Parklands was to be a pineapple plantation

 Allen Charles Harries family tried growing the crops in Parklands

Thika is Kenya’s pineapple town. Okay, pineapples are also grown in surrounding regions such as Gatundu. But Thika’s pineapples take the errr....cake! It is Thika that Kenya Canners (now Cirio Del Monte), Kenya’s largest exporter of canned pineapples, call home.

By the way, at independence, pineapples were considered special fruits and to manage the crop, the government of President Kenyatta I looked out for a fruit company and found one in Hawaii, where American firm, Del Monte, was then operating. It had an appetite for expansion to Africa where labour was a dime a dozen, and as enticement, the government took over Anglo-French Sisal farm and leased it to them in 1965. That was besides restricting the  pineapples to growers approved by the Canning Crops Board at the time.

This explains the scarcity of pineapple processing factories in Kenya where Del Monte enjoys a monopoly and hardly outsources pineapples to small scale farmers due to that, not so small matter, of meeting international standards.

The behemoth that produces juice concentrates and mill juice sugar was 98 per cent acquired by Cirio Alimentare in 2002 to become Cirio Del Monte - one of the top five pineapple exporters in the world.

But did you know that pineapples were initially to be grown in Parklands, Nairobi? Well, the story stretches back to 1904 when Allen Harries arrived in Kenya from South Africa with his wife Olivia. Her son-in-law, Herbert Cowie, imported fruits to grow, in all places, Parklands, but the crops could just not grow. That was in 1920s Kenya.

Cowie threw them out.

Mrs Harries took the pineapple suckers and planted them at Karamaini Estate, the family plantation in what later became Thika town, and where they thrived to date!

Her third-born son, Aldred Ivan Rule Harries, came to Kenya from South Africa and settled at Karamaini in 1912 and  continued with pineapple, sisal and coffee farming.

From his initials, he named his farming outfit, A.I.R. Harries & Sons Ltd that still exists in Thika, where the other dominant crop is macadamia - also courtesy of the Harries family.

In 1946, Aldred Harries’ son, Peter Allen Harries, returned to Kenya from studies in New Zealand from where he brought macadamia seeds and planted them on a farm he bought and named Oreti, a Maori word for ‘place of danger and raw beauty.’

Aldred died in the late 1950s. Peter died in 1983. Peter’s only son, David Harries, took over, but retired in 2013. His nephew, Boyce Allen Harries, now runs A.I.R. Harries & Sons Ltd, which also manages Chania and Oreti Coffee estates, the processor of Harries Coffee. The firm also runs other private coffee estates in Kenya.