Patrick Collinson succeeded Sir Geoffrey Elton, Thomas Cromwell redivivus, as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is From Cranmer to Sanford.
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Vol. 25 No. 11 · 5 June 2003
pages 15-20 | 7031 words
The Cow Bells of Kitale
Patrick Collinson
In a court in western Kenya, on 13 July 1934, Major Geoffrey Selwyn and his wife, Helen, were jointly charged with the murder of a ‘native’. Geoffrey Selwyn, my father-in-law, died before the trial began. Proceedings continued in his absence, and my children’s grandmother was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison. The trial attracted much attention at the time, and when Helen Selwyn was sentenced it made the front page of some British newspapers. But the case was soon forgotten, unlike the more lurid pieces of white mischief which went on in the so-called Happy Valley. Yet the Selwyn affair mattered more, and like George Orwell’s Burmese Days (published in the same year), it encapsulated almost all the stresses of British colonialism.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 13 · 10 July 2003
From Sarah Hutton
It was not just the Masai and the Suk (Pokot) who were cleared from their ancestral lands in Kenya: the same fate befell the Kikuyu people. In 1953, nearly twenty years after the Selwyn case about which Patrick Collinson writes (LRB, 5 June), Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu leader and future president of Kenya, was tried near Kitale, charged with having organised the Mau Mau insurgency. My parents, visiting from Uganda, attended the proceedings. The anthropologist Lewis Leakey acted, for a time, as interpreter. A fluent Swahili speaker, Leakey had been giving talks to the white settlers about the Kikuyu people, and my mother was appalled by what he told her about the white farmers' ignorance of their African employees and African culture – this less than a decade before independence.
Sarah Hutton
Middlesex University
From S. Daniel
Patrick Collinson must have been writing before the new Government of Moi Kibaki made primary school education free in Kenya: the children living in the Selwyns' former farmstead are now no longer 'too poor' to go to school.
S. Daniel
Gilhoc, France
Vol. 25 No. 14 · 24 July 2003
From Patrick Collinson
S. Daniel (Letters, 10 July) writes that no children in Kenya are now 'too poor' to go to school, and that my article reflects conditions before President Moi Kibaki came to power. He is partly correct, although the children of whom I wrote were (in 1997) unable to go to school not for lack of money to pay fees but because they could not afford uniforms. And in Kenya, as in many parts of the so-called developing world (and as it was in 16th-century England), the children of peasants cannot always be spared from the workforce to receive an education that may not be relevant to their perceived needs. It is not enough to wave a magic wand, which is perhaps what Moi Kibaki has done.
Patrick Collinson
Trinity College, Cambridge
Vol. 25 No. 16 · 21 August 2003
From Peter Le Pelley
S. Daniel's letter (10 July) and Patrick Collinson's reply to it (24 July) gave our President's name as Moi Kibaki. This is insulting to the man who ousted Moi: his name is Mwai Kibaki.
Peter Le Pelley
Nairobi, Kenya
