Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto
Gun, Probably in Africa. Photo by Edward Van Altena, 1909, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002709191/.
Barack Obama was not the first president of the United States whose connections to Kenya shined an international spotlight on the country. A century before the inauguration of the first African American president, one of Obama’s predecessors was busy making plans for an extended tour of East Africa. Just three weeks after leaving office in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt set sail for an expedition in British East Africa cosponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.1 An avid hunter and naturalist who as president had established five national parks, Roosevelt, together with his son Kermit, felled game to be mounted for exhibitions at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Natural History in New York. The expedition carried home hundreds of hunting trophies (including nine lions, thirteen rhinoceroses, and twenty zebras) and romantic tales of a rugged yet opulent life on safari, introducing American households to people, places, and things with which they were almost wholly unfamiliar.2
Arriving in the ancient port city of Mombasa on Kenya’s Swahili Coast in late April after almost a month at sea, Roosevelt’s extravagantly outfitted party—their entourage included 250 porters, and Roosevelt’s tent had a bathtub—set off on an extensive safari, making a circuit through Kenya, Uganda, Congo, and into Sudan that took nearly a year to complete. The expedition was widely covered in the press, and Roosevelt had been commissioned by Scribner’s magazine beforehand to document his travels for the princely sum of $50,000 (an amount equivalent to roughly 1.3 million in 2014 US dollars).3 His serialized accounts of the expedition were later compiled and published as African Game Trails. A best seller by all standards, the book provides an important window into how Kenya was popularly marketed to American and international audiences more than a century ago.
Most directly, Roosevelt’s expedition stimulated interest in big game hunting and helped to designate Kenya as the premier site for a safari. As Edward Steinhart writes, “Even after the construction of the Uganda railroad, travel to and within East Africa remained both arduous and expensive. Only the wealthiest European and American aristocrats could make the excursion for the purpose of shooting big game.”4 Such travelers, he points out, “laid the basis for the growth of Kenya’s modern tourist industry.”5 We would add that the safari experiences recounted in print by travelers like Roosevelt, complete with luxurious trappings and outdoor adventure, have contributed strongly to the elite character of tourism in Kenya that continues to center on the recreation of the interpenetrated worlds of the white hunter and the colonial settler.6
More abstractly, set against backdrops of dramatic natural beauty, Roosevelt’s descriptions of the flora, fauna, and people that he encountered on safari offer insights into the roots of enduring, exoticized stereotypes about Africa and the lasting effects of such representations on Kenya. The foreword to African Game Trails reflects the triumphant zeal of an explorer, the scientific curiosity of a naturalist, and the latent racism of the early twentieth-century American. Focusing on what he saw as the untamed nature of both African landscapes and Africans, Roosevelt recounts:
In these greatest of the world’s great hunting-grounds there are mountain peaks whose snows are dazzling under the equatorial sun; swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in the steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts where the iron desolation is shrouded from view by the wavering mockery of the mirage; vast grassy plains where palms and thorn-trees fringe the dwindling streams; mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths. . . . The dark-skinned races that live in the land vary widely. Some are warlike, cattle-owning nomads; some till the soil and live in thatched huts shaped like beehives; some are fisher-folk; some are ape-like naked savages, who dwell in the woods and prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves.7
Coming a quarter century after the “Scramble for Africa,” during which the European powers carved up Africa following the Berlin Conference, Roosevelt’s expedition took place as the mysterious “dark continent” was becoming increasingly knowable through the processes of colonization and when discourses about the imperial nations’ “civilizing mission” in Africa were in full flower. Accordingly, Roosevelt’s prose, bolstered by his authority as a former president, helped cement images of Kenya as an exotic locale inhabited first by spectacular flora and fauna and populated second by “dark skinned races” whose “primitive” lifestyles rendered them stuck in almost primeval time.
Roosevelt was not alone in depictions of the landscapes and lifestyle he found in Kenya as both exotic and static. Rather, African Game Trails was typical of its genre; travelers’ accounts of the period rarely acknowledge the sweeping political, social, and economic changes wrought by colonialism (and African engagement with them) or the violence (and African resistance to it) that accompanied the imposition of British rule. Such incomplete representations of Kenyan culture and history invite the following questions: What might have Kenyans thought of the ways in which their experiences were described in works like African Game Trails? How has outsiders’ “ownership” of history and control over representations affected Kenya’s social, economic, and political trajectories from the early twentieth century forward? In what ways and in what contexts have Kenyans narrated their own stories and represented themselves? What have these competing histories accomplished?
With these questions in mind, this chapter focuses on the complexities of the colonial experience, the myths surrounding it, and the work that competing discourses about Kenya’s colonial past continue to perform into the present day—not simply in Kenya, but globally as well. Indeed, writing about his long discussions with a local historian in Western Kenya during his 1988 visit, Obama recalls being admonished, “The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”8 Accordingly, a primary goal of this chapter is to sharpen understandings of Kenya’s colonial past and its relationship to the present. We turn next to one of the most enduring and powerful tropes, or common themes, about Kenya—Kenya as a “white man’s country.”9
Creating the Colonial Landscape: The (Un)Happy Valley of the “White Man’s Country”
By the time Roosevelt made his journey, the colonization of Kenya10 figured as the domain not just of the “white hunter” but of the white settler. In the swath of fertile land that extended from the slopes of Mount Kenya to escarpments hugging the Great Rift, with its volcanic lakes, to the plains of Laikipia that composed the White Highlands (so called because they were lands alienated, or officially given over to white settlement and ownership), Africans were progressively turned off the lands they had inhabited and worked for generations. They were expelled to “native reserves,” islands of agriculturally poor lands demarcated along tribal lines, or they were allowed for a time to “squat” on white farms, exchanging their labor for the right to reside on settler lands and to retain a small fraction of the crops they produced.
This realization of Kenya as a “white man’s country” had its deep roots in an African adventure undertaken a little more than a decade before Roosevelt’s epic safari by another young man of prominent family and considerable means, Hugh Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere.11 In 1896, accompanied by an entourage that included teams of Somali bearers, a professional photographer, and two hundred camels, Delamere, who reputedly coined the term “white hunter,” embarked on a far-ranging safari that led him more than one thousand miles throughout Somaliland and concluded ultimately in Central Kenya.12 The lush landscape captured Delamere’s imagination, and a few years later, shortly before British East Africa became the Kenya Colony and Protectorate in 1905, he returned as a settler, taking up a ninety-nine-year lease on one hundred thousand acres near the Mau Plateau that he pledged to spend £5,000 developing over a period of five years.13
Working from his vast Equator Ranch and as a chief figure in the settler lobby in Nairobi, Delamere threw his energy into the development of Kenya as a “white man’s country.” Chairing an official land commission in 1905, Delamere advocated that the initial development of the highlands be undertaken by wealthy,