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.
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