Isiolo: A town filled with hidden treasures
Photo/FILE
Over the years, Isiolo has grown into a sizeable town. The tarmac now stretches way past Archer’s Post and Ololokwe, the iconic bread mountain.
Isiolo was always the last stop before Kenya’s little known Northern Frontier District (NFD), supporting a few dukas on a dusty street where the nomadic people of the arid northern deserts met – the Somali, Samburu, Rendille, Borana, Gabbra and other rarely heard-of tribes.
It was the lowlands, where the tarmac ended before entering the NFD. Isiolo was, until a few decades ago, the most southern range of the camel, the ship of the desert.
Now camels are common south of the Equator; as the saying goes, as the desert inches its way forward, so does the camel. Over the years, Isiolo has grown into a sizeable town.
The tarmac now stretches way past Archer’s Post and Ololokwe, the iconic bread mountain, ending near the hamlet of Merille on its way to Moyale on the Kenyan-Ethiopian town. However it is still short of Moyale by about 400 kilometres.
A couple of emails from Michael Wanjau, a public health management officer in Isiolo, drew my attention to the town. Wanjau is interested in digging up facts about places he’s stationed at.
One of his email read, “Hi Rupi. Have you been to Joy’s House in Isiolo? A soldier’s memorial of the Second World War Monument is also in Isiolo, near the old NFD PC’s office.” Attached were a couple of photographs.
Opportunity presented itself over New Year’s, for we were late driving back to Nairobi from the northern safari circuit.
Suddenly I remembered Wanjau’s emails but it being the holiday season, it was too late to contact him.
After many enquiries, Joel Ndunda, the manager at Bomen Hotel, Isiolo’s premier tourist class hotel, located Joy’s House for us.
The camp is named after Joy Adamson who, with her husband George, is legendary for being the first to begin rehabilitating orphaned lion cubs to survive life in the wild.
Joy’s House is located in Maili Saba on the outskirts of Isiolo. We drove out of Isiolo’s dusty street, past the beautiful white-marble Jamia Mosque, which is the biggest in the region, and the grand Catholic Cathedral built under the direction of the late Italian Bishop Luigi Locatto who was murdered in the compound a few years ago.
The cathedral supports an awesome fresco of Christ. Turning into the dusty road at Maili Saba for Adamson’s house, we reached it – a forlorn house standing by the banks of Isiolo River, fringed by raffia palms and the hills.
Nevertheless, it’s a quaint house from the 1950s. In her bestseller Born Free where Joy narrates the story of Elsa the lioness, she describes Isiolo:
‘For many years my home has been in the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya, that vast stretch of semi-arid thornbush, covering some 120 thousand square miles, which extends from Mount Kenya to the Abyssinian border.
‘Civilisation has made little impact on this part of Africa; there are no settlers. The local tribes live very much as their forefathers did, and the place abounds in wild life of every description.
My husband, George, is senior game warden of this huge territory and our home is on the southern border of the Province, near Isiolo, a small township of about 30 whites, all of whom are government officials engaged in the task of administering the territory.’
Fast forward to 2012: Most of the teeming wildlife is gone, except in the protected areas of Laikipia, Samburu, Buffalo Springs and Shaba. Few lions, elephants and other wildlife are seen outside these areas.
Isiolo now boasts some big hotels and shops. The miraa trade thrives, as do the street boys begging for alms. The house that we stand at is one of the houses that Joy and George lived in in Isiolo.
The other is near the Provincial Commissioner’s office in town. A war memorial reminds visitors of the soldiers killed in action during World War II. With all these treasures, dusty Isiolo has much to show off to the world.
