White Highlanders
Patrick Marnham
Happy Valley Nicholas Best (Seeker £6.95) The story of the English in Kenya, when it is told, will make an excellent book. Happy Valley is not it. Instead, Nicholas Best has collected a number of good anecdotes about the first settlers, Kenya in the two World wars, the struggle between the colonists and Whitehall, and the campaign against the Mau Mau. Much of this ground has been covered before, but not all.
One story which was new to this reviewer was the trick played by settlers on the party of Zionists who came out to view the Kenyan highlands as a possible place of settlement. Elephants were stampeded through their camp; Masai warriors threatened them; lion tracks were printed outside their tents: after only three days the Zionists decided to return to London and refuse the British government's generous offer. This story is rather hard to believe — apart from anything else it was surely Uganda which the Zionists were meant to be inspecting— but it is worth telling anyway as it has a certain likelihood about it: that is how the settlers would have behaved.
Other stories are undoubtedly true in every sense. Evelyn Waugh's account of his visit to Lady Delamere's house at Elm enteita is always worth repeating. 'Lady D fished in lovely stream where I was stung by nettles. Caught nothing. Returned to find Raymond [de Trafford] arrived. He got very drunk and brought a sluttish girl back to the house. He woke me up later in night to tell me he had just rogered her and her mama too.' Ah, Kenya. Here is the founding myth of Happy Valley, a remote and beautiful country, a place of light-hearted pleasure, where in the author's words, there was 'a life of laziness and laughter and long, lingering looks between fit men and their best friend's wives'.
In a rather wistful aside Nicholas Best states that the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi 'has probably seen more fornication than any other club of its kind in the world'. This unverifiable claim would not be immediately obvious today. Comfortable and agreeable as the club remains its present membership does not quicken the pulse.
In truth there must have been a large measure of refuge in this adventure from its earliest days. The original government offer made in 1901 proposed a place in Africa which was teeming with game, where the soil was rich and the land was cheap or free, and where, above all, the climate was healthy. The offer was repeated in 1919 when Britain promised very little to many aspiring farmers. To the first arrivals, and even to the second and third waves of settlers, Kenya in its unspoiled state must have seemed more than they had ever hoped for.
It did not take long for reality to intrude. Lieutenant Richard lvieinertzhagen's punitive expedition against the Kikuyu in 1902 had preceeded the arrival of the white settlers. 'I gave orders,' reported Meinertzhagen 'that every living thing except chil dren should be killed without mercy . . . Every soul was either shot or bayoneted. . . I was surprised at the ease with which a bayonet goes into a man's body.' His action was officially approved. In years to come the Kikuyu also carried out punitive expeditions. Hilda Stumpf was an elderly American missionary who for 20 years opposed the important tribal custom of female circumcision. In 1930 an intruder entered her bedroom and forcibly circumcised her. A.G. Leakey lived all his life in Kenya and was a blood brother of the Kikuyu tribe. During the Emergency his wife was killed and the old man was abducted, carried into the forest and forced to take the Mau Mau oath. Then he was buried alive as a sacrifice to the god Ngai.
Mr Best does not skimp this darker side, but his book does seem to miss a dimension of the white experience. Elspeth Huxley and Margery Perham have both drawn a picture of a more thoughtful community. Above all Karen Blixen, whose masterpiece, Out of Africa, is mentioned by the author in passing, suggested that for a time at least there was the possibility in the settlement of creating something a bit nobler than a jolly racket. There is a clue to be found in another book she wrote about Kenya, Shadows on the Grass.
One day the Kikuyu squatters on her farm asked her an important question, 'did the King of Denmark laugh?' Your tribe', they added, 'is different to those of the other white people. You do not get angry with us as they do. You laugh at us.' Many settlers found it easy to laugh at the Africans, but not many of them used laughter as an alternative to anger. The sympathetic understanding which Karen Blixen reached with some Africans, and which may have been shared by such friends as Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton, failed however to take root. Perhaps it depended on the innocence of this first encounter. Remembering it 30 years later Karen Blixen wrote, again in Shadows on the Grass: 'I have told of how I sat and watched Denys flaying the lion [she had shot]. Going back to that morning after so many years it seems all alive and clear round me, hard to leave once more. I knew then, without reflecting, that I was up at great height, upon the roof of the world, a small figure in the tremendous retort of earth and air, yet one with it; I did not know that I was at the height and upon the roof of my own life.'
Finch-Hatton and Cole both died and Karen Blixen went broke, and the remainder of the colony's short life was increasingly dominated by an ugly struggle between white and Kikuyu for land. In view of the implications of that struggle, that the interests of Kikuyu and English were irreconcilable, the residents of Happy Valley sensibly enough preferred their jokes.
When the joke died, the colony died with it. There was not much point in Happy Valley when the more apt question had become: 'Are you married? Or do you live in Ealing?'
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