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White man's country: Kenya Colony and

the making of a myth
a
Will Jackson
a
School of History , University of Leeds , Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
Published online: 12 May 2011.

To cite this article: Will Jackson (2011) White man's country: Kenya Colony and the making of a
myth, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5:2, 344-368, DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2011.571393

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 Journal of Eastern African Studies
Vol. 5, No. 2, May 2011, 344
368

White man’s country: Kenya Colony and the making of a myth

Will Jackson*

School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

(Received 1 April 2010; final version received 20 January 2011)
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This article explains the cultural construction of Kenya Colony. It does so by

combining two related histories
those of international tourism and of colonial
rule
and two key explanatory themes
those of crisis and of commodity.
The cultural construction of the colony, the article argues, emerged from two
decisive moments: the ‘‘Indian crisis’’ of the early 1920s and the Mau Mau
Emergency of the 1950s. Its content, meanwhile, was determined by its creation as
a product, to be constituted, marketed, purchased and consumed. Colonial
decline coincided with the emergence of Kenya Colony as global brand. Whilst the
political project to maintain white man’s country failed, the commercial project

to market white man’s country as a commodity
succeeded emphatically.
Attending to political crisis and cultural construction together, moreover,
illustrates the function of the Kenya myth. The myth of Kenya Colony, the
article argues, operated through recursive tropes of the picturesque, the
transcendent and the primeval that are manifest not only in the writings of
colonials themselves but also in accounts of Kenya produced in the period after
independence. By examining the post-colonial period alongside the formative
years of colonial rule, the extent to which ideas about Kenya circulating in the
world today should be thought of in neo-colonial terms becomes apparent.
Keywords: Kenya Colony; Mau Mau; tourism; commodity; neo-colonialism

That Kenya was Britain’s most aristocratic imperial possession is a matter on which
historians have tended to agree. ‘‘Known after 1920 as Kenya’’, Kathryn Tidrick
writes, ‘‘the new colony was incomparably the most aristocratic of Britain’s outposts
overseas’’.1 Dane Kennedy concurs: ‘‘The dominant element within the white popu-
lation of Kenya’’, he suggests, ‘‘consisted of a social stratum most appropriately
termed gentlemanly’’.2 To some extent, the point is indisputable: Both C.J.D. Duder’s
and Kennedy’s own research into the social background of European immigrants
during the first thirty years of settlement show a disproportionate number of lords
and ladies, dukes and earls.3 Nor can there be any argument over the lengths to which
authorities were prepared to go to preserve Kenya as a destination for the rich.4
Certainly, the aversion to ‘‘poor whites’’ in Kenya was unequivocal: Nothing was
more damaging to the racial ideologies separating colonisers from colonised than the
appearance of a white man with nothing in his favour but the colour of his skin.5
All this notwithstanding, one does not need to look long or hard to detect the
overlap between a predominant contemporary image of Kenya’s Europeans and the
now conventional historical consensus. The gentlemanly stratum, Kennedy wrote,

*Email: w.jackson@leeds.ac.uk

ISSN 1753-1055 print/ISSN 1753-1063 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2011.571393
http://www.informaworld.com
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 345

was the dominant one. That is not to say that it was representative. Indeed, it was
their apparent prevalence that, as Elspeth Huxley argued, created the false impression
that the colony’s settlers were drawn mainly from Britain’s aristocracy:

This was far from the case. Afrikaner transport riders, Scottish cattle traders, Italian
mechanics, Irish garage owners, Jewish hoteliers, and farmers drawn from the despised
and mediocre middle classes, were all there too, in much greater numbers.6

While Kenya’s aristocratic settlers comprised only a ‘‘visible minority’’ (the

phrase is Carolyn Shaw’s), their lasting legacy was their contribution towards a
mythology that has lived on, albeit in transmuted form, to the present day. In fiction,
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memoir and later, film, Kenya Colony has consistently been depicted as a place of
loyal servants and resplendent views, of sundowners in the evening and journeys
down roads that were dusty in the dry season and oceans of mud in the rains. It is
a discourse of the luxuriant and the picturesque, finding its archetypal (and most
influential) expression in the work of the Danish baroness Karen von Blixen,
whose 1937 memoir Out of Africa has provided the template for much consequent
European and North American writing on Kenya. While Kenya’s colonial mythology
has been picked over extensively by literary critics, however, what remains strikingly
absent is an historical explanation for why Kenya Colony continues to be associated
with a particular combination of romance and adventure almost fifty years after
political independence.7 Why is it, put simply, that as practitioners of the ‘‘new
imperial history’’ continue to pull apart triumphalist colonialist narratives elsewhere,
in the case of Kenya the dominant colonial version of events
of an elite, if atavistic,
gentlemanly class felicitously transplanted to the scenic surrounds of equatorial
‘‘British East’’
has remained more or less intact?8 Recent work on Mau Mau has,
to be sure, made the violence of ‘‘white man’s country’’ much harder to ignore.9
But the settlers themselves, and the kinds of experiences that they enjoyed, remain
tightly bound by discursive convention. Alongside a plethora of popular accounts,
only Kennedy’s 1987 study of settler society in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia
and,
more recently, John Lonsdale’s contribution to the Oxford History of the British
Empire
have offered anything in the way of more critical alternatives.10
The aim of this article is not to lament the persistence of Kenya Colony’s romantic
mythology but to explain it. It is based on two basic propositions: First, that the
dominant image of white Kenya was laid down during the most turbulent periods of
its politics
first in the early 1920s, and later during the Mau Mau Emergency in
the 1950s; and second, that the form this image took grew out of the manufacture of
Kenya Colony as a commodity. To explain this image, I argue, it is necessary to trace
the history of tourism in Kenya not so much parallel to the history of colonial rule
but, rather, entwined within it. While the political entity that was Kenya Colony
withered in Macmillan’s winds of change, the cultural commodity lived on, continuing
to inform perceptions of Kenya in the post-colonial, globalised age.
To imagine, however, that perceptions of Kenya in the post-colonial period have
remained static since the transition to independence is to overlook the diverse
ways in which patterns of production and consumption have developed. To posit a
bald and basic continuity will not do; nor is it helpful to set up an oppositional
perspective of irreversible rupture and radical change. Instead, what is needed is
an appreciation of the ways by which continuity and change have combined; how
Blixen’s influence, for example, has endured but at the same time been transformed;
 346 W. Jackson

how the echoes of the travel writers and ‘‘white hunters’’ of the 1920s might
be discerned almost a century on in contemporary ‘‘white writing’’; how relations
of power have remained entrenched at the same time as the profiles, backgrounds
and worldviews of those engaged within them have altered over time. Examining
the commodification of Kenya, therefore, provides a valuable entryway into thin-
king through the cultural aspects of decolonisation and the possible legacies or
‘‘after-lives’’ of empire. Precisely because the rendering of Kenya as a tourist
commodity has depended upon the making manifest of prospective tourists’ prior
ideas, moreover, looking at what this commodity entails, as well as the manner
by which it is produced, provides valuable insight into those images, ideas and
associations by which Kenya (and frequently by extension, Africa) is imagined, by
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people not only in Britain but around the world today.11 To expand upon these
themes, the paper is divided into four parts. First, I set out the uniquely controversial
nature of Kenya’s colonial politics, focusing in particular on the ‘‘Indian crisis’’ of
the early 1920s; second, I examine the impact of commodification on the cultural
production of the colony, looking at the ways by which the marketing of Kenya
as a destination for tourists and settlers alike has shaped its discursive construction;
third, I examine how crisis and commodity came decisively together during the
late-colonial period when African nationalism rendered the colony ungovernable at
precisely the moment that international tourism to Kenya became a viable economic
prospect; lastly, I discuss the ongoing legacy of Kenya’s colonial discourse in shaping
contemporary perceptions of Kenya and consider the extent to which tourism to
Kenya today might usefully be considered in neo-colonial terms.

White man’s country I: Crisis

Described as Britain’s ‘‘most troublesome colony’’ by one historian, ‘‘by far the
most controversial of British African possessions’’ by another, Kenya’s unique
facility for attracting unwanted attention unfolded from a central fact: Kenya was
alone amongst Britain’s colonies in Africa, administered from Whitehall, in which
there existed a significant settler population. Settlers, to be sure, existed in far greater
numbers to the south but there minority self-government was progressively con-
ceded
to South Africa with Union in 1910 and to Southern Rhodesia with the
granting of self-governing status in 1923. Kenya was neither one thing nor another;
neither, in Lonsdale’s words, a ‘‘West Coast’’ trading colony, ruled through its chiefs
in the name of native trusteeship, nor a ‘‘South African’’ colony of palpably per-
manent white settlement, fit for minority rule.12
The effects of this were two-fold. First, it meant that colonial rule in Kenya would
always be hamstrung by two irreconcilable demands: to make the colony pay and
satisfy the settlers on whom its fortunes were staked on the one hand, and to adhere
to the imperial philosophy of ensuring the ‘‘uplift’’ of ‘‘native’’ populations on the
other. Second, it meant that from 1923, Kenya alone in Africa took on the mantle of
Britain’s colonial shop-window. Here would be the testing ground on which the
virtue or the vice of British imperialism would be exposed.13 The problems that
unfolded from Kenya’s basic contradiction were compounded, in other words, by the
fact that they would be so frequently in question. Those who wrote of Kenya often
did so in self-defence but against the force of their own illogic, striving to articulate
a rationale that could encompass both the ‘‘civilisation of backward races’’ and the
insatiable demands of settler capitalism for labour, land and a pliant state.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 347

While it has long been recognised that it was from these conflicting demands that
British Kenya policy was frustrated, what has been less explored is their profound
effect upon colonial expatriates themselves. For those who had sunk not only their
theories and fortunes but their own flesh and blood into making ‘‘white man’s
country’’ work, the contradiction at the heart of settler-colonialism was the deter-
minant fact of their colonial careers. Attempting to rationalise their presence became
the perennial colonial endeavour. The result was a discursive prolificacy that far
outstripped that of any other British colonial territory during a comparable period.
Amongst settlers in particular, for whom colonising Kenya meant claims not only
to reside but to permanently belong, literary output increased as dreams of ‘‘white
man’s country’’ were undone.14 Claims to truth were made most frequently when
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those claims were undermined.15

To fix a date when controversy began in Kenya is arbitrary, of course. The cost of
the railway in any case ensured that ‘‘British East’’ was controversial from the start.16
It was not until after the First World War, however, that the controversies stemming
from Kenya’s particular form of settler-colonialism earned the colony true notoriety.
Increased European immigration, ever the settlers’ principal aim, was at the root of
the trouble. The Soldier-Settlement scheme, inaugurated in 1919, allocated over a
thousand new farms across two million acres of land to British subjects who had
given military service during World War One.17 The result, inevitably, was a marked
increase in the colonists’ demand for labour, exacerbated by the post-war economic
boom. A circular issued by the new Governor, Sir Edward Northey, instructed
District Officers to achieve ‘‘by every possible lawful influence’’ an increase in the
supply of labour to European farms.18 By far exceeding previous exhortations to
‘‘encourage’’ native labour, the Northey circular lit a firestorm of protest among
liberal opinion, both in Kenya and in Britain. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Pro-
tection Society, meanwhile, scandalised by a series of incidents in which settlers were
found to have assaulted, tortured and, in some cases, killed their African employees,
worked strenuously to publicise what they held to be the particular brutality of
settler-colonialism in Kenya.19
While liberal opinion in Britain depicted Kenya settlers as ruffians and thieves,
settlers felt themselves to be grievously wronged. Ill-informed humanitarians, they
contended, could hardly understand ‘‘the facts’’ as they appeared to the man on the
spot. As controversy centred on the exploitation of native labour, settlers cast
themselves as benevolent trustees of Africans’ future. Their opportunity to do so,
however, arose out of a quite separate crisis. This was the claim by Kenya’s Indians
for political franchise and the right to occupy land in the ‘‘white’’ highlands
those
fertile uplands between Machakos and Fort Ternan that since 1903 had been
reserved for occupation by those only of ‘‘European’’ descent.20 By 1920 the number
of Europeans in Kenya had approached 10,000 (double the pre-war figure) and the
availability of alienable land was decreasing accordingly.21 Settlers responded with
alarm, therefore, to the prospect that ‘‘their’’ highlands might be opened up to
Indian settlement. Even more disturbing was the prospect of an equal franchise. At
the 1921 census Indians outnumbered Europeans by two to one.22 An equal franchise
on a common roll thus appeared tantamount to the surrender of European political
power. ‘‘White civilisation’’, as Elspeth Huxley melodramatically recorded, ‘‘would
be swamped in a brown, enfranchised flood’’.23
The history of the Indian crisis has been extensively discussed elsewhere.24 That
settlers were prepared to resort to military force (and had even drawn up plans
 348 W. Jackson

to have the Governor interned) is how the episode is most frequently remembered.25
Its most significant
and lasting
legacy, however, was the image of white
settlement propounded by the settlers. Coincident with the labour controversies and
the scandals of settler brutality, debates around the Indian Question opened the
rhetorical space for Europeans to repel the charges of their critics and fashion their
own public ideologies of benevolent paternalism and ameliorative change. Critically,
the crisis forced a much stronger enunciation on the part of the settlers of their self-
professed civilising mission.26 To refute Indian claims to the highlands, settlers
insisted upon their own, unique ability to ‘‘civilise the natives’’. In a report released
following the Indians’ demands in 1919, it was argued that an increasing Indian
presence was injurious to African interests on both moral and economic grounds:
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not only would Indians monopolise those subordinate skilled and semi-skilled posi-
tions to which Africans might aspire but they would also be utterly unable to exercise
that civilising influence to which only Europeans were equipped. ‘‘It is our firm
conviction’’, the report set out, ‘‘that the justification of our occupation of this
country lies in our ability to adapt the native to our own civilisation. If we complicate
this task by continuing to expose the African to the antagonistic influence of Asiatic,
as distinct from European, philosophy, we shall be guilty of a breach of trust’’.27
Against the critical self-image of the benevolent European, the presence of ‘‘poor
whites’’ had to be strenuously denied. This was because prestige in Kenya involved
persuading not only Africans but the British public as well of the rightness of
European rule. Violence on the part of settler-farmers towards their African em-
ployees, as the events of the 1920s showed, was grist to the Kenya critics’ mill.
Against these critical voices, Kenya settlers had to propagate the image of the
Europeans in Kenya as compassionate rulers. It was the Indian crisis above all,
however, that linked the absence of ‘‘poor whites’’ with the political rationale
articulated by the doctrine of a ‘‘civilising mission’’. ‘‘We are now called upon to face
the African’’, ran an editorial in the settler newspaper, the East African Standard,
‘‘[and] in this aspect he is peculiarly favoured because here among the Europeans
there is hardly any of the ‘poor white’ class to which otherwise he would inevitably
be drawn’’.28 ‘‘If the colonisation of Africa is to be a success’’, elaborated Elspeth
Huxley, ‘‘it must be entrusted to the best among the colonising race, not to the
remittance man and the indentured coolie’’.29 In the imperial vision of progress, the
direction of change could only go one way: ‘‘If the natives are to be raised’’, wrote
one settler, ‘‘it is no good trying to do it by lowering the European in their eyes’’.30
Invoking trust hitched the wagon of European mastery to the guiding star of
benevolent imperial rule. The settlers thus offered a direct renunciation of their critics
to whom African interests and colonial capitalism were irrevocably at odds, whilst
matching their own rhetoric to the doctrine of trusteeship emerging from Versailles.
As the Indian crisis gathered steam through 1923 and the voices of critics in Britain
grew louder, settlers and their supporters fell back time and again on their bene-
volent imperial role as the guarantee for their preeminent political position. ‘‘If we
submitted to Indian demands’’, claimed the Standard, ‘‘it would mean the frustrating
of the promises we made to the Native of Africa . . . that he should have his chance to
rise in a civilized community’’.31 For the first time in the colony’s history, both its
settlers and its administration had been forced to justify their presence, backed into a
corner by the competing demands of ‘‘native’’ uplift and export-capitalism. It was in
the process that the vital importance of propaganda emerged. Only by exploiting
their gentlemanly networks, by courting the British press and by aggressively winning
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 349

new adherents to their cause could proponents of ‘‘white man’s country’’ keep their
dream alive. Summoned to London to argue their case, the settlers embarked on an
unprecedented public relations campaign, giving interviews to the press, preparing
newspaper articles, hosting events at their Grosvenor House headquarters and re-
hearsing repeatedly their professedly unique ability to act as trustees on the Africans’
behalf.32 The result was the realisation by Kenya’s settler population that if they were
to receive imperial recognition in the future they must present themselves as sole
trustees of the African future, a position which depended on an idealisation of their
own self-image as much as it did a derogation of the colony’s far more numerous
Indian population.33
The controversies of the early 1920s raised to prominence a particular idealised
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image of European settlement in Kenya whilst making starkly apparent the value to
be derived from a sympathetic settler lobby in Britain able to counter the voices of
Kenya’s critics. They also contributed to a dramatic quickening of public interest in
the colony. ‘‘All publicity is good publicity’’ runs the mantra of the marketeer, and
though tales of violence and oppression fired the settlers’ rage, they also helped to
establish Kenya Colony in the consciousness of the British public, located somewhere
in the exotica of empire news and redolent of railways, ‘‘natives’’ and the stop-start
progress of the pioneers. Indeed, it is at least in part due to the controversies of the
early 1920s (coupled with the publicity given to the post-war settlement scheme and
the first of the ‘‘champagne’’ inter-war safaris) that we are able to explain the efflo-
rescence of travel writing, newspaper reportage, fiction and memoir concerning itself
with Kenya that appeared in Britain throughout the 1920s.34 As this essay goes on to
discuss, it was not until the second great crisis moment in the life of the colony

Mau Mau in the 1950s
that such a discursive prolificacy would be seen again.
Likewise, it was not until that same late-colonial period
when not Indians but
Africans challenged the continuation of white minority rule
that the value of a
concerted propaganda campaign was fully to emerge.

White man’s country II: commodity

The controversy of Kenya’s colonial politics reached its height in the 1950s, during
the Mau Mau Emergency. Yet it was in that same period that the number of
Europeans either visiting Kenya on holiday or moving to live there permanently
increased dramatically.35 The dangers portended by Mau Mau, it seems, were offset
by the attractions that Kenya had to offer
its pleasant climate, its open spaces, and
its ample opportunities for profit and sport.36
Consideration of the manner in which Kenya was advertised to the wider world

to tourists and prospective settlers alike
demands that we consider the ways by
which the colony was commodified from the very beginning of colonial rule right
through to its demise. The travel agent Thomas Cook first sent tourists into East
Africa in 1903 as part of a tour up the Nile to Khartoum, south to Lake Victoria and
on to Nairobi, nicknamed by Cook ‘‘the St. Pancras of East Africa’’.37 The tour’s
pièce de majésté was, of course, the new Uganda railway, only recently completed, by
which the final leg of the tour was conducted. Five years later, Cook launched its first
‘‘Highlands of British East Africa’’ tour, its route into the interior from the coast
allowing tourists the imaginative adventure of following in the footsteps of those
Victorian explorers whose writing had done so much to generate East Africa’s
popular appeal. The railway, meanwhile, not only made this journey possible for
 350 W. Jackson

tourists; it also provided its incomparable charm. By the turn of the century both the
romance of the road and the romance of the ocean were beginning to decline;
Marconi’s successful experiments with transatlantic radio transmission had visited
modernity upon the sea while Cook’s own nostalgic stage-coach trips from London
and Guildford had spectacularly failed.38 The Uganda railway offered a winning
alternative; now tourists could encounter for themselves something of Africa’s grace
and grandeur but they could do so in safety and in style, enjoying the African
landscape and its abundance of game from the comfort of their carriage window.
In his book on the history of wilderness in the North American imagination,
Roderick Nash has argued that from the beginning of the twentieth century, East
Africa replaced the American West as America’s next tourist frontier.39 That the
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region did so was due largely to its plenitude of ‘‘big game’’. From the very beginning
of white settlement, parties of wealthy European aristocrats and American million-
aires travelled to Nairobi, none more famous than ex-American president Theodore
Roosevelt, whose 1909 safari set the standard for the champagne safaris of the inter-
war years.40 ‘‘The visit’’, as a policeman in the Protectorate recalled, brought ‘‘a mass
of invaluable free publicity’’ and occasioned ‘‘the latter day invasion’’ of what
Roosevelt had termed ‘‘the most attractive playground in the world’’.41
As John Mackenzie has shown, hunting ‘‘big game’’ in ‘‘British East’’ appealed to
a class but to a culture as well; to be wealthy was a prerequisite but of greater
significance was the symbolic importance to be derived from the mastery
of man over nature, the thrill of proximate peril and the chivalry of ‘‘sport’’.42
Many of those Europeans who came to settle in Kenya, it should be noted, did so, at
least in part, because of the sporting opportunities that the colony had to offer.43 Most
importantly, published accounts of intrepid ‘‘great white hunters’’; of the novelty and
the romance of ‘‘dinner in the bush’’; and of the freedom and the beauty of Kenya’s
‘‘open spaces’’, together created the discursive foundations on which a nascent tourist
industry was laid.44 Tourist discourse during the early colonial period might thus be
seen as the ‘‘link in the chain’’ between the writing of the Victorian explorers in the
nineteenth century and the marketing of Kenya halfway through the next.
Notably, it was from Kenya’s early touristic development that the colony’s
picturesque appeal emerged. Kenya was intended as a destination for the rich yet
it was its apparent classlessness that provided its fascination. ‘‘I suppose there are
not many countries’’, wrote the Nanyuki settler Arnold Paice, ‘‘in which one might
entertain a dirty butcher one night and a general with a string of decorations the
next’’.45 For wealthy settlers, wearied by the tedious class-bound conventions of life
back at home, Kenya offered the opportunity for a life free from constraint. ‘‘Men
of good British stock’’, Dundas notes, ‘‘could be seen going about in disarray so
extreme as to be patently studied and their habits, if not their minds, were as untidy
as their dress’’.46
That men of good British stock went about in disarray was remarkable to
Dundas but his tone was not one of shock but of indulgence; only because these were
men whose social and racial credentials were safely beyond doubt were they per-
mitted to flout convention. Wealthy settlers dressed in rags not because they had to,
in other words, but because they could. ‘‘Only people utterly sure of themselves’’, as
John Gunther wrote, ‘‘can dare to be quite so unconventional’’.47
Concomitant to this cult of unconventionality was the extraordinary spectacle
that Kenya’s social elite themselves came to represent. If life was lived ‘‘on different
proportions’’ here, as one visitor to Kenya observed, then the country’s Europeans
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 351

took on different proportions too, the men ‘‘striding across the pages of each-others’
newspaper articles’’; the women decorating the lounges of the colony’s better known
hotels in outfits of tweed and crepe de chine.49 It should be remembered, however,
that whilst ‘‘dressing up for dinner’’ was in general the imperial rule, in Kenya such
colonial ostentation was combined with a countervailing tradition of dressing down.
Kenya’s settler elite were louche if nothing else. At formal dinners, the women
dressed in long-skirted low-necked gowns and the men in stiff shirts and white
waistcoats, but ‘‘up country’’ or on safari, supper was taken in dressing gowns and
pyjamas.49 This was the adventure of holiday and camp: the English better classes in
rarefied surrounds.
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It was not just the denizens of Happy Valley, however, who enjoyed picturesque
appeal. The significance of the tourist gaze upon Kenya derives from the fact that it
was not Africa alone that was made exotic but the process of colonising Africa as
well. ‘‘Here indeed is a vision of colonization’’, declared a 1936 Thomas Cook guide,
‘‘the vision of men and women wresting a living from the soil, making homes and
raising children to inhabit their glorious tradition’’.50 ‘‘Here is civilization in all its
stages’’, announced another guidebook, before depicting a visual montage of the
ancient and the modern, delightfully combined:

Primitive African peoples just awakening to the insistent voice of progress side by side
with plantations and the homesteads of the settlers. Modern towns and ancient
settlements, modern rail and steamer transport, or the delights of safari if you choose.
Lovely highland scenery or the brilliance of the tropics. The freedom of the world’s real
open spaces. And behind it all, like a gorgeous backcloth, the enthralling history of
Eastern Africa, Arab and Portuguese feuds, the trails of Livingstone, Speke and Burton,
the epic of the Twentieth Century pioneers with their backs against the wilderness.51

Nor was the colonial picturesque limited to Kenya’s great outdoors. Descriptions of
city life also made poetry from the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition. In New
Zealander Margaret Gillon’s description of Nairobi in the 1930s, we see the delight in
difference that ‘‘the races’’ provide:

In the main streets of Nairobi one sees the smart, well-dressed Europeans, the flashy
over-dressed Indians brushing shoulders with the less opulent of his kind, whose betel-
nut stained teeth and lips make a red gash across his face. The African is there in great
numbers, shop gazing and spitting revoltingly in the gutter. The karani, or clerk-type of
native in the height of fashion, strolls along ignoring his more primitive relative in from
the reserve, whose dress of blanket or skin makes a picturesque splash of colour as he
mingles in the crowd . . . such are the streets of Nairobi as seen by the tourist.52

In accounts such as these, the conflicts and contingencies inherent within colonial
rule were effaced by the picturesque quality of its surface appearance. Colourful
variety was the delight not only of the tourist but of the expatriate and the émigré as
well.53 It was precisely this seemingly apolitical quality, however, that imparted
political claims. ‘‘Without doubt’’, wrote one settler, ‘‘[my] most lasting impression of
Africa is the brilliance and warmth of an African’s smile, rendered all the more
satisfying owing to the contrast of flashing white teeth against the background of
dark skin’’.54 That the sight of an African’s smile was appealing on an aesthetic level
belied the fact that its description as such carried a political claim
that Africans, in
short, were content in their colonised position. It was precisely this surface appear-
ance, moreover
of harmony and goodwill, transcendent of politics
that came to
 352 W. Jackson

characterise much of the propaganda material on Kenya produced during the

colony’s dramatic final years.

Kenya Colony in the 1950s

During Kenya Colony’s final 25 years, the European community changed drama-
tically, most readily apparent in the fact that it more than doubled in size.55 So too
did the ways by which its history was being written. In the take-off of mass tourism,
in anti-Mau Mau propaganda and in the life-writing of settlers and colonial officials,
the dominant idea of Kenya as a place of romance and adventure became enduringly
entrenched.
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The first publicity organisation in Kenya was the Kenya Association (KA),
founded in 1932 by a group of prominent settlers and businessmen in order to ad-
vertise ‘‘the attractions and advantages’’ of the colony, to stimulate tourist traffic and
to assist new settlers in migrating to Kenya.56 Throughout the 1930s, the KA re-
sponded to enquiries from prospective settlers, distributed information regarding
agriculture in the colony and coordinated the expansion of the colony’s tourist
infrastructure.57 It was not until the Second World War, however, that the need was
felt for more sophisticated machinery in order to attract settlers to Kenya and
propagate abroad a positive image of British colonial rule.58
In 1944, it was decided that the Kenya Information Office, founded at the
outbreak of war to coordinate wartime propaganda in Kenya, should continue to
operate in peacetime. Four years later the Office produced its first publicity pamph-
let, Kenya: 77 Questions Answered, a document published primarily to attract settlers
and tourists to Kenya but also to rectify common misapprehensions, because, as the
brochure set out, ‘‘so many people acquire distorted ‘facts’ about young and difficult
countries like Kenya’’. Typical of Kenya’s late-colonial propaganda, the brochure
combined a sanitized colonial history with seemingly impartial information about
climate, topography and the life of a settler farmer. European settlers, it explained,
had been greatly responsible for the advancement of African peoples who at the
turn of the century had existed in an ‘‘extraordinary state of backwardness and
ignorance’’. More immediately, new settlers coming out from Britain could expect to
enjoy cricket, polo, golf and tennis. ‘‘Three packs of hounds’’, readers were informed,
‘‘hunt regularly during the season’’.59
The Kenya Information Office was not alone in disseminating alluring visions of
Kenya Colony to an audience overseas. In 1948, the East African Tourist Travel
Association (EATTA) was established in Nairobi, its intention to promote interna-
tional tourism to the region as a means of relieving Britain’s beleaguered economy.60
Tourist traffic brought in foreign currency, American dollars in particular, which
relieved in turn the pressure on Britain’s post-war debt. The 1945 National Parks
ordinance provided for the marking out of Kenya’s wilderness, and by 1949, parks
had been established at Nairobi, Tsavo, Amboseli and Mount Kenya.61 In 1952, the
British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) introduced the first passenger jet
service in the world and soon after began offering tourist-class air fares from London
to Nairobi.62 Three years later, EATTA had established offices in London, New York
and Durban and publicity brochures were being distributed to travel agents across
Europe and North America.63 ‘‘In this wonderful age’’, enthused one, ‘‘experiences
which Vasco de Gama, Columbus and others gave their lives and fortunes to acquire,
are now within the reach of anyone with the leisure to enjoy them’’.64 ‘‘Travellers
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 353

follow in comfort’’, announced another, ‘‘trails explorers blazed less than a century
ago’’.65 By 1958, EATTA had distributed two million copies of over 40 publicity
documents, targeting in particular Britain, Western Europe, North America,
Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.66
Other organizations propagated Kenya’s gilded reputation. In 1948, the Electors
Union, a grouping of prominent settlers operating as an informal settler lobby in
Nairobi, produced a pamphlet entitled Kenya: Britain’s Most Attractive Colony, its
express intention to attract settlers and tourists (in market terms, the two were
interchangeable) to Kenya. ‘‘It is a gloriously beautiful country’’, the brochure
asserted, ‘‘a land of extraordinary variety . . . of human beings, of wild fauna and
flora, of scenery and climate’’. For women in particular, ‘‘after the strain and anxiety
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of the war years’’, conditions in Kenya were said to be ‘‘particularly attractive’’.

Sunshine was ‘‘abundant’’ and servants ‘‘plentiful and cheap’’.67
Post-war publicity materials thus renewed older ideas of Kenya Colony as a place
where British expatriates could enjoy an invigorating outdoor life that was
increasingly difficult to find ‘‘back home’’. For tourists, meanwhile, Kenya offered
an encounter with wilderness inseparable from the colonial imagining of a land that
was simultaneously savage and picturesque. If the project to promote Kenya to
tourists was driven by commercial logic, it was also indivisible from a parallel
political project. This was the endeavour to propagate a sanitised image of Kenya
that could counter negative publicity generated by the Mau Mau Emergency.68 In the
face of unfavourable press coverage, publicists set out to provide alternative
narratives to those put forward by anti-colonial critics. In so doing, they invoked
the hard work and the imagination of the colonial ‘‘pioneers’’, the benefits that
Africans had derived from colonial rule and the attractiveness of Kenya Colony to
visitors from overseas.69
In October 1952, the European Elected Members Organisation, the leading voice
of the Kenya settlers, persuaded government to establish a Public Relations Office in
London. Granville Roberts, formerly agricultural correspondent for the East African
Standard, took charge, his role to brief reporters on the Emergency, to guard against
press misrepresentation and to encourage a steady flow of ‘‘good news’’ from
Kenya.70 At the same time, in Nairobi, Michael Blundell rallied support for a ‘‘Truth
about Kenya’’ fund, in order to combat the ‘‘half-truths’’ and ‘‘false information’’
that critical press comment appeared to represent.71 Both organisations, as Susan
Carruthers has shown, were extremely active in promoting a view sympathetic to
Kenya’s settler community. It was a view not limited to Mau Mau but extended to
incorporate the character and disposition of the settlers themselves, constructed
around an idealised historical narrative of colonial progress.72 From monies raised
by the Truth about Kenya fund, offices were set up in London under a new
organisation, The Voice of Kenya; to its director, Kendall Ward (erstwhile leader of
the Elector’s Union), instructions were despatched ‘‘to put over what white settle-
ment had done in Africa’’ and ‘‘counter slanders . . . made against us’’.73 As media
interest focused attention upon Mau Mau, meanwhile, both the Colonial Office and
the settler lobby were determined to present the peaceful progress of life carrying on
as usual.74 Working closely with the BBC, Kenya’s Department of Information,
formed in 1954 out of the old Information Office, soon found that ‘‘life as usual’’ lent
itself far better to newsreel footage than print media. Positive, peaceful themes

‘‘soft’’ stories as they were known
worked much better on the screen than they did
on the page.75
 354 W. Jackson

By the close of 1954, the Department of Information had amassed over 13,000
feet of 13mm film and a photographic library of over 25,000 prints.76 All depicted a
graphic (if, in retrospect, predictable) visual repertoire of civilisation cheerfully
imparted and development pressing implacably ahead. As film began to predominate
over print, publicising Kenya took on a global reach. The dramatic rise of television
and the popularity of cinema now meant propaganda materials could be shown not
only in Britain but in Europe, North America, Australia and across continental
Europe.77 Against the tumult of Mau Mau, the genius of ‘‘life as usual’’ was its apo-
litical appearance. There seemed to be nothing contentious, in other words, in the
planting and harvesting of crops, in the amicable collaboration of European manager
and African apprentice and in the enjoyment of Kenya’s attractions by visitors from
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around the world.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said defined culture as ‘‘all those practices,
like the arts of description, communication and representation, that have relative
autonomy from the economic, social and political realms’’.78 It is a curious, inevit-
ably problematic, frame of reference. Nothing, surely, can exist immune from the
economic, the social and political. ‘‘Discourse’’ is materially produced. Nor can con-
formity to type prove more than correlation. Thinking about Kenya-as-commodity
does force us, however, to think again both about the human experience of colonising
Kenya and the patterns of continuity by which colonial Kenya is culturally
reproduced today. On reading memoirs of Kenya Colony (both published and
not), what is glaringly apparent is the unmistakable imprint of colonial Kenya’s crea-
tion as a commodity. Colonial discourse, it should be noted, created meaning by the
force of repetition; claims to describe what was novel in fact described the familiar,
verisimilitude achieved by reaffirming what Kenya
or ‘‘Africa’’
was already
supposed to be.79 Colonial knowledge was thus continuously refreshed, just as the
enacted performance of Europeans in Kenya was likewise refreshed, as colonials
behaved, wrote and imagined themselves in the figurative footsteps of those who had
gone before.80 Precisely because language had prior meaning, moreover
because
it existed within that circuit of representation and symbolic value that discourse
entails
political claims were conveyed suggestively as much as they were explicitly
stressed, through an assortment of sights and sounds that could never be merely
innocuous or descriptive. The Maasai warrior sighted in Nairobi; the sounds of
spacious, darkened distance beyond the comforting home-fires of boma, home and
camp; the ‘‘relentless, disciplined’’ steel lines of the railway pursuing their way amidst
‘‘the winding of footpaths and graceful herds of antelope’’81
such was the tropic
architecture through which the colour and the texture
the sensorial feel
of the
colonial day-to-day was expressed.
The majority of the settler memoirs, it should be noted, were written either
towards the end of colonial rule or in the aftermath of independence. They were
written not merely to narrate but to make sense of the lives that they describe in the
context of political decolonisation. To make comprehensible the present, both
settlers and officials looked back to a halcyon past before Africa and Africans had
been corrupted. ‘‘The old bad had gone’’, wrote a settler during Mau Mau, ‘‘the new
bad was still to come’’.82 ‘‘It was a lovely country’’, wrote a former official in 1973,
‘‘completely unspoiled by modern additions to the natural landscape such as roads
or houses with corrugated iron roofs’’.83 ‘‘I saw East Africa’’, another recalled, ‘‘at its
very best: When mankind had not changed the wilderness into a semblance of
civilisation’’.84
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 355

If the catastrophe of decolonisation made Europeans idealise their colonial past,

so Kenya-as-commodity determined the quality of their nostalgia. In the act of re-
membering, settlers and officials drew upon an evocative visual vernacular: of
Mombasa from the prow of a ship; of the Athi plains from the carriage of a train; of
English country gardens laid out before expansive panoramas. Such was the colonial
picturesque
the visual grammar by which what was politically contingent was made
beautiful and thus benign. It was a transformation recognised by the novelist, Evelyn
Waugh, at the same time as he indulged its basic premise: the Kenya settlers, he
wrote, were neither cranks nor criminals but, rather, ‘‘men out of sympathy with their
age’’.85 A poet or a wanderer, the logic implied, could hardly be a crook as well. As
Simon Lewis has written of Karen Blixen, to write lyrically of Africa and so render
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both colonised space (and the author’s presence therein) as beautiful was to make
what was in fact structured fundamentally by relations of political and economic
power appear to be something naturally or divinely ordained, remote from the
banality of politics and free from the taint of human responsibility.86 The function of
myth, in other words, was to ‘‘ignore the political’’; a diversionary tactic that served
to exculpate colonial settlers and tourists alike.87 It was a powerful conceit, embodied
in the figure of Blixen herself. As this final section shows, the reproduction of Kenya
Colony as a commodity in the post-colonial period has Blixen and her old Etonian
lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, at its heart.

Legacies of empire
Several historians have posited tourism from the ‘‘developed’’ to the ‘‘developing’’
worlds as a form of imperialism by another name.88 The final section of this article
will address this ‘‘continuity’’ or ‘‘neo-colonial’’ thesis by examining some of the
cultural aspects of tourist travel to Kenya in the period after independence. Whilst
much has been said already on the continued dominance of the lucrative safari
industry by prominent white Kenyans and overseas firms, less has been said on the
ways in which tourism continues to combine discursively with the colonial mytho-
logy of Kenya.89 By examining the commodification of Kenya today we can get
closer to explaining why the romance of Britain’s ‘‘most attractive colony’’ has re-
mained to a great extent undimmed.
Settler farming
always the professed pretext for the appropriation of African
land and labour in Kenya Colony
was, in truth, never up to much.90 As decolo-
nisation restored Africa to Africans, erstwhile settlers needed a new rationale to
justify their continued hold over what was left of their former great estates. From
settler farms, safari parks emerged, the conservation of nature replacing the
trusteeship of ‘‘backward races’’ as the white man’s rationale.91 At the same time
the number of international tourist arrivals into Kenya rose astronomically, increa-
sing six-fold during the ten-year period that straddled independence, from 41,000
visitors per annum in 1958 to 262,000 a decade later.92
Such a dramatic expansion of Kenya’s tourist industry is only in part explicable
by developments in aviation technology and the growth of international tourism. No
less significant is the fact that in the period after independence successive Kenyan
governments identified Kenya in its commodified form as one of the country’s most
lucrative (and marketable) assets, not least for its capacity to bring into the country
vital reserves of foreign exchange.93 For prospective tourists, meanwhile, Kenya held
out unrivalled promise. Whilst possibilities existed for viewing big game across
 356 W. Jackson

Southern and Eastern Africa, only Kenya was politically stable, English-speaking
and well disposed to the West. By the turn of the twenty-first century, well over a
million international visitors were entering Kenya every year.94
If the extent of tourism to Kenya is striking, equally telling is the content of its
product. Photographing wildlife remains the tourist’s primary recreation but whilst
an encounter with ‘‘wild Africa’’ provides one staple of the tourist circuit, a vicarious
immersion in Kenya Colony provides another. Nostalgia, in other words, takes place
on multiple levels, as tourists are encouraged to experience both a contrivance of the
primeval (in the form of unspoiled wilderness) and a simulacrum of that colonial
world through which such primitivist yearning had previously been expressed.
Accounting for the restoration of colonial-era hotels across Southeast Asia in the
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1990s, Maurizio Peleggi described the ways in which nostalgia itself has been
commodified and consumed.95 That these hotels today offer a level of comfort
unknown to their customers’ colonial forebears, Peleggi showed, presents no obstacle
to the ‘‘staged authenticity’’ on which a successful exchange of the tourist product
depends.96 A similar analysis might well be applied to Kenya. Here, several key
tourist attractions are sites of colonial mythology; the home of Karen Blixen
and Finch-Hatton’s grave (both at Ngong) are two prime examples.97 Many of the
more ‘‘high-end’’ hotels, meanwhile, have been refurbished to resemble the colonial
experience of old.98 Luxury safari camps, in particular, capitalise on the ‘‘chic cool
white linen nostalgia’’ (the phrase is Ann Stoler’s) that was brought to life so vividly
in the cinematic version of Out of Africa.99 The Karen Blixen Camp in the Masai
Mara National Park, for example, promises an experience that combines ‘‘a step
back in time’’ with ‘‘the luxury of today’’.100 Furnished with reproductions of
Blixen’s own furniture, the camp also offers
in addition to game drives, a ‘‘mess
area’’ and dinners in the bush
Internet access, ‘‘wellness’’ treatments and a gift
shop. At the Tsavo National Park, meanwhile, is Finch-Hatton’s, a luxury tented
lodge (located, so it is claimed, at the site where Finch-Hatton himself pitched camp).
Here tourists are invited to relive ‘‘the golden era of the safari with elegance, first
class comforts and the finest cuisine, surrounded by the spectacle of the great African
wilderness’’.101
Both Finch-Hatton’s and the Karen Blixen Camp closely conform to what
Peleggi described as the contrivance of ‘‘colonial ambience’’
the revivification of a
colonial aesthetic that allows tourists to imaginatively escape the social and political
reality of the present by entering a consumerist fantasia of the colonial past.102
Though such an ambience is what the owners of these and other luxury hotels are
unquestionably endeavouring to achieve, it is telling that they are careful to avoid
mentioning the colonial by name. Instead they refer to heydays and golden ages, to a
time when extra-European space was still ‘‘in its prime’’; the world, in other words, at
a point before, pristine, picturesque and forever (only just) out of reach.103
If tourists to Kenya today find themselves ‘‘playing’’ at being white settlers, it is a
phenomenon explicable by the fact that the tourist product must always be designed
to approximate to tourists’ prior expectations and ideas. Such expectations, as John
Urry notes, are constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices,
such as film, television and literature
what might loosely, pace Said, be labelled
‘‘discourse’’ (and that includes, of course, promotional material aimed at tourists).104
In this regard, it cannot be without significance that the early years of the twenty-
first century have witnessed yet another wave of biographies, memoirs and popular
histories of Kenya Colony.105 What is particularly telling here is that in many of these
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 357

accounts the perspectives of author, subject and reader are blurred together, creating
an imaginative encounter with empire in which the reader (likely to be reading the
book en voyage) is encouraged to overlay their vicarious and immediate experience.
Consider, for example, Sarah Wheeler’s recent biography of Denys Finch-Hatton.
‘‘I followed him to East Africa’’; Wheeler confides in her preface, ‘‘[and] tried to see
[it] through his eyes’’.106 Interestingly, Wheeler notes similarities between Finch-
Hatton and herself (‘‘he was divided by his love for worldly things and his desire to
escape them, as am I’’) and narrates her journey as a quest to discover not only
Finch-Hatton but also herself (‘‘I followed Denys on a journey of self-realisa-
tion’’).107 This elision of perspective reaches its highest form when Wheeler takes a
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flight in a light aircraft over the Aberdare hills:

Many of the topographical descriptions in the book come from my own African travels.
I wrote those passages late at night, when tiny comet-tailed geckos invaded the pages of
my notebook and ostriches boomed in their peculiar hollow way not far from our camp.
It was only when I flew low in a small plane over banks of purple delphiniums on the
slopes of the Aberdares that I understood what it meant to Karen Blixen to take wing
with Denys.108

Thus, Wheeler imaginatively enters the perspective of Karen Blixen, playing at being
the lover of the man whose biography she writes. The passage derives from a key
moment in Out of Africa: Blixen’s evocation of flight:
To Denys Finch Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting
pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa . . . Every time that I have
gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realised that I was free of the ground,
I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. ‘‘I see’’, I have thought, ‘‘This was
the idea. And now I understand everything’’.109

Here, Blixen invokes perhaps the ultimate colonial symbol: of superiority made
spatial, of being ‘‘up above’’, transcendent of the earth, in proximity to God. His-
torians have often cited the primitivist quality of such discourse but less frequently
commented upon is its religiosity; this was not just a land devoid of (African) man, it
was also pre-lapsarian.110 That is to say, it was a world before sin, before innocence
had been corrupted by the taint of human evil. I should reiterate my argument: The
function of a mythology is to obscure guilt. And it is in this way, perhaps, that this
style of writing should best be understood
as a form of exculpation, as a claim to
be free of the ground, and with it, complicity in systems of oppression or injustice.
In a seminal contribution to the history of colonial travel writing, Mary Louise
Pratt described the panoramic vista, by which the adventuring male adopts the
promontory or ‘‘monarch of all I survey’’ perspective at the climax of his journey,
usually at a point of elevation overlooking, typically, that classic female symbol:
the lake.111 For Blixen and Wheeler, however, it is less the panoramic than the
ethereal that marks their writing
the desire to float unencumbered and in ‘‘three
dimensions’’.112 Flight was an important cultural practice
and trope
for settler
Kenya; the Aero Club of East Africa had been in existence since 1927.113 In the
post-colonial period, this tradition has continued in commodified form as, from
the 1980s onwards, hot-air ballooning emerged as an important component of the
luxury tourist safari. Today, a one-hour balloon ride costs in the region of $450.
Typically, at its completion, guests are offered a champagne breakfast in the bush,
 358 W. Jackson

a direct re-enactment of Blixen, Finch-Hatton, and that ‘‘noble pioneer’’, Berkeley

Cole.114
So what of continuity and change? How different really are the ways by which
Kenya is encountered (and consumed) today from the ways in which Kenya Colony
was in the past? To what extent, moreover, is the consumption of colonial Kenya
today separable from the consumption of post-colonial Kenya? In two important
respects, things are different now. In terms of cultural production, it is important to
note that it is not merely outsiders who are keen to market Kenya for tourist con-
sumption. Indeed, perhaps the most problematic challenge to the continuity thesis is
the eagerness of the post-colonial African state to endorse and indeed encourage the
marketing of colonial nostalgia through international tourism.115 No longer is the
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manufacture of ‘‘brand Kenya’’ solely a white man’s preserve. In terms of consump-

tion also, the old racial binaries have lost their purchase. Although many black
Africans do not share the European fascination with Kenya’s wildlife, tourism to
Kenya today is a global market, with visitors coming not only
or even primarily

from Britain, the old colonial power.116 Now the pleasures of Kenya’s beaches, cities
and national parks are open to anyone; nowhere here are enclaves or exclusions
drawn along explicitly racial lines.
This is not to say, however, that enclaves and exclusions no longer exist. Both in
terms of production and consumption, major continuities can be discerned across
colonial and post-colonial time. The marketing of Kenya, it should be noted, takes
place not in Kenya itself but in tourist generating countries, mostly by companies
based in Western Europe and North America.117 Not only are these producers
steeped in the Western epistemic tradition; they are also the main financial bene-
ficiaries of tourism to Kenya.118 As for consumption, whilst it is correct to note
that
in theory at least
anyone is welcome to enjoy Kenya’s attractions, in practice
it is only a privileged minority
predominantly white, western and wealthy
who are
able to do so. The binary of coloniser and colonised, it might be argued, has not been
done away with so much as reconfigured. Now it is not ideas of racial difference but
the laws of supply and demand that determine how Kenya is culturally constructed

and for whom. Just as access to the product itself is delimited by wealth and
opportunity, however, the advertising of the product is available to all. There are
bound to be, in other words, many millions of people around the world who will
never have the opportunity to travel to Kenya themselves but will nevertheless be
exposed to ideas about Kenya through a variety of promotional media
the TV
advert, the bill-board poster, the newspaper travel supplement, the publicity
brochure.119 Images circulating in these more ‘‘traditional’’ advertising formats are
also to be found on-line. ‘‘The colonial legacy lives on’’, announces the website for
the Kenya Tourist Board, with no apparent irony, ‘‘in the traditions of the great
safari, and the pursuit of adventure and freedom’’.120

Conclusion
In the spring of 2010, the BBC broadcast two hour-long documentaries, both
concerning Kenya. The first, broadcast in February, was entitled Last White Man
Standing. Taking as its subject the killing of ‘‘poacher’’ Robert Njoya by the wealthy
white landowner Thomas Cholmondeley (great-grandson of Lord Delamere
the
original white man of ‘‘white man’s country’’), the film recounted one of the most
sensational legal cases in recent Kenyan history. Produced as part of the BBC’s
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 359

acclaimed Storyville series, the film offered a penetrating insight into the conflicts
and controversies that continue to bedevil the white land-owning community in
Kenya today. Two months later, a second film appeared, The History of Safari with
Richard E. Grant. Combining archival footage with the contemplative peregrinations
of Grant himself, the film provided a graphic and eminently watchable account of
safari travel in Kenya from the beginning of the colonial period through to the
present day. Yet what was most striking about the film was the imprint of colonial
nostalgia. This, as Grant repeatedly insisted, was not intended as a sanitised or
selective historical account: Full justice would be done, it was implied, to the
controversial history that safari comprised. What controversy that there was here,
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however, was limited to the questionable ethics of killing animals for sport. What was
emphatically not discussed was the conflicted history of land-usage in colonial and
post-colonial Africa that both the commodification of safari and the wider
conservation movement involve.121 This, in short, was a white man’s history, with
Africans occupying only marginal roles and the violence and dispossession inherent
both in the colonising of Kenya and in its tourist consumption comprehensively left
out. As A.A. Gill, TV critic for The Sunday Times, shrewdly observed:

The real fallacy and sadness of the safari isn’t the death of animals, it’s that it implies an
Africa without Africans. This is the only foreign holiday that liberal people go on
hoping never to meet the natives.122

This ‘‘Africa without Africans’’, moreover, was a feature not only of Grant’s
historical narrative but also his own personal ‘‘journey’’. Grant stays
of course

at the Norfolk Hotel, the ultimate ‘‘historic hotel’’ in Kenya, where he takes tea on
the terrace and enthuses over Kenya’s romantic colonial past. Later, we see him on
safari at dawn, stepping out onto the balcony of his luxury camp: ‘‘It’s like the
garden of Eden’’ he declares. Yet again, we find the elision of colonial and
contemporary time and space. Here is Grant, in the footsteps of Finch-Hatton. And
here is the viewer, in the footsteps of them both. Africans appear, meanwhile, in
their customary colonial (or neo-colonial) roles
as drivers, trackers, waiters and
guides.
As I have argued in this paper, mythology serves to obscure political guilt,
whether it be through the idiom of flight, through the making picturesque of
African landscape or the invocation of a pre-lapsarian world. If Grant’s film provides
evidence of ‘‘yet more of the same’’, however, it is equally the case that its effects
are likely to be offset by more critically-minded accounts of Kenya current in
contemporary media today
Last White Man Standing providing an excellent case
in point. As long as ideas of Kenya continue to be shaped significantly through
the marketing of the country as a tourist commodity, however, colonial mythologies
are likely to persist. While the international tourist market remains viable, meanwhile,
the profusion of memoirs, novels, and biographies of Kenya Colony will find a
receptive audience. Today, the Kenya memoir is flourishing as never before.123 Yet
perceptions of Kenya (both present and past) are being mediated through commu-
nication networks that are hyper-fast and ever expanding in their reach. Whether
these new technologies will facilitate new ways for understanding Kenya’s colonial and
post-colonial history, however
and whether the mythology of ‘‘white man’s country’’
might finally be displaced
remains to be seen.
 360 W. Jackson

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nalini Mohabir for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. All errors
of fact and judgement remain my own.

Notes
1. Tidrick, English Character, 131.
2. Kennedy, Islands of White, 92.
3. Duder, ‘‘Men of the Officer Class’’; Kennedy, Islands of White, 44
45.
4. Legislation promulgated in 1906 demanded that all settlers without guarantors already
established in the colony deposit £50 with customs on arrival, intending to preclude the
entry of those likely to fall on hard times whilst insuring against the costs of repatriation
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were any to do so. When the soldier-settler scheme was inaugurated at the end of the
First World War, applicants were required to demonstrate that they possessed at least
£1,000 in capital or a regular income of £200 a year. Kennedy, Islands of White, 43;
Duder, ‘‘Men of the Officer Class,’’ 72.
5. Duder, ‘‘Men of the Officer Class,’’ 71; Kennedy, Islands of White, 167
86; Tidrick,
English Character, 134; Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County,’’ 87. On poor whites elsewhere in the
European empires, see Arnold, ‘‘European Orphans’’; Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious
Europeans; Stoler, ‘‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’’; Morrell, ‘‘White But Poor’’;
Saunders, ‘‘History of White Poverty’’; Cairnie, Imperialists in Broken Boots.
6. Huxley, Nine Faces of Kenya, 104. As Michael Redley has shown, immigrants to Kenya
after the First World War were as likely to come from manufacturing, commercial or
professional backgrounds as they were from the landed gentry. Redley, ‘‘Predicament,’’ 9.
7. Other literary-inflected accounts of colonial Kenya include: Duder, ‘‘Love and the
Lions’’; Lassner, Colonial Strangers, 17
69; Whitlock, Intimate Empire, 112
41; Knipp,
‘‘Kenya’s Literary Ladies.’’
8. For an overview of the ‘‘new imperial history,’’ see Howe, New Imperial Histories Reader.
9. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Elkins, Britain’s Gulag.
10. On Europeans in colonial Kenya, see Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement; Redley,
‘‘Predicament’’; Kennedy, Islands of White; Duder, ‘‘Men of the Officer Class’’; Duder
and Youé, ‘‘Race and Politics’’; Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County.’’
11. Urry, ‘‘Consumption of Tourism,’’ 26; Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, 66.
12. Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County,’’ 75; Duder, ‘‘Love and the Lions,’’ 427.
13. Bennett, ‘‘British Settlers,’’ 58.
14. Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County,’’ 78.
15. Carson, Sun, Sand and Safari; Dundas, African Crossroads; Farson, Last Chance; Gatti,
Africa is Adventure; Gregory, Under the Sun; Hunter, Hunter; Huxley, Flame Trees;
Huxley, Mottled Lizard; Lander, My Kenya Acres; Lipscomb, We Built a Country;
Lipscomb, White Africans; Mitchell, African Afterthoughts; Roosevelt, A Sentimental
Safari; Seaton, Lion in the Morning; Stapleton, Gate Hangs Well; Whittall, Dimbilil.
16. Eliot, East Africa Protectorate, 216
17.
17. Duder, ‘‘Men of the Officer Class,’’ 70. Dane Kennedy describes the scheme as ‘‘the single
most significant event in the shaping of [Kenya’s] white settler community.’’ Kennedy,
Islands of White, 53.
18. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour, 112.
19. For the court proceedings of these cases see the East African Standard for September
1918, June to September 1920 and June to August 1923. Numerous letters were published
in the British press during this period, questions were asked in the Commons and the
Colonial Secretary was petitioned repeatedly by the Anti-Slavery Society’s executive
committee. See Anti-Slavery Society papers, Rhodes House (hereafter RH): Mss.Brit.
Emp.s.22/G.136 to G.145. Reference to these incidents can also be found in Ross, Kenya
From Within, 14; and Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour, 118.
20. Bennett, ‘‘Settlers and Politics,’’ 271, 298.
21. Kennedy, Islands of White, 50, 58.
22. In 1921 the number of Europeans was 9,651 to 22,822 Indians. See Census Office, Report
on the Census.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 361

23. Huxley, White Man’s Country, II, 116.

24. For a comprehensive account of this crisis, see Huxley, White Man’s Country, II, 110
40;
Dilley, British Policy, 141
78; Maxon, Struggle for Kenya, 160
279; Youé, ‘‘Settler
Rebellion,’’ 347
60; Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County,’’ 95.
25. For the full account of settlers’ preparedness to resort to violence see Duder, ‘‘Settler
Response.’’
26. Lonsdale, ‘‘Home County,’’ 95
6.
27. Cited in Huxley, White Man’s Country, II, 114.
28. Editorial, East African Standard, June 20, 1923.
29. Huxley, White Man’s Country, I, 64.
30. Bache, The Youngest Lion, 65.
31. Editorial, East African Standard, February 1, 1923.
32. Huxley, White Man’s Country, II, 44. See also ‘‘Lord Cranworth to The Editor,’’ The
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Times, January 23, 1923; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 440.

33. As Lonsdale has written, the least noticed yet most important effect of the crisis was the
settlers’ realisation that to receive imperial recognition they must portray themselves as
co-trustees of the African future and to deny that role to Indians. Lonsdale, ‘‘Britannia’s
Mau Mau,’’ 273
74.
34. Examples include: Boyes, Company of Adventurers; Bromhead, What’s What; Buxton,
Kenya Days; Carnegie, Kenyan Farm Diary; Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles; de Janzé,
Vertical Land; de Watteville, Out in the Blue; Norden, White and Black; Powys, Ebony and
Ivory; Powys, Black Laughter. On fiction during the inter-war years, see Duder, ‘‘‘Love
and the Lions’’’; on the ‘‘champagne safari,’’ see Steinhart, Black Poachers, 119
22.
35. Between 1939 and 1959 the European population in Kenya almost tripled - from
an estimated total of 21,000 in 1939 to a total of 60,000 in 1960. Jackson, ‘‘Poor
Men,’’ 9.
36. My coupling together of profit and sport is taken from Lord Cranworth’s memoir, Profit
and Sport in East Africa.
37. Thomas Cook, Traveller’s Gazette, December 10, 1903. On Thomas Cook and the British
Empire, see Teo, ‘‘Wandering in the Wake,’’ 165; Hazbun, ‘‘East as an Exhibit.’’
38. Brendon, Thomas Cook, 252
54.
39. Nash, Wilderness, 343
54.
40. Mackenzie, Empire of Nature, 161; Steinhart, Black Poachers, 117.
41. Foran, Cuckoo in Kenya, 87.
42. See also Mackenzie, ‘‘Ritualised Killing,’’ 147
66.
43. Steinhart, Black Poachers, 92.
44. To Steinhart, it was precisely the fact that the safari developed from a hunting expedition
to ‘‘travel for the sake of travel’’ with the hunting itself punctuated by dinners, dances
and various other social events that established the Kenya safari’s particular appeal.
Steinhart identifies the famous Prince of Wales safari in 1928 as the key event in
developing this appeal. On ‘‘dinner in the bush’’ see Callaway, ‘‘Dinner in the Bush,’’
232
47.
45. Kennedy, Islands of White, 184.
46. Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 58.
47. Gunter, Inside Africa, 318. For other intimations of the cult of unconventionality that
Kenya afforded, see de Janzé, Vertical Land, 35; Strange, Kenya Today, 14; Carnegie, Red
Dust, 220; Seaton, Lion in the Morning, 20; Scott, Nice Place to Live, 47, 155.
48. Norden, White and Black, 62. For descriptions of European women at Nairobi’s hotels,
see Lady Moore’s diaries, RH: Mss Brit Emp.s.466 (3), 17; Strange, Kenya Today, 39
40;
Foran, Kenya Police, 55.
49. Cole, Random Recollections.
50. Thomas Cook, Travel in East Africa, 1936.
51. Tourist Travel Committee, Playground of Africa, 23.
52. Margaret Gillon, ‘‘The Wagon and the Star,’’ unpublished manuscript, RH: Mss.Afr.s.
568, 28. For a similar account of Nairobi see Strange, Kenya Today, 38.
53. Notably Gillon was not a tourist herself (though passages of her book feel unmis-
takably like a tourist guide), but a nursing sister and a member of the colonial
service.
 362 W. Jackson

54. E.F. Kennedy, ‘‘Life was Seldom Dull: The Experiences of a Woman in Equatorial
Africa,’’ unpublished manuscript, RH: Mss.Afr.s.514, 328. See also Hamlyn Memoirs,
RH: Mss.Afr.1757, 38.
55. From an estimated total of 21,000 in 1939 to a total of 60,000 in 1960.
56. ‘‘Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Kenya Association,’’ August 31, 1932,
RH: Mss.Afr.s.595.
57. See RH: Mss. Afr.s.595, File 2 for enquiries submitted to the Kenya Association relating
to settlement in the colony. See also Kennedy, Islands of White, 83
4.
58. Gadsden, ‘‘Wartime Propaganda’’; Smyth, ‘‘Genesis of Public Relations’’; Morris,
‘‘Britain’s New Empire.’’
59. Kenya Information Office, 77 Questions Answered. Other notable publications during
this period include Kenya Central Office of Information, Kenya: A Story of Progress;
European Agricultural Settlement Board, Kenya: A Farmer’s Country; and Kenya Cen
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tral Office of Information, Kenya. Over 20,000 copies of Kenya: A Story of Progress were
distributed around the world throughout the later 1950s. (A quarter of those printed were
distributed by the East Africa Tourist Travel Association; through the Department of
Information, the government agreed to put up £2,000 to cover the costs). Kenya National
Archives (hereafter KNA): AE/32/10, Information Liaison Committee.
60. KNA: AE/31/1, Formation of the East Africa Tourist Travel Association (EATTA).
61. Neumann, ‘‘Post-war Conservation Boom’’; Beinart and Hughes, Environment and
Empire, 289
309; Akama, ‘‘Evolution of Tourism,’’ 12.
62. Ouma, Tourism in East Africa, 15.
63. KNA: AE/32/4, ‘‘Branch Manager’s Annual Report for May 1950-December 1951.’’
EATTA publications included: Nairobi: A Visitor’s Guide (1952); Visit East Africa (1955);
The Hotels, Safari Lodges and Restaurants of East Africa (1956); Stronghold of the Wild:
On the National Parks of East Africa (1957); A Guide to Mombasa and the Coast (1957);
Exploring East Africa, (1958); and Kenya Safari (1961).
64. East Africa Office, Sport in Kenya.
65. East African Standard, Most Attractive Colony, 33.
66. Ouma, Tourism in East Africa, 18.
67. Kenya: Britain’s Most Attractive Colony, 89.
68. Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, 121.
69. See for example: European Settlement Board, To Farm in Kenya; and Kenya Central
Office of Information, African Advancement.
70. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, 144; Kennedy, Myth of Mau Mau, 256.
71. Evans, Law and Disorder, 164.
72. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, 128
68.
73. Ibid., 147.
74. Ibid., 165
166.
75. KNA: AE/32/10, Information Liaison Committee Meeting, March 15, 1955.
76. Kenya Department of Information Annual Report, 1955.
77. KNA: AE/32/10, A. Matheson, ‘‘Channels for Overseas Publicity on Kenya,’’ October 9,
1954.
78. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii.
79. On claims to be the first European to behold a particular landscape, for example,
see Hunter, Hunter, 11; Raymond Mitford Barberton, The Quest for the Loonburg
Duiker, RH: Mss.Afr.s.1166, ii, 13; Hammond and Jablow, Africa That Never
Was, 17.
80. Thus we read in Genesta Hamilton’s memoirs that the gorge she saw on safari at Kijabe
was ‘‘a real Rider Haggard scene’’ and in J.A. Hunter’s memoir that in Kenya he would
spend his evenings reading the works of Selous, Baker, Stanley and Speke and liked to
feel that ‘‘in a modest way I was following in the footsteps of these great men.’’
Hamilton, A Stone’s Throw, 66; Hunter, Hunter, 101
2.
81. Blundell, Love Affair With the Sun, 10.
82. Lipscomb, White Africans, 32.
83. T. Farnworth Anderson, ‘‘Reminiscences,’’ RH: Mss.Afr.s.1653, 34.
84. Foran, A Cuckoo in Kenya, 66
7.
85. Waugh, Remote People, 182.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 363

86. Lewis, ‘‘Culture, Cultivation and Colonialism.’’

87. See Roland Barthes’ notion of myth as depoliticised ‘Speech’ in Barthes, Mythologies, 143.
88. Ash and Turner, Golden Hordes, 165, 171; Krippendorf, Holiday Makers, 56; Nash,
‘‘Tourism’’; Gilbert, ‘‘Ecotourism.’’
89. Akama, ‘‘Neocolonialism,’’ 146, 150; Ash and Turner, Golden Hordes, 175; Teo,
‘‘Wandering in the Wake,’’ 166
67; Sindiga, Tourism and African Development, 164.
90. Mosley, Settler Economies, 234
35.
91. Whitlock, ‘‘‘The Animals are Innocent,’’’ 242; Neumann, ‘‘Post-war Conservation
Boom,’’ 23.
92. Akama, ‘‘Evolution of Tourism,’’ 14
93. Ibid., 15.
94. Kenya Tourism Statistics, Experience Kenya Communications Ltd: http://www.
experiencekenya.co.ke
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95. Peleggi, ‘‘Consuming Colonial Nostalgia.’’

96. MacCannell, ‘‘Staged Authenticity.’’
97. Whitlock, ‘‘The Animals are Innocent,’’ 236.
98. Apart from Finch-Hattons and Karen Blixen Camp other notable examples include The
Norfolk, The Stanley, The Muthaiga Country Club and numerous safari lodges across
Kenya’s national parks and on private conservation areas.
99. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 14.
100. http://karenblixencamp.com.
101. http://www.finchhattons.com.
102. Peliggi, ‘‘Consuming Colonial Nostalgia,’’ 261.
103. Ibid., 262.
104. Urry, ‘‘Consumption of Tourism,’’ 26.
105. These include: Nicholls, Red Strangers; Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun; Paice, Lost Lion of
Empire; Lovell, Straight on till Morning; Osborne, The Bolter; Spicer, The Temptress;
Trzebinski, Life and Death; Huxley, Flame Trees.
106. Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun, 1
2.
107. Ibid., 2
3
108. Ibid., 4
5
109. Blixen, Out of Africa, 167.
110. Anderson and Grove, Conservation in Africa, 4
5; Akama, ‘Neocolonialism’, 145.
111. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 201
3.
112. Blixen, Out of Africa, 167
113. See http://www.aeroclubea.com; Markham, West with the Night.
114. Blixen, Out of Africa, 151.
115. Peliggi, ‘‘Consuming Colonialist Nostalgia,’’ 260; Akama, ‘‘Neocolonialism,’’ 145.
116. Monbiot, No Man’s Land, 88
117. Akama, ‘‘Neocolonialism,’’ 147.
118. Sindiga, Tourism and African Development, 164.
119. On the vicarious experience of empire encountered through popular culture and
advertising see Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire; Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders.
120. http://www.magicalkenya.com/index.php?optioncom_content&taskblogcategory&id
64&Itemid190
121. See Neumann, Imposing Wilderness; Brockington, Fortress Conservation; and Duffy,
Killing for Conservation, for studies on Tanzania and Zimbabwe. A scholarly social
history of conservation, tourism and safari in Kenya after independence awaits its
historian.
122. Gill, ‘‘The History of Safari,’’ The Sunday Times, May 2, 2010.
123. See Gallman, I Dreamed of Africa; Atwood, Jambo Mama; Illumberg, Tea on the Blue
Sofa; Hoffman, I Married a Masai; Hoffman, Back from Africa; Hoffman, Reunion in
Barsaloi.

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