Something of Value
In the forty-five years since Something of Value was published, Kenya became an independent nation and has undergone a steady change that turned it into a vastly different country than it was in 1953, or at independence in 1963, or, for that matter, as recently as 1993. Predictably, history’s view of the events of the Mau Mau Emergency, which lasted officially from late 1952 to 1960, has altered dramatically as well.
Like a pendulum, the world’s view and historians’ assessments have swung wildly between two extremes. On the one hand, there is the settlers’ view of the Mau Mau as a gang of bestial thugs and cut-throats, urged on by Moscow and fueled by bloodlust; on the other, there is the left-wing (for want of a better term) and generally academic view of the Mau Mau as a legitimate independence movement that was victimized by the British and inaccurately portrayed in the media. Likewise, perceptions and opinions on Something of Value as a novel, and as a reflection of life in East Africa in the early 1950s, have changed over the years as well.
A rule of thumb in journalism states that if you write a story and everyone involved accuses you of bias, then probably you have presented a reasonably accurate, balanced, factual picture. As general rules go, it is not a bad one. To a great extent that sums up the reactions to Something of Value, from all sides, from the time it was first released, right up until today. This is not to say it is not a widely admired novel, because it is. It is only to say that the different political factions all seem to view it as unduly partial to the other side. To Robert Ruark the journalist, that alone would be a source of rueful satisfaction.
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Robert Ruark returned from his second safari in 1953 and immediately began working on the novel. Published in 1955, it became an instant best-seller. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which guaranteed tremendous sales. It was also widely anticipated, and although there was an embargo on its sales, bookstores in New York broke the embargo left and right and the books flew out the door.
The novel was unquestionably Ruark’s most controversial work. For the time, it was unbelievably gory, with graphic descriptions of killings, mutilations, Kikuyu oathing ceremonies, bastardized oathing ceremonies employed by the Mau Mau that became progressively more ghastly and revolting, and torture employed by the settlers to gain information. By comparison, the murders carried out on both sides, also described in considerable detail, almost pale. There are stories of dogs and cats with their stomachs slit open, hung up on gate posts while still alive, to greet their returning owners. There are mutilations of farm animals and torture of prisoners.
Not surprisingly, the gore took center stage when the book was reviewed, and also not surprisingly, many reviewers seemed unable to see past the blood and the horrors to what lay in the depths of the story itself. The fact is, Ruark described nothing whatever that did not actually happen. The book is factual to a fault. In the introduction to the book, his defense that it was not written “for the pre-bedtime amusement of small children,” did not change the critics’ view that it was unnecessarily graphic, bloody, and loathsome.
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The plot is classic and symmetrical. The story begins in 1942 with two boys, one white, one black. They are childhood friends. Together they have grown up on a farm in the highlands outside Nairobi. The boy, Peter McKenzie, is destined to be a professional hunter, and it is generally acknowledged that he was modeled on Harry Selby. The black boy, Kimani, is a Kikuyu, the son of McKenzie’s father’s headman, Karanja. His destiny is less certain; he may become Peter’s gunbearer, or a farmer like his father, or who knows? That he is black, and Kikuyu, limits him in the Kenya of the time. On a safari with Peter and his future brother-in-law, Jeff, Kimani is insubordinate and Jeff strikes him — a terrible insult to a Kikuyu, which will bring an evil spirit. This comes to pass in the eyes of the Kikuyu and events gradually unfold with a tragic inevitability. Kimani tries to kill Jeff to ward off the evil, but the attempt fails; Kimani flees and disappears. As the reader discovers later, he drifts into the arms of one of the Moscow-inspired freedom groups, and commits a crime for the express purpose of being sent to prison, where he learns the craft of terrorism from other incarcerated “freedom fighters” who used British jails as universities. By 1952, when the Emergency erupts, Kimani is a confirmed Mau Mau.
By this time, Peter McKenzie is a successful white hunter. He gets married and while on his honeymoon, a Mau Mau gang led by Kimani attacks Jeff’s farm, killing Jeff and his children, and leaving Peter’s sister for dead. Unbeknownst to anyone, she is pregnant and later delivers a baby boy. Peter then devotes his life to fighting the Mau Mau and almost destroys himself in the process. His marriage falls apart under the strain, and he watches as everything he values disintegrates. Meanwhile, Kimani becomes a top Mau Mau, a completely dehumanized thug divorced from the ancient, honorable values of the Kikuyu. Peter finally tracks him down on Mount Kenya, kills him, and comes down off the mountain with Kimani’s illegitimate son, who is still an infant. He returns to his family farm with the idea that the two small boys, Kimani’s son and Peter’s sister’s son, one black, one white, should be raised together.
In the course of the novel, Ruark lays out vast amounts of information about Kikuyu life, customs, and superstitions. He is anything but unsympathetic, as the title clearly implies. It is allegedly taken (doubt was later raised on this point) from a Basuto proverb that states: “If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.”
Ruark’s premise was that the Kikuyu had lost their traditional values and had not found a set of suitable replacements. Whether this was the fault of the British colonialists, or the Kikuyu themselves being seduced by missionary teachings, or by formal education, or the Western material world, is not really important. The novel is a penetrating and succinct analysis of the essential conflict that existed between Kenya’s white civilization and its black population. The conflict had less to do with land than with a way of life. As they did everywhere else, the white settlers, the colonial administration, and the missionaries and teachers, fundamentally changed the way the black people lived without seeming to take into account that they were meddling with an ancient culture that was a product of centuries of social evolution. Overlaying a mission-school education, forcing women to cover their breasts, preaching against multiple marriage, attempting to halt female circumcision, and enforcing a plethora of petty rules and regulations that prevented black people from pursuing their traditional way of life — all of these things were bound to cause confusion, chaos, and as it ultimately turned out, conflict and bloodshed. Land may have been at the root of the trouble, but even had there been sufficient land to satisfy everyone, there would still have been serious problems eventually.
Ruark’s portraits of Karanja and the Kikuyu are almost loving. Even as he degenerates into the worst kind of amoral thug, Kimani is not painted as inherently evil. He is a product of a seriously flawed system, as well as a victim of events beyond his control. This does not justify his brutality, which he pays for in the end. No one would accuse Ruark of being a bleeding-heart liberal, but Kimani starts out as an admirable boy, and when he dies he is not totally unadmirable by any means.
The book’s other major characters likewise have their good points and flaws. Jeff, who sets off the tragic train of events by striking Kimani, is a good example of a particular type of colonial white man who sees black people as one-dimensional beings, best managed much as one would manage a draught horse, with a combination of stick and carrot and no attempt to understand their point of view. Yet Jeff is also a fun-loving, charming character, wounded in the war and invalided home. He is Peter’s boyhood hero as well as the catalyst of the destruction of Peter’s world.
Henry McKenzie, Peter’s father, is almost the prototypical Kenya colonial farmer that Ruark came to idealize, if not idolize. Henry is a man embraced by the land and is so close to the Kikuyu as to be almost one of them. In fact, at one point Henry utilizes his knowledge of Kikuyu magic to combat the Mau Mau. He is hard-working and devoted to his family, his farm, and his Kikuyu friends, especially his headman and alter-ego, Karanja. In his younger, elephant-hunting days, Karanja had been Henry’s gunbearer and constant companion. In old age, they are closer than brothers. Had more colonials been like Henry McKenzie, and fewer like his son-in-law Jeff, perhaps the Mau Mau movement would never have been born.
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Something of Value was published to a decidedly mixed reception in America, Britain, and Kenya.
Reviewers were critical of the blood but enthralled by the story and the writing. Regardless of what they thought, however, the book-buying public was in no doubt. The book became a best-seller and established Robert Ruark as a major novelist. The transformation from wiseguy columnist and lightweight comic novelist that began with Horn of the Hunter was completed with Something of Value. From that point on, Ruark was a writer to be taken seriously.
In Kenya, the book’s reception among the colonials it portrayed was curious. No one denied Ruark had told the truth about life in the colony, as well as about the Mau Mau. If anything, they felt, he had told it too well. Then, as now, Kenya’s white population was a small, insular community where everyone knew everyone else. Because of the book’s specific subject matter, many of its characters were, naturally, portraits of real people. Peter McKenzie based on Selby is one example, but there are other, more specific ones, as well. The two women who ran their remote farm by themselves, and fought off a Mau Mau attack one night, were real people who did exactly what Ruark described, although he changed the names in the book. The farmer who ran the anti-terrorist Campi a Simba on his property in the highlands was also real. Harry Selby took Ruark to the camp to meet the anti-Mau Mau forces when Ruark returned to Kenya on his second safari.
Under these circumstances, it is understandable the people Ruark knew in Kenya would pore over the book to see if they appeared in its pages and if Ruark had painted them sympathetically. This attitude is perfectly normal and occurs with any novel. The criticisms of Something of Value did not stem from people feeling slighted or misrepresented, however; they came from two entirely different sources.
The first concerned Kenya’s resident novelist and chronicler, Elspeth Huxley, who had published her own novel about the Mau Mau, A Thing to Love, the year before Ruark’s book appeared. Elspeth Huxley ranks with Karen Blixen as a Kenya writer with an international reputation, and she has written both fiction and non-fiction books about her adopted country. English by birth, she emigrated to Kenya with her parents in 1913 and grew up on a farm in the highlands near Thika. She was educated in England, but returned to Kenya in 1931. Over the years she spent long periods in both countries, giving her both an insider’s view of Kenya and an outsider’s perspective. She was Lord Delamere’s biographer (White Man’s Country) and wrote acclaimed books about life in Kenya, including The Flame Trees of Thika, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Out in the Midday Sun. A Thing to Love, her novel about the Mau Mau, appeared in 1954 and is not considered one of her best works. The book contains a predictable mixture of white people and black, with good and bad on both sides. There are heroes and villains, but most of the characters are somewhere in between. There is a love affair, and there are atrocities.
It would be difficult for anyone to write a book about the Mau Mau and not include all of the above. After all, Kenya was a small stage with a limited cast, and any attempt at portraying reality would be bound to have similar people, settings, and circumstances. Immediately upon publication of Something of Value, critics in Kenya began to compare it with Huxley’s novel, and there were even whisperings that Ruark had, if not actually plagiarized, then at least drawn heavily on Huxley’s book for characters and situations.
Aside from the obvious parallels, however, there are actually very few similarities between the novels. Logistically, it would have been impossible for Ruark to steal Huxley’s material even had he wished to, since too little time was available between the appearance of the two novels for Ruark to have obtained a copy of A Thing to Love, stolen material, and grafted it into a book that is as well planned and constructed as Something of Value. And also, aside from the obvious aspects, the two novels are about as different as it is possible to get and still write about the same subject.
Elspeth Huxley was writing about a land and people she knew intimately and from long association. She was an insider. She knew firsthand many of the contradictions and complexities and ambiguities of life in Kenya — nuances which Ruark did not fully appreciate at that time, having been exposed to Kenya life for all of three years — and this tortuous view shows through in Huxley’s book. For want of a better term, there is a listless, resigned quality about A Thing to Love, as if Huxley saw what was happening in Kenya with all the inexorable slow-motion doom of a waking dream. It is despairing, if not actually desperate, and its characters are trapped in a situation not of their making, but which will destroy them inevitably nonetheless. There is also a quality about the book found in many novels originating in England in the early 1950s — a reflection of the drab, lifeless, disillusioned, almost hopeless society postwar England became with its socialist governments and the disintegration of its empire. It is perhaps unfair to call Huxley’s novel lifeless, but there is a definite sense that its characters are simply going through the motions.
Something of Value, on the other hand, is anything but lifeless. It is exuberant to a fault, whether it involves black terrorists mutilating pet dogs or white hunters mutilating black prisoners. There may be no hope, but it is certainly not hopeless.
Robert Ruark freely conceded, publicly and in print, that he had studied Elspeth Huxley’s writings as part of his voracious consumption of anything and everything he could get on Kenya over the years, from Speke and Burton, to Baker and Blixen. Huxley’s books — all her books — graced his bookshelves in Palamós, but so did many others. He may have cheerfully admitted that he “stole relentlessly” from other writers, but the admission is the kind of self-deprecating, apocryphal statement any writer would make. Ruark certainly read everything, and made use of it as background, but he did not plagiarize. Still, the innuendoes began in Kenya in 1955 and continue to this day.
In a society as insular as Kenya’s white community, which is both protective and jealous at the same time, it is natural that many would champion their home-grown novelist against the intrusions of the big-city American. That attitude undoubtedly played a part as well.
The other criticism of Something of Value, according to Harry Selby, was that Ruark betrayed his white contacts by portraying them too accurately — which is to say, warts and all — and even presented the Mau Mau and the Kikuyu in a too-sympathetic light. This is puzzling, given that black historians say the book fails to show the genuinely dark — that is, racist — side of white Kenya society. If the novel does have a serious failing, that is it. There were many white supremacists in Kenya, of the extreme right-wing Afrikaner stamp still found in parts of South Africa today. None of Ruark’s characters come close to portraying that kind of ingrained racism, and in a sense he idealizes the Kenya settlers, showing their best side while ignoring their worst. As a Southerner, Ruark undoubtedly knew anti-black racism when he saw it. Whether he simply chose to ignore it, or it did not fit into his premise for the novel, or — and this is most likely — the constraints of plot did not allow the introduction of a completely different and complex thread, is impossible to say. In his defense, to a great extent he idealizes traditional Kikuyu culture as well. And, it should be remembered, he was writing a novel, not a definitive history of black-white relations in Africa.
Looking at Something of Value today, forty-five years after it was first published (and with the benefit of hindsight, if not historical revisionism), one can see the overall even-handedness of Ruark’s treatment and view it dispassionately as evidence of good journalism. In the Kenya of 1955, with terror outside every door, blood running freely, and daily stories of fresh atrocities, any idea that Ruark was siding with the enemy would have been grounds for castigation. But that is the difference between literature and propaganda. Robert Ruark may not have been Tolstoy, but he was not Dr. Goebbels, either. While his sympathies as a man lay with the Kenya settlers, his instincts as a journalist were simply too strong for him not to tell the whole story.
Criticism by Kenya’s white community may be slightly puzzling, but condemnation by blacks, both Mau Mau and pro-black historians, is perfectly understandable. It was immediate and long-lasting.
Historian Robert J. Edgerton, in his history Mau Mau: An African Crucible, published in 1989, refers to Something of Value as a “caricature of white heroism and black savagery” that reinforced government propaganda and portrayed the Mau Mau as something it was not. Edgerton’s premise is best summed up by the subtitle on the cover, which says it is “The extraordinary story behind the bloody liberation of Kenya in the 1950s and the British deception that hid the truth from the world.” Edgerton is also the author of Like Lions They Fought, a history of the Zulu Wars in South Africa. He writes from a particular point of view, which seems to be that African blacks can do no wrong, and African whites can do no right. Like many people who adopt a cause, he goes to greater extremes in his advocacy than would most of the actual participants. His book is, however, a good look at how the Mau Mau are viewed from the other side.
It is understandable Edgerton would feel the need to criticize Something of Value, because many non-Kenyans learned what they knew of the Mau Mau from its pages. Not only was it a best-seller, two years later it was made into a movie starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. The novel remained in print, in softcover at least, until 1980, which is astonishing longevity for a book by an author who had not only been dead for fifteen years, but was also largely discredited among mainstream readers.
When I first visited Kenya in 1972, I found Something of Value displayed prominently in bookshops in Nairobi — a fact I found more than a little surprising, given its subject matter and the political leanings of Jomo Kenyatta’s government. Even today you will find the book on shelves in any literate household from the Cape to the end of the English-speaking African world. Historians like Edgerton may hate it, but it is still the extant picture of the Mau Mau uprising for significant numbers of people.
In the years since it appeared, other books have been written about Kenya life, including some by combatants on both sides, and any number of memoirs have been published by professional hunters writing about their adventures in the field. These memoirs share one trait: a general reluctance, by those who were most directly involved in the combat operations against the Mau Mau, to go public with their memories. Some professional hunters today, who were then little more than teenagers, still refuse to speak for publication about the activities in which they were involved. Harry Selby says that even living in Botswana, two thousand miles from Kenya, he would not be comfortable revealing some of the things that happened, and his former partner, professional hunter Andrew Holmberg, insists that in writing his memoirs he will not discuss the Mau Mau Emergency, nor the events of that time. This leaves a curious gap in these autobiographies and memoirs, but it is understandable and, from a social point of view, perhaps even laudable. What happened, happened. Nothing can undo it, but that is no reason to put it all on display.
Tony Archer, a professional hunter who was one of the “pseudogangsters” — white men who blackened their bodies and participated in operations against the Mau Mau in their forested mountain strongholds, working with former Mau Mau who had been turned — talks about those times with some reluctance. This reticence has to do, not with fear of reprisal, so much as with Jomo Kenyatta’s famous speech at the time of independence, in which he urged his countrymen, and the remaining white settlers, to allow the old wounds to heal over — to seek neither retribution nor revenge, but to live and work together in peace. Many greeted the speech at the time with derision and bitterness, but Archer believes Kenyatta meant what he said and that enough people accepted his words that it staved off the kind of post-independence bloodbath many people, including Robert Ruark in some of his more bellicose moments, predicted for the former colony.
Today, fifty years after the beginning of the Emergency, those who saw it firsthand are growing old. Most have died. Sometimes, Archer says, he will attend a social gathering and meet a black man of his own age who was a Mau Mau in his youth. They do not fall into each other’s arms like old comrades, but nor do they reach for a gun. There is a feeling of having lived through a bad time, a feeling both know and share, that outsiders can never fully appreciate. Like old soldiers from opposing armies, they have more in common with each other than they do with the civilians from either side who did not see the things they saw.
Robert Ruark foresaw much of this in Something of Value. He even predicted it, indirectly, at the end of the novel when Peter McKenzie comes down off the mountain with Kimani’s infant son and takes him home to be raised with his newly born nephew. Peter knows that if there is to be any hope of a decent future for Kenya, the two sides will have to learn to live together. Most important, they will have to do things differently than they did in the past. Seen from the vantage point of fifty years on, with the immediacy of the atrocities gone, Something of Value more than lives up to its name.