The Kenyan Highlands
The Great Depression hit Kenya hard. European settlers were often as poor as the ordinary Africans they were supposed to lord it over. When commodity prices collapsed there was no money at all. My late father remembered how white farmers survived on a diet of zebra biltong and maize meal. They wore rags and lived in mud huts with old petrol tins and tea-packing cases for furniture. Blackwater fever was rife. Cars were rare and people got around on mules or ox-carts.
In 1936 the Kakamega gold rush attracted bankrupt settlers from all over Kenya. I recently visited the old Kakamega goldfields and the land was honeycombed with abandoned mining shafts teeming with bats.
Nobody got rich in the gold rush, but my father always spoke fondly of the Depression years. He said, ‘Everybody was broke, but they were such happy times.’
There’s truth in that. My happiest times have often been when I was skint. My brother Kim and I were once extremely poor in London. Typical washed-up white Africans. We had a Sardinian friend called Bandito who got sick of us all being hungry. He drove his Ford Capri out into the countryside, stuffed a sheep in the back and brought it over to Finchley Road for us to slaughter. Happy, happy days.
I never was good with money. I briefly made a bit of cash selling a house in Nairobi. While holidaying at Lake Como I bought shares in Israeli technology stocks, Russian oil and a casino in Las Vegas. It was all gone very quickly and I was relieved when it went. With money, I felt vaguely American. Since then I have never had anything but debts. When I read the Sunday Times money section I cringe at the thought of what I would say in one of those interviews.
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