Lugard Falls on River Galana in Voi town were named after Captain Frederick Lugard, Britain’s first proconsul in East Africa.
He first pitched tent here on his way to occupying Uganda, before colonising 10 million Nigerians with less than 10 colonial officers. That was in 1890, twelve months or so before Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was born in the ‘year of the sweet potato.’
Captain Lugard had been sent by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEACO) to counter German influence. The Sultan of Zanzibar also ruled the mainland including present day Kenya and Tanzania where Arabs controlled lucrative ivory and slave trade-which had been abolished in Europe.
Many East Africans hated Arab rule. To profit from this bile, the German East Africa Company sent a dude named Carl Peters to Tanzania, where tribal leaders were enticed into signing blank treaties, effectively making their people subjects of the German Kaiser, and not the sultan. They happily obliged.
Fearing increased German control, the British set up IBEACO with Captain Lugard as its point man in East Africa. Pressure was put on the sultan to hand over Kenya to IBEACO under whose mandate Captain Lugard trekked to the hinterland, signing treaties which inadvertently made Kenyans subjects of the British crown.
A journey that takes 45 minutes by plane, four hours along the Standard Gauge Railway and seven hours in a bus, took Captain Lugard and his caravan, almost three months to reach present day Dagoretti, where Maasai Laibons signed treaties giving away nine million acres of their land. The Kikuyus under tribal warrior Waiyaki wa Hinga, resisted, destroying Fort Lugard in the process. For their ‘cooperation’ (including proving British soldiers with free beef), the Maasai were neither conscripted into both World Wars nor incarcerated in detention camps during the Mau Mau insurgency! And It was in ‘war free’ Maasai land where Jomo Kenyatta took cover to escape conscription into World War I.
A string of rebellions, including the Nandi resistance under Orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei and the Bukusu resistance under Mukite wa Nameme, made Kenya a ‘hardship area’ for IBEACO. With little profits, it sold its ‘interests’ to the British crown.
This was how the groundwork for 70 years of British colonialism was laid by Captain Lugard before he was sent to colonise Uganda and Nigeria - a name coined by his childless wife, Flora Shaw.
Captain Lugard died at the age of 87 in 1945 - the year Jomo Kenyatta took cover in the English countryside to escape the vagaries of World War II.
