Abraham's People: A Kenyan Dynasty

Abraham’s People traces the journey of the Lithuanian-Jewish Block family from its time of persecution under the Russian Tsars to its position as the founder of East Africa’s famous hotel chain, Block Hotels.

The story begins in Lithuania in 1849 with the birth of Samuel Block and follows his progress through the pogroms of Russia’s ‘Pale of Settlement’ and his eventual flight to South Africa.

Conscripted in to the army of the Tsar at the age of twelve, Abraham Lazarus, Samuel’s only son, is smuggled out of Russia aboard a cattle ship bound for England. Desperate to escape the sweatshops of Leeds, Abraham follows his father to South Africa where he is inspired by the dream of joining those bound to establish a new Jewish homeland in Africa. In 1903 he lands in Mombasa with two ponies, a sack of potato seeds, twenty-five pounds and the clothes he stands up in.

Resourceful and determined, likeable and capable, Abraham spends the next sixty years trading in everything from pigs to carpets, and from mattresses to land until, eventually, he acquires his first and Nairobi’s finest hotel, The Norfolk.