A Very Different Land: Echoes of Kenya in the 1930s and '40s

Abstract

'A Very Different Land' tells the story of how the strong agricultural economy of present day Kenya is based on the agriculture of the Colonial period, a story told through the eyes of my father and his colleagues. My father, Owen, was an Agricultural Adviser in Kenya from 1928 to 1950, rising from Assistant Agricultural Officer to assistant director of the department. It was a period which saw a transformation in farming throughout all parts of Kenya.Kenya was always part of my life. I grew up surrounded by talk of life in Kenya, and it was a benchmark of comparison and memory. My parents both loved their life there and my childhood was full of reminiscences and Swahili phrases; when we went to France and my parents were searching for a word in French, out came a word in Swahili. A stool made from a single piece of wood and decorated with beads came from Kisii; a round coffee table in an African hardwood was bought in Kitale. When the weather in England got very hot my father sighed with happiness and said it reminded him of Mombasa. When, later, my mother visited me in Hong Kong, she loved the verandahed Repulse Bay Hotel because it reminded her of Mombasa.I was born in Nairobi in 1947 but my father retired from the Colonial Service two years later at the age of 46 to take up a life in England. My mother brought me back to England first, in a flying boat from Lake Victoria. I did not return to Kenya until 2002 except for a night stopover between Lusaka and London in about 1980, but when I did I visited All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi and found my father's photograph in the vestry; he had been director of the choir from 1945 to 1950.There is an echo in the family history. Consciously or unconsciously following in his footsteps, I have worked in development and technical assistance as an economist in developing countries for 30 years, sometimes in Africa but also Asia and the Far East, and the Middle East - but never Kenya. I had never realised how close the parallels are between his world in Kenya in the 1930s and my development world in the latter part of the twentieth century until I started reading some of the reports by him and other agricultural officers in the Departmental Reports and recognised the language of the adviser; there is a characteristic tone of weary optimism. "This land is very fertile and we hope that with sufficient demonstration and teaching the local population will be able to increase the output of maize and food crops-.. " or "Once the road has been completed costs of transport will be much reduced which will enable better marketing of local produce. The benefits to the local population in terms of nutrition and household income will be significant". A willing for things to improve but recognition of the great difficulties; "if only things were organised like this, or like that"-When I began to write this book, I had two main thoughts: to explore what Owen and his colleagues thought they were doing, why they had come and what they achieved; and to examine what is left of their time in Kenya - and what they contributed to the life of the country. In writing this book I have used interviews and memoirs, as well as government records. I was fortunate enough to find a number of memoirs of officers from that period in Kenya in the Rhodes House library collection in Oxford; for the details on agricultural practice and the lives of agricultural officers I found unpublished manuscripts which were the background for a review by Anne Thurston at Oxford University on agricultural practice in Kenya, part of the Oxford Development Records Project undertaken in the early 1980s under the Direction of Anthony Kirk-Greene from St. Antony's College, Oxford.2There are one or two extraordinarily rich databases which document lives and people of that period - that of Peter Ayre will be well known to followers of Kenya; he is compiling a data base of all Europeans living in Kenya between the wars, and this record has been extremely valuable. …