Did you know this man got Kenyans going to shagz?

It is December, the one month in the year when Kenyans troop to shagz — what was once called reserve — leaving Nairobi and other major urban areas resembling ghost towns.

Indeed, going shagz, is a Christmas tradition, and did you know it all started with one man, Governor Evelyn Baring?

Do you know he had a chapel constructed at Government House (today State House) so that he could receive the Holy Communion every morning with his wife, Molly Baring?

By the way, Molly turned down 28 proposals before accepting Baring, whose family owned Barings Bank where the Queen banks.

“Sir Evelyn Baring is one of the most aristocratic aristocrats I have ever encountered,” wrote John Gunter in Inside Africa, “and the atmosphere is almost that of 18th-century England. People emerged down corridors as if they had just stepped out of antique frames”.

The man who almost died rescuing an Indian girl from drowning was the Governor of Kenya who declared the State of Emergency in October 20, 1952 at the height of the Mau Mau insurgency. He thought it would last “just a few months.”

The State of Emergency ended in 1959, and in the seven years it lasted, many people who had come to Nairobi, especially from Central Kenya, where the Mau Mau rebellion started, were rounded up for screening via ‘cleaning the lungs’ (interrogation).

Thrusting a hot egg, gun barrel or snake into a victim’s rectum, plucking nails, hammering mouths with spikes on fingers at full force,” burning live skin, castration and being forced to eat the outcome and chopping years were among the horrendous state-sponsored torture methods employed by the colonial government during ‘screening’ sessions.

Those found to have the ‘Mau Mau look’ and ‘aura of evil’ were detained.

Those found to have no adherence to the militant group were put in lorries and shipped to ‘Native Reserves’ (home districts).

No one was to leave the ‘reserve’ without the permission of the chief as Caroline Elkins notes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.

The ‘divide and rule’ tactics employed by the colonialists also meant that Kenyans had to stick to their shagz eliminating all possibilities of ganging up against the imperialists.

Sir Baring died in 1973, but the taking to shagz-home districts- that took place during the State of Emergency stuck to date!