riverbeds of the Northern Frontier District chewing
mswaki
twigs and balancing on one leg, like herons.
Among these stood the mission African, the parody of the white man. Mission schools, of which there were forty in Kenya in 1911, were situated mainly on the coast. But secular colonists were already influencing the lives of coastal peoples more decisively than missionaries. The first large tribe to be deeply affected were the Giriama, cultivators who were compelled to pay tax to representatives of the Crown and send young men as laborers to government projects and plantations. Similarly, male Nyamwezi, who came from what was then central German East Africa, were working as porters for European farmers or pimply district officers straight out of Cambridge setting off to administer an area the size of England. A Nyamwezi could march with fifty pounds on his head as easily as with nothing, and his tribe, who had carried the chains of the slave caravans and the chop boxes of the first explorers, had naturally taken up the desks and ledgers of the next tribe of invaders.
EVERYONE AT THE NORFOLK was talking about the highlands, so, at the end of his first week, Denys returned to the railway station and set off through twenty-seven miles of juniper-wooded hills to the summit of the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley, part of a 3,700-mile continental fault system that slashes Africa from Mozambique to the Red Sea (where it continues to northern Syria). Operating since ancient times as a natural frontier for both humans and animals, the Rift is Kenya’s most outstanding topographical feature, a fold in the surface of the earth and a literal rift across the country, its escarpments dipping to a tawny floor of savanna teeming, then, with game. The Kenyan Rift varies in width, narrowing at Lake Elmenteita and flaring out again, like a skirt, at Lake Naivasha. Denys headed toward the thin middle section to stay with Lord Delamere, the most influential white man ever to settle in Kenya.
Hugh Cholmondeley, the third baron Delamere, always had the same meal for his tea: gazelle chops, blancmange, and tinned peaches consumed to the accompaniment of “All Aboard for Margate” on the windup gramophone. A gnomelike figure with red hair and a large nose, he was to become a firm friend of Denys’s through the African years despite their differences. Besides his height and comic appearance, Delamere lacked Denys’s charisma as well as his literary sensibility and musical gifts, but he could have taught Denys about ambition and achievement. Through focus, application, and monomania, he had kick-started East African agriculture.
Delamere had grown up on his family estate, Vale Royal in Cheshire, and acquired a taste for big-game hunting on a trip to Somaliland when he was twenty-one. In 1897, he trekked south from Somaliland and after a thousand miles on foot emerged on the northern levels of the Laikipia Plateau. There he looked out over the highlands—the fertile foothills, the temperate, cedar-forested slopes of the Aberdares, the rioting invasion of soundless life that followed the rains—and, after what he had been through, he thought he had found the promised land. He grew increasingly certain that the white man could develop these well-watered highlands, and it was a passionately held belief that determined the course of his life. Ever since he and his wife moved to Kenya in 1902, they had been experimenting with large-scale agriculture and battling to prove that white men could live permanently in the tropics (although they had left their infant son in Cheshire, just in case). Delamere had acquired land at Njoro, in the southwestern Rift—the equator ran through a corner of it, so he called it Equator Ranch—and sent voluminous orders home for stock and equipment. The difficulties facing the pioneering farmer, struggling to introduce British methods, were immense. The Maasai ewe was so shaggy that to
mswaki
twigs and balancing on one leg, like herons.
Among these stood the mission African, the parody of the white man. Mission schools, of which there were forty in Kenya in 1911, were situated mainly on the coast. But secular colonists were already influencing the lives of coastal peoples more decisively than missionaries. The first large tribe to be deeply affected were the Giriama, cultivators who were compelled to pay tax to representatives of the Crown and send young men as laborers to government projects and plantations. Similarly, male Nyamwezi, who came from what was then central German East Africa, were working as porters for European farmers or pimply district officers straight out of Cambridge setting off to administer an area the size of England. A Nyamwezi could march with fifty pounds on his head as easily as with nothing, and his tribe, who had carried the chains of the slave caravans and the chop boxes of the first explorers, had naturally taken up the desks and ledgers of the next tribe of invaders.
EVERYONE AT THE NORFOLK was talking about the highlands, so, at the end of his first week, Denys returned to the railway station and set off through twenty-seven miles of juniper-wooded hills to the summit of the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley, part of a 3,700-mile continental fault system that slashes Africa from Mozambique to the Red Sea (where it continues to northern Syria). Operating since ancient times as a natural frontier for both humans and animals, the Rift is Kenya’s most outstanding topographical feature, a fold in the surface of the earth and a literal rift across the country, its escarpments dipping to a tawny floor of savanna teeming, then, with game. The Kenyan Rift varies in width, narrowing at Lake Elmenteita and flaring out again, like a skirt, at Lake Naivasha. Denys headed toward the thin middle section to stay with Lord Delamere, the most influential white man ever to settle in Kenya.
Hugh Cholmondeley, the third baron Delamere, always had the same meal for his tea: gazelle chops, blancmange, and tinned peaches consumed to the accompaniment of “All Aboard for Margate” on the windup gramophone. A gnomelike figure with red hair and a large nose, he was to become a firm friend of Denys’s through the African years despite their differences. Besides his height and comic appearance, Delamere lacked Denys’s charisma as well as his literary sensibility and musical gifts, but he could have taught Denys about ambition and achievement. Through focus, application, and monomania, he had kick-started East African agriculture.
Delamere had grown up on his family estate, Vale Royal in Cheshire, and acquired a taste for big-game hunting on a trip to Somaliland when he was twenty-one. In 1897, he trekked south from Somaliland and after a thousand miles on foot emerged on the northern levels of the Laikipia Plateau. There he looked out over the highlands—the fertile foothills, the temperate, cedar-forested slopes of the Aberdares, the rioting invasion of soundless life that followed the rains—and, after what he had been through, he thought he had found the promised land. He grew increasingly certain that the white man could develop these well-watered highlands, and it was a passionately held belief that determined the course of his life. Ever since he and his wife moved to Kenya in 1902, they had been experimenting with large-scale agriculture and battling to prove that white men could live permanently in the tropics (although they had left their infant son in Cheshire, just in case). Delamere had acquired land at Njoro, in the southwestern Rift—the equator ran through a corner of it, so he called it Equator Ranch—and sent voluminous orders home for stock and equipment. The difficulties facing the pioneering farmer, struggling to introduce British methods, were immense. The Maasai ewe was so shaggy that to
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