White women of the red ochre
.jpg)
Out of Africa (forgive the irresistible pun) came a very special breed of women … too many to mention
here. I have chosen to focus on a few … all of them writers. There are others, Neera
Kumar Bromson, etc, who I hope I will connect with soon. One of these days I
will get around to Beryl Markham and others of her ilk if I can dig up the
appropriate material.
In the meantime, allow me to share this with you.
AS short-term memory loss appears to rape my mind, I am re-reading a lot
of old, old Kenya classics such as Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and Errol
Trzebinksi’s Silence will Speak. Errol worked as deputy advertising
manager in the very earliest days of the Nation in Nairobi, starting with the
launch of Sunday Nation and in the company of the indomitable Althea Tebutt. Later
she wrote a cookery column. Above all, I remember her as a forceful, determined
lady. I was a very wetter-eared sports reporter and neither of us took any
notice of the other. She was stunningly beautiful. She has been quite ill and I
have lost track of her. She lives in Lamu. When I first time I read SWS, a
friend lent me her copy in London, I was completely blown away by the
meticulous devotion to detail, the very, very high quality of the English
language and the sheer depth of detail, especially about Denys Finch Hatton and
his family history in Britain.
I have finished reading SWS and I guess I will have to have
another read.
Still amazes me that they managed to keep their love affair secret, in
the sense that they did not write about it and if they did talk to friends, it
was as a secret shared. I guess Errol more than anyone else knew more than she
wrote. In this day and age, both books and others of a similar ilk are somewhat
tough reads. In today’s politically correct world, much of that era is
sometimes very hard to take, especially the hunting and game kills. These are
pages of Africa’s history and the memories are fading fast. Some folks revel in
that, I choose to record them for what they are: matters of fact.
On the other hand, there are always the “new truths” after Uhuru. A
piece by Carey Baraka (Drift) does just that. I do not challenge it but present
it as another version of the “truth”: “Karen Blixen, a Danish
aristocrat, moved to Kenya at the height of Empire, in 1913, with her new
husband, 15,000 Danish crowns, and the intention to start a coffee farm. It was
only later, after she returned to Denmark in 1931, that she gradually found fame
as a writer. Her 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, offers a record of her time in Kenya, detailing her
relationships with her lovers, her servants, and the two thousand “Natives” who
lived on her farm. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the grand old man of Kenyan letters,
later wrote, “As if in compensation for unfulfilled desires and longings, the
baroness turned Kenya into a vast erotic dreamland in which her several white
lovers appeared as young gods and her Kenyan servants as usable curs and other
animals.”
And dreamland she made it. On safari, Blixen’s
servants carried bathwater to her on their heads across the plain, and, she
writes, “when we outspanned at noon, they constructed a canopy against the sun,
made out of spears and blankets, for me to rest under.” She imagines herself a
judge to the Kikuyu squatters, claiming at one point that she looks at her cook
“with something of a creator’s eyes.” To Blixen, the Africans existed if not
quite at the level of the bush animals, then somewhere just above them. “The
Natives,” she writes, “could withdraw into a world of their own, in a second,
like the wild animals which at an abrupt movement from you are gone—simply are
not there.” She believed that “the umbilical cord of Nature has, with them, not
been quite cut through.”
Deserted by her husband, Karen threw herself into the
hedonistic social life available to the European gentry in the colony. When the
Duke and Prince of Wales came to visit, she made the local Kikuyu perform a
dance in their honor. She and her lover, British big game hunter Denys
Finch-Hatton, oscillated in and out of the “Happy Valley set,” described by Ulf
Aschan, the godson of Blixen’s husband, as “relentless in their pursuit to be
amused, more often attaining this through drink, drugs, and sex.” A popular
question among British aristocrats at the time was, “Are you married or do you
live in Kenya?” None of this appears in Blixen’s memoir, which skips over wild
parties in favor of providing lush detail about the landscape and the “Natives.”
I am sure my Kenya Friends Reunited bloggers will have their own tales
to tell. I hope you will share them with me. (skipfer43@gmail.com). I was never privy to that circle of settlers in Kenya and I have no
reason to doubt the integrity of the writers. By the time 1950 came along, the
winds whispered (or prophesied) the coming windows of change and nobody it
seemed wanted to dwell on the past, except for excerpts of “white mischief”
after the Scotch had got the better of those who could still remember. As a
young journalist, I was lucky enough to meet many of the leading lights of
politics, social and sports clubs, sportsmen and sportswomen etc. Hence, I
floundered in the leaves of books and trusted that the authors were painting a
true picture of the white society in earliest Kenya. Perhaps some of the nicest
people I encountered were Stephen Moore who inherited Moores Bookshop in
Government Road, Mrs Riceborough who was the magistrate in the juvenile court
when I was a very, very young junior in the Probation and Remand Home Service, Ray
Batchelor, John Velzian, Sir Derek Erskine (who set up the Kenya Amateur
Athletics Association), Archie Evans, Marcell Brunner (who was the godfather of
Kenya boxing from its infancy). Sir Humphrey Slade, who, as Speaker of the
Parliament, educated me in the ways of the House. Sir Michael Blundell was kind
enough to speak to me even though I was just a kid. A tribe of cricketers, rugby
apostles, field hockey disciples, cricketers who were keepers of the English
game in darkest Africa, soccer players and aficionados all the other sports
including fishing. Like, I said, I did not know too much about Europeans
because we all lived separately in apportioned districts (but they did not call
them separate development as they tried to do in South Africa). To make up for
this lack of knowledge, I spent a lot of time in the MacMillan Library and read
books until sleep finally lassoed me and left me hissing a kind of snore in the
quiet of the night.
My undiminished regret is that I did not think about it much earlier in
my youth. Had I done so I would have published a book about the people I had
met and learnt from in Kenya. Regret, I am told is the manna of the damned.
Never mind.
But then again, I found a new tribe: British and European journalists in
Kenya and around the world who fashioned me into the kind of journalist I
eventually became … after those first baby steps in 1960. Too many to mention
here and many survive to this day, thinning by the year and we try to keep in
touch.
Elspeth Huxley - A Biography
by C S Nicholls
Elspeth Huxley (The Flame
Trees of Thika) was the major commentator on Kenyan affairs for the British
public from the publication of White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya in 1935 to that of Nine Faces of Kenya in
1990. Christine Nicholls' biography gives a full picture of this outstanding
woman, of wide interests and unbounding energy. The bibliography lists
forty-eight books that she wrote, besides innumerable articles, radio scripts
and live broadcasts. Her ability to write with such fluency, providing vivid
descriptions of people and places, and also with a wry sense of humour, made
her work so appealing. Her radio broadcasts, especially on the BBC's The
Critics from 1950 to 1961, made her well known in Britain, while her
semi-fictional accounts of her childhood in the settler community of Kenya
before and after World War I, The Flame Trees of Thika (1959)
and The Mottled Lizzard (1962),
were widely read - especially after they were filmed for television in 1981.
However, it was her knowledge and judgement of
African, primarily Kenyan, affairs that were her chief claim to fame. She left
Kenya in 1924 to study agriculture at Reading University and, having married
Gervas Huxley in 1931, did not live in Africa again. But she visited almost
every year except during the war when she worked for the BBC and at the
Colonial Office. These visits had the dual aims of research and to stay with
and assist her parents, Jos and Nellie Grant, farming near Njoro. The success
of the biography of Lord Delamere, which expanded to two volumes giving the
history of white settlement in Kenya, decided Elspeth to make her living by
writing. The novel, Red Strangers (1939),
attempted to understand the African reaction to British rule and settlement,
and during the war, Elspeth engaged in a correspondence with Margery Perham,
published as Race and Politics in Kenya (1944), in which she supported devolution of
responsibility to settlers, while Perham argued for continuing Colonial Office
control to safeguard the interests of Africans. Both agreed that there had been
a lack of clear British policy in Kenya and that more rapid progress should be
made to train Africans for self-government.
Elspeth's visits to Kenya after the war resulted in
an official report on reading matters for Africans, which led to the establishment
of the East Africa Literature Bureau in 1948, and a major account of
contemporary East Africa, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1948) - which was viewed by Kenya settlers, who had
previously considered her their champion, as dangerously radical. Her
travelogue of West Africa, Four Guineas (1954),
described emerging African nationalism and the problems of the path to
independence. In 1960 she served on the Monckton Commission on the future of
the Central African Federation. After the Mau Mau uprising she wrote two major
books, A New Earth (1960) and Forks and Hope (1964).
Of the latter, Nicholls comments on '.... its intelligent analysis. Again, the
penetrating eye and poet's pen had been put to good use, to create a
contemporary commentary which reads beautifully.' (p344).
This is a comprehensive work which brings to life a
most stimulating character, but also the history of Kenya during British rule.
Many moons ago, my friend Mervyn and the late Elsie
Maciel told me about a memorable encounter with Elspeth Huxley:
A day with Elspeth Huxley - by Mervyn
Maciel
With a rail strike on at the time, my wife and I decided on making the journey
to Wiltshire by coach. We were heading for a litle village of Oaksey in one of
the oldest boroughs in England - Malmesbury - and the home of world-famous
veteran author, Elspeth Huxley, whose guests we were to be for the
day (14th September 1994).
The grey skies of London
and steady drizzle soon gave way to brighter weather as our coach sped along
the busy road. To put us to the minimum inconvenience, Elspeth had
suggested that we alight at the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester from,
whence she would collect us. A delayed departure from London meant that we were
half an hour late arriving at Cirencester but there to greet us, despite the
chill of near-autumn weather, was this warm and stimulating 87-year-oLd author.
From here she drove us the eleven miles to her cottage named 'Green End' and
after some welcome refreshments we were driven to the nearby pub for lunch. The
meal itself was sumptuous and highly enjoyable, especially in the setting of
this pub, so typical of old England and still unspoilt by London standards.
We later returned to her cottage for coffee and, while our hostess was busy
brewing this aroma-rich coffee (Kenyan of course!) she 'let us loose in her
study to soak in the richness of this well-stocked library. Most of the books
had an African flavour - stories of the early pioneers in Kenya; a priceless
history on overflowing bookshelves, section of which held some 40 of her own
titles ranging from 'White Man's Country', to 'The Flame Trees of Thika
(dramatised for television in 1982) and its sequel The Mottled Lizard', to 'Out
in the Midday Sun' and, of course her latest anthology - 'Nine Faces of Kenya,
an autographed copy of
which she had presented us with some months earlier.
During our coffee break we were shown part of her excellent collection of
family photographs including some of Karen Blixen and many early European
pioneers who had carved out a niche for themselves in Kenya's history. Many a
face we recognised, especially that of her mother Nellie (The Hon. Mrs. Grant)
who farmed at Njoro and who we had met on many occasions during my service at
the Plant Breeding Station there. We heard that her mother later retired to the
Algarve, the Njoro altitude of 8000 ft above sea level being too much for
someone approaching 90! There she bought and at Lagos and had a house built.
She remained independent until the last, pruning her orange trees, enjoying the
early
sardine catch brought in by the local fishermen and of course driving her own
car.
With just over an hour left to catch the coach home Elspeth was determined
to Show us some of Malmesbury town. At 87 I found her very astute, mentally
alert, a patient listener and a confident driver. She quickly spotted a parking
place and then walked us to the nearby 12th
Century Abbey and told us a little of its history.
After a quick look at her watch 'there's still time' she said, and off she
drove, aiming we thought for the coach stop but she had othr ideas. In those
few minutes she drove us through Cirencester, passing the Royal Agricultural
College (from where many of my former Kenya Agricultural colleagues had
graduated) and then to the coach stop, making sure that
we were on the right side of the road.
'Wasn't she exhausted after a full day of conducting us on a guided tour, not
forgetting her warmth and hospitality?' I enquired. 'Oh no, not at all, she
replied, 'I only wish could have shown you more – you must come again'.
With her warm handshake and a motherly hug for Elsie we reluctantly bade goodbye,
but we did not leave empty handed as Elspeth made sure that we had a
pot of her home made strawberry jam (from home-grown strawberries) and a jar of
coffee - Kahawa Ya Kenya!
Sadly we were not to meet again as she left us in January 1997.
C.S. Nicholls is an outstanding author in her own
right.
Christine Nicholls was born in 1943 and taken to Kenya after
the end of World War II, in 1947. Her father and mother were teachers, at the
Central (later Highlands) School, in Eldoret. The family moved to Nyeri in the
early 1950s, where her parents taught at Nyeri Primary School. After being
acting headmaster at Nyeri, her father, Kit (C.J.) Metcalfe became headmaster
at Parklands School and Westlands School in Nairobi, before moving to a
permanent post as headmaster of Mombasa Primary School in 1954. By then
Christine was a pupil at the Kenya Girls’ High School in Nairobi. Her mother,
Olive Metcalfe, was headmistress of the Aga Khan Girls’ School in Mombasa.
Christine boarded at the Kenya High School in Nairobi.
Seven years later Christine went to Oxford
University, to Lady Margaret Hall. She received her MA and went on to do a
doctorate at St Antony’s College. Upon receiving her D.Phil. degree, Christine
became a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London
University. She then became a freelance researcher for the BBC Arabic
programme.
In 1977 Christine joined Oxford University Press
as Assistant Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She progressed to
become Editor, before retiring in 1995. Five volumes of the Dictionary were
produced by her (the first five with Sir Edgar Williams and Lord Blake). She
lives in Oxford, England.
She remains a steadfast pillar of Old Africa Magazine.
By kind permission Stephen Luscombe.
Cynthia Salvadori
(By kind permission of Old Africa Magazine)
.jpg)
We were all saddened to receive the news of Cynthia
Salvadori’s passing in late June. She was a good friend and regular contributor
to Old Africa magazine. But here’s another tribute written by Old Africa author
Judy Aldrick. We’ve also included a photo of Cynthia visiting Old Africa reader
Mervyn Maciel in his “Manyatta” in Surrey, UK, in 1993. Cynthia will be missed
greatly by all of us who knew her.
Cynthia Salvadori
The news of Cynthia Salvadori’s sudden death in Lamu on
Monday 27th June, at the age of 76, will come as a sad shock to her many
friends.
She will be remembered chiefly for her books about the
Asian Communities and the Asian pioneers in Kenya. She chose to draw
attention to these communities at a time when their history had been largely ignored
and their contribution to Kenyan society was underrated. Her book
‘Through Open Doors’ published 1983 opened the eyes of many to the
intricacies of the various religions and differing peoples of the Asian peoples
of Kenya. The meticulous research and remarkable assembly of facts made
this book an essential reference book on the subject, which would be hard to
improve on. She went on to collect the histories of the Asian pioneers
in a number of books ‘We Came in Dhows’, ‘Two Indian Travellers’ and
‘Stories of the Punjabi Muslim Pioneers in Kenya’. Her hallmark was
always exact research with plenty of references, indexes and illustrations.
She was a perfectionist in her work and demanded a lot from the
publishers and editors, with whom she worked.
Besides her interest in the Asian communities she also
had a deep commitment to the nomadic peoples of the NFD, who lived on the
borders with Ethiopia in an area that is amongst the poorest and least
developed in Kenya. She spent time in Marsabit and Moyale and was never
happier than when riding her mule and collecting anthropological notes amongst
the Borana people. She later wrote a book about the Borana and also
helped compile a dictionary of their language. She wrote an extraordinary number
of books on a wide variety of subjects. She loved to write, contributing
to magazines, fascinating articles on subjects as diverse as sea urchins, the
mysterious graves at Ishakani, or Borana circumcision rites. But as she often
told me, she did not write for money, she only wrote on subjects that
interested her and because she wanted to. Her father Max Salvadori, also
a prolific author and a former professor at Smith College, Massachussets, had
told her that important maxim for success as a writer, at a young age. Cynthia
had a great admiration for her father, but also inherited an artistic talent
from her British mother.
Cynthia had a deep love for Kenya and came from an
Anglo-Italian-Kenyan heritage. She was conceived in Kenya but born in the
Uk and was always particularly proud of her mother’s ancestor Jack Haggard a
former British Consul in Lamu. He was the brother of the famous writer
Rider Haggard. Her father, who had been imprisoned by Mussolini for his
anti-fascist views, came to Kenya as an exile from Italy in 1932. When
the Second World War broke out in 1939, he returned to Europe to fight, while Cynthia
and her mother went to the United States where they eventually settled.
But as soon as she could, immediately after finishing university, she
returned to her African roots.
Cynthia was a nomad who never liked to settle long
anywhere. She loved to travel and needed the continuous stimulus of a
wide variety of people, cultures and religions. She wore her erudition
lightly, but was immensely knowledgeable and well-read on any number of
subjects. Amongst her passions could be listed cats and horses, crossword
puzzles and detective novels. She cared little about what she wore or
luxuries of any kind and always travelled light – never going anywhere without
her notebook, camera and more recently her trusty computer.
Cynthia possessed extraordinary determination and
strength of character, at the end of her life she refused to have an operation
on her arthritic hip but suffered it with great stoicism, never complaining.
She also had the gift of friendship and sympathetic conversation and was
most generous to all those she befriended. She was a person of great
value, and her multi-faceted talents will be difficult to replace or forget, her
like ever to meet again. Cynthia will indeed be sadly missed.
Judy Aldrick 29th June 2011
Comments