Background

Educated at Eton College, he inherited his title at the age of 17. As a young man he made five hunting expeditions to Somaliland, on the last of which, in 1896, he made his way across unexplored country--now part of Ethiopia, Somalia, and northern Kenya--to Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean. The fertile and, in many regions, apparently uninhabited East African highlands that he saw inspired him to pursue a life of pioneering. In 1903 he secured 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares) of land near Njoro, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Nairobi. Here he experimented with crops and livestock and fought with the colonial government in promoting the interests of the white settlers. He served on the legislative council, the rudimentary parliament of Kenya, and during World War I he worked as an intelligence officer among the Masai tribe on the border of German East Africa, a section now in Tanzania. His dream of creating a new white dominion in Kenya was frustrated in 1923 when the British government proclaimed Kenya to be a primarily African country. He died at Loresho, near Nairobi, on Nov. 13, 1931.