A place in the sun

In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five of them. ‘It is almost impossible to get at them to exterminate the lot,’ he wrote apologetically to his father, ‘though they get some pretty hot lessons occasionally for they are always shot like dogs when seen.’ A couple of years later, he improved his score by slaughtering almost 100 from a community that failed to provide the food he wanted.

Out of such violence was born the colony of Kenya. In 1895 the British government took over the assets of Hall’s company, a great swathe of territory acquired from the Kikuyu, after it proved unable to finance a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria — Nairobi was chosen as its inland depot. Charles Eliot, an early governor, decreed that no one with capital of less than £300 should be allowed to buy land, thus ensuring that Kenya would have some of the most expensive real estate in the empire, owned by some of its most aristocratic colonists. Drought, locusts and an unpredictable commodities market drove many to the wall, but nothing shook the self-assurance of the survivors. ‘It is hard to credit what a good opinion we had of ourselves in those days’, wrote Elspeth Huxley. ‘There was the empire, and there were we at the heart and centre of the world.’