Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  I asked after the school. It is enormous now, with five or six hundred pupils and an impressive tally of distinguished alumni; also Charles Rubia, a former mayor of Nairobi; Geoffrey Kamau, ex-mayor of Nakuru; and a junior Minister, Kiruiru. Benson, however, does not send his children there. He takes his two eldest in his pick-up to the fee-paying primary school at Egerton College, where they mingle with the offspring of expatriate professors and the like. He himself attended what used to be the Duke of York’s, a boarding school run on English public school lines, originally for white boys, in Nairobi. It has been re-named after a famous Maasai laibon, Lenana.

  In 1938 Lord Egerton of Tatton, a misogynist and recluse who built himself a castle at Njoro, gave about eight hundred acres of his estate to provide for the training of European lads intending to make their careers in agriculture. Our neighbour Sandy Wright was then his manager. He and Nellie drew up a preliminary scheme to put the idea into practice; after much planning and discussion, the Egerton Farm School came into being. Then, after the Second World War, came a dramatic expansion. Newcomers under the post-war settlement schemes were required to take courses there before acquiring their farms or tenancies, so the institution grew, but it was still a farm school, not a college.

  And now … The Registrar took me round. We drove for miles and miles, passing building after building, lab after lab, hall after hall of residence, a great new library, a cheese factory, orchards, greenhouses, workshops, playing fields. The gleaming kitchens, full of stainless steel appliances equipped to serve three ample meals a day, would be the envy of many a princely New York or London hotel. The teaching staff is partly Kenyan and partly drawn from many foreign countries, and diplomas can be won in a score of subjects from engineering to food marketing, wildlife management to home economics. Two hundred of the sixteen hundred students are women. That little acorn that we knew of old – Nellie used to supply all the vegetables – has become a great oak indeed.

  ‘My father was a shika kamba on a European farm,’ said the Registrar. A shika ngombe was the small boy who walked ahead of a team of oxen to guide them. This shika ngombe (of the Nandi tribe) grew up to start a small primary school, and his son Paul won a bursary to the University of Arizona to study range management. On his return with his degree he was posted to the North, with the task of persuading the nomadic tribes to take part in range management schemes. He found that this was by no means as easy as it was in the United States. ‘Our trouble here is people,’ he said. ‘Instead of co-operating, they quarrel all the time among themselves, especially the Somalis. They will not follow instructions given them for their own good.’ It all sounded very familiar. If one closed one’s eyes it might have been Glenday, Reece or Turnbull speaking. Same problem, same response.

  I thought back to the heady days of freedom-struggling when the world would be the nationalists’ oyster once the foreign devils had been expelled. Two quotations from the British poets, I thought then, summed up the two credos. ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in Heav’n’, said Milton’s Lucifer, a cry echoed by Africans refuting colonialist assertions that they ‘weren’t ready’ to take over, lacking experience and expertise. ‘For forms of government let fools contest’ retorted Alexander Pope. ‘Whate’er is best administered is best.’ I could almost see Paul nodding his head.

  The arms of Baron Egerton of Tatton are still displayed, and the family motto, Sic Donet, is the motto of the college, soon to become a university.

  What becomes of all these students who go forth with their diplomas? Do many, do any, become genuine farmers with mud on their boots and tractor-grease on their hands? Very few, I was told; their sights are set rather on offices and labs; but there are a few, and others may follow.

  From the point of view of efficiency it was a backward step, in some cases even a disaster, to split up so many productive farms formerly in white ownership into small-holdings barely able to support a single, if large, family, and in bad years unable even to do that. The banks, hoping to check the process, decreed that the new owners must pay off their loans before the land could be officially sub-divided and title-deeds registered. The unforeseen result was a rush to sell every available asset in order to gain the security of a title-deed. Everything moveable and saleable was moved and sold. So it was something of an agricultural wasteland that I drove through in the Njoro district, formerly the heartland of white farming. Fences, water troughs, corrugated-iron roofing, left-over machinery, all, or nearly all, were gone. Sleek dairy cattle had been replaced by skinny little beasts drinking from muddy pools in a half dried-up river. It was as if the clock had been turned back fifty years.

  But there are exceptions, and their number is growing. Men of the new breed of rich Africans, mostly with government connections, who have bought some of the best of the Europeans’ farms, now run them efficiently under good managers, some of whom are Egerton-trained. Considerable chunks of the Rift Valley were acquired, and are still owned, by various members of the Kenyatta family; the late President’s estate is protected by a high steel fence like that surrounding Whipsnade Zoo, though designed to keep ill-intentioned people out instead of captive animals in. The trend is towards farming cooperatives and companies to keep intact such units under professional management. So perhaps ecology will make a come-back, in time.

  Where tea and coffee thrive – Kenya’s mainstays – there is a different story. Both have proved, contrary to many expectations, excellent crops for small-holders, given good overall direction and organisation. Prices have soared and production expanded, exports have saved the country from financial undoing, and the small-holders have flourished. They are the lucky ones: both of these crops are particular as to the conditions that suit them, and, if not suited, will not grow.

  A little way beyond Njoro township came the unexpected sight of a lot of glossy, handsome horses grazing in a paddock; then a flock of fine-woolled sheep in a green field. This was Sasumua, a word associated in my mind with bees. And here, indeed, were the Nightingales’ bees, resettled after their enforced move from the Kinangop, together with an assemblage of livestock, and joined now by another breed of insect: silk-worms, bred in droves on approved Japanese lines.

  The Nightingales’ horses are no sideline but a major enterprise. Racing languished after independence, many thought for good, but now it has come back into fashion, bringing a brisk demand for yearlings which the Nightingales breed. That scourge which I so well remember, horse-sickness, had been overcome.

  It was at Njoro that the first professional trainer built his stables, and here those stables are today. Instead of a horse, each loose-box is occupied by a heavy, old-fashioned hand-loom. Before it sits a young woman weaving, to her own design, yarn spun from locally shorn wool. In another shed the spinners pedal at their wheels, and outside the dyers thrust skeins of yarn into debbis simmering on a charcoal brazier, together with ingredients of local dyes. Women bring their babies, and come and go to suit themselves. I thought how happy and relaxed it all seemed.

  The stables were built by Charles Clutterbuck, who set up as a trainer here in 1904. With him came his daughter, Beryl, four years old. His wife stayed behind. Clutterbuck built a house for Beryl, a squat, three-roomed bungalow, with odd little spikes on its gables that give it a jaunty air. Now it is full of wollen jackets, rugs, shawls and lengths of cloth ready for sale.

  It was from here that Beryl used to set out with her spear to chase wart-hogs barefoot with Nandi braves, as related in her autobiography West with the Night. She grew up among horses and Nandi stable-boys without benefit of schooling, and it was said that Clutterbuck aged his daughter as he aged his racehorses: that is, the horse became one year older on a certain date, I think 31 August, regardless of when it was born; and that she was therefore only sixteen when she was married to a brawny farmer who had played Rugby football for Scotland and had a posho mill nearby. This is not mentioned in her autobiography.

  When she was eighteen her father went b
ankrupt and left the country, and Beryl rode off with all her possessions in two saddle-bags to start in business as a trainer on her own. All the odds were against her – age, sex, poverty – but she pulled it off. She had a genius for handling horses, and one or two of the leading owners gave her their patronage. She married Mansfield Markham, Glady Delamere’s brother-in-law and a rich man, but that marriage, like the first, did not last. Then she turned from horses to flying. One of the early aviators, Tom Campbell Black, taught her to fly and she qualified as a commercial pilot, entitled to fly passengers, mail and anything else to anywhere in the world. This was in 1931 when she was still only thirty-one years old. In little single-engined aeroplanes she flew all over East Africa, where landing strips were few, and three times to England, a flight of about 6,000 miles.

  Several white hunters such as von Blixen and Finch Hatton were her friends, and she developed a technique of spotting from the air likely trophies for their clients to approach on foot, such as large tuskers. So intelligent were the elephants, she wrote, that the cows would crowd round the bull, or bulls, so closely as to conceal the big tusks from airborne hunters. This implies a process of reasoning that scientists may not credit, but the intelligence of elephants is well known and no one can be sure of its limits.

  The climax of Beryl’s career came in 1936 when she set out to fly a Vega Gull from Oxfordshire to New York, and so to become the first woman, and the second person, to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic from east to west.1 The inlet valve of her petrol tank froze up over Nova Scotia and she had to make a forced landing in a swamp, so she did not make it to New York, but she did succeed in flying the Atlantic, solo, in a tiny aeroplane, against prevailing winds. Her time was twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes.

  Beryl’s third marriage was to an American, Raoul Schumacher, who helped her to write her book. After that ended, she returned to the land of her childhood to become probably its most successful trainer. The little house her father built for her must be seventy years old, a great age in colonial terms. It ought to be declared a Listed Building with a blue plaque to commemorate East Africa’s most famous woman flyer.

  From one extreme in the shape of Beryl’s cottage I went on to the other, Deloraine, a nine-day wonder when first built by Lord Francis Scott. Trees and shrubs have grown up almost to submerge it in greenery and colour. Sunbirds hover above blue salvias that have invaded a formal brick-pathed garden, and take shelter in mauve-flowering bauhinia trees. The harsh cry of hadada storks as they fly over, and the falling cadences of doves, fill the air.

  In my youth I found the Scotts’ daughter, Pamela, intimidating, although she was considerably younger than I. Forthright and outspoken, her clear blue eyes held, I thought, a certain coldness, her manner a hint of hauteur. Perhaps I was influenced by the patrician nature of the Montagu-Douglas-Scott connections. Neighbours looking in for a chat about foot-and-mouth disease or army worm might face the hazard of encountering a royal personage – Princess Alice was Lord Francis Scott’s niece – or at the very least an earl or viscount. Photographs of a legion of titled relatives lined the staircase, and still do; but the titled relatives, if they came to Deloraine, had to put up with rattle-trap jalopies, brown bath water and jiggas in the toes like everyone else. Eileen Scott – Lady Francis – kept a diary in which she described a visit to Berkeley Cole’s farm. Her host was dressed for dinner in a pair of shrunken crêpe drawers that failed to cover his naked legs, and a patched old jacket. ‘A huge Russian bear-hound eats off our plates at will. Three sheep came in at luncheon and hens pecked around the table.’ Her comment on this experience, an unaccustomed one for a Viceroy’s daughter, was: ‘Mr Cole was one of the most amusing men I have ever met.’2

  Time has done its proper job of mellowing. Pam Scott’s candid opinions and decisive judgements are still forthrightly delivered, but tempered by a greater tolerance, and her natural generosity remains. For half a century she has farmed this land at Rongai, having been thrown in at the deep end by her father who, on her return from a finishing school at the age of eighteen, told her that he could no longer afford a manager, but felt sure that she could take it on. So instead of Court balls and tea with the Queen she found herself delivering calves, drenching sick cows, setting tasks for labour and dealing with the petty detail punctuated by crises that make up most farmers’ lives.

  Then came independence, the great divide. You went or you stayed. Pam had no hesitation in making her decision, and little sympathy with those who, as she saw it, ran away. When Daniel arap Moi was a member of the local African District Council he was an occasional visitor to Deloraine, and it was he who signed her application form to become a Kenya citizen.

  Deloraine now belongs to a body called the Rift Valley Development Trust, whose chairman is President arap Moi, and which runs the Rift Valley College of Science and Technology situated near Nakuru. Pam Scott rents back for her lifetime the house and sufficient land on which to keep a small dairy herd, assorted poultry and a flock of snow-white goats. The arrangement enables her to experiment with devices to heat the bathwater by fermenting tanksful of manure, with home-made solar heating, with photography and other matters, as well as to entertain innumerable ‘winter migrants’ who come from Britain to enjoy the sunshine and hospitality which, while no longer colonial, continues in that kindly tradition.

  Deloraine as I remember it had no bolts or bars; dogs and people wandered in and out of open doors. Now it has been fortified, and night watchmen (when not asleep) prowl about the grounds. A pump and its engine had just been stolen from a field.

  At Olpejeta, one of the country’s largest ranches and on the great Laikipia plain, there seemed to be a slip in time. On lawns kept green by sprinklers and under shady trees, a concourse of people strolled about, sipped white wine cup, helped themselves to delicious salads and greeted friends. Nothing unusual in this, a luncheon barbecue: but the faces were white. Olpejeta is a long way from any city and white farmers are supposed to have disappeared. Quite a lot have evidently been left over, and they did not look unhappy or oppressed.

  Olpejeta belongs now to Mr Kashoggi, said to be the richest man in the world, but there are a number of claimants to that title. Like his forbears, his life-style is nomadic, but a string of camels has been replaced by a Boeing 727 fitted up as a very superior tent. The bathtub, I was told, really does have gold-plated taps, but I did not see them myself. Mr Kashoggi with his entourage drop down from the sky and take off again without warning as he flits about the world accompanied by a Korean bodyguard, girl-friends and a skilful chef. His American pilots are recruited from the Presidential flight. Whatever he possesses, said his Kenya-born manager, must be of the best, and you couldn’t have a better boss. He never interferes.

  Many of the white farmers and their wives are Kenya-born. Some have given ground – sold it, to be precise – and stayed on. Robin Davis has sold off most of his grandfather’s soldier-settler farm near Nanyuki, and ploughs and cultivates on contract for his African neighbours. ‘The days of women hoeing in the shamba,’ he said, ‘are over.’ He has kept back eighty acres and concentrates on highly-priced products, such as apples, turkeys, Jersey cream. Raymond Hook’s daughter keeps poultry on a portion of her father’s former land. A useful sideline is provided by film companies; Robin has already played the part of a bearded Boer transport-rider and is currently involved in a film about a female Tarzan swinging nakedly about the trees.

  Elephants have become a problem, both to the farmers and to themselves. Deprived of their ancient migration routes and harried by poachers, they are forced from their proper habitats to search for food and water. They break fences, and have been known to drink dams completely dry. Farmers and ranchers are putting up electric fences with considerable success; elephants explore unfamiliar objects with the tips of their trunks, which are extremely sensitive. Successful electric fencing still further restricts the elephants’ range. ‘In the long run it would be kinder,’ sai
d a farmer, ‘to shoot the lot.’

  Not much future for the elephants. How about the humans? The children of the white farmers go to Britain for their secondary schooling and all of them, or nearly all, want to come back. ‘Do you think that you’ll be here, or your children will be here,’ I asked, ‘in twenty years’ time?’ ‘If you’d asked that question twenty years ago,’ one of them replied, ‘the answer would have been an emphatic no. And here we are. Another twenty? Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised.’ A lady well up in her eighties gave a forthright reply: ‘In twenty years’ time we’ll be buying back anything we want.’ The new settlers, she said, were growing the wrong things in the wrong places and wouldn’t survive. Few shared her confidence to that extent. The laws of ecology are one thing and the needs and hopes of people another, and the odds are on the latter to prevail.

  Here on the foothills of the Mountain was an object-lesson to show that not all Africans sub-divide the land they buy and then, not always but too often, spoil it. On the road to Timau we passed a paddock fenced and watered with a good grass ley, and on it incongruously grazed some inferior scrub cattle. They were surrogate mothers. The eggs of pedigree Friesians, after being fertilised by champion bulls, are flown from Britain to this farm (which has three European managers) to be inserted into the wombs of these cheap and humble Zebu cows. The ranch belongs to Mr Kenneth Matiba, Minister for Social Services and Culture.

  Beyond Timau the A2, tarmac’d now all the way from Nairobi to Isiolo, makes a spectacular dive of about 4,000 feet from the Mountain’s foothills to what some people call ‘the real Africa’, a land of hot, dry savannah bush with rocky gulleys, thorn trees, baobabs, many-fingered euphorbias and, in the river beds, borassus palms. Saucer-eared Grevy’s zebra and close-patterned reticulated giraffe are native to this region. You come to Lewa Down, where Delia, Elizabeth Powys’ daughter, and her husband David Craig have created an oasis watered by springs.