100 Years of the Irish in Kenya

 

100 years of the Irish in Kenya

2016 marked the 100th anniversary of the ‘1916 Rising’ in Ireland, a milestone on the country’s road to achieving independence in 1922. To commemorate that event, the Embassy of Ireland in Kenya organised an exhibition chronicling the presence and contribution of Irish people in Kenya since 1916. This article draws on the themes of that exhibition. (Kenya Past and Present, a publication of the Kenya Museum Society, which continues to do a sterling job)

 

 

The Irish have a long tradition of travel and emigration. Today, an estimated 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry and heritage — among them former US President, Barack Obama, whose other heritage is Kenyan. The Irish came to Kenya as entrepreneurs, teachers, doctors, coaches, aviators, farming and motoring pioneers, workers in nongovernmental organisations, and especially as missionaries, both religious and lay. The Kenya they encountered mirrored in many ways their own experience of home: agricultural, traditional, poor in material wealth, but rich in culture. They stayed to become an integral part of the development of a newly emerging African state which, like the country of their birth, had a strong desire for independence.

This history of the Irish in Kenya since 1916 outlines the stories of some of the Irish who travelled from a small island nation on the edge of Europe to contribute to and be a strong presence in the development of present-day Kenya. Coffee and the Holy Ghost Fathers Irish missionaries grew the first commercially viable coffee plants in Kenya and launched its coffee industry. In 1899 the Holy Ghost Fathers (today known as the Spiritans) from Ireland and France arrived in present-day Nairobi and settled in the then Kikuyuland, now Muthangari. They named their mission St Austin’s. One hundred coffee seedlings arrived with them, the plan being to grow coffee commercially to finance the mission. An Irish Spiritan, Father Tom Burke, was head of the mission. He was a young energetic Limerick man from a rural background. In 1905, Fathers Burke and Hemery tasted the first commercially viable coffee in Kenya. In 1906, the coffee appeared in a Nairobi shop and was soon being exported.

The coffee, an Arabica mocha blend, was quickly recognised as a commercial crop suited to the Kenyan climate. Farmers who had failed with other commercial crops set up large coffee plantations using seed from St Austin’s. Karen Blixen bought some of her seedlings from the mission. It was almost fifty years before a competitor would rival the mission plants. Motoring pioneer John Joseph Hughes was a visionary who contributed to farming, business and industry in Kenya in the first half of the 20th century. Hughes came to Kenya in 1920 as an advisor for the world’s largest buyer of flax. He quickly realised that a mixed farming policy, rather than monoculture, would suit local conditions better. He moved to the Agricultural Department of the government to develop this policy successfully. When his two-year contract ended Hughes joined forces with another Irishman, Tom O’Shea, a general outfitter in Eldoret, and travelled through western Kenya supplying farmers with goods.

In the 1920s Hughes secured the rights to import Model T Fords into Kenya. In this era of the Great Depression, he devised a modified form of barter whereby Model T Fords were sold in exchange for crops. It was a resounding success. In 1928 he set up Hughes Ltd. in Nakuru, which soon became the largest motor company in the country, capturing 52% of the motor market in Kenya. J.J. Hughes had a deep sense of responsibility towards his adopted country and set up a fully equipped training school for Kenyan mechanics.

After independence he became the Republic of Ireland’s first Honorary Consul to Kenya. In the 1920s Hughes secured the rights to import Model T Fords into Kenya. In this era of the Great Depression he devised a modified form of barter whereby Model T Fords were sold in exchange for crops. It was a resounding success. In 1928 he set up Hughes Ltd. in Nakuru, which soon became the largest motor company in the country, capturing 52% of the motor market in Kenya. J.J. Hughes had a deep sense of responsibility towards his adopted country and set up a fully equipped training school for Kenyan mechanics.  The Irish were central to the birth of aviation in Kenya. A Cork man, John Evans Carberry, formerly the 10th Baron Carbery [sic], came to Kenya in 1920 and brought his passion for flying with him. In 1928 he imported the country’s first registered aeroplane, christened ‘Miss Kenya’. Seeing the commercial potential in aviation he registered a new company, Kenya Aircraft Company Ltd. His second plane, ‘Miss Africa’, made the first civilian flight from Kenya to Croydon, England. Mrs Florence Wilson, a passenger on that flight, established Wilson Airport on her return. Carberry loaned his custom-built Percival Vega Gull to Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly solo east-west across the Atlantic in 1936. He also financed that flight. It is reported that Beryl Markham undertook the flight in response to Carberry's challenge.

Kenya Airways was founded in 1977 with technical and management support from Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national airline. Dublin man, Brendan Donohoe, seconded from Aer Lingus, was finance director of Kenya Airways in Nairobi in the 1990s. In 1994 he became general manager and part owner of Air East Africa, a successful cargo operation in the east and central African regions.

Retired Irish Honorary Consul, Joe O’Brien, is an engineer and licensed aerobatic flight instructor. He has trained people from all walks of life in aerobatic flying, from missionaries to the chair of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). From 1998 Joe was a volunteer aerobatics instructor for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). Over 14 years he trained eight pilots for the KWS Airwing, most of whom went on to become professional pilots. Joe O’Brien, in his eighties now, is still active as an engineer.

The Kenya Irish Society Originally the East African Irish Society, the Kenya Irish Society was co-founded in 1924 by Dublin man, Edward Keane Figgis. Figgis was a partner in the Nairobi-based Daly and Figgis law firm, the oldest law practice in Kenya and today known as Daly and Inamdar Advocates. In 1972, reflecting political changes in East Africa, the society became the Kenya Irish Society (KIS).

Ruth Hogan, a past president of the society, wrote a history of the many members and past presidents who contributed greatly to their adopted country. Among these: • Dublin man, John Clark Stronach, was the engineer for the building of Nairobi State House in the 1920s and became the country’s Director of Public Works in the 1940s. • Mayo man, Sir Joseph Sheridan, was Chief Justice in the 1930s and presided over the infamous Broughton Trial in 1941, where Sir Jock Delves Broughton was controversially acquitted of the murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll. • Another Dublin man, Archibald Thomas Ayres Ritchie, a graduate zoologist, arrived in the country after World War I and was Kenya’s Chief Game Warden from 1923 until 1950. • Sir Joseph Aloysius Byrne was the first Irishman to be appointed Governor of Kenya in 1931. He was a keen golfer, and the Sir Joseph Byrne Cup was awarded at the Royal Nairobi Golf Club for many years. • Mr Justice Bourke, later Sir Paget Bourke, was a senior Kenyan judge in the early 1950s. He was also an uncle to the first female president of the Republic of Ireland, Mary Robinson. • Cork man, Alfred (Fred) Dalton, was appointed first general manager of the newly formed East African Railways and Harbours Administration in 1948, a post he held until his retirement in 1953. He went on to become chairman of the Maize and Produce Control Board and also sat on the local civil service selection board.

Government and administration Prominent in the East Africa Power and Lighting Company (EAPL), Wexford man, Paddy Deacon, came to Kenya in the late 1940s. Paddy was head of personnel and management for EAPL. He recruited and trained Kenyan employees and established a residential training school. He ran management training courses for organisations such as Securicor, Mumias Sugar, KCB Bank, John Mowlem & Co. and the Nation Media Group. He was a governor of the Kenya Polytechnic and, together with Shell and British American Tobacco, founded the Federation of Kenya Employers. Among other things, he was also a member of the Industrial Court and served on the Board of Trustees of Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital for 27 years. In recognition of his contribution to his adopted country, then President Moi appointed him a Member of the Order of the Burning Spear in 1999.

St Patrick’s High School, Iten, was founded by Irish Patrician Bothers in 1961. It became the third secondary school for Kenyan boys north of Naivasha. In 1989, the school was one of the first in Kenya to start using computers. It is widely regarded as the best distance-running high school in the world. Coaching Kenya's champions The last two world recordholders of the 800 metres  — Wilson Kipketer and David Rudisha — were coached by former St Patrick’s High School principal, Brother Colm O’Connell. A Cork man, Brother Colm came to Kenya in 1976 for a few months and has stayed 40 years. Initially with no formal training in athletics, he has coached almost 30 Kenyan World and Olympic medallists. He is equally encouraging of girls and is credited with starting the influx of female athletes to Iten in the 1990s. The small high-altitude town in the Rift Valley is now a major centre of athletic excellence. Athletes from Kenya and around the globe live and train there. Today, Brother Colm, the ‘godfather of Kenyan running’, is still training champions. There are an estimated 120 athletics training camps in Kenya basing their approach on Brother Colm’s style of coaching. 

Missionaries By far the greatest number of Irish people to come to Kenya were missionaries, both lay and religious. Irish missionaries first arrived in the mid-19th century and passed on not only the gospel message but also many skills as a means of contributing to the social, technical and economic advancement of the Kenyans among whom they lived. Many hundreds came and stayed to work in a wide variety of pastoral and development activities, particularly in the areas of health care and education. They worked in every (then) province in Kenya. Forty Catholic missionary congregations and orders, either founded in Ireland or with Irish members, have worked, and are still working, in Kenya. Their contribution is manifest today in institutions such as the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, which was Nairobi’s first Catholic interracial hospital. The Church of Ireland, through the Church Missionary Society of Ireland (CMSI), and earlier as part of the Church Mission Society, has been present in Kenya since the mid-19th century. Irish Presbyterian missionaries, through Presbyterian Global Mission, have also been a presence in Kenya for many years. Their work continues today in areas such as Kajiado, Narok and Nairobi. One lay missionary was the Venerable Edel Quinn who established the Legion of Mary (a movement for lay missionaries) in Kenya in 1936. She broke new ground for missionaries by bringing together people of different races and ethnicities in mixed Legion branches. Travelling with her Islamic driver in an old 1932 Ford, she established branches in Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi. Motivations have changed since these early missionaries came to Kenya, but their commitment to the Kenyan people is as strong as ever. Today their focus includes justice and peace, ecology and working with the poorest of the poor.

Education — The quiet revolution  It was notably in the area of education that the Irish, in particular the missionaries, contributed to their new country. Irish missionaries established primary and secondary schools in every province in Kenya. Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, was taught by an Irish nun who had fought in Ireland’s War of Independence before becoming a nun. Sister Teresa Joseph O’Sullivan established the first Catholic high school for Kenyan girls in Limuru in 1936. Maathai acknowledged the nun’s influence in her memoir, Unbowed, saying Sister Teresa had aroused and encouraged her lifelong interest in science.

In 1983 Sr Teresa received an award from the National Council of Women in Kenya in recognition of her contribution to Kenyan women. St Mary’s School, Nairobi, is the Alma Mater of President Uhuru Kenyatta. It was founded by the Irish Holy Ghost Fathers in 1939. In the same area as St Mary’s is the prestigious Loreto Girls School, founded in 1921 by Irish Loreto nuns. In 2013, the Loreto Sisters were awarded the Kenyan Golden Jubilee Award for Excellence in Education.

Perhaps the most unusual Irish involvement with Kenyan health care was that of the so-called Flying Nuns of Turkana. In the early 1960s, the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM) sent young nuns to northwest Kenya to provide a mobile medical clinic. The young Sisters piloted flimsy two-seater aircraft, whose wings and fuselage were wrapped in Irish linen and spray-painted for durability. They flew over a desert of 51,000 sq. km, doing their own refuelling and basic maintenance, bringing the only available medical assistance to famine-stricken areas, their supplies usually samples from Ireland and the USA. Their work continued through the 1960s. A hospital and training centre was subsequently set up in Kakuma, which continues today under the supervision of the local diocese.

Dr Roland Burkitt had a practice in Nairobi in the 1920s with other Irish doctors. He was among the first to understand that, in cases of fever, lowering temperature quickly was necessary. A somewhat eccentric man, he was known to have driven a patient naked around Nairobi to this end! When found pouring water into the radiator of his car, after it boiled over coming up the escarpment, an old patient passed by and shouted, “Giving your car a spot of your own famous treatment, Burkitt?”

The better-known of the Burkitts was Professor Dr Denis Parsons Burkitt, surgeon, scientist and clinician, who came to Mombasa in 1943. He learned Kiswahili and trekked to equatorial Africa to establish his medical research. Denis Burkitt had an outstanding ability to observe disease patterns, identify their peculiarities and develop concepts and hypotheses. He won the Canada Gairdner International Award for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science in 1973, one among many awards. He was the first to describe a common and lethal form of childhood cancer in Africa and the first to discover its cure. African lymphoma, now known as Burkitt’s lymphoma, is a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma recognised as the fastest-growing human tumour, associated with impaired immunity. Burkitt first described the disease in 1958. He studied it in children with malaria and with the Epstein-Barr virus. Burkitt’s lymphoma is studied by medical students across the globe.

He was also the first medical researcher, thanks to his observations in Africa, connect a high fibre diet with better health. He was fond of saying, “If you have an enemy, give him your frying pan”. His pioneer book on the topic is The Fibre Man. He died in 1993. Gerald Edward Nevill was an Irish surgeon who made a major contribution to Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital, Nairobi, helping it become a modern paediatric institution, the first in sub-Saharan Africa. The chair of its Board of Management for 42 years, his contribution is recognised in a wing named after him at the hospital. In more recent times, Carmelite priest Dr Fr Robert McCabe’s research in Turkana into tropical diseases resulted in Desert Nomads, a book outlining solutions for providing healthcare in remote rural areas. It has become a recognised handbook for all those working in tropical medicine. These pictures and snippets illustrate but some of the stories of the Irish in Kenya. Today there is still a strong Irish presence in Kenya — almost 1,500 strong. Irish people work in the areas of business, education, non-governmental organisations, sport and in the United Nations, to name but a few. The deepening business relationships and the re-establishment of an official embassy in 2014 will inform future relations between Ireland and Kenya so that they can be strengthened by mutual understanding, respect and opportunity.

 

ABOUT THE Author Bróna Ní Mhuirí is the wife of the Ambassador of Ireland in Kenya. A former teacher of history and Gaelic language and teacher trainer, she has taught in a number of African countries. Photographs provided by the author.

(This article does not mention the evil some Irish priests did or the brutality of  Irish nuns as teachers)