White Mischief (2 page)

In the colonial imagination, Africa was a dangerous country which inspired extremes, liberated repressed desires, insinuated violence. At the furthest end of the scale was the subconscious fear that someone might even break ranks, betray his country and his class by “going native,” though just what form this might take could never be put into words.

The colonials often shared that strange sensation common to exiled Englishmen living in groups of being “out of bounds.” Many of them had money. Many were remittance men who had been paid off by their families and sent away in disgrace. Once their spirits and sense of status had been restored by this feudal paradise, the temptation to behave badly was irresistible, and both men and women often succumbed to “the three ‘A’s”—altitude, alcohol and adultery. No wonder there was suspicion of the colonies at home, and that the Erroll case touched off a tinderbox of resentment.

The history of the quest is often inseparable from the evidence itself and lies at the heart of the main narrative. In the first part the story, which comes from many different fragments collected over a long period, is put together like a jigsaw. In Part II, which deals with the search for a solution, many gaps, quandaries, blind alleys and breakthroughs are included in the narrative where they might usefully add to the store of information and evidence and where they give momentum to the quest. There are also some detours along the route which seemed too good to be left out.

In homage to Cyril Connolly, a diligent investigator, I quote his own advice (to be taken, he would have said, before embarkation). It comes from “The Missing Diplomats,” another, though more transient, of his obsessions: the case of Burgess and Maclean.

Those who become obsessed with a puzzle are not the most likely to solve it. Here is one about which I have brooded for a year and now wish to unburden myself. Something of what I have set down may cause pain: but that I must risk because where people are concerned, the truth can never be ascertained without painful things being said, and because I feel that this account may lead to somebody remembering a fact or phrase which will suddenly bring it all into focus.

PART ONE

THE MURDER

1

THE WHITE HIGHLANDS

It is generally a benefit we confer when we take over a state. We give peace where war prevailed, justice where injustice ruled, Christianity where paganism ruled. (Whether the native looks on it in that light is another matter. I’m afraid that possibly he does not as yet appreciate his benefits.)

L
ORD
C
RANWORTH
, 1912

I would add house management [to a list of hints for prospective settlers’ wives] were it not that the supervision of native servants is an art in itself. One could not, for instance, learn by experience in England when is the right time to have a servant beaten for rubbing silver plate on the gravel path to clean it, and this after several previous warnings.

L
ADY
C
RANWORTH
, 1912

Lady Cranworth had been given a chapter to herself in her husband’s textbook for the new arrivals, which described the first decade of white settlement and portrayed Kenya as the white man’s heaven on earth. He called the book
Profit and Sport in East Africa,
and a later edition, with more restraint,
A Colony in the Making
. He described the sheer pleasure of the experience, the undiluted nobility
of the landscape with which Englishmen and Scotsmen from landed families would instantly feel familiar; the unlimited scope for game shooting, the richness of the soil and the millions of acres of virgin grazing land waiting to be settled. Although public schoolboys, he suggested, had acquired a bad reputation as colonists elsewhere in the Empire, Kenya was different. Here they were particularly suited to local conditions. Their high opinion of themselves was shared by the natives, particularly the Masai, their ignorance, “often colossal,” of farming would give them the benefit of a fresh eye on the unusual obstructions that the tropics would put in their way, and as for their devotion to sport, there was nothing the native liked better than eating large quantities of meat. Clearly Lady Cranworth, like the strident memsahibs that Karen Blixen described later, had already succumbed to fierce measures on the domestic front.

The British Government had officially taken over the country, as East Africa Protectorate, in 1895, to compete with German imperial expansion in East Africa. The Germans were building a railway into the interior from the port of Tanga. The British raced ahead and built their own line, 580 miles long, from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. It took five and a half years and was completed in 1901, to great acclaim.

Before that, any journey inland was an Arab slaving expedition to Uganda or a gruelling Rider Haggard romance undertaken by a lonely white man, a Thompson or a Livingstone, with an army of deserting porters and under continual threat of attack by the nomadic Masai.

The Indian railway workers imported by the British died in great numbers, not on the spears of the Masai “Moran” (young warriors), who seemed to accept the railway and the superiority of British weapons, but from dysentery, malaria, Blackwater fever, tsetse fly and from the heat itself. Many others fell prey to the man-eating lions of Tsavo, who held up the work for several weeks and seemed for a time to be invincible.

The railway was a splendid and ambitious piece of engineering, undertaken in appalling conditions and with truly Victorian confidence. The track crossed deserts, wound up mountains, descended escarpments and cut through forests and across swamps. It rose from sea level to almost 8,000 feet, running across the grazing land of the Masai and the homeland of the Kikuyu tribe, who were less well disposed to this invasion. It looked absurdly unequal to the task, this clockwork toy, with its four carriages and its dumpy tank engine, on a track that looked as pliable as soldering wire. But it was a stupendous journey, for the first part in the intense heat of the Taru desert, with no relief from the clinging and caking red dust which lay in ripples on the floor of the compartment. At Voi, in the coolness of the plains, there was the unforgettable sight of the great massed herds of zebra, giraffe, kongoni, wildebeest, Grant’s and Thompson’s gazelle, grazing across the savannah or running eight or ten abreast.

Nairobi was established in 1899, on the frontier between the Masai and Kikuyu, as the last possible rail depot before the track climbed 2,000 feet up the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley. For anyone looking down into the vast floor of the valley for the first time, the sheer scale of the landscape was over powering—something quite new to the senses.

Tea was taken at Naivasha station, the beginning of the highlands, and from there on, up to Gilgil and then to Nakuru, the promised land was slowly revealed, in all its immense variety and beauty. After some miles of thorn and red rock, you emerged into thousands of acres of rolling English parkland, a haze of blue lawn rising and falling to the horizon, untouched by the plough and apparently uninhabited. Some of it resembled the landscape of the west of Scotland, with the same dramatic rock formations, grazing pastures, dew-laden mists. Streams rippled through the valleys, wild fig (sacred to the Kikuyu) and olive grew in the forests; the air was deliciously bracing, producing an ecstasy of well-being, and the quality of
the light was staggering. There were scents too, the indefinable flavour of peppery red dust and acrid wood smoke that never fail to excite the deepest nostalgia.

And yet unless the land was productive and profitable, there was no point to this “lunatic express,” as its opponents had described it in England. It had been built for prestige and super-power competition, and its only effect was to drain the Colony’s budget.

The Commissioner for East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, a distinguished Oxford scholar and diplomat, produced a scheme in 1901, soon after his arrival, of recruiting settlers from the Empire to farm the land. The idea was simply to make the railway pay for itself, by hauling freight from the uplands to the coast. The development of the Colony was a secondary consideration, indeed almost an accident. A recruitment drive was launched in London, and the first wave of settlers arrived in 1903 from Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The photographs depict them as “Forty-niners” from the Yukon—a much rougher crowd than the later arrivals, who were drawn mainly from the Edwardian aristocracy and the British officer class. Nevertheless, there were many peers among these first arrivals—Lord Hindlip, Lord Cardross, Lord Cranworth, for example—and victims of the English system of primogeniture, such as Berkeley and Galbraith Cole, younger sons of the Earl of Enniskillen.

There were millionaires, too, like the amply proportioned American, Northrop MacMillan, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the fabulous Ewart Grogan, a fiercely chauvinist Englishman who had walked from the Cape to Cairo. There were fugitives, wasters, speculators.

Above all there was the man who became the settlers’ unchallenged leader from the turn of the century until his death in 1931, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, who had first set eyes on the Kenya Highlands in 1897, at the merciful end of a 2,000 mile camel ride from Somalia.
He had returned to England for six unhappy years, to look after his estates, but the Kenya bug had infected him too, and he returned in 1901 to buy land.

Lord Delamere was a natural leader of the settlers. He had inherited an enormous estate in Cheshire and vast wealth besides, soon after leaving Eton—where he had distinguished himself as a reckless and unruly boy, untouched by the civilising classics. He was arrogant and wasteful, with a sudden, violent temper; his political instincts were austerely feudal, and physically he was small and muscular, and in no way handsome. But he had the gift of supreme confidence in himself and in his vision of the future for the Colony, which was inspired by an old-fashioned sense of duty to the Empire—the duty, quite simply, being to annex further territory on its behalf.

Kenya was always more fashionable among the aristocrats than Uganda or Tanganyika after the First World War. Uganda was a little too far from the sea, along the railway, and Tanganyika, until then, had been a German colony. The pick of the sites in the Kenyan White Highlands had an English air, almost like the rolling downs of Wiltshire, all on a supernatural scale and under such an immense sky, that when you are first exposed to it, you may be seized both with vertigo—from the sheer speed and height of the clouds—and
folie de grandeur
. Such grandiose surroundings were irresistible to the English settlers and often went to their heads.

In the earliest settler scheme, a million acres were given away on 999-year leases. The contract required a capital sum to be invested in the first five years and an annual rent to be paid to the Government. Failure to comply meant confiscation.

Delamere was granted the first plot, at Njoro, along the railway line north-west of Nakuru. It was at Njoro that he began the experiment that nearly ruined him, but that almost alone laid the base for Kenya’s agricultural economy.

The distribution of the land was a chaotic process centred on the Land Office in Nairobi. In 1904, the year the Norfolk Hotel was built—soon to be known, from its guest list of English trophy hunters, as the “House of Lords”—the town still resembled a bleak and over crowded transit camp, with its rows of identical huts and its makeshift roads which were either knee-deep in mud, or carpeted with the red dust which hung in a cloud over the town. Prospective settlers pitched their tents near the Land Office and waited, often for months, for their applications to be dealt with by the overwhelmed bureaucrats. The Whitehall plan became a full-scale frontier scramble—appalling fights broke out almost nightly at the Norfolk—and under pressure, the laws protecting traditional African land rights were often loosely observed. The nomadic grazing land of the Masai in the Rift Valley, for example, was considered unoccupied, and stretches of Kikuyu land were added to farms alongside the reserve—a costly political mistake.

The English settlers were often quaintly ignorant about Africa—its history, the tribal distinctions, the wild animals, which were believed to attack on sight and on principle. They would be amazed by the virulence of the diseases that affected crops and livestock—some settled on land that the Masai had known for generations to be bad for cattle—and angry at the difficulties that were bound to arise where Edwardian attitudes met with the more cosmic outlook of the Kikuyu or the Masai. There were simple misunderstandings. Patience and politeness were the very basis of the African disposition, especially towards strangers and guests. But Western forms of gratitude were alien to most of the tribes—there is no word for “thank you” in Kikuyu. On their side the shrieking memsahibs rapped out their commands in pidgin Swahili, with a fierce English accent that sounded grating and discourteous to African ears.

There were notable exceptions. The more feudally minded pioneers like Delamere managed to establish a
relationship with the African population that allowed a genuine intimacy, a form of startled mutual respect that was not to be repeated in the next generation.

The European’s greatest fears, however, were reserved for the equatorial sun itself, whose rays were believed to damage not only the spine (hence the boom for the London tropical outfitters in “spine pads”—a thick strip of cotton gauze that stretched from the neck to the buttocks, worn with intense discomfort), but were thought to attack the liver and the spleen as well. Lord Lugard advised the wearing of heavy flannel cummerbunds. Winston Churchill, who took an unofficial tour to Kenya as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, feared its effect on the nervous system, the brain and the heart. If it was necessary to remove the hat, even momentarily, he wrote, “it should be done under the shade of a thick tree.” Some advised never removing it at all, even indoors, since corrugated iron, although a brilliant British invention and a memorable contribution to British colonial architecture, was not considered adequate against the rays. Out of this came the fashion of wearing the double terai, two wide-brimmed, floppy hats, one on top of the other. Removing all this armour was done standing on the bed, well away from the
siafu,
the safari ants who hunted their prey—anything up to a large antelope—in brilliantly executed pincer movements, travelling in columns often a mile long.