White farmers lived in squalor, had to contend with jiggers

By Amos Kareithi

It was the photographs of rolling plains populated by wild animals lurking in the background of spear-wielding cattle herders prominently displayed in a Wembley exhibition that did the trick. The spell cast by the irresistible beauty of a land begging to be conquered was enough to drive the budding scholar out of the prestigious Wellington College into the lawless jungles. With only 100 sterling pounds in the wallet and a shotgun stashed in one of his tin boxes – just in case it was needed in Africa – the young man boarded the SS Matiana, destined for Mombasa. Michael Blundell was barely 19- years old, when he got on board the ship in October 1925.

His mission was clear: he was determined to tame Africa and learn farming. A month later Blundell was disabused of all his romantic dreaming of Africa when his ship docked in Mombasa and he had to wade through deep waters in a boat to dry land as there were no berth.

 

Opted out of law degree

The recollections of the man who opted out of a law degree to venture in Africa where he would chart Kenya’s post-independence and colonial times, acting as a bridge between the colonialists and the freedom fighters are captured in his book, A love Affair With the Sun.  Rail commuter transport at the time was at its infancy.

It was so rudimentary that passengers travelled in small box-like compartments where food was stale lentil soup heavily spiced with tomato sauce. This was at a time the man-eater lions of Tsavo that had earlier made the construction of the railway difficult vanquished, although elephants were apparently trying to emulate them. They would plant their massive bodies along the line at night and refuse to budge to the chugging train that desperately hooted in the dark; eager to proceed past the dusty Taru Desert wastelands. Blundell says there was no road transport, as both the tractor and the lorry were yet to be introduced.  Most of the gifted 20,000 settlers rode on oxcarts. Majority of the settlers who were World War I veterans had no idea about farming and lived in squalid conditions that could make a contemporary street boy squirm in discomfort at the mere suggestion of spending a night in similar quarters.

 

Sacrificed comfort

Although he had sacrificed the comfort of London to learn farming in Kenya, Blundell was shocked to learn that he was to break his back for the next one year without pay. But he considered himself lucky because some sons of Britain’s aristocracy had to pay as much as £30 a month to be taught how to tame the African jungle by failed farmers.

 Kipkarren Valley, the pioneer settler’s open school was some 27 miles from Eldoret town where former soldiers tried to tame wild game, as they acted as the buffer between the Nandi and the Uasin Gishu Maasai. The average size of the pioneers’ farm was between 2,000 and 5,000, where an army of workers served them as they tried to experiment with all sorts of farming.

 This was at a time light after sunset in most parts of the country could only be provided by fire brand and settlers used kerosene lumps that were hung on posts inside their grass thatched mud walled hovels. “The floor was rough, beaten earth, infested with jiggers and fleas. 

Most settlers lived in grass-roofed huts. Skins of animals were used as rugs. Nobody walked on the floor of the house barefoot as jiggers and fleas were all over.” It is difficult to visualise the apprentice farmer, fresh from London hopping around the compound immobilised by jiggers pleading with a stout barefoot African to remove the pest.    The bug could have devastating effects for once it burrowed itself in the human flesh, the horrible flea-like creature would feed on toes and other parts of the human anatomy. “I knew it had come for me when I experienced intense itching. The jiggers had to be removed by a sterilised needle in a painful process. Some young girls had parts of their budding breasts eaten away by jiggers. Some men had half their toes gone.” Pioneer British soldiers had introduced the pest that historians claim as a biological weapon was excessively harsh on Africans, as they did not wear shoes. Although the European settlers were keen to civilise Africans, and claimed to have superior hygienic standards, in the 1920s they, too, were living in squalid conditions. Blundell graphically captures the living quarters of the senior Ugandan railway official who was in charge of the rail line from Eldoret to Kampala who had a base at Turbo Station. “I had supper with Bessler at Turbo Station, the new head of the line. He lived in a round African mud and wattle hut with a loose thatch dumped on the roof.

A hurricane lamp with glass covered in smoke hung from a roof pole,” Blundell writes. His inventory of the senior man’s furniture is depressingly short as it consists of “one small rickety table” and a cheap three- shilling Nubian chair while animal skins were spread on a floor that was not cemented.

 

Financially ruined

According to this pioneer farmer who would later become a Minister for Agriculture and a representative of the entire European settler community, the whites new nothing about farming. “Coffee failed and dairy cattle were killed by the East Coast Fever. My boss Bronco Bill planted 70 acres with maize, but lost to thirds to game.”

 Every end of the month, Bill received £30 from Newey Swann, a son of a prosperous London stockbroker, so that he could teach the young man farming.  This was a princely amount for when Blundell had been inducted into Kenyan ways of farming he secured a job where John Price paid him about £7 for the first time in 18 months. Swann later bought a 700-acre piece of land in Mt Elgon after he was taught how to farm for a number of months.

Most of the farmers who had been gifted the expansive pieces of land by the colonial administration for the services they tendered during the war were financially ruined by the great depression that started with the collapse of the Wall Street in 1929. 

There were interludes when settler farmers switched roles into community policing when the occasions demanded as happened after a white young man murdered his girlfriend and her friend. The man, Ross, who worked for the Kenya Farmers Association in Nakuru, had invited the daughter of a local chemist for a date. Another girl in turn accompanied the girl.

After watching a cinema in Nakuru he drove the two girls to Menengai Crater where he shot the intruding girl on the head and dumped her body down the cliff. Shortly after, he shot his girlfriend and dumped her body in a shallow grave. All the settlers in Nakuru who were also members of the Kenya Defence Force searched for one of the girls’ body for a week in vain before sending a delegation to go and see the governor, Joseph Byrne in Nairobi. They demanded that the suspect be released to them for 36 hours and promised to return him to the police unharmed.

The suspect under heavy guard was taken to Menengai crater where he was forced to sit on an upturned petrol gallon and was interrogated throughout the night until he broke down towards dawn. In their unity they were able to force the murderer to reveal where he had buried his girlfriend.

 

Killed 12 Afrikaners

 It later emerged that his father, too, had killed 12 Afrikaners in cold blood in South Africa after they were captured wearing British uniforms.

When the Second World War broke out most of the farmers would later be forced to abandon their farms as they were conscripted to fight the Germans. They would only return to pick up the pieces after the war. Despite their inexperience of the natural and manmade calamities the pioneer farmers had to go through they still established Kenya’s agricultural sector.  This was despite the fact that they were later confronted with an uprising as the Africans who provided cheap labour who started agitating for their land.

Although the settlers had come to Kenya with nothing but great expectations and had lived in squalid conditions, they were unwilling to surrender the land searing during the Lancaster Conference in 1960.  One extremist, Anderson had declared that he and his friends had no intention and were not willing to be governed by people who had just come from trees.  

Traveling around the country, some of the farms established by the pioneer colonialists like Lord Delamere are still intact and so are the magnificent castles the whites established in the White Highlands.

These pieces of architectural masterpieces belie the humble beginning some of their owners, especially those who lay no claim to the British aristocracy had to go through before setting them up.

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