4 Nothing of Value: Colonial Fiction about ‘Mau Mau’

Fiction as Propaganda and the Settler Novelists

Propaganda Advantages of Fiction over ‘Non-fiction’

Now that ‘Mau Mau’ has been introduced as a concretely explicable historical phenomenon and an attempt has been made to establish where historical fact ends and the myth-constructing enterprise of colonial ideology begins, I can turn my attention from the ‘non-fiction written about ‘Mau Mau’ by the colonial authors to the fiction. The central proposition of this book, as indicated in my introduction, holds that fiction reveals, or ‘renders visible, the structure of the ideology within which it is produced. The basic structural features of colonial settler ideology have been identified, it now remains to examine how these are revealed by the fiction. It will become apparent in the process just how little distinction there is between the propaganda functions performed during the 1950s by the ‘non-fiction about ‘Mau Mau’ and those performed then (and still being performed now) by the fiction.

Where the propaganda potential of his/her medium is concerned, the writer of fiction has several advantages over the writer of ‘non-fiction. Where Stoneham, for example, propounds the ‘myth of the lazy native’ in his ‘factual’ accounts of ‘Mau Mau’, the best he can produce by way of evidence for his assertions is a series of anecdotes about his personal experience or that of his acquaintances. His readers may or may not believe him, depending on the extent of their ideological sympathy; if they do it can only be because they are predisposed to believe what he says, because either way they have no immediate means of verifying his statements outside of their own ‘experience’. The novelist, by contrast can ‘create’ a fictional world in which blacks can be seen to be lazy. They can be described as lazy by white or, even better, black protagonists, but it won’t end there as it would with ‘non-fiction’. The views of the protagonists can be confirmed both by ‘omniscient’ authorial comment and by the configurations of the plot. If the fictional world is self-consistent, if the writer can convince his or her readers that the novel describes the ‘lived’ experience of individuals, then the characters’ encounters with (or even experience as) lazy blacks will be accepted, and the myth will be perpetuated. The internal logic of the novel is more likely to win ideological converts, or at least induce ideological reinforcement effects, than the bald statements of the ‘non-fictional’ works which submit themselves directly to extra-textual reference.

Moreover, as Huxley’s A Thing to Love exemplifies particularly well, where the fictional world interpellates the reader sufficiently strongly to win assent to its general outlines, every individual detail that conforms to those outlines is likely to gain more or less unquestioning acceptance. Thus, for example, Huxley has a member of the movement describe Chief Kimani, a ruthless government-appointed ‘chief’ as follows: ‘ “I know Kimani well,” said the trader. “He has made a lot of money from his coffee and from other crops. The people in his district are rich. He is a strict man and so they do not like him. He doesn’t let them brew enough beer.” ’1 Because extensive use has already been made of the myths about ‘the African’s’ lack of moderation (particularly in relation to alcohol) which would incline him not to favour a ‘strict’ chief, the reason given for the unpopularity of this particular government chief – that he didn’t let the people brew enough beer – rings true in its fictional context. It is clearly intended, and doubtless happens with many readers, that the particular will be taken as exemplifying the general, and the unbridgeable political and economic differences between the government-appointed ‘chiefs’ on the one hand, and the large body of landless peasants on the other, will be forever reduced in the reader’s mind to a matter of beer. In the process the reader will almost certainly have his or her attention distracted from the fact that by 1953 no Gikuyu had been allowed to grow coffee for long enough to have grown rich from it. And the reader will probably be induced to overlook the implausibility of Huxley’s having a member of the ‘conspiracy’, as ‘Mau Mau’ is called throughout the novel (a term which calls to mind the colonial recourse to conspiracy theory touched on in my last chapter), make the absurd claims that, firstly, ‘the people’ of any district in Kenya ‘are rich’, and, secondly, that the wealth of the ‘chief should somehow bring wealth to all the people of his district. (This ignores the fact that most of the wealth of the chiefs derived precisely from the labour services of the people in their districts.) As was seen in Chapter 2, the more land and wealth the ‘chief possessed the greater the number of dispossessed peasants the district would produce.

The fictional world is made self-consistent through a structure of mutually reinforcing interpellations. Here the attribution of wealth to all the people of the district ties in perfectly with attempts made throughout the novel to suggest that many of the participants were wealthy men, and thereby to disguise the economic causes of the revolt To have acknowledged that the wealthier Gikuyu were almost invariably government supporters, for the reasons given in Chapter 2, would have undermined the whole fabric of the colonial myth of ‘Mau Mau’. Thus, for example, the reader is told in a description of one of the many district committees of the ‘conspiracy’: ‘The other two were men of less education but greater wealth. One was a barber in the town, the other a trader who owned several lorries. No one knew the extent of their riches, but rumour had it that the trader’s yearly income exceeded forty thousand shillings.’2 And of Josiah, one of the leaders, it is said: ‘He had gone into trade and politics, which mixed well. Several trading ventures had turned out nicely and now he owned three lorries, a contractor’s business, a chain of bakeries, an interest in a newspaper and various other concerns.’³ There is nothing in the novel to suggest that this wealth was in any way exceptional. The suggestion that three of the five men described were men of some education, which (as Chapter 2 will have shown) would be highly unlikely, performs the same function. The wider ideological implications are clear. If colonialism brings such wealth (and education) to the African population it must be a good thing. And if such people then turn on colonialism and organise a revolt it can only be out of ‘hatred’, ingratitude and lust for power.

Whatever is said in fiction, then, needs only to accord in some measure with the co-ordinates of the fictional world to have credibility for those who believe in that world. This means that the most far-reaching notions can be implanted in the mind of the reader with little risk of their being rejected. This chapter will show just how far-fetched many of the notions endorsed by the fiction are, and will suggest that most of the novels written about ‘Mau Mau’ by white authors are nothing more than vehicles – and conscious rather than unconscious vehicles –for the propagandising of the settler view of ‘Mau Mau. They are peopled by whites who generally conform perfectly to the settler’s idealised conception of him or herself, as exhibited in the ‘non-fiction’, and by blacks who dance obediently when their author pulls the strings of myth and stereotype. Apart from their all too obvious commercial value in Ruark’s case, these novels appear to exist largely to give a white readership confidence in its myths.

Fiction is the production of ideology. This means that an ideologically determined selectivity is operative in the production of every aspect of the fictional world offered to the reader. This is usually obvious enough in characterisation; it is perhaps less obvious of other aspects of the novel such as, for example, scene-setting or ‘local colour’ passages. In this fiction these are often presented as the protagonists’ first impressions of Kenya. These range from Sheraton’s, ‘he was admiring the multi-coloured flowering shrubs, looking at the negroes with their prancing feet and their loud flashy clothes, and the other negroes with their dragging footsteps and their shapeless, cotton rags’,⁴ to Marjorie Harding’s:

I kept telling myself that every city has its seamy side, but all the same I felt that Kenya was letting us down. There was a smell of stale refuse in the air; hordes of the more unwashed type of Indian swarmed over the roads and congregated at the corners; Africans in filthy shorts and even filthier shirts, threading a path between them, wobbled past on bicycles, or simply stood and stared with prominent, lack-lustre eyes. The squalid, ramshackle shops and dwellings could not have been described as picturesque by any stretch of the imagination.5

Add Thomas’s description of the same part of Nairobi, ‘the streets narrowed and became dirty and smelly’,⁶ and the overall force of the words ‘dragging, ‘shapeless’, ‘rags’, ‘smell’, ‘hordes’, ‘unwashed’, ‘swarmed’, ‘filthy’, ‘squalid’, ‘ramshackle’, ‘dirty’ and ‘smelly’ makes it clear that for the white writers poverty is something Contemptible, another stick with which to beat the drum of white ‘civilisation’. Harding’s paragraph displays a total misrecognition of the surface symptoms of colonial underdevelopment (even down to a blind notation of some of the symptoms of malnutrition) and, given that necessary conceptual absence, provides a perfect example, in Wolf’s terms quoted earlier, of ‘the kind of stupidity which ascribes to the people themselves the responsibility for the evils to which they are subject’. No thought is given to the socio-economic causes of the poverty precisely because this is a structural impossibility of the ideology.

The ostensible criticism of ‘I felt that Kenya was letting us down’ can be seen as part of a complex interpellatory structure which has a close parallel in Ruark’s use of American tourists such as Nancy Deane: ‘The car approached the native bazaars, and Nancy Deane got her first look at Africa, heard her first African sounds, smelled her first African smells. She seemed stunned. The smell was enough to stun a stranger.’⁷ This is followed by a snatch of dialogue where Nancy’s: ‘You don’t mean to say people actually live in these shacks?’ is answered by: ‘They jolly well do. About fifty thousand of them, I reckon. They’re happy enough.’⁸ Empirical ‘facts’ about Kenya, whose selection is determined by colonial ideology’s necessary determinate blindnesses, are inserted into the fictional consciousness of a ‘character’ who is presented as initially outside the closed circle of ‘recognitions’ and ‘obviousnesses’ which constitute the controlling ideology of the fiction. In Nancy Deane’s case this is made explicit in her tendency to side with blacks, and in her brother’s, ‘my apologies for Nancy, but she took a couple of courses of sociology in her senior year in college’.⁹ This type of ‘consciousness’, pre-treated by the controlling ideology to iron out any traces of fundamental contradiction between it and that ideology, then serves as a fictional ‘test’ for the controlling ideology which the latter naturally comes through with flying colours. What we have here is, then, the presentation of the ‘position’ of the naive liberal-reformist visitor: a recognised critical position which – while ‘thinkable’ because it is not systematically anti-colonialist – needs to be fictionally falsified to clear the ground for the counter-interpellation of colonial apologetics. (This is primarily done by weakening/destroying the unitary conception of man central to metropolitan liberalism.) The descriptions of Nairobi set in train one of the main interpellatory devices of realist fiction – the presentation of ‘change’ in key characters whereby a process of convergence between their consciousness as initially presented, and the ‘truth’ of the fiction as a whole (known in advance by the author), is presented as a process of learning.

Settler Novelists, and Variations in the Myths Endorsed by Some Metropolitan Writers

This chapter will deal with eight novels whose production can be seen to have been determined by the colonial settler ideology outlined in Chapter 3. A further four novels about ‘Mau Mau’, also written before Kenya’s independence, but giving evidence of being determined by a markedly different ideology (the dominant ‘liberal-democratic’ ideology whose hegemony was established in the metropolis, as opposed to the essentially fascist ideology of the settler response to revolt in the colony), will be discussed in the next chapter.

Of the novels to be discussed here only three (Ruark’s Something of Value, and those by Huxley and Thomas) would appear to have been conceived by their authors as novels primarily about ‘Mau Mau’. Uhuru is set in post-Emergency/pre-independence Kenya but is discussed here because large sections are devoted to the Emergency and the ideological determinants of the two novels appear to be identical.¹⁰ The other authors, Sheraton, Harding, Kaye¹¹ and Stoneham,¹² merely use ‘Mau Mau’ as a background which adds additional spice to thrillers, ‘romances’, detective stories and mysteries. The bland way in which these authors take the colonial racial stereotypes and the myths about ‘Mau Mau’ for granted and put them forward as ‘facts’ is possibly, as far as ideological interpellation is concerned, even more effective than the detailed accounts of the movement given by Ruark and Huxley. The ‘romance’ or detective story enthusiasts, having set out simply to satisfy their enthusiasm, come away ‘knowing’ a bit about ‘Mau Mau’ and ‘the African’, or having had what they had gleaned from newspapers confirmed by its acceptance by people who ‘know’ enough to write books. ‘Knowledge’ in this context (particularly the kind of ‘knowledge’ disseminated by ‘authorities’ such as Ruark) can be equated with power (the power of pre-emptive definition, translated into political practice, to affect the lives of vast social masses). Said’s argument in Orientalism is pertinent: ‘Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny. . . To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it’¹³ Said goes on to elaborate on the knowledge/power dialectic: ‘. . .knowledge of subject races . . . is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.’.¹⁴

Only two of the novelists under consideration can be regarded as Kenyan settlers. One of these is Stoneham, the other is Huxley, who identifies herself explicitly with settler views: ‘You flatter me by tending to regard me as a sort of spokesman for the Kenya settlers. This puts me in a false position. I can lay no claim to such a distinction.’15 Huxley could declare, as late as 1964: ‘The habit of colonialism dies almost as hard as that of tribalism. It is the habit of knowing what is good for others and seeing that they get it.’¹⁶

The other authors were not settlers, had only limited experience of Kenya and accordingly had no immediately concrete need to subscribe to the colonial settlers’ justificatory ideology. The determinants of the subjectivities of these authors derive from the metropolitan rather than the colonial social formation and there are, as one would expect some variations in the body of myths endorsed by their novels. Thus Harding, for example, writing a novel for the Collins Romance Library, after a brief visit to Kenya, and having no vested interest in subscribing to the settlers’ view of themselves, can allow her romantic hero to say: ‘This is a hard country, Mouse, and it breeds sharks. You won’t find many people giving you a helping hand if you are down on your luck. The majority will shove you farther under if it suits them. And it usually does.’¹⁷

Thomas, ‘one of the youngest colonels in the British army’,¹⁸ whose experience of Kenya was acquired as an army officer on active service against ‘Mau Mau’, provides the best example of the kind of divergence from the settler ideology that these novels reveal. The suggestion that settler agricultural practice might not have been universally irreproachable, which is ‘unthinkable’ for the settler, is not unthinkable for a visiting army officer. Henderson, a long established settler, tells Jackson:

You’ve neither love for this country nor your own land You’ve ruined that farm of yours, absolutely sapped it dry. When you came out here after the war that farm could produce eighteen bags to the acre – you’ve thrashed it and put nothing back, so that I doubt if anyone will ever get more than five bags now. And you’ve treated your labour abominably. There’s no room for your sort in Kenya, Errol.¹⁹

The passage clearly interpellates the reader with the ‘obviousness’ that most settlers loved their country and their land and didn’t treat their labour abominably, but settler farmers like Jackson are conspicuously absent from the settler writings. Moreover, and even more ‘unthinkable’, Jackson promptly murders Henderson, makes the murder look like the aftermath of a ‘Mau Mau’ raid and frames Karioki, Henderson’s servant.²⁰ The plot recounts Karioki’s experiences on being forced to join a group of forest fighters and the hero, Derek Stone’s, attempts to clear Karioki who had saved him from a ‘Mau Mau’ attack earlier.

Thomas, for whom ‘Mau Mau’ posed a military challenge rather than a political threat can also afford to be more accurate historically than the settlers, and to recognise some of the difficulties facing the individual Gikuyu peasants during the Emergency. For example, he has one of the forest fighters tell Karioki that there was no alternative to joining the ‘gang’; ‘I came over from the Rift Valley. There were hundreds of thousands of us who used to work on the European farms. When we got back to the Reserve we had no land and there was no food. I had to do something, and there was no choice.’21 It was, as has been seen, ‘unthinkable’ for the settlers that members of ‘Mau Mau’ could have gone into the forest for socio-economic reasons such as these.

The justificatory myths which Thomas develops most fully are those which relate specifically to the conduct of the ‘security’ force campaign against ‘Mau Mau.’ The one aspect of the Emergency for which the army officers would feel a particular need for justificatory myths would relate to the treatment of prisoners. Thomas accordingly gives the myth of ‘Mau Mau’ cowardice (not it is worth noting, endorsed by Ruark) its fullest elaboration in this fiction. This is seen particularly when forest fighters are captured:

Stone looked at him in astonishment and contempt The man actually seemed eager to bring about the destruction of his own men. Such behaviour was by no means exceptional, he knew. Everyone talked of this baffling absence of any sort of loyalty once a gangster was captured.²²

The elaboration of such a myth is clearly the best way to gloss over the third-degree methods being used. That the myth is elaborated specifically in the interests of the army’s reputation rather than that of the ‘security forces’ generally can be seen from a (somewhat contradictory in relation to the last quotation) passage a few pages earlier:

Duffy took a step forward and hit the prisoner savagely across the mouth with the back of his hand. Kifaru jerked his head back, scared out of his wits. His lips began to bleed and blood showed on his teeth. The two police askari remained completely impassive.

Stone was horrified.

’Don’t do that again, Duffy’, he said coldly in English . . . ‘We’ll do this the proper way. There’ll be no more violence.’²³

Duffy is a policeman, Stone is the army officer. The otherwise wholly redundant ‘in English’ is there to interpellate coolness (which equals rationality and control as against irrationality) and ‘proper’ (which equals legal) behaviour as attributes of Englishness which, in this context is a property of metropolis/army as against colony/police, but is more generally a property of white as against black.

Despite such, comparatively minor, divergences from the colonial settler view outlined earlier, and despite the different emphases placed across the range of settler myths, attributable to variations in geographical, biographical and other social, particularly class, determinants, the non-settler novelists to be discussed in this chapter subscribe to all the central tenets of the colonial view of ‘Mau Mau’. Thus Thomas can be seen to subscribe to the myth of African brutality; to the myths about the oaths; to the notion that ‘these people have only known civilisation for – what – fifty years?’; to the myth that ‘Mau Mau’ mutilated its victims, and so on.24 This indicates not only the persuasiveness of the settler myth-making and the propaganda about ‘Mau Mau’ directed towards Britain, but also suggests, again, the fundamental connection between metropolitan and colonial ideology by revealing just how receptive the general ideological ground of the metropolis was to the fictional ‘concretion’ of discursive typologies and narrative structures produced in settler propaganda, based on the specific forms of colonial racism and colonial fascism.

This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first I examine the extent to which the myths about ‘Mau Mau’ identified in previous chapters are endorsed by the novels, and in the second I examine the various fictional devices, such as the use of plot and of different categories of spokesmen, used in presenting the settler view of the revolt Examples are taken from all the novels under consideration but particularly from Ruark and Huxley who are the best known and the only two of the group whose works are still readily obtainable. But it is not enough simply to stop at the surface recognition of either the colonial myths or the individual components of metropolitan bourgeois ideology that can be identified in the fiction. The notion of ‘rendering visible implies the existence of a necessarily interconnected structure of representations, recognitions and interpellations (based on the structure of interconnected practices in which their bearers are formed as subjects) which is revealed by the fiction. My third section, in which I focus largely on Ruark and Stoneham, endeavours to provide a more systematic account of the ways in which the structures of the settler ideology identified in Chapter 3 are rendered visible in the colonial fiction.

Although Ruark and Huxley are widely recognised as racist writers in some circles (though these clearly exclude the vast majority, for example, of the whites in southern Africa as well as large sections of the popular fiction reading public in Britain) it is clearly important to examine the ways in which the colonial myths are projected, and the techniques used to interpellate putative readers. Moreover, though Ruark can be shown (now that the fruits of such research as that of Rosberg and Nottingham, Barnett and Buijtenhuijs are available) to be presenting a highly inaccurate and mythologised account of ‘Mau Mau’, his publishers remain undaunted by such research and his readers are allowed, if not encouraged, to remain ignorant of its findings. The 1980 reprint of the Corgi edition of Something of Value still claims that: ‘His first and most famous novel tells, with horrifying accuracy, what it was like to live in Kenya.’²⁵ Ruark makes a point of insisting in his forewords on the historical accuracy of his novels. Thus in the foreword to Uhuru he gives himself a retrospective pat on the back with: ‘It was five years after the publication of Something of Value until the famous Corfield report substantiated the bare facts on which my fictitious creations were founded’²⁶

That Ruark’s novels are still, a quarter of a century later, being allowed to disseminate the settler version of ‘Mau Mau’ under the pretence of historical accuracy need not merit anyone’s concern if Ruark were as little read as Neil Sheraton (or, for that matter, Alexander Pope) but, alarmingly, one finds that the Corgi paperback editions of both Something of Value and Uhuru were reprinted, with a single exception in each case, every year from 1970 to 1980. The publishers refuse to release sales figures, but the frequency with which the novels have had to be reprinted suggests that Ruark has quite possibly had a greater formative influence on the Western image of Africa, and ‘Mau Mau’ in particular, than any other writer.27 It is considerations such as this that make it imperative that these colonial novels be subjected to the kind of study embarked upon here.

The Embodiment in Fiction of Colonial Myths About ‘Mau Mau’

Interpellation and the Relationship between Author and Character

The concern of this section is to show something of the extent to which the colonial myths about ‘Mau Mau’ were embodied in the colonial fiction. Some of the techniques used to ensure the reader’s acceptance of the ‘authority’ of the protagonists who are used by these authors to give utterance to the myths will be examined in the next section, but before going on to indicate the extent of the fiction’s endorsement of the colonial myths it is important to comment briefly on the identification of implied author with character.

By far the largest part of such traditional critical analyses of the techniques of fiction as Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is taken up with the discussion of different types of narrator, control of distance, and so on.²⁸ While it is obvious that establishing the exact relationship between character, narrator and author is vitally important to the immanentist critic in search of the ‘meaning’ of a work (which he or she expects, a priori, to be unitary), it is also apparent that where the ideological interpellation of subjects is concerned it is not so important whether the author is deliberately distancing him or herself from his or her characters or not The interpellation can proceed even where the author apparently dissociates him or herself from what is being said by the characters, though there are, of course, limits. Thus, to take a straightforward example, Brian Dermott, the main protagonist of Uhuru, can say: ‘. . .you’ve got the individual Wog himself to worry about He hasn’t changed with the winds of change Macmillan yaps about He’s still the same old lazy Wog, who’d rather sleep than fight rather fight than work, rather argue and drink beer than either fight or work.’²⁹ Irrespective of any distancing character traits Ruark may have imbued Dermott with in an attempt to suggest that he does not have his author’s full approval, such, for example, as his excessive drinking, and irrespective of Ruark’s explicit dissociation of himself from the racist terminology used by Dermott (‘My use of the words “nigger”, “Wog”, “Coon”, “Nig”, and the vulgar like is not a personal habit of the author, but is a custom of speech regrettably still practised in real life in Kenya and elsewhere . . .’30), Dermott’s speech still has an interpellatory function. The racial myth is propounded, the terminology is used, the reader is hailed, and recognition of the ‘obviousness’ of the myth is invited, and in many cases, without doubt, received. The only proviso is that everything else in the fiction must cumulatively fail to undercut Dermott who, if he is to be taken at face value, must not in other words, be one of the eminently recognisable villains of this fiction. (Villains can, of course, be used to interpellate readers to the ‘obviousness’ that the opposite of what they maintain is, in fact, the ‘truth’.)

The simplest device is obviously to have the ‘authoritative’ statements which carry the interpellations emanate from sources with evident authorial support who are designed to win the reader’s sympathy and credulity. Thus Peter McKenzie, the hero of Something of Value, is used to give new arrivals in Kenya (who are obviously reader surrogates) a seven page (‘authoritative’) account of what they can expect, during the course of which every racial myth mentioned in Chapter 3 finds such expression as the following:

In the African make-up there is really no such thing as love, kindness, or gratitude, as we know them, because they have lived all their lives, and their ancestors lives, in an atmosphere of terror and violence. There is no proper ‘love’ between man and woman, because the woman is bought for goats and is used as a beast of burden. There is no gratitude, because it would never occur to them to give anything to anybody else, and so they have no way of appreciating kindness or gifts from others. They lie habitually, because to lie is the correct procedure, or else some enemy might find a way to do them damage if they tell the truth. They have no sensitivity about inflicting pain, or receiving pain, because their whole religion is based on blood and torture of animals and each other. They think, even the best of them, that nothing’s funnier than a wounded animal or a crippled animal. It’s a big joke. I don’t even think that they themselves feel pain the way we do.³¹

Here one notes, in particular, the way the myths combine to justify the use of physical violence and torture: blacks are used to (genetically adapted to?) terror and violence; they don’t feel pain; they always lie, which means that if you want the ‘truth’ you always have to use torture – which they would use on you if they got the chance – but you needn’t feel bad about it because they don’t feel pain; and if they should die you needn’t feel too bad about that either because they don’t experience ‘proper “love” ’ so their wives/husbands, and other relatives, wouldn’t mind anyway.

That such views as those expressed by Peter McKenzie are indistinguishable from Ruark’s own is made clear by his forewords, which provide an extremely compressed exposition of the authorial ideology which informs the novels. Thus, for example, we are told:

In order to understand Mau Mau it is first necessary to understand Africa, and the portion of Africa in which Mau Mau was allowed to flourish is only just fifty years old as we reckon civilization. To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we ‘civilized’ people have encountered in two centuries.32

The tenor of the statement as a whole gives the lie to the pretence of self-depreciation in the inverted commas round ‘civilized’, while ‘was allowed to’ is important in that it clearly establishes that Ruark is taking the settler line against the government in accusing the latter of being blind to the dangers of ‘Mau Mau’ and incompetent in dealing with them.

A paragraph from the foreword of Uhuru gives a comprehensive view of Ruark’s attitude to Africans:

Each native African has his own concept of ‘Uhuru’. For some it is a mythical description of a round-the-corner Utopia of slothful ease, of plentiful booze and an altogether delightfully dreamy state in which money grows on bushes and all human problems are ended. To the nomadic grazier it means endless flocks [sic] of lovely useless cattle and gorgeous land-ruining goats – with infinite vistas of lush pasturage, and water galore between two suns’ march. To the ivory poacher it is an absence of game wardens and stuffy restrictive game laws. To the meat-eater it is limitless meat and a plentitude of free salt; to the drunkard a sea of honey beer; to the womanizer, a harem which stretches to the horizon. To the peasant African farmer, it is the white man’s magically rich and loamy land which will certainly be his on the magic day of ‘Uhuru’, when the white man is driven from the continent and all the carefully nurtured soil reverts to the African. To the wilfully lawless, ‘Uhuru’ is a licence to rob and steal, to kill without punishment and to flout rules of decent human behaviour with reckless impunity.³³

The colloquialisms such as ‘booże’, ‘lovely’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘galore’ which Ruark uses in this paragraph but nowhere else in his foreword indicate that he finds it necessary to operate on a different, and lower, level when it comes to talking about Africans. This paragraph, which ends with a ringing ‘Law and Order interpellation, clearly endorses a number of the settler race myths. These include the myths of idleness; of over-indulgence in food, alcohol, and sex; and of improvidence. With his ‘land-ruining goats’, his ‘white man’s magically rich and loamy land’ and his ‘carefully nurtured soil’ which will ‘revert’ to the African, Ruark’s mythologising energy is clearly focused in particular on the myth of Gikuyu agricultural incompetence and white farming expertise. The statement that the black man regards the white man’s land as ‘magically’ rich (reinforced by the irrationality of ‘magic day of “Uhuru” ’) not only implies that he is illogical, superstitious and ignorant about farming, and therefore of obviously inferior mental capacity, but also suggests that the land was not rich before the white man appropriated it and that he was thus justified in doing so.

Colonial Myths about ‘the African’ in General and ‘Mau Mau’ in Particular

The basic colonial myth, the myth of white superiority, finds a good deal of direct expression in the novels. Thus Peter McKenzie declares both his credentials and his fundamental article of faith in: ‘They damned well are my inferiors in the white man’s world as we know it out here. . . I live here, I was raised here, and I know niggers. And they bloody well are not ready to sit in the Legislative Assembly.’34 Dermott is equally confident: There is nothing a Kikuyu can do in the bush that we cannot do better.’³⁵ There is nothing a Kikuyu can do outside the bush that we cannot do better.’ Perhaps the extreme expression of white superiority, taking the form here of black inferiority, comes in a passage in which Thomas describes an oathing ceremony (heavily indebted to Carothers for its suggestions of witchcraft Black Mass and mass hypnosis³⁶) and interpellates the reader with the ‘obviousness’ that blacks have a ‘natural’ and irresistible propensity for evil:

The whole group seemed to be seized and held by a common, sinister, almost hypnotic excitement Their faces reflected a secret pagan lust Yet in the atmosphere there was something even deeper, something unworldly and intensely malevolent Karioki felt it from across the glade, and his heart sank As a Christian his soul revolted, yet as a native he could not deny a strange, horrible fascination.³⁷

For all Thomas’s divergence at some points from the colonial settler ideology, this strikes me as being the extreme expression of racism in a highly competitive field.

The myth of the empty land finds expression in almost all the novels. This ranges from Huxley’s ‘the land had been uninhabited save by wild game’;³⁸ to Stoneham’s vision of the land’s long-awaited destiny, ‘this place was empty of men, awaiting the coming of white settlers’;³⁹ to Kaye’s Romantic Hero Drew’s statement (with its Churchillian interpellatory tour de force): ‘Our grandfathers found a howling wilderness that no one wanted, and which, at the time, no one objected to their taking possession of. And with blood, toil, tears and sweat they turned it into a flourishing concern.’⁴⁰ All primary resistance to the colonial penetration of Kenya is here excised from history with the stroke of a pen. The interpellation has it, of course, that the blood, toil, tears and sweat were the white man’s.

The myth of ‘the African’s destructiveness and incompetence as an agriculturalist is given its most telling expression in A Thing to Love where Sam Gibson, the hero, speaking to Gitau, says: ‘For hundreds of years your ancestors have sat and looked at this lovely country and never once done anything to better it – they only cut down trees and moved on, draining away its fertility.’41 There is nothing particularly forceful or original about this statement of the myth, but Huxley makes it unanswerable. Gitau is a leading nationalist politician, he is (again like Kenyatta) head of a teacher training college, he has just returned from an overseas conference at which, we are told, Kenya’s problems were discussed, but he is unable to refute the allegation. This is mainly because the argument is supposedly irrefutable, partly because as a black man, particularly as a black political leader, he has to be characterised as stupid: instead of refuting the allegation Gitau merely ‘felt most uncomfortable. He knew he was being criticised, but indirectly, and he had lost the thread.’⁴²

The contradictions into which the colonial authors were sometimes led in pursuing this myth, which tends to conflict with the myth of tropical exuberance, are made apparent by W.B. Thomas. Karioki remembers that, in his early youth, ‘in the Reserve they had not had set meals. One ate when one could, or when food was by some good fortune suddenly available. It was nothing then to do without a meal for a few days.’⁴³ The ‘then’ is obviously crucial to the interpellation. Yet on the very next page Karioki says of his ‘Country’: ‘It is like a great garden. The soil is rich red and fertile, the best in all Africa. The rains are good, and everything grows quickly.’⁴⁴ This clearly demonstrates the conflict between the ideological need to portray the Africans as starving to death before the colonisers arrived, on the one hand, and the need, in the face of the (perfectly just) accusations that the whites appropriated much of the best land, to assert with defensive vigour that the land in the African reserves is the best in Kenya.

The other side of the agricultural coin – white farming expertise – is made much of in the fiction, as one would expect considering the important place in the justificatory ideology held by the myth of the mixed farms’ importance to the economy. Its fullest development is found in Uhuru where Njoroge, Dermott’s farm foreman, is presented reflecting on the view of Kenyan agriculture he had been given by Dermott who flew him around in a light aircraft for the purpose:

Here the Bwana had forced the land to perform at his command; there the Kikuyu had pleaded with his land but the land had not answered . . . the Bwana’s land was rich and sparkling and bright with green crops and blue water; the native land was scraggly brown and tattered as an old pair of dirty pants.⁴⁵

One notes Ruark’s approbation of the coercive side of the ‘forced’/‘pleaded’ opposition. The myth is invariably linked to the myth of the lazy native and its implied opposite, the white person’s industry. Here Njoroge dutifully reflects: ‘One does not see, riding high with the vultures, all the dirty, back-aching sweated toil that goes into making the white man’s land.’46 In context this, again, can only refer, improbably enough, to the white man’s ‘back-aching sweated toil’. Sheraton’s settler spokesman Riley says of his neighbour: ‘. . .he works damn hard, the old boy. We all do here, really. Got to, only way to make the farms pay.’⁴⁷ Hands, usually ‘heavy and calloused’⁴⁸ are a key signifier in Ruark and few settlers escape without having their hands described, though he gives the game away somewhat when he says: ‘Henry McKenzie liked his house. Since he had built it all himself, but adds later in the same sentence that it was ‘all done or directed with broad calloused hands’.⁴⁹ The counterpart to this myth is seen in Harding’s heroine’s reflections on her black labour force: ‘The wages were low, admittedly, but it was half a job, or less, for every man.’⁵⁰

Two further points are worth making in this connection. Firstly, the fiction on occasion makes clear (though inadvertently) the connection between the colonial race and the metropolitan class myth (which is not to suggest that the class myth doesn’t take on the identical racial guise in the metropolis). Huxley’s Colonel Foxley, for example, thinks: ‘They [the Gikuyu] liked doing nothing better than any race he had ever known. For that matter even the English private soldier, so far as his experience went, did not look for much more, off duty, than beer and women.’⁵¹ Secondly, the formulations of the myth often serve to obscure the coloniser’s actual ‘landed gentry’ life-style and thereby his or her reasons for being in the colony in the first place. Thus a Kaye spokesman, Gilly Markham, can say with elaborate irony:

You just don’t understand what some of these old Kenya hands are capable of; or how their own little patch of land can end by becoming the centre of the universe to them, just because they made it out of nothing by the sweat of their brow, and starved for it and gave up their youth for it, and sacrificed comfort and safety and civilization and a lot of other trivial things for it.⁵²

The point isn’t just that the sacrifices made by these god-like beings who created land out of nothing (‘hands’ obviously has the same value as a signifier here as it has for Ruark) were obviously made in the interests of the profits they hoped to get from their ‘little patches’ (averaging about 5,000 acres) of land. The forbidden question here is precisely ‘what would they be doing now in England?’; what, if anything, has been ‘sacrificed’?

The Africans in the fiction are, predictably, for the most part thieves and liars⁵³ and the sometimes contradictory myths about the ‘African mentality’ are made much of: Africans have ‘no apprehensions for the future’;⁵⁴ ‘It’s no good trying to treat Africans as though their processes of thought were the same as Europeans’;⁵⁵ ‘The longer you live among them, Derek, the more you realise that you just cannot get inside the African mind.’⁵⁶ These last two quotations, determined by the need to interpret the revolt as irrational, obviously contradict the crucial myth which holds that the white man on the spot in Africa ‘knows his African’, seen already in Peter McKenzie’s claim to ‘Know niggers’ and seen also, for example, in the assertion that Charlotte Stuart, the matriarchal figure in Uhuru, ‘know[s] more about natives than the natives do themselves’.57

This myth leads directly into the myths about ‘Mau Mau’ in particular, built on the existing foundation of myths about ‘the African’ in general. Sheraton’s Rocky Russell observes the countryside around Nairobi:

It looked a fine rich country, but the enormity of the wild growth all around brought the realisation that it was difficult country to keep in check. He wondered just how well the Africans would fare on their own, if they didn’t have the white man’s brain to organise them.⁵⁸

Sheraton’s and Harding’s plots hinge entirely on the assumption that blacks are too stupid to organise anything, so there must have been whites around to organise ‘Mau Mau’. Max Gorman, the villain who organises the fictional equivalent of ‘Mau Mau’ in African Terror, explains his role:

Although this General Boko is damn nearly a millionaire, what he lacks is the gift of leadership and organisation. He’s a fanatic with crazy ambitious ideals, but he doesn’t know how to plan their fulfilment. So I’m teaching him! And a wealthy, dim-witted black has to pay very good money to be taught the art of leadership!⁵⁹

It is worth noting that the black leader is again, as in Huxley, and for the same reasons, very wealthy. The danger to the ideology of white (which, in practice, meant British) superiority implicit in having a white villain is overcome, for Sheraton’s putative readers in 1957, by making him a German. In Ruark’s case it is overcome by making the necessary white organiser (and, later, organisers)⁶⁰ Russian. The Russian Piotr’s presence is explained by Ruark’s Kenyatta figure thus: ‘The wa-Russians, understand organisation very well.’⁶¹

‘Mau Mau’ in the colonial fiction is the product of Gikuyu territorial ambitions and desire for power (‘at last the whole of Kenya would belong to the Kikuyu)’⁶² but it is the product of ambitious and selfish individuals and has no mass support: This Mau Mau is definitely unpopular among the natives, anyway; they hate the idea of it.’⁶³ The novels all lay such heavy stress on intimidation as to suggest that the vast majority of those who joined the movement did so under duress.⁶⁴ This would be ideologically necessary as a way round the recognition that if ‘Mau Mau’ were really what the colonisers maintained it to be it would mean that the ‘civilising mission’ had been a total failure. It was also clearly a direct projection onto those who administered the oaths of the violence used by the ‘security forces’ to obtain confessions to having taken the oath.

It is on references to the ‘Mau Mau’ oaths, and descriptions of fictional oathing ceremonies wholly informed by the colonial myths, that all the authors rely most heavily for the evocation of an atmosphere of horror and bestiality which is perhaps the most strident of their anti-‘Mau Mau’ interpellations. Ruark provides the best example of the two main ways in which the reader is interpellated.

Firstly, there is the resort to direct authorial comment in passages which pretend to a ‘documentary’ authority (often ‘substantiated’ by the lavish sprinkling around of the names of historical people and events.65) The narrative voice in Something of Value, for example, maintains:

The point was ever more, now, to weld the Mau Mau more firmly by increasingly horrifying and loathsome oath-takings. All semblance of the original tribal symbolism had disappeared, and now the oath-takings were simply orgies of obscenity, black masses employing the most basic revulsions. The oaths were numbered, each competing for horror and obscenity.⁶⁶

Secondly, Ruark, relying entirely on the colonial accounts of the oaths, describes imaginary ceremonies with a loving attention to detail. (Ruark’s invention of ‘a third, less primitive oath’ for the non-existent white organisers of ‘Mau Mau’ does not, of course, incline one to give much credibility to anything he has to say about oaths).⁶⁷ He describes, for example, one ceremony at which a man and his son are killed for use as the main ingredients of the mixture which has to be eaten. The oath administrator taunts the father and makes him watch as his son is decapitated; the reader is then told:

The headless body fell twitching, blood pumping from the neck, across the body of the father. The boy’s blood surged, bubbling frothily like a flood, into his father’s face, thickly covering his mouth and eyes, and the tiny pathetic body thrashed like a headless chicken on the father’s breast. . . Kimani took the panga, and split first the skull of the man, making a vertical and then a horizontal cut just above the eyes. He laid back the bone as one would peel the hard shell from a shattered coconut, and scooped out the grey brains. He repeated the operation with the child.⁶⁸

The function of the account of the oath here, as so often in the colonial discourse about ‘Mau Mau’, is to focus the generalised primitivism/atavism interpellation on the specific image of cannibalism. To demonstrate that ‘there is no proper “love” between [African] man and woman’ (as well, of course, as to carry the pervasive black ‘irrationality’ interpellation) Ruark has the child’s mother watch the proceedings and then immediately join ‘the leaping mass’ of onlookers: ‘She too began to bob and leap and croon, her eyes hypnotically fixed. . . ‘⁶⁹ The five page account of this ceremony provides a perfect example of (and also thereby of the need to examine) the propaganda stratagem of using negative fictional exemplification for recruiting assent to the most extreme repressive implications of colonial political practices which, in more ‘normal’ circumstances, are ideologically processed through a set of interlocking discourses of positive abstraction: for example, Christian evangelism, social Darwinism and juridical trusteeship.

Thomas, Huxley and Stoneham all follow Ruark in giving full accounts of oathing ceremonies. The necessary accompaniments to being oathed range from the strangling of dogs70 to the committing of murder – ‘because it is only the first killing that is difficult’.⁷¹ Descriptions of the ceremonies are often embellished with thetrappings of the Black Mass. Thus Thomas includes the ‘skin and entrails of a domestic cat’⁷² and Ruark includes ‘strangled cats’.⁷³ Here, as in the remarkable number of formulations of the myth that ‘the African’ has no feeling for animals in this fiction,⁷⁴ and the descriptions of the mutilating of animals,⁷⁵ the putative reader is being interpellated as an ‘animal lover’, whose concern for the welfare of animals can take the place of (a politically and economically risky) concern for the welfare of people.⁷⁶ The fullest evocation of the Black Mass is Stoneham’s:

. . . Macheria was led to one of the huts. In the dark interior was a kind of altar surmounted by a sheep’s skull framed in bones, which looked to Macheria suspiciously like human relics. Little candles had been lit inside the skull and shone through the eye sockets, a small fire burned before the gruesome shrine.⁷⁷

The insistent stress on the trappings of witchcraft in these descriptions discloses the conceptual impossibility of the ideology’s recognising either the importance to Christianity of its own rituals of worship or their parallels in the official ‘Mau Mau’ oathing ceremonies. The ritual eating of the body and drinking of the blood of Christ could obviously be interpreted within other cultures in a variety of different and unflattering ways.

The compiling of lists of oath ingredients also offered considerable scope for horror, bestiality and cannibalism interpellations. Dermott describes how he has seen ‘menstrual fluid mixed with human sperm and animal dung and stewed brains for the oathing’,⁷⁸ while Thomas lists, among other things, the blood, ‘some brains and one eye’ of a dead man, blood from a cut in the buttocks of a live dog, seven tufts of dog hair and blood from each of the initiates.⁷⁹

Psycho-sexual Myth-making

The myths about the oaths are obviously indistinguishable at some points from the myths about ‘Mau Mau’ mutilation of victims and the myth of African brutality. Ruark’s fiction reveals him to have been obsessed by the idea that ‘Mau Mau’ victims were invariably decapitated.⁸⁰ Sheraton, describing the murder of an elderly farmer, tells his readers: ‘Like Gorman’s dog [sic], Rocky saw that the knife had done its ghastly work before a merciful death had intervened. . . The head was nearby, stuck on a small post sticking out from the ground.’⁸¹ The German’s dog had been castrated. Thomas is more explicit: ‘They took the body and the eyes, but they left his head on a stake with his private parts hanging out of his mouth.’82 Heads on stakes in relation to ‘Mau Mau’ clearly owe more to a tradition of Western images of Africa (as exemplified in Heart of Darkness for example⁸³) than they do to historical ‘fact’. Settler castration anxieties – the ultimate threat to white masculinity posed by the black super-stud – can presumably also be held responsible for the innuendo of the ‘certain parts’ in Drew’s account of how he dug up his best friend’s grave and found that he had ‘been roasted alive over a slow fire after having certain parts of him removed for use in Mau Mau ceremonials’.⁸⁴ Ruark is more explicit: ‘. . .they might just need some fresh brains or a spare pair of balls for a ceremony and chop off the first white head they run onto’.⁸⁵

This treatment of the myth that ‘Mau Mau’ mutilated victims is only one of a number of features of these novels which reveal the extent to which fiction provides a scope for psycho-sexual myth-making far exceeding that of ‘non-fiction’. Nowhere in the ‘non-fiction’ about ‘Mau Mau’ are the myths of African sexuality and African brutality linked in the way they are in the fiction. This is presumably because a bald statement to the effect that, for example, blacks experience orgasm when they chop whites to pieces with pangas could not be substantiated by any evidence (it is clearly not empirically verifiable) and would therefore be likely to look suspect in a ‘historical’ account – whereas fiction has no need to worry about such considerations. Such statements when fictionalised can be ‘verified’ by their consistency to the internal logic of the rest of the fictional world.

Ruark is unable to resist making the climactic moment in Something of Value, the murder of Jeff Newton and his children and the mutilation of Elizabeth Newton, literally climactic. His description of Kimani’s attack on Jeff Newton reads:

A wild, red-rolling madness enveloped Kimani and he struck with the panga, struck again and again, slashing away the slap in the face, drowning in blood the thahu [curse] on his father’s house, washing away the ruin of his boyhood plans, slicing away the cold wet years on the mountain, cutting away the years in gaol, cutting, slashing, as he struck and struck again and suddenly found that the crotch of his trousers was wet and the other men had already gone into the house.⁸⁶

Huxley clearly subscribes to the same myth, though she is not as crudely explicit as Ruark. The Foxleys’ trusted servant Raphaelo leads the attack on them and the reader is told of his frenzied hacking at people and furniture: ‘The mounting frenzy, the suspense, the moment of release were like the sensations of passion a thousand times intensified.’ Just in case the point has been missed, she continues: ‘He could not regret it, any more than he could regret the possession of a woman.’⁸⁷ (It is only white men who have the ethical discrimination to be able to regret the ‘possession’ of a woman.)

The automatic linking of sex, violence and blackness in colonialist consciousness is implicitly mobilised in the publisher’s blurb on the paperback edition of Something of Value. It is a commonplace that the blurb on a novel often provides a crucial indication of the mode of consciousness which is imputed to the readership being invited to consume it. Once this general mode has been ‘targeted’ with respect to a specific sub-division of popular fiction the strategy of what one might call ‘spurious shock’ – titillation backed (and morally exonerated?) by the promise of ideological confirmation – is set to work. (Fanon’s comment comes to mind: ‘If one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, not from a universal view point but as it is experienced by individual consciousnesses, considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena.’88 The blurb on the dust-cover the hardback edition has it that: ‘Suddenly Mau Mau slips down to slaughter in the heart of the McKenzie family, to ravage and terrorize and turn smiling feckless Africans back to the worst devices of their primitive devils.’ The Corgi edition says: ‘It tells how, suddenly, Mau-Mau [sic] began to rape and terrorize and turn smiling Africans into primitive savages.’ The change from the ambiguous suggestiveness of ‘to ravage and terrorize’ to the directness of ‘to rape and terrorize’ is significant because Ruark does not dwell on rape – indeed there is no single instance of a white woman being raped by a black man in this novel (or any of the other colonial novels), which is clearly what is suggested by the blurb. The idea of white women being raped by black men is apparently regarded as something likely to boost the sales of the novel, so it is invoked even though the reader’s expectations will be frustrated.

This relates to the whole question of projection, which is clearly crucial to an understanding of what is happening in the colonial novels. Fanon provides a succinct account of what would seem to be involved:

Jung consistently identifies the foreign with the obscure, with the tendency to evil: he is perfectly right. This mechanism of projection – or, if one prefers, transference – has been described by classic psychoanalysis. In the degree to which I find in myself something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origin to someone else.⁸⁹

The benefits to be derived from this process of projection, and the relevance of the quotation from Fanon to a discussion of colonial settler ideology in general, and the colonial fiction in particular, are made clear by a passage from Marie Bonaparte:

The anti-Semite projects on the Jew, ascribes to the Jew all his own more or less unconscious bad instincts. . . Thus, in ridding himself of them by heaping them on the shoulders of the Jew, he has purged himself of them in his own eyes and sees himself in shining purity. The Jew thus lends himself magnificently to a projection of the Devil. . . the Negro in the United States assumes the same function of fixation.90

As, obviously, does the black Kenyan, the Gikuyu in particular, for the white settler. One notes, for example, the use of ‘primitive devils’ in the original blurb.

The connection between the ‘more or less unconscious bad instincts’ talked about by Marie Bonaparte and the blurb’s invitation to read about rapes which didn’t take place, even in the novel, is suggested by another passage from Fanon:

For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state). The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. The women among the whites, by a genuine process of induction, invariably view the Negro as a keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations. . .⁹¹

’Invariably’ is an alarmingly broad generalisation and suggests an element of racial counter-myth-making but Katie Crane, the heroine in Uhuru, is, interestingly, characterised very much in these terms. When she sees some Maasai men for the first time the reader is told:

Their togas fell away from their cocked legs, showing them completely nude. They seemed sublimely unconscious, but were perhaps even more smugly conscious, of the casual display of their genitalia.

‘Whoo-ee!’ Katie Crane whistled. ‘Daddy, buy me that! . . . Lot of man under that skimpy red shift. . . Yessir. I’m going to buy me a brace of these to keep me company on the long cold winter nights in Palm Beach.⁹²

Here – despite the negative (anxious) portrayal of aggressive female sexuality – the narrative voice nevertheless implicitly underwrites Katie’s perception of the African as, in Hernton’s words, ‘a great “walking phallus" with satyr-like potency’.⁹³ Indeed Ruark projects onto Matisia the notion that ‘the white woman seeks our bodies not because we are black and a novelty, but because we are strong and virile and bigger in those important parts than the white man’.⁹⁴ It is also clearly significant that while Ruark allows the admission that ‘even during Mau Mau they [white women] were not violated in Kenya. Killed, yes, but not violated [sic]’,⁹⁵ he nevertheless allows Don Bruce the right to worry away once more at the unspeakable act which keeps failing to take place: he assigns to him the warning ‘no more molesting of our women’ as part of the white men’s ultimatum to the black politicians at the end of the novel.⁹⁶ A clear case of drawing on the projected image of the black as ‘super-stud’, ‘on the loose’, ‘after our women.’⁹⁷ This obsessive anxiety is obviously not unconnected with the tacit recognition that black men objectively have much cause for sexual revenge – if, that is, they accept a simple reversal of the terms within which rape of black women by the colonisers can feature as a sign of virility.

The most obvious examples of projection in the accounts of black brutality, ones which undoubtedly have underlying sexual connotations as well, are the detailed accounts given of the flogging by ‘Mau Mau’ of reluctant oath takers or offenders against forest-fighter discipline. Flogging, as has been seen, was standard colonial practice. In the fiction it appears that a whole range of illicit and culturally inadmissible emotions of pleasure are given release by means of displacement. Great stress is laid, in all the accounts of flogging by ‘Mau Mau’, on the spectators’ enjoyment of the spectacle. Thus one finds, in Thomas’s account, ‘ “Twenty lashes” said Kifaru. . . The gang leant forward in enjoyment’;98 and Huxley says: ‘Njombo was stripped and held down and flogged . . . when Njombo began to cry for mercy the watchers grew excited. . . The man wielding the belt was like an instrument through which they . . . drew a collective satisfaction.’⁹⁹ The relation between colonial myth and colonial practice is suggested by Fanon’s ‘projecting his own desires on to the Negro, the white man behaves “as if" the Negro really had them.’¹⁰⁰ If the rape-reversal fantasy can never quite break through the wall of repression, then the flogging scenes must be made to carry the double charge of desire which cannot otherwise be fully articulated.

Perhaps the most striking example of psycho-sexual myth-making in the fiction is found in the culmination of Sheraton’s African Terror. Audrey, Rocky Russell’s helplessly devoted admirer, has been taken as a sacrifice to a ‘terrorist’ meeting. Rocky arrives in time to see:

In the centre of the arena was a fire . . . in the centre of the fire ring was Audrey. She was completely naked, the firelight shining on her lovely young body, and she was dancing crazily as long spears, thrust through the flames, occasionally prodded her flagging efforts.¹⁰¹

What better medium could be found for the offer of vicarious release from (revenge for?) the constraints of colonial-bourgeois morality than the full-frontal presentation of the sexually potent black man prodding the ‘flagging efforts’ of a ‘lovely, young, completely naked’ white object of rape/torture with his (unmistakably phallic) long spear thrusts?

The myth of African brutality does, of course, find a great deal of expression which does not invoke the myth of African sexuality. Thus Peter McKenzie, reacting to the smell of blood, maintains that ‘the Wogs loved it. They lived off it. They doted on it.’¹⁰² And Drew says: ‘The average African gets no pleasure out of just shooting an enemy. He prefers to kill him slowly, and watch him suffer.’¹⁰³ Fiction also provides more opportunity than ‘non-fiction’ for the dramatisation of African ‘blood lust’. This has already been seen in Kimani’s killing of Jeff Newton, it is also made much of in the account of the killing of Dermott’s faithful retainer Kidogo in Uhuru: ‘He stared at the blade, then ecstasy slid into his face and his body leaped in a spastic jump. Suddenly he lunged and cut Kidogo’s head completely free of his shoulders. Flecks of foam came to Kisu’s lips; his body rippled from head to foot.’104 ‘Spastic’ is a key signifier in Ruark which carries the interpellation of ‘African irrationality and lack of control as against the white reason and control which exemplify ‘civilisation’.¹⁰⁵

Enough evidence should have been given of the extent to which the fiction endorses the colonial myths, and of the extremes to which these authors go in their formulations of the myths, to justify both the assertion that the fiction was one of the heaviest weapons in the race propagandist’s armoury in the dissemination of the settler view of ‘Mau Mau’, and to justify an explicit reminder of the influence that such novels are likely to be having to this day in shaping Western views of Africa – particularly since the major terms of the ideology from which these fictional Africans are produced continue to be faithfully reproduced both on state television and in the press: ‘quality’ as well as ‘gutter’.¹⁰⁶

Fictional Devices Used in Propounding Colonial Settler Ideology

Terminology, Selected Spokesmen, and Plot

I turn now from the identification of the myths endorsed in the fiction to a discussion of the fictional techniques used by these authors in interpellating readers’ assent to the settler view of ‘Mau Mau’ as the ‘obviously’ correct one.

To start with the most obvious of these, the writers’ unquestioning and incessant use of the settler terminology of ‘terrorists’, ‘gangs’, ‘gangsters’ precludes the admission of any alternative interpretation of the movement and is one of the simplest devices whereby the writer defines his putative readership – those who can conceive of ‘terrorists’ as ‘freedom fighters’ won’t read Ruark for ‘entertainment’. The official view of ‘Mau Mau’ as a disease affecting the Gikuyu mind, the victims of which were susceptible to ‘rehabilitation’, is conveyed by a pervasive vocabulary of disease and poison. The ideas of the ‘Mau Mau’ leaders are ‘an infection, to be spread far and wide’; ‘Mau Mau’ is a ‘plague of the mind’ which needs a ‘cure’;¹⁰⁷ it is a ‘sickness’ or a ‘contagion’.¹⁰⁸ The disease is caused by a poison: ‘So deep had the poison gone, so corrosive was it, that even parricide could not be ruled out.’¹⁰⁹ Ruark links ‘Mau Mau’ with Russia not just through the presence of a Russian organiser but by means of this vocabulary as well. The introduction to Something of Value maintains that ‘Mau Mau’ is a ‘symptomatic ulcer of the evil and unrest which currently afflicts the world’ which is clearly to be seen as communism; the reader is told ‘the [Mau Mau] poison seeped and spread to the neighbouring tribes’; and the connection is made clear at the end where it is maintained that, if the settlers leave, ‘the jolly old Russian [will be] free to walk in and grab Africa, just as he’s grabbed every other place where he planted his poison’.110

The writers employ a number of obvious standard devices to discredit the ‘Mau Mau’ leaders and followers. These range from Thomas’s insistence that ‘Mau Mau’ fighters were not ‘brave’ but ‘drug-sated’,¹¹¹ to Huxley’s dramatisation of bickering among the African nationalist leaders,¹¹² to Ruark’s and Huxley’s repeated suggestions that the ‘Mau Mau’ leadership were embezzling funds and living in luxury on the oathing fees.¹¹³ The only device worth commenting on is the attempt to discredit the ‘Mau Mau’ leaders by attributing excessive drinking to them.¹¹⁴ The regulation drink for black leaders in Huxley and Ruark is ‘half a tumbler of brandy’,¹¹⁵ while Sheraton’s General Boko drinks neat gin by the tumbler.¹¹⁶ This is interesting as alcohol is clearly being used as a device to elicit disapproval when it is blacks who are drinking, yet Ruark, for example, can say with obvious affection, ‘the Kenya folk are always a trifle fiddled at lunch’; he can describe his hero’s nights of drunken violence in indulgent terms; and can allow Henry McKenzie (a reliable commentator) to comment nostalgically on a pre-war wedding when ‘they beat up the bridegroom and nearly tore the wedding-dress off the bride. The bridegroom, the best man, and the bridegroom’s father were all in hospital for a week.’¹¹⁷ Ruark clearly cannot conceive that such descriptions – revelatory as they are of the values and desires usually more cautiously displaced onto blacks – in any way interfere with the fundamental article of faith which is the superiority of white ‘civilisation’. The putative reader must be able to pass over the contradiction between the legitimation of brutality (there being no other serious criterion of manliness) and the conventional stigmatisation of ‘violence’ which is applied to the (pathological) ‘mentality’ of the oppressed. The ideal male colonial (characteristically a connoisseur of guns¹¹⁸ as well as a hard drinker) retreats primly to the stockade of utilitarian/evangelical paternalism in denying ‘the African’ the right to drink. Experience of the power of the irrational and transposed fear of it in ‘the African’ are never far from the surface.

Christianity (almost always intimately associated with the nuclear family) is massively invoked in some of these novels in the process of denigrating ‘Mau Mau’ and justifying the colonial response. Peter McKenzie, reflecting on the men in whose company he has just sliced five ‘Mau Mau’ suspects to pieces, says of one of them, ‘no finer man lived in Kenya. He loved his animals. . . He cherished a wife and three children. He owed no man money and went regularly to church.’¹¹⁹ Christianity and economic self-sufficiency are indistinguishable in this ideology. Matthew’s experience in A Thing to Love leads him to conclude of ‘Mau Mau’: ‘. . .these men belonged to the devil and had been sent to overthrow the ministry of God’.¹²⁰ The Divine Presence is invoked as the ultimate interpellatory device by both Thomas and Huxley. Karioki can take the oath and remain ‘uncontaminated’ because: ‘Reaching through the deep evil in the glade, to Karioki alone came an awareness of Divine Presence. Karioki stood up and undressed.’121 And, at the climax of Huxley’s plot Matthew, being tortured,

. . .looked up at his tormentor without hatred or fear, but with a strange sense of joy, for he found that God had filled his soul with a great living flood of strength and that nothing which might happen now could break him. I know that my Redeemer liveth, he said in his mind, and got slowly to his feet.¹²²

The extremes of racism and violence which this body of fiction endorses indicate that the colonial ideology’s sentimental adherence to Christianity is nominal, but where the official rationale of colonialism still formally includes the notion of imparting the benefits of Christian civilisation, the name is still clearly felt to have powerful appeal. It is thus inevitable that Huxley should hit on Christmas Day as the choice of ‘the Conspiracy’s’ leaders for their planned night of ‘the long knives’.¹²³ The reader is invited to imagine the children having their heads cut off by the Devil-possessed ‘Mau Mau’ as they open their stockings on this sacred Christian festival.

The most general fictional technique used for the winning of assent to the settler view of ‘Mau Mau’ is the use of a number of easily identifiable categories of spokesmen (usually men, as it happens). The use of settlers such as the McKenzies and Drew who have authorial support and ‘know’ Kenya and thus ‘the African’ is the most obvious, and needs no further comment. Slightly more subtle is the use of the ‘liberal’ settler depicted as very sympathetic towards Africans and used to pass judgement on what the author disapproves of. Huxley uses Pat Foxley in this way. Pat teaches in a mission school to the embarrassment and chagrin of her parents who are deeply suspicious of education for Africans. Teaching in a mission school is enough to define her, for the novel, as liberal – the farthest left position still compatible with vestigial decency. But her enlightenment is brought into question very early on by her indirect endorsement of the myth of African dishonesty: ‘. . .we try to do something about it. Those who really do become active Christians don’t steal and lie – not nearly so much, anyway.’¹²⁴ (An offence against private property in this ideology very easily elides into an offence against God.) And it soon becomes apparent that Pat is just a convenient device whereby Huxley can make racist assertions through the mouth of a character who has been built up to have a reputation for liberalism. Thus Pat is found, a quarter of the way through the novel, thinking about ‘the Kikuyu’:

These were a clever, tenacious, unforgetting people who could nourish feuds and hatreds as relentlessly as any Sicilian. They didn’t easily give up. She had a lot of sympathy with the Kikuyu. The toad beneath the harrow – she could sometimes feel, herself, the bruises that their pride sustained. But a conspiracy founded on hatred by seekers after power, and built up by intimidation, couldn’t be the answer.125

This passage not only endorses the usual colonial stereotype of ‘the treacherous Kikuyu’ and the (contradictory) myth that those who took the oath had to be intimidated to do so; it also paradoxically reveals the incapacity of writers like Huxley to give a convincing rendering of the characteristic categories of liberal discourse, while unconsciously (but accurately) registering its limits: its refusal to regard revolt as a legitimate response to even the most extreme forms of colonial oppression.

The most frequently resorted-to category after that of knowledgeable settlers is that of the ‘good’, i.e. pro-government, black. This obviously requires the colonial authors to waive for the time being the myth which maintains that the black man is congenitally incapable of telling the truth, but that concession is more than compensated for, it is obviously felt, by the air of authenticity the myths are likely to acquire when propounded by the black man himself. Thus, for example, Matthew, the Christian son of a government-supporting chief in A Thing to Love, is shown ruminating over the civilised benefits which accrue from being ruled by Europeans, and the chaos which would follow their departure:

If they went, the country would be torn like a buck pulled down by hunting dogs. All that the leaders of the conspiracy wanted was wealth and power for themselves. They didn’t really care for the people. Josiah would fight with Gitau, Solomon with Gisuri, and everyone would suffer. Soon hospitals would have no doctors, the trains no fuel, the schools no pencils, men like his father would be driven out or murdered and the Indians would buy everything.¹²⁶

The counterpart to this is the, equally frequent, use of ‘bad’ blacks, usually leaders of ‘Mau Mau’, who are made to articulate views which are presented as inauthentic derivatives of negative ‘European models (the social semiotics they give off are similarly presented) – particularly that of the devious, conspiratorial (ideally communist) ‘intellectual’. Thus ‘the well-travelled, pipe-smoking Kikuyu’,¹²⁷ who later stands trial at Kapenguria, articulates the myth of Gikuyu expansionism, ‘we will stretch in power through Uganda past the Congo’,¹²⁸ and says: ‘I want many new members of the secret society, and I want them mostly after a few foolish people have refused to join us and who have died rather rudely for the refusal and have been hung upside down with their guts dripping from their slit bellies.’¹²⁹

The colonial writers’ attempts to render the consciousness of blacks as supporting evidence for white race myths lead inevitably to some extremes of absurdity. Thus Ruark can attribute the following thoughts to Stephen Ndegwa in Uhuru:

The land is ours, we say, the internal voice hammered at him. It was my grandfather’s land yesterday and so it is mine today – especially since the white man has back-achingly improved and planted and fertilized it. We have forgotten that it was only bush and plain when the red stranger came; wasteland occupied mostly by rhino and elephant and game that ate the crops [sic]. We have forgotten that we killed each other needlessly and that disease and war and wild animals cut us down to a pitiful minimum; that famine and plague and superstition have kept us wedged in a hole like warthogs during all our history.130

It is one thing to make a black man subscribe to the myths about the precolonial past – he might after all have been brought up on colonial ‘history’ books – it is quite another to make a Kenyan black man subscribe to the myth (one of Ruark’s favourites) that it was the white man’s back that ached in the process of entrenching white settlement in Kenya. But even this last quotation pales into insignificance beside the later account: ‘Suddenly Ndegwa wanted to laugh. It was all so Goddamned ridiculous. Here he was sitting among the goats trying to get a line on the thinking of a race of people whose thoughts ran around like a chicken with its head cut off.’¹³¹ The race of people he is referring to is his own; and Ruark is not intending any elaborately satirical comment on the assimilation of white modes of thought by Uncle Toms.

The single interpellatory device most heavily relied on in this fiction is the plot. Wayne Booth touches briefly on plot at various points in The Rhetoric of Fiction, and at one point says: ‘We can admit, of course, that the choice of evocative “situations and chains of events" is the writer’s most important gift – or, as Aristotle put a similar point, the “most important of all is the structure of the incidents”.’¹³² Booth clearly does not, however, regard plot as one of the ‘rhetorical resources available to the writer’.¹³³ When it comes to the resources available to the writer for propagating ideology through fiction there can, by contrast be no doubt about the accuracy of Aristotle’s assertion – the ‘structure of the incidents’ is unquestionably ‘the most important of all’.

Plot is undoubtedly a rhetorical device. Indeed it is the key controlling device through which an author ensures that the myths to which he or she subscribes are shown to be the ‘truth’. It is rhetorical because it carries out a tendentious ‘validation’ of the position of one or other side in whatever ideological dispute has been carried on in the novel. Thus the author can invent a character, allow the character to propound racial myths, apparently dissociate himself or herself from the character, and implicitly from the myths, and yet construct his or her plot in such a way as to show that the character was right all along. For all Ruark’s avowed reservations about people who talk about ‘wogs’, his plots nevertheless declare that people who talk about ‘wogs’ know what they are talking about; they are continuously ‘proved’ right by ‘events’.

The sentimentality of the plot configuration is the single device best calculated to win the assent of the majority of readers to Ruark’s ideology. In Something of Value it has, for example, to be on the second morning of Peter McKenzie’s honeymoon that the news comes through of the attack on the McKenzie farm. And what could be better guaranteed to win the reader’s hostility to the black man than to have him break up a perfectly good Mills & Boon romance plot by cutting the heroine’s throat – particularly if he timed it so perfectly as to precede the long-awaited marriage proposal by a mere five minutes? Which is precisely what happens in Uhuru. After a great deal of patient adoration and long-suffering on Katie Crane’s part (she has the two incompatible functions of vamp and bride in the text) and considerable agonising on the part of the outward-bound Brian Dermott, the latter finally decides to fulfil all Katie’s (respectable) dreams by asking her to marry him. She has gone out for a ride so he follows to make the proposal. But in the meantime a black man who was intent on kidnapping Katie’s companion, an African child, for use in an oathing ceremony, has rather casually ‘walked back over to where Kathleen Crane lay’ and cut her throat.134 The interpellation carried by the formal ‘Kathleen’, instead of the usual ‘Katie’, at this juncture is worth noting; Huxley employs the identical device when, describing Foxley’s last action before he is killed, she uses ‘Mike Foxley’¹³⁵ instead of the almost universal ‘the Colonel’ or ‘Colonel Foxley’ (which obviously carries its own, more generally useful, interpellations). The named, christened, social personality is a part of white ‘Civilisation’; at the moment of death the impersonality of ‘the Colonel’ and the familiarity of ‘Katie’ are inappropriate to the name being entered on ‘Civilisation’s’ Roll of Honour.

Ruark undoubtedly has a number of the skills required of a competent novelist at his command, and generally has the ability to imbue his white characters with a reasonably convincing realist illusion of ‘life’. Katie Crane is, for the most part, likely to win the sympathy of Ruark’s readers. She is, crucially in terms of the plot, generally favourably disposed towards ‘the Africans’ – though at times, as we have seen, rather too much so – and prepared to argue with Dermott on their behalf; as when she condemns his determination to wipe out the Gikuyu tribe and ‘recolonise the bloody place’ as ‘barbarism, pure and simple’.¹³⁶ When she is killed in this casual and wholly inconsequential way (or apparently so), it becomes clear that she only ever existed as the supreme device for manipulating the reader’s sympathies. The whole build-up of sympathy for her (predicated on her role as the romantic heroine) over three hundred odd pages has been solely so that she can have her throat cut as the sacrificial victim on the altar of Ruark’s ideology. She exists only for that moment; a moment which is intended by Ruark to give the lie in one fell swoop to all her pro-African sentiments, extracting revenge both for her naivety and her moments of cardinal error in the field of trans-racial desire. The origins of Katie’s ‘wrong-headedness’ had earlier been defined by her brother’s ironic ‘she went to one of those advanced schools and took a course in the social sciences’;137 the plot ‘shows’ that academic training, particularly in sociology, is no substitute for the ‘experience’ and ‘knowledge’ of the man on the spot. Moreover, for all that Ruark was himself American, she is also ultimately expendable as a cultural outsider to colonial Kenya, her American femaleness finally unassimilable within the protocols of British settler-colonial marriage. Here we have a supreme instance of the use of plot as the definitive and oracular rhetorical device: the murder of Katie Crane makes, or is intended to make, everything she has said in favour of Africans throughout the novel wrong, everything that Brian Dermott and all the others have said against Africans, right.

The Colonial Novelists’ Claim to Objectivity’

This brings me to the most important, and most insidious, of all the devices relied on by the authors of colonialist fiction in seeking recognition from their readers of the ‘truth’ of their ideological propositions. This is the pretence to objectivity, which Ruark is at pains to maintain throughout – as prescribed by the aesthetic ideology of liberalism which has it that ‘good’ fiction is non-ideological. Ruark is certainly sharp enough to recognise that this is the dominant position in the world of literary reviews and he plays to it in a foreword to Something of Value which is clearly a retrospective attempt to provide acceptable ‘cover’ for what he has done. ‘[This] certainly is not a political book’,¹³⁸ the reader is told. And in case he or she is not convinced the publisher’s blurb provides authoritative ‘confirmation’: ‘His knowledge of African beliefs and customs is remarkable, and he writes with equal sympathy and understanding of the problems of both settlers and natives.’ The book could not, of course, be ‘political’, firstly because it was imperative to pass the revolt off as having nothing to do with political grievances, as being caused by something as ill-defined as the blurb’s ‘unseen evil. . . moving in the forests and mountains’; and secondly, because, as already seen, the bourgeois ideology within which Ruark works makes a rigid formal separation between ‘politics’ and daily life whereby ‘politics’ is confined to the activities of political parties.

As part of the pretence of impartiality Ruark has Peter McKenzie assert that the brutality and guilt in the Emergency are shared by whites as much as blacks, thus: ‘God Almighty forgive us, Peter thought. Look at me, as bad as the Mau Mau, maybe worse, because we do it absolutely coldly.’¹³⁹ And again: ‘I can’t believe that there’s a man up that hill who really started out as a “bad" man, any more than Kimani did or I did. And I am just as bloody a murderer as the men I kill.’¹⁴⁰ But, for all Peter McKenzie’s sentimentalised metaphysical uncertainties, the selectivity in Ruark’s development of his material makes it unmistakably apparent that for Ruark, at least, Peter McKenzie and the other white men are quite literally not as bloody a bunch of murderers as the men they kill. Even the most cursory comparison of the way Ruark describes what white men do as against his descriptions of what black men do will show the falsity of the authorial pretence to impartiality. ‘Coldness’ (cf. ‘coolness, ‘nerve’, ‘self-control’) versus ‘heat’ (blood, orgasm, irrationality etc.) – the structuring opposition contained in the antithetical ‘racial attributes’ – gives the game away.

The zenith of Ruark’s lingering treatment of’African brutality’ comes in his treatment of the raid on the McKenzie farm. In describing what Peter McKenzie sees when he arrives at the farm Ruark uses the word ‘blood’ and its cognates no fewer than 54 times in the space of two-and-a-half pages.141 The scene is described in lingering close-up detail, magnified as through a ‘macro’ lens. As, for example in:

A blood-purge. A bloodletting. A blood oath. A river of blood. Bloody. For the first time in his life Peter McKenzie was sick in the presence of blood. The room was soaked in it, swimming with it. It came soggy into his shoe soles. . . There were separate big pools of blood, sticky, coagulated, crusty now. A long slick trail of blood led from one of the easy chairs to end in a thick pool under the piano. The trail was like the blood spoor of an animal but the prints were hand prints and knee prints and there was the long red smeared smudge between.¹⁴²

Every conceivable stop is pulled out in the effort to nauseate the reader, to produce a literal gut-reaction to the ‘Mau Mau atrocity’.

Just in case the six-page account of the aftermath of the raid, as seen by Peter McKenzie, is not enough to drive the point home, Ruark gives the raid the full treatment a second time with a six-page flashback to the events as they were in the process of taking place, as seen through Kimani’s eyes:

. . .he saw two children, their chests cloven from neck to belly, nerve-jumping on the floor, and Elizabeth Newton dragging herself slowly under the piano, clutching at the bowed piano legs with her one hand. Blood flowed from her as a stream bubbles and rushes down the mountain-side.¹⁴³

In contrast, the descriptions of what the allegedly equally bloody murderers (the white men) do are characterised by a striking absence of blood. Thus, after the Peter McKenzie-led raid on a shamba, the reader is told:

Peter walked over to the first man he’d shot, holding cold on the chest, curious to see what sort of impact a soft-nosed .416 would make on a man. The man lay on his face [sic]. Peter turned him over with his foot. The impact a soft-nosed .416 would make on a man was considerable. The man had no back whatever for the space of a square foot.¹⁴⁴

The impact of a soft-nosed .416 may be considerable, but there is apparently no blood to be seen. Despite the condensed agitation at the scale of the damage caused and the fetishisation of the weaponry as a signifier of technological/cultural potency the action in this episode is all deliberately abstracted, distanced: it is almost as if the action is seen through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, the victims are carefully dehumanised, and the weapons imbued with a will of their own:

Two men and one small boy ran for the trail and there was the sudden harsh chatter of the machine-gun in the hands of the policeman. Bill Falconer held low on the legs and let the gun jump. It was funny to see the two men and the boy fall. They fell in exactly timed sequence, as ducks drop in a shooting gallery. One. Down. Two. Down. Three. Down. All down, in a descending scale then, the men first, the boy later. Bing, bang, bong. Like a xylophone.145

Funny? It is notable that when small black boys are shot like ducks in a shooting gallery they are as bloodless as ducks in a shooting gallery, and they are not shown ‘nerve-jumping on the floor’. The visual distancing is made explicit a few sentences later (where the technological/cultural device comes again, significantly, from the world of entertainment): Then he heard the solid smack of Peter’s big .416 and saw the woman freeze as if she were in a movie and somebody had stopped the reel.’¹⁴⁶

On the few occasions when the camera does focus momentarily on blood in the rendering of the white man’s doings (doing something which one of the whites says ‘isn’t a thing a white man does’¹⁴⁷) blood clearly has a somewhat different signification. Describing the aftermath of the process whereby five black men have been sliced to pieces in the interests of obtaining information from a sixth who is forced to watch – the reader is not given any details of the actual process (there is, in fact, a break in the text, whose silence is extremely eloquent) – Ruark says (immediately after the break):

The slope that reached down to the stream had become toboggan-slick with the blood of the men, and a tiny trickle ran down away from the soaked ground and clotted in the cold stream. The little fish surfaced and struck at it as they might strike at a grasshopper. You could see them clearly through the red film of the blood in the water. The sparkling sand alongside the stream was dyed bright red and soggy now . . .¹⁴⁸

Apart from the fact that the description in the text only takes six lines and uses ‘blood’ twice, as opposed to two-and-a-half pages and 54 times, Ruark aestheticises this by using metaphors from natural science and painting to ‘compose’ the account – in both senses of the term.

Only one further instance need be cited of the way the author’s selection and treatment of his material give the lie to his claims to being ‘objective’. The reader is told:

One of Peter’s more sharply defined memories was of a swab-out of the prison pen, to make room for more candidates for interrogation. A man called Sloane from Kinangop, who had once been the legal husband of a now dead woman whose child had been taken unborn from the woman’s belly and shown to her, just before the woman died, pleaded for the right to clean out the prison pens. He cursed horribly and tears flowed from his eyes as he walked through the pen with a pistol in one hand and a panga in the other. He became over-hysterical finally and his eyes fixed on nowhere and foam dribbled from his lips. They had to go into the pen and drag him out and tie him down, and then they had to go back into the pen again with guns and finish off what Sloane had started. It was possible Sloane was mad, because he shot himself a week later, biting his rifle barrel between his teeth and tripping the trigger with his toe.149

Here we have a description of what is clearly, in context evidence of the settlers’ being as bloody murderers as the ‘Mau Mau’. Again, in spite of its being one of Peter McKenzie’s more sharply defined memories, it is given no sharp definition. No account of what Sloane actually does is given. And there is no blood. A more detailed description is, in fact given of the alleged ‘Mau Mau atrocity’ which this action is seen as retaliation for. What Sloane does is distanced, and an attempt is made to render it more acceptable to the reader, by the use of ‘pens’ and the medical term ‘swab out’. Ruark only allows his penchant for details its usual free rein when it comes to Sloane’s method of committing suicide. This last is a decent gesture on Sloane’s part as it opens up the possibility that when white men become over-hysterical and have foam dribbling down their lips it is because they are mad. It is notable that the possibility of his being insane is only entertained once he has shot a white man – himself. As long as he is merely killing blacks he is only ‘hysterical’. It would appear that he only becomes definable as ‘over’ hysterical when he stops making a good job of the killing. Even when white men might, in terms of foam dribbling down their lips, possibly be mad, they do not go in for the kind of ‘spastic jump’ with which Ruark characterises his black murderers – who are never insane, merely black. Finally, it is worth pointing to the ideological weight of that otherwise utterly gratuitous ‘legal’ husband, and to the symbolic value, in terms of the white man’s burden, of its being tears rather than semen which he emits when he does his killing.

The Fiction’s Rendering Visible of the Ideological Structures of Colonial Fascism

Linkages Between ‘the Family’, Sexism, and Anxieties about Homosexuality

Having identified the colonial myths endorsed by ‘Mau Mau’ in this body of fiction, and having examined some of the fictional devices used in interpellating the reader and seeking assent to the colonial view of the revolt (in other words, having shown the extent to which, and ways in which, this fiction was used as a propaganda vehicle), it remains to attempt to identify the way in which the overall ideology, rather than its individual components, is ‘rendered visible’ in the fiction. It is only by answering the question, ‘what does this fiction reveal of the ideology’s binding links (and thereby its structure) and their determinations?’ – an answer to which is essential if one is going to be able to identify the historical materiality of the ideological process – that one can approach an answer to the question of ‘why the fiction is so and not otherwise’.

It is here that the main political thrust of an analysis such as this must lie, though it is conceivable that something may also be being achieved in the process of making it possible for people (having been shown the extent to which the myths are elaborated out of a particular combination of historical circumstances, in the service of a very particular class experience and class interest) to begin to question similar (or even identical) myths when they encounter them, as they are still (increasingly?) likely to do in Britain as well as southern Africa. In tracking down the most complex twists and turns of ideology to their determinants in the structure of a social formation it becomes possible to break out of the circle of a dominant and oppressive set of discourses which allow ‘all questions’ except those referring to their own historical origins, and to identify the malfunctions in the structure which generate the gulf between the ideal projections of the ideology and the real relations of production (and hence conditions of human existence) embodied in the structure. To do this it is not enough simply to identify the various attitudes adopted on specific issues – such as organised labour, homosexuality and racial superiority – the analysis must also situate the particular attitude within an account of the ideology which integrates its component parts, and verifies the accuracy of this integration by locating them in the particular ensemble of social practices which give rise (in a given historical situation) to the type of ‘subjectivity’ in question. Only by doing this can the analysis show not only the necessary relation of the particular attitude in question to the structure as a whole but also, by implication, the need to, and indeed possibility of, transforming that structure.

Chapter 2 showed that, faced with an armed threat to their privileged political and economic status in Kenya, the colonisers reacted with extremes of repressive violence. Chapter 3 suggested that in many respects the ideology which determined that colonial practice during the Emergency could be described as a colonial (which is not to say that it didn’t, and doesn’t, have metropolitan adherents) form of fascism. This section will suggest that the colonial fiction confirms the account given in my last chapter by revealing the ideology which determined it as being in a large measure definable as ‘fascist’, and that, moreover, its fascist tendencies are in some ways revealed more clearly in the fiction than they were by the ‘non-fiction’. Attention will be focused particularly on the novels by Ruark and Stoneham; the former because his novels are much the most widely read, the latter because his fiction so faithfully reproduces the key categories of thought characteristic of settler ‘nonfiction’.

Many of the individual components of the ideology (for example a deep hatred of communism and socialism) revealed by the fiction can be seen to be characteristic of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology in general, not just of the ideology of those class fractions which, to take Britain as an example, would today subscribe to the ideologies of the right wing of the Conservative Party or the National Front and the various other neo-Nazi groups. It is the interconnected structure of these components, with their various representations, recognitions and interpellations, and the way that structure determined, and was determined by, colonial practice, which identifies the ideology as fascist.

To talk of an undifferentiated ‘bourgeois ideology’ determining this fiction would clearly be too imprecise to have any analytical usefulness, though some aspects of these novels are most aptly described as being quintessentially ‘bourgeois’. I am thinking, for example, of Ruark’s meticulous, almost fetishistic, cataloguing of the contents of the interiors of settler houses, the contents of settler gun cabinets, the lavish array of wedding presents at a settler wedding, the trade names of the perfumes, clothes and cameras of Peter McKenzie’s clients and the names of the shops in New York, Paris or London at which they would have been purchased, and so on.150 Ruark’s catalogues have perhaps the same ideological value as John Berger ascribes to oil painting’s ‘ability to render the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts’,¹⁵¹ which is ‘to demonstrate the desirability of what money [can] buy’.¹⁵² Thus, for example, Ruark’s two-paragraph description of the Hotel Norfolk’s cold buffet¹⁵³ is not only a celebration of the ‘landed gentry’ life-style spoken of by Brett, it is also a lingering indulgence in the material and sensual benefits that accrue from having money.

The bourgeois nuclear family, with its traditional division of labour and economic exploitation of women and its importance as a device for ensuring the retention of the ownership of the means of production in the hands of the ruling class, is clearly crucial to bourgeois ideology in general. The family also, as Poulantzas indicates, has a particular and important place in fascist ideology. Poulantzas’s comments are clearly apposite to the settler farmers in particular:

The role of the family is related to the representations and aspirations of a petty bourgeoisie characterized by isolation and family organization in its economic life, and by its search for a social unit immune to class struggle. . . It disguises the class struggle and takes away its reality, contributing to the tendency to ‘authoritarian hierarchy’ peculiar to imperialist ideology.¹⁵⁴

The colonial novels use the threat posed to the white family as one of their most powerful interpellations; the attractions of family life (as the bastion against a hostile and incomprehensible ‘outside world’) are regarded as a central ‘obviousness’. This is best exemplified in Ruark’s three-page account of an evening spent with the Newtons after which Nancy Deane reflects that ‘she had never seen a nicer family. That was the word, nice . . . when she went to bed that night she had a sense of warmth and well-being which she hadn’t remembered since her childhood It was a bunny-rabbit-in-a-burrow feeling, warm against the world.’155 Immediately before Jeff Newton goes out to get murdered by Kimani, the reader is presented with an idyllic scene of English petty-bourgeois comfort and tranquillity; an interior against which the ‘outside world of Africa’ can only sin: ‘Jeff was sitting sprawled in a chair with baby Caroline on his knee. Young Harry was curled up with the Irish setters . . . Elizabeth was reading on the other side of the fireplace.’¹⁵⁶ The murder of Jeff and the children, like the murder of Sheraton’s Basil Riley, is pre-eminently the destruction of the family idyll, the irruption of the wild beast into the bunny-rabbit burrow, of ‘savage nature’ into the material and psychic interiors of home and householder.

The wedding is a central legitimating symbol, as seen already in the sentimental use the plots make of Peter McKenzie’s honeymoon and Brian Dermott’s failure to make his marriage proposal. But it is also always an enabling context for the establishment of a certain basic level of snobbery and for the construction (from the perspective of the passive, adoring female figure) of the central super-male character. Earlier in Something of Value Ruark had devoted 34 pages to a description of the Newton wedding and honeymoon.¹⁵⁷ This included such statements as: ‘The bride was unbelievably lovely in her grandmother’s Empire wedding gown.’¹⁵⁸ The bride is a virgin (with all the connotations of ‘new’ rather than ‘shop-soiled’), which, to her, ‘means I’m a little specialler than the others, anyhow, and he’s saved me up for a treat’.¹⁵⁹ The economic function of the wedding is made clear earlier in the novel. The McKenzie farm adjoins the Newton farm and the Keith farm. Henry McKenzie suspects (rightly) that Peter will marry Holly Keith, which will mean that: ‘The three properties would then join, and the seed of Henry McKenzie would take permanent root on the land.’¹⁶⁰ The dynasty-dreams of a rootless expatriate petty-bourgeoisie would be securely founded. The disproportionate space devoted to the wedding means that it isn’t just Elizabeth Newton, it is the ‘unbelievably lovely’ bride, who is disfigured, and it is a bridegroom who is decapitated. This is more than murder; it is blasphemy, desecration. So deeply does it transgress against the sanctity of the central ritual of petty-bourgeois life that any response becomes legitimate.

Weddings, detailed descriptions of wedding dresses and receptions, and celebrations of family life are representations common to bourgeois ideology in general. It is the imperatives of settler domination of a labour force in revolt which determine the particular use of the family as a central interpellatory device in the fiction and allow protection of the family to become the excuse for aspirations which would be genuinely ‘unthinkable for the liberal-democrat of the metropolis. At the end of Uhuru, a group of settlers, intent on preserving their privileged position in post-independence Kenya, prepares to take the law into its own hands, with full authorial support Don Bruce outlines their credentials: ‘We are mostly family men – and most of us were in the armed forces during the last big war. We are farmers and lawyers and policemen and shopkeepers and game wardens and doctors and engineers.’161 The appeal to farmers, lawyers, policemen, etc., to give assent to whatever is proposed simply because they are farmers, lawyers, policemen, interpellates the reader on the basis of an assertion of absolute class unity unflecked by any kind of secondary contradiction. The list of occupations is subsumed under the category of ‘family men’ – the family is very evidently seen here as ‘the social unit immune from class struggle’. Don Bruce continues his statement of intent to Ndegwa: ‘We will kill you people, Ndegwa. We killed you before. Now we will kill you massively. For every one of us you kill, we will kill a thousand of you. We will kill your women and children and set fire to your crops.’¹⁶² The claim to be a ‘family man’ is considered to be sufficient to justify the destruction of families: ‘We will kill your women and children.’ The interpellation of the sanctity of the family has become, under the social conditions of colonial revolt, a justification for genocide; ‘the family’ is here seen to fill the role it has for fascist not simply bourgeois, ideology.

The central ideological role of the nuclear family (with its traditional division of labour) and the ideology of sexism are interdependent While sexism is, again, a feature of bourgeois ideology in general, the peculiar forms it takes in the colonial fiction reveal the determining ideology to be fascist Sternhell argues the significance to the development of fascist ideology of the Futurists’ Manifesto whose point number nine says ‘we want to glorify war . . . and militarism, patriotism . . . and contempt for women’, and point ten includes ‘we want to. . . fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.’¹⁶³ While the aesthetic principles and modes of the Futurists may have had little in common with those of realist colonial fiction, it is clear that where the informing ideology is concerned there is a good deal of common ground. The colonial novels about ‘Mau Mau’ are, as regards women, at best a glorification of their subordinate role. For Sheraton those who aren’t ‘honest hard-working wives’ are ‘loud-mouthed butterflies’.¹⁶⁴ The only way in which Dermott says he could conceive of marriage ‘would be for me to be the giver on the financial side. I couldn’t take your money to be a play-acting gigolo-husband any more than I’d accept money from a fleet of whores.’ Katie Crane says: ‘I was hoping to hear you say that.’165 The notion of the man being financially dependent on a woman is unthinkable, an offence against the most basic proprieties, the woman who would support a man is no better than a whore.

One side of the sexist coin has already been seen in the idealisation of the wife and mother, the other is seen most clearly in Ruark’s characterisation of Lise Martelis, a Belgian whore (chauvinism often accompanies racism) who is ‘kept’ by the black politician-villain Matisia, but nevertheless is used to interpellate the reader’s assent to a number of ‘obviousnesses’ about women. Thus she thinks at one point: ‘How little it took to please a woman, really. A scrap of a house, a few sprigs of flowers, an apron; a stove and a fridge and a man.’¹⁶⁶ Again, employing the device of putting self-denigratory interpellations into the mouths of those they seek to denigrate, in the hope of making them sound more convincing, Ruark has her say:

Of course she acted like a married woman. All women were married women basically, she thought. It was only the men who were unmarried But you could not expect a man to realize that A man lived in his head and his groin was secondary. A woman lived only in her ovaries, and her thoughts were all ovarian if she bothered to form thoughts at all.¹⁶⁷

The fiction here lays bare the ideological relation between racism and sexism. Woman, like the black man, is physical and not rational and thus (mind/spirit being superior to matter/body) inferior to the white man. She is ‘naturally’ made for a life of service to family (particularly her husband); the black man’s ‘natural’ role is to serve the white man too. Woman is ovarian; the black man is genital. Woman exists to reproduce; blacks (to borrow Fanon’s formulation of the myth) ‘copulate at all times and in all places. . . They have so many children they cannot even count them’.¹⁶⁸ This is essentially a rapist’s view of women which justifies itself by ‘creating’ as a vehicle for its articulation a white woman who is not only a whore but one who is being kept by a black man (seen significantly as ‘a great black bull’).¹⁶⁹ It comes as no surprise to find Ruark attributing masochism to her: ‘The woman sighed, relaxed, seeming almost pleased at the blows.’¹⁷⁰

The settlers’ need to secure their political and economic future in Kenya by the founding of dynasties, seen already in Henry McKenzie, finds its fullest expression in Kaye’s Later Than You Think, a detective story in which the murderer turns out to be a highly respected, if somewhat eccentric, Kenyan settler widow who murders her daughter-in-law because the latter is unable to produce any children to perpetuate the family name. This is seen as deplorable but understandable.

It is the basic economic need (‘farms and machinery needed a man, a white man, alertly atop the job all the time . . .’¹⁷¹) for white procreation in the colonial context that determines the particularity and pervasiveness of this fiction’s interpellations against homosexuality, another characteristic of fascist ideology not seen in the ‘non-fiction’. Thus Valerie Dermott’s maternal ambition is seen as being ‘to rear her children strong and ruddy and handsome. . . to raise them not to be drunks and pansies and useless languid lechers’,172 and Tom Deane hopes ‘maybe I can raise me up an heir or so that won’t be a pansy’.¹⁷³ The reader is told of one of Peter McKenzie’s safari clients:

There was the pansy chap, a lawyer from Los Angeles, who ran after all the black boys. Peter caught him with one of the porters, who seemed to think that there was nothing very unusual about it Peter beat the porter with a kiboko and sacked him, and Dan drove the pansy chap back to Nairobi and refused any payment for the safari.¹⁷⁴

Ruark’s inability to resist the temptation to smear the African, in his terms, with the suggestion of a tendency towards sexual degeneracy, is, of course, a complete contradiction of his use of sodomy as epitomising the ‘Mau Mau’ oathers’ strategy of forcing the Gikuyu to perform acts which were anathema to them. This passage exemplifies the public school attitudes and hierarchy outlined by Stoneham in Chapter 3: the ‘remedy’ for homosexuality is a beating followed by expulsion (the passage interpellates the reader with the ‘obviousness’ of the right assumed by the master or prefect to arbitrarily administer the beating). The politico-economic determinants outlined earlier produce an ideological sub-ensemble whereby no morally upright, Kiboko-wielding coloniser intent on purging the world of homosexuality could possibly be expected to accept tainted money.

Ruark not only uses the imputation of homosexuality as a term of abuse directed against the British government, ‘we’ll do something that won’t depend on Mother England and the pimps in the Colonial Office and a lot of white bumboys for lousy black politicians’,¹⁷⁵ he also obviously sees it as one of the strongest possible anti-‘Mau Mau’ interpellations. Kimani, whose ‘eyes rolled backward in horror’,¹⁷⁶ is instructed: ‘. . .you will practise sodomy whilst in gaol, each man in turn leaving his seed in the body of the other man. In this way each is wholly bound to the other’.¹⁷⁷ The grinning Russian’s suggestion that ‘perhaps gaol will not be so bad’¹⁷⁸ is, of course, proven right:

As time went on there was less objection to the binding part of the oath, and Kimani and the others found that a man might slake his animal appetites on the body of another man quite satisfactorily if no women were available. And so, gradually, another strong bond, apart from the bond of the oath, was linked to each man. . . . The sounds at night sometimes reminded Kimani of the noise goats made in a hut, snuffling, grunting and stirring endlessly.¹⁷⁹

Ruark’s fascinated rendering of the acoustic details suggests a strong element of projection. The vehemence of Ruark’s hostility to homosexuals is the equivalent of his hostility to communism. This can be explained in Hoch’s terms (the ‘grinning Russian making the connection obvious):

. . .on the conscious and, more importantly, the subconscious level, both groups attack the work ethic and its psychic structures of authority. The communists primarily attack the social hierarchy on which alienated work is based, and the homosexuals – perhaps even without realizing it themselves – attack the psychological preconditions of this hierarchical authority. The victory of either group would seem to threaten the control of the existing authority structures over all those desires repressed into the unconscious.180

The particular function that the attribution of sodomy to ‘Mau Mau’ by Ruark (and the accounts of bestial oathing ceremonies in all the colonial novels) performs in the context of violent repression of colonial revolt is also suggested by Hoch:

What seems to be at stake in all this is the attribution of certain dark and unclean, even animalistic, practices – especially sexual practices (in the Middle Ages the most popular variant was sodomy) – to rebellious, outsider or subordinate groups, thus justifying (according to the prevailing sexual ethic) their repression.¹⁸¹

The heroes of this fiction are defined very much in opposition to ‘pansies’, in perfect accord with Hoch’s comment that ‘the male role today is often defined, not so much by its positive attributes as by its non-effeteness: a “real man” is one who is least open to the charge of homosexuality’.¹⁸² If ‘the whole social conditioning for masculinity in our society . . . [is] a kind of aversion therapy against homosexuality’, as Hoch suggests,¹⁸³ then not only will the popular fiction written by men be determined in part by the authorial subjectivity of those who have undergone that therapy, but it will also itself be an important part of the therapy.

The Cults of Nature, Action and Instinct as Cultivators of a Climate for Genocide

It is in relation to ‘masculinity’ interpellations and their opposite, always relating back to, and determined by, the economic demands and will to absolute power of settler colonialism, that the interconnections of a cluster of the ideological strands of fascism which do not appear to any marked extent in the ‘non-fiction’ are rendered most clearly visible in the fiction.

Sternhell identifies these strands as follows: ‘They decried the life of the great cities, which was dominated by routine with no room for heroism, and to the claims of the individual’s powers of reason they preferred the merits of instinct, sometimes even of animality’; ‘Fascism . . . was also a revolt against decadence’; ‘. . .in place of the degenerate man of a stay-at-home civilization to which physical effort had become repugnant, they offered the cult of the body, health, and the outdoor life’; ‘It was the virility of the fascist, his healthiness and bounding energy which finally distinguished him from the impotent bourgeois, liberals and socialists.’184

The particular quality of Peter McKenzie’s non-effeteness is defined by his bounding energy and seen very much in terms of a cult of ‘body, health and the outdoor life’. He is ‘a big man’ with ‘the strong sloping shoulders of a boxer’, ‘a corded column of neck’ and ‘abnormally sturdy, enormously thewe’ legs which had ‘the broad thick bands of the hard walker’; ‘Peter McKenzie could trot thirty miles a day in the smiting sun after elephant and still have enough energy left to run over a mountain at the end of it.’¹⁸⁵ Of McKenzie, the most fully characterised of the ‘heroes’ in this fiction, it is explicitly stated that ‘she [Nancy Deane] is seeing a real man at close range for the first time in her life’.¹⁸⁶ The main contrast to a ‘real man’ is set up here as ‘the interior decoration pansy set’.¹⁸⁷ By contrast with young men such as McKenzie, the reader is told of England that ‘the young men always seem so tired there’.¹⁸⁸ That the interpellations come from an ideological position very close to fascism’s ‘revolt against decadence’ is seen not only from the reference, once again, to ‘pansies’ who represent the apogee of decadence, but also from such passages as that which tells of McKenzie’s need periodically to get out into the bush away from clients, when ‘by and by the foul taste of movie stars and rich, spoiled women and old frightened fat men would come cleanly spat from [his] mouth’.¹⁸⁹

‘Decadence’ is an attribute of cities. Colonial ideology like early fascist ideology decries city life. Holly Keith says: ‘There is something sort of sad and sick in the cities that I don’t like a bit. . . Half the men are pansies and the other half think that because they aren’t pansies every woman they meet is panting to hop into bed with them, and they’re not far wrong at that.’¹⁹⁰ One thinks here of Sternhell’s comment that fascism was the ‘reaction of a younger generation to a Europe whose “morals are in decay” ’.¹⁹¹ Peter McKenzie is pleased his sister married Jeff Newton ‘instead of some city sissie who only talked about books and music’,¹⁹² and long before the end of the book the author is confident enough of the interpellation to be able to characterise someone to be looked down on as a ‘city type’¹⁹³ without further elaboration.

The colonial novels, particularly those of Stoneham and Ruark, establish a cult of the bush in contrast to ‘the city’ – best exemplified by a six-page account of Peter McKenzie’s after-dinner ruminations about wild animals which gives Ruark the opportunity to display his own ‘knowledge’ of their habits.¹⁹⁴ Peter McKenzie is characterised as out of place in the city, where he ‘fidgeted . . . after a day or two of wenching and heavy drinking’, and not ‘completely happy’ until back in the bush where ‘it was big enough . . . big enough for the nomads to drift their cattle over a million square miles of territory that nobody but Peter and God and the elephants [but not, one notes, the nomads] really loved’.¹⁹⁵ This is clearly a direct fictional rendering of ‘the linking of the human soul with its natural surroundings, with the “essence” of nature’ which Sternhell maintains to be the essential element of Völkisch ideology.196 The peculiarly colonial endorsement of this attitude is made apparent by Stoneham. Whereas ‘your rich sportsmen [sic] . . . does not like roughing it and he won’t walk’,¹⁹⁷ Herriot the hero roughs it: ‘Not for him the fly-proof tent, the spring mattress, canvas bath and host of servants to fetch and carry.’ Herriot only has a cook, a ‘houseboy’, ‘a third useful for skinning and cleaning and one to cut wood and carry water; ‘He would sleep in the truck on an old mattress and the boys would sleep under it. . .’¹⁹⁸ It is clear who roughs it, yet the obvious contradiction is ‘resolved’ by the implicit opposition – so ‘obvious’ that it does not need to be articulated – between ‘human’ needs and ‘animal’ needs.

The environmentalism¹⁹⁹ of colonial settler ideology contributed towards an ideological climate which could have accommodated the settler practice of repression even as far as genocide. It is the fiction again which makes the structural connection visible. Stoneham’s Audrey says (in her environmentalist’s voice ‘which did not frighten wild things’): ‘I think the multitude of humanity a great evil, people were not meant to live like rabbits in a warren. That’s what is wrong – there are too many people in the world, and they huddle together in those great cities.’²⁰⁰ The hero voices mild disagreement (not enough to override the interpellation) on this occasion, but later himself says: ‘Surely there are enough people in the world. And they’re nothing to rave over.’²⁰¹ John Thompson’s account to his clients in Something of Value carries the identical implication: ‘No, Africa’s finished as my father knew it. Soon there won’t be anything in it but the wogs and the Indians and the towns. All the game will be dead. . . Too damned many people out here already.’²⁰² Don Bruce would clearly, in these terms, be doing the environment and particularly the (white) lovers of game a favour if he fulfilled his promise to ‘kill you [the Gikuyu] massively’.²⁰³ What the fiction renders visible is what lies unstated behind Bruce’s extreme statement of (fascist) nationalism at the end of Uhuru: ‘[This] is an honest open force of men who love their country and their families, and who have been driven finally to the wall.’²⁰⁴ ‘Country’ for these men means their farmland, their natural environment and its game – ‘country’ does not include the vast majority of the population, who are seen as expendable. (As a fascist writer Ruark is notably weak on the fact that surplus value comes from labour.) The direct link between this environmentalist ideology and the killing of blacks is made explicit in the inscription Dermott imagines being put on a monument to him to commemorate his shooting of the black politician Kamau: ‘Mr Dermott made the shooting of politicians popular and it was not long before most of the members of the Legislative Council had been shot in various stages of undress by other selfless patriots. Several thousand elephant rhino and worthwhile people survived.’²⁰⁵

Environmentalism as an ideological background to, and justification of, violent repression is clearly shown by the fiction to have been bolstered by Racial Darwinism, whose key role in fascist ideology was indicated in Chapter 3. Stoneham insists that the bush ‘was a deadly place where every creature preserved its life literally from day to day and was lucky to see a new sunrise’,²⁰⁶ and introduces his novel with the statement: ‘Man is the counterpart of the beasts in his striving and contending; he must be ruthless or perish.’²⁰⁷ This finds its direct political expression in the context of ‘Mau Mau’ in the interpellation carried by Vinnick’s: ‘When people start a policy of terrorism the way to act is to inculcate greater terror.’²⁰⁸ Vinnick advocates the summary hanging of ‘every member of these illegal organizations, who was caught’²⁰⁹ (whose guilt would be an intuitively arrived at ‘obviousness’).

Here again the fiction reveals the structural connections between two key areas of colonial settler (and fascist) ideology: the cult of action and violence on one hand, and fascism’s marked hostility towards such values and institutions of liberal democracy as the Rule of Law and its accompanying legal institutions on the other.

The cult of action and instinct rather than discussion and reason, resulting in the advocacy of summary executions, finds expression in Herriot’s: ‘He was sick of all this talk – throughout the world in every conclave decisions were avoided in favour of rambling discussion.’²¹⁰ It is seen in another form in Rocky Russell’s disappointment at the lack of violence in his first encounter with the ‘terrorists’: ‘Somehow it all seemed like an anti-climax – the easy, cowardly surrender, and Rocky turned away contemptuously; this wasn’t what he’d come for!’²¹¹ ‘Cowardly’ here clearly invites recognition of the obviousness of the need to approve ‘bravery’ in any circumstances, and Sheraton’s fiction here reveals another structural link in the ideology: the potential which ‘bravery’ holds as an interpellation which will override ideological adherence to such concepts as the Rule of Law. The ‘cowardice’ of ‘Mau Mau’ in Sheraton and Thomas has as its counterpart the bravery of whites, but that is not its only function. The credentials of Don Bruce’s group at the end of Uhuru are not only that they are ‘family men’ but also that ‘most of us were in the armed forces during the last big war. Here the militarism, the law and order, and the cult of action interpellations of fascism come together: the ex-serviceman, particularly the ‘brave’ exserviceman like Sheraton’s Basil Riley (to whom Sheraton awards a V.C.²¹²) can do no wrong. Riley, accompanied by Rocky, goes to the Lees’ farm to find that the Lees have been murdered, they are attacked by three members of the band, all three are wounded and incapacitated, whereupon Riley ‘wrings their necks’. The investigating police officer asks: ‘But why wring their necks? Riley, this looks to me like the act of a crazy man.’ Whereupon Rocky intervenes (grabbing the inspector by the front of his tunic): ‘Leave Riley alone, he’s alright! Two of those savages rushed him and he tackled them single-handed, without turning a hair. He’s got guts, I’ll say that.’²¹³ Enough said; or so, at least, the policeman seems to think, and so, clearly, the reader is intended to think. Riley acts the way Vinnick advocates people should act in response to ‘Mau Mau’ (or indeed any manifestation of ‘degeneracy’) and the novel ‘shows’ him to be right.

The cult of action and the bravery interpellations, then, reinforce the appeal of ‘when a rogue is caught our cumbersome legal procedure, which is quite unsuited to a country like this, allows him to get off nine times out of ten’,214 and combine in the central interpellation seeking assent to the ‘obviousness’ of the need for violent repression, as expressed by Dermott, ‘The only way to fight any sort of terrorism is to do it better’,²¹⁵ which is a central tenet of straightforward, classical fascism replete with its endlessly flexible definition of what constitutes terrorism (for indeed the psychic world of fascism is a sea of terrors) and its necessary drive to genocide. In doing it ‘better’ anything goes; as Drew says: ‘You cannot conduct a campaign against bestial horror like the Mau Mau with gloves on.’²¹⁶ This clearly recognises the fundamental contradiction between the (fascist) position being adopted towards the revolt and the kind of public school sportsfield ethos propounded by Carothers with his ‘most of us from Great Britain would refuse to kick a man when he is down, would cheer the losers in a football match, would shake hands with an opponent in the boxing ring, would be kind to dogs and cats’,²¹⁷ and supported by Stoneham in his colonial-administration/public school analogy. The recognition of a fundamental antagonistic contradiction is clear, and with it comes the recognition that the earlier ideological structures are no longer adequate to justifying the ‘enforced’ changes in repressive practice.

The fiction displays a number of attitudes held in common with fascism whose place in the ideological structure, and whose relation to colonial practice in general, are too obvious to need elaboration. Among these the most obvious are a hostility to organised labour (perhaps best seen in Ruark’s Kenyatta’s: ‘I have planned it [Mau Mau] through politics and through trade unions and through the friendship of thieves and other men who have got into trouble’²¹⁸), and particularly strike action, which would have posed a distinct threat to the coloniser’s crude forms of primitive capital accumulation, and the concern for racial purity. The latter is seen particularly in the interpellations carried by the hostile vocabulary of ‘half-breeds’ and ‘half-castes’,²¹⁹ as in Ruark’s ‘she remembered one particularly repulsive-looking half-breed who leered at her with crossed eyes as she blundered through the loafers on the dukah’s porch. It was the first easily detectable mixed blood she had seen in Africa’²²⁰ The products of miscegenation are not only necessarily physically degenerate, they are also grammatically dehumanised.

The last aspect of Kenya colonial settler ideology I want to discuss in relation to fascism is its hostility to communism and socialism. The interpellations take various forms, from direct attacks on Fenner Brockway;²²¹ to smears on Pritt ‘who had successfully represented Gerhard Eisler, the communist fugitive from America’;222 to statements like: ‘When the Socialists get in. . . there’s going to be any amount of hue and cry to make the niggers magically white gentlemen.’²²³ Ruark’s fiction in particular reveals a quite startling intensity of paranoid Russo-phobia. Russians ‘hate the English’.²²⁴ One of the most widely publicised and mythologised aspects of ‘Mau Mau’, the killing of domestic pets as a warning, is attributed to Russian influence (the ‘wa-Russia’ says: ‘. . . it is best when this killing starts, to leave behind a sign. This was found to be effective in my country. A strangled cat or cow with her teats chopped off or a disembowelled dog upended on a fence-post makes a good, strong, memorable, effective signature’²²⁵). This reaches an extreme of absurdity in Uhuru when Ndegwa asserts: ‘Poor people in America were better off than the richest Russians.’²²⁶ This last presumably owed a good deal to Ruark’s American nationality, but the anti-communist attitude is characteristic of most of the writers, as seen in the use of the names ‘Russia’ and ‘China’ as apparently self-sufficient interpellatory devices.²²⁷

The ascription of foreign, white, particularly communist, leaders to ‘Mau Mau’ reveals the extent to which this fiction is determined by conspiracy theory.²²⁸ This is most clearly seen in Harding, who avoids specifying who the enemy is but hints that it is ‘Red’.²²⁹ The villain, Sam, who has the designation of Cultural Relations officer (anyone who attempts to ameliorate the lot of the blacks in this fiction is immediately suspect),²³⁰ has fomented the rebellion, as he explains to the heroine, on behalf of the ‘Dragon’s Teeth’:

We’re everywhere, Sue. That startles you, doesn’t it? We’re respected Government officials, lawyers, doctors, clerks – we guard your houses for you and collect your mail. . . You’re going to be grateful to me for taking you over to the other side. England is finished, she hasn’t got a hope in hell.²³¹

One reason ‘England is finished’ is because she even encourages the black man ‘to form political groups and start his own trade unions’.²³²

These novels, then, reveal the ideology’s lumping of socialism, communism, trade unions, and even liberalism’s attempts to better the living standards of blacks – for whatever reasons – into a largely undifferentiated hostile force which in one way or another threatens, so he or she believes, the economic existence of the settler farmer. The material conditions determining the adoption of fascist ideology differ from those in Western Europe, but many facets of the ideology are adopted almost unchanged; and this is not in the least surprising since the settler-fascist always remains the product and creature of metropolitan contradictions, profoundly conscious of being trapped between the hammer of bourgeois indifference (‘the rich, the fat and the idle’) and the contempt of the ‘intelligentsia’ (‘pansies, bookworms, socialists’) on the one hand, and the anvil of the working class and the colonial masses on the other.

I conclude this chapter with a quotation from Stoneham:

There was tumult and destruction over the mountains; more huge cloud-masses came swirling over the crests. The lightning hardly paused, showing here and there at unexpected points, reminding Herriot of the flickering of snakes’ tongues. He kicked his legs over the cliff and chortled with glee, the warring of the elements roused in him a fierce exultation. The old Norsemen had thought lightning the blows of Thor’s hammer, the thunder his wrathful roaring, the gale the puffing of his angry breath. There was a romantic strain in those old sea-rovers which evinced itself in the manly poetry Herriot could admire – very different from the mawkish imaginings of the moderns. Herriot liked poetry to flash and ring like a sword; he thought it the only thing he had in common with a certain type of German.

Well, here was the Götterdämmerung exhibited before his eyes. He had a front seat to witness nature’s stupendous effects and fit the spectacle to the music he remembered.

He began to shout distorted fragments of the Valhalla motifs. Then he laid aside pipe and hat and plunged back into the depths to express his feelings in violent exertion.233

Here we find a perfect example of ‘the pagan awe of unlimited and unintelligible forces of nature’²³⁴ which Lowenthal identifies as one of the most important of the authoritarian themes and moods in Knut Hamsuns novels – which, like Ruark’s and Stoneham’s, portray the ‘antinomy of society and nature in an extreme form’.²³⁵ Lowenthal argues that in Hamsun ‘flight to nature as protest becomes flight to nature as idolatry’ and, in the submission to nature it demands, contains an element of anti-intellectualism,²³⁶ which last is regarded by Poulantzas as one of the main characteristics of fascism.²³⁷ This is seen clearly in Stoneham: ‘You had to take the wilderness as it was, without criticism, sinking your mentality to that of the animals about you.’²³⁸ A number of other features of Hamsun’s writing identified by Lowenthal, such as ‘flight from the city and escape to nature’,²³⁹ have already been seen in the colonial fiction.

The passage from Stoneham defines ‘manly’ against ‘mawkish’, with its connotations of spiritual softness and degeneracy, and ‘the moderns’ against the Vikings, who were picturesque and brutal. ‘Warring’ rouses ‘fierce exultation’ in Herriot as does the ‘flash and ring’ of the sword; the stress throughout the passage is on the ‘feelings’ to which Herriot gives expression in ‘violent exertion’. Fascism, says Sternhell, ‘propagated the cult of impulsive feeling and glorified both impatient instinct and emotion, which it considered superior to reason. . . It was the rediscovery of instinct, the cult of physical strength, violence, and brutality.’²⁴⁰ Feelings have direct expression in action, not only in Herriot’s plunge, but earlier when he ‘kicked his legs over the cliff and chortled with glee’. Herriot sees himself as a late romantic and, not coincidentally, invokes the music of Wagner which fascism made its own. The passage clearly gives evidence of a number of the tendencies to fascism which have been discussed in this section. Herriot’s taste in poetry was very obviously not ‘the only thing he had in common with a certain type of German’.

In conclusion, it can be seen that the fictional world of these novels is ideological in that it is constructed on the blueprint of their authors’ ideology, based on the colonial settlers’ imaginary representation of their relationship to their real conditions of existence and definable as a form of fascism. And it can be seen that everything that happens in these novels, all their characterisations and even their settings, relate to and illuminate that ideology. The writing of these novels about ‘Mau Mau’ served the primary function of attempting to win the assent of the popular-fiction-reading public to the settler account of the revolt and the wider body of colonial race myths. It is worth pointing out, finally, that perhaps the most illuminating light novels like Something of Value (a singularly inappositely titled book) shed on the ideology they bolster is through their not only having been able to find publishers in the first place, but also in their revealing that there are still publishers who remain, in 1985, perfectly happy to continue publishing them. Moreover these novels are not banned – even though that ideology countenances the banning of books on the grounds of ‘obscenity’. Leaving South Africa aside, where the usefulness of this racist propaganda to the government and its general acceptability to the white reading public are all too obvious, it is significant that while Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on trial for ‘obscenity’ in the London courts, Something of Value and Uhuru were allowed to carry on busily cultivating a climate conducive to genocide from the respectable railway bookstalls of W.H. Smith, and bookshops too numerous to mention.

Notes

1. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 87.

2. Ibid., p. 85.

3. Ibid., p. 117.

4. N. Sheraton, African Terror (London, Robert Hale, 1957), p. 28. ‘Neil Sheraton’ is the pseudonym of Norman Edward Mace Smith who was an airline pilot at the time when he wrote this novel.

5. M. Harding, Mask of Friendship (London, Collins, 1956), p. 27.

6. W.B. Thomas, The Touch of Pitch (London, Allan Wingate, 1956), p. 213.

7. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 191.

8. Ibid., p. 193.

9. Ibid., p. 211.

10. R.Ruark, Uhuru (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1962).

11. M.M. Kaye, Later Than You Think (London, Longman, 1958).

12. C.T. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery (London, Museum Press, 1954).

13. E.W. Said, Orientalism (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 32.

14. Ibid., p. 36.

15. Huxley, Race and Politics, p. 41.

16. E.Huxley, Forks and Hope (London, Chatto & Windus, 1964), p. 256.

17. Harding, p. 115.

18. Thomas, blurb preceding title page.

19. Ibid., p. 25.

20. It can only be this suggestion that a white man could be so villainous as to commit a murder and then frame a black for his crime that has resulted in this novel being the only one of those under consideration in this chapter to be banned in South Africa.

21. Thomas, p. 82.

22. Ibid., p. 196.

23. Ibid., p. 191.

24. Ibid., seriatim pp. 75, 72 (for one of many examples), 90, 176.

25. Ruark, Something of Value Corgi Paperback Edition (London, Transworld Publishers, 1980).

26. Ruark, Uhuru, p. ix.

27. Private letter from Hamish Hamilton Ltd. (signed by an editorial consultant), 29/1/79: ‘. . .we never disclose sales figures’. My letter to Transworld Publishers was not acknowledged.

28. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago, Chicago U. P., 1961).

29. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 181.

30. Ibid., p.x.

31. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 209.

32. Ibid., p. 7.

33. Ruark, Uhuru, p. vii.

34. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 211.

35. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 367.

36. Cf. Carothers, pp. 15–18.

37. Thomas, p. 72.

38. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 139.

39. Stoneham, p. 40.

40. Kaye, p. 117.

41. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 104.

42. Ibid.

43. Thomas, p. 47.

44. Ibid., p. 48.

45. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 356.

46. Ibid.

47. Sheraton, p. 56.

48. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 121. See also e.g. pp. 158, 179.

49. Ibid., p. 17. Emphasis added.

50. Harding, p. 146.

51. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 66.

52. Kaye, p. 10.

53. E.g. Harding, pp. 94, 198.

54. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 141.

55. Kaye, p. 116.

56. Thomas, p. 93.

57. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 177.

58. Sheraton, p. 30.

59. Ibid., p. 172.

60. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 308.

61. Ibid., p. 290.

62. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 159. See also Ruark, Something of Value, p. 301.

63. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 67.

64. E.g. Thomas, p. 63; Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 128; Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 59.

65. See particularly Something of Value, pp. 388–98, 472–3.

66. Ibid., p. 473.

67. Ibid., p. 308.

68. Ruark, Something of Value, pp. 330–1.

69. Ibid., p. 332.

70. Sheraton, p. 65.

71. Kaye, p. 88. The committing of a murder by every person who took the oath would, of course, have resulted in the deaths of a good half of the non-Gikuyu population of Kenya.

72. Thomas, p. 52.

73. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 179.

74. E.g. Harding, p. 250; Ruark, Uhuru, p. 50.

75. E.g. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 51; Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 74; Thomas, p. 59.

76. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained (London, HEB, 1981), p. 33, for a trenchant criticism of the settlers preference for animals over Africans.

77. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 59.

78. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 179.

79. Thomas, pp. 78–9.

80. Ruark, Something of Value, pp. 376, 388, 390; Uhuru, pp. 37, 142.

81. Sheraton, p. 61.

82. Thomas, p. 127.

83. Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether (London, Dent, 1974), p. 130.

84. Kaye, p. 114.

85. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 184.

86. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 386.

87. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 214, both quotations.

88. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 113.

89. Ibid., p. 135.

90. Quoted, ibid., p. 130. See also Calvin Hernton Sex and Racism (London, Andre Deutsch, 1969), p. 13: ‘In the eyes and emotions of a racist society the person of colour becomes a subject for prurience: all those things about themselves which white people think are nasty, the perversions, fears, fantasies and forbidden yearnings, are visited upon the Negro.’

91. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 125.

92. Ruark, Uhuru, pp. 206–7.

93. Hernton, p. 18.

94. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 134.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., p. 523.

97. Hoch, p. 48.

98. Thomas, pp. 74–5.

99. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 195.

100. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 117.

101. Sheraton, p. 188.

102. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 377.

103. Kaye, p. 60.

104. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 386. See also Stoneham, p. 135.

105. See also: ‘Unconsciously, Peter’s body jerked in the spastic, head-bobbing leap of the excited African, the uncontrollable hysteric jump which forms the basis of all Central African dances.’ (Something of Value, p. 13.)

106. See, for example, P. Braham, ‘How the media report race’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.), Culture, Society and the Media (London, Methuen, 1982), pp. 268–86.

107. Huxley, A Thing to Love, seriatim pp. 119, 222.

108. Thomas, pp. 15, 238.

109. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 168.

110. Ruark, Something of Value, seriatim pp. 7, 471, 522.

111. Thomas, pp. 12, 142.

112. Huxley, A Thing to Love, pp. 46–7, 110.

113. E.g. ibid., pp. 86, 101, 191; Ruark, Something of Value, p. 293.

114. E.g. Huxley, A Thing to Love, pp. 52, 110.

115. Ibid., pp. 45, 49; Ruark, Uhuru, p. 148.

116. Sheraton, p. 179.

117. Ruark, Something of Value, seriatim pp. 180, 175, 108.

118. See e.g. the detailed catalogue of Henry McKenzie’s guns, ibid., pp. 23–4.

119. Ibid., p. 457.

120. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 226.

121. Thomas, p. 78.

122. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 232.

123. Ibid., p. 57.

124. Ibid., p. 28.

125. Ibid., p. 64.

126. Ibid., p. 123.

127. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 300.

128. Ibid., p. 301.

129. Ibid., p. 295.

130. Ruark, Uhuru. p. 129.

131. Ibid., p. 465.

132. Booth, p. 97.

133. Ibid., Preface.

134. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 387.

135. Huxley, A Thing to Love, p. 208.

136. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 367.

137. Ibid., p. 251.

138. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 8.

139. Ibid., p. 458.

140. Ibid., p. 521.

141. Ibid, pp. 376–9.

142. Ibid., p. 378.

143. Ibid., p. 387.

144. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 439.

145. Ibid., p. 438.

146. Ibid.

147. Ibid., p. 454.

148. Ibid., p. 455.

149. Ibid., p. 440.

150. Ibid., seriatim pp. 24, 23–4, 109, 186–7.

151. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, B.B.C. & Penguin, 1972), p. 88.

152. Ibid., p. 90.

153. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 180.

154. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 255.

155. Ruark, Something of Value, pp. 242–4, the quotation is from p. 244.

156. Ibid., p. 385.

157. Ibid., pp. 106–30, 135–45.

158. Ibid., p. 119.

159. Ibid., p. 118.

160. Ibid., p. 19. This formulation is strongly reminiscent of Jacobus Coetzee’s ‘ur-acf of copulation with the land, and all that that is intended to connote about the coloniser in Dusklands (J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1974, p. 101).

161. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 521.

162. Ibid.

163. Sternhell, p. 351.

164. Sheraton, p. 160.

165. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 319.

166. Ibid., p. 346.

167. Ibid., p. 429.

168. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 111.

169. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 136.

170. Ibid., p. 138.

171. Ibid., p. 231.

172. Ibid., p. 14.

173. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 354.

174. Ibid., p. 164.

175. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 423.

176. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 298.

177. Ibid., p. 299. See also Uhuru, p. 134. For a rebuttal of these suggestions see Kariuki, pp. 139–40.

178. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 299.

179. Ibid., p. 302.

180. Hoch, p. 87.

181. Ibid., p. 54.

182. Ibid., p. 80.

183. Ibid.

184. Sternhell, seriatim pp. 334, 356, 357, 360.

185. All quotations in this sentence from Ruark, Something of Value, pp. 157–8.

186. Ibid., p. 352.

187. Ibid.

188. Ibid., p. 204.

189. Ibid., p. 170.

190. Ibid., p. 215.

191. Sternhell, p. 356.

192. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 39.

193. Ibid., p. 341.

194. Ibid., pp. 59–64.

195. Ibid., p. 167, all three quotations.

196. Sternhell, p. 337.

197. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 48.

198. Ibid., p. 10, quotations and summary.

199. Sternhell, p. 360: ‘In its desire to reconcile man with nature, save him from a lingering death and physical decrepitude and safeguard his primitive virtues and his natural environment fascism was possibly the first environmentalist ideology of this century.’

200. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 157, both quotations.

201. Ibid., p. 179.

202. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 234. The interpellation here is clearly identical with that in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Mountain Lion’:

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans

And never miss them.

The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, V. De Sola Pinto and W. Roberts (eds.) (London, Heinemann, 1967), p. 402.

203. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 521.

204. Ibid., p. 523.

205. Ibid., p. 396.

206. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 174.

207. Ibid., p. 7.

208. Ibid., p. 132.

209. Ibid.

210. Ibid., p. 64.

211. Sheraton, p. 22.

212. Ibid., p. 58.

213. Ibid., p. 65, summary and quotations.

214. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 67.

215. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 368.

216. Kaye, p. 115.

217. Carothers, p. 27.

218. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 290. See also ibid., pp. 21, 296; Uhuru, p. 146; Harding, p. 254.

219. E.g. Sheraton, pp. 133, 135, 184.

220. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 328.

221. Thomas, pp. 37, 89.

222. Ruark, Something of Value, p. 389.

223. Ibid., p. 102.

224. Ibid., p. 292.

225. Ibid., p. 295.

226. Ruark, Uhuru, p. 442.

227. E.g. Huxley, A Thing to Love, pp. 158, 160; Ruark, Uhuru, p. 522.

228. See Sternhell, p. 336; Billig, p. 155.

229. Harding, p. 186.

230. See e.g. Huxley, A Thing to Love, pp. 65–7.

231. Harding, p. 253.

232. Ibid.

233. Stoneham, Kenya Mystery, p. 17.

234. L. Lowenthal, ‘Knut Hamsun’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, Urizen Books, 1978), p. 320.

235. Ibid., p. 321.

236. Ibid., p. 322.

237. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 256.

238. Stoneham, KenyaMystery, p. 174. Other examples of this anti-intellectual strand are: Ruark, Uhuru, pp. 29, 251, 521; Something of Value, p. 211.

239. Lowenthal, p. 323.

240. Sternhell, p. 370.