Caroline Elkins describes the club as having had a reputation during colonial times as "the Moulin Rouge of Africa", where the elite "drank champagne and pink gin for breakfast, played cards, danced through the night, and generally woke up with someone else's spouse in the morning.

"[1] According to Ulf Aschan, "The club had a rule, still in force today, that a member is entitled to damage any loose property as long as he pays double its value.

The Muthaiga Country Club is described in Beryl Markham's 1942 memoir West with the Night: "'Na Kupa Hati M'zuri' (I Bring You Good Fortune) was, in my time, engraved in the stone of its great fireplace.

Its broad lounge, its bar, its dining-room—none so elaborately furnished as to make a rough-handed hunter pause at its door, nor yet so dowdy as to make a diamond pendant swing ill at ease—were rooms in which the people who made the Africa I knew danced and talked and laughed, hour after hour.

"[3] Evelyn Waugh describes the Muthaiga Country Club in his 1931 travel book Remote People (also included in the anthology When the Going Was Good).