Revisiting the ghosts of Happy Valley

What you need to know:

  • Wanjohi town sits in the looming shadow of the bedraggled beauty of the endless Aberdare Ranges.
  • Scooting down the road, one gets the feeling you can reach out your hand and touch the hills.
  • The road from Ol Kalou town passes through rolling farmland peopled with teak and cypress and thick-fleeced sheep.

It is not at all hard to understand why the earliest white settlers chose the land that would later be known, famously and infamously, as Happy Valley.

While the Happy Valley --- which earned its tag for the debauchery and excesses of foreigners --- covered several regions in the Rift Valley and even Nyeri, it is Wanjohi Valley in Kipipiri that firmly put the ‘W’ in the whirlwind that characterised the madness, attracting people of pale colour with its charm.

It is beautiful beyond any song.

Wanjohi town sits in the looming shadow of the bedraggled beauty of the endless Aberdare Ranges. Scooting down the road, one gets the feeling you can reach out your hand and touch the hills. But it is not just the proximity of the craggy promontory of the ranges.

The road from Ol Kalou town passes through rolling farmland peopled with teak and cypress and thick-fleeced sheep. As the road bears the visitor closer and closer to a chapter, a vignette of Kenya’s history that will not be willed away, there’s a feeling of being on a movie set, or thumbing through an arresting novel.

I arrive in Wanjohi on a Thursday afternoon under a scowling sky. I had been warned that it rains, almost without fail, every afternoon. I am looking forward to the sheets; in movies, rain usually offers some poignancy, and if there’s a motion picture, this --- the hills, the land, the sheep --- is it.

The remains of this ballyhooed period live on; relics of a distant, yet very present era. But it is not an easy history, a theatre that plays out even today, with the descendants of those whose land was misappropriated by the foreigners, and the descendants of those foreigners: the former seeking some kind of recompense, the latter seeking a part of themselves, maybe even some absolution.

LIFE IN CHAPTERS

I am looking for the Buxton House, the oldest of the settler houses ever built in the valley. A narrow road shaded with brush opens to a clearing and there, in all of its crumbling glory, is Buxton.

The one-storey house, built around 1908 by Geoffrey Buxton, a pioneering farmer, is a sturdy piece of architecture made all the more remarkable considering it was made entirely of mud.

The sloping roof is woven together by moss. The wooden flooring is intact and there is a ghostly feeling to the place. After independence the house was given to a local family.

The current occupants were uncomfortable talking about their residence, citing family strife. But it was apparent that they wouldn’t mind having the house renovated, and probably have paying tourists visit.

Juliet Barnes, Chair of HVT with aide Solomon Gitau at Clouds House, one of the Happy Valley houses. PHOTO| WILLIAM RUTHI

In a way, the reticence throws in some light endemic to the conflicting and sundering issue of colonialism; on the one hand is the question of hard-earned independence, and on the other is how to confront and even embrace, and profit from, the ghosts of history.

"Yes, indeed there is the lingering pain of the suffering brought about by colonialism,” says Juliet Barnes, a Kenyan of British extraction and author of the book, The Ghosts of Happy Valley.

Barnes is the chair of a registered non-profit trust, the Happy Valley Heritage Trust (HVHT), founded in 2017. The trust has seven trustees, five of them Kenyans.

Barnes says the former county government of Nyandarua approached her through the Tourism ministry, and persuaded her to create a trust to try to protect some of the houses.

“The county speaker was also very helpful and managed to get it gazetted into law that these old historic relics could not be destroyed,” she says.

“Kenya has some unique old buildings dating back to her colonial era, which have great potential, as yet untapped, to promote local and international tourism in parts of the country where few tourists currently venture.”

THE VALLEY OF ALL THINGS

When Geoffrey Buxton settled in Wanjohi, he found the ideal land that had evaded him as he tried to settle in Kenya. He named his new estate ‘Happy Valley’.

At the time, the name didn’t evoke what ‘happiness’ in the valley later came to represent. But as more settlers made their home in the region in the 1920s, the term took on sinister notoriety.

The motley characters were variously described as ‘Anglo-Irish aristocrats’ and ‘hedonists’. They included Hugh Cholmondeley, Josslyn Hay and the 22nd Earl of Erroll, Lady Idina Sackville.

With enough idle time, endless pockets and copious amounts of entitlement, the Happy Valley residents turned the area in and around sleepy Wanjohi valley into a playground of debauchery. Sex parties, wife-swapping and drugs were common fare.

Down the road is a grassy field that once hosted polo racing. The grounds were once well-manicured, the edges teeming with cheering fans -- the most improperly proper crowds waving the horses and the players on, all the while waiting for the night for other entertainment.

ON THE PATH OF GHOSTS

While the beautiful Kenyan highlands attracted mostly the British, there were other settlers from many other European countries, as well as Boers from South Africa, and even Americans.

I get back on the road, chasing the ghost of one particular American, a woman named Alice de Janzé, whose exploits topped all others.

The natives nicknamed her ‘Waceke’ --- meaning the ‘slim one’ in Kikuyu because of her reedy frame. Born Alice Silverthorne in 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, she lived in Paris with her husband, Count Frédéric de Janzé, in the 1920s.

The couple first came to Kenya in 1925 at the invitation of Josslyn Hay (Lord Erroll) and his wife Idina who had settled in Wanjohi Valley.

Alice de Janze's former residence at Happy Valley Satima Primary School. PHOTO| WILLIAM RUTHI

It wasn’t long before Alice began an affair with Hay, and later with another settler named Raymond de Trafford. Back in Paris, she ditched her husband for Trafford.

But Trafford didn’t plan to marry her and the thwarted Alice shot him, then herself but both survived and Alice moved back to Kenya in 1928 but was kicked out of the country.

In a lurid turn, Alice in 1932 married Trafford, the same man she had attempted to kill but the couple soon divorced. Depressed and distraught Alice returned to Kenya and tried to regroup.

It is a few minutes past 5pm when I arrive at Happy Valley Satima Primary School in Kiambogo village outside Wanjohi town where Alice’s home once stood.

The main house was torn down several years ago, but the smaller one still stands. But it is a ghost, a husk. Several planks of wood that once made the walls and the interior are missing. But her presence hasn’t completely faded.

In the years following her return to Kenya, this time for good, Alice emerged herself in the hobbies of hunting and gardening, all the while falling apart as she battled depression which she kept at bay with morphine.

Her farm dipped into Wanjohi River and some of the trees and flowers she planted still remain.
As I walk in her dilapidated former house with its fireplace, I imagined how life must have been for a lonesome, depressed white woman.

I imagined her ghost, her eventful, tragic life.

“Most people here do not know the history of this house, this woman,” say Solomon Gitau, a passionate historian who grew up in the area.

Gitau has been working with Juliet Barnes, the author and chair of the HVHT to sensitize people on the history living in their midst.

From the school yard one can see a beautiful grassy knoll, Lion Hill. Alice gave it the name after she rescued a lion cub there.

On weekends she hosted parties up Lion Hill, a vantage point where one could watch herds of elephants lumber across the river as her dogs gambolled in the grass.

Alice committed suicide by shooting herself in 1941. Her grave, marked by a pile of stones, is located behind the school.

At Wanjohi town I take in the sight of the endless Aberdares one last time. The rain has come as promised, cleaning the air. In the waning light, the hills, the valley appear almost…biblical.