Gallery

Lost Treasures

While reading an old Magnum from December 2010 I came across an article by Gregor Woods in Gallery entitled “Forgotten Treasures”. It concerned an article taken from the Cape Argus newspaper dated 18 July 1963, reporting the imminent sale of 32 000 privately-owned firearms in Nairobi, Kenya. These firearms had been handed over to the police for storage in the years leading up to the independence of Kenya in December 1963. The owners, many of whom had left the country, were given three months to claim their guns after which all the guns would be sold.

Those days were unsettling and nervous times, as nobody really knew what to expect post independence. Legal compliance was the order of the day and gun owners had to re-apply for their gun licences having handed them in to the police. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it?) After independence most farmers were allowed to re-licence their firearms although in reduced numbers. My father was a farmer and professional hunter, and was allowed to keep a fair number of firearms as tools of his trade. However, we handed in many guns that we never saw again and for which we were not compensated.

I do not recall that a sale, as mentioned in the Cape Argus article, ever took place. An agent by the name of Graham Boswell was supposed to have overseen the sale but it is possible that many quality guns left the country legitimately through him.

The firearms that were handed in were stored in a military underground armoury in a town called Gilgil, in the Rift Valley between Nairobi and Nakuru. In early 1964 I attended boarding school in Nairobi and at the end of the first term, my mother arrived to collect my sister and me for the trip back to our farm near Kitale in north west Kenya. My