Forgotten Pioneer

Anthea Ramsey first wrote this memoir as a record for her grandchildren so they could have some understanding of how their family had come to live in Kenya. I feel it is important to know this before embarking on the read because, although my interest was maintained throughout, this isn't a professional recounting of a family history and it wasn't intended to be. The book is a good starting point to explore the British in Kenya as Ramsey touches upon famous scandals such as the antics of the Happy Valley set. She also writes about her memories of the Mau Mau uprising. I appreciated the inclusion of lots of old photographs especially the one of Doctor Rosendo Ribeiro riding his zebra because I had already been made aware of this man through Vered Ehsani's fun Society For Paranormals crime fiction series which is set in 1910s Nairobi.

In criticism of The Forgotten Pioneer I would say that I often wanted a lot more detail than we were given, especially of Ramsey's grandparents' lives, although I understand that the level of detail I'm thinking of would have actually turned The Forgotten Pioneer into more of a history of British Kenya which wasn't the idea of this book! I did find myself sadly shaking my head at the results of the British occupation. Ramsey mentions her grandfather going to shoot wild animals at weekends mostly to alleviate his boredom, and of lions being so numerous they were considered vermin. With so many species now being on the brink of extinction, I felt uncomfortable reading about such irresponsible behaviour. The Forgotten Pioneer is written from an exclusively white point of view too. Ramsey does make a point to seemingly always use the words happy and smiling ahead of any mention of the family's black servants, but her equally frequent use of hostile to describe black people who weren't servants tells its own story.

While Ramsey is obviously proud of what her grandfather achieved as a white pioneer anglicising Kenya, there is never any discussion of whether he Should have done these things. We are obliquely shown black tribes shunted off into reservations so white immigrants can buy cheap land; we then see white families insisting on maintaining their British way of life with very few choosing to integrate into Maasai or Kikuyu culture - quite the opposite to expectations of how immigrants To Britain should behave. I was also surprised by how normal it seemed for families to not actually live as families, but instead to rely on nannies and boarding schools to take up parental roles. The Forgotten Pioneer is an interesting glimpse into a very different way of life!