Kenya's Literary Ladies and the Mythologizing of the White Highlands

Abstract

In the 1980s one of the curious aspects of the West's fitful concern with Africa has been the revival of interest in Kenya's literary ladies: Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley.' This revival of interest is marked by the award-gathering cinematic version of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, the televised record of Markham's adventures and achievements, together with the popularity of her biography, Straight on Till Morning, and the successful televised dramatization of Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika. And while it is morbidly interesting that a revival of American and British interest in literature is marked primarily by cinema and television activity - indeed, caused by such activity - it has been graced by new editions or at least new printings of the respective memoirs of the three ladies: Out of Africa, West with the Night, and The Flame Trees of Thika.2 There is a certain amount of coincidence in the revival; the centennial of Dinesen's birth, the publication of several popular accounts of life in the white highlands (Nicholas Best's Happy Valley and James Fox's White Mischief, for example), and the discovery of Markham by the feminists are all among the contributing events. But whatever the external circumstances of the revival, it has to be understood in terms of an internal dynamic and relationship - an interrelatedness of subject, author, and audience. It is a phenomenon of both race and class. James Olney's Tell Me Africa is a study of black African autobiography. Apart from its analytical and explicatory virtues, it is important because it points toward the significance of the autobiographical

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