Reading (and films): The American perspective beyond the news media

Wangari Maathai, author, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former member of Kenyan Parliament, writes of the European influence on Kenya’s development:

“The missionaries were followed by traders and administrators who introduced new methods of exploiting our rich natural resources: logging, clear-cutting native forests, establishing plantations of imported trees, hunting wildlife, and undertaking expansive agriculture…" -- Maathai, W. Unbowed: A Memoir. Anchor Books: New York, 2008, p. 17

As Americans, if we look beyond the news media, our view of Kenya is likely to be based primarily on stories from the perspective of those Europeans, many of them independently wealthy.

Karen Blixen and her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, left Denmark in the early 1900's and created a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills of British East Africa (now Kenya). She wrote about this experience, her life there, and her relationship with big-game hunter Denis Finch Hatton in Out of Africa under the name Isak Dinesen, published originally in 1937 (Modern Library, 1992). Probably more familiar is the Oscar-winning Sydney Pollack movie by the same name starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford (1985). To its credit, the film shows beautiful scenes of Kenya and does not dodge the contradictions in the character’s lives. Having watched it recently, I’m still pondering the scene of Finch Hatton toting around large ivory tusks in an early segment of the film juxtaposed against his lament of man’s interference with the natural environment in a later monologue.

Italian socialite Kuki Gallmann, author of I Dreamed of Africa, developed a ranch near the Great Rift Valley of Kenya in the 1970’s before dedicating her life to conservation (see Gallmann Nature Conservancy). This memoir, too, has been produced as a film by the same name (2000). I give Roger Ebert a “thumbs up” on his review – which makes it clear that the film, starring Kim Basinger, is entirely missable. I was further disappointed to learn that much of the filming was done in South Africa rather than Kenya.

Less well known to Americans (probably because it hasn’t hit the big screen) is Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s My Kenya Days (Harper Collins, 1994). Thesiger, recognized by the BBC as one “one of the 20th century's greatest explorers,” writes of his early game-hunting treks in Kenya, a period as honorary game warden, and his settlement there in the last chapter of his life. The book reads more like a trail guide than a memoir, as Thesiger describes the setting, wildlife, and native people with what seems an anthropological air. I kept a detailed map of the country close at hand and found the book a good primer on geography, particularly of the Rift Valley and Northern Kenya. Throughout the reading of this book, I had a disquieted feeling that I could not fully articulate. And then, in doing a bit of research, I ran into this quotation from Michael Mewshaw of the New York Times:

“Wilfred Thesiger has long had a reputation as a legendary traveler, in his words ''perhaps the last explorer in the tradition of the past.'' But while his courage and resourcefulness are admirable, his autobiography indicates no awareness of how much his expeditions depended on poor, tractable people in dictatorships and colonial regimes. That this type of travel is no longer possible might strike some readers as less a tragedy than a cause for relief.” -- “Barbaric splendor suited him.” A review of Thesiger, W. The Life of My Choice in The New York Times, March 20, 1988.

Claudia Daggett