What a surprise ! Kisumu on TV !!

A good friend messaged me to say Kisumu was going to be on TV, featured in one of my favourite programmes, Who Do You Think You Are, which take a 'famous' person and investigates their genealogy.   (Available on iPlayer in the UK for, I think, about four weeks).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08zj63p/who-do-you-think-you-are-series-14-4-adil-ray

It was so interesting to see the streets and people of Kisumu again .... many of my friends have no idea what the town is like, and its attraction for me .... so I hope they watched this ! I have no idea who the personality was who was featured .... never heard of him .... but his mixed Pakistani and African heritage was most interesting.  

Most genealogy in UK and USA etc is done by following a paper trail of certificates, censuses, newspaper reports, etc., but this doesn't apply to the non European communities; for them, the oral records are everything, and so it proved in this programme.   The oral 'records' and conversations linked his grandmother back to Uganda, and to the Kabaka of Buganda !   

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I am still niggling away at the history of that mysterious little bit of land in the north west of Kenya.    See  http://luolaughter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/an-annoying-puzzle.html

I have looked at several old maps I have, and think I may have part of the answer, but still need some more investigation.   It seems it might be to do with the distribution of land back in the days of the British Empire.   Before 1902, what we now know as the west of Kenya was considered to be Uganda; the rest was the East Africa Protectorate, the border being a line very roughly from the north of Lake Rudolf (now called Turkana) straight down to roughly Namanga on the Tanzania (Tanganyika) border.   Various re-alignments were done on maps in the 1920's, (that little lump of land was still not part of Kenya) until 1933 when Kenya was the shape we know it to be today, but still excluding that little piece, which wasn't included on maps until 1961 !   I have absolutely no idea about the politics of all this.  Why anyone would actually want that little piece of dry, arid, inaccessible desert I don't know, but as its still 'administered' by Kenya, I suppose there must be some reason.   I have contacted friends in Kenya to see if anyone knows anything about it.   I don't expect to find out much from them until after the election on 8th August.  

Its interesting to note that at one time, Israel was going to be created as a homeland for the Jewish people in what is now western Kenya.   But that's a whole different story, which I might find out more about another time !