Administrative officers in Kenya used to complain that they were never left long
enough in one district to know its people and their language; no sooner had one
learned Kikuyu or Masai or Somali than one was posted away, never to speak it again.
In juggling seniority, suitability, health, leave and family commitments, those in
charge of postings seemed to ignore continuity. There may have been a rationale in
this: a District Commissioner left too long with one tribe tended to become less its
administrator than its champion against neighbouring tribes, even against the
government. So the officer who wanted to get to the top should not specialise and must
do at least one tour in the Secretariat.
L. E. Whitehouse ('Wouse') was a bachelor and backwoodsman who rated job
satisfaction far higher than promotion. He spent 20 years with the Masai and 12 with
the Turkana, separated by only two years in an 'advanced' district. He should have
retired without making any impact outside his two tribes, but as things happened, he
probably had a greater effect on Kenya after Independence than all the Provincial
Commissioners and Secretariat luminaries put together.
His is a difficult posthumous biography to write. He left practically no useful notes
on his years in Masai, so his biographer must rely on letters and diaries written by
other people, some with little relevance to Wouse (much of this material, however, is
fascinating, such as Daphne Moore's description of a lion hunt by Masai moran.) One
ean fault this book in detail: for instance. Lari, the scene of the Mau Mau's most
horrific massacre, was an ordinary village of Kikuyu loyalists, by no means a
'settlement of Kenya Police, their wives and families'; the illustrations are unworthy of
the text. But enough of nit-picking; this is a first class biography of a man who
deserved one.
Wouse believed that rules, even his own, were meant to be broken. As a headmaster
and Third Class Magistrate he trespassed many miles into Tanganyika to arrest,
illegally, the murderer of his clerk. He always obstructed the recruitment of Turkana
labour by European settlers, believing that exposure to civilisation would teach them
(the Turkana, not the settlers) bad habits. But when, after retirement, he bought a farm
himself, he would employ on it only Turkana. He was adamant that married officers
should not bring their wives into Turkana, but connived at one District Officer doing
so because he had known the wife as a little girl. She became his biographer, so the core
of her excellent book is based on personal knowledge of Wouse's work in Turkana,
which pointed the way (without one-fiftieth of the funds) for post-Independence
development there.
Jomo Kenyatta was imprisoned in Turkana from 1952 to 1959. He arrived an
undoubted promoter of terrorism and left there a magnanimous elder statesman,
inclined to nepotism and closing an eye to corruption by his nearest and dearest, but
prepared to forgive and forget. For this transformation, which created modern Kenya,
Wouse is widely believed to be responsible.
He made no such claim himself. Probably the visits to Turkana of the Kikuyu
Bishop Kariuki, a stout opponent of Mau Mau, did most to change Kenyatta. But
Wouse, while never breaking or bending a prison rule, treated 'Mzee' with friendliness,
lent him books, protected bim against thuggish fellow convicts who bullied him. The
author points out that, although Wouse had no such intention, this treatment followed
the classic pattern of brainwashing - the hardship of prison food and conditions
alternating with the District Commissioner's humanity. All that Wouse would claim
was that he and Mzee established a 'rapport'. The generosity towards him of the
government of independent Kenya suggests that this was an understatement.
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