I myself came out to the Protectorate of British East Africa before the First World War, while the Highlands were still in very truth the happy hunting grounds, and while the white pioneers lived in guileless harmony with the children of the land. Most of the immigrants had come to Africa, and had stayed on there, because they liked their African existence better than their existence at home, would rather ride a horse than go in a car and rather make up their own campfire than turn on the central heating. Like me they wished to lay their bones in African soil. They were almost all themselves country-bred and open-air people; many of them were younger sons of old English families, schooled early in life by elderly, dignified keepers and stablemen and were accustomed to proud servants. Themselves untamed, with fresh hearts, they were capable of forming a Hawkeye-Chingachgook fellowship with a dark, untamed nomad or hunter; they accepted and trusted the Somali, as the Somali accepted and trusted them.

During the war, and the first years after it, no new settlers landed. But in the following years an energetic advertising of the Colony of Kenya as a country of unique economic possibilities was started in England, and ‘Closer Settlement’ was made the catchword. It brought out a new class of settlers, people who had grown up and lived in one town or one community in England, and who were strangely provincial compared to the African Natives, who were at any time prepared for anything. Plots of land were also given out as rewards to British non-commissioned officers, most of whom were city people, who in the loneliness of the great landscapes felt that they had been promised more than they were given.

To me it was a sad programme. From the point of view of emigration, I reflected, Kenya, with an altitude and a climate in which white people could not take on manual labour, and with a vast Native population, would never be an area of great moment. When I first came to the country there were about five thousand white people there; she might, I thought, possibly take in ten times as many. But then, I was told, Australia and New Zealand and Canada could at the same time take in up to fifty or a hundred millions. And from the point of view of the country itself, the ‘true home of my heart’, a closer white settlement was a dubious benefit, and it was the quality, not the quantity, of white settlers which we should have at heart. I laugh, and I suppose I ought to blush, when I call to mind that at this time I wrote to a very superior political personage in England and developed my views to him. I am indeed touched when I remember that he did really send an answer to my letter, in a courteous, if non-committal, note.