Read on Twitter
#HistoryKeThread Mawingo
The name of Gabriel Prudhomme (pictured) wouldn’t ring familiar with most Kenyans. Not with many historians, either.
The name of Gabriel Prudhomme (pictured) wouldn’t ring familiar with most Kenyans. Not with many historians, either.
But Gabriel was a European living in Kenya in the 1930s. He was a bush pilot. He liked to fly and savour from the skies above the breathtaking cracker beneath that was the Kenyan countrywide and its wildlife.
He was a man of good taste. He also had a way with women. Well, he was French.
Perhaps derisively, one UK website - and I don’t wish to name it - describes him in these very words:
“French pilot, playboy and daredevil from Alsace-Lorraine. He had a reputation as a womaniser based on his flying other men's wives to Nairobi on shopping sprees, returning them to their husbands the same day, having seduced them first.....”
Like the savannah tree and Kenya’s grasslands, the life of Gabriel is inseparable from the history of the luxurious hotel found on the foot of Mount Kenya - the Fairmont Mt. Kenya Safari Club.
This is the hotel as it looked in the late 1940s. In those days, the hotel, was known as Mawingo.
It was built by “Manhattan socialist” Rhoda Lewihnson and her lover, Gabriel, after they had bought the land from another American, San Franciscan Myra Wheeler.
It was built by “Manhattan socialist” Rhoda Lewihnson and her lover, Gabriel, after they had bought the land from another American, San Franciscan Myra Wheeler.
Just before the purchase, Wheeler’s husband had died suddenly overseas. It was Gabriel who agreed to Wheeler’s request to fly her around Mt. Kenya so she could, from the clouds above, sprinkle her late husband’s ashes over the dense jungle below.
Left bereft and downhearted, Wheeler put up the land for sale. The timing couldn’t have been more opportune for Rhoda, a dazzling lady in her 50s, and her much younger French lover. She went ahead and purchased the land the same year - 1938.
Within a year, construction of an imposing country house which Rhoda called Mawingo was complete. Rhoda wanted their house to have a Swahili name for clouds (which is Mawingu, but the building was nonetheless christened Mawingo).
In 1948, ownership of the the hotel was acquired through an auction by Abraham Block (right, with his wife Sarah), the Jewish-Kenyan founder of Block Hotels.
But how did the auction come about? What became of Rhoda and Gabriel?
Sometime in 1939, Rhoda gave Mawingo as a present to her lover Gabriel. And when WW2 broke out, Gabriel had a stint in the French military, serving in Algeria. He later flew to New York to join Rhoda there.
While in the United States, the couple’s love affair worsened, leading to a divorce. Just like that, a fairytale romance nestled at the foot of Africa’s second highest mountain came to an end.
By that divorce Rhoda’s association with Mawingo also came to an unceremonious end. This was because she had earlier given the hotel to Gabriel as a gift.
Gabriel then travelled back to his home country France, which at that time was broken down by the ravages of war. On a cold winter afternoon on 11th February 1945, tucked in a wretched family house that lacked heating infrastructure, he succumbed to pneumonia.
The interesting thing is that Gabriel had written a Will intending to bequeath Mawingo back to Rhoda. But at the time of his death, the Will unsigned, Mawingo was left at the mercy of an auctioneer.
So in 1948, Mawingo was auctioned by Gabriel’s Jewish lawyer, one Lazarus Kaplan. Waiting on the wings to purchase the hotel was Abraham Block.
Block also at various times owned, among others, The Norfolk Hotel, New Stanley Hotel, Outspan and Nyali Beach Hotel.
In 1959, Block sold the hotel American film star and movie director William Holden (pictured), who renamed it Mt. Kenya Safari Club.
Holden owned the hotel until 1981, when he died in an accident.
Following Holden’s death, Saudi billionaire businessman Adnan Khashoggi acquired the property.
Then again in 2007, the hotel was bought by the Fairmont Hotels and Resorts group, who operate it to this day.
Following Holden’s death, Saudi billionaire businessman Adnan Khashoggi acquired the property.
Then again in 2007, the hotel was bought by the Fairmont Hotels and Resorts group, who operate it to this day.
Mt. Kenya Safari Club has throughout its history played host to a number of famous foreign personalities among them Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, John Travolta and Charlie Chaplin.
This is a view of the luxurious hotel today.
Recent reports say that Kenyan billionaire businessman Humphrey Kariuki now owns the hotel, which continues to be managed by Fairmont.
