Kenya days

My collected diaries tell me that almost exactly ten years ago I was in Kenya visiting my uncle, who was in the last few months of his life. Uncle Ted was married to my late Scottish maternal grandfather's sister. A life-long vegetarian he was the eldest of a large Quaker family who moved out to East Africa in the early decades of the 20th century. Ted's mother was a remarkable woman who kept the family going, and as the eldest he supported his siblings by working on a farm in Tanzania (then Tanganika). He eventually farmed coffee near Nairobi and was a pillar of the Museum and a keen tennis player. A pacifist by conviction, he served as an ambulance driver on the East African front during the Second World War and during the Mau Mau emergency slept with a gun under his pillow to protect his estate workers from the guerillas who were waging a terror campaign against farm workers. A very gentle man, his wife, my great aunt Marjorie was quite a tour de force. A teacher at the Agha Khan school in Nairobi, she never seemed to like children and perhaps was as frigtened of them as they were of her. Throughout their long marriage and well into Marjorie's declining years - she was older than Ted and died before him - theirs was a relationship based on trust, tolerance and good humour. So often, when a controversial topic came up and Marjorie was holding forth, whether on children, family or their long-serving cook NuHu, Ted would become increasingly exasperated and suddenly exclaim " O Marjorie! ". In that phrase lay a universe of meaning and comment.

Having no children of their own, Ted and Marjorie followed the fortunes of their assorted nephews and nieces, and succeeding generations. There was something of a tradition in my mother's family to go out to Africa to stay with Uncle Ted and Auntie Marjorie during the Summer of leaving school, before going to University. My mother and her two sisters both made the journey as did I many years later. The African summer was a defining moment in one's life up until then and to have that connection was magnificent indeed. Experiencing the extraordinariness of Africa as a callow youth of 18 for the first time is to enter a different world. Ten years later the magic was just as strong.

Over many years Ted and Marjorie's farm in Nairobi became a place to which friends and family retuned time and again, and was also the scene of an Out Of Africa-style love story between cousins: one a young RAF officer and the other a 17 year old fresh from school.

So it was with great concern that I have followed the events in Kenya these last months and hope and pray that the settlement mediated by Kofi Annan will hold and real political change will happen. Kenya has not in the past been a crucible of trible violence, but once those forces are unleashed they can be very difficult to control. Ten years ago the talk was of the then incumbent President, Daniel arap Moi, being up to his neck in the usual corruption and Richard Leakey, who was credited with saving the Kenyan wildlife industry, was active on the political stage developing a credible opposition to the ruling party. They were balmy days indeed compared with the appalling scenes these last months. The legacy of post-Colonial Africa has too often been one of the 'big man' presiding over a corrupt regime. Let us hope that Kenya moves out of the shadow of the big man into a properly functioning multi-party state as soon as possible and Kenyans once more return to the ideal that they are Kenyans every bit as much as tribal affiliations of Kikuyu or Kalendrin