It was during our visit that the question came up of literature for a new and growing reading public of Africans. Mitchell had identified a serious gap in the educational system. Every year the schools were turning out more and more adolescents who could read, but only just; few had received a secondary education and their English was rudimentary. Apart from the Bible and primers issued by the various Missions, there was practically nothing in their own vernacular tongues, or in simple Swahili, for them to read. Mitchell foresaw that, if no action was taken, this gap would widen, and widen dangerously; all sorts of folk with axes to grind might step in, using cheap hand-printing presses, to spread their opinions, and often lies. ‘We don’t want a vacuum filled with hot air’ was his comment. A generation for whom new fields of knowledge were being opened deserved something better.
This conversation was to have repercussions for me nine years later. War intervened. In 1940 Mitchell was summoned to Nairobi to co-ordinate the East African war effort, then on to Ethiopia to set up a civil administration after the Italian defeat, then on to govern Fiji and serve on the staff of South-East Asia Command. In 1944 he was transferred back to Nairobi, and soon afterwards invited me to report on the situation in all four East African territories as to the provision of literature for Africans, and on what could and should be done to improve it. So, in October 1945, I set out on this daunting task.
There was already in existence a Literature Bureau set up by the Nigerian Government to print simple books and booklets in the Fulani tongue for the Muslims of the North. It was arranged for me to have a look at the set-up on my way, so I proceeded, in the uncertain conditions of air travel just after the war had ended, to Zaria, where the Bureau had its headquarters under Dr Rupert East. After a week there and a few days in Kano, I continued my journey to Khartoum in an ancient Anson of RAF Transport Command, and then more briskly in a Lockheed to Kisumu where we were dumped, as Nairobi airport was closed to civilian traffic. However, there was a train.
I spent the next two months talking to, or being talked to by, all sorts of people: school teachers and directors of education, missionaries and information officers, and many others, including George Turner, the new principal of Makerere University College as it had by then become, whom Mitchell had enticed from Marlborough College and who was to inspire the budding university with his forward-looking, humane and Christian spirit.
Sir Philip had returned from the wars an exhausted man, having had no leave for seven years. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I remember how, one evening at dinner, talk flowed from him as it often did – he could be a brilliant conversationalist – but scarcely made sense, like an engine racing away while not in gear. Shortly afterwards he went on three months’ leave and returned apparently restored, but I do not think that he was ever quite the same again. The cutting edge of his intellect had been blunted, and that was why (I believe) when tremors of the impending Mau Mau crisis began to shake the country, he insulated himself from their shock, brushing aside the warnings he received from his subordinates, and why he ended his career in 1952 under a cloud instead of in the bright sunshine that his former achievements deserved. He was a sincere Christian who did his best, I think with reasonable success, to live up to the Founder’s teachings, and a patriot of a kind now all but extinct, who wrote of King George V: ‘He was a living personality to me and my generation, an inspiration and an example … the one sure foundation of honour and justice, of security and of devotion.’ Mitchell added that he had cried like a child as he listened on the radio to the King’s funeral service in St Paul’s Cathedral.
At the end of 1945 I submitted a report suggesting the lines on which an East African Literature Bureau might be set up, and what its main objectives should be. Nothing happened for a while, except approval of the report in principle. The problem was to find someone to run the proposed Bureau, a difficult task calling for an unusual set of qualifications. It is seldom that a round peg can be found to fit exactly into a round hole, but in this case it was, in the shape of Charles Granston Richards. He had reached Nairobi in 1935 as a member of the Church Missionary Society to develop book distribution among Africans through the C.M.S. bookshop there. By 1947 this bookshop was known throughout East Africa for its service to an African reading public which was rapidly expanding. Charles Richards was already beginning to develop local publishing and had himself written several short books in Swahili. The Church Missionary Society agreed to release him by stages, and on 1 April 1948 he opened the Bureau with headquarters in Nairobi. It came under the East Africa High Commission, which had been set up in 1947 to co-ordinate the various services common to Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika – the nearest these three countries ever got to the federation that for over twenty years had beckoned them on like some phantasmagoria in the sky towards a unity that never came, in the process spilling into the sand untold billions of words uttered and printed by commissions, committees, enquiries, reports, proposals and conferences.
Charles Richards remained director of the Bureau for fifteen years and built up a most impressive enterprise, including a library service whose ‘book boxes’ were delivered to bush schools from the border with Sudan to that of Zambia and fed from up-to-date central libraries. He set out to train his staff in all aspects of book production and distribution, so that when he left in 1963 the whole Bureau, from his successor downwards, was staffed by Africans.
I had no more to do with the Bureau after writing my report, so cannot tell its story here, but three of its aims were, I think, especially important. One was the training programme I have already mentioned. Another was to stimulate the writing of fiction by indigenous authors. Before the coming of the missionaries in the nineteenth century, the only written East African language was Swahili; but, as with other pre-literate peoples, there was a strong oral tradition of folklore and stories, nearly all of which involved the supernatural. When the Bureau launched its magazine Tazama (meaning Look!) and invited readers to submit stories, the centre-pieces were often ogres. The staff of the magazine introduced more up-to-date heroes and heroines. Instead of ogres there were businessmen, head teachers and the like, and the ogresses became air hostesses whose adventures were more sophisticated than meeting nasty apparitions in the forest. Gradually, new African writers emerged. A prize was offered for the best original work of fiction, and it was through this contest that Ngugi wa Thiong’o, today a widely read author, became known outside East Africa.
The third aim was to get Africans writing and reading about their own histories, traditions and their natural world, drawing on their own environment for images and examples. Many of the books previously on offer had been translations from British or American texts; it made little sense to read about primroses or skylarks or the wives of Henry VIII if you had never seen a primrose, heard a skylark, or seen anything remarkable in a powerful king having six wives.
Finally, there was the question of what language to publish in. East Africa has over two hundred, most of them spoken by too few people to make their use in publishing a viable concern. In the end, the number of languages used was narrowed down to twenty-seven, including English and French.10
The Bureau flourished until the break-up of the East African Community (which succeeded the East Africa High Commission), in a welter of recrimination and ill-will, in 1977. Kenya and Tanzania then carried on with their own separate Literature Bureaus. Uganda’s branch had already sunk beneath the blood-stained waters of the regime of Idi Amin.
At Entebbe Gervas and I boarded an Imperial Airways aeroplane – the Horsa, I think – and continued our homeward journey. Bumpier and bumpier it got, hotter and stuffier, paper bags constantly in use especially when coming in to land, which we did at Malakal, Kosti and Khartoum, where the temperature at midnight was 110°F. Off next morning in the dark, down at Atbara for a repellent breakfast, on to Wadi Halfa where an uneatable luncheon smothered in flies awaited us in a tent which was even hotter than Khartoum. At Assuan
we spent the night in a horrible hotel, and proceeded at daybreak to Cairo.
Here we abandoned our Horsa to embark in a much more comfortable flying-boat. Our hours were still erratic. We were called in Alexandria at 3.30 a.m., had breakfast at 4 a.m., and were airborne in Sylvanus well before dawn. This was the best part of the flight, over the sea. Above Corfu we flew low over two parallel lines of grey, majestic warships of the Royal Navy’s entire Mediterranean fleet. Here was Britain’s seaborne might, and might it was, very reassuring; we had no inkling that soon it would be seen no more. We parted from Sylvanus at Brindisi to catch the night train to Milan, and so to Le Bourget and the last lap across the Channel. A strong head-wind reduced our speed to that of a fishing vessel just below; we raced it neck-and-neck until we reached the English coast; the fishing vessel just won.
We cannot really have enjoyed this six-and-a-half day trip, and yet all the memories that linger are good: crossing a silky Nile at dawn to see the Tombs of the Kings, the whole bowl of the sky aflame, unbearably dramatic above an infinite desert; cool drinks at evening in hot places with fellow-passengers and crew, consisting then of five young men, all cheerful and friendly; stretching cramped legs under the shady trees of Khartoum’s small zoo before nightfall; the good food and comfort of the wagon-lits. And it was still an adventure. We were to fly this route many times again and note its progress from discomfort, heat, airsickness, improvisation and the unexpected – we once spent nearly two days in the desert, sheltering under a wing of our stranded aeroplane, while waiting for a spare part – to a stream-lined, non-stop, eight-hour flight in air-conditioned comfort, meals on trays, stewards and service and no paper bags – and impersonal, uneventful dullness, with the gloomy prospect of an international airport at the end.
CHAPTER 7
Livestock Barons of the Rift Valley
Three men between them owned a large chunk of the Rift Valley, transformed its dusty veld into thriving ranches, and became legendary figures to a younger generation. These three were Lord Delamere, Galbraith Cole and Gilbert Colvile.
Only the first of the trio took to politics, to become the spokesman of the white community and to win a name beyond the borders of East Africa. A good deal has been written about Delamere’s political life and about his career as a pioneer but his character, I think, has remained an enigma.
I can remember him only dimly: a short, stocky figure in a big mushroom hat with long greyish hair (he was then in his fifties) and a beaky nose, clad in a mud- or grease-stained brown cardigan, glimpsed in Nakuru’s single street. His name was revered in East Africa, and I was startled to learn, when engaged on his biography, that his relatives in England, far from admiring him as an empire-builder, condemned him as a renegade who had ducked his responsibilities as a landowner and drained his Cheshire estate of its resources in order to finance wildcat schemes in a remote part of Africa that was nothing but a burden to the British taxpayer, and had been much better left to its primitive tribesmen and savage beasts.
His first wife was Florence Cole, a daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen. She had all the charm, wit and sparkle expected of the Irish, as well as generosity of spirit and loyalty to a husband who, while not unkind or probably unfaithful, gave more of his heart to his dreams and schemes for the growth of his adopted land than to his wife’s happiness. After a gentle upbringing at Florence Court in County Fermanagh, she was dumped down in a mud hut without doors or windows amid wild animals, Maasai warriors and herds of cattle, far from telephones or doctors or any contacts with what we call civilisation, and left alone for weeks or even months on end to act as farm manager. This was the lot of many European wives and few complained, while some relished its dangers and responsibilities. Certainly Florence Delamere did not complain, but she must have lacked companionship, she was never strong, her health suffered and she was separated at an early stage from her only child.
Her life became rather easier when Delamere moved to Soysambu, his first enterprise at Njoro having failed, and built a somewhat more substantial dwelling. Even so, there were few comforts. After her death, her brother Galbraith wrote of Soysambu: ‘There’s something about it that always depresses me and I can’t help thinking that my sister must have hated it. There’s somehow a sort of bareness about D’s surroundings that I can’t explain.’
Two of Florence’s brothers, Galbraith and Berkeley Cole, aged twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, arrived in East Africa in 1903, fired by Delamere’s enthusiasm, to settle there for the rest of their lives. Galbraith had the ranch next to Soysambu called Kekopey, meaning in Maasai ‘the place where white comes through green’ – a reference to deposits of diatomite later to be mined by the Coles. Galbraith wrote of his brother-in-law: ‘I think he is the most brilliantly clever person I know, marvellously quick to understand things, but he shuts his mind to all things except those which have to do with the material side of life with the utmost determination.’ This resolve left ‘a sort of gap, a something rather hollow in his company. He’s the sort of person to whom you would hesitate to express a thought that perhaps seemed a little far-fetched – not that he wouldn’t understand it, he would, no one better, but he would dismiss it probably with ridicule. His keen wit, his perception and an amazing faculty for, so to speak, detaching himself and never giving himself away, make him very strong in dealing with most people, and all sorts of material things … He won’t be known but he likes to know others. It’s rather like “take all and give nothing” with him.’1
A good prescription, perhaps, for the armour of a politician but not for the companionship of a spouse.
This wall of privacy had existed even when he was a young man. At the end of 1896 he had left Berbera on the Gulf of Aden at the head of a large caravan, marched southwards across barren deserts sparsely occupied by ferocious nomads for nearly two thousand miles, and reached Kenya’s highlands just under a year later. His companion was a young doctor with whom he had already spent some time elk-hunting in Norway and recovering from a serious accident sustained while fox-hunting in Cheshire. During the whole expedition they were continually in each other’s company and became good friends. Delamere was then twenty-six years old. Not long before he left England, he had become engaged to be married. Yet not once, Dr Atkinson told me, during the whole expedition, did Delamere mention his fiancée’s name or speak about her, and it came as a surprise to hear that his companion had married.
There were, I think, two Delameres. There was the dedicated farmer who in his early days lived sparsely and austerely, indifferent to comfort, seeking for company his Maasai herdsmen – he was a fluent speaker of their tongue – and for reading matter pamphlets about liver-fluke in sheep or white papers on government expenditure; and there was the roisterer renowned for his parties at Muthaiga Club or Torr’s hotel when champagne flowed and thick heads followed in the morning. His hospitality, when these festive moods took him, was unbounded. Rose Cartwright, who knew him well, told me that she used to avoid him when she met him in Nairobi. ‘I knew I’d be swept into a party if I didn’t,’ she said ‘and much as I enjoy parties now and then I don’t want them all the time. But up-country he was quite different: generous and nothing was too much trouble if you were in a fix of some kind.’
Had Florence lived, her influence might have found ways to breach the wall erected to repel invaders of his privacy. Instead, her death in 1914, when she was only thirty-seven, strengthened the fortifications. Delamere formed no stable relationship with any other woman until his second marriage fifteen years later. Then he wrote to Glady: ‘I believe that you and the future of Kenya are the only two things I care for.’ Within less than four years, he was dead.
Galbraith Cole had set eyes on Africa at the age of nineteen when his regiment had arrived at the Cape to take part in the Boer War. While the regiment was resting, he used to ride off on his pony with a horse-blanket to sleep in the open, and in the early dawn ‘wander about looking at all sorts of things, small buck,
merecats, birds, everything … the bold rugged scenery, the exquisite clearness of the atmosphere, the amazing beauty of the starlit nights impressed my imagination …’
With Delamere’s help, he secured a grant of 50,000 acres, later exchanged for 30,000 acres adjoining Soysambu in the Gilgil district. There were then no woolled sheep in East Africa, only the longhaired native kind. He bought 2,000 Maasai ewes for five rupees each (about seven shillings) and sent to New Zealand for twenty-eight merino rams to cross with them. At first nothing went according to plan. In the initial breeding year, ninety out of every hundred lambs died. Most of his Kekopey ranch was waterless, and only about one third could be put to use. Galbraith had water piped from a river in the hills and installed tanks. Zebras came and helped themselves, and thousands had to be shot. Lions broke into the enclosures where cattle were driven for the night and killed and stampeded the beasts. ‘How can you make a country and an industry and feed a lot of lions at the same time?’ Galbraith demanded. ‘If I had my way I would gas all the vermin and game that got in the way of development.’ Few farmers were conservationists then.
Less than twenty years later, Galbraith possessed on his two properties – he had acquired another one, even larger – over 30,000 merino sheep and several thousand head of cattle; the death rate from all causes was, in a normal year, down to under seven per cent, and his wool was fetching satisfactory prices in London.
Meanwhile there had been a personal disaster. As well as lions, zebras and diseases, stock-thefts were a major worry. One white policeman and a small force of askaris stationed many miles away were impotent to stop marauders from stealing Galbraith’s sheep and eating them on the spot. The law having failed him, he took the law into his own hands. One night he came upon a hut hidden in the bush and surprised inside it three Kikuyu men skinning a sheep of the merino, not the native, breed. The men fled; Galbraith fired two shots after them and one of the men was fatally wounded. Galbraith failed to report the matter to the police.
Out In The Midday Sun Page 12