'White Man's Country'

These two volumes, White Man's Country - Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya - were written by Elspeth Huxley and published in 1935. They are the story of the man who probably did most to lay the foundations of a strong and diverse agricultural economy in early Kenya Colony.

Born in 1870, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, inherited at the age of 16 a large estate in the north of England and quickly ran through the money that came with it. By 1899, after hunting trips in Somaliland, he had found Kenya, and in 1903 managed to persuade the Kenya administration to lease him 100,000 acres (400 km2) of potentially fine agricultural land near Naivasha in what came to be known as the White Highlands. From then on he both acquired and sold large areas of land, using them and loans floated on the family estate to develop the farms and introduce modern techniques, such as crossing pedigree British bulls with local cattle and introducing new crops. He faced daunting problems, losing many of his animals, such as the merino sheep, below, and crops to diseases until then unknown to science.

After fighting in the 1914-18 campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika, Delamere became the de facto leader of the British and South African settlers who had been encouraged to settle in the White Highlands, a role which inevitably led to confrontation with the colonial administration. One of the key areas of dispute centred on what the future of the settlers should be. Delamere saw them as permanent, leading the development of the country, while increasingly the British government saw the interests of what were termed 'the natives' as paramount. Not that he was anti-native: he had a wonderful relationship with the Maasai tribe, all his cattle herders being Maasai, many of whom he kept on even though he was well aware that they were stealing his cattle.

Huxley's book is very sympathetic to Delamere. She had come out to Kenya, age six, to join her parents on a small coffee farm near Thika, so she wrote the book from a settler's point-of-view. It was her first book, and she went on to write a further 41, including the autobiographical The Flame Trees of Thika.

Unlike many of the African books which have travelled the years with me, these two volumes only date back to November 1966, when I bought them, second hand, while living in Stone and studying at Keele. I have just re-read them, probably for the first time since then, and thoroughly enjoyed them for what they tell of the privations of life for the early settlers - Delamere lived most of his life in a mud hut - and their drive and confident sense of purpose. Some of it today makes difficult reading: where the sheep grazed the wild animals had been cleared.