Some years later I heard another version of the story from an elderly Dutchman who had taken part in the trek. He had been a boy of fifteen or so. By then in his seventies, he was still alert and active, lean and tough as leather, his brown face wrinkled, his hands calloused from a lifetime of handling reins, whips, plough-handles, rifles. His memory was prodigious; every day, every camp, every event had remained stamped as clear as type on his mind.2
The leader of the trek, he said, was Jansen van Rensburg, and forty-seven families took part, plus three single men and two Predikants. Some kind of bargain, he believed, had been struck between van Rensburg and the Governor of the day, Sir James Hayes-Sadler: if van Rensburg would bring up not less than thirty families with their wagons and equipment, they would be leased the land on easy terms.
At Nakuru, this narrator said, the Boers bought native oxen and set to work to train them, while a scouting party went forward on horseback to find a route. To reach the Uasin Gishu plateau they had first to climb a heavily forested escarpment which rose steeply from the valley. There was no road, not even native paths since there were no Africans living on the plateau then. Cecil Hoey used to take safari parties there and testified that the plateau was empty of all African settlements until you reached the Nandi hills far beyond the plain. People called Sirikwa had dwelt here once and had left traces of circular stone dwellings, but they themselves had disappeared. Some local historians supposed that they had been wiped out by the Maasai, others that an epidemic had destroyed them. In places, Hoey had come upon collections of whitened bones which may have marked the site of battles long ago.
The Boers’ trek began from Nakuru on 4 August 1908, this old man said. The trekkers halted at the foot of the escarpment while the men hacked a path through the first part of the forest and threw rough bridges over its many streams.
Then they started on the long climb. It must have been a wet year, for soon the wagons were bogged down axle-deep in mud. Two, three, even four spans of oxen (sixteen to a span) were hitched together to extricate the wagons, which sank in again as deeply as before. Up and up they heaved and hauled, up the towering escarpment. I cannot imagine how they got those wagons up; sheer willpower must have powered them besides the half-trained little beasts. It was bitterly cold. Sometimes they made no more than a mile or two in a day.
At last, they drew clear of the forest to the windswept crest of the escarpment and outspanned at over 6,000 feet above sea level, at a camp called Brugspruit, where they thanked God for their deliverance, and a two-year-old girl died. The great plain lay before them with its waving grasses, green now after rain, its trees and rivers and the vast herds of game which gladdened their hearts. This was as the Transvaal once had been and was no longer. Only one man did not rejoice. That was Cecil Hoey, sitting on his rock observing their advance. ‘I went back to camp that night’, he later recorded, ‘a very sad man, realising that the countless herds of game must now give way to make room for western civilisation.’
The emissaries of western civilisation trekked on until they reached the Sosiani river, beside which Eldoret now stands, where they parted company, each family fanning out to find its own bit of promised land. An Afrikaner who had preceded them, one of three brothers called van Breda, had roughly surveyed it into blocks, and each man took up a leasehold of between 800 and 5,000 acres. Each family built a shack from the trees, grass and earth of its new domain, put up fences, inspanned oxen to simple ploughs and turned the first furrows. They sowed wheat, maize and vegetables. It was the wrong time of year, and all those first crops died. They persisted, and the revels of those lions under Sergoit rock were ended. Wheat is more useful to mankind than lions.
When I saw it twenty-five years later, the plateau had been transformed into a prosperous region of wheat and maize fields, fenced pastures carrying grade cattle (native Zebus crossed with pedigree European stock), flocks of sheep and plantations of black wattle trees, with roofs of farmsteads winking at you through trees that had grown up around them. Roads, telegraph wires, reservoirs stocked with fish and used by sailing clubs, all these had come into being in a remarkably short time and despite such setbacks as the First World War, the slump that followed it and then drought and locusts. The plateau and the Trans Nzoia beyond had become Kenya’s major exporting area of wheat, maize, wool and wattle bark and one of the granaries of eastern Africa. Tractors crawled like beetles over the rolling plains, and the little scarred, heroic oxen, like the wild animals, had had their day. This was an impressive achievement in a land where, in the words of a historian of the district, ‘patient, tough women used to visit Eldoret once a month or took a shopping trip to Nairobi once in a decade, and spent six weeks on the journey.’
All that had changed in 1924 when the railway reached Eldoret, the first train garlanded with wheatsheafs and bearing the Governor of the day, Sir Robert Coryndon. Eldoret had started with a mud-and-wattle hut to house a post office clerk; then came a District Commissioner whose stone rondavel, plus a humbler one for his clerk, together with an office and a store, cost £167 to build. Next came a policeman, then an Indian called Noor Mohamed opened a store, and an ox-wagon brought the Standard Bank of South Africa in the shape of a safe, a brass plate and a manager who became a famous figure round about, J. C. Shaw. The safe rolled off the wagon when it was being unloaded and, as it was too heavy to move, the bank was built round it. Mr Shaw used to take his morning bath in a tub behind its counter, and then stroll in his dressing-gown to Eddy’s bar, which had opened up across the way, for a quick one in preparation for the day’s business. This consisted mainly of dispensing overdrafts whose limit was one hundred rupees.3 Mrs Eddy provided the town’s water supply by means of an ox-cart service from the Sosiani river and by selling it by the debbi – an empty four-gallon petrol tin.
Eldoret was then called Sixty-four, the number of the farm which became its birthplace. The name was changed in 1911 at a meeting between the farmers and the Governor, Sir Percy Girouard. By then a second Boer trek had taken place, this time on a smaller scale, and British farmers had taken up land. Among them was Cecil Hoey. To cross the Nzoia river he felled a tree which became known as Hoey’s Bridge, and so it has remained, though by now a different bridge. This opened the way to the settlement of the Trans Nzoia district, north-west of the plateau. So the rough out-riders of western civilisation, so-called, spread out, and put to use land that had lain for long without a master; and the game fell to their rifles.
All this was described to me by Cecil Hoey, who had seen it all and himself been a pace-maker. What is so interesting about Kenya’s history is that events belonging by rights to a bygone century, to the era of covered wagons and the Oregon Trail, should have taken place, albeit on a relatively tiny scale, within the lifetime of people still alive. Cecil Hoey had come to East Africa at the turn of the century. He was a burly man, rather slow of speech, with a quiet humour and strong fixed opinions. Times were to change more quickly than his power to adjust to such changes. Some years later, when a new generation of educated Africans had emerged, he and his wife invited me to stay on his farm on the plateau. Then I received a message cancelling the invitation. I had offended against a code he was not prepared to renounce; I had lunched with an African at a Nairobi hotel. To do this was still liable to offend some, though not all, of the older generation of white people. The African in question was Tom Mboya, one of the first of the new breed, a highly intelligent young man who had been an undergraduate at Ruskin College, Oxford; he wrote a book which contained a telling incident. He had been employed as a laboratory assistant by the Veterinary department and was alone in the lab when a European woman walked in, looked around and enquired: ‘Is anyone here?’ He replied: ‘I am, madam.’4
So, regretfully, I never saw Cecil Hoey again to hear more of his recollections – he was a good raconteur. He ended his days on the Coast and, after a lifetime spent in up-country Africa, left instructions in his will that he was to be buried at sea
.
There is a postscript to the story of the Boer treks of 1908 and 1911 to the plateau. It is in the shape of an item in the Johannesburg Argus dated 23 February 1961, less than three years before Kenya’s independence.
Twenty-nine weary trekkers – the vanguard of what they promise will become a mass exodus of Afrikaner families of farmers from Kenya – crossed the Beit Bridge after dark yesterday and spent their first night in their homeland in a Messina rest camp … The adult trekkers agreed that they left Kenya because there was going to be an ‘explosion’ at independence. Mr Piet Olivier, a prosperous farmer in the Eldoret district, said: ‘It will be a much worse place than the Congo when independence comes. The only reason why we came now, at the risk of being called cowards, is that we would probably have to leave half our families behind – dead – after independence …’ Mrs Martha Steen-kamp had to sell all their furniture in her 14-room farmhouse for Rand 60 – and the Kenya Government took half in tax.
CHAPTER 3
Nellie’s Friends
The track leading uphill from Njoro township to my parents’ farm was so familiar that the years seemed to drop away and nothing to have changed, except that perhaps the ant-bear holes in the wheel-tracks were in different places, and the stringy grass in the middle rather thicker. Small totos in their skimpy cloaks feverishly shooing herds of bleating goats out of the way; women in goatskin cloaks and aprons bowed under their loads – one never saw a loadless woman; an ox-cart rumbling down and drawing into the bush with much shouting and cracking of whips; all this was the same. And there were the two umbrella thorn trees bent over the track towards each other as if guardians of the domain, framing between them the small square wooden bungalow, its tin roof rusted to a nameless sort of colour and smothered by a purple-flowering solanum. (Whether the house held up the creepers or the creepers held up the house, as Nellie had remarked, was a moot point.)
Before the car bumped to a halt a surge of dachshunds flowed out to meet me, offering a sea of waving tails and a cacophony of barks. Then came Karanja in his red fez, scarcely changed at all, and then Mbugwa, who had changed a lot, having grown from a kitchen toto into a well-built young man, both of them grinning from ear to ear and pumping my arm up and down. Dogs, pandemonium, fervent greetings, and then Jos and Nellie walking more sedately after them. Neither was a demonstrative person. The evening sun had fallen behind the dark crest of the Mau hills but the valley far below was still flooded with honey-tinted light barred by long purple shadows, and the blue eye of Lake Nakuru winked up at us from the foot of the long, yellow slope of Menengai. Doves were calling with notes like a mellow wine dropping from a bottle; green pigeons flew over on their way to roost, weaver-birds chattered in a thorn-tree just behind the house, goat-bells tinkled in the distance as flocks were driven in for the night.
And yet there were changes. Jos and Nellie had aged, of course, but more than I had expected. Life had been hard for them in the intervening years. The farm, Gikammeh – called after the hyraxes that screeched their heads off every night from the trees – lay on the margin of this aboriginal forest which was full of tall, majestic cedars with fluted bark, festooned with grey beards of lichen, and wild olives with their twisted trunks and random branches. Below lay the Rift Valley, bounded on the distant side by the great ranges of the Aberdare mountains. The Njoro river separated our land from the forest. When my parents had come here there had been nothing in the way of civilisation, no human habitations, paths or signs of man, just thick bush, tongues of forest and a number of open glades where creatures of the forest came to graze; buffalo, bushbuck, waterbuck, tiny little suni and others. The only human thumb-print was a flimsy bungalow put there to fulfil the Government’s development clauses in the lease. When Nellie first moved in, it had been full of bags of maize belonging to a trader who had used it as a store.
To turn this stretch of Africa into a farm had been hard work, made harder by all the bush and trees. Everything had to be cleared. Just cutting down the trees, or burning them, was not enough; their stumps had to be drawn before a plough could get to work. For this, a labour force was needed. As no Africans were living round about, some had to be recruited from afar. They came, but everything was strange to them, even picks and saws; this was a far country full of dangers, also cold and comfortless, and most of them absconded. There were no tractors then – or rather, Jos and Nellie could not afford one, and the terrain was too rough; the little oxen had to haul and heave at tree-stumps, as deeply embedded as the most obstinate of tooth-stumps in a human jaw.
Gradually, painfully and expensively, trees and their roots were cleared, the bush uprooted and then the small, crude ploughs of the day, some only single-furrowed, were deployed. Maize was sown, fences put up, a cart-track made to the river for water-hauling, storage sheds knocked up, and the round thatched huts of the Kikuyu appeared. Nellie has related how, when she arrived at Njoro in 1923 to start the enterprise (with three dachshunds, two Siamese cats and some basic provisions) she found waiting at the station half a dozen Kikuyu employees who had gone on ahead from my parents’ coffee farm at Thika, secretly, ready to accompany her to the new land. She was touched at this act of loyalty and affection, but knew that loyalty and affection were not the primary reasons. Word had got round that there was fresh land, virgin land, with plenty of firewood going free, as well as grazing for cattle and goats. A passionate desire for land was, as it remains, in the very marrow of Kikuyu bones. When it came to giving out new shambas, they wanted to be in on the ground floor.
Now clusters of round thatched huts, each cluster surrounded by a palisade of cedar planks, had arisen. When one Kikuyu family comes, others follow. The half-dozen individuals she had found waiting at the station had mushroomed into a sizeable population, each family with its goats and cattle – and its children, many children. Already Nellie had started a farm school.
The small amount of capital Jos and Nellie had to get the farm established was soon exhausted, because the costs of clearing had been higher than they had expected. The bank was negatively firm. Some other source of cash had to be found. There was much talk at this time (about 1927) of a railway to open up Tanganyika’s southern highlands, which lay about two hundred miles south of the line from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma. They were sparsely inhabited, well watered, presumably fertile, and only awaited, in the opinion of enthusiasts, enterprise and expertise to become a land of milk and honey, a ‘second Kenya’. Moreover, there were plans to build a railway to link this region with the central line, and surveyors were already at work. Tanganyika’s Government was issuing leases on favourable terms, and a minor land rush had started, with several of Kenya’s leading figures, including Delamere, involved.1
The opportunity seemed too good to miss. Jos and Nellie joined a little cavalcade of battered cars and one lorry which bumped for more than five hundred miles over rudimentary roads, the travellers camping by night beside their vehicles, to the promised land. Jos stayed down there in a half-built bungalow without doors, windows or furniture, living on the most basic kinds of food. He was rather old for this sort of existence, being fifty-three.
Nellie got a lift back in a lorry and returned to Njoro to build herself a mud-and-wattle hut on the plain below Gikammeh on what were called the pipeline farms. This plain was waterless, and part of it had formerly belonged to Delamere – he had called it Equator Ranch. All it needed to be profitably farmed was water. So he laid a pipeline from a river on the Mau escarpment; then he divided the ranch into five-hundred-acre sections, provided each section with a water tank and a patch of wattle trees for firewood, and let it off on very easy terms. This was to further his overriding aim, which was to settle as much of Kenya’s highlands as was not in native occupation with farmers of European stock.
The pipeline farms were being taken up; few of the newcomers had experience and equipment for breaking land; Nellie had both. She formed a syndicate with two friends, moved her ploughs and oxen down to the plain (sh
e called her dwelling Piggery Nook) and set to. Being treeless, this land was much easier to break than Gikammeh had been. For company she had the dachshunds and her embroidery – her hands were never idle. She was out supervising the ploughing and harrowing from sunrise to sunset. At one time she had ten teams, each of sixteen oxen, drawing three-furrow ploughs at work on these pipeline farms, and she even acquired two second-hand tractors and trained their African drivers. One of the drivers drove a tractor all the way down to Jos in Tanganyika to help out. Neither man nor tractor returned.
Jos had decided to plant Turkish tobacco, which fetched a higher price than the Virginian kind; with a two-hundred-mile journey by wagon before you even reached a railway, a high price for your produce was essential. But Turkish tobacco plants are not so hardy as the Virginian. His first crop started splendidly, and then was totally destroyed by frost. By this time the prospect of a railway had receded. Moreover Jos’s health had deteriorated. (He still had some pieces of shrapnel embedded in his chest, left over from the First World War.) He returned, sadly, to Njoro.
Then came the Depression. No need to labour the point about the catastrophic fall in prices. I know that Nellie sold a number of fat porkers for one shilling each. Neither she nor Jos was a complainer, and only when I returned to the farm did I realise just how hard times had been, and still were. The ponies had been sold, so Nellie walked about the farm, and Sunday morning rides into the forest whch had been so much enjoyed, and games of amateurish polo at the club, were no more. The old Ford had been converted to run on paraffin, which was cheaper than petrol; it spluttered and choked, and its journeys, which were strictly rationed, ended all too often in a call for oxen to come and tow it home for yet another cleaning of plugs and carburettor. When the telephone charges rose to £13 a year the telephone had been removed.
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