ILLUSTRATION: DAWN COOPER
NOT ON YOUR KNIFE
Everyone’s favourite multi-use tool, the Swiss Army Knife, could actually claim to be German. In the late 1880s, the Swiss Army commissioned a folding penknife for its troops, but no homeland manufacturer could handle a 15,000-unit order, so they had to be made across the border in the German town of Solingen, known as the ‘city of blades’.
The clerk of Kenya
Before he became the ‘founding father’ and first President of the Republic of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta was employed as a water-meter reader. In the thirties, he also found work as a film extra, most notably playing a tribal chief in the 1935 movie Sanders of the River, starring Paul Robeson.