John Boyes: The colonial Kenya 'king' who carried evidence under his arm

Among the early white buccaneers to Kenya after the 1885 Berlin conference was John Boyes.

His exploits in making commercial inroads in Kikuyuland to the point of becoming a blood brother with some local chiefs may have earned him the title, ‘King of the Wakikuyu’. But Boyes was more of a rubble rouser than a businessman.

Boyes arrived in Mombasa in 1898 as a 24-year-old lad from Yorkshire. He was armed with ambition to make a living in the unforgiving terrain. The young man, whom fellow whites called the “cheerful rogue”, had a disposition that scared not just the natives but government officials. But he always managed to get himself out of trouble through tricks learned when he served as a ship cabin boy, simply,  makanga wa meli. 

To his credit, Boyes introduced the growing of the black wattle in 1901, a tree that changed the fortunes of many people in central Kenya even after independence. For such ‘kind acts’ Boyes was able to trade with the Kikuyu who supplied him with provisions that he later sold to the railway workers.

With money rolling in and gaining the confidence of a tribe that did not take intrusion into their territory kindly, Boyes grew so big to the chagrin of the colonial administrators. His biggest sin, however, was to fly the Union Jack in his camp, an act akin to treason. The ‘tough as nails’ Boyes saw nothing wrong in his actions. “I mildly put the question to the [colonial] officer as to whether he expected me to fly the Russian flag, or any other except that of my own country,” he retorted. 

Boyes was arrested and kept under the guard of about 10 native soldiers and 200 local witnesses for the long journey to Nairobi. The ensuing investigation by Francis Hall and Captain Longfield, his arrest and prosecution appeared to be good comic relief to Boyes. “Here was I, a (so-called) dangerous outlaw, being sent down to be tried for my life on a series of awful indictments, through a country in which I had only to lift a finder to call an army of savage warriors to my assistance,” he wrote in his book, John Boyes, King of Wakikuyu.

What was more comical, he wrote, was that since he was the only one riding a mule, his accusers had handed him a large blue envelope containing the evidence that was to indict him for safekeeping on the journey to Nairobi. “I was the only mounted man in the whole outfit...taking myself to Nairobi with the whole of the evidence under my arm. He was later acquitted and returned to Kikuyuland for more business deals. He died in July 1951 in Nairobi.