Sunday, May 11, 2025, Plot 229, Nairobi South Cemetery, Kenya – formerly British East Africa.[i]
I left the Stanley Hotel at three o’clock this afternoon. The weather was clear, though it rained torrentially last night. Cars floated from the road.
The cemetery soil sticks to my shoes, rich and black. Fecund soil. My first full day in Kenya.
Hello Lomond. You are buried here, underneath the sedge.
Your father stayed at the Stanley in 1904, 1909, and 1914. More precisely, in 1914 James Ricalton was at the Stanley when he was not by your side at the British Hospital.
You lay feverish there for two weeks, Lomond, intestines perforated, seizing, delirious, then quiet. You died May 29, 1914. One hundred eleven years back. Since then no one from your family has visited. One hundred eleven years.
*
The Stanley Hotel is significant. Ernest Hemingway wrote three Africa books there, sitting in his suite, at the bar, and by the thorn tree – Nairobi’s first post office. Winston Churchill visited, as did Teddy and Kermit Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth, Karen Blixen, and the other Stanley – Henry, who found David Livingstone. Writers, hunters, explorers, heads of state, past and present.
I stayed at the Stanley in 2019. Then I visited the hospital, now Kenyatta National Hospital, the largest in East Africa – larger than Ethiopia’s Black Lion, a place I also know.
Lore has it that you were taken from the hospital and buried fifteen minutes after you died – so feared was your disease – jungle fever, typhoid pneumonia.
I suspect you were interred on land aside the hospital and moved when your plot was made ready. Kenyatta Hospital is now large, over-spreading your initial, sanitary grave.
*
I brought things with me. A plastic spade, water from Loch Lomond, a stone from Loch Lomond, and an empty Viagra bottle containing ashes from my father.
My father was your sister Mary’s son, George C. Wilson. He would have been your nephew, you, his uncle.
I had a map of cemetery plots on my iPhone. An iPhone is today’s version of a portable kinetograph, the device you and your father were evaluating for Thomas Edison. Moving picture films taken by the kinetograph were shown using a kinetoscope. Today, we use something called TikTok and other platforms.[ii]
In 2018 I viewed your films at the Library of Congress. I did this with Dr. Roger Bailey from Saint Lawrence University, a Ricalton scholar. Your father attended Saint Lawrence briefly.
As a note, Viagra is a blood pressure medicine that today is used to promote male virility. It can be useful. George was most virile but, like all, he aged.
The map shows yours is plot 229. Two hundred and twenty-nine.
*
Three men searched for you, my driver, the cemetery guard, and me. Lomond – finding you was difficult. Many stones are worn blank by age; most are blackened by moss.
Some plots have no stones above the earth, just a mound and flowers or vegetation. Some are mulched with straw. That day, the mulch smelt like my sister Kathy’s farm. Kathy. Caddy.
Your grave is unmarked.
*
The driver and guard gave up after thirty minutes of hunting. They toed mulch and sedge from sunken stones. The guard, an old man, poked with his staff.
There was a pattern on the map for your site – that is, next to you on the map is a large rectangle that is labeled “Delamere.” On the other side is “Irwin.”
At first, I wandered searching in the wrong end of the cemetery. I looked a bit in the Jewish section – many beautiful, tall and ornate stones marked by the Star of David.
I thought of my sons. They are ethnic Jews – like their mother.
Like you, Lomond, I am Presbyterian.
*
In some places the grass and growth are deep. I considered that I could be bitten by a dangerous thing. A small-toothed viper? A malarial insect? Stung by a nettle? Our first day.
Reconciling map to stones was difficult. I found myself confused. I would read one name on the map, say “Scott,” find the memorial, then lose track.
At last I found Delamere, then Irwin. Though overgrown by sedge which bloomed pale yellow, blue and purple, and not visibly marked, your grave was certain.
It is defined by a concrete kerb bounding five by ten feet. At the head is a rusted metal plate two by five feet. The rest is layered by sedge and soil, the circumstance of a nutrient cycle.
I knelt beside you and took time to prepare.
*
You were twenty-four when you died. James was sixty-five. I am sixty-five.
I used the spade to dig a hole over where I estimated that your heart had lain, before it decomposed. Your heart did not decay, your spirit lives, stanchion.
I poured Dad’s ashes into the hole. I placed the stone from Loch Lomond on top of Dad’s ashes.
The stone is not inconsiderable, oblong about three by two inches by one inch thick. A beautiful gray with light streaks. It felt cool, as stones in water do.
In 2017, I smuggled the stone and water from Scotland to my home where it set in a glass vessel aside my tartan. Yesterday, I flew with stone and water into Nairobi.
I poured water from the Loch over the stone and ashes. There was a brief, satisfying splish-splash to my ear, then quiet. I pressed my hands above your heart.
Lomond.
*
You were named by your father after Loch Lomond. He thought it the most beautiful body of water in the world (aside the Saint Lawrence River, where you fished and swam).
I visited Loch Lomond in 2017. In Edinburg I stayed with my cousin Innes Miller. Our relationship dates from two Riccalton (as then spelled) sisters who lived about 1720.
Innes and I explored Edinburg, New Town and old; the village, farm and family church in Riccalton; and Loch Lomond at Balmaha.
From Balmaha we ferried to Inchcailloch – Scottish Gaelic for the “Isle of the Cowled Woman.” The place was established as a nunnery. Later it was a burial ground.
When we visited Inchcailloch’s graveyard, Innes and I walked through a vale thick with Scottish bluebells. You were there, you were remembered.
*
I covered the stone, water, and ash with soil. I put a little soil from your grave in a vessel to return home with me. I made photographs with my iPhone. I set on Delamere’s kerb.
*
Your neighbor was quite considerable, a British peer, one of the most influential British settlers in Kenya (then known as British East Africa).[iii] Lord Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, moved to Kenya in 1901 and acquired vast land holdings from the British Crown. Over the years, he became the unofficial leader of the colony’s European community. Biographers note that Lord Delamere was famous for his tireless labours to establish a working agricultural economy in East Africa. He died in 1931 at his coffee farm in Loresho, not far from Karen Blixen’s 6,000-acre plantation.[iv]
*
While Lord Delamere’s plot is large, about ten by thirty feet, he is buried alone, a solitary rectangle with a tall monument at top center. I am certain he knew your father.
Lord Delamere spoke Maasai. Though, as a settler, he was hated by the tribes.
That was not the same for your father. James was loved by the Kikuyu. Decades later ethnographers would review his photographs with descendants, marking tradition and joy.[v]
*
Tears arrived.
I stood.
*
“Hello Lomond. I’m Jim. Jim Wilson. James Ricalton Wilson. I am here to thank you, to say that I and my family venerate you. You were buried on May 29, 1914. Your father was with you then, crying deeply, planting his hands on the soil above your heart. Kikuyu men who carried your litter from the veldt to Nairobi stood behind. They wept also, touching stick and spear – Muthĩgi and Itimũ – to soil.
“No person from your family has visited since you were buried, one hundred eleven years ago. One hundred eleven.
“You are the son of James Ricalton and Mary Ricalton, your father’s first wife. You are the brother of Mary Ricalton, my grandmother. You would have been the beloved uncle of my father George C. Wilson, who was born in 1927. You died at age twenty-four. Twenty-four.
“Your sister Mary told me about you; she ran her fingers through my hair as I sat at her feet, a captivated child knowing his name. Mary spoke also of your father James, how proud James was of you, your kindness and vigor. Your affection for inquiry and discourse.
“Mary wept when she spoke of you. She was delicate. I called her Nana. As a child, Nana was a star athlete. When I knew her, she was old and gnarled. Nana lived to age ninety-eight.
“My father George often told me your story. George was a writer and, in a way, an explorer, like your father. Like James.
*
“Thank you for the life you lived, the richness you gave your father, your mother Mary, and your stepmother.
“You are my namesake. Today I dug my fingernails in the dirt over your heart, cleaned the metal above this. Years back, I visited your cenotaph near your Waddington home, aside the Saint Lawrence.
“Lomond, I am here because I love you. I look to your inspiration. A first lost son in a long story, broadly shared. The death of a young son.
“With Love, I am James Ricalton Wilson.”
*
I returned to the Stanley Hotel. I walked the stairs up to the Exchange, the former Kenya stock exchange and had a glass, a taste of spirit. Scotch, then water.
*
Lomond, you and James steamed east from New York to Southampton then south to Cape Town, a journey of at least twenty days. With my friend and her son we flew by airplane from Washington to New York, then Nairobi. A journey of twenty hours.
In Port Elizabeth, South Africa, you and James launched on a whaling ship to test and demonstrate Mr. Edison’s device, the portable kinetograph.[vi] It worked magnificently. From Cape Town, you trekked north along the route that captivated Cecil Rhodes.[vii]
In the veldt you viewed – and sparingly hunted – uncountable animals. Cape buffalo, antelope, hippopotamus, leopard, rhinoceros, baboon, crocodile, giraffe, lion, zebra, cheetah, wildebeest, and elephant.
My friends and I saw these beautiful creatures, too, when on safari in Maasai Mara and a slip of the Serengeti. We reached with binoculars and only shot with cameras. Our safari vehicle was rugged and comparatively effortless.
Though supported by Kikuyu porters, your trek was hard. In the Lake Victoria region, you were bitten by a long-legged mosquito which had drawn blood from an infected monkey. Your fluids mixed and your fate was sealed.
In the Rift Valley between Victoria and Nairobi, your fever rose, and a bloody cough erupted. Kikuyu men bore your litter and made the difficult climb from the veldt to the plateau, thence the hospital. I traveled this path.
*
As George recounts, when James returned to Waddington, your step mother Barbara Campbell refused to speak to him, such was the depth of her sadness and anger. (Barbara had argued against your joining the expedition that your father and Mr. Edison proposed.) The world’s greatest traveler, James Ricalton never journeyed abroad again. He walked miles aside the Saint Lawrence. At times, from Waddington to Ogdensburg and back, a stretch of fifty miles in one day. James’ pace was furious, but only a soft echo of his desolation. He struck the soil with a walking stick, his Muthĩgi carved by the Kikuyu.
*
*
A father who experienced a son’s trauma afflicted by exceeding urgency, sadness, and guilt – and intolerable loneliness. A lost son, an injured son.
The injured father.
[i] Nairobi South Cemetery. www.eamemorials.co.uk/EAMemorials/KENYA/Nairobi%20South%20Cemetery/NairobiSouth.htm.
[ii] “History of Edison Motion Pictures.” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures.
[iii] Wikipedia contributors. “East Africa Protectorate.” Wikipedia, 16 Jan. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Africa_Protectorate.
[iv] ---. “Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere.” Wikipedia, 25 Feb. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Cholmondeley,_3rd_Baron_Delamere.
[v] Sobania, Neal; interview with the author. Also, Sobania, N. W. Culture and Customs of Kenya. Greenwood, 2003.
[vi] “History of Edison Motion Pictures.” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures.
[vii] Wikipedia contributors. “Cape to Cairo Railway.” Wikipedia, 16 May 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_to_Cairo_Railway.
