Visiting London

Well... We're certainly learning a lot about you, tonight George!

A crust old Empire sort, eh!. Maybe you were a tea planter in 'Keenya'. One of the Happy valley lot. Or maybe a ruggedly handsome military policeman, persuing the Mau Mau.
It certainly holds with the whisky sodden old curmudgeon image that you sometimes project.

No George.

I feared that, like the other hugely photographed, constant presence in the cinema and tele, imensely talked about big city (NYC), London would not live up to expectations.

London and NYC are completely different.

Completely agree with mowog.
Please tell me you smoke pipe. One made of some exotic wood and ivory.
I'd love that. Seriously.

For me to have been a tea planter, or a member of the Happy Valley set, or a policeman in persuit (sic) of the Mau Mau, I would have to have been born much earlier than I was.

At the time of independence, I was barely a teenager.

I did, however, witness the gradual deterioration of a country that had been built up by hard work, and which, like Zimbabwe, has been on a downward path ever since independence.

I don't blame anybody in Kenya for this. In 1900, Africans south of the Sahara were (with some exceptions) living in the early dawn of the Iron Age, without the wheel or written language. To go from that to a Western-style democracy in 60 years was asking a lot.

That the process has failed in Kenya and every other country says much more about the cynicism of America (which promoted independence to damage Britain), and about the Utopianism of the British Left, than it does about Africans, black or white.

G

Thank you for the clarification, George. I must say I'm a little disappointed, tho'.

What you say about America encouraging independence to undermine Britain is interesting and something I had not heard of.
It is said that President Obama holds anti British feelings. He believes that his Grandfather was badly treated by the British authorities, in Kenya. The first thing he did on moving into the Whitehouse, was to remove a bust of Churchill from the oval office and send it back to the British embassy.

America wanted access to markets controlled by Britain, which is probably fair enough. However, the pressure to grant independence before the peoples of Africa were ready was cynical in the extreme, and has resulted in the chaos we see now.

Interestingly, this was all happening while segregation and other racist measures were common in the US South.

There is now a sizeable middle class in Kenya, and if it were not for the endemic corruption, the country might have a chance. As it is, I am not hopeful.

As for Obama, he might do well to reflect on the fact that were it not for the British stopping the East African slave trade (which fed Arabia), he might not be around today. Slaving expeditions went as far inland as the African Great Lakes, and on into the Congo, and were big business.

Try googling Tippu Tip. And the Nile books of Alan Moorehead offer a very readable account of life before the British arrived. Nasty, brutish, and short was not the half of it.

G