The white king and the killing of an African rainmaker

John Boyes. He tried to set himself up as king but he was rejected by the colonial government and fought by the Africans he was trying to subjugate. [File, Standard]

Long before Kenya as a country was established and its people lived in a land without borders, a lone white, John Boyes, tried to set himself up as king but he was rejected by the colonial government and fought by the Africans he was trying to subjugate.

Boyes' interactions with a people who had never seen a European in the 1890s are retold in his book, A white King in East Africa, which opens insights of a world that is long gone as seen from a European's lens.