A TUSKER AT THE STANLEY

The Exchange Bar at the Stanley in Nairobi is arguably the most famous watering hole in Africa.  Named after Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the Dark Continent's greatest explorer, the Stanley Hotel was built in 1902.  Teddy Roosevelt drank here, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, and a long long list of European "crowned heads."

It was a great place to find out what the Soviets were up to in Africa during the Cold War, so I hoisted many a Tusker Lager here years ago.  And here I am again.  With no intrigue going on, just a lot of folks ensconced in leather chairs engaged in friendly talk about safaris or business.  I've got a mug of Tusker, of course, but I've also got a wireless Internet connection on my laptop.  What would Hemingway have thought?

Yet what keeps coming to my mind is a picture I once took out in the bush not too far from here.  It's of a palm tree:

You'd never think it was anything special until you realize that palm trees are not native to the East African bush.  You're looking at real and awful history here.  This is a slave palm.

This spot was once a campsite of Arab slave traders lying along one of their routes from the Indian Ocean coast into the interior.  When they camped with their human booty in chains, they would eat their favorite delicacy – dates – and toss the pits onto the ground.  Occasionally a pit would take seed and grow into a – slave palm.

Slavery is, for liberals, America's Original Sin, the great evil for which it can never be forgiven, even though hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a Civil War to end it.

Yet, when the first African slaves arrived in what was to become America, at the English colony of Jamestown in 1619, Moslem Arabs had been enslaving Africans for a thousand years.

As we discussed in Allah and Slavery, Islam's god specifically approves of slavery.

In Sura (chapter) 33 verse 50, of the Koran, Allah says it is "lawful" for Moslems to own and have sex with "those whom thy right hand possesses of those whom Allah has given you as spoils of war" – women captured in war and enslaved.

In Sura 33:52, Allah says he doesn't approve of men having sex with women other than their wives, except for "those whom thy right hand possesses."  Allah says a man having sex with his slave girls is OK – even, by the way, if they are married to one of their owner's male slaves.

The Koran is riddled with Allah's other approving guidelines to slavery and slaves.  Slavery was hard-wired into Islam from the religion's inception in the mid 7^th century.  Islam was invented by the Arabs to provide a religious rationale for their Conquest of the Middle East and North Africa – and it justified making slaves of any conquered people.

Persians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Berbers, anyone the Arabs could get their hands on were enslaved.  But the greatest reservoir of slaves lay across the Red Sea from Arabia – Black Africa.

For over 12 centuries, the Arab slave trade in Africa was the most lucrative business in the Moslem world.  From the mid-600s to the early 1900s, countless millions of Black Africans from East and Central Africa were captured and transported to Moslem kingdoms in the Middle East, Central Asia, and India.

The men were castrated and made eunuchs, who could then be safely put to work in harems, or as servants, soldiers, and slave laborers.  The women were primarily enslaved for the sexual use of their purchasers, and secondarily as servants.

The transatlantic slave trade from West Africa to the English colonies in America didn't really get underway until the late 1600s and was stopped a little over 100 years later in 1808 by the British Parliament.  Slavery in America continued for another half-century.

The two centuries of slavery in America are dwarfed by the over 12 centuries of the Arab slave trade in Africa.  The Arab slave trade is one of Islam's most heinous crimes against humanity, for which Arab Moslems owe the world the deepest apology.

Only Christian Western colonialism in Africa, primarily from the British, put an end to this evil.

Which is why Kenya today, for all the supposed African resentment towards the West, is a predominately Christian nation cooperating with America in the war on Islamofascism.
Kenya has a short history as a country.  The British Royal Navy had spent much of the 19^th century shutting down with force and guns the Arab slave trade in the Indian Ocean, finally seizing its main port of Mombassa in the 1890s. 

With that, the British East Africa Trading Company was launched, the colony of British East Africa established, and the building of a railway to open up the interior.  In 1899, the Brits built a railway supply depot at an uninhabited spot the local Masai tribe called Ewaso Nyirobi, cool waters.

Just three years later, The Stanley emerged in the blossoming new city of Nairobi.  By 1905, the colony's capital was moved here from Mombassa.  The climate, on the Equator yet a mile high in altitude (5400 ft), made the place and surrounding area, the "Kenya Highlands," an attractive place for British settlers.

After World War One, they came in droves.  By the 1930s, there were over 30,000 of them, prospering by growing coffee and tea.  After World War Two, "Kenya," as the colony had become known after the enormous Mount Kenya (17,058 ft.) dominating the highlands, continued to flourish under British rule and law.

Nairobi had become the center for launching "safaris" (from the Swahili word for "journey") to hunt and photograph big game.  A luxurious tourist lodge for game viewing in the nearby Aberdare mountains called Treetops had become famous – so much so that it was a favorite of visiting British royalty.

One of these royal visitors was the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King George VI.  On the night of February 5, 1952, asleep in her room at Treetops, she was awakened to be told that her father had died – and that she was now Queen of England.

At her coronation on June 2, 1953, among the guests attending were Moslem sheikhs of a British dependency on the Arabian peninsula called Qatar.  Included in the sheikhs' retinue were a number of Black African slaves.

By then, an incredibly vicious rebellion against British rule had emerged among the Kikuyu, one of Kenya's largest tribes.  The Brits called the rebels the Mau Mau (rhymes with wow-wow), and they had to kill almost half of them (close to 5,000) before it was over in 1956.

At the beginning of the Mau Mau rebellion, the Brits accused the founder of an independence movement – KANU, the Kenya African National Union – of being its instigator. 

Kamau wa Ngengi was a Kikuyu born in 1898 who, as a Christian changed his name to Johnstone Kamau, then, when he founded KANU in 1947, to Jomo Kenyatta.  The Brits put him in jail from 1953 to 1959.  By that time, the demand for Kenya independence was irresistible.  It came on December 12, 1963 – with Jomo Kenyatta as Kenya's president.

Kenyatta allayed British fears, becoming an ally of the West, refusing an alliance with the Soviets, and rejecting Marxism as an economic model.  There was corruption and rigged elections and a few secret police.  But compared with other African rulers, Kenyatta was incredibly benign.

Although I must confess:  on the Merv Griffin show in 1976, I revealed that "Mama Ngina," Jomo Kenyatta's wife, ran the elephant poaching-ivory smuggling business in Kenya.  To have that announced on national television caused a major uproar in US-Kenya relations.  I was asked to renounce the statement and publicly apologize.  All the request got from me was a laugh.

It was to Merv's credit that he kept me on as his co-host for his shows with adventurer guests (like Thor Hyerdahl, Jacques Cousteau, and Lowell Thomas).

Kenyatta's successor upon his death in 1978 was his vice-president Daniel arap Moi, who started out fairly honest, became fairly corrupt (again by African standards), and naturally, this being Africa, President for Life.  That life ended in 2002, whereupon his vice-president, Mwai Kibaki, assumed presidential office.

The difference was that, in the judgment of international observers, Kenyans chose Kibaki in a free and fair democratic election.  Kenya has enjoyed a remarkable political and economic stability since its independence, something very rare in Africa.  Part of the reason is Christianity.

It helps unite Kenyans across tribal affiliations.  Fully 80% of Kenyans are Christian, with a number of denominations flourishing, including Roman Catholicism and especially the evangelicals who routinely hold enormous gatherings of tens of thousands.

With the terrible history of the Arab slave trade, only 15% of Kenyans are Moslem, mostly among Black-Arab mestizos along the former Slave Coast.  (The remaining 5% are tribal-animist such as the Masai.)

That history has made Kenyans very resistant to the lure of Radical Islam, and has made Kenya a real bulwark against its encroachment into Africa.  We often hear the assertion that Islam is "the world's fastest growing religion."  Not in Kenya.  Here it's Christianity.

I think that's good cause for hoisting a Tusker at the Stanley, in appreciation for the good Christian people of Kenya.

And now, I must bid you adieu for a while.  The Serengeti has no communication with the outside world.  But the world will still be very much there when I return in a couple of weeks, and we will have very much to talk about when I do.  See you then.

Ps:  I'd like to suggest that while I'm gone, you ever so often poke around in the TTP archives of previous articles.  There's an awful lot there waiting for you to discover.