Kenya's rich history is intertwined with royalty, colonialism, and the enduring allure of its landscapes and wildlife. This article delves into various aspects of this history, from Queen Elizabeth II's time as Queen of Kenya to the legacy of colonial figures and the modern-day echoes of that era.
Queen Elizabeth II and Kenya's Independence
Elizabeth II was Queen of Kenya from 1963 to 1964, a period when Kenya was an independent sovereign state with a constitutional monarchy. She was also the sovereign of the other Commonwealth realms, including the United Kingdom. The Kenya Independence Act 1963 transformed the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya into an independent sovereign state, with Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state and Queen of Kenya.
The Queen's constitutional roles were mostly delegated to the Governor-General of Kenya, her representative in Kenya, who was appointed by the Queen on the advice of her Kenyan Prime Minister. Malcolm MacDonald was governor-general throughout this period.
Interestingly, Elizabeth was in Kenya at Treetops Hotel when her father, George VI, died on 6 February 1952, and she became queen. She had arrived in Nairobi on 1 February and had been staying at Sagana Lodge, near Mount Kenya.
The Enduring Legacy of Karen Blixen and Colonial Nairobi
After Kenya declared independence from British rule in 1963, there came a flood of renamings. Schools, suburbs, and roads were rechristened in ways that spoke to a new idea of what it meant to be authentically Kenyan. One appellation that escaped the fate of the rest was “Karen” - the name of a Nairobi suburb, presumably christened for the Baroness Karen Blixen, the Danish writer also known as Isak Dinesen.
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Karen Estate lies seventeen kilometers west of the city centre and is one of a few Nairobi suburbs where tall jacarandas loom large, straddling long driveways onto huge mansions with plush gardens. Karen’s contemporary ethos was unintentionally revealed in a New York Times Style story about the suburb’s upscale boutiques in which every single shop-owner and fashion designer mentioned is a white woman, including the Swedish proprietor of a shop called “Bush Princess.” The two African women pictured, only one of them named, are both floor staff.
In Karen today, you can breakfast with the endangered Rothschild giraffes at Giraffe Manor, or adopt an elephant at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Karen Blixen, a Danish aristocrat, moved to Kenya at the height of Empire, in 1913, with her new husband, 15,000 Danish crowns, and the intention to start a coffee farm. It was only later, after she returned to Denmark in 1931, that she gradually found fame as a writer. Her 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, offers a record of her time in Kenya, detailing her relationships with her lovers, her servants, and the two thousand “Natives” who lived on her farm.
Deserted by her husband, Karen threw herself into the hedonistic social life available to the European gentry in the colony. When the Duke and Prince of Wales came to visit, she made the local Kikuyu perform a dance in their honor.
In 1985, the memoir was adapted into a film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The plot, which draws on several additional sources including Blixen’s second memoir, Shadows on the Grass, and Judith Thurman’s biography of Blixen, is primarily focused on Blixen’s romance with Finch-Hatton. The year after the film’s release, Kenya saw a dramatic spike in tourism (from 152,000 visitors to 176,000 in a single year), and the house Blixen once lived in was converted into a museum. By 1987, the tourism sector had become a tentpole of Kenya’s economy, bringing in approximately $350 million annually.
Prior to the violence of colonialism, the 6,000 acres Blixen called her own had belonged to the very “Natives” about whom she rhapsodized in her memoir.
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Wanton theft is at the core of colonial Kenya, which the British established as a settlers’ frontier, parceling off land to European adventurers. The first batch of settlers received their land grants in 1902. It included British aristocrats like Lords Delamere, Hindlip, and Cranworth, who set the gold standard for a gilded countryside hunter lifestyle.
With its warm climate and its stunning landscapes, colonial Kenya was an attractive getaway for European aristocrats looking to escape the winter chill, and colonial planners catered to their needs. In white Nairobi, safe from the scourge of non-Europeans, residents could live charmed existences in a green paradise.
After the Great Depression, Blixen was forced to leave Kenya and sell her family’s now-bankrupt plantation, Karen Coffee Company (which, confusingly, was either named after Blixen or her cousin). The buyer, developer Remi Martin, subdivided the land into ten- and twenty-acre plots and kept the name “Karen.” Heralded by advertisements in the early 1930s as a place for “contentment in retirement,” the new estate boasted such activities as golf, tennis, polo, fishing, and shooting. “All the Amenities without the Disadvantages of Town,” one advertisement read.
Contemporary Echoes of Colonialism
As a Black Kenyan man, it’s likely that if I were to walk alone in Karen, I’d be questioned and asked for identification. This is not particular to Karen; all the wealthy neighborhoods in Nairobi are rife with physical barriers and security guards who carefully screen visitors. The estate is picturesque: potted plants hang from street signs, and tall croton trees hide old English colonial bungalows.
Perhaps no figure better illuminates the links between contemporary Kenya and its colonial past than the Karen Cowboy. KCs are modern-day descendants of the Happy Valley set. Their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents came to Kenya and acquired land as participants in the violence of the British colonial project. They revel in the settler-colonist aesthetic, keeping horses, dressing in cargo pants and safari boots, and driving old Land Cruisers and Land Rovers.
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Many have a wealth of information about the country of Kenya and can speak Swahili, but keep themselves isolated from the Kenyan population.
One of the more publicly recognizable avatars of KC culture was Tom Cholmondeley, the Nairobi-born, Eton-educated great-grandson of Lord Delamere, one of colonial Kenya’s earliest British settlers and “progenitor of Kenya’s most famous white family.”
Often, KCs champion animal conservation, painting the often-poor pastoral communities who live in proximity to conservancies as poachers and destroyers of the environment and wildlife. This mode of conservation, prominent Kenyan carnivore ecologist Mordecai Ogada has argued, “Remains firmly in the ‘Victorian gamekeeper’ mode,” where conservation is about protecting wildlife from lower classes so that the elite can enjoy the wildlife for themselves.
Though Karen Estate remains a colonial-aristocratic suburb, it’s not immune to change. Some of the old houses, with stables ensuite, have been demolished and replaced with apartment complexes. Cabro roads have been laid, and townhouses erected. There are malls now, and other developments afoot. In response, the Karen Lang’ata District Association, arguably the most powerful homeowners’ association in Kenya, has swung into action.
No longer the exclusive enclaves of rich Europeans, the neighborhood is now the almost-as-exclusive enclave of rich and upper-middle-class Europeans, Asians, and Africans. A combination of nonwhite house owners, the proliferation of apartment blocks, and the encroachment of urban Nairobi has shifted the colonial-aristocratic ideal 250 kilometers north, to the plains of Laikipia, which offer more land and animals to hunt.
At the Karen Blixen Museum, our guide Thamima explained to Linda and me that Blixen fought for the right of girls to attend school. She told us about Blixen’s friendship with Berkeley Cole, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat from Ulster and prominent settler-colonialist in Kenya.
I asked Thamima how it feels, as an African, to talk about a white colonialist all day long. “I enjoy interacting with people,” she told me. “And she wasn’t all bad.
In the Western (especially British) imagination, Kenya occupies an outsize place. Writing in The Guardian in 2019, Afua Hirsch observed that Africa is synonymous with Kenya in the “British tourist lexicon.” At the root of this romanticization of the country is Blixen and the blockbuster adaptation of her story, which drew on colonial-era British notions of the African frontier while conveniently erasing the violence of empire, a paradox that saturates safari tourism more broadly.
Tourist brochures of Kenya still describe it as the aristocratic utopia of Blixen’s memory. Then there is Giraffe Manor, a ten-minute drive from the Karen Blixen Museum, which similarly advertises itself as a throwback to Kenya’s colonial past. “Indeed, one of its twelve rooms is named after the author Karen Blixen.” Another is named for Finch-Hatton.
A cursory glance at the Giraffe Manor’s ownership offers a crash course in the Karen Cowboy phenomenon.
Royal Safaris and the Allure of Kenya
Kenya’s allure has always attracted royalty: in the late 1920s, the then Prince of Wales and his brother, Prince Henry of Gloucester, headed for Nairobi. Prince Henry - until then his mother’s blue-eyed boy - got detained by the party scene and by an affair with Beryl Markham, a pioneering aviatrix, writer, racehorse trainer and, at the time, a married woman.
Initially the prince slew animals and bedded District Commissioners’ wives with abandon. Finch-Hatton, though, persuaded him to for-swear guns and instead film the wildlife, setting a trend that continues to this day; the prince became, effectively, an early conservationist, though he still brought his mistress, Viscountess Furness, along on his second safari, Finch-Hatton thoughtfully placing their tents side-by-side. It was Furness who, fatefully, introduced the prince to Mrs Simpson.
The Queen, after all, became the Queen on her 1952 trip there with her young husband, Prince Philip, while staying at Treetops - one of the country’s first game lodges - the night before her father the King’s unexpected death. She had so relished her treehouse, perched above a muddy watering hole, and had been so thrilled to watch fractious elephants, baboons and battling rhino that she said, ‘I don’t want to miss a moment of this.’ The next day she wrote tenderly to her father, praying that he too might visit Kenya. It was not, alas, to be.
Sixty-five years later, Queen Elizabeth II still reigns and the Royal Family continues their jaunts to Kenya-indeed, Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton on safari-and we can only imagine that both the place and the experience remain close to her heart.
Connectivity, community and biodiversity are the watchwords, hunting anathema. ANDREW HOWARDBut the undeniable lure is the animal life.
Further game drives (in a Land Cruiser) offered up somnolent lionesses, hordes of buffalo, rare black rhino - Lewa is a rhino reserve, pullulating with these primaeval creatures. The only one of the ‘big five’ - lion, elephant, leopard, rhino and buffalo - to elude me was the notoriously hard-to-see leopard.
Wonderfully, there were myriad examples of the exquisitely patterned Grevy’s zebra, their rumps reminiscent of a Bridget Riley painting - 12 per cent of the endangered breed are to be found at Lewa.
Even more jaw-dropping is the sunset view from Cottar’s Bush Villa, up above the campsite. Hollywood royalty’s been - Angelina Jolie, several times, initially with Brad Pitt, just as Drew Barrymore and Natalie Portman have picked Lewa; financial royalty, in the shape of George Soros, was there last year; and animal royalty too.
For Calvin Cottar, East Africa is a ‘pleistocene paradise’ that’s ‘magic everyday’. It’s a place where he once had to stand as still as possible for 20 minutes as a leopard passed within five feet of him; had he batted an eyelid, ‘she’d have been on me’. It was then, he claims, that he realised he wanted to be ‘close to nature, without threatening it. I fully understand the hunting urge, but you don’t need to hunt to get the same adrenaline.’ Instead, what he could and should offer clients was ‘as close interaction with animals as possible, watching lions hunting and fighting... adrenaline without danger.’
Humility, as well as adrenaline, is what you feel, however luxurious your campsite, under those huge African skies, in the beautiful, barbaric face of nature. All those animals! All those birds! All that beauty! All that comfort! All that delicious food! It’s a dish fit for a king.
Here is a table summarizing key figures and locations mentioned in the article:
| Figure/Location | Description |
|---|---|
| Queen Elizabeth II | Queen of Kenya (1963-1964), Became Queen while in Kenya in 1952 |
| Karen Blixen | Danish writer and aristocrat, author of "Out of Africa" |
| Karen Estate | Nairobi suburb named after Karen Blixen |
| Giraffe Manor | Luxury hotel in Karen, popular tourist destination |
| Tom Cholmondeley | Descendant of Lord Delamere, example of "Karen Cowboy" culture |
KENYA: A JOURNEY OF COLONIZATION AND INDEPENDENCE
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