Pink mischief at the Muthaiga Club – from a colonial outpost in Kenya
For over a century, this colonial outpost has welcomed stuffed lions, African kings and murderous toffs,
Ihave always loved the Muthaiga Country Club, having been a ‘temporary member’ (courtesy of a late aunt and a living sister), more on than off, for the past 50-plus years; my grandfather was once its chairman.
It is by far my favourite haven in Nairobi, Kenya’s raucous, bursting-atthe-seams capital.
The club is tucked away in the leafiest suburb of the city, yet barely a mile from Mathare Valley, one of its roughest, teeming slums. The food and drink are good; the service warm and friendly without being sycophantic, efficient without being militaristic. I am always welcomed back jovially by the watchful receptionists, manning an old, polished, wooden counter by the front door, as a long-lost rafiki (friend).
The only big change in the past few years (apart from the sprucing up of some of the bedrooms) has been the metal dragons’ teeth on the road by the outer entrance and the tediously thorough but necessary inspection of cars on their way in, since Kenya-based Somali jihadists, known as the Shabab (the Youth), reckon any such outpost of Western comfort could be a juicy target.
In architectural terms, salmon pink is still Muthaiga’s dominant colour and Sir Alfred Munnings still its prime painter, with 30-odd reproductions of English horsey scenes gracing the walls of the dining room, drawing room and bar. Portraits of such luminaries as Lord Delamere, the driving spirit of Kenya as a pioneering settlers’ colony at the start of the 20th century, still hang unabashed.
The long, single-storey façade, with its distinctive pink outer walls, is much as it was when built in 1911, when the indigenous population was probably under two million (it’s now nearing 50 million) and whites numbered a few thousand. Near the bar, a stuffed lion’s head, zapped by Freddy Ward in 1906 when the king of cats roamed the bush around Muthaiga, still eyes you menacingly from within its glass box as you amble towards the gents. I will growl if it is ever removed.
The early aura of romance, occasionally sliding into loucheness, is nowadays affectionately, even reverentially, remembered. It was in the club that Karen Blixen first met her poet-cum-pilot lover, Denys Finch Hatton, acted by Robert Redford
in the film of Out of Africa (1985), who crashed his plane fatally in 1931.
Still more frequently memorialised in Muthaiga folklore is the last evening in the life of Joss Erroll, when Sir Jock Delves Broughton, Bt, toasted his errant wife, Diana, wishing her happiness with the Scottish earl who’d stolen her; a few hours later, it was almost certainly Broughton – though he was later acquitted – who shot Erroll, in a car on the other side of Nairobi.
The club’s cleverest achievement is to have conjured up a new flavour without discarding the old. People who don’t know the place often sneeringly assume it’s a ridiculous time warp inside an almost apartheid-like, whites-almostonly social fortress with a handful of token blacks.
Not at all. It has an amusingly bizarre mix of old and new, of stuffy and cool. The ethnic make-up is a thoroughgoing hotchpotch of black, white and brown; at a guess, the racial make-up is level-pegging white and black, with black predominating among the younger generation.
Even the intra-african tribal mix is a good concoction of Kenya’s 40-odd recognised tribes (of whom half a dozen, led by the Kikuyu, make up threequarters of the populace). Among the surnames, you may note a clutch of them connected to Jomo Kenyatta, the founding president and his son Uhuru, the country’s current main man, and another web of names linked to Daniel arap Moi, Jomo’s successor, and to Tom Mboya, long ago assassinated, whose Luo ethnicity was the same as Barack Obama’s father.
In crusty, old-fashioned form, you are not supposed to ‘do business’ in the old bit of the club – no flourishing of notebooks and, in the more trad front half, no mobile phones. I was politely pounced on by a waiter merely for looking at messages when dining solo in the old dining room.
But the club has craftily massaged the rule book by building a modern restaurant-cum-watering hole at the back, suitably called Pinks, next to the swimming pool and gym. It has several blaring big TV screens showing football and cricket; ipads and iphones, bright casual gear, nifty bikinis and lively children are the norm.
Back in the 1970s, when I edited a newsletter called Africa Confidential, I never sensed that any of my African guests at the club were in the least bit discomfited by the flavour of the colonial past that suffuses the place. If anything, African grandees who occupy the
members-only bar at the front prefer the old style and antiquated rules on dress, including the ban on mobile phones and the requirement for jackets (and certainly no trainers) at dinner in the old dining room.
I remember having one of the frankest chats I’ve ever had, over a long lunch at the club, with a charming former agriculture minister, himself a member, pondering the reasons for the prevalence of corruption in Africa. (I remember him also telling me his father had around a hundred children.)
I recall playing squash there with Patrick Olimi, the late and sadly lazy one-time King of Toro, whose beautiful but wicked sister Elizabeth had been Idi Amin’s foreign minister.
I restored amiable relations at the bar with a former long-serving attorney general, Charles Njonjo, another keen Muthaiga member, who usually wore a carnation in the buttonhole of his pin-striped suit, after we had settled his libel action against my newsletter.
Mwai Kibaki, the current president’s predecessor in the top job, was criticised for retreating too often to the serenity of the club’s golf course instead of hobnobbing with the wananchi (the people).
These days, it’s probably best not to mention that a Mau Mau general, Mwangi Toto, was tracked down and shot dead in the 1950s on the club’s golf course by a counter-insurgency posse including a club member, whom the then club secretary apparently scolded for carrying out the deed on a Saturday, when members would be upset as they teed off.
My many guests have included one of Africa’s bravest election monitors; Kenya’s best theatrical impresario, a former student of mine when I was briefly a teacher in Nairobi; and one of Kenya’s first black, skyscraping architects.
On the paler side, I recall lunching with the Swedish hunter Bror Blixen’s jolly British widow (successor to Karen, a Dane), who explained why he couldn’t have given either wife venereal disease. And I recall seeing Diana, Lady Delamere, for whose love Erroll was murdered when she was married to Broughton, clutching a couple of books borrowed from the excellent Muthaiga Library entitled Real Life Murder Stories. I promise that’s true.
The most recent African guest I took to Pinks, a few months ago, is an outstandingly courageous and charismatic prison reformer, Peter Ouko, who was himself on death row for ten years before receiving a presidential pardon a few years ago. While in prison, he befriended the current Lord Delamere’s late son and heir, an erstwhile fellow prisoner, who killed a game ranger and a poacher and died in 2016, aged 48.
Muthaiga, for me, epitomises the best of Kenya, a fizzing cocktail of old and new.
‘Lady Delamere clutched a copy of Real Life Murder Stories’