I’m still doing my homework. Although I’ve left the pre-WWI colonial Kenyan set behind, most of what I’m reading is still American-European. I started with Bill Bryson’s tiny book, African Diary (2000), that he wrote as a fund raising device for Care International. There are some terrific word pictures about refugees, travel on light aircraft and on trains to Mombasa. We will be doing the first, and I am holding on to my valium. As for the second, Mombasa is not on our schedule.
A real find was Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s The Present Moment, (1987). She’s English, came to Kenya in 1954 as an Anglican missionary, stayed and married a Kenyan. The Present Moment is about seven African women living in The Refuge, an old people’s home in Nairobi. The women, from different ethnic groups, Kikuya, Seychelloise, Luria, Luo, and Swahili, all ended here because of the shattering of tribal support systems brought on by changes in Kenyan society over 50 years. Macgoye raises issues about Moslem and Christian conversions, the so called freedom fighters, and the roles of women in this developing society. The book makes interesting reading about a non-European segment of Kenyan society.
And then there was the Jewish experience of Kenya. I didn’t even think about Jews in Kenya until I started to read Nowhere in Africa by Stefanie Zweig. I forgot seeing the film a few years ago. This is a different world from that of the pre-WWII European settlers. The German Jews who fled to Kenya were mostly from the cities little prepared for farm life. Zweig, as a child, appreciated the beauty of the country but her parents experienced drudgery, isolation, hardship and strangeness. Worse, English anti-Semitism was not dead. And, not unlike the U.S., émigrés from hostile nations (Germany) were interned, though only for a short while.
My last effort before leaving is True At First Light, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous “fictional memoir.” There are vivid depictions of life in a safari camp during Mau Mau days–a lot of sitting around, psuedo-philosophizing and drinking. Also there was a constant search to kill a prize lion. It made me cringe. I never got why anyone would want to kill an animal just to say “ I did it.” But–there is an interesting tie in to a made up religion. Maybe even Hemingway couldn’t really justify the killing. Tribal conflicts between the Kenyans keep surfacing and of course relations between the white man, in this case Hemingway, and the natives, both men and women. He was a womanizer, no doubt. Must have been amazingly charming, though judging from this book I think alcohol also played a large part.
All these people, real and fictional pasted their lives on to the countryside. I’m curious what my experience will be.
Tags: books, Bryson, Hemingway, Jews, Kenya, Macgoye, tribes, Zweig
