Red Strangers : The White Tribe of Kenya

C. S. Nicholls

With the stately lowering of the Union flag in December 1963, seventy years of British rule in Kenya came to an abrupt end. The effect of independence on white society was devastating. Thousands of second and third-generation settlers abandoned their homes and livelihoods, never to return.

But what had attracted the European pioneers to settle in Kenya in the first place? And how, within little more than half a century, did white society develop from its early days of mud-floored shacks of corrugated iron to the sophisticated cities of Nairobi and Mombasa?

For decades attention has focused on the shenanigans of the louche denizens of the Happy Valley set, while the creators of one of Britain’s most flourishing colonies have languished in obscurity. C.S. Nicholls redresses the balance, revealing Kenya’s forgotten history, from its early explorers and the creation of the Imperial British East Africa Company, through two World Wars, to the demise of colonial rule and Kenyan African ascendancy.

Incisive, absorbing and entertaining, Red Strangers : the White Tribe of Kenya is one of the world’s great untold stories.

CHRISTINE NICHOLLS was educated in East Africa and at Oxford. She was joint editor and then sole editor of the Dictionary of National Biography over a period of twenty years, and edited the Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Biography. Her other books include The Swahili Coast, Cataract (with Philip Awdry), David Livingstone, History of St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1950-2000, and Elspeth Huxley: a Biography. She lives in Oxford.

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