I have travelled the world’s coastlines and now live in a country of many fine beaches but I have never yet seen beaches more perfect than the Kenya beaches of my childhood.
Of course, as with all my African reminiscences, my mind is harking back to a time as well as a place. A time when I, a child of privilege, had as my backyard a couple of hundred kilometres of exquisite white sand and turquoise sea and sighing coconut palms.
The varied faces of a typical Kenya beach. Photos by Thomas Ackenhausen.
And these beaches were all but deserted, except for a few local fishermen who earned their meagre living there. And, on weekends, the “white” community for whom going to the beach on Sunday – or even Saturday – and any day during the school holidays – was a type of holy ritual. It was our main form of recreation, our temple of pleasure. And we knew we had something special that could be found in few other places on earth.
Of course there are plenty of beaches around the world with sand white as snow, fringed with palms and overlooking an ocean sparkling in more shades of blue than you ever see in a painter’s palette. But what made the Kenya coastline so special was the reef, located a mile or so offshore and stretching from near Malindi in the north to about Shimoni in the south, which protected the beaches from rough seas, big waves and sharks. When the tide was full, we could swim in safety and enjoy a bit of body surfing or just jumping up and down in the modest waves. And when the tide was out….
…Aaahhhh…when the tide was OUT! Then indeed we had a playground full of fascination. For the seascape from shore to reef was a mosaic of coral outcrops and gleaming pools, some shallow, some deep enough to lie in or even swim around a bit. The white sand at the bottom of these pools was pristine apart from a small scattering of shells and little, darting, bright-hued fish. And the occasional crab scuttling from one outcrop to another. There was so much of interest in these pools and in the coral. And a few dangers, too. Moray eels lurked in crevices, sharp of tooth and aggressive to small, inquisitive hands. Sea urchins clung to the hard surface, spines dark and painful if you stepped on them. Which we did, and suffered the consequences when the punctures became infected, as they often did. But apart from these minor irritations, a child – or an adult – could spend the long hours of low tide mucking about in the pools or walking out to the reef or looking for shells which – back in the fifties and early sixties – could still be found there.
The fishermen in their frail-looking outrigger canoes would seek out the biggest and most commercially-valuable shells – the conches and cowries – and sell them to traders or to white folk on the beach, particularly those on holiday from up-country who would take them home as souvenirs. We locals were more blasé, though there were few European homes in Mombasa back then without a giant conch shell lamp! By the time I was in my teens these large shells had become over-harvested and rarely seen but we could still find leopard cowries and take them home and leave them to stink in the garage or on a veranda ledge until the sea-starved dead “dudus” inside had disintegrated or been eaten by ants.
Few of us children were lucky enough to live right by the beach and of course there were no real beaches on the island, except for Tudor Creek, and we didn’t think much of them! Murky, muddy, full of sharks and – it was rumoured – crocodiles. So we were dependent on our parents to take us there, and for most of us this was a Sunday outing. A picnic would be packed and a groundsheet or blanket to sit upon. Sandwiches and perhaps quiche, which we called egg and bacon pie, and fruit. Possibly cake. Never chocolate because it melted in the tropical heat. We kids didn’t care – all we wanted was to get there and stay there for as long as parental tolerance and comfort would allow.
Top: Whitesands Hotel in the 1950s and Bottom: Nyali Beach Hotel about the same time. These were two of the popular beach destinations on the northern beaches, both for up-country holidaymakers and locals looking for a day out.
We were never bored. If the tide was out, we had a thousand pools to play in. If it was in, we swam and played water games. We also built sandcastles. Or drew hopscotch lines. If the grown-ups could be persuaded to play with us there was cricket and rounders, with improvised wickets and bases gathered from the debris beneath the palm trees and casuarinas. The endless imagination of children meant we were never tired of the beach – in the days when reading books, the weekly radio shows and an occasional visit to the cinema were the only forms of entertainment. We were pirates, we were shell seekers, we were castaways building our own palm-thatched shelters. Skinny, sunbrowned, always on the go. And we went for walks, too, both with our parents and alone. It was so safe, back then, on those beaches. You could walk, alone, for miles and in the long distances between the handful of beach entry roads and modest hotels and see only a friendly fisherman, checking his traps.
Fish trap under construction. Photo courtesy of Robin Swift.
Those traps were another source of adventure. Made of sticks and poles and jutting from the tidal zone out into the water they cunningly trapped fish that came in on the tide, leaving them to be picked out at will when the tide went out. We would sometimes help the fishermen catch the worthwhile fish and crustaceans and that was fun too. Sometimes, however, on a particularly high tide, dolphin got trapped there and small shark. Small but still sufficiently toothed to bite off the arm of a fisherman one day, who bled to death before he could be given medical aid. Once this story got around, we kids found the traps even more fascinating!
The Sunday beach expedition was usually a multi-family affair. On longer journeys we would go in convoy. Our favoured beaches were Jadini, in the south, which we believed had the best beach (from there to Diani) and where instead of a picnic we would have lunch in the dining room banda and my parents and friends would have a drink in the bar with Dan and Madeleine who were something of a legend for hospitality. But it was a long haul to Jadini and so our most visited beach was Nyali where the big hotel offered excellent hospitality, the great terrace overlooked the sea and the lido down on the beach provided drinks, snacks and changing rooms for day visitors. As well as an outdoor dance floor. And a raft just offshore. At other times we would go north to Shanzu, owned by my friend Margaret’s parents who were also famed for their hospitality. Or Whitesands, then owned by the Durwood-Browns. These were all casual sort of places with thatched bandas for the guests and a big, open-sided thatched dining room and recreation centre with bar. So simple, so unpretentious, so created for a perfect beach experience. At various times these places offered dancing and Whitesands had a radio that played the Hit Parade on Sunday evenings. It was there I first heard Elvis sing It’s Now and Never and we teenagers were shocked and disappointed that our badboy hearthrrob, fresh from army service, was now singing music of which even our parents approved!
My mother and I on the beach at Jadini, about 1957. Jadini was a long drive from Mombasa Island but the beach strip along Jadini and Diani was one of our favourite destinations on Sundays.
How clearly I recall going home in the car, all passion spent, our skins roughened by sand and salt water, hair stiff with both. Home to hot baths and the modest Sunday night supper of salad with ham or tinned salmon, left ready by the cook before taking his day off. The slight sting of sunburn and the smell of calamine lotion as we crawled under our mosquito nets and fell instantly into the deepest and most satisfying of sleeps.
During school holidays, our greatest desire was to spend all day, every day in the water. At Nyali, or the Swimming Club just over Nyali Bridge, or, more rarely, the south coast beaches close to the Likoni ferry, Twiga or maybe Tiwi. What joy it was when we were old enough to have bikes that could carry us across bridge and ferry to be where we most longed to be. Independent, free, sunbrowned and skinny, needing only a soft drink and a cheese sandwich to get us through the day.
These simple whitewashed and thatched bandas were the typical accommodation of the day, simply furnished but comfortable enough to suit our modest holiday needs back then. And the sea was right at our door. (Photos courtesy of Beaver Shaw).
And then we put away our buckets and spades and our contented innocence and became teenagers for whom the beach had a very different interest. It was the popular place for birthday parties and teenage barbecue dances, scuffing the sand with our bear feet to Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins and, later, The Beatles, as rock and roll gave way to The Twist. We walked along the sand into our first love affairs, shyly holding hands, sneaking away from our parents and sullen when they insisted on knowing where we went. We still swam and frolicked but we were more self-conscious now, aware of our developing bodies, plagued by pimples and periods and embarrassing erections. Soon enough we had steady boyfriends and girlfriends and the boys had cars and it was down by the beach, or on the beach, that we lost our virginity, some of us.
Top: Myself on the beach at the Mombasa Swimming Club when I was fifteen. This was on the seaward side when you crossed over Nyali Bridge; a tiny, simple little building and a rather indifferent beach facing across the harbour to the Old Town. Its main attraction was that we could reach it easily on our bikes! Bottom: A year later and I’m on Nyali Beach with my BF Val Wheeler. We’d go to the beach with our boyfriends on Saturdays, change our clothes and shower at the beachfront Lido and then dance to a live band on the terrace of the Nyali Beach Hotel on the cliff above.
And then we were young adults and still the beach was our main weekend playground. We ventured further afield, north to Malindi and lovely Watamu, south to Shimoni which was all-but deserted in those days, always looking for a new and perfect and empty stretch of pristine sand. We took our picnic rugs and our simple food and often stopped in the little villages for cool madafu, watching while an obliging local cut the top off the coconut with a panga. We took along gear for spearfishing now, and hauled tanks for scuba diving, no longer satisfied just to stay within the protection of the reef but going into the blue deep beyond, where the bombies were.
There were only a dozen or so beachside hotels on the north and south coast in those days and they offered reasonable access off the main road but everywhere else you could only get to the water over rough sand tracks, the sand itself red or white depending on where you were, often so deep that we had to get out and help push each other’s cars through it. Old cars were all we young folk could afford – Morris Minors and Ford Prefects and battered Peugeots and Beetles with their engines at the back. No café SUVs for us! Our tyres were worn, our radiators prone to overheating and yet we got through. Lured by the siren song of turquoise water and the white waves breaking on the distant reef and a perfect day in the paradise that was soon to be lost to us.
For by the time we were taking our own children down to the sea on a Sunday, things were changing. The beaches, once so safe, were no longer places where we could wander alone. In the post-Independence boom more and more hotels were built, of much greater sophistication, and new people from around the world came to stay in them and new people from up-country came to work in them and today there are highways and bridges and buildings and shops and a degree of commercialisation that we could never have imagined, when we were young. There are camels on the beach, now. And vendors of tourist tat. And posh lounge chairs under the palms.
Yet the sand and the sea and the reef remain the same and children still play there, thrilled by what once thrilled the children of my generation. They have so much more than we ever had, in a material sense, and many virtual worlds at their command, so perhaps to them the beach is just one of many pleasurable experiences. Whereas for us, it was everything.
(I wish to acknowledge the photos used here of Thomas Ackenhausen, Robin Swift, Kevin Costa and Beaver Shaw, all contributors to the Kenya Friends Reunited Facebook site – without their photos this story would not be nearly so appealing. Thank you all).
The Oceanic Hotel, built on the cliff ovedrlookiing the Mombasa seafront, with a Union Castle ship coming through the malango and into Kilindini Harbour. The hotel, long gone now, was built in the late 1950s and I used to play in the scaffolding. My home was nearby.
I was very young when I first went to live in Mombasa but I still remember my first impression of the seafront.
We had moved down from Nairobi which to my child’s mind seemed a dark place in those days, shadowed by Mau Mau and that dreariness that often seemed to imbue this city built on swamp and plain with the dark bulk of the Ngong Hills looming nearby.
Mombasa, by contrast, was all sunlight and sparkle and nowhere did it shine more brightly than on the narrow strip that stretched from the Golf Club to the Likoni Ferry; a mere shelf between cliff and ocean. Most of it covered with the smooth green of the golf course, coconut palms streaming their fronds in the sea breeze and, at the Kilindini end, the solidly reassuring bulk of baobab trees.
My home was not far away and thus the seafront was a ready playground for myself and friends. Something was always going on there. Ships came into Kilindini Harbour from all parts of the world, bringing a whiff of faraway places. Or else they went out again, the little white pilot boar bobbing behind, ready to take off the pilot once the malango had been safely passaged. The malango was the gap in the reef and through it came not only ships but also sharks, to make the harbour a dangerous place to swim, though it didn’t stop those of us who sailed small boats out from the Mombasa Yacht Club venturing upon its narrow waters. So narrow that when a large ship came down the creek it appeared to be steaming through the landscape when you glimpsed the funnels from a distance. I remember seeing the Ark Royal and, later, an even larger American aircraft carrier come into harbour and it was a fine sight – breathtaking because you wondered – hoped even! – if it would get stuck in the shallow beds of coral that lay either side of the creek entrance or, even worse, hit the high cliff bank at Likoni.
Most things of worth or interest entered Mombasa that way, in those days and if there was nothing else to do it was always worth going down to Ras Serani Drive to wave at the ships. On a couple of memorable occasions we waited excitedly down by the water, or up on the high cliffs where the Oceanic was built, to watch the Royal Yacht Britannia sail in bringing her royal cargo. We loyal little white children of Empire, Union Jacks in sticky hands, greeted the visitors with enthusiasm but then so did our parents and others of Her Majesty’s subjects whether white, brown or black. Innocent days! During Princess Margaret’s 1956 visit a splendid fireworks display was organised on the southern side of the creek. Alas, something went wrong and after a few preliminary rockets and Catherine wheels the whole lot went up in one big whizzbang, including the set-piece of Her Royal Highness’ head over which the firework makers had laboured lovingly and long. It was a big disappointment to the authorities but we kids thought it was great fun, especially as the event nearly turned into an even worse disaster when grass along the Likoni clifftop caught on fire and had to be put out by the fire brigade.
Besides the ships, there was the sea itself. While the coasts north and south of the island were protected by the long, white reef that prevented large waves from breaking on the beaches, the rough, brown coral cliffs on Mombasa’s ocean side were constantly battered by an unfettered ocean that, at times, could become very rough indeed. This was a matter of great excitement to children and we would spend hours watching the bigger waves as they surged over the ragged coral and sent their wild white spray high into the air. Or, the more daring among us would descend the flesh-tearing rocks into Glassy Cove, so named for the thousands of brightly coloured pebbles that surged in and out with the tide. These were the sea-smoothed remains of a long-lost cargo of bottles, precious to us as jewells, and I have written about this cove elsewhere, in the story “C.J..” Here we would play in the cave and wait for the incoming tide, running out to touch the edge of the water when it surged backwards, then racing the waves back to higher and still higher ground, knowing we dared not slip and either slash ourselves on the jagged coral or be sucked out into the ocean.
What freedom children had then! The seafront, when one thinks back, offered its share of hazards but no parent forbade us to play there and we would be gone for hours without supervision. And none of us came to any harm, that I can recall. Those of us who lived locally in the area bounded by Cliff Avenue, Kizingo Road and the smaller streets roundabout had a secret path down to the front which in itself was a source of pleasure for it was bounded by Lucky Bean trees and there was a house to one side, believed by us to be haunted and with a very large and romantically overgrown garden. We strung the hard little red seeds into necklaces and played in the garden, when its fierce caretaker wasn’t about. In the late ‘50s my friends and I formed a small gang and we would waylay other children found using “our” path and take them prisoner and tie them to trees until anguished ayahs or mothers came looking for them.
Glassy Cove and other clefts in the cliff face offered another opportunity at low tide – golf balls. On the seaward side of the golf links (as we called them then) and not far from the clubhouse, golfers had to go close to the water’s edge and drive across an indentation in the cliffs. Very often their balls didn’t make it safely across and dropped short instead, to roll down the decline into Glassy Cove. We kids would race the young African caddies to retrieve these balls and then sell them back to the golfers. Some of whom were our parents. My father, for one, strongly objected to this and when I brought a couple home one day, refused to pay me. He was greatly chagrined when I promptly went down to the Golf Club and found another client! It was rather mean of us, really, because the caddies probably needed the money more than we did; our meagre pocket money may not have gone far in buying toys and sweets and comics but at least we were well housed and fed!
Here and there along the font were the remains of fortifications and gun emplacements, reminders of the two world wars in which Mombasa had been vulnerable to German attack. At the time of which I am writing the second of those wars was not long behind us and the concrete platforms and bunkers made good places to play, or just sit and watch the sea. They were subject to a bit of graffiti even in those days, and the first time I ever saw the word “fuck” it was scrawled on one of those pocked grey walls. I didn’t know what it meant but knew, by some instinct, that it was not a word I could go round repeating. Little did we guess that it would one day become a common word in the vocabulary of primary school children and just about everyone else!
A strange African took possession of one of these old gun emplacements for a while and made it into a home. He was hideous, toothless and quite mad and we children were very frightened of him because when we approached what we considered, after all, was OUR territory he would chase us away, shouting incomprehensible things. Children can be cruel little beasts and it became our great delight for a while to tease this poor creature, whom we inevitably nicknamed Majinga. He used to feed himself by going down among the rock pools at low tide and picking things out of the pools – tiny shellfish and sea slugs and such. Seaweed, too. Madness made him incontinent and he turned the gun emplacement into a latrine, filthy and stinking, until at last some authority came and took him away. “To Mathari”, we children whispered in awe, knowing that this was the name of the asylum in Nairobi where lunatics were housed.
Another seafront character was the man who used to sell peanuts from his hamali cart, mostly to those waiting for the ferry to Likoni. He was an Afro-Arab – what we wazungu used to call a “Shirazi” or “Shirry” for short – dressed usually in a red-and-white check kikoi and a white embroidered cap. He always had a kind word for children as he dished out his peanuts into cones made from newspaper pages. The taste of those “nuts” – which we called njugu but are now, I believe, called kajanga, rich in salt and oil, remains in my tongue’s memory and all the more tasty for being forbidden – parents considered this cheery entrepreneur dirty and his peanuts unhygienic – but we bought them surreptitiously and ate them with relish!
By far the biggest attraction on the seafront during the 1950s, for children anyway, was the Florida Swimming Pool. For those of us who lived on the island this provided the only safe swimming and during the school holidays, when we couldn’t get out to the north and south coast beaches, we would spend long hours here. Free, mostly, from adult supervision. The long seawater pool was filled through the simple expedient of opening two sluice gates set low in the thick wall that divided the pull from the ocean. So it was rather like swimming in the sea, complete with the odd small fish or bits of seaweed. I saw my first seahorse here, floating serenely in the deep end and there were always stories about sharks being washed over the seawall on very high tides, though of course even if this had been possible any such creature would have been instantly visible from the pool surrounds! We would spend hours in that pool, as only children can. In between swims we would lie around the edge or clamber on to the seawall where we could watch the waves break. A game evolved by which we older kids – and I’m talking eleven and twelve-year-olds here – would dare each other to jump into the ocean and wait for a wave to carry us back near enough to grab the wall and pull ourselves up and over. Only the bolder among us did this, and the best swimmers. It was said that a couple of boys bolder than all the rest had actually gone out through the sluice gates when they were opened (which happened once a day) and then swum back in again but, like the shark story, the wisdom of age has taught me that this oft-repeated tale is probably not true. Most of us were pretty handy little swimmers, though, equally at home in pool or ocean.
The Florida had two spring boards at the deep end of the pool which provided us with endless fun and those of us who went on to become notable divers at our up-country boarding schools learned our skills here. They were excellent boards with good length and plenty of bounce, covered in a rough sort of coir matting. Even greater thrills were provided by the diving platform which had, from memory, four levels (though it could have been five – not sure, now). This served as a rite of passage for young pool-goers: we would start on the lowest platform and work our way up to the high board as fast as our ability – and our courage – would allow. Some never made it but those of us who did were as triumphant as Olympians, grinning down at the lesser mortals before plunging, bodies stretched and arms extended, to the green depths below. The top board seemed very high to me then though it was probably not as high as my child’s eyes perceived it; certainly not as high as the top board of the diving platform at the high school swimming pool to which I graduated at the age of twelve. High enough, though, to permit jack knifing and swallow diving and a double (but not triple) somersault. How I – and others – worked on our diving once we’d got the hang of it. For two years, every holiday, my friends and I would do little else. We brought to diving that single-minded concentration which only children can bring to any new activity until – like jacks and hopscotch and other passions the diving craze gave way to some other and equally impassioned interest.
A boy was killed one day, diving from that top board. A slight boy with sun-streaked blond hair who would have grown into a handsome man had he lived. During the times when the pool was being emptied and filled a sign would be placed on the diving platform steps, forbidding us to dive. Of course, we ignored it and it became another rite of passage that when the caretaker’s back was turned we would sneak up on to the boards and practice our skills in shallow water. The trick was to flick your body upwards immediately it touched the surface, arms extended and fingers flexed ready to bend upwards too. Surprisingly, when one looks back, we managed to do this successfully time after time though I remember the dry-mouthed fear of it and the relief when each dangerous dive was safely completed.
On that terrible day I was in the changing rooms when it happened and remember being furious that others had seen the accident and I had not. I soon learned the details, though, for children are gory little beasts. I heard about the neck that snapped with a sound audible to those already in the half-filled pool, and the blood and brains that floated to the surface. None of it true, of course. In this age of ever-ready counselling it’s hard for those raised in a different time and place and social code to understand how little this affected us emotionally, except as a subject of gossip. The only “counselling” we got was a sharp warning from parents and teachers as to what happens when you disobey rules set in place for your own good. Needless to say, the diving board steps were more closely guarded after that and as far as I know nobody ever dived into the half-filled pool again – but then this may have coincided with my being sent away to boarding school, an improved ability to get to the beaches in the school holidays and, not so long after, the closing of the pool.
The Florida pool, in the late 1950s or possibly early ’60s. You can see my parents’ house a couple of streets back from the top of the cliff top. Also part of the golf course, across from the pool. A great playground for children of that era who lived and went to school nearby.
The era of “going down to the Florida” passed, as all such childhood phases pass, to morph into a very different Florida experience when the place was turned into a nightclub. This set out to be a stylish place and for a while, when I was in my late teens, it seemed to have taken on all the glamour of those nightclubs I’d seen in films of the ‘30s and ‘40s: smoky dimness lit only by red-shaded table lamps, a small and crowded dancefloor, women in cocktail dresses, palms in pots, live jazz and torch songs, an atmosphere imbued with the musky perfume of forbidden delight. Here, in the sinful hours after midnight, when respectable people were abed, you might see men dancing with other men’s wives and women holding hands under the table with other women’s husbands. Here you could rub shoulders with shady characters whom you would not acknowledge in daylight. Here you might say things that could only be whispered anywhere else.
“I know…a dark…secluded place
A place…where no-one…knows you face
A glass…of wine…a swift embrace
It’s called…Hernando’s Hideaway. (Ole!)
So they had sung, to a tango beat, not so many years before my own time on the dance floor of youth. And, to me, it described the Florida Night Club quite perfectly. Alas, it became steadily sleazier in the years following Independence as the European patrons took flight and newer, smarter places took its place. But the dear old Florida did not fade away and, after several new beginnings, is today a fashionable restaurant as befits its splendid position on the seafront.
Ahhhh, the seafront. How its soft sea breezes sing forever in my memory. In that magic period just before and after Independence when I and my friends were in full hormonal bloom at a time when doing “it” was nominally forbidden outside marriage, the seafront became our main trysting place. We could sit and neck in the gun emplacements, or fondle each other in the steamy backseats of our Volkswagens and old Peugeots. Many a woman of my age lost her virginity beneath the baobab trees or on the grassy parking areas facing the sea. Sex then was softened and sweetened by romance –we knew all the love songs by heart and they underscored the lovely clichés of our environment – the sound of the waves, the moonlit pathway over the water, the swaying palm trees, the humid air so conducive to passion. Few young people have ever been quite so blessed.
Yet this idyll, too, did not last. As the stringencies of British rule were relaxed crime became more prevalent – and more dangerous. Petty pilfering and house breaking gave way to serious assault and even murder. A girl I knew was raped on the seafront by five men, one of them a taxi driver, and her boyfriend savagely beaten. No longer would the seafront offer a safe and romantic haven for lovers.
Yet in daylight hours the dear old seafront remained a place for promenade and pleasure as well as one of the world’s most delightfully-located golf courses. In those far off days it was a quiet place during the week with little traffic, but on weekends it drew the people of the island from their hot houses; not just the comparatively small European population but Indians, also, and on Sundays it resembled the marine parade at Bombay-sorry-Mumbai. Africans back then, unless in domestic service, lived mostly on the further and landward side of the island and couldn’t afford cars. Nor were they enthralled by the ocean. Indians, however, could drive there – and did. In fact it was a standard joke among Europeans as to how many Indians could fit into a Morris Minor!
Rather a cruel joke, really, reflective of the attitude felt by some Europeans towards those with browner skins and different customs. Never mind that they provided the community with its groceries and most other commodities, and were the major philanthropists, too. I can see, looking back, what a relief it must have been for most of those Indians – Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees, Catholic Goans – to escape from their small, crowded, stiflingly hot flats for just a few hours each week to enjoy the cool breezes that came from “their” ocean. In any case, the bright saris and salwar kameez of the women added a touch of colour to the generally sportive and cheerful atmosphere that was the Mombasa seafront when everyone was out and about. It reminded us that we were all living in an exotic and generally happy place even though it lay on the edge of a huge, dark and often frightening continent. So much more exciting and spicy than life in Surbiton or Wolverhampton – or even Delhi – on a Sunday afternoon!
When I think of the Mombasa seafront I’m reminded of how simple were our pleasures back then. To have a car to take us for a Sunday drive and a bit of a promenade along a lovely seashore where we might meet friends and stop for a chat; where there was space for children to run around and dogs to frolic; where we might buy a cone of peanuts or an ice cream, looking forward to an evening of music and perhaps a play on the radio, or a curry from the Elias Hotel or fish and chips from the Rocco because it was the cook’s night off. Would people today be content with such modest pleasures, I wonder? In this age of non-stop digital self-gratification? Probably not, yet the Mombasa seafront endures as a place to walk and talk and admire the view.
It’s even livelier today, and much more crowded. A multi-cultural horde gathers there on weekends – and even weekday evenings – to enjoy what we used to enjoy yet with many additions. Music blares from car speakers, today’s pleasure seekers can buy a wide assortment of things to eat and drink, tourist “attractions” abound. There is a certain tattiness replacing the pristine expanse of grass that used to be. Gone forever are the silent sunsets of my memory, but for a new generation in a new age the dear old seafront is still a wonderful place to be.
THE beginning of the 1960s was a bad time for Kenya farmers. First, in 1960, came a severe drought which hit the Ukambani around Machakos harder than most other areas. As so often happens in Africa, the drought which forced farmers to sell off cattle cheaply or else move them to other and often remote grazing areas was followed by some of the worst flooding known since European settlement.
And then came the army worm (Spodoptera exempta), a voracious little caterpillar that can gobble up entire pastures in a few hours. This time the army worm plague was so thick on the ground that the Mombasa-Nairobi train couldn’t run on its tracks, greased to impassability by the crushed bodies.
After the army worm the precious new grazing that came up after the rain was suddenly invaded by herds of zebra and wildebeest. The first time in years such a thing had happened and the timing seemed almost deliberate, as if the game was getting its revenge for the invasion of the wilderness with our pampered domestic stock.
And so the farmers gathered in the Ukambani to save their grazing by driving the herds of zebra and wildebeest, impala and kongoni back into the Masaai Reserve. Half a dozen families including children over the age of twelve, assorted friends and relatives from “town” who enjoyed a bit of shooting, and plenty of watu to do most of the “driving” because it was not only white settlers who were affected by the infestation of game but also the squatters who lived on their land and those who worked the village shambas.
Imagine if you can today, in the age of endlessly clicking cameras and little zebra-striped safari buses and game lodges with infinity pools what is was like to rise in the chill of dawn on the day of the game drive. To eat a hearty breakfast of porridge or cornflakes, eggs and bacon, kedgeree and sliced venison, toast and marmalade. To hear the click of bolts as guns were checked and feel the excitement sizzle through your veins like a lighted fuse. It sounds terrible to tell such a tale today, but this is how it was, back then and one shouldn’t judge the past by the mores of the present.
All had been planned days before. A shallow valley selected along which the herds could be driven; the strategic placing of the best shots along that route, the starting point for the mass of yelling beaters waving sticks and bright pieces of cloth and clubs to finish off the wounded animals. Also in the rearguard were those Europeans who would follow the herds in vehicles, some armed, some just along for the fun of it, all making a great deal of noise as they bush-bashed their suffering vehicles over the rough and mostly trackless terrain. Here and there lookouts were stationed on rock outcrops and small kopjes along the slopes above the valley. These were mostly younger people and the less-experienced shots, positioned where their sharp eyes could be of benefit to the hunters but where they were in no danger from the stampeding mass of hooves and horns. We (for I was once one of them) were given light rifles and two pieces of cloth, one red and one white. We waved the white “flag” when we first saw the game coming towards us down the valley. The red cloth was used mostly to drive back any animals desperate enough to stray up the slope. It could also be used to signal danger to the other watchers, for where there are zebra and wildebeest in a panic there are also lion and hyena. Other creatures used to get caught up in game drives, too, made dangerous when their natural fear of humans was overcome by confusion. Rhino for example. Or stray buffalo.
Standing on one of the kopjes with hands shading eyes, we looked to where we’d been told the game would come. It was a long wait, in the hot early sun that drove the chill from the air and hyrax back to their holes after a night’s foraging. This was Africa so in that early hour there was always something to see; a Bataleur eagle soaring overhead, a cloud of vultures rising on distant thermals, a family of wart hogs trotting busily by, tails in air, a cobra slithering hood down in the grass. We were always warned to be wary of cobras which were plentiful thereabout and used to lie and sun themselves on the rocks, ever ready to take offence. Meandering across the long, shallow valley was a creek, dry in that season and a likely hazard to the vehicles that would soon cross it in pursuit of the driven herd. Its belt of shrubs and long grass was a daytime shelter for the small solitary antelope such as Dik Dik and Duiker and they, too, would be caught up in the general stampede and perish there, unless they could stay calm and low among the boulders.
It takes a long, long time to get grazing herds of wildebeest and zebra on the move. They start easily when disturbed by humans but don’t run for long. They must be steadily, mercilessly harassed until the spark of panic ignites into a headlong rush that will not easily be stopped until the stronger beasts tire. For once they are in range of the guns and begin to fall they must run on and on, or die. On the particular day that lives in my memory, it was early afternoon before those of us acting as lookouts far down in the valley saw the first puff of dust on the horizon. The puff soon became a cloud, thick and brown, rising higher and higher, sinister as smoke. Then we heard the dull, insistent thud of many thousands of hooves and, as they came closer, the wild cries of the beaters and the blare of vehicle horns. We enthusiastically waved our white flags to signal the distant marksmen and soon enough the vanguard was a hundred yards from us, heads down, back legs driving through under the hard bellies or else kicking up in occasional bursts of terror or perhaps rage.
On and on they came, the heavy grey bodies of the wildebeest, the flashing stripes of the zebra, an occasional flash of dun or chestnut. Small self-contained herds of impala stayed wisely on the edge of the stampede, leaping high and long, graceful even in panic. You could smell them from a long distance; the bovine gaminess of fleeing ungulates; the reek of squirted dung turned liquid by fear. And over it all, and through it all, the coppery smell of African dust that is made up of so many elements both ancient and new. Amazingly, despite the general pandemonium, a few creatures here and there would stand off to the side, grazing for a few minutes as if they hadn’t a care in the world, before suddenly rejoining the stampede. Some of these strayed innocently up the slope to where the lookouts were waiting to shoo them back into the mainstream and though here and there some developed a sudden sense of self-preservation and broke through to safety up the slope and beyond, most obeyed the herd instinct and continued to run with the rest.
The din was beyond description yet soon another and louder sound reached our ears as the guns began their merciless slaughter. And slaughter it was, because the point of the exercise was not fine shooting but simply to send the herds far enough away from the European-owned farms and tribal shambas so that they could not easily come back. So the hunters – and perhaps hunting is not quite the right word here for it denotes skill and there was no skill involved in this – just fired into the solid mass of animal flesh as it galloped by, not worrying whether they killed outright or merely wounded. In any case, no wounded animal would survive long in the rush for if it stumbled or fell the hooves of its fellows would make sure it never got up again. And so it went on, hour after hour, and we all felt the blood-madness that takes over at such time until the last few exhausted stragglers staggered by.
This blood madness is a fearful thing and when it passes people look at one another uneasily or cough and turn aside or light up a cigarette or shuffle themselves about a bit, embarrassed by such a loss of the self that is usually governed by everyday decencies. Some find it harder to shed than others. I remember an incident involving two young soldiers from the Cameronian regiment, invited out for the day by a kindly farmer who feeling sorry for them as being far from home and friendless in a strange land, thought they should be given a chance to know Africa better before being sent elsewhere. This pair were not officers but ordinary squaddies from the slums of Glasgow whom nobody else would have thought to invite into their homes.
They were conspicuously ill-at-ease among the settlers, shy and mumbling and sounding so much like the comic-book hero Oor Wullie that nobody could understand a word they said. Yet at the end of the day, with the blood madness still on them, they suddenly became volubly over-excited. As we drove home in the red dusk, with several of us standing close-packed in the big farm truck, they were swearing and yelling every time the wheels hit a pothole, boasting of all they had shot that day. Game drives got to some people like that; they just couldn’t come down or let go. A jackal ran in front of the truck, its eyes glinting in the dusk, presenting an easy target. One of the soldiers picked up his rifle and shot it, but the shot only caused a gut wound and the jackal spun round and round, shrieking and snapping at its side. The soldiers laughed at the spinning jackal; almost screaming with mirth that sounded every bit as frenzied and horrible as the shrieks of the wounded animal. The whole convoy of vehicles stopped and somebody – I can’t remember who – finished off the jackal with a merciful bullet. The soldiers stopped laughing and there was a dark silence. Having killed all day and seen others kill, they couldn’t understand that what they had done was an appalling breach of etiquette. That enough was enough, even for hunters. That we were sated with slaughter and could suddenly bear no more of it. Especially when it was gratuitous and unnecessary. I think one of the soldiers had been planning to jump out and seize the dead animal’s brush, as a trophy, but if so he thought better of it and they were both silent for the rest of the journey. Nor did we see them later at the post-hunt barbecue on one of the farms, for they had been packed off back to their regiment.
Behind us on the plane we had left more than a thousand corpses scattered in heaps of grey and brown and black-and-white. The watu from the farms would take some of the meat and so would the tribespeople from the reserve but most would be left to the scavengers, for Africa has a vast appetite and can soon swallow up any excess, any outrage. Blood and bone and flesh would soon enough be reduced to fragments in the dust and where in the fresh morning the herds had grazed and kicked their heels, now the carrion eaters would come through the evening murk for their turn at the table.
This is the story of two young men, a mob of cattle and a year spent under canvas battling lion, rhino, drought, deluge and the many diseases of the African bush. All they had were a few basic supplies, a nervous labour force and their guns. It’s an adventure that Ernest Hemingway, that great lover of African adventure, could never even have dreamed of. And it recalls a time and a way of life that is long gone.
Kenya, like much of Africa, is a climate of extremes and it’s always, as Bob Lake used to say, one or bloody other! Bob is one of the two young men in this story, and the one who endured this adventure the longest. It is from his memoirs that the account is drawn.
In the three years up to 1961 the annual rainfall in Kenya fell from just over 304.8 millimetres (12 inches) a year to 76 millimetres (3 inches). . This severe drought caused problems for the cattle farmers in the Machakos district, south of Nairobi, and stock condition began to deteriorate. Then, as grazing turned to dust, huge herds of game – mainly zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and antelope, hartebeest and eland – moved out of the neighbouring Maasai reserve and on to the farms.
This led to a concerted effort to drive the wild game back into the Maasai country. Farmers and friends from the city gathered to shoot the vast herds and drive them back towards the railway line that ran between Nairobi and Mombasa. Bob Lake and his friend and neighbour Mark Millbank, the heroes of this tale, between them shot several hundred head in less than a month and drove many more than this on to other farms, where the shooting continued. Thousands of carcases were left for the vultures. It was brutal, bloody work and, in current terms, unacceptable but for them at that time, it was survival.
And, as Bob recalled, seventy years later: “It was all in vain. When I was out shooting with Major Joyce’s William Evans shotgun, on his property on the evening of April 11, 1961, I was surrounded by huge clouds of moths – as heavy as a snow storm. On top of the drought, the dreaded army worm moth had arrived. Within days our land was covered by millions of caterpillars, eating the last bits of vegetation down to the roots of grass.”
The caterpillars devastated acres of crops and pastureland as well as the greenery that kept the herbivores alive in the wild areas. They made the roads treacherous and stopped the trains from running. It was a plague of biblical proportions, consuming what little pasture had survived the drought. Something drastic had to be done.
Another local cattle farmer, Dennis Wilson, located 250,000 acres of ungrazed land at Athi Tiva, known then as the B2 Yatta Controlled Hunting Block and mostly uninhabited. It wasn’t good land, which is why nobody lived there; it was a dry, thorny part of the nyika that lies between the high plains country of the Athi, just south of Nairobi and the green hills that run behind the coastal strip. The nyika is not desert and it has rivers but it’s inhospitable country and home only to lion, rhino, elephant, cheetah, hyena, various tough-mouthed antelope and a lot of ground squirrels. Today it’s all been subdivided into small holdings and shanty villages and you have to wonder how they make a living there. Back then, nobody wanted it, except to shoot things for sport.
To save the herds around the Konza and Ulu areas, Bob and Mark set out to move 5,200 head of cattle belonging to nine farmers to the Yatta plateau, on to land given by the Kenya government as temporary grazing until the drought broke.
Each farmer provided herdsmen for his/her own livestock and contributed to the expenses of the venture on a per head of cattle basis. Bob was appointed manager and Mark as his assistant. Their only transport was Bob’s old, stripped down Land Rover.
For the two men, both 21, it was a great adventure – and a big responsibility. Athi-Tiva was home to the dreaded tetse-fly as well as ticks carrying cattle diseases such as anaplasmosis, east coast fever and redwater. The area had no roads, only rough tracks through the hunting block; nor were there any buildings or development of any kind.
The journey involved moving, at very quick notice, the 5,200 head of cattle south by rail for 150 km, then unloading them and walking them another 80 km north-east along the bush tracks and game trails. The herdsmen had to be constantly vigilant because the local Big Cat population soon got word that there was beef takeaway to be got for very little effort – it’s a lot easier to bring down a cow than a wildebeest or buffalo! Bomas – rough enclosures of thorny brush – had to be erected at night and the Wakamba youth taking it turns to be on guard were armed only with spears, clubs and pangas (machetes). Bob and Mark had rifles, shotguns and sidearms and the former were in constant use, to scare away predators or shoot for the pot.
When Bob, Mark and the labour force reached their destination a camp was set up near the Athi River – which was only a series of shallow pools in that dry season – and eventually Bob had the labour build him a long-drop loo up on a hillside where he could look out over the countryside – king of the world! Because he loved it there! Loved the whole, wild, hard life of it. A solitary man by nature, he was content to spend his days supervising the men and tending to the cattle, hunting and yarning with Mark, eating simple meals cooked over a campfire, going to sleep with the sounds of the bush in his ears. Lion prowled around the camp at night, attracted by the beef carcasses hung in one of the tents, covered only in a mesh to keep away flies. These steers, as well as various buck and antelope, had been killed to keep the camp in meat. A vigil had to be kept to prevent rhino from barging through the camp and knocking it down, there were a couple of near misses with elephant herds wandering past. Hyenas came to scavenge for any scraps or rubbish left lying around, their weird, wittering calls making it difficult to sleep.
*
They were not completely isolated. A few weeks after the camp had been established, a small village appeared further down the river. A few huts roughly put together from mud-daubed branches and corrugated iron, a dozen families, some goats and chickens. In the Kenya of those days, such habitations could appear almost overnight. Bob questioned the menfolk who blandly replied that they had squatters rights as the land was uninhabited. Bob pointed out that it was government land, set aside for hunting and not habitable anyway. Before long, a cow disappeared and then another. Bob’s men reported finding horns and hooves half-buried in the sand along the riverbank. Then food and small items were stolen from the camp. The Kamba herders went and searched the new “village” and found incriminating evidence. They threatened to drive the newcomers away and burn down their shanties. Things looked ugly and the two young white men had to try and calm things down; concerned also by the fact that the squatters were obviously starving in that savage country.
They shot some Grants gazelles as an emergency food supply, much to the disgust of the herders who clearly regarded these non-Kamba invaders from further south and east, lacking in all the bush skills needed to survive, as opportunistic parasites attracted by what they obviously saw as some sort of new farm settlement. More would come, they warned darkly, and Bob knew this was probably true. So he contacted the authorities in Kitui who eventually sent down an African police officer and his askari to deal with the problem. By now the number of squatters was steadily increasing, though they had neither food nor water nor protection from wild animals. A child had died, and it was reported that an old man, too, had died and been put outside the loose boundary of the squatter village, among the trees, where he was consumed by hyenas. Bob was skeptical about this story but the Kamba labour force firmly believed it and shook their heads at the young bwana’s tender British innocence.
In any case, the brief and lacklustre appearance of uniformed authority seemed to work and the squatters disappeared as quietly as they had come – one morning they were there and by nightfall the bush had swallowed them, leaving scarcely a trace.
Visitors, too, came from time to time to relieve the loneliness – friends, family, the other cattle owners, government inspectors and a vet bashed their way through the thorny terrain to reach the camp. All had to bring their own camping gear and at times the little canvas boma became quite festive – there would be rough shooting by day and singalongs by night; the Wakamba labour force would put on a bit of a dance. Better than that, the visitors would bring whisky, gin, beer, tinned delicacies, newspapers, books and magazines. But nobody stayed for long. Which was just the way Bob liked it. He was happy with Mark’s company and with learning more about the ways of the Wakamba and the wildlife all around. In the evenings they would read by the light of torches and spirit lamps. They turned in early because the work began at dawn, the days were long and in any case sleep was often interrupted by troublesome wildlife including, once, an invasion of Safari Ants which consumed everything in their path that wasn’t wood or stone or iron and could only be halted – though not completely stopped – by splashing around kerosene and petrol and setting it on fire, then battling to prevent the fire from spreading to the surrounding bush.
“Of all the dangerous things that happened in that year,” said Bob later, “That was by far the worst and it was lucky one of the watu gave the alarm before the ants got into the sleeping tents.” Trapped animals – and humans – have been devoured alive by the dreaded siafu – the remorseless, relentless Dorylus ants of Africa.
As it was, any food that wasn’t in a tin was consumed and a perilous trip in bad weather had to be made to Kitui the next day to re-supply; not just food but petrol and kerosene. “We kept a good supply after that,” Bob remembered.
Another constant threat was the scarcity of water and seeking it involved risk as the cattle were moved to the nearby river, and waterholes, and back. Water storage tanks were trucked in, small dams were built, pumps were put in place with great difficulty in and over the hard ground.
Bob and Mark were both keen hunters and good shots but had some narrow escapes – especially when an enraged rhino chased them, and Bob’s gun bearer, up a small and very prickly thorn tree. On another occasion, Bob and one of the senior herders were walking back to camp in the dusk when they got a strange feeling. They turned round to see two lionesses walking a few metres behind them. The men stopped. The lionesses stopped. Then, seemingly uninterested, moved into the bush. The men started walking again, turning their heads to see, after a few minutes, the lionesses back on the track behind them. Athi Tiva is not so far from Tsavo, where the famous pair of man-eaters once roamed and the area had always had a bad reputation for producing lion with a taste for human flesh. So the men were worried. After this continued for a few more minutes, and the camp still some distance away, Bob turned and shouted at the animals, who hesitated, lashing their tails, then, as Bob told it later, looking at each other as if to say “What’s that puny human think he’s doing?”
“I think, Bwana,” said the senior herdsman, a little agitated,, “That you should shoot them, not shout at them. These simba do not like to be shouted at.”
The lionesses were now only a few bounds away. Lion are curious creatures and Bob felt that if they meant serious trouble they would have just attacked without warning; perhaps they just wanted to know what these two strange two-legged creatures were, wandering through the bush.
“It was for all the world like they were two girls just out for a stroll and not particularly interested in us at all,” he always said in later years, when recalling the incident. “They knew where they were going and they obviously had no intention of getting off the track just because we were there. I got the feeling that if we’d just stopped and stepped back to one side they’d have passed us by with hardly a glance. But of course I couldn’t take the risk.”
So he raised his gun and fired over their heads. Even in those days, you couldn’t just kill a lion without a permit, except to save your life, though of course nobody would have known, in so remote a place. Nor blamed you, for there was no shortage of lions. Bob knew he might have to shoot them both and hoped they’d have the sense to bound away – which they did. Snarling.
“They stopped once and looked back at us,” he recorded in his game diary, “And I’d swear they were looking annoyed and reproachful. And then they melted into the bush and we didn’t see them again.”
Lions weren’t the only danger. When the rains came, which they did with shocking force, the almost-dry riverbed suddenly became a torrent, washing away bridges and tracks. This meant that the cattle could not be moved and Bob had to stay for longer than planned. Mark had gone by then, called to other duties, and two other young men came down, at separate times, to lend a hand. Two other young adventurers. But it all proved overly rough for them; too dangerous and lonely, and, like the occasional visitors, they didn’t stay long.
One of them, though, stayed long enough to give himself some grief. When the rain eased off the Athi ran more gently and pools formed among the rocks. Almost overnight, hippo appeared, just a few of them, lounging in the water with their watchful eyes above the surface by day, coming on to the riverbank at night to feed on the fresh new grass. Grass which was needed for the cattle.
The men tried scaring the hippo away and Bob’s new offsider, James, even went to Kitui – a long journey in the Land Rover – and brought back some cheap firecrackers which they set off gleefully – but after an initial panic and a lot of bellowing and splashing the hippos ignored them. Bob then shot one, and made biltong from the flesh and whips from the hide but while the hippos moved further down the river they didn’t go away.
James, who was in Kenya for a year after finishing Agricultural College, to gain experience before finding a job in South Africa, was a hot-headed 19 year old who came to look upon the small mob of hippo as a personal challenge. Though he had never done any shooting before, he took to it with enthusiasm and spent hours driving Bob and the African camp servants mad by practicing on a variety of targets – mostly old Heinz soup cans. Bob taught him rough shooting with a shotgun, for birds, and they bagged francolin and guinea fowl which made a pleasant change from the main diet of beef with maize meal and tinned vegetables.
But James’s mind was set on something bigger and as this was still a hunting block he was able to obtain a license to go for it. And the shooting of almost anything could be justified as necessary to conserve cattle feed. Bob had a good relationship with the Game Department, which trusted him to do the right thing, so he warned James several times to be prudent with his new-found skill.
Rain had made everyone’s work harder. No visitors could get through to relieve the tedium, this included the vet so Bob had to do a lot of the veterinary work himself; inoculating and dipping the cattle in the rough timber yards which had been hurriedly erected upon arrival, helping cows give birth, castrating young bulls. These were tough beasts with a strong dose of Sariwal in their bloodlines but they were still subject to the pests and diseases that makes raising cattle in Kenya such a challenge. Some of them were mauled in attacks by lion and leopard, which also took calves, others were bitten by snakes or harassed by hyena. Bob was out for long hours each day, fixing problems and encouraging the labour, many of whom had got fed up with the whole venture and wanted to leave, or had already gone.
James, young and heedless, went down to the river one evening and shot a hippo. He thought he’d missed because it disappeared under the water; when its head popped up he shot again. And again it disappeared, only to reappear a minute later. James decided to take a closer position and moved from behind his rocky vantage point closer to the water. And then he noticed three hippo carcasses floating along in the current, towards the camp. He’d shot three different animals! Half thrilled, half scared, he raced down the bank to have a closer look. Whereupon a couple of huge males came out of the water, straight at him. Instead of standing his ground and trying for another shot, James turned and ran towards the camp, screaming. Bob and some of the labour came from their tents to see what was up, in time to see the boy stumble and roll down the bank, on to some rocks. As Bob told it, the two hippos stomped about a bit but the sight of so many humans proved discouraging and they waddled back into the water to join the herd.
James had broken his right arm. It was put in a sling and he was given some aspirin, the only painkiller they had in camp, apart from whiskey. He had to endure the agony for several days before Bob was able to get him to Kitui in the Land Rover – an excruciating journey for someone with a bad fracture and a
Down on the Athi River in 1961 From top left, Bob by the river near where his offsider James shot three hippo and then had to run for it; taking cattle across was always a risky business; James in the camp, just before his hippo hunting trip. Botom from left: When the drought broke and the rains came the river flooded and carried away the bridge; watering the cattle; an askari and his officer from Kitui questioning one of the squatters who mysteriously came to take up residence near the Athi Tiva camp.
Bob stayed for a year, living under canvas, happy in his comparative solitude and well-aware that he was undergoing a rare Boy’s Own adventure. Eventually, after the rains had come and gone and the grass grew quickly again on the plains, under the hot African sun, he and others took the cattle back to their home farms, with remarkably few losses considering the long period of privation and danger. Another long and difficult trek, another rail journey. And the acclaim of those whose livelihoods had been saved.
Bob Lake, my husband, lived to be 85. He had many adventures, both in Africa and in Australia where we eventually migrated and where we lived in some of the country’s toughest cattle country. Yet he always considered the Athi Tiva expedition the greatest adventure of his life and it’s a good job he wrote it all down because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share it with you now.
Though Kenya is famous for its wild game the island of Mombasa has always been rather poorly equipped with wildlife, if you exclude marine creatures. Mongooses were plentiful, and birds and reptiles but no antelope or elephant or zebra and certainly no large feline predators.
Until, that is, the Day of the Leopard. Or, to be more correct, a couple of weeks of The Leopard because once, a long time ago, a rumour went racing round the island that a leopard had crossed from the mainland and was on the prowl. I can’t exactly remember the year but it was possibly 1959 or 1960, and I missed all the excitement because I was at boarding school in Nairobi.
*
Africans on their way home at night reported a large, spotted cat – a chui for sure, glimpsed slinking through gardens or following them at a discreet but still nerve-wracking distance. An Indian shopkeeper thought he saw the same creature skulking about when he was emptying some food bins one night. Soon sightings were coming from all parts of the island and these gained credence among the scoffers – such as my father – when pug marks were found in the grounds of the Church of England cathedral. The protestants of Mombasa considered this a definite triumph over the Papists down the other end of Fort Jesus Road and some wag suggested that the Provost of the Cathedral (not sure if it was still Rex Jupp at that time) buy himself a rifle! The pug marks were identified, by those who knew how, as being definitely those of a leopard.
After that the search was on, but the leopard proved elusive which, consider how crowded was our little island, without a lot of natural bush left upon it, is a tribute to the ability of big cats to conceal themselves from human view. We were not, in fact, particularly frightened of this particular big cat because leopards were not known to attack humans unless seriously provoked. However, a leopard is still a formidably strong and well-armed animal and who knew what it might do if it became hungry enough. Children were warned not to wander too far and dogs were kept indoors at night. As it was, any dogs that disappeared at that time were considered to have become leopard food and a couple of gung ho types actually sat up at night with native pi-dogs bought especially for the purpose and tied up as bait nearby, until the RSPCA put a stop to it. Men – European men at least – seemed to consider the whole thing a good joke but women and Africans – who were of course less-securely housed and more likely to be out on foot at night – were frightened. Indians were frightened too or at least the man behind the counter of our grocer, Beliram Parimal was, because, as he told us, “leopard is terrible man-eater”. In India, said my father, that’s quite true, for there leopard are larger than ours and also seem to be fiercer. He was a great fan of the books of the Indian hunter Jim Corbett, whose brother lived at Bamburi, and had not long since read The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. Unfortunately others in Mombasa had read this book too, borrowed from the British Council Library at Tudor, which probably helped fuel the general hysteria.
Leopard were, of course, quite common on the mainland wherever there was heavy forest. I myself saw them a few times – one on the roof of a cottage at Jadini Hotel, one crossing the road not far south of Malindi. When calves were taken at Kilifi Plantations a leopard was the suspected culprit and when I lived at Port Reitz my servants were afraid to walk home after dark because leopard were often seen in the vicinity. But a leopard on Mombasa Island would have to have either crossed the causeway, or Nyali Bridge, or swum across Tudor Creek or possibly the lower mangrove reaches of Kilindini Harbour. Suggestions that it might have crossed on the ferry from Likoni were generally disregarded! It all seemed so unlikely and even the reported pug prints in the church ground were regarded with suspicion by some – Mombasa was never short in those days of young practical jokers and some still remember the night a few of us drove all over Nyali pulling out name posts (remember those?) and swapping them around to confuse home owners and visitors. And then, suddenly, the leopard did something quite unexpected.
We lived in Kizingo Road and not far from us was a collection of small, cheap, thatched houses known collectively as “the bandas” and inhabited by the lower-ranking white local government employees. Among them was a woman I shall call simply “Mrs R”. She was married to a mechanic employed in the council workshops and her Lancashire origins were very obvious in an accent so broad that those of us who spoke “home counties” English could barely understand her – and thus she was much imitated behind her back. For Mrs R was not popular. She nagged her husband, gossiped spitefully about her neighbours, had few friends and was feared not only for her uncompromising opinions, loudly expressed in that harsh accent, but for her constant trouble-making. She was particularly unpopular with the neighbourhood children because, childless herself, she was always shouting at us to stay well clear of her house and garden and “keep roody noise daown”. I may be libelling the poor woman who has been dead many years now and thus unable to defend herself – but this is the way I (and others) remember her.
Mrs R was of that type and class – fortunately a tiny minority in Kenya – who went out to Africa purely for the job – and perhaps the sun – and appeared to get very little out of it. They never learned Swahili, never went into the bush or even a game park, never in fact stirred very far from their government-supplied house. They lived frugally in order to save to go “home” one day and buy a small bungalow at somewhere like Hove. They employed only one servant to do everything and as their houses usually contained little besides the basic PWD furniture this little was not much. In fact they feared and despised Africans and were, in turn, despised by those who did work for them and who preferred their bwanas and memsaabs to not interfere in the kitchen or lock up the pantry or dole out groceries with parsimony.
Mrs R was a case in point – she had a succession of servants from tribes who did not take well to domestic service and she treated them with rudeness and suspicion. Worse, she raised her voice to them in a way that other memsaabs would consider ill-bred as well as likely to be counter-productive. Possibly she did this because she had never bothered to learn any Swahili and believed, in true British fashion, that the only way to get a foreigner to understand you was to shout at them. Again, I am being rather harsh, and more than a teeny bit snobbish! But that’s the way it was. People like Mrs R never felt any kind of affinity with Africa, never felt the deep love felt by the rest of us, never tried to understand it, longed always for the day when she could finally return “home”. Where, no doubt, she would bore her friends and relatives with tales of her glory days as a memsaab. And people like Mrs R never took any interest in wildlife nor learned to tell one animal from another.
Ironic, therefore, that it was to Mrs R that the Mombasa leopard made its most famous appearance. According to two close neighbours, they were awakened late one night by a scream and a terrified voice calling out “Wilf, Wilf, it be taiger! It be taiger!”. When they rushed outside they realised the voice they were hearing was that of Mrs R, emanating from the conjugal bedroom. “Wilf, wake up!” she called. “It be taiger!”.
The way it was reported to me (and to many around the neighbourhood) Mrs R had been lying awake in bed when she saw a large, spotted, bewhiskered face peering right in her bedroom window. “When I realised what t’thing was,” she confided to my mother, “I were raight terrified”. Mrs R might not have known her animals but she did know a big cat when she saw one in her window, and had then woken up her sleeping husband. Loudly enough so that every one else in the neighbourhood (the bandas were very close together) could hear. The Story of Mrs R and the “taiger” winged its way round the island next day and she may well not have been believed except…that one of the neighbours who rushed to her aid reported later that his dog, an Alsatian known for its savage nature, had cowered whimpering at his side. And…the clincher…several pug marks of an unmistakable leopard nature were found in the soft sand of the garden bed outside Mr and Mrs R’s window.
The search was intensified but though expert trackers were brought in they found it difficult to find a trail through the little roads and gardens large and small that comprised the area between Kizingo Road, Prince Charles Street (as it was then) and Ras Serani Drive. However a couple of days later an African wandering under a baobab tree not far from the Likoni Ferry looked up and got the fright of his life, for there, draped nonchalantly over a branch, was the leopard. I got a fright too, when I heard about it, as did some of my friends, because this tree was a favourite play spot of ours and we’d even built a small cubby house in its thick, protective branches. The big cat was then captured, caged and (I think) released on the mainland. Nobody ever knew, conclusively, how it had got on the island, let alone why. The rumour mill ground out theories by the day – it had been brought on to the island deliberately as a joke; it was an escaped pet; it had escaped from one of Carr-Hartley’s zoo shipments at the port. The first might just possibly be true, albeit unlikely, the other two were obviously ridiculous because any escape would have been reported. And you don’t keep a large creature like a leopard in your home without friends and neighbours knowing about it…I’m just repeating this now to show how so many people don’t bother to think before they theorise!
We kids, of course, happily believed all the rumours in turn and even came up with a few of our own. One, I remember, was that the leopard (we always thought of it as “he”) would for sure have had a mate somewhere who would look for him everywhere and, through starvation and revenge, would prey on those who had taken him. Which shows that, back then, we knew little more about the habits of leopards than did poor Mrs R!
A Baobab tree, found all over eastern Kenya in the dry nyika country between the Nairobi uplands and the coast. Mombasa island was covered in them and legend had it that under each one was an Arab soldier, slain during the wars with the Portuguese who occupied Mombasa for a while. Baobabs are useful trees; the fruit is edible (though not particularly palatable) and a good substitute for cream-of-tartar, birds and other wildlife find refuge in the branches, some people even made temporary homes in them and we kids made cubby houses in them. We had a big specimen in our garden and I (with help from our gardener) made a snug little refuge there, impregnable to my ayah and most adults but not, alas, to my agile father!
Our cook, Mboji, was, by Kenya standards, better than average at his job.
There is a tendency today among the ci devant bwanas and memsaabs to eulogise the skills of the cooks of their youth, and to remember the meals they prepared more fondly than is warranted. The truth is, we ate very plainly in those days, at best, and very badly indeed, at worst.
My parents were both rather keen on their food and demanded a reasonably high standard of their cook. By “reasonably” I mean that meat should be tender or at least chewable and cooked to the right degree, neither overcooked in the case of beef nor undercooked in the case of pork. Vegetables should not be boiled to a fare-thee-well. Custard should not be lumpy. A cook should have a reasonable repertoire of recipes, be prepared to try new things and have some understanding of how to creatively use condiments and spices.
Mboji met those standards, which was more than could be said for the mpishis employed by some of my parents’ friends. Down the road lived my friend Irene, whose mother was not very interested in housekeeping and whose father knew better than to protest. They employed a truly awful cook. His idea of that perennial nursery favourite of our youth, macaroni cheese, was to use spaghetti instead of the more usual macaroni, cover it in a lumpy cheese sauce and then bake it in an oven until it dried out to the consistency of a pudding, with the pasta all crisp and crackly. We’d pour HP sauce all over this and I, for one, used to think it yummy and be very happy to be invited down for supper on a Sunday evening (as with most people we knew, they had dinner on six nights a week but a light lunch – usually out somewhere – on Sundays and “supper” in the evening). My mother, however, ate it once and could never be persuaded to do so again. This cook also used to do a “curry” every Saturday which, like most Kenya curries served in European households was a stew with curry powder added. I liked this a lot because it had potatoes in it, which Mboji’s curries did not have. Mboji, in fact, made a pretty good curry. I say this after years of learning about and cooking Indian food. His curries would not have passed muster in an Indian household but at least he used fresh spices and authentic condiments and they bore an acceptable resemblance to the real thing, especially his prawn pulao. Mboji did not believe in putting potatoes in a curry. He would serve them as a side dish, cooked in ghee with appropriate spices.
I had another girlfriend, Ann, who lived across the road, and she also had a mother who was not interested in housekeeping. In fact this woman had no interest in her family at all and, in my memory, was rarely home. I shan’t mention her name here because she was very well-known in the Mombasa of the late fifties and early sixties. Her husband did something obscure in the PWD and they were rarely seen about together. Their bungalow was dreary beyond belief, furnished only with the ugly PWD furniture common to many Kenya houses back then. My mother would have had cheerful covers made for the furniture and put vases of flowers everywhere but in this home there were few books or ornaments; no pictures on the wall except a calendar; no comforts anywhere. The bedrooms were bleak and barely furnished beyond a couple of iron beds in each. I stayed the night there once, as girls do even though they are only a stone’s throw from home, and hated it. Even though I wasn’t much concerned with comfort and decor at that age and thought my own parents rather finicky because one couldn’t drop food on the floor or put your feet on the furniture in our house.
In my friend’s house, the cook-cum-houseboy (they only had one servant; how odd we thought that!) was worse than awful. He barely cooked at all but seemed to be employed merely to throw an occasional broom around the painted concrete floor (no rugs) and open a can. Every time I ate there, we had baked beans on toast. Now this was a popular dish in our house, too, at least for my brother and I who were of course fed separately in the evening from our parents (at least until we were in our teens). These suppers consisted mainly of baked beans on toast, sardines on toast, tinned spaghetti on toast, cheese on toast and scrambled egg on toast. We did sometimes have other things – I remember tinned salmon salad and also tinned corned beef (which we called “potted human”) and salad. But it’s the somethings-on-toast I remember because these were our favourites and, like most kids, we detested salad.
Ann’s family cook, however, rarely seemed to adventure beyond the baked bean for the evening meal and they didn’t always have a hot lunch, either. The mother, a career woman, ate out a lot, and the rest of the family survived on tinned stuff and the occasional flavourless stew or – when spoiling themselves – a leathery roast topside or chicken.
So I was considered very lucky by some of my friends and my home a haven of comfort, with good meals and well-trained servants. They loved to come and stay over, or just have a meal, and my mother – and Mboji – were always happy to lay an extra place at the table.
When I look back, our meals were very simple. The delicacies we take for granted today were just not available to most of us in those days, or cost too much for the average household. Meat was abundant and cheap but usually of poor quality and tough. I remember Ginger Bell’s butchery in Mombasa, where the carcases used to hang overhead, so that I would avert my eyes when buying meat there, which I did when I grew up and had a home of my own to run. He was a good butcher but the quality of the meat, while flavoursome, was not what we would tolerate today. Every week Mboji used to order a large piece of topside and this was roasted on Monday and served with roast potatoes and usually fresh carrots and tinned (later frozen,) peas. Fresh peas, like so many other “English” vegetables, were difficult and mostlyimpossible to get in Mombasa. Cabbage was rare and cauliflower almost unknown. My parents used to reminisce happily about the brussels sprouts and parsnips of England, which were only well-flavoured if they’d “had the frost on them” . As neither of my parents knew anything about horticulture and had never grown a vegetable in their lives, I doubt they really understood what this meant, but I remember them saying the same about “new” potatoes.
Back to the beef – this was our standard weekly fare. On Tuesdays we had cold beef with salad and boiled potatoes. On Wednesdays it was served as shepherd’s pie. Thursdays were a bit exciting because this was Mboji’s day for spontaneous creativity and we never knew what we’d get, though it was always delicious. I remember the remains of the joint being cut into thick slices and recooked in the oven in a casserole dish, with a flavoured sauce made from tinned tomatoes and onions poured over it. Or chopped into a tasty hash and served with rice. Friday’s meal was often fish, not because we were Roman Catholic but because it fitted in with all the other meals. Fresh fish of course was freely available in Mombasa, from the markets, but when frozen food became available we used to have Tilapia from Lake Victoria, packaged and frozen by Tufmac. It seems wicked now that with all the parrot fish and kingfish in the sea at our door, we ate frozen fish! But so we did sometimes, served either grilled or in a mornay sauce. We never had it fried – for fish and chips we went to the Rocco fish bar in Kilindini Road and either ate it there or brought it home wrapped in newspaper. That was often a Sunday night supper and we considered it a great treat.
Saturdays my parents either entertained or ate out. When entertaining, the meal would usually be soup, then something with prawns and/or fresh fish, followed by a roast of pork. Pork was a great treat then, brought down from up-country. If my parents were REALLY putting on the dog we had a leg or saddle of Molo lamb. Sundays were always less structured in our household, due to it being Mboji’s day off. Mukiti, our houseboy, used to do the honours instead but he could only cook a bit and in any case we usually went to the beach for the day. Either to picnic, when we children were small or, when we grew up, to lunch at one of the beach hotels. The Sunday evening meal was always quiche, which we called egg-and-bacon pie back then, or, as stated, fish and chips or a takeaway curry from town. But Saturdays live on in my memory as the special day of the week for meals. Of course, we children didn’t take part in the dinner parties when we were small and were given the usual early supper – but on Saturdays we got a treat. This was usually sausages, but not any old sausages. These were Walls skinless sausages and we adored them! My father did too so we sometimes got sausages on other days too – but usually they were a Saturday night treat for the kids.
Best of all, though, were those rare Saturdays when my parents were neither going out nor entertaining. We usually had a curry then, with all the trimmings. Or else we had Mboji’s signature dish – roast chicken. My father maintained to the day he died that Mboji’s roast chicken was the best in the world and it, too, was served with all the trimmings – bacon on the top, roast potatoes, assorted vegies, sage and onion stuffing (from a packet) bread sauce (home-made the traditional way) and gravy. We sometimes ate chicken in other ways; in curries for example, or a casserole. These were the tough village birds that were brought live to the house, purchased after much argument with the sellers by Mboji, and then killed by Kaola our garden “boy” under the Neem tree near the kitchen door. When we had roast chicken, though, the bird was especially purchased from our grocers, Beliram Parimal, and for a higher price that guaranteed it to be tender and succulent. The comparatively high cost is what made it a treat for special days.
The smell of that chicken roasting had us salivating all morning as it drifted right through the house and across the garden. To this day it remains my favourite dish, even in this age of TV superchefs and cooking contests and sundried tomatoes and aioli and truffle oil. Mboji, dressed in his spotless white uniform and beaming with pride, would bear in his kuku on a large platter, and we would all murmur with delight and anticipation. Visitors (for we sometimes had close friends or casual visitors to lunch on Saturdays) would be similarly impressed by the sight of this glistening, golden brown bird on its big white plate. Few other homes in Mombasa, we smugly believed, could boast such a bird – or such a cook. My father would carve with ceremony, legs for the children, breast for the adults, the parson’s nose (for some reason considered a delicacy) retained for himself. I longed for the white breast meat but knew it as a right of passage that one day I, too, would be serving up such a bird and would be able to eat whichever part of it I liked!
Mboji worked for us for many years, but not without a brief hiatus. He was a Taita, from near Voi, so was able to get back to his family often, apart from the usual two weeks holiday a year. We had quite large servants’ quarters and the wife and two small girls came down to live with us from time to time, but Mboji preferred them back in the village tending to the family plot. He seemed always to get on very well with our other servants, who were Wakamba, but perhaps he was lonely because though in all ways clean, cheerful, competent and decently-behaved he did occasionally go on a bender and my father would be called in the middle of the night to go and bail him out of the local clink. For the next few days he would skulk about the kitchen, reddened eyes lowered in shame, having assured my father he would never disgrace us all again. But of course he did, though never more than once a year. One year, however, when my father’s responsibilities for the finances of the province were weighing heavy, he received the familiar call in the middle of the night and THIS time he refused to go. Instead, he left Mboji to enjoy Kingi Georgi’s hospitality for another day before paying the fine, and then he sacked him. We were all very shocked and my mother was livid; where, she said, in the tones of The Mikado’s Kadisha, Will I Get Another?! But my father would not be moved and the household went into a sort of subdued mourning because Mboji was, to us, part of the family and we missed him. We also had to make do with Mukiti’s cooking for a few days, with some necessary but reluctant assistance from my mother.
Then, with as much self-assurance as an angel sent from Heaven, Andrea appeared. He was from the Congo, of some tribe unknown to us, and spoke French as well as a very correct Swahili in a strange accent. He came to us by way of a friend of a friend, and was said to have worked for the French Ambassador in Nairobi, or at least for a Frenchman of high standing in the colony. Certainly he had impressive references. My father took him on at once and our mealtimes were transformed! Andrea was not just a cook, he was a CHEF par excellence. His cassoulet was a poem, his casseroles sublime. His pastry was perfect and for afternoon tea we got éclairs instead of scones; tortes instead of Victoria sandwich or fruitcake. And as for his soufflés…well…let me just say that I have never tasted anything so light and perfect since – certainly I have never myself quite managed to attain that standard. My mother was in ecstasy and her reputation as a hostess shot up to new heights. To be invited to our place and eat Andrea’s cooking was considered a great privilege. My mother reviewed her entertainment schedule and decided she could risk bigger and bolder dinner parties. Andrea responded to this with great enthusiasm, helping her plan wonderfully exotic menus, giving her new ideas that her simple English (well, and Italian too) soul had never dreamed of, telling her of a fine foods emporium in Nairobi that imported cheeses from France, at a cost. For the first time we tasted brie and camembert. It is not an exaggeration to say that our family was the envy of Mombasa – or at least the European section of it.
Oh, and Andrea could do a pretty good roast, too. True, it had flourishes that were strange to us. Gone was the familiar weekly joint of topside, replaced by sirloin served very rare. Lamb, too, that most precious of meats, was served up gigot in style and rather more rare than my father liked. Pork, for some reason, Andrea despised. And yes, he could (at our request) roast a chicken. And a very fine chicken dinner it was, too. And yet, as my father used to say, it was not QUITE as good as Mboji’s. My mother vigorously denied it but secretly we kids agreed with our father. Maybe it was the garlic, which though not entirely strange to us was nonetheless used sparingly in our household. Maybe it was the exotic stuffing – chestnut puree, celery and walnut – that took the place of the dear old packet sage and onion. Maybe it was the lack of bread sauce, which Andrea did not know and refused to make when it was explained to him.
We children, too, benefitted a bit from Andrea’s haute cuisine though he made it obvious he was not frightfully keen on wasting his talents on the nursery supper table. Gone were the baked beans (le baked bean! Quel horreur!) and the tinned sardines. Instead we got eggs scrambled in orange juice or poached over spinach (which we hated). Sardines were served rather deliciously in a baked dish over potatoes, which we loved.
There was, sad to say, a definite downside to all this culinary euphoria. Andrea, like all great chefs, was temperamental to a fault. He despised the other servants and bossed them around in a tone as deadly as a cobra. In fact he despised our whole household and made it clear he was accustomed to better things, like some Upstairs, Downstairs butler who finds himself forced to work for a socially inferior family. He launched into furious tirades which went right over my mother’s head; for one thing she was rarely around to hear them and, when she was, dismissed them airily as “temperament”; understanding neither French nor much of Andrea’s high-flown up-country kiSwahili she really had no idea what he was going on about. She continued to be his champion, despite the fact that he was always criticising the kitchen and bullying her into buying expensive culinary gadgets that had to be purchased in Nairobi or even from overseas. I remember an omelette pan that had to be ordered from Johannesburg.
Andrea was also rather fond of fitina – ever ready with a complaint. These were generally about the other servants or we children, especially myself. He was quite gentle with my often-sickly brother but found my rambunctious tomboyish ways not at all to his taste. He particularly disliked me going into the kitchen and helping myself to cheese from the ‘frig, or sitting on the back stoep and chatting with Kaola, who was a great friend and occasional companion in adventure. Andrea’s complaints were made to my father, generally when he came home from the office at lunchtime, and always began with: “Ah Bwana, shauri kidogo….”. My father learned to dread these complaints which always led to unpleasant confrontations with either his staff or his children. In any case, after a short honeymoon period of fabulous feasting, he was not quite so keen as the rest of us on our new cook. My father liked French food well enough, in a restaurant, but at home he preferred plainer English fare. Also, Andrea (who had demanded, and got, higher wages than Mboji and probably any other cook in Mombasa at that time) was proving very expensive. The grocery bill had shot up and there were always extras being brought in from elsewhere. My mother did not like to rein in Andrea’s enthusiasm because he sulked if thwarted and implied that no hostess of HIS wide experience would quibble about such bagatelles as the cost of importing pate de foie gras direct from France – or at least from Leopoldville!
Certainly we were eating well, but our formerly happy household was becoming a place of strife. The servants were grumpy, we children were constantly being chastised, my father was irritated and even my mother was becoming increasingly anxious. Over it all presided Andrea; tall, thin, supercilious and constantly critical. Then, after some months of this, my grandmother arrived to stay. Andrea, though he would not have thought it when he first encountered this small, apparently insignificant woman, had met his match.
My grandmother’s visits were regarded with apprehension by all the household, except myself who unreservedly loved her. Days before her arrival Mboji and the rest would be scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom and turning out the cupboards. Our kitchens were plain places then and not at all like the fancy “hostess” kitchens of today. Usually they were furnished with a large wooden table, a stainless steel sink and draining board, a white electric stove/oven with two round and one rectangular hot plates, a meat safe, a charcoal water-purifier on a stand, and a few dingy cupboards painted pale green or cream or possibly a combination of both. There would be a large pantry in one corner and a scullery near the back door. It was a room for preparing food, without pretension. No decor to speak of except a fly paper hanging from the ceiling, and a generally inadequate single-bulb light either naked or with a plain shade. This somewhat dreary part of the house was the cook’s fiefdom and memsaabs rarely ventured here. My grandmother, however, had an unusually un-memsaab-like preoccupation with hygiene, and was contemptuous of women who never set foot in their own chikoni. How else would you know whether it was being kept clean? How else prevent your family from being poisoned by germs? Our Kamba servants feared her but were accustomed to her ways; she lived near Machakos and spoke quite a bit of Kamba as well as functionally-fluent and often pungent kitchen Swahili, so during her first day or two with us there was always much warm Kamba greeting and exchanges about families and acquaintances back in the Ukumbani – Kenya could be a small country like that and servants that worked for you were often related to those working for members of your own extended family. Nonetheless, however hard our lot had worked to put the kitchen into tiptop shape, Memsaab Susu (as they called her – it means “witch”l) was never satisfied and it all had to be done over again until she was. My mother, considerably irritated by this bald attack on her housekeeping standards, kept well out of the way. Like most memsaabs we knew, she was content to leave her servants alone and not worry too much about what they did with their time, provided they were always there to tend the family as and when required. She liked a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing home but otherwise maintained a benevolent distance.
My grandmother, however, was different. When she’d done with our house she’d go and inspect the servants quarters and they, too, would have to be scrubbed down and disinfected. Servants’ children would be inspected for headlice and ringworm, stern lessons would be given on personal hygiene, hands would be inspected before preparing and serving food to ensure they had been properly washed with yellow Sunlight soap. The smell of Dettol and Jay’s Fluid was everywhere. Worse, my grandmother had an obsession with constipation; the state of our bowels was checked daily and all of us, servants included, were liberally dosed with Milk of Magnesia or Andrew’s Liver Salts.
Mboji and my grandmother had always enjoyed a wary (on his part) but amicable (on both parts) relationship. Though not a Kamba, he was a Taita, which she considered the next best thing. Andrea, however, she detested from the start, and it was reciprocated. Firstly, my grandmother did not appreciate his cooking, which was an insult to his pride so severe as to be almost mortal. For the first time we saw his self-esteem droop when she casually waved away his most tempting dishes. The truth was, though I don’t expect anyone bothered to tell him, that my grandmother rarely ate what my mother would have called “a normal meal”. She had a small appetite and preferred merely to nibble between meals, on cheese and biscuits, fruit, celery and pickles, anything that could be cut into small pieces and eaten anywhere but at the dining table.
When I look back, we ate a lot then, though we were all thin. Breakfast was always eggs cooked in one of several ways, with cereal and juice and toast as well. Kippers, too, when available. Mid-morning snacks were rare, but lunch was always a two-course meal, even if (when we were adults) we also had a full dinner in the evening. This meal was usually served no earlier than 8pm so between lunch and dinner we had afternoon tea at four o’clock, between work (or school) and whatever activities (usually sport) were planned for the late afternoon and evening. This “tea” always consisted of at least one kind of sandwich, biscuits and/or scones and a cake. Children had “supper” at about 6 – 7pm and this, too, was quite substantial; the something-on-toast already mentioned.
My grandmother didn’t bother with any of this, except on high days and special occasions, but stuck mainly to her cheese and bikkies, or the brown bread she bought specially in Nairobi. “I never eat,” she would say grandly and my mother would mutter something like “Well of course she doesn’t ever eat a proper meal, she’s always nibbling between meals.” Mboji used to make up little trays of things he knew my grandmother would like to pick at but often she would go into the kitchen and cut herself some cheese and take an apple from the ‘frig. This infuriated Andrea, who didn’t like memsaabs in his chikoni and had already suffered the indignity of having it cleaned, and himself along with it. For my grandmother was the type of Englishwoman who believed that only the English really understood cleanliness. And I mean the English, not the British, because though she might have accepted the Welsh (she was herself Welsh) and the Scots as practicing suitable standards she was very dubious about the Irish. She certainly had no high opinion of the French as a nation of clean-livers and any African trained by them must in her mind be in need of some strong instruction on the subject of both kitchen and personal hygiene. Domestic espionage was my grandmother’s forte and one day she caught Andrea not washing his hands before making his perfect pastry. Some pithy views were exchanged on both sides. And when my father came home for lunch that day, Andrea was waiting for him with his familiar: “Ah, bwana, shauri kidogo”.
This time he went too far. My father might often have found his mother-in-law irritating but he was not about to have her dissed by a servant. That would indeed have been letting the side down because though he was not a hard employer my father did expect both respect and obedience from those paid to serve us. So he very sharply put Andrea in his place and the latter, not over-endowed with humility, promptly resigned. A short while after he rather sullenly apologised and said he hadn’t meant it, but my father was not one to miss so good an opportunity and remained adamant. My mother was upset but not as much as the rest of us might have expected because even she was getting tired of Andrea’s tantrums and unfavourable comparisons of our household with others for whom he’d worked.
For a few days we had to put up with Mukiti’s efforts once more, and we ate out a lot, or fetched in fish and chips from Rocco’s or Chinese from the Hong Kong Restaurant. Then, in the mysterious way of Africans, Mboji arrived at the back door, asking for his old job back. To say our family was happy is to understate it. We were ecstatic! He must have been gratified by the warmth of our welcome. Of course, he fell off the wagon a few times after that and had to be bailed from gaol, but we put up with itfor the sake of his cheerful face and plain but honest food, and above all his roast chicken.
As I said at the beginning, my father maintained to his dying day that Mboji’s roast chicken was the best in all the world and for him no other, however wonderfully cooked, would do. Of course, he was quite wrong. I make a much better roast chicken than Mboji ever did, partly because I’m a better cook but mainly because chickens today, though perhaps not quite so tasty as those leggy, free range African kukus, are a lot more reliably tender and succulent.
And yet, like so many of my African memories, Mboji’s chicken has become sanctified by time and distance and, as with Proust’s little cake, one sniff of a chook roasting in my own oven and I’m back there in Kizingo Road waiting for our proudly smiling cook to bring his masterpiece to the table.
The sea was sparkling blue beneath the summer skies
And all alone with you I was in paradise
We wandered hand-in-hand, along the golden sand
Into my first love affair
That song was a big hit back in the late fifties when I was at boarding school in Nairobi. It was made famous, I think, by an English singer named Craig Douglas (possibly not his real name; very few English boys were called “Craig” back then); a milkman who had enjoyed a brief flare of fame before sinking back into obscurity. I feel I have a small claim on Craig Douglas because my cousin Susan, who lived (and still lives) on the Isle of Wight knew a girl who went out with him. Presumably while he was still a milkman. His songs, of which I can only remember two (the other is the more famous She Was Only Sixteen), seemed to echo the clopping sound of a milkman doing his horse-drawn rounds, or so my father once commented. Though by the late 1950s I don’t suppose there were many milkmen still driving horses, not even on the Isle of Wight.
For those of us who WERE about sixteen when the bland but boyishly pleasant-looking Douglas (he didn’t smoulder like Cliff or have the cheeky charm of Adam) enjoyed his brief hit-parade success, it was a song for our time and place. I was slightly younger but already well awake to the possibilities of love. It was no accident that Shakespeare made Juliet fourteen; we forget as we age that the most intense love is felt in our teens, when our hormones are most urgent and our emotions untempered by reality.
To live in Mombasa, back then, and walk along one of those endlessly pefect beaches, beside the Indian Ocean which ALWAYS sparkles, hand-in-hand with the boy of our choice (and who had, oh bliss! chosen us) really was paradise enow! True, our sand was white rather than golden, and all the better for that. Our cousins in England, poor pale things, could only enjoy that gold for a brief summer each year, and that fleetingly. Whereas we Kenya kids had our white beaches always there for our delight.
And so, for the teenagers of Mombasa, and those older than us who, for reasons which we found incomprehensible and faintly revolting, still insisted on romance in their lives, the beach was an essential factor in our love affairs. So it was for me, and I still remember those moonlight walks and frenzied gropings in the sand with great affection. But my first love affair was not with a boy – it was with Mombasa itself; the town and the coastlines north and south. Mombasa was the first great love of my life; like all great loves the memory still warms my heart and like all lost loves it haunts me still.
I still remember the day I fell in love. My father had taken up a new post and so we packed up the house in Nairobi and headed for the coast. We were, I remember, all ecstatic about this. Nairobi had come to seem grim with the dark shadow of Mau Mau still upon it. We didn’t doubt that the British Government and the stalwart nature of the settlers on their fortified farms would ultimately prevail over a handful of disaffected and witch-ridden tribesmen but there was nonetheless a strong sense of unease in the European community, sensed even by children at a time when children were seen and not heard and certainly not informed about adult affairs. It is not of course the done thing to say this now, but we felt betrayed by those we considered in our trust and wondered whether we could ever feel safe in that beloved country again. Too, the winds of change were beginning to blow just over the horizon, perceptible to those astute at reading political weather. Terrorism was all but defeated but those of us who thought we had won the battle were soon to find we had lost the war; within a decade we would no longer rule the land and our way of life would be gone forever.
None of this weighed on my small family, however, as we took the red road to the coast. We knew what to expect because we had holidayed at Jadini where the simple thatched banda with its iron beds and primitive bathroom, sited between the jungle and the splendid beach, was all that up-country folk expected of a holiday in those simple times. But to actually live there with the beach forever at the door and the palm trees waving and the warm, moist seawind blowing over the island was unimaginable bliss. Especially after Nairobi which seemed colourless and dreary by comparison.
I should admit here that I never did really care for Nairobi. Most Mombasa people didn’t. Perhaps I associate the Kenya capital with boarding school (which I loathed and where I always felt I’d been exiled from my coastal heartland) and also the earlier period of Mau Mau with its curfews and alarms. Beyond that, however, I always sensed (and still do in memory) a darkness at the heart of the city which Ewart Grogan once described as “that miserable scrap heap of tin”. Of course it had changed a lot since pioneering days and had its revered icons – the Norfolk Hotel, the New Stanley bar, the markets, the game park at its boundary – as well as some fine social and civic developments such as theatres, shops, cinemas and Ledgco. For me, though, there was always a faint sense of depression to be found in the neat suburbs where so many of the houses were built of a grim grey stone, imprisoned by dense hedges of cypress or kai apple. I felt this most keenly on those Sunday afternoons when I was taken out of school on one of the precious exeats by well-meaning aunts who took me to their homes and tried hard to feed and amuse me. The homes all seemed to be filled with a kind of sad Sunday silence . Even the gardens were darkened by overhanging trees which seemed vaguely threatening to me; occasionally leopards were seen in those trees, hunting the suburbs for dogs. Such leopards, the servant of one of my aunts once told me, were really were-creatures and therefore dangerous because they had no fear of people and were particularly fond of the flesh of children. He was a Kikuyu and thus believed strongly in such things and I believed too, because it seemed quite natural that Nairobi would harbor black horrors behind its sombre hedges.
The coast, by contrast, was all lightness and sun and happy glitter. We arrived there as eager new residents after the long drive which at that time was still an adventure. Traffic was low enough that when you passed another car, in a cloud of red dust, everyone waved and sometimes we would stop and exchange news of conditions ahead of us. Animals large and small crossed the road with insouciant frequency; everything from tiny ground squirrels by the dozens to buck and gazelle of various types, zebra and wildebeest on the Athi Plains as far as the scarp above Hunter’s Lodge, then rhino and elephant in the hot lowlands of the nyika. The mandatory stops were Kibwezi and Mtito Andei where there was a passable roadhouse; Voi if you needed fuel or felt you couldn’t go any further.
On this occasion we drove across the Causeway and on to Mombasa Island late in the afternoon, our car covered in red dust that also lay thick and gritty in our eyes and throats. Our first stop was the office of “Uncle” Peter. This was a courtesy title only; he and “Aunt” Kay were friends of my parents and no relation at all but it was common then for children to address close family friends by familial titles. The Japanese do it too, and the Australian aborigines. It’s one of those little social niceties that we have now lost in an age where even very small children call all adults by their given names.
Uncle Peter worked for the government and though I don’t know exactly what he did it must have been reasonably high-ranking because he and Aunt Kay had rather a splendid house on the seafront, next-door-but-one to the Golf Club.
And it was there, sitting outside his office, in the back of our brand-new albeit dusty Morris Oxford, that I fell in love. I remember the moment perfectly, though I can’t remember for the life of me exactly where we were. Somewhere around Treasury Square I should imagine. My father had gone inside to announce our arrival and while he was there I looked up and saw a coconut palm, heavy with fruit, leaning over the pavement. This tree, in all its slender elegance, repeated itself in shadow upon a white wall. And that was it! That’s all it took! Something about the tree and the quality of light and the feel of the air pierced my young heart as surely as Cupid’s arrow and skewered it firmly into the sandy soil of the Kenya coast. Seven decades or so later I remember the moment quite clearly.
We then drove round the seafront where the usual afternoon breeze freshened the humidity. The grass on the golf course was bright green patched by the sandy bunkers. Palms framed the large houses up on the cliff, huge baobabs spread their sparse branches below. The sea was as blue as only the Indian Ocean can be on a fine day. A large ship in the dove grey and red colours of the Union Castle Line lay just off-shore awaiting the services of the small white pilot boat that bobbed over the waves towards it. Apart from one or two cars and a couple of golfers the whole expanse before our delighted eyes was devoid of human activity.
Just think, said Uncle Peter. I can walk out on to that course and play golf whenever I like – it hardly costs a thing.
Could you swim, I wondered? Swimming was new to me and associated with waterholes in the Athi River where you had to watch out for crocodiles.
Not here, said Uncle Peter. It was all coral cliffs and no beach. But you could walk round to the ferry and back one way, or to Fort Jesus and back the other way and hardly see a soul. And there were plenty of good beaches north and south of the island.
I was to do those walks many times, as child and adult. The seafront was to become focal to my life; a place to play in the baobab trees and the ruins of the wartime gun emplacements; to drive around for coolness of a Sunday afternoon and watch the bright-coloured Indian families debouch from their small cars; to buy peanuts in cones of newsprint from vendors pushing small carts; to ramble from end to end while pondering everything from failing relationships to major life-changing decisions; to swim away the school holidays in the Florida pool and, when it became a night club, to dance away the small hours. It was here that my beloved island met the sea head-on; beyond lay a world which, back then, I had absolutely no desire ever to see.
We spent our first night in the Manor Hotel. It was old and a bit fusty, with large and heavy wooden furnishings. My brother and I went to the first sitting for dinner, the only people in the dining room and the only children in the hotel at all. The waiters wore the standard uniform of white kanzu and red fez and served us with the kind, slightly irreverent deference with which African servants treated white children in those days. I remember there were four courses and that we ended with floating puddings which we thought a great novelty. Perhaps, like bread-and-butter pudding, they’ll make a come-back one day and be all the go in fashionable restaurants.
That night we slept for the first time under mosquito nets; these had not been necessary in our Nairobi house and we found them strange and a bit claustrophobic when the hotel ayah tucked us in. Funny to think that for many years after I left Mombasa I was unable to fall asleep easily because I missed the security of a net over me. Large ceiling fans stirred the air, another novelty. My parents, all dressed up to dine, came in to bid us goodnight. Isn’t it exciting?, said my mother looking happier than she had for ages because she was recovering from a serious illness that had left her thin and gaunt and very nervy. I thought it was exciting and knew myself already besotted by this new home, though I couldn’t have put my feeling into words.
Next morning I awoke and saw the sunlight glinting through the heavy shutters and, once again, that already-familiar silhouette of the coconut palm with its fronds gently shivering. The day would be full of new things; a house, a school, a different life. I don’t remember feeling even the tiniest regret for whatever I had left behind. I knew I was home.
In the years after that I came to know my island intimately, even to its furthest and least likely corners. I walked everywhere, to school, to town, to visit friends on the other side of the island. And where I didn’t walk, I cycled. It was nothing to us then to cycle all around the island and across the ferry to the south coast or over the bridge to Nyali. I’ve sailed down Kilindini Harbour and up the further reaches of the creekways beyond Port Reitz where even African fishermen didn’t go. I’ve explored the upper reaches of Tudor Creek, too, in the small and unstable canoe made by my father. There was a world of adventure for children in those places and nobody told us we shouldn’t seek it out, though the waters were full of sharks, especially around the Kenya Meat Commission and the port. I’ve swum across from the old Swimming Club to the Mombasa Club and back and cycled through the African townships and the commercial go-down area at Chamgamwe. I’ve trapped fish in the mangroves along the edge of Mbaraki and explored the forgotten caves near Fort Jesus. I’ve walked to town down Cliff Avenue when the Poinciana trees were in full bloom and wandered the streets of the Arab old town where street vendors were generous to children and old women swathed from head to toe in black bui-buis would scold us and tell us to go home.
Here, the old harbour could be glimpsed through narrow gaps between the pastel houses, busy with dhows in season, a glimpse of an earlier and more romantic epoch. We learned about this time in school; of conflicts up and down the Zinj coast, of Portuguese adventurers and Arab sultans, of slavers and missionaries and the explorers who ventured into the interior for ivory and the renown of discovering the sources of great rivers. The names of Speke and Burton, Grant and Thompson, Krapf and Rebmann were as familiar to us as were the names of Columbus and Magellan and Drake to children elsewhere. There were missionary graves just north of the island and the remains of the old Freretown slave market. Fort Jesus was a stalwart reminder of past battles; the small mosques dotted around the island a reminder that such battles had ended in compromise. We were taught that Mombasa meant “island of war” and Dar es Salaam meant “haven of peace” and that both had been havens for the pirates who sailed the waters from the Horn of Africa to Zanzibar, long before the slavers came.
I absorbed all this as if it was my birthright but strange to tell, when I learned all these things, it did not occur to me that there was anything extraordinary about the place in which I lived. I used to sit in the hot classroom at Mombasa Primary School, head on one hand, and dream of places that I considered truly exotic; Pago Pago, Rangoon, Rio di Janeiro, and great, slow-travelling rivers such as the Irrawaddy, the Brahmaputra and the Amazon. When I pictured pirates they were always walking planks in the Caribbean. Those were the faraway places with strange-sounding names of which I dreamed; it never occurred to me that the Kenya coast was in any way exciting or exotic. Like children everywhere we played at pirates and at one time our games were centred on an old wrecked boat that we found in the mangroves far up Tudor Creek. We shouted “ooo aarrhhh” at each other in the accents (or so we thought) of Devon and wore eyepatches and made swords out of timber and made each other walk the plank. We were always Blackbeard (a film that came out of Hollywood about that time) and never Sinbad. It was a triumph of culturism over geographical reality; who we were – little colonial Bwanas and Memsaabs – was more powerful with us than where we were.
Looking back like this it can be seen that I had soon learned to take my great love for granted. And yet I do think that one of the genii of the place had writhen its way into my spirit so that I “belonged” to the island in a way that my parents and other adults could not. Adults of my own kind, I mean, who had come to Mombasa too old to fall wholly under its influence. They liked it for its easy working hours, its obvious beauties, its pleasant life of clubs and sport and parties and beaches. I – and I know others who grew up there feel the same – knew something much older and deeper. It came to me in strange moments but the feeling is impossible to describe though it has something to do with Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being; a sublimity of soul envoked by a full moon over the sea, the sun shining in a certain way on a white wall, a dusty track between mbati-roofed shacks, the shocking contrast of white sand and green dune-plants and blue water, rain washing the squalid streets down the far end of Salim Road, the elegant stone fretwork of Islamic architecture, the rattle of the planks on the old Nyali Bridge, the song of the men pulling a ferry across a sun-splashed creek.
And there is a feeling more powerful than all the rest that today, long-exiled, I associate with Mombasa. It’s a purely personal feeling rather than one which others might share and though it manifests itself in the guise of memory it is not of any one particular memory but rather a synthesis of recollection that stands for a time and a place precious to my soul. I call it my “red lamp feeling” for want of any more telling description. There is a room, at that point of darkness which comes just after sundown on the equator, and in it are a mother, a father and two children. I think they are reading or listening to one of those old fashioned radios with a cloth piece at the front – I can’t quite be sure because, as I say, this is not quite a memory and not quite a feeling but something in-between. In that room there is a red-shaded standard lamp whose light shines kindly on them all and is also reflected in a nearby window. The room has window bars and the general appearance of my childhood home in Kizingo Road; beyond that I recognize and remember nothing. I have no idea what triggers this feeling/memory today but when it comes it washes over me with indescribable intensity – a sort of hot flush from the past which is at once painfully nostalgic yet deeply comforting. “This is absolutely the right time and the right place” it seems to say. I’m an atheist and a rationalist but if I believed in Heaven I would want it to be back there and back then for eternity!
So deep was my attachment to Mombasa that throughout my youth I could not bear to be anywhere else. I didn’t care much for going on long leave with my parents; the sea trip either way was fun but Europe – and England especially – seemed grey and cold and dreary to me in those years after the war. Who could find pleasure in bathing in a grey sea where the beach is full of stones, when they had known the soft white sand and coral pools of the Kenya coast? Who could enjoy the dull and rainy streets smelling of wet wool and the dank garden laurels of London suburbia when they were accustomed to dusty red-brown roads and flame-red poincianas and the beloved silhouette of palm trees? How could anyone LIVE in England, I wondered? France was a giant gallery of art and architecture intimidating to children, Italy a place of ruins both ancient and modern inhabited by voluble fat women in flowery penziones who fed and minded my brother and me while our parents went out to dine in little cliff top restaurants overlooking the sea. Well if that’s what they wanted they could do it just as well at Nyali Beach was the way I looked at it then. All I wanted was to get back home where I belonged.
Even worse was being sent up-country to boarding school. Again, it was as if all the colour had been taken from my life and I hated it! I pined and wilted and begged my parents to let me stay and finish my schooling at the coast where the old Loreto Convent seemed to embody the spirit of every such school in every tropical colonial outpost, its deep verandahs shaded by frangipani and Poinciana trees, the sound of chanting softening the wet and heavy air. Eventually I got my way; on the day when I was sent home by train, in disgrace, though fearing (justifiably!) the retribution that awaited me all I could think of was that I would soon be back in Mombasa Island’s safe and sunny embrace.
And so the years passed and in my memory we danced them away with no concern for the future. Dancing was very much part of our lives; we started when young at the Railway Club’s school holiday Wednesday night rock ‘n roll sessions for teenagers , graduating to the Sports Club at New Year and the Sunday night live band out at Port Reitz. While my parents and their friends danced sedately at the Chini Club we younger folk did the twist on the floor under the stars at Nyali, or at the Sunday tea dances further up the coast, or at private parties on Saturday nights. Nightclubs opened, seedy and mildly wicked, and we danced there, too. We danced on New Year’s Eve and at Government House on the Queen’s birthday, and on board ships in the harbor. We drove to the dances in open cars with the soft wind of the ocean blowing our hair, and back from them late at night on the long, empty roads, spoiled children of Empire who would dance forever as long as they never left the Enchanted Isle.
Yet leave we did, most of us. The problem with all great loves, whether they be for people or for places, is that they change. And so do we. When this happens we either try and accept the changes and grow old together, wrinkles and all. Or we part and go our separate ways. When Independence came to Kenya and Mombasa began to change, not dramatically at first but in small, insidious increments, I knew I couldn’t stay. The reasons for leaving were all commonsensical but in my heart I felt that a serpent had entered Eden and I and my kind were being cast out and that Eden itself was about to be despoiled. Fanciful, I know, but then love is not a reasonable emotion.
Sad to say, so disenchanted had I become with my Enchanted Isle that when I finally left I did so without a twinge of sorrow. All I can remember is driving one last time through to Tudor to say goodbye to a friend and thinking how dull and flat everything seemed on a Sunday afternoon. The very palm trees that I’d always so loved seemed to droop with lethargy. I, by contrast, was filled with the vigour of seeking new and larger horizons and I felt quite sorry for those whom I was leaving behind! It was only later, quite a bit later, that the soft and sweet memories stole over me and I wept for all I had given up, even though I knew that what it was I missed was gone from me forever, stolen by time as well as politics.
In time I learned to love a new land where the beaches, like those of my childhood, go on forever. True the sand is not quite so white nor the sea quite so brilliantly aquamarine; the coconut palms have been planted and there is no protective line of reef. Yet still it’s a fine place where I can wander the tideline safely and alone, and where I can still recapture something of my magical childhood.
Because the essence of your first great love is that you never forget it. Never, ever, quite manage to tear it from your heart. In memory, Mombasa is never very far from me and because I have not been back that memory is pristine and preserved in time as perfectly as an insect in amber.I began this story with a song and I’ll end it with another; one that, when it came out, I felt had been especially written about Mombasa. When I sing it today, it still makes me cry!
Lyrebird Mountain 