Ol Orien

On the other side of Ol Orien an Englishman, Brian Freyburg, was given a farm. He looks like an athletic don with prematurely grey, receding hair and ingenuous eyes behind spectacles. He spent a lot of the war escaping from Italian Prisoner-of-war camps and being recaptured.

Archie, exhausted by his war work and saddened by the break up of his first marriage, took Robin at his word when after the war Robin asked him to come and spend a holiday in Africa. He initially came out in 1947 and continued to repeat this visit annually, usually during January and February, for the next eleven years.

Together they began to plan going into partnership over some farming project. Archie found that the simplicity of life in East Africa, and the fabulous energy the sun gave back to him, was the contrast he required to his active London life. Robin himself was becoming increasingly interested in Tanganyika's long term future. He felt if he became a farmer, like his father before him, and thereby rooted in the soil, he could play a more permanent role in the country's development than permitted to a transitory civil servant. He had met David Stirling, the founder of the Capricorn Africa Society, and felt that his policy of common citizenship and a multi-racial form of government might well be the answer for the East African states where the Africans, though still backward, must soon begin to move politically, and there was a small settled European and Asian community.

He resigned from the Colonial Service in 1951 when he was allotted one of the Ol Molog farms. His colleagues thought he was quite mad. Surely every diligent Administrative Officer only had one goal in life-to be a Governor finally. How irresponsible of Robin carelessly to throw that chance away.

The opening up of Ol Molog with this group of unusual men did not escape the English press, who had some wild, misinformed theories about it. Perhaps the most amusing was that Sir Archibald McIndoe had taken over the whole area and given each farm out to one of his Guinea Pigs, as his war patients were called, with "2,000 each to start them on their way. Archie however was unamused, particularly when Con Benson, an eminent London merchant banker who was given farm No. 8 and visited it annually, came over to Ol Orien with the newspaper cutting in his hand and slyly demanded his "2,000.