Category: my kenya days

I DREAMED OF AFRICA by Kuki Gallmann

This book recounts the author’s life in Kenya. Originally from Italy, she had always been fascinated by Africa, and eventually moved there with her second husband, buying a large ranch on which they kept cattle and provided a safe haven for wildlife.

She provides an interesting picture of Kenya in the 70s and 80s, at the tail end of the Happy Valley period, and includes many accounts of her intimate experience with African wildlife. The heart of the book however is her various bereavements. Her husband is killed in a car crash, and then a few years later, her son, an amateur herpetologist, is killed by a puff adder. Their funerals are minutely recorded, as are those of two or three of her friends.

Now, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.

I think I may have a heart of stone.

Great suffering does not necessarily make a great novel. Heartfelt sincerity, while important, is not all you need. (Oscar Wilde: “All bad poetry is sincere.” Ouch)

Now, before you start hating me in the Comments, let me give you an extract, and you hand on heart try and tell me that this is not dreadful:

There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa . . . A last eagle flies majestically back to nest on steep cliffs.

Clearly, while she may have dreamed of Africa, she did not dream of writing without cliché.

In the interests of fairness, I should say it is very readable, especially if you skip the funerals. I couldn’t sleep last night, and polished off about 200 pages from 1am.

I admire the lady, who has a genuine and inspiring love for the Kenyan landscape, and has had a genuinely terrible time; but I just cannot admire the writer.

MY KENYA DAYS by Wilfred Thesiger

I found this randomly in the bottom of a cupboard. Wilfred Thesiger is apparently a fairly famous explorer. Born in 1910, he travelled very widely throughout his life, to areas then wild and untouched.

It is almost like he got in just under the wire: when there were still wild areas of the world that weren’t online, or at least on a National Geographic special. This book is written when he is 84, and he clearly feels cramped in our smaller and more interconnected world.

At first glance he would appear to be a typical product of a certain kind of privilege: born in Africa, to a father in the Colonial Service, then Eton, Oxford and a life of travel across Africa and the Middle East, producing books with exceptionally dubious titles: ARABIAN SANDS, VISIONS OF A NOMAD, THE MARSH ARABS. One feels that one gets the picture. However, let me tell you, the picture is not at all what one would think.

He was miserable at Eton and Oxford, and you gets the impression that he scrabbled to get back to Africa like a drowning man. He travelled always on foot (and we’re talking across the DESERT, chaps. Across the wilder bits of the African savannah) for months at a time. He travelled, and often lived for long periods (like years) with local people. He was in short, entirely, and amazingly, bush.

Also amazingly, he has managed to write a rather boring book about it. Given this kind of source material, this is quite a feat. It is mostly just an account of dates and places, and people’s names, without very much life to them. The rather unfortunate title MY KENYA DAYS gives you a sense of the kind of novelistic ambition we have here. Or don’ t have.

It gets most interesting, actually, when he talks about his current life. He is living with some of his travelling companions, Kenyan men, and their families. He eats goat stew every day, sleeps in a room with five other people, and seems terribly happy. He rather charmingly rambles on in old man style about their various dogs, and the funny things they do, and the children: Sandy, Talone, and Bushboy. He talks about how lonely he would be in the flat he still owns for some inscrutable reason in Chelsea, and ends the book with this: “It is here, among those whose lives I share today, that I hope to end my days.”

An impressively original man. One of his books is called THE LIFE OF MY CHOICE, and I kind of felt that I could see that he really he is one of those few who actually do make their own choices.