Possibly because the men were all outdoors shooting animals and clearing land, the best-known chroniclers of the romantic, improbable lives led by white settlers in British East Africa have been women: Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley. Dinesen’s Out of Africa is, considered in purely literary terms, the best book on the subject, but she was a self-mythologizer and, according to those who knew her and her world, essentially dishonest. Beryl Markham’s autobiographical West With the Night has achieved a popularity out of all proportion to its merit: while Markham’s life was thrilling by any standards, her prose is artificial and unconvincing, written in a sort of second-rate Hemingwayese.
Huxley (1907–1997) was less visionary and musical than Dinesen, less given to high lyricism than Markham, and more truthful than either. In forty-eight works of fiction and non-fiction—she was both a novelist and a political authority, one of the acknowledged experts on colonial and post-colonial policy—she explored Britain’s African empire and its disintegration, of which she was an astute and passionately interested eyewitness. The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), a charming novel based on her childhood memories of British East Africa (BEA) before the First World War, is a minor classic, giving a glimpse of Africa in its last, fleeting moment of primeval splendor and a matchless child’s-eye view of the courage and folly of its white settlers. “One of the mild surprises of advancing age,” she reflected, truly, “is to discover that part of one’s lifetime has turned into history, a process which one generally assumes has come to a halt about the time that one was born.”
Huxley’s biography—a life that encompassed the entire history of Kenya Colony as well as substantial portions of its pre- and post-colonial story—has now been written by C. S. Nicholls, herself a white Kenyan. It makes for interesting if rather dry reading, no match for Huxley’s own clear, colorful prose which has fixed indelible images in many a reader’s imagination. Unfortunately for Ms. Nicholls, Huxley inherited the stoic ethos and stiff upper lip of her caste, which considered displays of feeling to be un- becoming. She habitually suppressed her deeper emotions; the only feeling she allowed herself to show was irritation. This masked her inner life and has made her an opaque and elusive biographical subject. “As for soul-baring, I’m bad at it,” she admitted.
I myself lived in the one-time so-called “White Highlands,” on and off, between 1973 and 1989. When I first began visiting Kenya, early in the 1970s, the settler society described by Huxley still existed in a recognizable if watered-down form, but by the end of my visits there it had all but dis- appeared. The spread of the telephone throughout the 1970s, and the television set a decade later, dragged the white community out of its anachronistic and cheerfully self-imposed isolation. On another level, a certain self-consciousness set in with the international propagation and, ultimately, the marketing of anything that could be labeled “colonial” or “Raj.” Ralph Lauren’s clothing designs, evoking a fevered fantasy of deluxe safaris led, perhaps, by Bror von Blixen for the benefit of Teddy Roosevelt, were one manifestation of this trend. Another was the popularity of the bogus Out of Africa film with its improbable fashions: Meryl Streep braving the red African dust in frivolous white linen. (Real memsahibs of Isak Dinesen’s generation dressed, according to Huxley, rather differently, in “hideous clothing which was far too hot and bulky for the climate. This consisted of ill-fitting gabardine breeches, partly concealed by short, wide, flapping khaki skirts, and a khaki coat and boots.”) The final Disneyfication of Kenya—the moment it became clear that whatever might be left of the “real thing” had ceased to be real—occurred a couple of years ago, when an entire issue of Architectural Digest was dubbed “The Kenya Issue” and devoted to glossy houses, many owned by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of original settlers, worked over by architects and designers and decked out with African art. A far cry from the pre-World War I sitting rooms described by Huxley, with green velvet sofas and even pianos incongruously standing in whitewashed rondavels, on floors of puddled clay.
That the recent apotheosis of this “settler chic” has occurred in the midst of politically correct anti-colonialism has been possible, of course, because the erstwhile white masters lost their sting along with their power. As Huxley observed in the years following Kenyan independence, “The colonist hyena [is] emerging from the shadows into which the comrades drove him in the bad old imperialist days. Now that western imperialism (though certainly not other forms) has receded into history, the white colonist can be seen not only with his manifest failings, but with virtues it is no longer blasphemous to recognize.” And, “far from being black-hearted villains, [the white settlers] are becoming nostalgic old things deserving of affection rather than abuse, like steam railway locomotives.”
Huxley’s parents, Josceline (Jos) and Nellie Grant, arrived in Africa in 1912. Both from grand families—Nellie, née Grosvenor, was a cousin of the Duke of Westminster, while Jos was descended from a governor of Bombay—they had little money of their own and, impractical optimists, saw a glowing future in Africa’s fertile White Highlands. Upon their arrival in Nairobi Jos purchased five hundred acres of virgin bushland, suitable, he was told, for growing coffee, some fifty miles up-country near the little outpost of Thika. Thither the couple repaired, accompanied by oxcarts loaded down with eccentric impedimenta that included an Escoffier cookery book and a dressmaker’s dummy.
It is hard, confronted as we are each day with pictures of an Africa being torn apart by guns, drugs, and internationally financed warlords, to realize how isolated the interior still was only a century ago. At night, local Kikuyu warriors edged nervously up to the Grants’ camp, attracted by the apparent magic of a safari lamp. “They were like bronze statues endowed with life and moved tautly, as if on springs, ready to bound forward or back. One felt that just as they vanished into the void like antelopes when alarmed, they might spring forward when angered and thrust with spears; they were triggered men.” Huxley’s work is imbued with a feeling of loss as “progress” destroys this world, running through Africa “at breakneck speed … an elemental force, like wind or sun or lightning, that doles out good and evil more or less impartially.”
Elspeth sailed out to join her parents at the age of six; her memories of these early, pioneering days, with whites and Africans living parallel and mutually incomprehensible lives that intersected only on certain levels, are rendered in exquisite prose in The Flame Trees of Thika and its sequel, On the Edge of the Rift. Jos, a dreaming Micawber, and Nellie, a brilliantly entertaining woman of high energy but not, perhaps, very practical, make wonderful characters in Huxley’s fictionalized memoirs but must have been infuriating parents; everything they touched failed, and Huxley had to provide financial help from the moment she was old enough to earn a living.
Huxley remained obsessively fixed on Africa throughout her writing life, but as an adult she never deviated from her decision to live elsewhere. After studying agriculture at Reading University and, for one year, at Cornell in the United States, she settled in England. At the age of twenty-four she married Gervas Huxley, a businessman and the cousin of Aldous and Julian Huxley. Like her mother before her, she was the dominant partner in her marriage; Gervas was a gentle, diffident man. But as in many such cases he seems to have served as a protective buffer between his wife and her somewhat abrasive mother. “Nellie and Elspeth,” one friend recalled, “both powerful women, argued and fought all day long, comments like how dare you say that, give reason for your theory, voices rose as more gin poured in.” (They quite enjoyed their clashes, however, and in 1980 Elspeth collected her beloved mother’s letters and published them, with great success, as Nellie: Letters from Africa.)
Huxley’s first book was White Man’s Country (1935), a two-volume biography of Lord Delamere and in effect a history of the settler movement of which he was the political leader. Her sympathies, at this point, lay with her own people, the settlers; but they were to change over time, and though she never demonized the imperialists, by the 1950s she had come to believe that independence was not only inevitable but necessary. “Of course it’s hard on individuals,” she wrote, thinking of her many friends who lost their farms—their life’s work and only capital—in the forced land sales of the new nation. “Of course it has its personal tragedies. No man on earth can stop these great waves of history from sweeping away good and bad together. They not only can’t be stopped, they shouldn’t be. It’s right, you know, it’s right that people should be free.” This in spite of the fact that she disliked and mistrusted Jomo Kenyatta, and knew that the new African rulers would probably not turn out particularly well: “human beings,” she wrote, “are the same whatever their colour and level of so-called civilization—that is to say, on balance, bloody.”
Huxley’s non-fiction has, of course, dated: Africa has moved on, with a rapidity that even she, canny though she was, could not have foreseen. Her novels, though, continue to charm, with their thoughtful vision of the traumatic and often absurd juxtaposition of African and European cultures. Her upbringing had made her keenly aware that while human nature does not much differ from one culture to another, ways of perceiving the world emphatically do. European ideas of ownership and land-tenure, large-scale agriculture, and other innovations must have shaken the African worldview to its roots. The Kikuyu, as Huxley wrote in The Flame Trees of Thika,
walked about their country without appearing to possess it—or perhaps I mean, without leaving any mark. To us, that was remarkable: they had not aspired to recreate or change or tame the country and to bring it under their control… . If water flowed down a valley they fetched what they wanted in a large hollow gourd; they did not push it into pipes or flumes, or harass it with pumps. Consequently when they left a piece of land and abandoned their huts (as eventually they always did, since they practiced shifting cultivation), the bush and vegetation grew up again and obliterated every trace of them, just as the sea at each high tide wipes out footprints and children’s sand-castles, and leaves the beach once more smooth and glistening.
Huxley was a bit of an oddball, an artist and an intellectual (though she would have been too modest to describe herself as such) in a violently anti-intellectual culture. White Kenya, even when I knew it a couple of generations after Huxley’s youth, was disproportionately populated by people who nowadays would be labeled as having ADD: action, of nearly any sort, was to them far preferable to reflection. Huxley gave these people clear voices with which to explore their lives and the colonial project itself. Here, for example, is a conversation between several characters from The Flame Trees of Thika: Robin and Tilly, based on Jos and Nellie; Lettice and Hereward Palmer, their neighbors; and Alec Wilson, a clerk from London who has taken up farming in Africa.
“Whenever I look at a Kikuyu woman toiling up a hill with a baby and a load of produce on her back weighing about a hundred pounds, [says Lettice Palmer], I feel guilty.”
“How ridiculous!” Hereward exclaimed. “They are only natives. Do you expect to lower yourself to their level?”
“I sincerely hope I shall never have to try.”
“Surely,” Tilly put in, “the idea is that they should rise to ours.”
“Do you suppose,” Lettice mused, “that one day they will become adept at water-colour sketches and German Lieder?”
“It seems unlikely,” Robin reflected, watching a procession of three women, bent under their loads… .
“Surely that’s the whole point of our being here,” Tilly remarked. “We may have a sticky passage ourselves, but when we’ve knocked a bit of civilization into them, all this dirt and disease and superstition will go and they’ll live like decent people for the first time in their history.” Tilly looked quite flushed and excited when she said this, as if it was something dear to her heart.
“That is not the whole point of my being here,” Alec Wilson put in, during a pause that followed. “I didn’t come to civilize anyone. I came to escape from the slavery one has at home if one doesn’t inherit anything. I mean to make a fortune if I can. Then I shall go home and spend it. If that helps to civilize anyone I shall be delighted, but surprised.”
“Of course it will help indirectly,” Tilly said.
“They must have an example,” Hereward agreed.
“Do you think that we set an example?” Lettice inquired.
Nicholls’s biography will please those who are already interested in Huxley, or in colonial Kenya, but it is no substitute for Huxley’s own books, especially The Flame Trees of Thika, On the Edge of the Rift, and Love Among the Daughters, her semi-autobiographical trilogy. Her sound sense and intellect, combined with humor and a descriptive gift that at times rises to the poetic, leave readers with a rich vision of a life that, whether for better or worse, has disappeared forever.
