Lake Magadi: Salty saga that has outlived a century of mining

When a journalist-turnedland speculator used his connections to secure lucrative deals for his masters, he had no idea that he was laying the foundation for a controversy whose effects will be felt in India and Kenya more than a century later.

Ernest Gedge had plied his trade in Uganda and South Africa, filing stories for The Times of London as a correspondent before he visited Mumias and started ‘hallucinating’ of acquiring millions of acres of land to cultivate opium.