Area Code – Kiambu Town

Kiambu town is a busy and bustling administrative centre in the heart of Kikuyuland.

But, unless you were born there, live there or work there, I guess you know very little about the place. Except may be you have heard the lurid stories of hijacks, killings or buried vehicle spare parts.

It is not a town you would go to unless you have a reason to go to. It isn’t a town you pass through on your way to somewhere else. Not like Thika, on your way to Nyeri or other places to the north and east. Not like Naivasha, on your way to Nakuru or other places to the north and west.

Thika has its Blue Posts Hotel and waterfalls; Naivasha has its many lodges and the lake; Kiambu, I suggest, has no such tourist attractions. Nestling in the cleft of the two main roads, Kiambu leads to nowhere special. (Sorry, Githunguri if I underrate you.)

Well, the other day I did have a reason to go to Kiambu. Someone had recommended this book – Paul Spicer’s The Temptress.

It is yet another re-telling of the White Mischief stories, re-exploring the indulgent Happy Valley lives of European settlers, and re-focusing on the shooting of the aristocratic, wife-seducing, Josslyn Victor Hay, Lord Erroll.

(At ‘Joss’ and his wife’s house parties, it is said, no-one was allowed to leave unless they had slept with someone they hadn’t arrived with.)

And Paul Spicer comes up with yet another candidate for the murderer: Alice, Countess de Janzé, the beautiful, wilful and discarded lover.

At the time of the killing – it was in January 1941 – most suspicion naturally fell on Sir Henry ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, who had a good reason to be jealous because his wife was having a very public affair with Lord Erroll.

But there were plenty of other husbands who could have held a similar grudge. In fact, Delves Broughton was acquitted by the jury of settlers, many of whom, it can be assumed, felt that the philandering Lord had got what he deserved.

Another book has suggested that it was a political assassination by the British intelligence service, because Lord Erroll was known to have fascist leanings, had been sympathetic to the Nazi regime in Germany – and this was the time of the Second World War, when the British were fighting the Germans.

But, apart from the books, I have another source of information about Lord Erroll. I had the privilege of assisting Sir Michael Blundell in the writing of his autobiography titled A Love Affair with the Sun.

Contrary to the common view that Erroll was a macho rake, Blundell described him as something of a fop. “I remember seeing him at a cattle market,” Blundell told me. “He was wearing a black velvet hat and black velvet knickerbockers. I was struck by how pink his knees were.”

Blundell did acknowledge Erroll’s quick intelligence and organising ability. But he found his lifestyle distasteful, and he deeply resented the Happy Valley image.

“The Erroll set were a minority,” Blundell said. “Most of the settlers were hard-working farmers – and most of us had to struggle through the difficult years of the Depression of the 1930s.”

What then is the connection of all this with Kiambu? Well, Lord Erroll was the MP for the Kiambu constituency at the time of his death.

But that is not it. I discovered that these two settlers, so different in their attitudes and styles, are both buried in the cemetery of St Paul’s Church at Kiambu. So I went to see and take some photographs.

I had a few pleasant surprises. St Paul’s is a cared-for church. The grounds are trimmed and tidy. Inside, at the back of the nave, there are some quite dramatic and powerful paintings of the life of St Paul.

In the gardens there is a picnic site and a ‘Thingira wa Kama’ – a round meeting room in the style of the huts where the Kikuyu elders held their councils.

And the town itself? Yes, it is busy and bustling – but it is also remarkably clean and litter-free. The grounds of the Town Hall are well-kept, too, with extensive lawns and mature trees for shade.

As soon as we stepped inside, Elizabeth Nyambura Kariuki came from her Customer Care office to greet us. “How can I help you?” she asked.

Large-scale road works to the north of Nairobi; a clean and orderly Kiambu; a welcoming civil servant in a town hall – enough to make Lord Erroll and Sir Michael stir in their graves.

Source: Daily Nation