author
John Boyes
1874–1951
An English adventurer and memoirist, he wrote vivid first-hand accounts of colonial East Africa shaped by years of trading, travel, and conflict. His best-known books promise the pace of an adventure story while also capturing the attitudes and contradictions of their time.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Hull on May 11, 1874, John Boyes became known for his years in East Africa, where he worked as a trader and became famous as the so-called "King of the Wa-Kikuyu." He later turned those experiences into books, including John Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu and A White King in East Africa, which present his life as a sequence of risky journeys, negotiations, and survival stories.
Boyes also wrote The Company of Adventurers, continuing his tales of travel and frontier life. His work sits somewhere between memoir, travel writing, and imperial adventure narrative, which makes it lively reading but also a window into the colonial mindset of the period.
He died in Nairobi on July 19, 1951. Today, his books are remembered less as straightforward history than as dramatic personal accounts from the era of British expansion in East Africa.