the European eye it was not even recognizable as a sheep. Lambing, every white man knew, had to take place in spring: but when was spring? Horticulture was just as challenging, and, as most East African tribes were pastoral, nobody knew what might grow. When he got the idea of harnessing an abandoned railway steam engine to a plow, Delamere had to teach his workers how to use it. At least he had space on his side. When the plowhands asked how they should turn, he said, “Don’t waste time turning. Just go straight on.” Delamere worked through disasters and diseases (his own, and his animals’), and everything failed at first. In the inaugural lambing at Njoro, only six lambs survived from four thousand ewes. When he ran a herd of donkey mares with a zebra stallion in the belief that such a cross would be resistant even to the dreaded tsetse fly, and therefore make an ideal East African draft animal, one of only four foals was shot by a visiting hunter who thought he had discovered a new species. And yet Delamere persisted, a living symbol of the imperial belief that virtue belonged to the Briton who struggled to control his own environment. After further debacles with wheat, he negotiated more loans, brought a horticulturalist out to Njoro, and evolved the first successful East African wheat breed. When this was established, he moved forty miles down the Rift to Soysambu, where he had bought ten thousand waterless acres and established a stock farm—he was a herdsman at heart. He was already selling wool to London, and in 1910 formed a company that was to open a chain of butcher shops, importing machinery for the country’s first cold store and bringing butchers over from England.
Delamere had already gone through well in excess of £80,000, though in his personal and domestic habits he was ascetic. He needed little sleep, often working from five one morning till two the next, and he had extraordinary stamina for one who suffered congenital poor health. When there was a labor shortage, he counted twenty-three thousand sheep by hand each week. He was also intimately involved in public affairs, and from the outset acted as the settlers’ leader in their perennial disputes with the administrators, speaking with a distinctive hectoring confidence that invariably carried the day. Delamere was a looming and controversial presence in the small white community. He was inclined to Lear-like outbursts of anger, though never with the Maasai, with whom he was as soft as butter. He laughed when they stole his cattle (Maasai, conveniently, believed that all the cattle in the world belonged to them, the same feeling the Cheyenne in America had about horses), and had learned to speak several Maa dialects. Many Europeans indulged in a kind of romantic cult of Maasai adulation: the bravery of an enemy appealed to the element of chivalry bound up in the imperial ideal, and the athletic Maasai form reminded a certain kind of settler of the classical hero. Others—all English-men—simply liked being despised. Yet there was no awareness of the complexities of tribal groupings, or of the multilayered threads of custom that bound Africans together in an elaborate sequence of delicate ligatures, or of the intricate system of fines and penalties that covered every transgression big or small. Sir Charles Eliot, commissioner for the Protectorate from 1900 to 1904 as well as a world authority on sea slugs, wrote that Europeans were not “destroying any old or interesting system but simply introducing order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism.”
Delamere and his wife, Florence, lived by the Mereroni River in Kikuyu rondavels, or thatched mud huts, and there was always space for travelers, especially those linked by the kinship of class. Early in the morning, cows woke the somnolent residents with hot gusts of fetid breath snorted through an opening. When the sun rose, skeins of flamingos returned from their nocturnal sortie and
Delamere had already gone through well in excess of £80,000, though in his personal and domestic habits he was ascetic. He needed little sleep, often working from five one morning till two the next, and he had extraordinary stamina for one who suffered congenital poor health. When there was a labor shortage, he counted twenty-three thousand sheep by hand each week. He was also intimately involved in public affairs, and from the outset acted as the settlers’ leader in their perennial disputes with the administrators, speaking with a distinctive hectoring confidence that invariably carried the day. Delamere was a looming and controversial presence in the small white community. He was inclined to Lear-like outbursts of anger, though never with the Maasai, with whom he was as soft as butter. He laughed when they stole his cattle (Maasai, conveniently, believed that all the cattle in the world belonged to them, the same feeling the Cheyenne in America had about horses), and had learned to speak several Maa dialects. Many Europeans indulged in a kind of romantic cult of Maasai adulation: the bravery of an enemy appealed to the element of chivalry bound up in the imperial ideal, and the athletic Maasai form reminded a certain kind of settler of the classical hero. Others—all English-men—simply liked being despised. Yet there was no awareness of the complexities of tribal groupings, or of the multilayered threads of custom that bound Africans together in an elaborate sequence of delicate ligatures, or of the intricate system of fines and penalties that covered every transgression big or small. Sir Charles Eliot, commissioner for the Protectorate from 1900 to 1904 as well as a world authority on sea slugs, wrote that Europeans were not “destroying any old or interesting system but simply introducing order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism.”
Delamere and his wife, Florence, lived by the Mereroni River in Kikuyu rondavels, or thatched mud huts, and there was always space for travelers, especially those linked by the kinship of class. Early in the morning, cows woke the somnolent residents with hot gusts of fetid breath snorted through an opening. When the sun rose, skeins of flamingos returned from their nocturnal sortie and
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