Harry Belafonte's first visit to Kenya (in his own words)

 

Belafonte’s first visit to Kenya,

In his own words from his book.

 

As the images of the funeral (of John F. Kennedy) reverberated in all our minds and a new president inherited the challenge of passing the Civil Rights Bill, I flew to Africa for a celebration full of joy and promise: Independence Day for Kenya. With me, I brought Miriam and several musicians, though not Millard Thomas, who sadly had died of cancer. Miriam and I were received like visiting royalty. We sat in the reviewing stand as tribe after tribe paraded. On one side of us was Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first prime minister who vowed that tribal rivalries would be buried and forgotten in the new republic. On the other was Prince Philip, representing the British Crown. At some point, the British flag was lowered and the Kenyan flag was hoisted up to take its place. Carefully, the British flag was folded and handed over to Prince Philip, who put it on his lap. I was within earshot of him as he turned to an aide: “You know, I never really appreciated the vastness of the British Empire until I started receiving all those flags.”

After the ceremony came the concert, in a vast amphitheatre, to which we walked with all the tribes. There among were very proud and very tall Masai warriors who were simply transfixed with Miriam Makeba. After greeting us with much flattery, one of them started talking and gesturing toward Miriam and then to me. Finally, a translator stepped in. “He would like to know,” the translator said, “if you would be good enough to sell Miriam to him for ten head of cattle.”

I declined the kind offer as gently as I could and managed to refrain from teasing Miriam until we’d moved on. But that moment in its own way, showed just how deeply rooted tribal customs were in the new democracy. Independence in Africa as Sekou Toure and other new leaders were finding was hard to achieve but even harder to manage.

John F. Kennedy and the politics of the African student airlift

 

JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE STUDENT AIRLIFT

At a key point in the 1960 presidential campaign, a dynamic young leader from Kenya named Tom Mboya visited Senator John F. Kennedy. Mboya led a campaign of his own that would eventually bring hundreds of African students to America for higher education, including Barack Obama Sr., President Obama's father. Kennedy's decision to support the effort became an issue in the election and possibly a factor in his narrow victory.

American Education for African Students

Senator John F. Kennedy and Tom Mboya first met in 1959 at a conference on international affairs. Just 28 years old, Mboya was a labour leader and rising political star in Kenya's liberation movement. At the time, he was on a speaking tour of North America seeking scholarships for Kenyan and other East African students whose opportunities for higher education under colonial rule were severely limited. Kennedy expressed interest in Mboya's initiative.

Tom Mboya's personal quest secured dozens of scholarships from American and Canadian institutions. He also attracted a number of key supporters, including businessman William Scheinman, former baseball star Jackie Robinson, singer Harry Belafonte, and actor Sidney Poitier. Along with several others, they created the African American Students Foundation (AASF), which raised funds for travel and living expenses. Their fundraising supplemented money raised by African students' families and tribal groups. 

On September 11, 1959, eighty-one students from East Africa arrived in New York City on a chartered flight. After two days of orientation the students dispersed to colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. Based on the success of the 1959 program, AASF obtained new scholarships for approximately 250 additional students from Kenya and six other East African countries, but they still had to raise $90,000 to cover the cost of airfare. 

A Desperate Appeal

As the 1960-61 academic year drew closer, the situation was growing desperate. Appeals to the Department of State for help with transportation were rebuffed. Jackie Robinson approached Vice President Nixon on behalf of AASF and Nixon agreed to contact the State Department—again to no avail.

With the future of the project in jeopardy, Tom Mboya returned to the United States. On July 26, he flew to Cape Cod for a meeting with Senator Kennedy. Accompanying Mboya were his brother Alphonse (who was studying at Antioch College), William Scheinman, and Frank Montero, president of AASF.

Scheinman provided a thorough briefing about the situation of the East African students and asked the senator if he would take up their cause with the State Department. Kennedy doubted that he would have any more success on this front than Nixon. He discussed the options for private funding and promised a donation of $5,000 from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation as long as the AASF promised not to publicize his involvement.

Senator Kennedy followed up with a call to his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, executive director of the Kennedy Foundation, asking him to find out if other private foundations would make contributions. Shriver's contacts over the next few days yielded no additional support.

JFK then recommended that the Kennedy Foundation contribute the entire amount needed for the 1960 airlift. In addition to this initial $100,000 contribution, the foundation would pledge up to $100,000 more to assist students with basic living expenses in the United States. The AASF was informed about this decision on August 10 and reminded again not to publicize the donation.

Word did leak out, however, and the Nixon campaign learned that the Kennedy Foundation was financing the airlift. A Nixon campaign staff member then went back to the State Department, which promptly reversed its previous decisions and offered to provide $100,000 for the project. The AASF board ultimately accepted the Kennedy Foundation's support and urged the State Department to make its funding available to other needy African students.

Philanthropy and Politics

The situation soon erupted into a political issue. A member of Vice President Nixon's campaign strategy board, Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, publicly praised the State Department's grant on August 16, neglecting to mention the prior commitment of the Kennedy Foundation.

Speaking the next day on the Senate floor, Senator Scott charged, according to an article in The New York Times "that a charitable foundation operated by the family of Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic Presidential candidate had 'outbid' the Government and would foot the $100,000 bill. He said this had been done for 'blatant political purposes.' Senator Kennedy took the floor and read a telegram from Frank Montero, head of the African American Students Foundation, refuting this charge. The Massachusetts Senator said it was the 'most unfair, distorted and malignant attack I have heard in fourteen years in politics.'"

JFK continued by detailing the sequence of events that led to pledging financial support for the African airlift. He concluded his rebuttal of Senator Scott with an assertion that "the Kennedy Foundation went into this quite reluctantly... It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved. Nevertheless, Mr. Mboya came to see us and asked for help, when none of the other foundations could give it, when the Federal Government had turned it down quite precisely. We felt something ought to be done. To waste 250 scholarships in this country, to waste $200,000 these people had raised, to disappoint 250 students who hoped to come to this country, it certainly seemed to me, would be most unfortunate, and so we went ahead."

Other senators, from both sides of the aisle, came out in support of Kennedy. Vice President Nixon also appeared to distance himself from Scott's accusations. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, subsequently attacked the State Department's apparent surrender to partisan politics and sent a letter to Secretary of State Christian Herter demanding answers to a series of questions regarding his department's involvement in the affair.

The controversy received a good deal of attention in the press over the next few weeks. Commentary in African American newspapers was especially critical. A writer in The Pittsburgh Courier editorialized: "One of Nixon's henchmen showed State the deep point that the Kennedy gift would be worth a lot of Negro votes, which it would be best for Nixon to have in a tight contest, so all of a sudden State recalled that it had been for the project from the beginning!"

 

JFK's slim margin of victory in the 1960 presidential election could not be credited to any single group of supporters. But winning 68 percent of the African American vote was significant, amounting to a 7 percent increase compared with the previous election.

Encouraging Democracy in Africa

Fifteen former French, British, and Belgian colonies in Africa became independent during the summer and fall of 1960. Kennedy repeatedly stressed the importance of the United States reaching out to these emerging nations. Viewing American support as vital to their future, he also framed it as part of the larger Cold War struggle for hearts and minds—as in these remarks to a women's organization:

I believe that if we meet our responsibilities, if we extend the hand of friendship, if we live up to the ideals of our own revolution, then the course of African revolution in the next decade will be towards democracy and freedom and not towards communism and what could be a far more serious kind of colonialism. For it was the American Revolution, not the Russian revolution, which began man's struggle in Africa for national independence and national liberty. When the African National Congress in Rhodesia called for reform and justice, it threatened a Boston Tea Party, not a Bolshevik bomb. African Leader Tom Mboya invokes the American dream, not the Communist Manifesto.

By mid-September, "Airlift Africa, 1960" brought 295 students to New York City on four separate flights. (Many people referred to it as "The Kennedy Airlift.") Among those meeting with the students during their orientation week were Eunice Shriver of the Kennedy Foundation, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X. The students enrolled in colleges and high schools in forty-one states and several Canadian provinces.

They would face challenges on many levels—dealing with racial segregation (particularly for those on campuses in the South), different social and cultural norms, and much higher costs for basic living expenses. At the same time, small support groups formed around many students, helping them to cope and to feel that they had a home away from home. In the process, a number of lifelong friendships were formed.

Another Presidential Connection

A large proportion of the students would subsequently assume leadership positions in government and the professions in their home countries. One of them was the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya. Another Kenyan, a 23-year-old named Barack Obama, was inspired by the 1959 airlift and made his own way to the University of Hawaii. The first African to study in Hawaii, Obama was supported in part by an AASF scholarship fund set up by Jackie Robinson. He graduated at the top of his class. At the university, he met and married an American student named Ann Dunham. Their son, Barack H. Obama Jr., was born on August 4, 1961.

The airlifts continued through 1963, eventually bringing more than 750 East African students to the United States. Kenya would celebrate its independence in a ceremony on December 12, 1963, three weeks after President Kennedy's death. Tom Mboya went on to hold several senior ministry posts in the new Kenyan government, and many expected he would one day become the nation's leader. Tragically, he was assassinated in Nairobi in 1969.

COURTESY OF THE JFK LIBRARY

 

RIP HARRY BELAFONTE

 

RIP HARRY BELAFONTE

(1-3-1927 == 25-04-2023)

 

For just a few minutes in 1963, I had the privilege and honour to shake hands with the great Harry Belafonte in Nairobi. The late Pius Menezes who was responsible for bringing many, many international celebrities to Kenya had asked me to come and join him for a cup of tea at his shop in the old Ambassador Building (quite new in 1963). I used to meet him there quite regularly. The moment I stepped in the doorway, I almost fell to the floor … there standing in real life was the great Harry Belafonte. I was over every planet in the universe. Pius had invited Harry and the South African superstar Miriam Makeba to Kenya’s independence celebrations. Later in the week Pius and Quitty held a reception for all of Pius’ international guests at the Goan Gymkhana. That magical moment with Harry Belafonte has lived with me all of my life.

Here is a report of that time:

BY DENNIS MCDOUGAL (Los Angeles times)

JUNE 23, 1985 

 ADDIS ABABA

 

It’s been more than 20 years since the king of “Day-O” has had a hit in his native United States--but Harry Belafonte is still something of a living legend in Africa. The Harlem-born high school dropout has become a kind of calypso statesman who seems to carry more clout around with him in places like Ethiopia and Tanzania than a Soviet foreign minister or an American secretary of state.

From Nairobi to Khartoum, his recognition factor alone is probably 10 times that of Andrei Gromyko and George Shultz put together.

(Interestingly, in the official Ethiopian press--which diligently tries not to credit the United States for the aid that makes up about 40% of Ethiopia’s total relief imports--Belafonte is characterized as a “Caribbean” singer.)

During Kenya’s independence celebration in 1963, Belafonte and singer Miriam Makeba were invited to sing, but they weren’t relegated to some obscure corner of the room after their performances. Kenya President Jomo Kenyatta sat Belafonte down at the head table, right next to Prince Philip. The singer watched Philip fold up the Union Jack that once flew over the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and take it home to his wife in Buckingham Palace as a memento of a British colonialism that was in its final throes in Africa.

Twenty-three years later, during these diseased days of African famine and pestilence, Belafonte’s early ties to an independent Africa are turning out to be curiously important. Belafonte, who finishes up his own diplomatic mission to Africa this week, is emerging as a leading figure in a new kind of foreign policy that circumvents both Washington and Moscow.

“If we had struck an honorable treaty with a lot of these countries at the end of the colonial era, a lot of these troubles we are facing with them today would be non-existent,” Belafonte told Calendar during a break last week in his USA for Africa tour of Eastern Africa.

But Belafonte said that he believes the United States was responsible for upheavals, perhaps even assassinations, “thinking we could have our own way.

“So a lot of moderate guys are killed off in the beginning of African independence and we just polarized everything. In come the Soviets and they find this situation where they can push their thing. A lot of the loyalties you find in a lot of these countries can be traced back to the rebels who fought against the colonialist onslaught. The only really friendly persons around for a lot of these guys--especially young minds caught up in the fever of independence--were the Marxist forces.”

Though carefully reasoned, Belafonte diplomacy certainly isn’t the kind of policy analysis issued by State Department pundits. He doesn’t always go through channels. He tolerates, sidesteps, even ignores government bureaucracy. Instead, he croons his apolitical call to aid crippled populations, regardless of their politics, directly to the people.

Two weeks ago, the 57-year-old singer led the ubiquitous USA for Africa delegation into the oft-times medieval world of East Africa. Belafonte’s breakneck pace in covering four drought-plagued countries in 16 days wore out several members of his entourage, but there seems to be little question that it has been effective.

“He’s like something of a god over here,” said Ken Kragen, the manager of Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie who co-founded and runs the fledgling USA for Africa Foundation. “Mention Harry’s name and people fall down in front of you. They’ll do anything.”

“There’s no question of its importance,” one American official of an Addis Ababa-based private relief agency told Calendar. “He and this USA for Africa thing are keeping the famine problem high in everybody’s minds.”

Where career diplomats have frequently failed to obtain presidential audiences, Belafonte and friends have been ushered in on the simple strength of his mythical name. Both Ethiopian Marxist Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam and Tanzanian Socialist President Julius Nyerere--chairman of the Organization of African Unity--welcomed the chance to chat with the man who indelibly etched such immortal lines as “Come mister tally man, tally me banana” forever into the American consciousness.

And Belafonte still had time to take Julie, his wife of 28 years, to a command performance (by Belafonte’s command, as it turned out) of “Othello,” acted by the Ethiopian National Theater troupe in Ethiopia’s Amharic tongue.

If Belafonte had indeed been from the Caribbean, he might never have become Hollywood’s unofficial ambassador to Black Africa.

“As a kid growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, most of my perceptions of Africa were really like what the movies said,” Belafonte told Calendar. “It was what Johnny Weissmuller did in the trees and all of these frightened natives who stumbled through their own environment, who were afraid of their own shadows.

“So, as a kid, if you are psychologically bombarded with this--when you grow up you begin to believe that blacks are inferior, blacks are stupid--you somehow feel that you are legitimately the cursed race.”

When he joined the Navy during World War II, Belafonte’s segregated all-black division exposed him for the first time to black intellectuals and gave him his first taste of the 1940s and ‘50s Back-to-Africa movement, spurred on by Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, an educator and founder of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

“I ran into a bunch of guys who were much older than me who went to college at Tuskegee or Howard University. And they were talking very politically, about the war and about Ethiopia when the Italians did their invading.

“I didn’t understand all that much what they were talking about. But one of them gave me a book called ‘The World and Africa’ by Dr. DuBois, and it was my first major exposure to anything other than the Tarzan concept of Africa.”

He made up his own bibliography of African source texts from DuBois’ footnotes and went to the Chicago Public Library to check them out. The librarian told him the list was too long, so. . . .

“I told her just to give me everything by this fellow ibid because his name showed more than anyone else’s in the footnotes,” Belafonte recalled.

Perhaps his own ignorance and the humiliation it bred made him all the more sensitive to the needs of both individuals and nations who haven’t had the twin breaks of affluence and education.

“My family was peasants. They cut bananas and harvested sugar cane for rich British landowners on a farm in Jamaica before they came to New York.

“So, a lot of times, I have to make the observation that if I were ground under somebody’s boot and somebody told me I had a choice between going to the hills and fighting for my independence or sitting down and waiting patiently for the boot to be removed from my neck, I’d take independence every time.”

That same nationalistic fervor among the underclasses from Jamaica to most of Africa came with the end of World War II, according to Belafonte.

“At the end of the war, I think most of the countries thought they could go back to business as usual. But they discovered something that had not existed before: wars of liberation.

“The French found out when the Vietnamese said, ‘Uhn uh, we fought the Japanese as allies, we had a taste of independence, and we want it too.’

“The British found the same thing in Kenya. The Belgians found it in the Congo. All over the globe, there was this massive eruption of people whose appetite was whetted with a new desire for independence and self-determination.”

Ethiopia is a textbook case of how U.S. policy failed, according to Belafonte. There, Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled with an iron hand until he was overthrown by Mengistu in 1974. Despite the gross inequities of his government, rewarding a tiny ruling elite while most of the country lived in abject poverty, the United States supported and recognized his regime for almost 50 years.

“I don’t know if the West gave the Ethiopians a lot of options. They chose Marxism. But no matter what I think about an ideology, I have to put it into a context.

“I find Marxism and communism as diverse as Christianity. You got your Roman Catholics, you got your Mormons, you got your Episcopalians, you got your evangelical groups. So I can’t come to a place like Ethiopia with so simplistic a point of view as Marxism is bad or good.

“As China has visibly displayed, there is a very different line between what they want to do and what the Soviets want to do. Maybe there’s a different line with Ethiopia too.”

Belafonte diplomacy doesn’t always go through channels. He tolerates, sidesteps, even ignores government bureaucracy. Instead, he croons his apolitical call to aid crippled populations directly to the people.

(You will have your own favourites, but here is a small selection of Harry’s greatest hits: Matilda, Dayo, Island in the Sun, Man Smart, woman smarter, Scarlet Ribbons, Come Back Liza, There’s a Hole in the Bucket, Banana Boat Song, Mary’s Boy Child, Coconut Woman, God Bless the Child, Angelina …)

 

 I think this was at the Nairobi Goan Gymkhana

JACK ENSOLL, EDITOR, REMEMBERED

 

Jack Ensoll, pioneering editor passes on

Saturday, August 11, 2012 — updated on July 04, 2020

 

Courtesy of the Nation Nairobi.

 

Jack Ensoll, one-time editor of the Kenya Weekly News and later the Sunday Post.

I think this tribute is by the late Gerard Loughran, one of the finest journalists who blessed the Kenya media scene with his brilliance.:

 

I learned with great sadness last week of the death of an old friend from bygone Kenya – Jack Ensoll, one-time editor of the Kenya Weekly News and later the Sunday Post. His name and the titles of those papers will mean nothing to the vast majority of Kenyans today but, in the hectic years preceding Uhuru, they were active combatants in the fiery debate about what sort of country independent Kenya should be.

 

Jack fought vigorously, if naively, for a rainbow-hued, multi-racial future, arguing that significant power should be apportioned to Europeans in the new constitution since they were so important to the economy. If not, what on earth would happen? To which Dr Julius Kiano, minister for Industry in waiting, responded coolly: “You will have to rely on African goodwill”.

 

That, Jack, told me years later, was a big message. Quibbling about constitutional powers was irrelevant; the right-wingers, the settlers and the liberals finally realised that with Tom Mboya leading the charge, there was to be “none of this multi-racial nonsense, it was going to be one-man, one-vote, African majority rule”.

 

Jack, Yorkshire-born but brought up in Devon, arrived in Kenya from England in 1952 and became Nairobi editor of the Nakuru-based Kenya Weekly News, then edited by the formidable Mervyn F. Hill, author of Permanent Way, the classic 1950 account of the Kenya-Uganda railway. Wholly devoted to settlers’ interests (the KWN’s first edition carried an article about the price of maize, and so did its last), it was known as the “pea-green incorruptible” for the colour of its cover and its staunchness in the farmers’ cause.

My book about the Nation Media Group, Birth of a Nation (2010, I.B. Tauris), sketches in the sociological outlines of Kenya in the early 1960s as the country raced towards 1963. It was a society where everyone knew his place on the ladder.

While there was no official colour bar under colonial rule, there were invisible barriers which Africans and Asians were expected to know and respect.

 

The European community, too, was susceptible to minuscule gradations of class and status more appropriate to the 18th century world of Jane Austen than to Africa in the 1960s. The famous clubs, for instance. They may have been all-European but some seemed more European than others.

In Nakuru, the top people went to the Rift Valley Sports Club and lesser whites to the Nakuru Athletics Club. In Nairobi, the Muthaiga Club was the settlers’ stronghold while Nairobi Club favoured government officials, bankers and businessmen.

It wasn’t all about colour, however. When Michael Curtis, the effective founder of the Nation Group, a decorated soldier from WW2 and a Cambridge graduate, first sought membership at Muthaiga, he was black-balled. The Nation had proclaimed itself in favour of African majority rule, so there was no place for its editor-in-chief at the bars of the Muthaiga Club.

 

The clubs could not see eye to eye. The white-collar government men pictured themselves as conscientious administrators of the law but the sunburnt settlers saw them as short-term Johnnies, working a five-day week for a pension to spend back in Britain.

 

There is a popular story of a District Officer who seduced a settler’s daughter and begot twins. Honourably, he offered marriage. Responded the settler: “I would rather have two bastards in my family than one official.”

 

From the KWN, Jack Ensoll moved to editorship of the Sunday Post, fighting a losing battle to keep his ageing Cosser presses moving and a tiny staff competitive with the energetic young arrivals from Britain who staffed the Aga Khan’s papers in Government Road. He was never going to win this unequal battle and, though Jack steered his charges admirably through the turmoil of independence, eventually both the Post and the Kenya Weekly went to the wall.

 

Jack Ensoll loved Kenya, but some time in the 1970s, he returned to Britain with his family and joined the British Government information department.

There, his bluff, easy-going charm won him a wide circle of friends, including, some did say, the Prime Minister of the day, Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

 

Eventually Jack retired to his beloved Devon, where he died last week, aged 87. His funeral was arranged at the parish church, Saint Nectan’s, in Hartland, which he attended. Saint Nectan was a man after Jack’s own heart.

A fifth century Celtic hermit, he was attacked by robbers and beheaded. He then picked up his head and walked home before collapsing. One of the robbers went blind and the other died. Jack loved that story.

 * * *

I do not recall Jack being a great Kiswahili speaker but he did enjoy that silly game some Europeans played which involved figuring out the meaning of ridiculous Swahili phrases:

1. Maridadi simba.

2. Maji baridi askari.

3.Wewe kunu kuni wewe.

 

The answers being (1) Dandelion (2) Coldstream Guard (3) You would, would you!

 

IN Birth of a Nation, the story of a newspaper in Kenya, author Gerard Loughran included this appreciation:

 

I want to thank also all those current and former Nation staffers, and media people outside of the company, who gave generously of their time and hospitality to recall and explain events of the past half-century, along with those who responded with written recollections and in a variety of other ways. Essentially, this is history as seen by contemporary eye-witnesses, and the book could not have been written in this way without their memories. Gerry Wilkinson was particularly generous not only with his time, encouragement and suggestions over the lengthy period of writing and pre-publication, but crucially for his moral support at times when the way ahead looked obscure. If I have missed anyone who assisted me from the following list, please accept my apologies and take my gratitude as read:

Mahmood Ahamed, Dennis Aluanga, Violet Anyango, Allen Armstrong, Olive Armstrong, Robbie Armstrong, Frank Barton, Dick Beeston, Gavin Bennett, Aziz Bhaloo, Peter Biddlecombe, John Bierman, Brian Carter, Peter Chadwick, Alan Chester, Michael Chester, Nick Chitty, Tom Clark, John Collier, Ivor Davis, Paddy Deacon, Stan Denman, Tony Dunn, John Eames, John and Mary Edwards, Sean Egan, Albert A.A. Ekirapa, Sarah Elderkin, Jack Ensoll, Cyprian Fernandes, Ian Fernandes, Aidan Flannery, Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa), Dr B.M. Gecaga, Linus Gitahi, John Githongo, Michael Griffin, Desmond Harney, Charles Hayes, Margaret Hayes, Dr Peter Hengel, Richard Henry, Bob Hitchcock, Gloria Hitchcock, Mark Holden, Joe Kadhi, Paul Kalemba, A.R. Kapila, Irene Karanja, Paddy Kearney, Charles Kimathi, James Kinyua, Andrew Kuria, Tony Lavers, John Lawrence, Eric Marsden, Ros Marsden, Joseph Mathenge, Alastair Matheson, Ian Matheson, Julius Mbaluto, Chege Mbitiru, George Mbugguss, Helen Mbugua, Colin MacBeth, Peter McCardle, John McHaffie, Mike Mills, Tom Mshindi, Njonjo Mue, Wamahiu Muya, Mburu Mwangi, Cyrille Nabutollah, Mbatau wa Ngai, Dugal Nisbet-Smith, Mutegi Njau, Bernard K. Njeru, Philip Ochieng, Charles Onyango-Obbo, Albert Odero, Joseph Odindo, Blasto Ogindo, Patrick Orr, Malcolm Payne, John Platter, Ian Raitt, Arnold Raphael, Paul Redfern, Cyrilla Rodrigues, Jim Rose, Nick Russell, Robert Shaw, Mr Justice J.F. Shields, John Silvester, Peter Smith, Roger Steadman, Althea Tebbutt-Berryman, Louise Tunbridge, Errol Trzebinski, Yussuf Wachira, Neema Wamai, Mohammed Warsama, Frank Whalley, Ray Wilkinson, Ali Zaidi, Karl Ziegler.

 

 

 

 

 

THE LAST HUNT

 

THE LAST HUNT

By Jack Ensoll (Elspeth Huxley and Jocelin Grant’s Pioneer Scrapbook)

We met at Marindas, 9000 feet up on the old Barnett place and I remembered how John Barnett had complained as reedbuck played hide-and-seek around a few acres below a copse. Always the same, this time of year, out of one wheat field and into another. Then the wheat was beginning to stand high and was the signal for the end of another Molo season. Now it was just a slight green bloom on the brown land under a leaden sky, and I leaned from the saddle and picked everlasting flowers as moved off to draw.

Kariuki put the hounds into covert beside a stream and before long we heard the brassy summons of the Gone Away, the music of a good pack running, the rumble of fast cantering horses and the crack as they took their fences. Our pilot took us straight uphill, up one of those labouring, high-altitude hills, and we checked in at the woodland at the top. Now and then the panting and rustle of a hound at work, and again a burst of music, as they broke covert,  and were down the far side of the Marindas and running fast towards Summerhills and all that magnificent galloping Molo country, was at our feet.

The sweet African wind whistled past our ears and the damp earth flew from the hooves of the horses ahead and the astounded sheep drew together and watched. Through a swamp and over a fence in the wire and at the far side of Summerhills I gave it best and watched them go, the hounds a swift-moving pattern of black, white and tan. Kariuki and the whips are diminutive galloping figures in red and the rest of the field is behind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time in Kenya

 

I HAVE always been a fan of the late Elspeth Huxley from the very first time I read the Flame Trees of Thika. And thanks to the Macmillian Library, I read many of her other books. I first went to the library as a child and I was told that Indians were not allowed there. However, just before I chucked a U-turn, someone (a lady) tapped me on the shoulder and told me it was OK but if I came back again I would have to bring a letter from my parents. I said I would, even though my parents could not read or write. Anyway, I had lots of friends who were much older than me and who could write such a letter. I first became enamoured with the written word when I was a child at St Teresa’s Boys’ School and for the rest of my time in Kenya, the Macmillan would satisfy my almost daily appetite for reading. Later when I became a journalist, the Macmillan was also handy in helping me research material for my stories for the Nation.

Here are some yarns from Elspeth Huxley’s memorable Pioneers of Kenya (a collection of stories written by the pioneers themselves):

I am sure most of you have seen this letter which has done the rounds over the decades since it was written in 1905.

The senior officer in Nairobi

To the Traffic Manager,

Uganda Railway, Nairobi

Most Honoured and Respected Sir,

I have the honour to humbly and urgently require Honour’s permission to relieve me of my onerous duties at Londiani so as to enable me to visit the land of my nativity, to wit, India, forsooth.

This is in order that I may take unto wife a damsel of many charms who has long been cherished in the heartbeats of my soul. Said beauteous damsel has long been the goal of my manly breast and now am fearful of other miscreants deposing me from her lofty affections. Delay in consummation may be the ruination most damnable to romance of both damsel and your humble servant.

Therefore, I pray your Honour, allow me to hasten to India and contract marriage forthwith with said beauteous damsel. This being done happily I will return to Londiani to resume my fruitful official duties and perform also my maternal matrimonial functions. It is dead loneliness without this charmer to solace my empty heart.

If you honour will so far rejoice my soul to this extent and also goes equally without saying that said wife-to-be, I shall pray forever as in duty bound for your Honour’s life-long prosperity, everlasting happiness, promotion of the most startling rapidity and withal the fatherhood of many Godlike children to gambol playfully about your Honour’s paternal knees to heart’s content.

If, however, for reasons of State or other extreme urgency, the Presence cannot suitably comply with terms of this humble petition,  then I pray most excellent Superiority to grant me this benign favour for Jesus Christ’s sake, a gentleman whom your Honour very much resembles.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your Honour’s most humble and dutiful , terribly love-sick mortal withal.

(Signed)

B.A. (failed by God’s misfortune) Bombay,

Bombay University, and now Station Master, Londiani.

(The request was granted)

 

Milestones 1896

By Edward Rodwell (founded the Sunday Post, I think)

A line of chairs on which the women sat; behind them, the men stood straight as sticks in starched white uniforms, with swords, and big white military topees. Mr George Whitehouse, chief engineer of the railway, handsome, thirtyish and frustrated, addressed the gathering. It was an historic day, he said, because the railway had been a long time coming. It would still take a long time to complete but when it was done East Africa would be changed. The old order would be gone forever. Whitehouse than signalled for the first rail to be laid.

Mombasa in 1896 was not much of a place. Ndia Kuu (?) and Vasco da Gama Street comprised the shopping centre. There was no piped water, no sewers, no garbage collection, but plenty of flies and rats, and a cemetery with the bones of the late lamented protruding from the shallow earth. Road surfaces were unmade. Used as drains for centuries past, they stan. Most of the island was covered by jungle, infested with puff adders, and leopards roamed about the town at night.

As to the population, the jail contained 150: there were 169 Goans and 15,000 Africans, mainly Swahili; 6000 Asians, 500 Baluchis, 600 Arabs and 2667 slaves. Add to this the ladies and gentlemen who had watched the laying of the first rail. There were 24 Protectorate officials and their families, 39 railway employees and their families, 20 missionaries, 10 English businessmen, 2 Germans, 4 Greek contractors and 2 hotelkeepers of the same nationality and 2 Romanian hotelkeepers and 4 idlers.

There was also the new Mombasa Club and Sports Club just opened, for which Sheikh Ali Bin Salim had given land. At the former, a bell rang at 7 pm to signify that all women were to leave the premises. But women were allowed in for dinner on special occasions. Judge Hamilton once asked officials and their wives to dinner. The guests sat around a huge table. The judge would not divulge the ingredients of the piece de resistance, which was to be the surprise. It was borne into the dining room on a great covered dish and placed in the centre of the board. Everyone was agog. The host lifted the cover and immediately a hundred long-legged black crabs scampered all over the table. Well, he was quite right. It was a surprise. (1907)

 

Vasco da Gama Road Mombasa

ONE day Terry Fitzgerald of Solai stumbled on a large python and found himself wrapped round and round in its coils. There was no one he could call for help. He managed to get hold of the reptile’s jaw and tried to break its neck. It seemed a very long time indeed, while he felt himself more tightly squeezed and growing weaker, before he felt its backbone snap and the blessed relief as the coils relaxed. His hand was badly lacerated by the snake’s teeth and he was bruised all over but he escaped with his life.

 

Dr Roger Bowles: Gendin Farm was plagued by marauding baboons. I read an article in a South African paper on how to discourage them. I trapped a large dog baboon, painted him pillar-box red, tied a cowbell round his neck and released him. Then I caught a bitch baboon and painted her green and also released her. Early next morning there were two large baboons, red and green, sitting together on a prominent rocky outcrop. Behind them was a large pack of baboons. I fired a shot over the heads of the two harlequins. Off they went, the bell tinkling, followed by the rest of the back. That rid the district of the baboons.

 

 

 

 

 

Memories of Dar women's hockey

 

By Ivy D'Souza

IN MOST places in Africa where there was a Goan club there were always men’s and women’s hockey teams to be found, especially in the main centres. Sport, music, dance and whatever social activities took your fancy were to be found.

 

Tanga, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Arusha/Moshi all had healthy sports teams and programs. Memories have gone walkabout into the heavens and names, dates, events and other info is hard to come by. 

 

Below is one story, however much it might be lacking in all the facts.

 Ivy D’Souza went to St Joseph’s Convent School, Dar es Salaam from 1946-1954. She was at the same school for all her education. She played netball, hockey and rounders at school. “There were no other sports for girls in those days. Loved hockey the best. Due to financial constraints left school in Form 2 (Standard X) 1955 and did a Typing Course. I also learnt to sew and made dresses for my African neighbours at TShs5/- each! Started work as Junior Typist in 1956 and joined the Shamrocks hockey team to continue my love for the sport. This was a group of mixed nationalities. Anglo-Indian, East Indian, Goan, Seychelles, Mauritian, Chinese and European. I changed jobs for more money but never gave up on my hockey - I ate, slept and dreamt hockey”.

 

The Shamrocks and the Wanderers (their male counterparts) were the most loving family I was lucky to have found. Besides many other social activities like dancing (Rock and Roll and Jiving), I sat on the back of their motorbikes (Harley Davidson, BSA, Matchless) and went to Ngerengere or Morogoro about two hours away for some weekends.

Back L-R: Margo D'Souza, Clara Machado, Margaret Devine, Ella Santos, Ida Madeira, Carmen Ahtou, Patsy Rowland, Thelma Fernandes, Olinda Pinto?, Letty Maleappa, FRONT L-R Belle Maleappa, Ivy D'Souza.

Zanzibar Goan Institute ladies and the Shamrocks (with badges on their blouses).

The Shamrocks and Wanderers made a trip to Zanzibar one Easter Weekend and were guests of the Goan Institute.   East African Airways, our local airline, always had long weekend specials where return flights to neighbouring towns were much cheaper than at other times. We had a very successful weekend with both the Ladies' and Men’s teams doing well at Hockey and Soccer.

 

In 1958, I went to Tanga (about five hours driving away from Dar es Salaam) for three months and worked as a Typist, but still played Hockey for and with the Tanga Goan Institute Ladies.”

 

“I returned to Dar es Salaam in April 1958 and joined the Goan Institute Ladies team.  We practised regularly in Upanga and had some serious games against the European Gymkhana Club team which was the only other Ladies Hockey team in Dar es Salaam”

The Dar es Salaam Ladies Goan Institute hockey team for a series of sports events in Zanzibar. August 3, 1958: Front Row: Veronica D’Mello, Myra Viegas, Julie Pinheiro, Ivy D’Souza, Ida Madeira. Back row: Florrie Fernandes, Olivia D’Mello, Bridget Figueiredo, Marie Devine, Winnie D’Souza, Florrie Martins.

Coaches: Chic Saldanha, Albert (Patch) D’Souza and Mr Figeuiredo with the men's and women's teams about to board the plane.

August 1958 saw the GI team venture into the unknown

On leave in Nairobi in early 1959, I was asked to play for a Goan ladies’ team - advised to say I was from Thika; I had no idea where that was!  They fitted me with a uniform and hockey stick. I think I played Centre Forward, my usual position.  Was very impressed with Ellen Fernandes who played next to me.  Flicking the ball left or right, she was always there.  It was a fantastic experience which I thoroughly enjoyed and have never forgotten - We won that game!

 

 

Back Row L-R    Jane D’Silva      Ivy D’Souza     Tessie D’Souza      Hilda Martins        Lydia D’Cunha    Marie Devine

Front Row L-R   Ida Madeira    Julie Pinheiro   Linda Fernandes   Florrie Fernandes  Florrie Martins