The Kenyan Independence Struggle, through British eyes

The blurb for Leopard at the Door reeks of The Far Pavilions.

“A sweeping tale of self-discovery, betrayal and an impossible love.”

“evocative portait of a woman — and a nation — on the cusp of profound change”

Note how ‘nation’ is an afterthought in that second sentence. The book is set in colonial Kenya of the 1950s — a period about which I know little, but which interests me — but that blurb was redolent of the classic colonialist tales where the European protagonist’s personal journey of self-discovery is at the dramatic forefront of the story, set against a few “native” characters and a sepia-toned struggle for freedom in the background.

Leopard is not quite as bad as all that. It was published in 2017, and the author is too modern to go full colonial-bore.

The British protagonist, Rachel, is eighteen, and was dumped in England for six years of boarding school after her mother died. Returning to the Kenyan farm she thinks of as home, she finds that her father has a new companion, Sara. The insecure Sara embodies the worst of imperialist Britishers, being relentlessly racist, self-important, condescending and nasty to the servants and fully conscious of the ‘white man’s burden.’ In fact, her conversation typically consists of lines like:

“Show me a native who has ever benefited from education.”

In contrast, Rachel’s dead mother was a saint. Beautiful, kindly, making clothes and starting schools for the children of the Kenyan workers, willing to hire a Kenyan to tutor her daughter. She was Lady Bountiful, bettering the lives of the poor villagers. What did she think about the fact that she and her husband were setting up a farm in Kenya, owning the land, and employing the former residents as workers? The reader never knows.

Therein lies the problem with this book: the characters are so one-dimensional. The racist and manipulative Sara, the benevolent mother, the weak father, the evil District Officer Steven Lockhart, the open-minded kindly American Nate, the generous cook Jim, are all single-note. Lockhart, in particular, is unimaginatively written. He is cruel and racist, physically beating Kenyan unionizers until they die. He is also a pedophile who sexually harasses the 12-year-old Rachel, and who sexually abuses her at 18 as well, a man whose every utterance is leering, and who wants young men to ‘toughen up’. He tells cheerful stories about “Micks [Kenyans] with their hands cut off.”

Meanwhile, Michael, the Kenyan mechanic who has fought for the British in Burma, has been to college, solves crosswords and reads Shakespeare. He exudes a movie-hero vibe, but he is the only character who seems to have something more under the surface.

a stillness about him, a surety […] as though he has knowledge, a confidence that is also a kind of physical grace that cannot be corrupted by the fears of other men.

Michael brings novel points of view to Rachel’s limited worldview. As a tutor, he asks her thought-provoking questions:

What if Caliban spoke a language that Prospero didn’t understand? Would it sound like gabbling to him?

Does a good man keep slaves?

It is always easy to criticize, but there were things to like about this book too, especially the exposure to the history. By the 1950s, Kenyans were being squeezed into smaller and smaller plots of land while the British settlers spread their wings over the lush fields near Mt Kenya. A militant wing of Kenyan freedom fighters emerged: the Mau Mau. They were dominated by the Kikuyu, and started requiring Kenyans to swear fealty oaths. They were brutal, both to the 30-odd European settlers they killed, as well as to several thousand Kenyans who were not sufficiently cooperative with Mau Mau. In return the British tortured and killed 25,000 – 50,000 Kenyans, some who died of malnutrition and starvation as they were packed off to ‘villages’ with barbed wire fences and watchtowers. (Among those tortured was Barack Obama’s grandfather)

McVeigh puts a lot of historical background into the book, and doesn’t gloss over any of the gruesome details. The reader gets a powerful sense of the brutality and desperation. Ears are chopped off. Mau Mau burn houses with people locked inside. The British make Kenyans — men, women and children — wait in the blistering sun without shelter or water until they are interrogated. Some are beaten to death. Women who have just given birth are made to walk hundreds of miles to the nearest ‘reserve’. Animals are tortured and maimed. Blood is plentiful. People are disembowelled with ‘entrails floating in the water’. The evil Lockhart wants to tie Kenyans “to a stake near hyena holes”.

Almost as many Asians (probably from the Indian subcontinent) as Europeans were murdered by the Mau Mau, but they are not mentioned in this book.

The countryside is described with a clear-eyed appreciation.

A donkey grazes on the side of the road, black barrels strapped to his sides, and beside him, under a lone tree, a man is resting. Clusters of green leaves emerge from the tangle of white thorns above him. His clothes are worn and tattered, and a panga is strung from his belt.

Lush mountains rise up, punctured by flat plains where giraffe bend their patchwork heads to the tops of yellow-barked acacias.

Rachel, despite her youth, is the (anxious, emotional) voice of justice, bravely saying things like:

We never admit that Mau Mau might be rooted in a failure of British policy.

There is a dark secret that Rachel holds about Lockhart, but that whole plotline never made sense to me. The latter half of the novel moves briskly through more mayhem, the rather obvious love affair, and a happy multicultural ending in 1955 Britain.

I expect there are better fictional routes to learning about the struggle for Kenyan independence.