ABSTRACT
T HIS outline of Kenya history would not be complete without some allusion to the type of treatment meted out to disagreeable individuals in the ranks of the British
Government's servants in the Colony. The amiable principle adopted by the Political Machine was to seek by cajolery and " a good Press" to elicit favours, or, at any rate, benevolent neutrality, and, if neither was forthcoming, to turn and rend. If the first method proved satisfactory, life was tame and uneventful. Only when the second was adopted did the disagreeable official and the political vampires really get any fun out of life. The average senior official found it not worth his while to be disagreeable. Some of them discarded all joie de vivre and became obese. Some hoisted the signal: "Engage the enemy," drove about Kenya's troubled waters on one sublime corsair-hunt and, striving in every encounter to give as good as they got, finally went under with both broadsides banging and the flag still flapping:
But they all went under. They knew that was to be the end, before they started corsair-hunting. The excitement lay in the joyful element of doubt as to how long that crisis of Fate could be averted when the last culverin would flash and the hot weapons hiss as the tilted deck slid into the sea of Retrenchment. Up till that moment Kenya provided a life worth living.
