Fiction and Poetry

2 Settler Literature: Fiction and Poetry N ADDITION TO HER NONFICTION, Elspeth Huxley wrote a number of novels about Africa, mostly about Kenya. Some, such as Murder at Govern- I ment House (1937), are detective novels of no particular value, although some have been reprinted long after their original appearances. This particular novel would suggest that Huxley could rely on British readers having enough familiarity with a Kenyan setting to accept the conventional British crime-fiction pattern transplanted. Government House, however, is depicted as if it were an actual transplant itself, which of course it was, and the fiction is almost en- tirely concerned with mannered upper-class British characters. One of her novels deserves special attention, for it is an anomaly not only in her own work but also in Kenyan writing altogether. It is a revenge tragedy structured like a crime novel, although the intended crime is never committed. A Man from Nowhere brings to mind the assassination in London of Michael O’Dwyer in 1940 by an Indian activist who blamed O’Dwyer for the 1919 Amrit- sar Massacre in India. Published in 1964, just as white Kenyans were flooding out of newly independent Kenya, it seems a psychological thriller that reveals more of the author’s psychology than that of the characters. Although Kenya is never named as the setting, there are enough clues to identify the protagonist, Dick, as a self-exiled Kenyan white come to Britain to assassinate the Labour cabinet politician he feels is responsible for the betrayal of the whites and the handing of the colony over to former terrorists. Dick’s brother had been killed by Mau Mau and his wife had committed suicide. The whiteness of the High- lands and the entire colonial project has been negated by politicians at home: in that sense, Dick’s place of identity has been negated, and “nowhere” is his new home. Full of bitterness, he wants justice; somebody should pay for the devas- tated families the ‘wind of change’ has brought about. This phrase, repeated twice in the novel, is an echo of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s wording in his speech to the South African Parliament in 1960, recognizing that 38 WHITE SPACES Ꭻ nationalism and the drive to independence in Africa had become irresistible; the phrase was a signal of policy change, and Kenyan whites saw it as the writing on the wall – that Britain would no longer support them. This is a sluggishly written novel without convincing characterization. Hux- ley built suspense and romance into it, but both seem forced. The surprise end- ing spreads tragedy over all the main characters, leaving no hope for either Kenya or Britain. It is a very dark text. The victimization of whites in Africa is seen off and on, mostly in Edenesque flashbacks; they form the history of the plot as well as an epitaph for the settlers who are now embarked on their diaspora. Even stronger is her depiction of the British at home by Labour politicians. Drawing on her own experience of rural life in England and Wales, where she and her husband had played at hobby farming, Huxley portrayed lower- and middle-class English workers as having lost their national consciousness and their belief in themselves. She has Dick notice “the smallness of everything, and the apathy of people about their future. It was the past that really brought these people to life.”1 She uses castration symbolism for a people who seem downtrodden and small-minded, and who are certainly quite ignorant of recent events outside their own parish. The cabinet minister is presented as a fraud who has failed his own family as well as his nation. Thus, the novel-as-epitaph extends over the entire British people and Kenya is just a small example of this cultural collapse. A conservative polemic, A Man from Nowhere is imbued with bitterness and despair. One could hypothe- size connections with Nellie Grant’s circumstances, and those of friends leaving Kenya with little or no compensation; Dick’s predicament is theirs, and had made Huxley a woman from nowhere, for while she had written herself an identity as a prosperous writer, the place she and her writing came from was being extinguished and denigrated, and it was Labour politicians she blamed for let- ting it happen so quickly, when it had seemed there was lots of time to prepare a different endgame. She knew the reality the colonists faced, and felt their pain and loss. This is Huxley’s darkest work, and the closest she comes to modernism. Another crime novel, by Allan Peverett, Death Stalks in Kenya (1957), is equally dark in its depiction of settlers: The author has a white man, disguised as a black man, commit murder with native poison, in an attempt to escape detection. Highly complex, and with a safari insert that has another murder arranged by elephant, as well as the necessary romance, the novel is of a pattern with the late-1950s settler writing – grim, dark, and without much hope for a future. Even so, Kenya produced nothing like Leon Whiteson’s Whitesnake (1982), which sees 1 Elspeth Huxley, A Man from Nowhere (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967): 127, 25..

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