Award-winning photographer Nigel Pavitt has spent his life capturing his own stunning images of Africa. However, during his latest project he devoted all his time to uncovering amateur photographs from a bygone era that had never truly seen the light of day. His goal? To create a book celebrating the pioneering years of Kenya, the nation.
 In the space of 60 years from 1880, the interior of Kenya was transformed from a land untouched by outside influence into a modern country. Few nations in the world can boast a photographic record of such brief and momentous period in their history.
When the earliest photographs were taken, over 90 per cent of present-day Kenya was unknown. For a thousand years, seafarers from Arabia, India, Baluchistan, Malaya and China, and in the last 500 years those from Portugal, left their mark in scattered settlements along a narrow strip of coast bordering the Indian Ocean, which is blessed with an idyllic climate and lush tropical vegetation. Over time, an Afro-Arab culture evolved with Ki-Swahili as the lingua franca.
Few travellers ventured into the interior for lack of navigable rivers and other difficulties. Foremost of these was the inhospitable terrain. Inland from Mombasa lay a 60-mile-wide stretch of dry scrub country, the Nyika, a formidable barrier to any intrusion by man. The heat was intense, drinking water was scarce and the thick bush was covered with needle-sharp prickles and ‘wait-a-bit’ thorns which tore mercilessly at clothes and skin. Even if a traveller did manage to negotiate his way through, he then had to contend with another, very different, hazard – the Maasai. These nomadic cattle-owning people had a reputation for being exceptionally bloodthirsty, ever ready to murder and pillage. Their notoriety was exaggerated but they did exercise control over a vast area, relying on their structured age-grade society to mobilise an effective and destructive fighting machine of several thousand warriors. The fear they instilled in their neighbours had an unexpected benefit. While slaving flourished in most parts of East and Central Africa, here it was comparatively rare. Few dared risk the disapproval of the Maasai.
When Sultan Batghash of Zanzibar leased his mainland territories for fifty years to the British East Africa Association in May 1887, the region was known as British East Africa simply because it had been identified as being a British ‘Sphere of Influence’ at the Berlin Conference of European powers convened after the unseemly ‘Scramble for Africa’. In 1895, the British government took over responsibility for the administration of the country and formally declared the area the East Africa Protectorate. Soon a railway was built to Uganda, and the process of opening up the interior began. Little was known of the indigenous populations, who were then estimated to number between one and one and a half million. Their rich diversity of language and customs only began to be understood much later, after arbitrary colonial boundaries had been drawn as straight lines on a map.
My book is not about politics or the rights and wrongs of colonialism and settlement. It is a photographic celebration of life in an emerging African nation during those decisive pioneering years of a country in the making.
The search for pictures has been like looking for treasure at the end of a rainbow, often seemingly out of reach. My good friend Robin Schalch and I have criss-crossed the country in our quest for material. To while away the long hours on rough roads, we conjured in our minds the exciting pictures which we hoped to find at the end of our journey. On occasions, we were sadly disappointed; at other times, we found unexpected pots of gold. We have been privileged to see numerous family albums and examine more than 30,000 photographs. Many pictures were taken by the country’s colonial administrators or farmers with little more than a simple Brownie Box camera. Our initial choice of two thousand was scanned, restored and printed before the painful process of final selection eliminated two-thirds of them.
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Moments of history frozen in time
The Uganda Railway
In 1881 the British government financed the survey of a railway line from Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza (Lake Victoria). Captain JR Macdonald of the Royal Engineers and 46 trained survey personnel from India took two years to complete the task. Despite noisy opposition in Britain’s parliament to the expenditure of money on a ‘Lunatic Line’, a bill was passed on 1st August 1896, by which time work was well underway.
The experienced George Whitehouse had been appointed Chief Engineer of the Uganda Railway in December 1895 and lost no time in improving port facilities and linking Mombasa Island to the mainland. The old dhow harbour at Mombasa was unsuitable for vessels with deep draft, so all the stores, equipment and rolling stock for the Permanent Way, the Uganda Railway, had to be off-loaded from lighters at Kilindi beach until a proper harbour was built. The lighters were brought onto the beach at high tide and grounded as the tide went out. They lay alongside a temporary jetty which was partly made of timber piling. The cargo was then off-loaded by steam cranes directly into wagons. The lighters floated off on the next high tide, when the process began all over again.
Twenty miles or so beyond Nairobi in Kikuyu country, railway engineers established a temporary junction and siding station where they supervised a permanent track down the side of the Rift Valley escarpment. This undertaking involved the construction of eight viaducts with 1200 tons of steel. As a temporary expedient, a lift was built at the Escarpment Station to compensate for a difference in levels of 1523 ft (465m). Locomotives and wagons were lowered directly down the steep slope on ropes and pulleys attached to a steam-powered winch. George Whitehouse’s remarkable ingenuity, based on the principle of a funicular railway, saved a huge amount of time. In the 18 months betwen May 1900 and November 1901, the lift operated without accident and work progressed with speed along the floor of the Rift Valley. By the time the viaducts had been built and the permanent line brought into operation, the laying of tracks had advanced 170 miles beyond the escarpment.
Nairobi
A little more than a century ago there was no town called Nairobi. The place was a seasonal swamp on the edge of a forest beyond which large herds of wild animals roamed the vast plains. The city originated by chance in 1899 when railway engineers chose the level site for shunting and marshalling yards while they tackled the difficult task of laying a track down the Rift Valley escarpment, some twenty miles to the north. Before long, workshops were erected, stores built and a large tented encampment to house railway workers sprang up.
Farming
Potatoes were the country’s first agricultural export. Many farmers had high hopes of cornering the buoyant South African market but a combination of poor handling and storage, wrong varietal selection and lack of marketing left the experiment a financial disaster. It was not tried again.
One of the ruses adopted by farmers to collect ostrich eggs or catch young chicks in the wild. Wakamba tribesmen used a similar disguise with feathers. It could save them from attack by irate adult birds and allow them to approach close to unwary chicks. Captain Ernest Fey, know as ‘The Skipper’, ventured on foot from the Kinangop to the Mara River each year – a round trip of 300 miles – to capture chicks and drive them back to the Kinangop, where they were sold to ostrich farmers.
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