Stolen.
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At far left; James Martin; far right, Frederick Jackson with their host, Gîkûyû Chief Kamiri in the middle.
Around this time, the Agîkûyû were expanding, occasionally pitting themselves against the raiding Maasai around present-day Ngong, and against the Kamba in Thîka.
The British Company built stations at Machakos in Kamba territory and in Kikuyu.
At the coast they had representatives at Kismayu, Lamu, Witu, Malindi, Takaungu, and Vanga. The central administration was at Mombasa.
In the 1880s, the Agîkûyû rose against well-armed European caravans. One was led by a German and the other by a Hungarian, Count Teleki, who was heading northwards from Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The Agîkûyû swiftly joined the Maasai in being considered hostile by those early visitors.
In 1890 Capt. Fredrick Lugard had the Company’s first Kikuyu station built at Dagoretti.
Come April 1891, Waiyaki wa Hinga led local resistance that forced the British to evacuate. Their fort was destroyed.
It was then that Captain Eric Smith built a new station for the IBEA on the edge of the Rift Valley near Kikuyu, ordered Waiyaki to leave, and it was named Fort Smith.
Meanwhile, the Maasai were losing many cattle to disease and famine.
When Chief Laibon Batian died in 1890, the struggle between his sons, Lenana and Sendeu, weakened the tribe. Indeed some Maasai found refuge among the Agîkûyû, with whom they intermarried (Some of Jomo Kenyatta’s kinsmen, for instance, were Maasai).
The Maasai civil war went on, but in 1896 they tried to reconcile for the circumcision ceremonies.
In 1898, Sendeu was fighting the Germans in the south, and in the next two years, he was attacked by Lenana’s men.
In 1902, Sendeu finally gave up and agreed to live in obscurity near Lenana’s headquarters at Ngong.
In the west, the Nandi became more powerful. During the 1890s the Maasai and the Agîkûyû lost many cattle to rinderpest and then to pleuro-pneumonia.
Smallpox devastated the humans, obliterating more than half of the Agìkûyû.
Francis Hall at Fort Smith gave refuge to the surviving Kaputiei and Matapatu Maasai, though the Agîkûyû denied them food.
In November 1895 the Maasai attacked a caravan and killed hundreds of Agìkûyû, Nubian, Akamba and Swahili porters.
The porters had been recruited to serve in a British railway survey team. The porters stumbled on a desolate Maasai manyatta, where they allegedly found and raped women.
Infuriated by the act, morans waited for the caravan’s return trip and ambushed the porters, spearing hordes of them to death. One British engineer who was part of the caravan was also killed after he ran out of bullets.