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Out of Africa 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.
A review by Mary Bull from Stephen Luscombe’s excellent blog The
British Empire
Elspeth Huxley - A Biography
by C S Nicholls
Below Mervyn Maciel with Elsepeth Huxley
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:
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)
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.
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Cynthia Salvadori (with Mervyn Maciel)
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
Dear Mr Fernandes,
Your online account of white women in Africa has just been sent me by
a friend in S. Africa. Errol Trzebinski was a near neighbour in Lamu but, sadly, I had to flee Lamu in 2021 abandoning my 18th century house and all my
possessions after being set up by the criminal police and a number of
judicial officers in an attempt at extortion.
About 5 years ago she fell and broke her hip and the end of her femur is now impacted inside her abdominal cavity. At the time she was advised that she might not survive any surgery. Her daughter, Gabriella came out from UK to nurse her and remains in Lamu. At one stage Errol went up to the Nanyuki Cottage Hospital; nothing was done to repair the impacted femur but she was kept on morphine and returned to Lamu in a zombie-like state. She recovered from that eventually but I have heard more recently that she is now in a poor mental state, not helped
by the death of her son, Bruce, in Portugal a month ago.
I also knew Cynthia Salvadori well. She carefully contrived that I
should find her body so as to protect her house servant who was
probably very wise as subsequently, the police alleged that I had
written the suicide notes, an allegation repeated at the inquest and,
not content to invent allegations made repeated demands that I pay
their expenses. Cynthia was restricted to her apartment in a
house owned by Jony Waite so I would call on her very regularly. This
was to my advantage. In the acknowledgements to my own book of memoirs
‘A lot of loose ends’ I wrote “Cynthia was an acknowledged
anthropologist and historian with experience of the pastoral peoples
of Kenya, southern Ethiopia and southern Sudan with an encyclopaedic
knowledge, so her assistance was most helpful and her urgent
enthusiasm to read the next chapter acted as a goad, compelling me to
get on with the task. As each chapter came off the printer she
suggested various changes and improvements.”
I also used to treasure a photograph of myself and Nelly Grant at a
wedding in 1965 but sadly that is one of the many possessions and
books that I left behind. I am now a resident of Morden College, a kind of up-market almshouse, in Blackheath, S.E. London.
Regards,
Roland Minor
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