Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

| Coulsong

Question 2: Information about the indigenous population?

Q. Can you tell me something about the indigenous population of Kenya (the squatters, the Kikuyus etc)?

A. A good book about the Kikuyu is Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta. Following are some excerpts from Out of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen i Afrika) by Linda Donelson (copyrighted material, quoted by permission):

"The greatest problem Bror faced was finding workers to help him. His first task in Africa, once he had seen his land, was to hike into the Kikuyu hills and find the chief, Kinanjui. It took weeks of negotiations and many exchanges of gifts before Kinanjui guaranteed him a few hundred warriors willing to set down their spears for wages. The length of the planting season extended from February to June, coinciding with the long rains. Bror told Karen the incentives he offered: he gave the Africans a place for their huts and grazing for their cattle, as well as food and blankets, and wages amounting to a few rupees per month. According to regulations established by the Resident Native Labourers Ordinance, each worker willing to stay beyond the planting season would receive two acres of shamba (native farm) to cultivate as his own, provided he worked at least 180 days out of the year and agreed to bring his family to help with the harvest. Bror saw to it that each African placed his mark on a contract promising to work at least six months. He preferred that "squatters" live on the farm rather than leave at the end of the planting season, so he would know how many workers he could count on. Many white farmers had difficulty keeping workers, but it seemed to Bror that if the Africans were treated well they would stay. One of the chief concerns of any farm in the colony was keeping its workers in good health. The settlers' wives made it their custom to keep a daily check on the sick and injured. It would be up to Karen, as far as she was able, to attend to the medical needs of the Africans. If she felt at sea about ointments and bandaging, she was to do for the Africans what she would do for herself. This was why Bror had asked her to bring out from Denmark a chest of medicines. At any rate, Bror knew a little first aid, and if there was anything that together they could not manage, the Protestant mission hospital was only twelve miles away....

Many were scornful of how she had managed her farm. At the time of the sale there were 153 African families living there; some dared to say that one should not have expected to make a profit from land with all those Africans hanging about....

Karen's immediate concern after the farm sale was not for her own plans but for the fate of the Africans on the farm. Their work contracts did not expire until May 1931. By law they would then have six months before they had to leave. In the intervening time Karen hoped to receive word from the government about land where they could resettle together. She spent her time going around the government offices of Nairobi in a fever to find a new home for them....

The Africans had weathered the jostlings of power and accepted bewildering British regulations; they had worked for the white man to pay the white man's taxes; they had had their customs systematically extinguished by British law; they had patiently allowed their dances, their attire, their burial rites, and their religious practices--the customs of centuries--to be curtailed by the whims of a bumptious white race who had lived in East Africa barely thirty years. But, with all this, they had thought to go on living in surroundings familiar to them. Now the Msabu's selling the farm--a catastrophe they could not fathom--had made them homeless."