing. People were beginning to realise that you could get as much enjoyment, if not more, from safari life and the pursuit of wild animals by shooting them with a camera instead of with a gun. My little pocket brownie had done excellent work on horses, dogs and people, but herds of zebra or kongoni had appeared merely as blurred dots. Now I had brought with me a second-hand Leica, compact and precise, and this was to be my constant companion.
I would like to write that I never slew an animal after my return, but this would not be true. One of eastern Africa’s devastating droughts was going on. Crops were wilting, and the wild creatures, made bold by dwindling supplies of food and water, were invading farmlands in a desperate attempt to survive. A number of reedbuck suddenly appeared in my parents’ field of maize and started to demolish it. They came at night, and shouts and sticks and flashlights had failed to drive them away. Neither of my parents had wielded a rifle for years, so I volunteered to do so. I shot three of the reedbuck without difficulty – hunger had blunted their wariness – and did not enjoy it; but it was a case of ‘us or them’ and not a case of sport. There is the inescapable dilemma, the root cause of the animals’ doom everywhere – us or them. In the end, a not so very distant end, ‘us’ must win.
But in the meanwhile the animals on the left-hand side of the railway line were safe in their reserve. On the right-hand side they were unprotected and therefore scarcer, because the land had been fenced into European-owned ranches and, beyond, lay the hills of Ukambani which were closely cultivated by the Kamba tribe; and the Kamba, unlike the Maasai, were hunters and meat-eaters.
The arrival of the Mombasa train was still an event in Nairobi, and most of the population, black, white and brown, seemed to have gathered on the platform to greet relatives and friends. Glady Delamere had come to meet me. This was naturally an anxious moment, but Glady was good at putting people of all sorts at their ease. She had a striking appearance – chalk-white skin, jet-black wiry hair, dark-brown eyes – and gave out a sense of vitality, and of tenseness like a coiled spring. A throaty chuckle and a sense of gaiety softened what would otherwise have been a rather formidable presence. She was welcoming, unpompous and possessed a great store of energy which, at this time, had insufficient outlet; later, when she was elected Mayor of Nairobi, it found that outlet and she proved to be a hard-working and efficient Mayor. Tania Blixen wrote of her that she was like ‘a painted wooden doll’.6 She struck me as the reverse of doll-like, being so animated and unpredictable. People reacted positively to Glady; either they liked her or they did not. ‘I remember her’, her youngest daughter was to write years later, ‘as somebody who lit up a room as she walked in, smelling exotically of Chanel No 5, usually with a gardenia pinned to her dress and often smoking a Turkish cigarette’.7 Naturally I stood in awe of her – she was thirty-five, twice married, sophisticated and self-assured – but she did her best to dispel this feeling, and swept me off to a hairdresser to have the journey’s dust removed, and then to Torr’s hotel.
Torr’s was Nairobi’s grandest building, new since I was last there; a red-brick, four-storeyed edifice on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Hardinge Street (now Kenyatta and Kimathi) and was said, I am not sure by whom, to resemble Stockholm’s Town Hall. It had become the rendezvous for Nairobi’s café society and for safari parties and others who gathered there for eleven o’clock coffee, pre-lunch drinks and, in the evening, epicurean meals produced by a Swiss chef, and dancing to a fashionable band.
At Torr’s I was introduced to Ewart Grogan, its creator and proprietor, who was discoursing to a circle of admirers, mostly female, at his favourite table in a sort of palm court. He was a handsome Irishman, then in his sixtieth year, tall and upright with remarkable blue and penetrating eyes, dark arched eyebrows, greying hair and an inexhaustible flow of talk. Words poured from his lips like wine at some Bacchic orgy, intoxicating at the time but, when the orgy was over, you wondered what he had actually said. The usual starting point was some idiotic blunder on the part of the government or the crass ineptitude of bureaucracy in general. He was an expert, in his own way, on economics and finance and also, one gathered, on seduction, taking little or no trouble to conceal his infidelities (in more than one instance blessed with issue) from a long-suffering wife whom everyone liked and respected.
Grogs, as he was generally known, had wit, intelligence and eloquence as well as a measure of flamboyance, but there was something about him I personally found unattractive, perhaps a certain cruelty in his humour and outlook, a streak (as it were) of the battering-ram. Without question he was courageous; several of his exploits had become legendary, notably his famous walk from the Cape to Cairo to win the hand of his bride by proving to her father that, although without financial assets, he had resources of another kind.8 This was in 1899, when central Africa was no place to approach with a butterfly-net. Actually the walk was not from the Cape to Cairo, although that was the title he gave his book, but from the northern tip of Lake Nyassa (now Malawi) to Sobat on the upper Nile, but it was gruelling enough, taking him among ferocious cannibals and almost ruining his health.
He had got his girl and, in 1903, arrived in the East Africa Protectorate,9 just two years after the Uganda Railway had reached its terminus on Lake Victoria. In East Africa he was to make his somewhat chequered career. There was nothing he liked better than to find a vulnerable spot in the government’s hide and, like a hornet, puncture it with his sting. A flaw he discovered in the mining laws prompted him to peg claims all round Nairobi and threaten to dig up Government Road, a threat only averted by the hasty summoning of the Legislative Council which passed an amendment within twenty-four hours. Ewart Grogan was a charmer, a cynic, a swashbuckler, a buccaneer born out of time; generous with money, bold in his commercial ventures; when it came to fortune-seeking his scruples weighed, I should guess, about as much as a grain of sand. He had known Delamere well for thirty years and they had shared a number of tempestuous political experiences. He promised to tell me all he knew – or at any rate some of it – about D (as he was always called) and the pioneering days, and in due course he did, but I learnt more about his own exploits and opinions than about D’s achievements.
Glady took me to her home at Loresho, a coffee farm about six miles outside Nairobi where she lived with her three children by her previous marriage to Sir Charles Markham.
But pleasant as Loresho was, I could pause there only for a night. Two hundred pounds being insufficient to cover expenses, I had been fortunate enough to secure a commission from The Times to write two articles about the goldfields that had recently been discovered in Kenya and Tanganyika, and in particular about those centred on Kakamega, not far from Lake Victoria. A controversy had sprung up, as controversies always seemed to do in Kenya, about the future of this goldfield. So before starting on the biography I had arranged to go to Kakamega to gather first-hand impressions of what was going on.
CHAPTER 2
Nuggets and Covered Wagons
The gold rush of 1931/33 in western Kenya and northern Tanganyika is a forgotten episode in East African history, but at the time it was a matter of the utmost excitement and promise. In the midst of all the gloom engendered by the slump plus drought and locusts, a gleam of light had suddenly appeared. The first discoveries were on an insignificant scale, but they gathered momentum and soon there was talk of another Rand. Farmers raised their last few shillings and departed for the goldfields with a car-load of shovels and kerais – shallow tin basins used for carrying earth etc – basic camping equipment, one or two African assistants and a whole lot of hope. By the time of my arrival at Kakamega, about forty miles from Lake Victoria, upwards of a thousand European would-be miners were encamped there eagerly panning riverbeds and sinking shafts. Most of the gold was alluvial and in the form of tiny particles, but a nugget weighing four to five ounces had been found and everyone was hoping for a major strike.
The district headquarters, or boma, stood in a g
rove of blue-gum trees which everywhere marked the passage of British district administration, much as mango trees marked the passage of the Arabs. A Union Jack flew outside the office of the District Commissioner, a grey-haired, elderly man called Colonel Anderson, with one leg stiffened by a war wound. He was coping in a most unruffled manner with the unexpected situations that had sprung at him, situations for which no previous experience can have prepared him. The population of his district, I noted, was 385,680, divided into seventeen sub-tribes of a major tribal group called the Abaluyhia who occupied all this region east of the Lake and the Uganda border, known as North Kavirondo.
Like so many things in Kenya, the gold rush had got entangled in politics. This goldfield lay not in a wilderness like the Klondyke, or on the highveld like the Witwatersrand, but in a thickly populated native reserve. The question of land ownership has always been a complex, persistent and explosive political issue, and in 1930, only one year before gold was found, in an effort to stabilise the situation, a Native Lands Trust Ordinance had passed into law. This had defined the various reserves, one for each tribe or sub-tribe, which were to be ‘set aside for the benefit of the native tribes of the Colony forever’. You could not be more definite than that. Each tribe was to have its own territory and no one else, whether an African of a different tribe or a European or an Asian, was to have any legal rights therein. So much for the use of the word ‘forever’ in any human affair, as silly as ‘lasting peace’; thirty years on and all this legislation would be swept away; and lasting peace must await the millennium.
Now the question of mining leases had arisen. To sink a mine and to provide sites for machinery and accommodation for miners must mean making use of African land, even if only temporarily. Mining leases must therefore be negotiated. It must then appear to those individuals who, in one way or another, had rights over land, that a mining lease gave those rights away. Three years is indeed a cynical interpretation of ‘forever’.
But then – to bottle up, also forever, an important goldfield, if such it should prove to be, in the depths of a depression when the country, a poor one at the best of times, was virtually broke, hardly seemed sensible. It could be argued that a goldfield, by providing revenue that could be spent on education, health, communications, all the things so urgently in need of money, would indeed ‘benefit the native tribes of the Colony’ as the ordinance had laid down. So it was a dilemma. Much discussion was taking place in Parliament at Westminster, and in the press both in Britain and in Kenya, but no one knew just how to resolve it. Meanwhile, leases for one year only were being granted under strict terms to the mining companies who were beginning to set up shop, and no prospector could come in without a permit.
The result was probably the most gentlemanly gold-rush ever known. Not here swaggering figures in ten-gallon hats and a brace of revolvers flinging down bags of gold-dust on the counters of saloons; not here the drunken quarrels and the bold sharpshooters we had all been accustomed to by the movies. The District Commissioner had powers to keep out, even to throw out, any (in his opinion) undesirable character, and a single white policeman with a handful of African askaris had no difficulty in keeping the peace. Most of the prospectors had settled down, often with their wives, either in tents or in simple dwellings called bandas which could be built at a cost of about fifteen shillings from poles and grass cut from the bush. In the evenings the music of gramophone records and bids at the bridge table were more likely to emanate from tents and bandas than drunken altercating and poker calls.
The local tribesmen sold the gold-seekers milk, eggs (tiny ones from tiny hens) at fifty to the shilling, and plenty of fresh vegetables for a few cents. Kisumu, the railway’s original terminus, was only forty miles distant. Kakamega itself was green and pleasant, the gardens full of colour, and drought almost unknown, for it rained nearly every afternoon.
What I remember principally were the fireflies. At night, the ridges and valleys round about sparkled with millions of these insects, flashing their signals till the countless stars overhead were matched, it seemed, by another canopy of stars below, as if they had fallen to earth and yet stayed in the sky. Part of a mating ritual, I was told, but this did not seem to explain it. Thousands, tens of thousands of species of insect find their mates without releasing into the darkness, each one, a pinpoint of brilliance.
I stayed in comfort at a mining camp belonging to a syndicate headed by a rich American called de Ganahl, which had a concession on a small river called the Wachecehe near the place where the original find had been made, and I met the original finder. He, also, was an American, by name L. A. Johnson, who had settled in Kenya, if settle is the word, in 1910, after a spell on the Klondyke and adventures in the Spanish-American war. In Kenya he had tried flax and gone bust when the flax boom collapsed in 1921; then he had switched to maize and gone bust again when maize prices collapsed in 1930. That had sent him off prospecting in northern Tanganyika, where he had trudged on foot for thousands of miles and found nothing.
Late in 1930 he formed a syndicate in Eldoret, with four shares of £25 each, to finance a final try. The expedition, consisting of himself, his wife Fanny, two other Europeans and five Africans, set forth from Eldoret in two very ancient Fords and what was left of the £100 after buying petrol and one sack of flour, one of dried beans, one of potatoes and several sacks of posho (maize meal). Once again, they had no luck. When the money ran out they headed for home, making their final camp in the Kakamega district near the Yala river. Next day they panned a tributary of the Yala and found gold. Back in Eldoret they quickly registered another syndicate, borrowed money for petrol and returned to peg out claims along the Yala river. That was the goldfield’s beginning. By now the first stage was almost over, and the next stage had arrived when companies with capital were moving in with machinery and mining engineers to sink shafts and exploit the reefs from which the alluvial gold had come.
L. A. Johnson I remember as a tall, bony man with a jutting chin and an ill-fitting set of teeth, who looked every inch the tough prospector, and was as uncommunicative as a mule. ‘A grunt or two’, wrote one of his neighbours, ‘a great hoik and hefty spit and the word “Jesus” was L. A.’s usual comment on most subjects.’1 When the difficulties of receiving news of world events in the outback – this was before the days of wireless – were under discussion, someone asked ‘What do you do when the weekly East African Standard doesn’t arrive?’ Mr Johnson’s reply was simply ‘use grass’. He, at least, did well out of the goldfields, and when he went to the United States for a visit, Fanny wore a necklace of nuggets.
After a night in de Ganahl’s camp, I was introduced, next morning, to the technique of panning, to be rewarded by two very small nuggets, little more than grains, but still, gold. So I could capture a little of the excitement: next time they might be nuggets weighing half a pound. (Even then, not a great fortune; the price was £4 an ounce.) Then I was lowered down the shaft the engineers were in process of sinking to a depth of over a hundred feet. The reef was yielding gold in payable quantities and everyone was optimistic, the new Johannesburg was on its way. But that reef petered out. Others were found, more machinery imported and, in 1938, gold was Kenya’s second largest export, next to coffee. After that, output declined, syndicates folded and only a little residual mining went on, mostly over the border in Tanganyika. I am sorry to say that I persuaded Gervas to buy £50 worth of shares in a syndicate that couldn’t fail called Paka Neusi, which means black cat. (Moonshine Mining Co. was another of the syndicates.) Alas, our cat wasn’t lucky and we never had a dividend, not even a cent.
Perhaps, in the long run, the failure of the goldfield was fortunate for Kenya. Gold would have enriched the country, and it could have done with some enrichment. But the growth at Kakamega of a new Johannesburg would have entangled the country in endless disputes about African rights, land tenure and leases, and destroyed the peace of this generous and smiling countryside. There are no fireflies in Johanne
sburg.
I came back from Kakamega by way of Eldoret, then a little farmers’ township with a single dusty main street flanked by squat tin-roofed shops and Indian dukas (small shops), and by battered looking box-body cars angle-parked under rows of blue-gum trees. It was the embryonic capital of the Uasin Gishu plateau. Here you heard more Dutch spoken than English – we called it Dutch but it was really Afrikaans.
On this plateau, Afrikaner farmers outnumbered the British, and they had been the pioneers. I had been fascinated by the plateau’s story every since I first heard Cecil Hoey, one of the early settlers who reached East Africa about the same time as Delamere, give his account of how, when he was sitting one day on top of a rock called Sergoit watching three lions at play, he saw on the horizon a long white streak which at first he thought was smoke. Then it became too definite a shape for smoke and it looked more like a river, though he knew this could not be. Gradually it grew closer, and he was able to make out through his binoculars a long line of ox-drawn wagons, their covered tops showing as a dusty white. This was the trek of the Boers to the Uasin Gishu in 1908.
They had not trekked up Africa all the way from the Transvaal – tsetse fly prevented that. They had loaded their wagons, horses, tools, provisions, seeds and ploughs and all their other possessions on to a chartered ship in Delagoa Bay and unloaded them at Mombasa. The railway had laid on five special trains which took them to Nakuru where they camped, and began their preparations for the trek ahead.
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