Kenya Nostra
This is partly an admirably written life of Hugh Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere : " small, slight and rather ugly, with ginger hair, a large nose and a small mouth, keen and piercing blue eyes, and a delightful smile " ; with a violent temper, a taste for " boisterous humour," and a belief in the fundamental rightness of the feudal system. When a boy at Eton he wrecked a bootshop, and threw the boots and shoes all over the High Street ; and as a settler he locked the manager of the Norfolk Hotel; Nairobi, in his own meat safe when he said it was after closing time. Bored by the " orderliness and restraint " of life on his estate at Vale Royal, even in the hunting season, Delamere turned for distraction to lion-shooting in East Africa. Africa interested him more than lions. The last and most exciting of a succession of African journeys during the 1890s took him from Berbera, through the Galla country (along the undemar- cated Abyssinian frontier) into the Kenya highlands—and by 1902 he had decided to give up England, buy land, 100,000 acres of it, and settle. In this he was helped by Sir Charles Eliot, at that time H.M. Commissioner in East Africa, who believed in the policy of White settlement : " We are not destroying any old or interesting system, but simply introducing order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism." (But Eliot also disliked violence in any form, and suggested that every officer who came to East Africa should be given several medals on arrival at Mombasa, one of which should be taken away for every campaign which he initiated in his distr:ct.)
For the next thirty years Delamere's life was wholly involved in the settlers' struggle : the, struggle to make the production of wheat, maize, wool, meat, dairy products, profitable ; the struggle to strengthen the political power of the settlers in relation to the Admini- stration and the Colonial Office ; and the struggle for the " solidifi- cation of the White ideal." Farming and politics became inex- tricably tied up : as Sir Winston Church:ll said in My African Journey, " every White man in Nairobi is a politician, and most of them are leaders of parties.' Delamere's enormous physical energy (he breakfasted at 4 a.m. every morning off gazelle chops, to the accompaniment of his favourite tune," All Aboard for Margate," Played several times over on the gramophone) enabled him to stand the strain better than most. So he lived this exuberant, many-sided kind of life ; trying to find strains of wheat that were resistant to rust, and to breed sheep that were resistant to ticks ; experimenting with ostrich farms ; crossing zebras with donkeys ; talking late into the night with Masai herdsmen ; building twenty-mile pipe-lines ; starting wheat mills, creameries, bacon-curam factories ; opening it hotel in Tanganyika ; living in the main on mortgages and over- drafts ; campaigning against Jewish settlement in Kenya and against a common electoral roll for Indians ; resigning from the Legislative and Executive Councils (and going back again) ; taking part in deputations to Secretaries of State canvassing Smuts' support for his idea of a " White Settler backbone " to Africa, from the Cape to the Abyssinian frontier ; organising conferences to promote East African federation, and giving lavish, champagne dinners to win over the waverers.
But Mrs. Huxley's book is only in part biography.. It is partly also an apologia pro Kenya nostra—and that is, of course, one reason for this new edition. Much of what she has to say about Kenya history and politics (from an intelligent and sensitive White seleler's standpoint) is of contemporary interest. It is interesting to know that fear of " Gold-Coastism " was abroad as early as 1925, and that Delamere organised his first unofficial East African conference in that in that year because he was afraid of the extension of what he called the " West Coast policy "—" the policy of developing African dependencies as purely native states where the white man had no place save that of temporary administrator and teacher, states from which the European would ultimatOy withdraw alto- gether." But since this is apologetics, there is a tendency to emphasise familiar themes and present conventional characters. are is so often confronted with the degenerate Indian, the lazy, leisure-loving native, the inert bureaucracy, the empty unpeopled highlands, that one is forced to wonder whether Indians were ever tin fact so degenerate, natives so lazy, bureaucrats so inert, or highlands so unpeopled. Moreover, if this stylised society ever existed outside the settlers' fancies, it was already changing, as Mrs. Huxley is aware, while the history of which she writes was being As she puts it, nostalgically, in her preface, " To have seen in the dignified but naked savage ... the smooth-tongued legislator, the Bachelor of Arts, the doctor or even • .. the trousered clerk and self-confident school-teacher of teday. would have demanded a more
prophetic imagination than any of the newcomers could muster." This eighteenth-century world of hard-living, hard-drinking, landed politicians was built on the assumption that the Africans would accept the roles of submissive eighteenth-century peasants, labourers and servants for which they were cast. But Africans have begun to look for other, more interesting partS. They are no longer will- ing to leave politics to their betters. They have even questioned Delamere's self-evident proposition that Whites are " better." Antonio was, like Delamere, a charming man : but he had no adequate answer to Shylock's point : " If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ? If you poison us, do we not die ? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? " Remembering the settlers' revolt which Delamere helped to plan in 1923, but which turned out to be unnecessary, one might add : " The villainy you teach me I will execute ; and it shall go hard but
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