Ever wondered how the first car made its way to Kenya?

The Riley 12/50 Touring was the first car in the country thanks to Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi in 1923. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • The first cars in the country came in as a result of Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi negotiating for loans of cars to be tested under East African conditions back in 1923.

  • He received these vehicles, one of which was the Riley 12/50 Touring that you will soon learn more about.

Who was it that first penned an agony uncle column for Kenyan motorists and motoring enthusiasts alike? Well, it wasn't me, as you will find out in my book. There is a story behind that, but this is not about this column, it is about a little entity known as the Automobile Association of Kenya, better known as "the AA".

SPARE DRUMS

Established in 1919 by Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi as the Royal East Africa Automobile Association, the entity is there to promote and safeguard the interests of motorists via the dissemination of information regarding purchase and maintenance of motor vehicles, negotiation of insurance premiums (who knew?), mapping roads and setting up fuelling depots, or what we call "petrol stations".

Anyway, 1919 is a long time ago, and since then, a lot has happened, some of it courtesy of this former Royal East Africa Automobile Association:

1. The first cars in the country came in as a result of Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi negotiating for loans of cars to be tested under East African conditions back in 1923. He received these vehicles, one of which was the Riley 12/50 Touring that you will soon learn more about.

2. The first petrol station was nothing more than a backyard operation all the way at the Namanga outpost. The "backyard" part of that description is literal: fuel was sold in drums from someone's backyard until the sheer inconvenience of it all. The constant breach of privacy compelled both seller and buyer to set up a meeting point away from the seller's personal affairs. The seller brought his fuel to this meeting point where the buyer would show up at with his money (and spare drums, presumably, because Namanga is really far, so one had to stock up on as much fuel as they could to minimise the frequency of visits) and thus the first petrol station came into existence.

3. Establishment of cross-border routes, such as the Nairobi -Dar es Salaam-Malawi road and Nairobi-Khartoum.

4. Raising and distribution of funds for tarmacking of established roads in East Africa.

5. Establishment of a motoring magazine: Autonews, back in 1953

6. Establishment of a real driving school in 1962, beginning with a single car: a Ford Anglia under the guidance of M.A.S. Northcote and a few British ex-military types. Some of you may have seen a comical black-and-white photo of a training session for native drivers sitting behind desks with steering wheels nailed to the boards with rocks on their heads to force them to maintain an eyes-up posture. That photo is real.

About the establishment of Nairobi-Mombasa route, at the time, the only connection between Nairobi and Mombasa was either by the train, or by walking alongside the Kamba long distance traders. There was no road.

Enter one Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi, a man of vision.

He immediately roped in a road trip companion who, going by Fenzi's description of optimism and hard work, could only be assumed to have been a willing participant in that caper. Captain Gethin was his name and repairing punctures was his game - he ended up repairing over 50 punctures (56, if I recall correctly) despite cladding the wheels in protective leather over the next several days on what must have been the experience of his life. I think I would have given up at 10 punctures...

12hp is all it took. 12hp and a whole lot of gumption, plus half a ton of luggage and the help of a bunch of locals, but by Jupiter, they did it.

There is a reason why the trip was from Nairobi to Mombasa and not vice versa despite the fact that the car first touched Kenyan soil in Mombasa. In an ironical set of circumstances not entirely dissimilar to the ongoing SGR debacle, when the car first landed in Kenya, it had to be shuttled to Nairobi by train where it was registered and given the B3 plate (the B prefix was for Nairobi-registered vehicles, the 3 suffix meant it was the third car ever to be registered in Nairobi) after which it was free to operate whichever way its driver fancied. Galton Fenzi's fancy showed him to head back down to the coast, by road, a feat achieved earlier that same year by some brave souls on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle running away from lions. And yes, one of the two gentlemen on the motorcycle had only one arm.

The Car

The vehicle was a Riley 12/50 HP Touring, sent out to Galton Fenzi by Messrs The Riley Motor Car Company Ltd, Foleshill, Coventry in England. It was a test car, something I can easily identify with given my job here and whatnot, fitted with Dunlop Balloon 29 x 4.95 tyres, complete with a set of two spares. There is a reading lamp on the dashboard and the seats are all removable: the fronts by undoing a pair of screws apiece, the rears by undoing a single nut on each, making it an ideal camper van provided you shroud it in a mosquito net first. This, after all, is tropical Africa where the mosquito has claimed more lives than the AK47 assault rifle.

Tropicalisation was done via fitment of a massive radiator and high efficiency fan to cool things down when they got too hot. Long-life spark plugs that were still unchanged as of the 10,000-mile (16,000km) mark ensured the vehicle had the necessary urge to move around half a tonne worth of payload with its frankly meagre 12hp across some of Africa's most unforgiving terrain.

The Route

Some of the keener among you will immediately recognise the fact that Galton Fenzi's road trip stretched out over 1200km as antagonistic to the other fact that today the Nairobi - Mombasa highway spans "only" 485km. Where did the other 715km come from? Was the guy drunk the whole time, weaving about, piling on unnecessary miles?

(Fun fact: there is a Galton-Fenzi memorial in Nairobi's CBD, at the junction of Kenyatta Avenue and Koinange Street, which is used as the starting point for all distances measured from Nairobi.)

There are several very good reasons why the route covered 1200km, the first being there was no route to speak of. It's one thing to find the bush impenetrable in the far North when armed with a Toyota Land Cruiser equipped with a bull bar: it is quite another to try it in a 12hp wooden car equipped with removable seats and a mosquito net. Fenzi & Co. didn't have a Land Cruiser. Or GPS. What they had was miles upon miles of thickets where a few short years earlier, one John Henry Patterson got his mettle severely tested before making short work of a pair of jungle cats that had developed a taste of human flesh. This is the kind of situation Fenzi was looking at, with his wooden car. I can bet the two lion-dodging adventurers with the Harley-Davidson loomed large in his mind as well.

Besides fanged and clawed critters awaiting you as a snack, keep in mind the Riley only had 12hp. I may have praised its spark plugs earlier but they were not magical, between Nairobi and Mombasa lies some undulating landscapes. 12hp is what some regular go-karts develop right now. Strap half a ton of luggage to it and try going uphill. You can see the difficulty being faced here.

Remember the first petrol station in the opening paragraphs? It was at Namanga. This too factored in to the final decision that Fenzi and Gethin made about their eventual route.

The pair had three options:

1. Nairobi - Kajiado - Moshi - Voi

2. Nairobi - Kitui - Kilifi, which would take them through dense, unexplored brush in waterless territory, and of course right past the lions.

3. Use existing roads to Emali then run parallel to the same railway that brought the Riley B3 into Nairobi earlier, a route that was yet to undergo reconnaissance.

Fenzi was not an idiot, so he put all these factors into a mental line graph and concluded that the most sensible thing to do would be to try for a more open, if circuitous route - which was Route No. 1 above. First bearing: Namanga. It's essentially flat and open from Nairobi to Namanga where he would stock up on fuel before continuing on his ambitious motorised trek. What followed is the kind of drama that qualifies for entry into a Hollywood script:

The Saga

1926: Lionel Douglas Galton Fenzi and Captain Gethin set off on their pilgrimage trying to establish The New Capital To Coast Road. Somewhere along the way were traces of the old Sclater Road which had been abandoned 20 years earlier after the completion of the railway. Fenzi and Gethin had the honour of being the first people ever to arrive in Samburu by car, but this moment of glory was short-lived as Fenzi was immediately attacked by bees as he tried to "perform his ablutions" (take a bath).

Between Voi and just after Mackinnon Road, there was, well, no road (I see the irony there) which forced the two pilgrims to hack their way through bushes and thickets some of which soared to 20 feet in height. This is where the locals came in handy, carving a path through flora with exotic nomenclature such as sansovera, thorns, cactus and sisal.

Progress was difficult. Hacking away at the shrubbery left stumps chopped off at a 45-degree angle which were deadly sharp. The heat was oppressive, water was scarce and the air was thick and difficult to breathe. A constant worry was not the bush itself, but the infestation of rhinoceros which Fenzi was nervous could quickly transform their little car into a pile of firewood and spare parts in short order. Fortunately, they did not encounter any.

And? There was finally light at the end of the green tunnel. From Mackinnon there existed a new road that linked Samburu to the sea via Kwale and on to Likoni Ferry where a motor punt provided a crossing over to Mombasa island. They had made it.

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It had finally been done. Much as Fenzi and Gethin used a route that was mostly not the current Mombasa Road on that trip, they had proved that such a drive was feasible and that opened up a whole world of possibilities. In August of that year, Fenzi decided to try Route No. 3, running parallel to the railway line from Emali to Voi, which he was pleased to find was made of hard-packed red soil that enabled him to clock up to 45mph (72km/h) which in those days equated to warp speed. This is what eventually came to be the Mombasa Road we know and use today.

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If you’re interested, the AA has a motor show this weekend at the KICC where entrance is free and visitors are free to come and drink in all this amazing history. On display will be the self-same Riley 12/50 that ploughed its way from the Capital to the Coast under Fenzi and Gethin's helmsmanship, in fully restored glory, right down to its original colours.

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