Karangaita’ Kenya Coffee

PART 1

Chapter 1

New Century, New World

The indignity of jouncing about in a horse-drawn carriage and having to give birth in the aging Torbay Hospital was not for Mabel Henrietta Wollen (nee Whitehead). Her baby must be born at home; the doctor and midwife must come to her.

As one of ten children, she was familiar with the processes of giving birth. Anxious for the safe arrival of her own first baby, Mai (she hated to be called Mabel) kept the housemaids busy with• trivial demands all morning. By mid-afternoon, her contractions had intensified. Doctor and midwife were summoned, and a messenger sent to her solicitor husband Cecil’s office. In the late summer evening light, maids were still hurrying up and down the steep stairs with heavy jugs of hot water, extra towels, and linens—whatever Madam, doctor, or midwife needed to keep Madam happy. Downstairs in the billiards room, Cecil tried to stay calm as the clock sounded the passing hours.

Mai’s baby boy finally arrived before midnight on 9 June 1902. Mother and baby thrived. By 16 August, the family photo album shows Mai dressed in her beribboned best, baby in her arms, ready to join Torquay’s coronation celebrations for the new King Edward VII and his Queen, Alexandra. Infant mortality rates of the era were high and so for his first year of life, Mai’s firstborn is referred to only as ‘baby’ in the family photo album. He was eventually christened Ernest Russell Storey Wollen and thereafter called Russell or Russ.

Russell’s father, Cecil Storey Wollen, was a solicitor and a gentleman of some standing in Torquay, as was his grandfather, Grant Wollen, who had founded the family business. Although not in the same social class as landed gentry, solicitors and doctors were educated professional men. They might have to enter the homes of upper- and upper-middle-class society by the tradesman’s entrance, but they were accorded trust and social respect. The firm was successful and though Cecil worked hard, private means allowed him leisure time during the week as well. Once or twice a week he would stroll from the office for lunch at the Royal Torbay Yacht Club followed by an enjoyable afternoon playing rubber bridge for stakes of a penny a hundred points at the Imperial Hotel. A keen yachtsman, he owned his own yacht, employing a full-time boatman to look after it and crew for him. In summer he sailed whenever he could, racing the yacht on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Mai joined him in both bridge and sailing with great enjoyment, skill, and gusto.

Cecil loved fly-fishing too. After his marriage, he bought a cottage on Dartmoor in the tiny hamlet of Hexworthy so he could fish the river Dart and other trout and salmon streams nearby. He, Mai, and their children spent many happy and relaxing holidays on the moors. More than a century later, the family still owns the cottage, a little modernised but structurally unchanged since those early days. Successive generations of the extended family still love holidays in the cottage at Hexworthy, and all treasure their memories of Dartmoor adventures.

Russell’s brother John arrived in 1904 and in 1910, their sister Mercia made up the threesome, all born at home. Mai loved her children dearly but was never naturally maternal, so the children were mostly raised by ‘Nursey’ and in their earlier years the time spent with their parents was carefully regulated. Mai had a firm control of her household from the outset and was possessive of her husband.

About two years before the outbreak of the First World War, young Russell was sent two hundred and fifty miles from home to become a boarder at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. At first, school was tough for him. In his eighties, he plaintively told his youngest daughter he’d had awful trouble during the first term because he still regularly wet the bed. It seems Nursey hadn’t cared how often she had to change sheets for he didn’t recall her chastising him about bed-wetting. At Marlborough, made to wash his soiled bed linen as punishment, Russell soon learned to wake up in time. He was intelligent but like many boys, far more interested in sport than education. By his own account, his school days were fairly unproductive in the classroom but much better on the sports field. He was in the school’s rugby football first XV and became particularly good at boxing, another sport he loved.

Once war was declared all the fit young men, including teachers, enlisted and left for the terrible fighting of the First World War. The remaining teachers were mostly elderly men, tired of boys and teaching in general, looking forward to retirement. Russell was lucky enough to have an excellent house master who imbued the boy with a powerful sense of moral fibre and fortitude. No fewer than seven hundred and forty-nine old boys, teachers, and other staff from Marlborough died during the war. This house master’s support and encouragement helped the boys in his charge deal with the deaths of the men and boys they had known.

The appalling losses of World War I left deep marks on Russell and on his entire generation. At the war’s end, despite the joyful victory celebrations all around Britain, lads of all social and economic levels felt intense frustration at having been trapped in school, too young to join the battle, kill the enemy, and avenge their friends. The wretchedness of the immediate post-war years, coupled with the Spanish influenza pandemic, hastened the collapse of the old, rigid class order. By the time Russell left school, dissatisfaction amongst these young men who’d never been soldiers was plainly seen all over the country.

At the end of his school years, a disturbed and discontented sixteen-year-old left his younger brother John at Marlborough and returned home to Torquay. In common with many children who go to boarding school far from home, Russell had few friends his own age and social standing in Torquay. He found it difficult to settle down and took to spending his time with young labourers, fishermen, and tradesmen’s sons in the town. These were rough lads who enjoyed boxing, greyhound racing, and other questionable or even illegal sports like cockfighting. From them Russell learned how to set a snare for rabbits and how to poach salmon and pheasant. Such ‘common fellows’ were definitely not ‘suitable types’ to invite home and most certainly not welcomed by his parents.

The annual Torbay Royal Regatta has been the major event of the year in Torquay since the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s. In 1839, a year after her coronation, Queen Victoria granted Royal Patronage (the first ever granted for such an event) to the regatta committee. Torquay and the beautiful coastline and countryside around it became known as the English Riviera. During Regatta Week, yacht racing was the primary attraction, but there were always entertaining diversions organised for the landlubbers ashore. The Regatta Fair was no exception. In addition to booths advertising freakish attractions like ‘The Bearded Lady’, ‘The Jumping Fleas’, or ‘The Strongest Man in The World’, there was always a boxing booth. For two or three pennies, young men could come and try their luck in the ring with a professional boxer. A prize was offered for anyone who could complete a round and a bigger prize for anyone who defeated the pro. Whenever some ambitious fellow accepted the challenge, his friends and relations eagerly paid to see the fun, so the boxing booth did a roaring trade.

Russell, fresh out of public school and a handy boxer, egged on by his working-class chums, fancied his chances. He paid his pennies, stripped off his jacket and shirt, was strapped into boxing gloves, and led onto the stand outside. Holding the young man’s gloved hand up high, the tout shouted the odds to draw in the crowd and fill the tent. Russell’s heart sank when he saw his father standing tall, elegant, and unmistakable at the edge of the crowd. Cecil shot one unreadable look at his son and walked away.

Once in the ring, Russell, full of youthful confidence in his prowess, danced about the ring jabbing and feinting left and right. The heavyset bruiser blocked his punches and warned, Gently does it, Sonny, as he sized up his young opponent. Russell, heedless of this advice, landed a good hard blow to his opponent’s jaw. The old pro retaliated, growling, Right, Sonny, if that’s the way you want it, and boxed in earnest. Within moments, a swift uppercut dropped Russell. Chastened, he got up before the count to box on. Well-placed hooks and jabs from the pro broke his nose and gave him a black eye, but Russell still managed to finish the round on his feet and collected a prize. When he arrived home, bruised, bloodied, and late for dinner too, both parents let him know exactly how displeased they were. Teenage Russell was becoming a real worry to his parents.

To counteract his son’s wayward behaviour, Cecil took him in hand. Old photos show Cecil as a tall, slender man with smiling eyes in a kindly, wise, and gentle face and as father and son spent more time together, they forged a close and loving relationship. The two spent extended periods alone together at the cottage on Dartmoor, fishing for both trout and salmon in the season, and Russell became as keen and skilled a fly-fisherman as his father. The whole family loved sailing, racing their yacht at all opportunities. To the end of his life, Russell remembered his mother’s skill and strength at the helm despite her delicate hands and tiny wrists. He learned to play a good hand of bridge with either parent as a partner and even made some more socially acceptable friends, but he was still unsettled and discontent with his life.

As eldest son, Russell was destined to follow his father’s footsteps into the family law practice founded by his grandfather in 1868. Cecil had read law at University College in Oxford, but after World War I all available places went to returned servicemen and so a reluctant Russell was articled to Wollen & Hooper’s offices. Here, the typewriter had not yet entirely supplanted the old ways. Clerks still perched on high stools at their desks, drafting by hand important documents such as wills and conveyances. These drafts were later copied out ‘in fair’—elegant copperplate script on actual parchment. The managing clerk, the most important member of the firm after the managing partners, was Russell’s immediate superior. Addressed as ‘Mister’ by his subordinates, this man was always formally dressed, donning a bowler hat and black jacket when visiting the offices of other solicitors for ‘completions’.

Despite Russell’s lack of enthusiasm for a solicitor’s work, he learned elementary law and developed the logic that came from regular use of Latin. He mastered the basics of a lawyer’s accounting methods and a little of trust law, and both proved invaluable to him throughout his working life. In particular, he learned exactly why clients’ funds or monies belonging to other people were sacrosanct and must always be kept safely separate from his own funds or those of his employer.

Property conveyancing was still a real art and an important aspect of the practice’s business. Land and property titles had to be investigated back over the previous sixty years at least. Title deeds were pile upon pile of dusty, handwritten parchments with long narrations, each of which must connect with all preceding events. It was boring, repetitious work for a restless, rebellious, outdoor youngster like Russell and his heart was never in the future his father expected of him.

He dreamed of escape. Newspaper and magazine stories of exciting adventures and developments in East Africa fired his imagination. He was drawn by articles about the emerging colony of Kenya; information about growing coffee there drew him like a magnet. Russell devoured books like Ewart Grogan’s epic Cape to Cairo, Percy Fitzpatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld, and Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails. He was enthralled by Lieutenant-Colonel J H Patterson’s Man Eaters of Tsavo, describing the author’s efforts to destroy two maneless man-eating lions whose attacks on the Indian labourers employed in building the Mombasa to Uganda Railway brought the project to a halt.

When he failed a first-year examination, Russell became so depressed he tried to kill himself by putting his head in the kitchen oven and turning on the gas. Fortunately, he was discovered when the cook, returning early from her evening off, smelled gas. Horrified, Cecil and Mai finally accepted their first-born would never be happy following in his father’s footsteps. With equal measures of regret and relief, they agreed their troublesome twenty-year-old son could give up the law and follow his dreams of becoming a coffee planter in Kenya. Once the decision was made, they did all they could to find the best way forward for Russell.

Chapter 2

Colonial Backdrop

The names and explorations of Speke, Stanley, Livingstone, and others had been thrilling England since the mid-1800s. Britain and Germany saw colonisation as the best way to ensure the supplies of raw materials demanded by rapid industrialisation. Both countries began moving into and carving up East Africa. The British Government founded the East African Protectorate in 1895 and soon opened the fertile highlands to white settlers. The German Empire took similar action in Tanganyika and the areas known today as Burundi, Namibia, and Rwanda. Both England and Germany set up firm controls over their respective colonies before World War I.

During approximately the same time frame, the Maasai peoples leisurely advanced southwards from somewhere north of Lake Rudolf. As the Europeans drew up territorial boundaries for their new land acquisitions, the Maasai and their herds continued to move further into the country, reaching as far as Mombasa in 1859. The local Bantu-speaking tribes couldn’t effectively resist the disciplined training of the warrior Maasai. The Kikuyu, numerically superior but less warlike in nature, concealed themselves in the mountains and forests for protection against the Maasai who preferred open plains. In the mid-1890s, drought, famine, and plagues decimated both Kikuyu and Maasai. Rinderpest, a highly contagious and often fatal disease of ruminant animals, struck the Maasai’s beloved cattle, native sheep, and goats. One estimate claims this epidemic killed ninety percent of African livestock as well as countless wildlife. Smallpox, gift of the white man, wiped out up to half the native population. Epidemics broke out after the rains failed, viciously killing off the half-starved survivors of famine. Inexorably, the white peoples continued moving into and settling on lands they saw as fertile and empty.

The early exploits of a young Ewart Grogan, the first person in recorded history to walk the length of Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, reveal the romance, adventure, and British attitudes of the times. His wild, socially unacceptable behaviour in England saw him expelled from both school and university. In 1896, inspired by reading Rider Haggard’s romantic African adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines, Grogan travelled to Cape Town, enlisting in the British South Africa Company’s war in Matabeleland. Afterwards he went hunting big game and contracted malaria that turned into blackwater fever and almost killed him. To recuperate, he took the long, slow sea voyage to New Zealand. There he met and promptly fell in love with Gertrude Watt, a lovely and wealthy young heiress who was a direct descendant of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

Her stepfather was not impressed by young Grogan’s reputation or credentials. Rejecting him as a ne’er-do-well fortune-hunter, he told the young suitor, If you want to marry her, you first have to prove yourself worthy of her.

Stung, twenty-three-year-old Grogan demanded, If I walk through Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, will you let me marry her?

Spluttering with laughter, the older man agreed. Quite wrongly, he never expected the young upstart would even begin the journey, let alone succeed. Grogan’s marathon walk took him two and a half years and made him an instant celebrity on his return to England. Russell read his book about the journey, From Cape to Cairo, whilst he was still at school. Published in 1900, the book became a bestseller and can still be bought today. In 1903, Ewart Grogan married Gertrude, returning with her to Kenya where he soon became one of the colony’s best-known figures.

The drive, energy, and capabilities of less swashbuckling early settlers are deadened by the factual entries of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Dry words on faded, dusty government and commercial enterprise documents mask the enthusiastic determination of individuals as they worked to colonise East Africa. However, Hansard and government records between 1896 and 1903, when the Uganda Railway was finally completed, do reveal examples of great acumen and equally great shortcomings and incompetence.

From Mombasa on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the railway travelled nearly seven hundred miles over unknown, unmapped country. It climbed six thousand feet above sea level before descending the steep escarpment of the great Rift Valley and heading on through to its final station at Kisumu in Uganda. Early settlers and detractors dubbed it the Lunatic Line, claiming the challenges and cost overruns of building it far outweighed the original intent of it becoming a practical means of encouraging trade and commerce.

Over thirty-five thousand Indian labourers were imported to work on the railway. They were employed under contract and for this reason, the Indian rupee was adopted as the first standard coin for Kenya currency. Smaller local coins and notes of higher denominations were all expressed in terms of the rupee. The British sovereign was also legal tender and valued at fifteen rupees. This combination made for a confusing currency in Kenya’s earliest years. After the First World War, the rupee was withdrawn and the East African Protectorates (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika) granted their own currency. It was part decimal, part British, with the shilling as the standard coin, one hundred cents to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound.

As the British set themselves up in Kenya and Uganda, the German colonists did the same in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and modern-day Burundi, both sharing a border with Kenya. Agriculture had quickly been recognised as the financial backbone for Kenya, but when war broke out in 1914, settlers left their farms to enlist. The war years took a heavy toll throughout East Africa. Africa swiftly took the newly cultivated land back to bush if there was nobody to work it.

Chapter 3

Kenya Coffee’s Early Years

The first recorded coffee grown by Europeans in East Africa was planted by missionaries. These early plantings might have been at a French mission on the Taita Hills, about two-thirds of the way between Nairobi and Mombasa, or at the Scottish mission in Kibwezi, a little nearer to Nairobi. Records of the time are scanty and inconsistent. Young coffee trees were planted between 1893 and 1895 and the first crop was picked in 1896. The coffee trees did well if they were irrigated but without regular watering, they soon died. It turned out neither location had enough natural rainfall for coffee to succeed in the long term.

By 1904, the handful of pioneer settlers was coming to grips with two vital issues—what best to grow on this wonderfully fertile virgin land, and how to secure a large enough labour force to develop the farms and plantations they planned. The attitudes of early Kenya Government officials varied between unreservedly optimistic and thoughtfully cautious. Careful men warned those who rushed to the country hoping to make quick fortunes with scant money and no backing would probably fail. Men who arrived with a plan and sufficient funds were more likely to succeed.

From the outset, labour to develop these new farmlands was a controversial issue. Pressured by the settlers, the government issued ordinances designed to force Africans to work for the white man. Humanitarian and anti-slavery groups in London fought, with only partial success, against forced labour regulations set out by Kenya’s governor. Private individuals were forbidden to coerce labour, but the colonial government was empowered to extract forced labour for communal activities. This was defined and justified as a continuation of traditional duties owed to their chiefs by tribal Africans.

To the whites, the local tribespeople seemed to live in the immediate present, disregarding past troubles and giving little thought to future difficulties. Money was a new idea and seemed unimportant to them. The African tribespeople saw no advantage in exchanging hard physical labour for something they didn’t already own or that was easily available. From the outset, tribes protested and negotiated individually, but the first true stirrings of African Nationalism did not arise until after the war.

Relentlessly, settlers and missionary groups strove to develop their agricultural dreams in Kenya. Fascinating conflicts took place in the strange world of government, empire, and administration. By sea-mail and telegram, Whitehall officials and the young administrators and governing agents in Kenya discussed plans and concepts ranging from sound to impractical. Each proposal was examined and elaborated in detail before being discarded or implemented. At the heart of every issue was money.

Where should it come from? Who should control it? How should it be spent? The process of colonisation entailed endless meetings, debates, arguments, and political manoeuvring for personal, political, or business advantage. In Whitehall’s eyes, the overriding consideration was how to generate the best return on investment for Britain. Any initiatives to promote the growth and development of the new colony itself appeared as unimportant minor by-products to the demands of the British Government or commercial enterprises. Each person involved brought their own knowledge, competence, foresight—or lack thereof—to the table.

Today, communication across oceans and continents is instantaneous, cheap, and effortless. It was utterly different at the beginning of the twentieth century in Kenya. Roads existed only as dirt tracks. Cars were a rarity. Occasionally, reports and records of the time reveal the difficulties of travel. District officers and other officials trekked through all weathers on foot, by ox cart, on horse or mule through bush inhabited by wild animals. Getting to a meeting or obtaining information for a report might entail hours, even days, of travel in conditions unimaginable to a London counterpart. Airmail didn’t exist. Letters, usually handwritten, took weeks to reach England by sea-mail. In England, bicycle or motorbike riders delivered telegrams using paved roads. In Kenya, African runners hand-delivered telegrams, sometimes over marathon distances.

By 1908, although beset by pest and animal depredation (cutworm, rats, and monkeys amongst them), coffee was already recognised as one of the most promising crops to grow in the highlands. The soil, altitude, and climate of the Kiambu, Kikuyu, and Thika districts seemed especially suitable. Problems aside, coffee was a profitable crop and substantial capital was invested in developing the industry. A government entomologist was appointed in 1908 to help control insect pests, and experimental plantings in dissimilar locations followed a year later. In 1913, a government mycologist joined the growing research team to find methods of defeating the fungal pests.

Jamaica was already a proven premier coffee-producing country and so, eager to get the best advice, the infant Kenya Department of Agriculture looked to Jamaica for a coffee expert. They recruited Maxwell le Poer Trench, appointing him the protectorate’s expert coffee plant inspector. During his first few months in office in early 1914, le Poer Trench visited around forty plantations. His report was enthusiastic.

The berry being produced is of exceptional quality, he wrote, and the prospect and general appearance of the plantations is excellent. He warned, Coffee is not a crop to treat lightly. A golden harvest is not secured simply by planting large acreages. Care and attention of the young plants in nurseries, choice of saplings suitable for planting out, proper pruning and training of the young plants until they reach bearing stage, and treatment of the crop after picking will all materially affect the ultimate success or otherwise of the entire industry.

Le Poer Trench enlisted early in the war after only a few months in his new job. Fortunately for the coffee industry, he was soon invalided out of the services and was back at work by the middle of 1915. He gratefully noted the willingness of the inexperienced coffee farmers he was helping to accept and act on advice. Sadly for Kenya, as the more advanced young coffee plantations came to bear a full crop in 1917, the British Government declared coffee a prohibited import into war-ravaged and penniless England. The crop was not necessary for the war effort and shipping carrying it to London was more urgently needed for imports of essential raw materials. As a result, hundreds of tons of suddenly unsalable coffee were crammed into the few storage facilities available in Kenya. The colonists’ outcry forced the British Government to realise how disastrous this was and reluctantly, the Colonial Office in London managed to advance loans to planters against the security of their crops in storage.

At the end of the war, settler soldiers who returned safely to Kenya were filled with optimism and determined to get their farms in order again. Most of them were chronically short of cash, and as the western world arose from the privations of war, it needed vast quantities of primary products like flax, sisal, and coffee. Banks were eager to lend to Kenya farmers, who, encouraged by these newly buoyant markets, borrowed heavily.

Farming in Kenya is quite different to farming in Europe. The climate and seasons, altitudes, soils, crop diseases, and insect pests bear no resemblance to those of England. Coffee is a finicky crop to cultivate. Few early settlers were experienced farmers and worse, none had ever grown coffee before. No-one understood coffee thrives only within a narrow geographic and climate range. As a result, much of Kenya’s early coffee was planted on marginal or unsuitable land. One such plantation was Karen Blixen’s (Out of Africa) farm at N’Gong, at too high an altitude ever to succeed.

Le Poer Trench, doing his best since his appointment in 1914, lacked both staff and budget to reach everyone or everywhere in the colony. Nevertheless, the coffee industry continued to develop steadily despite erratic rainfall, pests, diseases, and plantations started in areas that proved unsuitable after a few promising years. The work of clearing the natural bush or forest and preparing the ground was all done by hand, aided by ox-drawn ploughs and the rare tractor. Planting, pruning, weeding, picking, and processing from berry to bean was also done manually or with minimal machine equipment.

Chapter 4

Finally, a Coffee Planter

This was the background to the challenging, fascinating new country gripping the imagination of a young man unable to bear the prospect of life in his father’s law practice. Once his parents accepted their firstborn would never be happy with the life they’d wanted for him, they gave in with characteristic grace and generosity. It was widespread practice at the time to pay employers who took on a young man sight unseen, and Cecil Wollen arranged for his son a fee-paying apprenticeship on Buckholt, a coffee estate in Thika.

Russell’s journey in 1922 from England to the plantation was by boat, train, and ox wagon. His new house was a rondavel—a round hut built mostly of grass and reeds with floors made from a mixture of mud and cow dung. Under the manager’s supervision, one of his first responsibilities was to oversee and organise the men and women making up the African labour force. He set and supervised their daily work schedule, recorded results, and paid the workers. His duties also included looking after them, seeing to their needs, treating injuries, and tending illnesses, for there was no doctor within a day’s journey for anyone, native or European. Each worker living on the plantation was also given a small shamba (area of land) where he could grow his own food. Russell loved his work. This, not poring over dusty title deeds, was life.

An early incident tested his mettle. One evening, the African headman came to him in distress. His bibi (wife) had been in labour all day. The baby was the wrong way round and he feared she would die. Russell knew nothing about humans giving birth, but he knew a little about dogs having puppies. Armed with this knowledge, he took some cord and a Dietz lamp and followed the headman down to the labour lines. There, in the smoky, reeking hut, he secured the baby’s feet with the cord and pulled it out whilst the headman and a couple of others held the poor, exhausted woman. The baby was stillborn, but the mother survived and a couple of days later the headman happily told Russell she was well enough to work on their little shamba.

With only an ox cart for transport, there was little entertainment for the young bachelor in the evenings. He often spent this time with some of the male workers gathered near his rondavel. He quickly learned enough Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, to swap stories and learn about the people, their families, and at least a little of the way they thought. He was sometimes an impatient and hot-tempered young man, and soon earned the nickname (never used in his presence) of Karangaita. Khara is an Arabic word for shit (Swahili uses many Arabic words). N’gaita is a strong purgative made from the purple berries of the mugaita, or Cape Myrtle bush, used by the Africans to get rid of tapeworms. Karangaita roughly translates as ‘shit-strong-medicine’ and the nickname may have been chosen because of his strong work ethic. Though he demanded high standards of work, he always tried to treat the people fairly, and overall, the workers respected rather than feared him.

Because he often took out a shotgun in the late afternoon or early morning to shoot buck or wild pig that damaged the coffee trees, the workers also appreciated his ability to supplement their larders. It was all a wonderful education for