• The book tells the story of the Delamere family in Kenya from the arrival of the Third Baron in 1896 to today
• The author's previous book was The Ghosts of Happy Valley, about the white settlers in the Wanjohi Valley in the Aberdares
Image: COURTESY
Title: For Love of Soysambu
By Juliet Barnes
Publisher: Old Africa Books
Price: Sh2,000 from all good bookshops
Despite its title, For Love of Soysambu is primarily a history of the Delamere family in Kenya, from the first arrival of 3rd Baron Delamere in 1896 to the death of his grandson Tom Cholmondley at MP Shah Hospital in 2018.
It is full of interesting detail, although sometimes overloaded with purple prose.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book for modern-day Kenyans will be the insights into the life of Tom Cholmondley, who became notorious after twice going on trial for killing intruders onto the family’s sprawling Soysambu estate that lies above Lake Elementaita near Naivasha.
The book’s version depicts him as not guilty of murder in both cases. In 2005, he returned fire and shot dead an undercover KWS ranger, who the Soysambu workers thought was a robber. In 2007, he shot at poachers’ dogs and a bullet ricocheted and hit one poacher. Neither death was intentional, according to the book.
However Cholmondley was certainly guilty of an extraordinarily chaotic lifestyle. Charming but unreliable, he was expelled from Eton, the aristocratic school near London attended by his ancestors. His marriage broke down because of his womanising and general unreliability. He was perhaps redeemed by the 42 months he spent in prison, where he taught business studies to his fellow prisoners and helped set up the 'Crime Si Poa' group. His death in 2018 during a hip operation was apparently due to a chromosome that made him vulnerable to ‘malignant hypothermia’.
The Delameres eventually enjoyed great wealth but the first Delamere in Kenya, Hugh, teetered on the verge of bankruptcy for three decades before his investments — from the Unga Flour company to his wheat and cattle farms — started coming good. To finance all this, he had mortgaged his Vale Royal estate, which was eventually sold off and is now a golf club near Manchester.
Barnes estimates that Delamere had invested close to £40 million (Sh6 billion) in today’s money. When he died in 1931, he still owed the banks £226,000, equivalent to £15 million (Ksh2.1 billion) in today’s money, according to Barnes.
Until the 1920s, Delamere largely lived in a series of mud buildings, socialising more with his Maasai herdsmen than the European community, although he simultaneously terrorised various early governors to make Kenya a ‘white man’s country’ and self-governing settler colony.
The original Delamere himself comes across as a forceful entrepreneur but domineering and unkind to his wives and children. He was not close to his own son Tom, while his grandson Hugh, the present Lord Delamere and perhaps the kindest of the males in the family, did not attend his father Tom’s burial.
Ultimately the Delameres were a dysfunctional family. With that background, it is perhaps no surprise that the youngest Tom turned out charismatic but wild.
Across the book, Barnes intersperses the story of the Delameres with her personal reminiscences of the family as a close friend and as a ‘grace-and-favour’ resident of a cottage on Soysambu, now increasingly under pressure from population growth and environmental degradation.
For anyone interested in the trajectory of white settlers in Kenya, this is a fascinating and often enlightening book. It follows her previous book, The Ghosts of Happy Valley, that searched for the forgotten houses of settlers in and around the ‘Happy Valley’ or Wanjohi Valley in the Aberdares. Both books are well worth reading.
Edited by T Jalio