By TONY MOCHAMA

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1922 AD, Ruaraka, Kenya.

George Hurst and his brother Charles Hurst, natives of Cardiff, Wales, established a small beer brewery on the banks of a river on the outskirts of Nairobi named Rui rwa Aka (women’s river), so called because some land prospectors had earlier tried crossing it but found women bathing at the crossing and had to turn back.

Charles and George Hurst were different sides of the same coin. George, the older one, born in 1878, chose to be a soldier but Charles, two years younger, took after his father and initially worked in the banking sector.

Though they chose different career paths, their interests in investment at some point converged in East Africa.

When World War I broke out in 1914 and Britain desperately needed soldiers to defend its interests in East Africa, George was among the foreign troops incorporated into the King’s African Rifles. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles at a time soldiers rode to battle on oxcarts, mule buggies, wagons and horseback, while some units used camels.

In the East African Mounted Rifles, George was awarded the Military Cross for his exploits as he battled German soldiers.

Charles, after a stint in banking back home, moved to Kenya, where he put his love for hunting into good use and collected specimens for zoos. He secured land in Soy, near Kitale in the North Rift, where he ventured into coffee farming but production was not very inspiring.

Charles “Will” Hurst, who is variously described as a party lover and drinker, got fed up with the loss-making ventures in a district boasting a solitary duka. He, like other settler farmers, was held hostage by the elements that made maize farming unprofitable. Rinderpest and east coast fever wreaked havoc on livestock.

Back home, English newspaper headlines gushed with optimism, fuelled by overzealous government agents and political leaders who painted a picture of the Promised Land in East Africa, where low-hanging fruits, milk and honey freely flowed.

Tusker bottles packed for export. FILE PHOTO | NMG

These are the factors that inspired Charles to start imagining of liquid gold flowing out of the brewery in Ruaraka into the parched throats of settlers, who would no longer have to wait for imported gins and spirits.

In one moment of this inspiration, Charles voiced his dream to his brother George and a friend, H.A. Dowding, as they were drinking at the Stanley Hotel. The vision of a local brewery soared high above the din of revellers and outlasted the wisps of blue smoke from the cigars and cigarettes that misted the hotel lounge.

Shortly after the barroom chat, the trio scoured the length and breadth of Nairobi looking for a place suitable for a brewery. Although none of them had any brewing experience, Dowding had some connections with Edne Malt Extract Company. When they went to Rui rwa Aka, which was just bushland at the time, they were excited after discovering the river that fit like a cosy glove into their plans. They began constructing a building that would house Kenya’s first brewery, which would grow into the biggest such enterprise in East Africa.

George and Dowding dug a well on the fringes of the river as they cleared the land while waiting for equipment that Charles had gone to buy in Britain using £7,500 ($9,900 at current exchange rate) that they contributed.

Their masterpiece of cut stone and the corrugated iron sheet would not win any architectural design competition, but the builders were quite proud of the work of their hands.

From their tents off River Ruaraka, their only entertainment was a star-lit orchestra of chirping birds and croaking frogs, while armies of mosquitoes joined the night revelry for bloody drinks.

First brew

After weeks of waiting, Charles returned to Nairobi with the equipment and they installed it. Using the manufacturer's manual, Charles boiled a solution in a copper cup over a wood fire and somehow produced the first brew, which was bottled and corked by hand.

His brewing mission complete, Kenya Breweries was registered on December 8, 1922 and produced its first beer on December 14, 1922. Beer cost Ksh12.50 ($0.11 at current exchange rate) for a dozen bottles while pints were sold at Ksh9.50 ($0.08) a dozen.

The bottled beer was then marketed to one of the most reputable Nairobi hotels, The Stanley, whose manager, aptly called Waterman, was on hand to receive the first 10 cases off the firewood kiln of this pioneering brewery.

The Christmas of 1922, and the other 99 Christmases thereafter, have witnessed merrymaking that has never been complete without friends gathering around a table to enjoy this brew, Kenya’s premiere beer, Tusker.

KBL managers and guests enjoy Tusker at a past event. FILE PHOTO | NMG

How Tusker got its name

And that takes us round to how the beer got its famous name: From an infamous incident in Ngorongoro, itself now the subject of a trans-oceanic dispute at the centre of which are Emirati royals accused of seeking licence to kill “Tuskers” for sport.

In 1923, with Dowding having the daunting task of beer production, the restless George Hurst left Ruaraka for Ngorongoro in northern Tanzania on a dodgy mission to acquire a German ranch at the crater. 

George always dreamt of owning a ranch in that region and the routing of the Germans from East Africa during World War I presented him with a golden opportunity.

On arrival in Ngorongoro, George moved into a derelict farmhouse located between the crater and the Lerai forest. He was optimistic that he could own the crater, home to more than 50,000 zebra and wildebeest. He, therefore, made an application to be allocated the land by the Custodian of Enemy Property, a government department tasked with reallocating assets seized by Britain upon the defeat of Germany in WWI.

George was optimistic about getting the Ngorongoro Crater ranch seized from a German, W.F. Siedentopf. It was on this conviction that he squatted in the dilapidated farmhouse biding his time.

But his hopes were dashed when his application was rejected and the government gifted the coveted crater teeming with wildlife to an aristocrat, Sir Charles Ross, manufacturer of the Ross rifle and Ross cartridge. The Siedentopf brothers had killed thousands of wildebeest, whose tongues they canned and shipped out of the country.

One of the Siedentopf brothers, Adolf, was however found dead, with a Maasai spear protruding from his body.

Disappointed by his failure to secure his dream paradise, and upon learning that Ross would be its owner for the next 99 years (until 2022 AD), George wandered off into the wider Ngorongoro. And here disaster waited.

A terrifying, reckless hunter

A few months earlier, George had miraculously cheated death after he attempted to photograph a lion. When the irate lion charged, he aimed and fired. But the beast grabbed and dragged him a few feet before it collapsed into a heap. At the end, his gun’s stock broke into two.

The wounded lion is said to have stood over the hunter before it literally died on George. Incredulously, the cat had summoned the last ounces of its energy to leave the hunter with some injuries. He lived to tell the tale, but not for long.

A magazine, Safari Trail, described George as “a terrifying person” to accompany in a hunt.

“Most people went once and swore they would never go again… George would walk into a herd of elephants as a farmer would into a poultry yard after the bird she proposed to cook for luncheon. When George spotted a fine bull elephant in the herd he would shoo the cows out of the way and shoot the bull (at point-blank range),” it said.

And that is how he met his fatal end.

On August 25, 1923, George headed a team of hunters contracted by the government of Tanganyika to cull elephants that had been killing villagers in the Ngorongoro area.

The ensuing tragedy is graphically captured in an article published in Habari 26: “…wounded bull with 470 at 11am with 5 rounds came up to him at noon and he (Hurst) put five more in him. 2pm elephant charged out of long grass at close quarters. Hurst fired two rounds, but Tusker dashed him against a tree. Death instantaneous.”

Maasai pastoralists graze their herds in Ngorongoro. FILE PHOTO | POOL

Tusker, noun – an elephant with well-developed tusks.

George Hurst thus became a statistic in government records as per gazette notice dated November 21, 1923: “Captain George Henry Russel Hurst of 3 Rivers, Trans Nzoia, died in (Ngorongoro) in Tanganyika on August 25, 1923.”

The magazine described him as a “white hunter who was said to be the bravest and most reckless man who ever hunted elephants.”

Another Tusker hunter said that George “sometimes went very far in his familiarities with animals” and “on several occasions, had actually booed at them in order to get them to run.”

Charles Hurst was devastated by the news of his older brother’s death. As the next of kin, he was cited in the gazette notice as the administrator of his brother’s estate in Soy.

To immortalise the role George had played in establishing the brewery, Charles named the then popular but nameless beer Tusker, in reverence of the elephant that had killed his brother, and a reminder of what a great hunter George had been.

To fill the vacuum in Kenya Breweries board, a new director, J.C. Aronson, was appointed.

A hundred years after the tragic event -- the mismatched duel -- the exploits of the hunter and the hunted are still unknown by many lovers of the brand.

By trampling George to death, the elephant unwittingly immortalised its tusks, its victim and its elephantine imprints in history, bottled in glass.

2022 AD, Ngorongoro, Tanzania.

Thousands of Maasai pastoralists are protesting a renewed move by the government to demarcate swathes of land in the Ngorongoro district and Loliondo ward, accusing the administration of using conservation as a pretext to remove them from their ancestral land.

The government wants to give hunting rights in the disputed 1,500-square-kilometre wildlife corridor in Ngorongoro to foreign investors for game hunting. Leaders and rights advocates say this would effectively deny thousands of herders a place to live as well as access to pasture and water for their animals.

Read: Leave herders alone, EA court tells Tanzania

For decades, the residents of Loliondo and Ngorongoro have been embroiled in land disputes. In 1992, the move to lease the Game Controlled Area in Loliondo to an investor from the United Arab Emirates for trophy hunting provoked anger among the Maasai, who claimed the licensing process was opaque and they had been largely excluded.

Read: No end in sight to Loliondo conflict

In 2013, President Jakaya Kikwete called off the plan to evict pastoralists from a disputed area after an online campaign opposing the move garnered over two million signatures.

Read: Tanzania ends hunting deal with Dubai royal family

Early this year, the Tanzanian government began putting up beacons, ostensibly to create a protected area, displacing tens of thousands of cattle herders, to pave the way for Tusker hunters.

Meanwhile, Tusker is turning 100 and East African Breweries shareholders, customers and staff are toasting to a century of growth and expansion from Ruaraka to Serengeti and beyond.