Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  Like others, the Craigs have discovered that tourists pay better than crops or cattle. Tourists must be fed, so there are vegetables and fruit trees under irrigation, milch cows, steers and almost everything except fish. I remember hearing how Afrikaner women used to bake their bread by scooping out a termite castle to make an oven. The Craigs have built pseudo-termite castles in which to bake for their visitors, who sleep in commodious tents and eat in an open-sided banda which has a hole in the side made by the trunk of an inquisitive elephant.

  From the Craigs’ house, perched on a rocky hillside, you can see the roofs of Isiolo winking at you from below. The place has grown fantastically, and no one could explain just why. There are no industries, no settled agriculture, no raison d’être at all so far as I could see. It has become a provincial capital, so civil servants have no doubt moved here in droves. The army, too, is here in force with all its sutlers, a comet with a long tail. Mosques have arisen, schools and hotels, a modern hospital; water been piped, electricity generated, an airfield made. The Great North Road, wide and red but not yet tarmac’d, drives northwards to Moyale where it links up with a tarmac’d but sometimes hazardous highway to Addis Ababa. I suppose Isiolo has become an outpost of civilisation. The last time I was here it was to stay with the Adamsons. The lioness Elsa travelled on the roof of George’s Land-Rover, Joy sat for hours sketching her loved one, and Patti Patti, her rock hyrax, tried to get at the whisky, stared crossly at all comers from the seat of the loo and, after bed-time, wrapped herself round Nellie’s neck and chattered angrily when disturbed.

  It is odd how small things stick in the memory while greater ones disappear. Looking down at Isiolo I remembered a queer whirring sound I had heard while sitting beside the Ewaso Ngiro river, like that of a toy clockwork engine being started up a long way off. I couldn’t make it out. Then from some crevice in the river bank an enormous ghost-like bird emerged, spread its wings and took off – surely the spirit of some chief or warrior captain soaring away over the trees. An eagle owl.

  As we climbed up from plain to highlands the sun was setting in his crimson bed behind the dark rim of Laikipia, and all the hills and valleys far beyond. There is always sadness in a sunset, and I was sad to say goodbye to that great brooding Mountain with its forest girdle, to the wildness of the bushlands at its feet, to the harshness of the rocks and gulleys where the bones of those who once possessed it all, the multitudinous wild animals, have turned to dust.

  Michael Blundell first arrived in Africa at the age of eighteen with two tin boxes, a shot-gun, £100 in cash and an agreement with an up-country farmer to work for a year in exchange for his keep. That was in 1925. By the time I first met him in 1936 he had set up on his own, survived the worst of the Depression, and was winning a name as a progressive farmer, with as yet no thought of politics. Like Cincinnatus he was called from the plough, or rather called himself, to the battlefield of politics immediately after the Second World War.3

  It was the war that brought about this change of direction. Within a few months of volunteering for the KAR on its outbreak, he had become a Lieutenant-Colonel. This rapid promotion was the result of a threatened mutiny by a labour battalion stationed in the NFD, most of whose men belonged to the Luo tribe. Michael had learnt to speak their language fluently, which few Europeans could do at the time, and was sent to quell the mutiny. The trouble was due to a misunderstanding; the men thought that they had joined the army to fight the enemy, but found that they were expected to makes roads and dig latrines. Instead of the slouch hats worn by KAR askaris, their headgear was a pillbox cap with a back flat, like that of French poilus. This had become a symbol of their inferior status. Lieutenant-Colonel Blundell managed to get the caps replaced by slouch hats, and the mutiny subsided. The battalion then took part in one of the fastest, if not the fastest, advances in military history, from the Juba river to northern Ethiopia, covering 2,800 miles over desert, mountain and gorge in forty-two days. After the campaign’s victorious end, Michael and his men were transformed into sappers and went off to fight the Japanese.

  They returned, he said, with changed ideas. For four years white officers and black askaris and NCOs had shared dangers and hardships, eaten the same food, slept side by side, lived and sometimes died together, and they had come to gain an understanding of each other’s point of view. The officers had formed a new respect for the men under their command, the men had seen that white bwanas were just as fallible as they were, and not entitled to a pedestal because of their race. Also they had rubbed shoulders with people from other parts of Africa and from Asia, to whom the ending of white rule was not a distant dream but an approaching reality.

  Whereas many of the white officers could foresee what these experiences would lead to, and sympathise to some extent with the nationalist aims, most of those who had remained at home could not. Thus a generation gap was widened by a further gap in understanding. When, after the war, Michael was elected to the Legislative Council as member for the Rift Valley, and subsequently to the leadership of the European elected members, he found no difficulty in getting his ideas across to those of his constituents who had seen active service, whereas older men and women were inclined to regard him as a dangerous radical. ‘Unsound’ was a word sometimes used. I remember someone saying, in shocked tones, ‘He lets Africans call him by his Christian name!’

  Thirty-five years later, after all the ups and downs of politics and government, Michael Blundell lives at ease, though not in idleness, in his home set in a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Nairobi, enjoying the role (as he puts it) of the Grand old Colonial Gentleman receiving television interviewers, journalists, and academics researching into colonial history. The controversies that surrounded him have faded into the past so completely that you wonder what the fuss was all about.

  It was, of course, about the end of colonial rule and the coming of African independence: about how this was to be accomplished, quickly or slowly, completely or with reservations, or indeed not at all; and about what was to become of the European and Asian communities when the British Government bowed out. Many opinions, many theories, many hopes and many fears were paraded in these disputes.

  After an interlude as Minister of Agriculture, Michael Blundell devoted his energies to attempting to convince his fellow Europeans that it was useless to imitate Canute. The only course open to them, he said, was to bow to the inevitable and make the best terms they could in the light of various pledges given by the British Government over the years, that the ‘immigrant communities’ would not be abandoned or betrayed. In this task he had wise allies and advisers in the shape of Wilfred Havelock, Humphrey Slade and others.

  His political opponents, who substantially outnumbered his supporters, took their stand on these pledges, the last of which was made by Alan Lennox Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1958. Former pledges had been underpinned by actions. The closer settlement scheme of 1948 had offered tenancies to last for forty-four years, and the scheme continued to operate, with an office and director in London, until 1960. Tenants were, presumably, entitled to assume that the landlord would be around in forty-four years’ time to fulfil his part of the bargain, which was to hand over the title-deeds of the land. A tenancy entered into in 1959 would have carried through until the year 2003. After the conference held at Lancaster House in London in 1960, the scheme was wound up and the tenancies lapsed. ‘No surrender’ was the rallying-cry of Michael’s opponents, always a more stirring one than ‘come to terms’. The Churchillian spirit was invoked – in vain. Between January and March 1960, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Iain Macleod, wrote ‘finis’ to the chapters of British rule in Kenya and of white settlement. Both were to be ended as quickly as possible, and in stages; in the event, the process took less than four years.

  They were uncomfortable years for Michael. The New Kenya Group that he had formed in 1959, open to all races, cooperated with the British Government in various measures taken t
o ensure a peaceful transition from colony to independent nation. (By then there were two African parties at loggerheads with each other, which bedevilled the process considerably.) The opponents of the New Kenya Group, led by Group-Captain ‘Puck’ Briggs, were sincere and honest men and women who kept their heads buried in the sand. In their opinion, Michael and his supporters had sold the pass they had been elected to defend. There was a much-publicised incident at Nairobi airport when, on Michael’s return from the conference at Lancaster House, thirty sixpenny pieces were cast at his feet. For two years, he told me, he and Gerry, his wife, avoided Muthaiga Club because so many of its members cut him dead. At a meeting held in Eldoret, a woman speaking in the pinched Afrikaans accent demanded: ‘Will Mr Blundell tell us when he is going to have his daughter circumcised?’ The names of Judas Iscariot and Quisling were bandied about.

  The dogs barked, the caravan passed. The Grand Old Colonial Gentleman sits on his veranda embowered in orchids grown in tubs, looking out on his garden with its flowering creepers, its bougainvillea-smothered trees and its cluster of palms – strange, flamboyant cycads whose feathery foliage reminds me of a Kori bustard giving his display. Fire-finches hop about, and now and then a handsome cock wydah bird, trailing his long black tail, dives from an oleander bush to join in. At breakfast on the veranda come juicy pawpaws and grapefruits, at luncheon soft, ripe avocadoes of enormous size and fat asparagus of delicate flavour. You can hear the milk-provider mooing from a nearby field. Friends and acquaintances, black and white, look in for a chat. Cascades of improvised music flow from a study littered with data on the classification of plants. Michael combines green fingers with botanical erudition: the first volume of an illustrated guide to The Wildflowers of Kenya has been published, and a second is on the way.

  Botany, ecology, music, politics, cooking (since Gerry’s death) and the byways of history are among his many interests, but I think that conversation is his strongest suit. Words flow in sparkling torrents, often witty, unexpected and provocative of thought. As a public speaker he was never a spellbinder. The farmers he addressed in country districts sometimes thought he was speaking above their heads and some of them resented it. His enemies – and he did make enemies – thought him egocentric, conceited, and over-fond of the limelight. He was apt, on occasion, to work himself up into a state where tears came to his eyes, in those days condemned as effeminate. But his friends found him warm-hearted, generous, sensitive, amusing, and refreshingly devoid of that parochialism apt to afflict colonial gentlemen, not to mention ladies, young and old.

  Michael was at home with Africans because he spoke his mind and pulled their legs without a trace either of that arrogance they had so often to put up with, as a rule with remarkable tolerance, or with the sycophancy that white people of a later generation sometimes display, and which they despise. It is rare to meet Africans without a sense of humour, and theirs and Michael’s strike the same chord.

  How much of history is shaped by individuals, and how much by trends of the time, is, I believe, a matter for discussion among historians. There is obviously a balance: the question is, how to apportion the influence of the Zeitgeist and that of the leader. A host of men and women have shaped Kenya’s recent history, but two have stood out: Jomo Kenyatta and, at least in my opinion, Michael Blundell.

  Suppose, in Kenya’s case, the leader of the Africans had preached revenge not reconciliation, and the leader of the Europeans a fight to the last ditch instead of coming to terms, the birth of independence would have been bitter and bloody instead of smoother and more amicable than almost everyone had expected it to be. Or suppose, in another context, that Michael Blundell had taken his tin boxes, his shot-gun and his £100 to Rhodesia instead of to Kenya, and that Ian Smith had grown up in Nairobi, the history of those two countries would not have been the same.

  The name of Jomo Kenyatta is respected throughout the world as a great African statesman; that of Michael Blundell is little known outside the circle of his friends. Both have done the state some service in their time, and in their way.

  So, past all the tributes to Twenty Great Glorious Years and on to the airport, like all airports crowded and chaotic, offering passengers an alternative of rushing for the gate or boring long delays. Everywhere were queues, but nothing to tell you which queue was for where. Looking for Sudan Airways, I found myself swept into a Somali pop group returning festively to their homes, and narrowly escaped getting carried off to Mogadishu. I changed queues just in time, and thought back to earlier flights over Uganda, over Sudan, over the Sudd invisible now more than 30,000 feet below. In three hours’ time we halted briefly at Khartoum, with its huge new international airport complex. Then Heathrow.

  I shall not be around to see the end of the next twenty years of Kenya’s independence but hope they will be Great and Glorious too.

  Notes and sources

  CHAPTER 1

  1 – Dr Burkitt’s story has been told in Under the Sun by his partner, Dr J. R. Gregory (The English Press, Nairobi, 1951).

  2 – This episode is described in full in East Africa and Its Invaders by R. Coupland (Oxford, 1938).

  3 – History of East Africa, Vol. 1, Chapter X, by John Flint (Oxford, 1963).

  4 – One such bride was Karen Blixen, née Dinesen; arriving at Mombasa on 13 January 1914, she was married next day to Baron von Blixen-Finecke, but by the District Commissioner, not in the cathedral. Prince Wilhelm of Sweden was a witness; the Protectorate’s Governor, Sir Henry Belfield, sent his dining car, and the American millionaire Northrup McMillan his cook, to accompany the pair by rail to Nairobi.

  5 – Africa View by Julian Huxley (Chatto & Windus, 1931).

  6 – Letters from Africa, 1914–1931, ed. by Frans Lasson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson and University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  7 – Private communication from Mrs Rose Hodson.

  8 – See Grogan’s own account, with A. H. Sharp, in From the Cape to Cairo, 1900, and his biography The Legendary Grogan by Leda Farrant (Hamish Hamilton, 1981).

  9 – The country was called the East Africa Protectorate from the start of British rule in 1895 until 1920, when it was re-named Kenya Colony. Originally it included part of what is now Uganda.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 – Pioneer’s Scrapbook, ed. by E. Huxley and Arnold Curtis (Evans Bros, 1980).

  2 – A fuller account of this trek is given in No Easy Way by E. Huxley, East African Standard, Nairobi, 1957.

  3 – The rupee was worth 1s. 4d. until 1920. In the following year the shilling, linked to the British pound sterling, became the Colony’s official currency. It is now the Kenya shilling.

  4 – Freedom and After by Tom Mboya (Deutsch, 1963); and Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget (Heinemann, 1982).

  CHAPTER 3

  1 – White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya by E. Huxley, Vol. 11, Chapter XXI (Macmillan, 1935; Chatto & Windus paperback, 1980).

  2 – These and others of Nellie’s projects are described in Nellie: Letters from Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981; and paperback, 1984).

  3 – White Mischief by James Fox (Jonathan Cape, 1982; Penguin, 1984).

  4 – Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 253, April 1943: ‘The Boma Trading Company’ by J.R. Riddell.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 – These and subsequent comments from the diaries of Lady Moore, 1924–1947, MSS Brit Emp s 466, Rhodes House Library, Oxford.

  2 – ‘The Night of the Hyena’, unpublished autobiography of Eric Dutton, DSO, CBE, lent by his widow Myrtle.

  3 – Kenya’s Opportunity by Lord Altrincham (Faber & Faber, 1955).

  4 – Letters from Africa, 1914–1931, op. cit.

  5 – Sir Edward Grigg, subsequently Lord Altrincham, paid this tribute in the dedication of his book: ‘To my wife, whose Welfare League for all races in Kenya opened a new Life to the Womanhood of Dark Africa.’

  6 – Lady Moore’s diaries, op. cit.

  7 – Kenya Diary, 190
2–1906, by Richard Meinertzhagen (Oliver & Boyd, 1957; reprinted by Eland Books, 1983).

  8 – I am indebted to Mrs Kit Taylor for allowing me to quote from her mother’s diaries; to her daughter Kathini for help on occasions too many to name; and to her husband Donald Graham for his recollections of the past.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 – Beryl Markham, née Clutterbuck, describes this incident in West With the Night (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1942; republished by Virago Press, London, 1984).

  2 – From tape recordings made by Mrs Cockie Hoogterp for the author. I wish I could convey in writing even an echo of her wit and talent as a raconteur.

  3 – Indians in Kenya, Cmd 1922 (1923).

  CHAPTER 6

  1 – For a full account of Delamere’s life and works see White Man’s Country, op. cit.

  2 – Manyatta is the word always used for these Maasai villages, but the correct term is engang. Manyattas were built especially for the warriors with their mothers and girl-friends, while the engang was the family dwelling. See Maasai by Tepilit Ole Saitoti & Carol Beckwith (Elm Tree Books, 1980).

  3 – Apparent only: a rigid code of conduct governs behaviour in tribal societies. As Clarence Buxton put it: ‘An individual Maasai is not free to make a choice contrary to the agreement of the group or groups. He would not dream of doing so.’ Buxton papers, MSS BE 390, Rhodes House Library, Oxford.