Nairobi's Community Hill - A Short history

By JOHN KAMAU
Nairobi’s Community Hill still puzzles me.
It was from that very spot that the pioneer Nairobi administrator, John Ainsworth was taken by the powerful railway engineer, George Whitehouse in 1900 or thereabouts, to be shown some land – far from the railway line – where he could build structures for the Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) administrators who were to leave Machakos for Nairobi.
Here, he decided to put a camp for his police – and it is a scandal that these same structures were still occupied by administration police until this year when they burnt to the ground.
It is again on this hill, secure because of the topography, which Ainsworth built these very structures and on the opposite hill, on the grounds of National Museums, he built his residential house – which was demolished to give way to the Coryndon Museum, the modern day National Museums.
From these two hills his security would watch over Nairobi from a vantage point. But only fate had moved them there because the railway had taken the best lands in Ngara and was given priority over the government. Thus, the government was pushed to the edge of the Kikuyu escarpment.
From this buildings, now gone, lay the frustrations that IBEA officials went through in their efforts to make Nairobi a township. They were the first efforts to have government buildings concentrate around Community Hill – and the reason why that area still houses some many of government ministries to date.
It is in this area that in May 18, 1906 that Sir James Sadler, the Commissioner for the East African Protectorate suggested to Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State, that the future capital of Kenya should be built away from the plains. Sandler argued that the site selected by Uganda Railway managers had inadequate drainage, and was unsuitable for a large and growing population. Nobody listened. The government quarters continued to expand around Community Hill moving West to the wooded areas as business congregated near the railway line.
That story is now halfway buried in the ashes of the burnt down police lines. A chapter of Nairobi history is gone.
Sadler told Churchill that it had been pointed out that Nairobi was a “depression with a very thin layer of soil or rock. The soil was water-logged during the greater part of the year…”
It had been recommended that the town be removed “to some point on the hills”.
But the railway engineers were not seeing Nairobi emerge to anything more than an Indian township which they argued could “prosper inspite of insanitary conditions and chronic plague.” Without anyone noticing corrugated iron shops began to mushroom on the plains as Indian coolies, whose contracts had expired, started turning to business. Prostitutes, sightseers started crowding the new railway depot- some looking for fun, others for leisure. With amazing speed the railway depot started looking like a town. They called it Tinville! Those who hated it more called it City under the Sun due the scotching heat with no cover.

Of Nairobi's Doonholm Estate, cattle dips and Namirembe Church

By John Kamau

Before a gate knocked him dead, 77-year old colonial Nairobi farmer, Mr J.K. Watson had faded into oblivion.
Even today, very little is known of Watson, and libraries have since discarded his pictures, mementos, and all that he stood for.
Yet, no Kenyan has never seen the cattle dips that this man helped design in the countryside, or heard of Doonholm Estate in Nairobi where it was all began before spreading countrywide.
Still, this was the man who helped in the actual construction of early churches in East Africa and the most notable so far has remained Namirembe Hill church in Uganda.
That, some might argue is the reason why Doonholm Estate in Nairobi has interestingly refused to give up its colonial name.
The only time it did was when the former Doonholm Constituency (actually Watson’s Farm) once represented by Mwai Kibaki, changed its name to Bahati (and later Makadara) and when Doonholm Road became Jogoo Road shortly after independence.
I have always met people who wonder why an estate in what was exclusively an African neighbourhood has such a name or its place in this country’s history.
Let me try to reconstruct the reasons.
Although now a residential area, Doonholm was previously a dairy farm known still as Doonholm Estate, and named after Glasgow’s Doonholm Estate where its previous owner, J.K. Watson hailed from.
Initially a 4,600-acre farm that stretched from the eastern edge of City Stadium towards the modern-day Doonholm Estate this was the first place in Kenya to have a cattle dip and to initiate a serious experiment against east coast fever.
It was also the place where the first breeds of Ayrshires, named after Watson’s birthplace, Ayr, were first tried in East Africa earning him many trophies including a prestigious Gold Cup given by East African Standard.
From that perspective, it would be interesting to look again at Doonholm Estate and appreciate its place in Kenya’s dairy history.. Watson, was not ordinary colonial settler and had been one of the few architects and constructors whose passion was to construct roads and houses.
Perhaps long forgotten is that this was the man who dug up the cotton soil at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue and laid foundation for what the road is still today.
Thus in terms of drainage, and design Watson gets most of the credit for laying the Avenue, then Sixth Avenue, which is the widest of all in the city.
Also, when he found that he could not supply milk to the city – he was the first milk-man for Nairobi City- he decided to build a murram track that he named Doonholm Road and which is today known as Jogoo Road.
Doonholm Road was running through the farm and linked it to the city and that is the reason why it was at the edge of African estates that were built to accommodate the African labour force.
But it was his desire to breed grade cattle in the region, even before Lord Delamere, that made him well known in the white-elite circles although his legacy later cut across the racial divide. At Doonholm Estate, Watson had an office – nay house- where most of the famous buildings he later built were conceptualized. Among the most notable buildings is the famous Namirembe Church in Kampala, and the YMCA buildings in Nairobi.
Namirembe, which celebrated its 100 years in 1997, is the oldest Diocese in Uganda, and the construction of the church there by Watson turned the hill to become the cradle for Christianity in Uganda.
From Uganda, Watson also built the building now known as the Kenya National Archives, and residential houses in Muthaiga before he quit to concentrate on farming at Doonholm - considered the edge of Nairobi.
And like the powerful architecture that he gave the town of Nairobi, his contribution to farming was remarkable although it is the designing of cattle dips in Kenya that went to annals of history for a man who had been bluntly told in 1903 that there was no land for faming in Kenya.
Initially, his stock had started to die of east coast fever and Watson was told there was no cure and that if he had to control the ticks, picked from the Athi plains, he had to build dipping tanks.
Records show that he ordered the first drums of chemicals from Coopers and were delivered by Messrs Newlands and Tarlton.
From then on, Doonholm became an experimental farm and one of the memorable notes written to the Agricultural Society of Kenya, of which he was a pioneer acknowledged the role of Watson in East Africa.
The letter dated August 4, 1913 says: In time to come when the history of the stock industry in British East Africa comes to be written, as assuredly it will, it will always be remembered that J.K.Watson (of Doonholm Estate) was the pioneer of stock dipping in the protectorate”.
Interestingly, and like the disappearing cattle dips in the countryside, Watson’s name has not had any luck. But Doonholm Estate lives on, not as a livestock far, but inhabited by people who Watson had, perhaps fenced out!
So should Doonholm retain its name? It is a question that only you can decide…

The clumsy origins of Eldoret; once a boer town

By John Kamau
Eldoret is out- may be for a short period after witnessing the exodus of its second wave of investors.
Of all the fancy and clumsy stories about origins of some Kenyan towns that I have come across, Eldoret beats them all: Nine-zero.
This was the only Kenyan town that ostensibly had a bar that was never manned! Revelers would just go, take beer and leave the money at the counter- and if they needed change they would take the exact amount and stagger to the hyena-laden fields of Farm 64 as the emerging town was known then.
The story is told of how two thirsty revelers found that one of their own had accidentally locked the padlock and they broke the door, took their beer, paid as usual and left. For years, the story goes on, the bar operated without a door.
But that is as far as the juicy stories of Eldoret go. Perhaps it happened, or it is one of those Happy Valley tales.
I doubt it happened for one reason. Eldoret is one of the only towns in Kenya that was founded by South African and British rogues, renegades and perverts! So, one might just ask: at what point did they acquire this civility of taking beer, paying and taking the exact change. Total lies.
But what we know is that Eldoret was the epicenter of colonial notoriety, murders, rape and chicanery. What is currently amazing is that the town, or just “Eldy” as they call it, has managed to hide this notoriety and past and soldier on rising to become the fifth largest town in Kenya.
It all started in 1909 when about 280 Boers arrived in Kenya from South Africa with prefabricated houses, wagons, ploughs, cattle and sheep and started a mighty trek to the highlands looking for a place to settle. Something akin to the velds of South Africa where they had fled from fearing to be colonized by the British.
Led by Meneer Van Rensberg the group left Mombasa – where they arrived aboard a chartered German Boat “Windhoek” – on June 1908 and reached Nakuru on July 18, 1908. It was at Nakuru that the47 families dispersed to different routes but most veered towards modern day Eldoret with some 42 wagons.
It was in the Uasin Gishu plateaus that the group, interestingly aided by gun totting British rogues, that they managed to push out the Maasai to create what they called “breathing space” .
Colonial writer, Elspeth Huxley in her book "No Easy Way" captured the drama: "To get heavily-loaded wagons up this steep escarpment along the rough, narrow, treacherous track, with inexperienced oxen and in a wet year, was a truly remarkable feat, and only Afrikaners could have performed it...."
Famous American travel writer Negley Farson, in his 1947 book "Last Chance In Africa" says that Eldoret to the Boers looked like “ their beloved kopjes in the Transvaal -- they out-spanned at once, saying: 'Here is a land where our women can breed in space' ...
But why did they pick Eldoret? There is one story that has been passed on for generations.
It is said that one of the wagons that made it to Eldoret was carrying a heavy safe that collapsed at the site of Eldoret. An attempt by the Boers to lift it back to the wagon failed and they decided to build a bank around the safe!
By this time most of the best land had been grabbed by the whites who had christened the entire area “white highlands” and wanted to lock out ownership from everyone else. That is how the Nandi’s lost most of their land here.
Of course the boers were no ordinary settlers but cowards (fleeing Anglo-Boer war!) perverts, and racists. It was the Nandis who paid a heavy price dealing with them.
The british also had no time for the boers who had taken up farms here that had been surveyed by the Royal engineers.
Farm 64 had been allocated to a boer named Willie van Aardt and it was him who built the first post office since he could not make a living out of the farm. Thus, the story of Eldoret township started after Aardt started getting applications for business plots on the farm.
The British administration sent one of its administrators, N.F. Corbett to build a stone house opposite the New Lincoln Hotel. It was opposite here that they build a corrugated iron police station and a District Commissioners residence from the remaining material.
All this time Eldoret had no name and was just Farm 64 and farmers had to be summoned by Governor, Sir Percy Girouard to give it a name.
The names suggested included Girouardfontein, Sirikwa, Sosiani, Bado Kidogo, and finally, Eldare. It was the governor who suggested that a ‘t’ be inserted at the end to read Eldaret but due to a typing error in the official gazette the name was spelt “Eldoret” in the gazette notice of January 1, 1912 and it was never rectified!
The Bank built by the boers became The Standard Bank but the Cape Town office allegedly refused to approve the premises unless bars were fitted in the windows. Historian, A.T. Mason captures what happened: “ all the paraphenaria of city banking arrived, including a brass plate which was quickly affixed to the mud and wattle wall. On one occasion its manager J.C Shaw told the office boy to patch the flaking mud but the Swahili of both the manager and the worker was meager with the result that when Shaw returned he found the wall had disintegrated under repeated onslaughts with buckets of water and the safe was outside in the mud!”
It is said that because there was no accommodation in Eldoret, some of the customers slept at the counter and took their morning bath at the bank or at a bar next door known as The Eddy’s. It is the Eddy’s that had been broken into by the revelers to have a beer.
Unlike other towns Eldoret used the Kruger coins as its currency and its District Commissioner had very little hold of the boers and the town was basically neglected and the public works department did not encourage stone buildings hoping to remove the corrugated iron and go elsewhere.
The DC had to refer all decisions to Naivasha or Nairobi and had no powers and in 1913 the first DC resigned in protest.
But it rose to service the agricultural farms with fuel and as a post office and by 1924 the railway arrived connecting the town to the coast.
Even today, the Boer legacy on this town can be seen in the old buildings and churches.

The children of the Happy Valley



In 1956 Leo Hoyle, of the royal Irish Fusiliers, become the first European in Kenya to be sentenced to death for raping and murdering an African woman to ostensibly “ end her agony” of being kicked out of her house.
The decision was, however, reversed by the court of appeal which declared him “legally insane” and reduced the sentence to a few months in jail.
Lots of Kenyans are wondering why there is seething outrage over the light sentence recently passed on Tom Cholmondeley. It is because the history of justice in Kenya appears to have been tilted in pre-post independent Kenya. The recent case of Tom Gilbert Cholmondeley and the eight months he got should not come as a shock. It joins a long list of such cases that have escaped the attention of Kenyans.
August 18, 1960 remains an important date because that was the date when a small crowd of about 300 people gathered outside Nairobi Prison to witness the hanging of Peter Harold Poole—the first and only white to be hanged in both colonial and independent Kenya — for killing an African, Kamame Musunga for throwing stones at his dogs. The case had actually torn the nation down the middle and had to be decided by the Governor who actually refused to intervene and Mr Poole was hanged at 8am in Nairobi prison. Today, his papers signed by Prison Superintendent J. A Mkinney and Nairobi medical officer, Dr D.H Mackay lie in our archives as part of our history.
White settlers had tried to push Tom Mboya, then Kanu secretary for Nairobi, to organise Africans to petition the governor to exercise the prerogative of mercy on Mr Poole, but Mr Mboya knew the political dangers of such an attempt.
Hanging those days was supposed to be a statement and dramatic too. That is why two hours after Mr Poole was hanged a notice was posted at the prison gates reading: “The sentence to death passed on Peter Poole by the Supreme Court has been carried out at 8 O’clock.” That was history. Mr Poole had entered the annals of Kenya history by becoming the first white to be hanged for killing a black man.
Nothing indicates the level of different thoughts going through the white and black communities than two comments made that morning and captured by the newspaper journalists who covered the drama: “May courage be rewarded in Heaven!, shouted one white man. “Justice has been done!” shouted a black man who was promptly arrested by the prison wardens. But Poole was just unlucky! Others who had committed macabre murders had gotten away with light sentences. “Happy Valley” has always had its tales. It was in the Soysambu Farm that Third Baron Delamere threatened to shoot any trespasser— including government surveyors —who set foot on the property. In 1908, he had also led a protest to Government House to demand the resignation of Governor James Hayes Sander for “being pro-native”.
Look at the case of Col Ewart Grogan. He was charged with murder of two African rickshaw riders whom he flogged to death in front of a magistrate. He even chased Police Superintendent, a major Smith, as he tried to intervene. Despite this, the murder charge was reduced to “assault” and he got two months of hard labour which he spent sitting in a “prison” opposite the Norfolk Hotel. There was also the case of a settler named Harris who flogged a farm labourer to death in 1943 poured kerosene on him and torched him. Smith was released on a bail by a High Court judge and later fined Sh600.
There was also the case of Walter Wilkin was on February 13, 1964 charged with murdering 33-year-old butcher Mwangi Kamau by locking him in a box and suffocating him to death. Wilkin got away with a light sentence of six years passed by the Chief Justice Sir John Ainsley. Wilkin had in 1955 also shot dead a Mr Wallace Gitagia, but the state entered a nolle prosequi.In 1980, Kenyans watched as an US sailor Frank Sandstrom walked away to freedom after paying a bond of Sh500 to keep peace after he admitted killing Monica Njeri, a Mombasa prostitute.
The case caused an outrage in parliament as the Attorney General, James Karugu, said he was not satisfied with the verdict. By that time Sandstrom had bolted to freedom.
And now Kenyans have watched yet another man get a light sentence. The White Highlands may be no more, but the Happy Valley is for real.

THE WORLD OF BANTU MWAURA


Two weeks ago we met in the streets of Nairobi. Bantu Mwaura was still in his true self: jovial, candid. We were both in a hurry but spent 10 minutes chatting. For five minutes he had lectured me on politics. We talked about arts - the Kenya National theatre and the general trend that arts business is taking.