Out in the noonday sun

National Review, July 31, 1987 by Priscilla L. Buckley

Out in the Noonday Sun, My Kenya

byElspeth Huxley (Viking, 262 pp., $18.95)

IT IS 1932. Elspeth and Gervas Huxleyare newly married and out of work. Gervas takes the only job he can find, in the tea industry in Ceylon, and 26-year-old Elspeth wangles a commission in Kenya to write the biography of the late Lord Delamere. It is eight years since she has set foot in the land where she spent her childhood with her parents, the impractical dreamer Jos Grant and his down-to-earth and thoroughly admirable wife, Nellie (amusingly described in Mrs. Huxley's The Thorn Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard).

Mrs. Huxley, NATIONAL REVIEW's Africaeditor in the Fifties and Sixties, is a writer of power and charm. At the end of her long journey from England, her ship pulls into Mombasa:

Mombasa's history is long and bloody,the dogs of war have made a killing here, many killings. Now that they are kenneled for the time being the island, lying like a viridian tongue between two mainland lips half closed over a mouthful of sparkling blue creeks and inlets, presented a gentle aspect to the world. . . .

Out in the Noonday Sun is aboutthe people Elspeth Huxley mingled with and talked to in pursuit of the Delamere story: those British settlers, hunters, soldiers, miners, administrators, engineers, and farmers--mostly farmers --who made their homes in Kenya between the great wars, before new dogs of war, the Mau Mau, were unkenneled and Britain's East African empire came tumbling down. She credits Jomo Kenyatta's gestures of conciliation toward the British community once independence had been achieved and the insights of Michael Blundell, an enlightened British soldier and settler, who persuaded what remained of the British community to accept Kenyatta's overtures, for the fact that, to the surprise of many, "the night of the long knives--or the sharpened pangas --never happened.'

Mrs. Huxley has the reporter's probingeye and a refreshing, nonjudgmental attitude: She is an observer and a raconteur, a skeptic and a wit. Even her digressions make a point.

Take "goat bags' and royal visits.Goats were often accepted in rural Kenya as payment of taxes, and since Treasury, in far-off London, could compound interest but not offspring, young goats became a form of ready cash that district officers used to defray expenses Treasury would never have approved (Kenyagate?) . . . As for royal visits,

There is a thesis to be written on thelegacy of royal visits to colonial possessions. . . . In many a far-flung outpost of Empire a gleam came into the eye of many a district officer as he reached for a file in which was embalmed a cherished project clobbered by a Treasury veto. . . . I know of at least one rutted track that had been converted into an all-weather road to enable a Princess to lunch with a remote farmer whose dwelling (in which a loo had to be installed) commanded a spectacular view.

Something of the caliber of themen and women who settled Kenya comes through in Cockie Hoogterp's reaction to a newspaper story reporting her death. When a distressed editor called to apologize, she said it was quite all right, she was returning all her bills marked "Deceased.' When pressed to correct the record, she dictated the following: "Mrs. Hoogterp wishes it to be known that she has not yet been screwed in her coffin.' The newspaper had confused Cockie, the second Baroness Blixen (Isak Dinesen was the first), with the third Baroness Blixen, who had indeed died in a motor accident in Turkey. An easy mistake in the East Africa of that time, when there was a great deal of running away with other people's husbands and wives. This was accepted with astonishing aplomb. "They fell in love' seems to have been explanation enough. But one philandering earl was murdered by a jealous husband, who, though acquitted, was thereafter shunned by good society, as was his erring wife. The Muthaiga Club disapproved.

There is the famous Dr. Burkitt,who, finding a patient in a dangerously high fever, stripped her naked for the long drive to the hospital. During the trip her fever fell. When they arrived, the patient was fully dressed and the doctor naked. When a threshing machine sliced Stanley Polhill open from chest to groin, Dr. Burkitt fitted a football valve to a bicycle pump and pumped air into Stanley's surviving lung. Polhill lived to climb the 13,000-foot summit of Kigangop.

These were extraordinary people,these Kenyan farmers, many of whom arrived in British East Africa with wives and small children, a few pounds in the bank, and little knowledge of farming--or anything else. Their steadfastness and courage in adversity are astonishing, and their joie de vivre is unsinkable. Why did they choose to stick it out through droughts and plagues, malaria, dysentery, and black fever, depressions and wars? Partly because "farming is an infection for which there is no known antidote, not even failure.' But also because so many of them had fallen hopelessly and irrationally in love with Africa: its mountains, plains, forests, jungles, and skies; its dawns and its sunsets; its great herds of wild animals; its peoples; the excitement, the challenge.