For the love of Africa- Lord Baden Powell

MAKING their way to the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri visitors are faced by this signboard, fixed to a pepper-tree at a turn of the drive. The Outspan has a lot of visitors: those who stay there while visiting Nyeri on duty or business, those who stay there for a holiday, those who use it as their base before going on to the world-famous "Treetops", and those who go there especially in order to see "Paxtu" itself, the last home of Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide Movements.

B-P first visited East Africa - each of the present countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania - in 1906, and he recorded his impressions both in words and pictures in his book Sketches in Mafeking and East Africa, published in 1907. He fell in love with the "wonderful views over the plains to the bold snowpeak of Mount Kenya", described after his visit in 1906, and so when ordered by his doctor to rest in the winter of 1937 it was to Nyeri that he came.
`When he left us', wrote Erie Walker in his book Treetops Hotel describing B-P's departure from Kenya in 1938, `Lord Baden-Powell was getting on in years. (He was, in fact, 81). "The nearer to Nyeri, the nearer to bliss", he said, "I am coming to spend the rest of my life at the Outspan."
'And he asked us to build him a cottage before he came back for what he said was to be the third and last time. He picked a site in the garden. "What", he said, "will it cost to build a little house with a sitting-room, large veranda, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and two fireplaces?"


In October, 1938, he came back to Nyeri to live in Paxtu, and never left East Africa again.
The cottage remains very much as it was when he first had it built, though the old makuti roof has been replaced by an iron one, and the garden which in recent years had got out-of-hand was rather drastically tidied up in 1964, but the fountain and bird-bath remain. The cottage is now joined to the main block of the hotel with a series of apartments.

A description of the house was given by B-P in a letter to the actor, Cyril Maude, in 1939:-
`We sit here in incessant sunshine (with showers to water our garden) and never since we came, four months ago, have we failed to have brilliant sunshine for a breakfast on the veranda. I enclose a photo of the shack we had built for us and we find it in every way excellent. Sitting-room in the center with the whole front open, with folding glass doors. On each side of it a bedroom with dressing-room, bath, cloak-room, etc., and servants' pantry at the back, with a covered way to the hotel 200 yards away, whence come all our meals. We have hot and cold water laid on, with electric light and heating, a delightful garden (much grown up since the photo) and a glorious view across the forest and plain up to Mount Kenya with its snowy top.'
The house has been lived in by B-P's old friend Jim Corbett, author of Man-eaters of Kumaon and other well-known books, and his sister Maggie.

Outspan Hotel,  was owned by Eric Sherbrooke Walker, Baden-Powell's first private secretary and one of the first Scout inspectors. Walker also owned the Tree Tops hotel approximately 17 km out in the Aberdare ranges often visited by Baden-Powell and people of the Happy Valley set
The Paxtu cottage is integrated into the Outspan Hotel buildings and serves as a small Scouting museum.
Baden-Powell died on 8 January 1941 and is buried at St. Peter's Cemetery. His gravestone bears a circle with a dot in the centre "ʘ", which is the trail sign for "Going home", or "I have gone home": When his wife Olave died, her ashes were sent to Kenya and interred beside her husband. Kenya has declared Baden-Powells grave a national monument.