Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway’s last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer.
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ISBN-10: 0-7432-4176-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4176-2
Portions of this work were previously published, in different form, in
THIS STORY opens in a place and at a time which for me, at least, remains highly significant. I spent the first half of my grown-up life in East Africa and have read extensively the history and literature of the British and German minorities who lived there for a brief two and a half generations. The first five chapters may be hard to follow today without some explanation of what was going on in Kenya in the Northern Hemisphere winter of 1953–54.
Jomo Kenyatta, a well-educated and widely traveled black African, a Kikuyu who had married an Englishwoman when he lived in that country, had, according to the British colonial administration of the time, returned to his native Kenya and unleashed there a black farm laborers’ insurgency called Mau Mau against the landowning immigrant farmers from Europe whom the Kikuyu believed had stolen the land from them. It’s Caliban’s grievance in
Mau Mau was not the Pan-African independence movement that forty years later has finally achieved black African majority rule in the whole of the sub-Saharan continent but something, for the most part, specific to the anthropology of the Kikuyu tribe. A Kikuyu became a Mau Mau by taking a sacrilegious oath that separated him from his normal life and turned him into a kamikaze human missile aimed at his employer, the European immigrant farmer. The most common agricultural implement in the country was called in Swahili a panga, a heavy-bladed, single-edged sword, stamped and ground from sheet steel in the English Midlands, able to cut brush, dig holes and kill people under the right conditions. Almost every agricultural worker had one. I am not an anthropologist and what I am describing may be nonsense, but that’s how Mau Mau was seen by the European immigrant farmers, their wives and children. Sadly enough, the most people eventually killed and maimed by this bit of applied anthropology were not the European immigrant farming families it was designed to harm but those Kikuyu who resisted oathing and cooperated with the British colonial authorities.