Ol Donyo Sabuk - Lord William Northrop Macmillan

Lord William Northrop Macmillan

Lord William Northrop Macmillan (1872–1925) was a decorated American soldier and knighted by the King of England, even though he was not British. He was a huge Scot raised in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He arrived in Kenya in 1901 for big game hunting, playing host to former US President Theodore Roosevelt, during his famous 1911 safari at their ranch, Juja Farm (later a popular location for film crews). He and his wife were great philanthropists. They established the MacMillan Library in central Nairobi.

His poor grasp of plain reality was more than compensated for by his exaggerated ambitions and legendary eccentricities. But not until travelling from where Juja town stands today, through open distance all the way around and past Mount Kilimambogo, can someone begin to understand how the unlikely dreams of one man shaped the future of an entire community.

If the facial image retained inside Macmillan Memorial Library, in Nairobi, which has immortalised him, is anything to go by, the man was a serious-looking gentleman. Indeed, he was serious enough to want to own the whole mountain, which, together with the Aberdares (Nyandarua Ranges), was regarded by the Kikuyu and Kamba as God's subsidiary home after Mount Kenya. This is Mount Kilimambogo, which today falls in the middle of Ol Donyo Sabuk National Park, another enduring legacy of Lord Macmillan's exploits. Macmillan's farming pursuits stretched from horizon to horizon. The anguish of his crushing failures to father children is equalled only by the indomitable spirit in which he took on one farming failure after the other. But the American stayed on, a craving that he seemed to have passed on to many people who followed in his footsteps.