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Nairobian investors are scrambling for a piece of the 19,000-acre Juja Farm, once the property of Lord and Lady McMillan — who bequeathed Nairobi with The McMillan Memorial Library.
The couple’s forays in sisal farming explains the presence of a bag and cordage factory there.
Juja Farm was later acquired by the Nettlefold Family, shareholders in Guest, Keane and Nettlefold, now GKN plc, a multinational automotive and aerospace components company. The farm now has many different owners who believe ‘mtu ni ploti.’
Lord William Northrup McMillan: The seven-foot, 136kg American millionaire came hunting here in 1904 and fell in love with Kenya where he carved his immortality in sisal farming.
He had coined his fortune manufacturing railway freight cars for the American railroad,
McMillan bought Chiromo House - still there at UoN’s Chiromo campus - from Colonel Ewart Grogan. It was the hottest house at the time.
From Chiromo, McMillan visited his 19,000-acre Juja Farm where “the anguish of his crushing failure to father children was only equaled by his indomitable spirit in which he took on one farming failure after the other,” as Judy Aldrick notes in her 2012 biography, Northrup: The Life of William Northrup McMillan.
Juja Farm was then called ‘Weru wa Ndarugu’ (Ndarugu Plains), which he renamed Juja after two statues bought in West Africa named ‘Ju’ and ‘Ja’ hence Juja that’s faced by Mt Kilimambogo (buffalo mountain) in the east. The Maasai called it Ol Donyo Sabuk (big mountain).
Tom Mboya’s dad, Leonard Ndiege, earned one pound (Sh140 at current exchange rate) a month cutting sisal there as David Galsworthy informs us in Tom Mboya: The Man Kenyans Wanted to Forget.
After 15 years Mboya’s old guy was promoted to Factory Overseer.
The McMillan Castle bragged of famous visitors including US President Theodore Roosevelt who wrote his bio in 1909 in the 32-room house Kambas nicknamed Kilavu (club) for its endless wife swapping and binge drinking parties.
World War I saw McMillan become a Briton, serving as a captain in The Royal Fusiliers for which he was knighted in 1918.
McMillan was nominated to the first Legislative Council, representing Ukambani (where locals called him ‘Mukola’) in 1920 and used his powers to found and fund the Kabete Training School for artisans and Kabete School for Teachers - to slow the immigration of Indians to Kenya.
McMillan died at sea in France - as predicted by the seer who sold him ‘Ju’ and ‘Ja’- in 1925. He was 53.
Lady Lucie McMillan: She ensured that the McMillan Library became the only building in the city that’s protected by an Act of Parliament, the McMillan Memorial Library Act of November 1938, to preserve the memory of her husband.
The land where McMillan squats on can thus not be sold or the building’s Victorian design altered.
She ensured her hubby was buried at his beloved Kilimambogo according to his will. The photographer who kept a pet cheetah died in 1957 and was buried next to her husband.
