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Colonial DC who banned white women in Turkana

The unforgiving Turkana sun has no antidote for an angry pharmacist whose authority has been questioned. In the forgotten north where few government officers wanted to serve, one tough man, a Nairobi medic turned administrator, lorded over it for 12 years and introduced harsh rules.

The pharmacist, Leslie Whitehouse, was unmarried by choice. However, when he was posted to Turkana at his own request in 1940s as the District Commissioner (DC), he introduced his own code of laws, chief among them that, no white woman was allowed into his fiefdom either as a civil servant or as a spouse of a government employee.

High temper

The mercurial DC loathed being contradicted and was known to fly into a rage if his orders were disobeyed. His district clerk, Mervyn Marciel, records in his memoirs how his boss punished an entire police station for annoying him. A police sergeant had reported some happenings which made the DC order the entire Kenya Police contingent at Lodwar to turn out on parade in their ceremonial dress.

The DC had also rushed home and changed into his official uniform so he could take the salute when the police officers paraded before him and presented arms.

Exempted one woman

The DC had no qualms breaking his own orders for he allowed one woman, Elizabeth Watkins into Turkana because he had known her a child. Watkins worked closely with the DC to an extent that she later penned his memoirs, Jomo's Jailor.

Whitehouse had made a name for himself earlier when he worked as a teacher in Kajiado where he had invited his students to bring five cows. To ensure the children got sufficient nourishment, each was required to be accompanied by a female relative who was to milk his cows.

The administrator's sense of justice was such that while he doubled as a third class magistrate in Loitotok, he marched into Tanganyika to arrest, illegally, a man who murdered his clerk. According to his biographer, he was opposed to the recruitment of Turkana people to work in European farms, saying it would degrade their culture.

This is the same man who was in charge in Lodwar when Jomo Kenyatta was detained and admitted he had a soft spot for his prisoner who he gave many books to read. He would later be accused of brainwashing Kenya's first president while in incarceration. Although Lodwar was far from Nairobi, the DC offered free transport for beer from the city to Turkana, making it more accessible than clean drinking water.