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The organization of information is a particular passion of mine.  How a society organizes its information determines its culture, its values and the means by which it exercises power.  

For example, as Walter J. Ong explains in his brilliant contribution to human thought, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, oral cultures must organize their information so that the important bits are retained and readily accessed in memory (p. 32-77).  Hence, oral cultures emphasize proverbs (as a distillation of wisdom), rhymed and rhythmic verse (easier to remember), and vivid, gory rhetoric that glorifies violence (makes a strong impression on the listener).  The results for culture, values and the exercise of power?  Epic poetry; devaluing critical thinking (too destabilizing to communal wisdom); superstition (a result of a critical thinking vacuum); and non-rational, superstition-, brute force- and violence-heavy means of exercising power.

So I was intrigued to see Joan Acocella explain, in her review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in The New Yorker, that the reign of Henry VIII was a period of radical reorganization of information in England.  Citing the historian G.R. Elton, Acocella writes that, under Thomas Cromwell (the protagonist of Wolf Hall), "English political policy, formerly at the whim of the nobles, became the work of specialized bureaucracies. England thereby progressed from the Middle Ages into the modern period."

The need for these bureaucracies arose, of course, because of the proliferation of information.  The greater the quantity of information that needs to be organized, the less likely that an individual mind can manage it with proverbs and epic poems (although both get people pretty far, pace Homer).  

And, sure enough, both these points - the limits of memory, and the proliferation of information - are emphasized in leit motifs in Wolf Hall.  In a sub-sub-plot, Thomas Cromwell tries to obtain a memory device built by Guido Camillo.  The thingamajig is a cabinet with drawers inside of drawers, described as

a theatre on the ancient Vitruvian plan.  But it is not to put on plays. . . . The owner of the theatre . . . stand[s] in the centre of it, and look[s] up.  Around you there is arrayed a system of human knowledge.  Like a library, but as if - can you imagine a library in which each book contains another book, and a smaller book inside that?

(p. 472.)  In a foreshadowing of the fate to befall prodigious memory in a literate future, Cromwell never obtains the device.  (Indeed, Camillo never finishes building it.)

Mantel also makes sly and amusing references to the information "avalanche" burying her sixteenth century characters:

[King Henry VIII] slips into his mouth an aniseed comfit, and snaps down on it.  "Already there are too many books in the world.  There are more every day.  One man cannot hope to read them all."

(p. 472)

When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of.  [Thomas Cromwell] feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

(p. 492)  In a month!?  Cromwell, pity us the Internet!

Historical periods of reorganization of information are particularly rich, since they invariably involve upheavals of culture and power as well.  In such periods, opportunity (as much as ruin) abounds.  Out of the churn, the long shot can win; the lowborn son-of-a-blacksmith can become the adviser to a King and second-most-important in the nation.  

While Cromwell has long been paired with the adjective "Machiavellian," Mantel suggests that his patron saint may not be Niccolo, but Melvil Dewey.  Mantel makes a persuasive case that Cromwell's greatest asset was not his cunning, propensity to manipulate others or hunger for power, but his awareness and understanding of how information was being reorganized and the ramifications of the new order - especially the increasing importance of the financial industry.  Here, for example, is the commoner Cromwell besting the noble Earl of Northumberland in a battle of wills over Anne Boleyn:

How can [Cromwell] explain to [Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland]?  The world is not run from where he thinks.  Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall.  The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun.  Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

(p. 378).  Whether Mantel is correct, historically, about Cromwell's gift, the lesson for us is clear.  We are currently living through a historic moment during which information is being radically reorganized.  Digitization of traditionally printed materials, along with decreases in the consumption of printed materials (which face massive competition from television, movies, Internet, and video games), are only two of the monumental shifts in information organization that are impacting our era.  Awareness and understanding of these changes are our keys to leveraging them for profit (personal, political, financial or otherwise).  Short of this consciousness, we'll have to fall back on being Machiavellian to succeed.

(Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, after Hans Holbein the Younger, from The Daily Mail)
 

Gerald Hanley's Warriors is an extraordinary book for many reasons, including the ambivalence it expresses about colonialism.  

Warriors was published in 1971.  To get a feel for the sentiments about colonialism in that era, consider a statement by Charles Miller, in his author's note to The Lunatic Express, a book about the construction of the Uganda Railway across Kenya, also published in 1971:

[I]t is hardly possible not to have an opinion about the British Empire. . . . For the record, I think that the British Empire, with all its horrendous failings, was on balance a good thing.  I mourned its passing.

(p. viii.)  On the other side of the issue, here's James Beauttah, a leader of the Kikuyu Central Association, quoted in Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham's book, The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya, published in 1966:

"Our society had [been] broken down [by colonialism] and the unity that we had in our old structure had been replaced by everyone fighting for himself, everyone on his own against all the troubles that had been brought to us.  There was a fundamental growing disunity that was our weakness. . . . [W]e had had so many wishes and ambitions awakened in us and then always the door slammed in our face.  This is worse than never having the ambitions wakened in the first place, far, far, worse."  

(p. 243.)  Now here's Hanley, distilling his observations about colonialism, gathered during his military service in Somalia during World War II:

[T]here is nothing fine or noble about savagery and illiteracy and superstition, no matter how splendid looking the warriors and the women.  After a good long dose of savagery it is interesting how much one has learned to prefer the gentle and the sophisticated.  Primitivism is a very much overrated way of life, and is merely pitiful in essence, no matter how fascinating the carvings and the masks and the quiet zoomorphic ravings on stone and wood, those endless circles in which the tribe has wandered and lost itself, waiting for the stranger to come with the message, even when it leads to the atom bomb.
. . . .
After the enormous orgy of torture and massacre in Europe and Asia [during WWII], I felt it was impossible for any white man to preach again, self-righteously, about goodness and peace, to any non-white man.  And that shame may have been the reason, bigger than African and Eastern restlessness, which caused the white man to pack his kit and go home after the second world war.  We must have all felt something of that shame, I think, and acted upon it without really knowing why.
. . . .
Yet ironically enough, while the conquered everywhere resented losing their country and their freedom, they nearly always took advantage of the policed peace forced upon them, nearly always relaxed, their swords left at home, yet they wanted their country back for themselves, while enjoying the "peace of the grave," as Pandit Nehru once called it, in which they now toiled under aliens. . . . [T]ime is always on the side of the original owners, if they can only survive.

(p. 73-74, 86.)  Later, Hanley quotes a Somali chief:

"We are lending you the labourers," he told me.  "But only because you are living with us here on the river, and because you have spoken well, and not because we recognise this new government which has replaced the Italians.  We do not want to be ruled by any strangers anymore.  They beat us with cannon, but ever inch of this land is ours.  Ours.  It can never belong to any strangers.  Men cannot live under strangers who have taken their lands.  Never.  If I had a spear and you had nothing and I came and took your house from you, and made you work in your own garden for me, you would not like that.  That is what they have done, these governments.  And it must come to an end now.  You can tell them that, for that is what we all feel."

Hanley was moved by the chief's speech.  "I agreed with every word he said," Hanley admits, concluding, "All these people everywhere would have to be let free, left alone, lectured to no more, or this war would be as useless as the last one."  (p. 91.)

Taken together, these excerpts from Hanley reveal a multi-faceted understanding of colonialism that glitters with accuracy.  Eschewing both the "on balance" opinion-drawing of Miller and the focused accusations of Beauttah, Hanley sees: (1) opportunities for a modern life, in contrast to traditional, pre-modern living, as being a good thing, despite the risks, (2) colonized peoples enjoying the benefits of those opportunities, despite resenting having these benefits and risks forced upon them, (3) white men as having no legitimacy to press those opportunities and risks upon non-whites, and (4) the inevitability of white men having to give up trying.  In essence, Hanley achieves the same understanding as Tayeb Salih, who - writing about colonialism in the Sudan in his masterpiece novel Season of Migration to the North - typically offered his insight with more poetry and concision: "[T]he [British] coming too was not the tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine."  (p. 60.)

The conflict inherent in this position - I cannot bestow benefits without costs too high; I cannot receive benefits without losses too great - is wrenching.    A mere glance at the current states of constant war in Somalia and the Sudan, and the abysmal governance in Kenya - and at the thousands of refugees, impoverished, starving and violence-traumatized people  in these countries - confirms that, had a resolution to this fundamental conflict been possible, people on both sides of the colonial equation would have been better off.

But to say that is a little like saying (I don't want to push the analogy too far) that, had Communism been able to work out its kinks, the world would have been a better place.  On balance, colonialism wasn't (and isn't) a blessing, any more than Communism was (and is) a blessing.  They are both systems that can be shown viable in abstract form, but the models can't be applied in practice.

The reason is that this basic conflict of being unable either to convey or receive benefits without costs and losses being unacceptable is a dynamic that pervasively poses obstacles to human engagement.  It's not merely the fly in the ointment of colonialism; it's a feature common to all aspects of the the human landscape, be they familial, professional, economic, sexual, creative, political or ecological.  Negotiating this conflict is an integral part of human engagement with "others" - be they our parents, our neighbors, our employers, our creditors, our lovers, our collaborators, our politicians or our environmental resources.

And negotiations notoriously end, neither in victory nor defeat, but in compromise: neither tragedies, nor blessings, they are simple enablers to living.  Hanley's wisdom comes in accepting this fact with ambivalence.

(Drawing of Gerald Hanley by John Huston, 1970s, from Warriors)    

In the last month, I've spoken with Tanzanians about their frustration with the rate of economic growth in Tanzania relative to Kenya (typically traced back to Julius Nyerere's collectivization experiments), and I've also talked with Indians about India's pace of development relative to China (typically attributed to China's embrace of foreign direct investment, which India has strictly limited).  In both instances, I have felt that focusing on the economic indicators was too short-sighted.

More important than quarterly earnings reports and stock market performance, in my view, are indicators like the ability to change leaders without killing people and the degree of social tolerance for different groups.  These indicators necessarily signal a positive and deep-seated assimilation of modern governance and social norms; and these norms, in turn, lay the institutional foundation for modern economies.  Economic prosperity, on the other hand, can readily be achieved (but not sustained) without any such foundation and, as we have seen even in the U.S., can be the result, not of productivity, but of chicanery.

From this perspective, the good news is that "late bloomers" like Tanzania and India may actually be better off in the long run; the bad news, of course, is that they're poor(er) now, with all the ramifications (lack of international respect, shorter life spans, etc.) that poverty entails. 

Personally, I believe that these costs are worth the benefits.  Modernization is a slow process, and developing countries that allow it time are (in my opinion) better off than those that rush the process.  That said, I'm not from a developing country, and obviously perspectives can differ.  Therefore, I was interested to read, in Santosh Desai's recently published - and excellent book - Mother Pious Lady, an affirmation of my perspective.

Mother Pious Lady is a collection of essays about India's middle class.  In a selection called "The Power of the Imperfect Solution," Desai argues that:

India understands time.  It understands the transience of all things, including solutions.  It understands that there are no final solutions to problems [hear that "End of History" wallas?]; at best there is a temporary equilibrium that must eventually get destabilized and give way to a new equilibrium. . . . The desire for lasting solutions is nothing but a desire to freeze time.

(p. 135.)  This understanding leads Desai to advocate as follows:

[While] Western analysis operates by reducing a problem to its components and freezing it in time . . . [t]hings are classified, labelled, put in boxes . . . . Perhaps a good place to start would be to stop labelling situations and conditions indiscriminately as problems.  Moving beyond the simplistic problem/solution mode into the process/time mode will allow for a much more realistic understanding of how things change and how little they do.  That we [Indians] understand this is a huge advantage; let us not take to the flashy shallowness of other modes of thinking in our quest to be seen as successful in the short run.

(p. 139.)

At the risk of being accused of "flashy shallowness" for praising a commentator with whom I agree, I think Desai's perspective is immensely valuable.  All countries - the so-called "developed," as much as the "developing" - are currently trying to strike the right balance between communal and individual, traditional and modern, indigenous and foreign.  Desai's explication of value in India's communal, traditional, indigenous views has done a great service to Indians . . . and to anyone interested in achieving balance in their own lives and countries.

(Image of Santosh Desai from Times of India)    

At a recent humanitarian training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, I had the opportunity to reflect on the extent to which modern thinking can impair learning. 

The training involved one Power Point presentation after another, most of which entailed some stultifying combination of semantics, theory and complicated visual depictions of behavior models.  The training materials looked like they'd been held hostage in some business management consulting firm that demanded ransom in the form of adherence to its enthusiasm for inane diagrams supposedly representing conceptual analysis of real world phenomenon.

Earnestly attempting to stave off sleep by focusing on the slides, I recalled Walter Ong's explanation in his masterful book, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, that abstraction is a characteristic of thinking in literate (that is, modern) societies.  Pre-modern, oral societies think more situationally:

Illiterate subjects [in one experiment] consistently though of the group [of drawings of a hammer, saw, log and hatchet] not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations - "situational thinking" - without adverting at all to the classification "tool" as applying to all but the log. . . . A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: "They're all alike.  The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces.  If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet.  It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." . . . Asked why another person had rejected one item in another series of four that he felt all belonged together, he replied, "probably that kind of thinking runs in his blood."

(p. 51 (citations omitted).)

Of course, situational thinking isn't bad or less intelligent than abstract, categorical thinking.  It's a different way of organizing information that, in certain contexts, is appropriate or even superior to abstract, categorical thinking.

One such situation, I have discovered, is during a training for hygiene promotion in emergencies.

Hygiene promotion involves persuading and cajoling people into washing their hands after using the toilet.  Safe water and food handling, safe disposal of excreta and solid waste, and safe management of "vectors" (rats, flies, mosquitoes, etc.) is also part of the job.

The job can be difficult and anxiety-provoking because the subject matter can be embarrassing, and people are often unwilling to discuss or change intimate habits, especially with or at the behest of strangers or foreigners.  In learning how to do the job, case studies, simulations and opportunities to work directly with relevant populations are helpful.  But as any parent who has toilet trained a child can affirm, diagrams of models of behavior change don't offer much assistance in getting a kid to use a toilet.

This retreat into business-consulting-speak may be a simple result of hiring too many engineers to do water and sanitation-related work in emergencies.  Engineers are notoriously poor communicators. 

But this silly and ineffective abstraction about hygiene promotion may also have another cause: anxiety about discussing embarrassing and, potentially, demeaning issues.  Making a behavior model about hand washing may seem, to some, more important work than actually communicating with others about hand washing; certainly, there's less risk of personal exposure and humiliation. 

Sadly, such a perspective simply leads to wasted efforts.  No matter how advanced the society in which we live, we are all practitioners of primitive functions, like defecating.  Modern thinking is powerless to change ancient facts.

(Image courtesy of the Global WASH Cluster website) 

"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago.  I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought.  She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.

I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber.  From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots.  In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now.  You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options.

But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker.  Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture."  Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory.  Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real":

Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?

Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters.

I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's.  Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive. 

More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows.  Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation.

But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs?  The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books.  She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal:

(1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.

At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient.  The modern world demands much of its denizens.  People must be educated and informed.  They must be physically fit and attractive.  They must be healthy and engaged in the world.  They must have families and jobs.  They must be sexy and productive.  They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound.  They must be free of prejudices and self-aware.  They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community. 

No other time in history has demanded as much of its people.  Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor.  These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time.  Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles.  Everyone must be everything.  And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have.

The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands.  Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it?  How do you meet social expectations in this day and age?  Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do?

Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day.  They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.).  

Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations.  Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it?  So perhaps we now overcount their importance.  

Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer.  Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs?

(Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia)

Recently, referring to one of my manuscripts, a publisher made a comment that can be summed up in this joke:  "Knock knock."  "Who's there?"  "The audience."  "The audience who?"  

Apparently, the answer wasn't manifest on the face of my manuscript.

The question is cogent.  Stories are obviously told differently depending on the audience.  (I recall, for example, an excruciating presentation I gave at a law firm during which I wildly - and inexcusably, since I'd been working at the place for four years - misjudged my audience's ability to exercise their imaginations or laugh.  Dead silence.  Vacant stares.  Awkward shifting in chairs.)  

Equally important, stories are sold differently depending on the audience.  And if one endeavors, as I do, to be a published author, one needs to care about how a book might be marketed, even if this job isn't rightly the author's (and, indeed, excessive interference on this end of the operations might be considered to be lunatic behavior).  

Nonetheless, despite all the wisdom I recognize in the "whose the audience?" query, I can't seem to get too enthused about it during the writing process.  When I think of who might read my work, I think "everybody," and probe the answer no further.  

This approach isn't (merely) laziness on my part.  I really do see myself as writing stories for everyone - for men and women, the generalist and the specialist, for those who hail from the developed world, and for those who are slogging through the developed.  (From the sales perspective, of course, my self-image is sub-optimal because not "everybody" buys books: women buy books, and more specifically, middle- and upper-class women, mostly from developed countries.)

But my approach is also informed by a simple pragmatism: if I thought too much about what other people would think of what I was writing, I wouldn't be doing my best work - if I'd be doing any work at all.  Self-consciousness is a notorious drag on creative output.  Writing to her Aunt Bess in April 1914, Karen Blixen remarked, "I believe that it would be impossible to write if one gave consideration to who is going to read one's work . . . ."  (Letters from Africa, p. 5.)

Is it a coincidence that it took Karen Blixen twenty years from that toss-off comment to sell a book? 

Karen Blixen's writing has long been recognized as being significant as much for what it omitted as for the subjects on which it dwells.  But that recognition has focused largely on Blixen's coyness about her affair with Denys Finch-Hatton.  Obfuscation seems to have been the modus operandi of their relationship.  As Errol Trzebinski recounts in Silence Will Speak:

Friends who knew Tania and Denys well - few were privileged to observe their relationship closely - concluded that they fully intended to perpetuate the aura of mystique which from the start has served to swathe and protect them in an enigmatic smoke-screen.
. . . .
"Tania and Denys were both very elusive and meant to be" . . . .

p. 150 (Denys called Karen "Tania" after "Titania," the Queen of the Faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream).

Reading Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham's The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya, I realized that omission and obfuscation characterized another relationship in Blixen's life: that of her self-touted love for her "black brother." (Karen Blixen, Letters from Africa, p. 390.)

Although Blixen's tenure in Kenya, from 1914 to 1931, spans important, early expressions of black Kenyan political agitation against the British government, she doesn't count this behavior in her inventory of Native capacities.  Her blindness is significant because Blixen was not immune to politics in Kenya: she rails about political maneuvering by the settlers ("I am so angry with the English because they want to impose higher taxes on them [the Natives]," Letters from Africa, p. 240).  But while white political activity provoked her sense of noblesse oblige, black Kenyan political activity completely escapes mention in her writing.

In March 1922, for example, the British arrested Harry Thuku (pictured), an activist who wrote a letter demanding redress of grievances from the British government.  After his arrest, Kenyans calling for his release converged on the detention center in Nairobi.  The protest ended in gunfire and between 21 and 56 deaths.

Among the many remarks of note in Karen Blixen's letters from 1922 are references her troubles with Bror, to her sister's death, to resuming painting, to her love of lilies, to her hair loss, to her brother Thomas' visit, and to books she and Thomas are reading, but the most singular political event of the year finds no mention.  (Caveat: some possibility exists that mention of Harry Thuku was not a topic the editors of her letters thought worthwhile to allow to remain in the letters, but - looking at entirety of her correspondence from Africa and her concerns during her years there - the possibility seems remote.) 

Black people - her servants being the only ones she knows - do crop up in her letters from 1922:  she bemoans her cook, Isa, being poisoned by his wife, and she celebrates her servant Juma's daughter, who "sets the table and makes toast and is full of her own importance as a houseboy."  (Letters from Africa, p. 132-133).

What explains this obliviousness by a writer who, in her own estimation and that of many critics, is incisive in her observations and humane in her depictions?  Shadows on the Grass, Blixen's superfluous follow-on to Out of Africa, provides a clue.  

Two pages into Shadows on the Grass, Blixen begins rhapsodizing about the paradigm of Master and Servant: the servant "needs a master in order to be himself."  (Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, p. 378-379.)  Her notion that blacks need a white telling them what to do in order to self-actualize is only too clear.  

The thing about servants - good servants, anyway - is that they're not disobedient.  They don't demand redress of grievances in a threatening way.  "Agitation" and "activism" are not their domain.  One the contrary, good servants have, as Karen Blixen says of black Kenyans in Out of Africa, an "immense gift for resignation" and keep "up a peculiar self-feeling in their relations to those who persecute[] them."  (Out of Africa, p. 144.) 

"Good servants" - not activists - seems to be all Karen Blixen can accept in the way of a role for black Kenyans in their relations with whites (that is, unless the black Kenyans are helpless, impoverished, ignorants in need of medical attention, in which case she is happy to help).   

In fairness, Blixen recognizes that some Africans - the Masai, for example - are warriors, not servants; but the Masai are pointedly outside the scope of white-black relations: they're isolated, on their "reserve."  And although Blixen acknowledges that Kinanjui is a Kikuyu chief - not a servant - in Kinanjui's relationship with her, his role is to provide her farm with labor: that is, servants.  When Kinanjui asks for a favor in return - to retire to her farm to die - she refuses him.  

Outside the scope of Master-Servant relations, Blixen doesn't have any capacity for interaction with black Kenyans because, ultimately, what seems to have stimulated her "love" for her "black brother" was the power she held over them.  Less educated than she wanted to be, less attractive than she'd hoped, perpetually struggling with her weight, dependent on her family for money, infected with syphilis and then abandoned by her husband, passed over for marriage by her lover, unsuccessful in her business endeavors, hopeless as a farm manager, the predominant experience of Karen Blixen's life in Kenya, as articulated in her letters, was helplessness and disempowerment.  Only in her relationship with the blacks around her was she able to fancy herself in control, although - if she recognized this fact - she wasn't able to record it in writing.  

What she does commit to paper, repeatedly, is a fixation with feudalism and the nobility of long-ago relations of power that, in the modern world, are recognized as unfair.  I don't doubt the sincerity that characterizes her status as an aristocracy groupie; but her romanticization of the past served as a convenient screen behind which to hide troubling questions about her power over the blacks on her farm.  

That Harry Thuku and black political activity don't manifest in Blixen's writing is therefore no surprise: Blixen defends herself by failing to see what she can't imagine, and her imagination was remarkably fixated by feudalism.

(Photo of Harry Thuku from Black Past)

Elspeth Huxley and Lewis S.B. Leakey were both born and raised in what is now Kenya in the early parts of the twentieth century (when the territory was British East Africa).  Both were keen observers, cogent critical thinkers, articulate voices, adventurous travelers and prolific in their works and writings.  They were also both sympathetic to black Africans and adopted balanced perspectives about colonization and its impacts on settlers and natives.

Despite these similarities, they come out on different sides of a question of pressing importance and, in light of my work at the UN Environment Programme, immediacy in my own daily life: environmental degradation.

Kenya currently is suffering a long-running and debilitating drought.  Electricity - much of which is generated by hydropower - has been rationed because the water levels are too low to produce sufficient supply.  Crops are failing, and people in Samburu are dying of starvation in the same horrifying manner (if not numbers) as their forerunners in Biafra and Ethiopia did.

In 2009, with our current knowledge of climate change, Kenya's condition looks like the effects of increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - and maybe it is.  But drought and the attendant sufferings aren't new in Kenya, and people have long cultivated knowledge about water, its sources and the impacts human activity can have on its availability.

Writing in 1963 on the cusp of Kenyan independence, in the context of the the handover from white national forest administrators to their black successors, Huxley writes:

The Masai are no respecter of forests.  Trees, to them, are enemies which rob them of potential grazing, rather than allies which anchor soil and make of it a sponge to absorb rainfall and return it in the form of springs.  The Masai drive their herds up into the glades and start fires which destroy the vegetation.

Across the Rift [Valley], on the south-western slopes of the Mau escarpment, you can count at least a dozen fires every time you fly over the mountains.  You can see blackened patches and clearings hoed for crops (a lot of these Masai have Kikuyu wives who cultivate) and the gloomy spectacle of human predators colonizing and spoiling the forests.  Already springs are dwindling and soon rivers that have always flowed the year through will be turned into seasonal streams that come down in spate in wet seasons, and dry up altogether in between.  Then what will the Masai do for water?  When their streams turn into dry, sandy river-beds they will shrug their shoulders and say shauri ya Mungu: the affair of God.  Perhaps it is, for tolerating so much human stupidity.

Elspeth Huxley, Forks and Hope: An African Notebook, p. 20

The argument that water shortage in Kenya had a human - and specifically "native" - cause was not original in Huxley's day.  Almost thirty years earlier, in 1936 - and about sixty years before the term "climate change" had entered our daily discourse - Lewis Leakey debunked the "blame the natives" theory of water shortage in Kenya:

The soil erosion which is taking place so alarmingly in some parts of the country, and the destruction of so much forest by fires, are both commonly attributed to the natives and their carelessness.  I believe,  however, that the more important factor governing both these troubles is a purely climactic one, although it is probably true that excessive grazing by goats and sheep, and carelessness with fire in forest areas, is hastening the process of nature.

If dessication really goes on for the next two or three hundred years at the rate at which it has been at work in the past few hundred, it will not only be the European community in Kenya that will suffer but also the natives, and as they have less money at their disposal for water boring and for water conservation, the latter will probably suffer the worst.

Lewis S.B. Leakey, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems, p. 169

With the scientist's perspective of drought patterns over hundreds of years, Leakey was able to identify Kenya - as early as 1936 and perhaps earlier - as being in a pattern of "dessication" caused by "climactic" factors.  Leakey understood that the drying up had started centuries earlier; and, moreover, that this latest phase was not the first in a series of swings between lushland and desert that Kenya had experienced over millennia.

Certainly, greenhouse gas emissions may be responsible for a speeding-up of this dessication process; what Leakey thought might happen in two or three hundred years might be occurring in sixty to one hundred.  Still, the comparison between Leakey and Huxley is significant: even the sharpest eye is apt to misconstrue what it sees without the scope of other disciplines and perhaps hundreds of years.

On the other hand, consider the perspective of Stephen Dobyns in his poem, "Where We Are (after Bede)."  Dobyns doesn't have (so far as I'm aware) any exposure to Kenya, let alone opportunities for close analysis of its people, soil layers or climactic patterns.  Nonetheless, from his perch of severe distance (nay, ignorance), he sums up climate change in Kenya (and worldwide) better than either Leakey or Huxley could:

This is where we are in history - to think
the table will remain full; to think the forest will
remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of
good fortune will save us from the night - a bird flies in
from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.   

To research my fourth novel, I have been spending time on safari in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, where I can experience environmental conditions that approach those that prevailed in British East Africa of World War I.  I frequently stay in a small, thatched-roof, canvas-walled cottage on the banks of the Malewa River, where shy water buck, demure bush buck, aggressive buffalo and plucky warthog cross, from which zebra and impala drink, around which monkeys scamper, and out of which hippopotamus surface like submarines.

Sitting on the raised veranda of the cottage, I've learned much:

• Animals, contrary to the notion I had - derived from high school reading about mythical Native Americans moving soundlessly through the forest - can make a lot of awkward crashing noise as they move through scrub and in their interactions with rivers.
• On the other hand, I am continually amazed at how animals can be grazing or passing virtually next to me, and I wouldn't have noticed them had I not serendipitously turned my head or looked up from my book.
• Animals are surprisingly often equally oblivious of my presence.  Don't they smell me?  Hear me creaking in my chair or walking in my cottage?  Apparently, they're used to a fair amount of awkward crashing noise and, as for smelling me, either they've all got sinus infections or the smell doesn't carry like I'd thought it would.

That said, I have noticed a marked increase in my "animal sighting quotient" since I've started coming on safari regularly.  Over time, I've learned to spy dik-dik "hiding" in plain sight by standing motionless; to distinguish the loping gait of the jackal threading through dense bush; to recognize the difference between the sound of wind rustling trees and animals snapping branches.

Some of this increased sensitivity is the result of greater exposure; but some of it is attributable to a slowing down - of my movements, of my gaze, of my breathing.  When I go on safari, I find I'm downshifting gears biologically as much as mentally: I'm relaxing my city metabolism as much as letting go of my urban worries.

So I felt a frisson of recognition finding two descriptions of this phenomenon by women more experienced in it than I.  Here's Elspeth Huxley on the "Dr. Doo-little" personality:  

The senior warden of the Tsavo National Park, David Sheldrick, and his wife, share their house at Voi with a great many animals and birds.  Both Sheldricks belong to that small company born with an instinctive understanding of their fellow creatures and with the patience which goes with these queer, unsought talents.  Such individuals are gentle, quiet in motion, slow spoken, unassuming, in a sense absorbent; they have a tranquil, indrawn quality.  People who are taught, jerky, spark-like and aggressive seldom draw from an animal the trust and feeling of security it needs.

Elspeth Huxley, Forks and Hope: An African Notebook, p. 135.

Now Karen Blixen, on the adjustment necessary to appreciate wilderness:

Out in the wilds I had learned to beware of abrupt movements.  The creatures with which you are dealing there are shy and watchful, they have a talent for evading you when you least expect it.  No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal.  The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa, p. 15.

To be honest, "slow spoken, unassuming . . . . tranquil [and ]indrawn" and having an "aptitude [for] stillness" aren't accurate descriptions of me yet.  But in the pleasure I experience from the emphatically non-urban thrills of the bush, I recognize in me "the ache for slow beauty/to save you from your quick, quick life," and I hope this means, as Kapka Kassabova promises in her poem "The Door," that I've reached age enough to have stopped "knocking on a door without a house."  The fourth book will tell.