MILES AND MILES OF BLOODY AFRICA
In the eight years since he made his first safari, Ruark had hunted with Harry Selby again and again, returning to Africa at least once a year, and often staying for several months. Together they had hunted throughout East Africa, from Somaliland in the north to the Mozambique border in the south, and as far west as the Mountains of the Moon. When he was not actually on safari, Ruark would visit friends in Nairobi or on farms in the Aberdares, or stay with friendly game wardens in their own private Edens. He had become close friends with Brian Burrows, the manager of the New Stanley Hotel, and often camped out in Burrows’s penthouse suite when he was in town. From reading, from talking with people, and just through extensive “exposure to the scene,” Ruark had learned an awful lot about Africa, and much of what he knew he had poured into two books, dozens of magazine articles, and hundreds of newspaper columns.
What he had seen during those eight years had both fascinated him and troubled him deeply. The bloodshed of the Mau Mau years had been bad enough, but by 1960 Africa was passing through an era of political change and instability far beyond what any but the most pessimistic observers had foreseen. After India gained its independence in 1947, it was a foregone conclusion that other British colonies would follow suit, and many of them were in Africa. Britain ruled a dozen separate colonies on the Dark Continent, many of them potentially wealthy or strategically valuable both to the West and to the expansionist Soviet Union. As Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal struggled, each in its own way, to deal with the independence movements that sprang up in their colonies, and with the pressure applied through the United Nations and other diplomatic channels, the superpowers of the time — the United States and the Soviet Union — pursued their own interests and prepared to turn Africa into an ideological battleground.
Kenya and the Mau Mau aside, of the colonial powers Britain was the one most prepared to give its colonies their independence. France, having lost Indochina to the Viet Minh at Dienbienphu in 1954, turned its attention to Algeria and fought a long war to keep it part of France. Belgium, pressured to give up the Congo, watched as the colony descended into chaos. Portugal declared that Mozambique, Angola, and the Cape Verde Islands were provinces of Portugal, and that it would never pull out. The Suez Crisis of 1956 provided the moral turning point. Britain and France invaded Egypt in an attempt to take back control of the Suez Canal, expecting the United States to (at least tacitly) back the move in order to protect its own interests in the Middle East. Instead, President Eisenhower strongly condemned the military action. As Egyptian units pulled back into Cairo, pursued by British and French paratroops, international pressure mounted on the two colonial powers. They were forced to halt their advance and, ultimately, to withdraw. Nasser, the Egyptian president, had won by losing. Suez was a turning point because Britain and France had been humiliated; the world had repudiated imperial military action, and it gave the African independence movements, from Cairo to the Cape, a new confidence.
The first to go was Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, which became independent in 1957. It is generally considered the first of Britain’s African colonies to achieve independence, although the Sudan, jointly ruled by Britain and Egypt for more than fifty years and technically not a colony, became a country on January 1, 1956. Ghana’s first president was Kwame Nkrumah, an American-educated politician and darling of the liberal left, who became something of a moral leader of black Africa. Between 1956 and 1960, almost all of France’s colonies in black Africa became independent. By 1960, conditions in the Belgian Congo were red-hot, and there was racial unrest in South Africa. Kenya, in its post-Mau Mau years, was moving toward independence as well.
From New York and Palamós, Robert Ruark watched the events unfolding and decided it was time to make a major journalistic safari in Africa — a serious attempt to visit the dark corners and to understand what was really happening, to go far beyond the “once over lightly journalism” he had been practicing sporadically between hunting trips. Hugh Foster says it was an effort to resurrect a career that was flagging as “his column popularity declined and his writing skills weakened,” but the facts do not support that conclusion. Poor No More may have received mixed reviews, but it was not poorly written by any means. It could have been better, but that does not mean it was bad. If, as a novel, it appears to be the weak link in Ruark’s chain of work, it is only because the other links are so strong. A more plausible explanation is the simplest one: Ruark was, by training and inclination, a reporter, and the events shaking Africa in 1959 comprised the hottest story around. Not only that, he was the acknowledged expert on the subject. Where else would he go but Africa?
As well, in the back of his mind he already had the basic idea for his next novel. Something of Value cried out for a sequel, and what Ruark had seen in Kenya since 1955 gave him the basis for a major work on emerging Africa. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had spoken of “the winds of change” that were sweeping across the continent. Robert Ruark would stand with those winds on his face and turn them into literature.
A major journey of exploration such as Ruark envisioned, the modern-day equivalent of Sir Richard Burton’s quest for the Nile, would be neither easy nor inexpensive. As well, Ruark had to have the blessing of Scripps-Howard and United Features, because if he was in Africa for five or six months, it meant his column would be Africa — all Africa — for virtually that entire period. There was no way he could carry out such a mission while trying, at the same time, to sprinkle his column with variety by writing on subjects like hemlines, women’s hair, and the domination of American children by television.
The other issue, as always, was money. Ruark had a very large income, but he was not independently wealthy. Such a venture would be very, very expensive. Although Ruark knew his way around some parts of Africa and certainly felt at home there, it was a highly dangerous place to be. It would be foolhardy for him to try to cover it on his own, and he knew it. For one thing, it was simply too big. For another, he did not speak all the languages, and the fact that he was a known journalist would shut some doors to him. Finally, there was the question of personal safety. He needed someone with him who knew the place intimately. On this ultimate safari after the biggest game of all, Ruark needed the best white hunter he could find. The obvious choice was Harry Selby, but hiring a Harry Selby virtually full-time for six months would cost a not-so-small fortune.
Ruark went to Roy Howard with his idea, and Howard jumped at it. Ruark was at his best, his liveliest, his most passionate and controversial, when writing about Africa, and this was reflected in reader polls. Howard was not at all averse to a full six months of in-depth coverage of Africa, as long as it was written in vintage Ruark. And he was prepared to unlock the vault to fund it. Armed with that most vital item of a foreign correspondent’s equipment — a lavish expense account — Ruark alerted Selby by cable and boarded a plane for Nairobi.
***
Ruark arrived in December, 1959. The Kenyan capital was then — and is now — the major communications center of sub-Saharan Africa outside of Johannesburg. Newspapers and wire services with only one correspondent for the whole continent stationed them in Nairobi because it had passable telephone service and reliable flights in and out. In that era, television was not yet a force in news gathering, and satelite television was not even a dream. Radio was strictly local except for short-wave like the BBC World Service and Radio Moscow. Urgent stories were filed by cable or telex. Longer magazine articles went by post, mailed from out-of-the-way places; the careful correspondent would later mail the top carbon from the next outpost, and keep the second carbon on file for insurance.
News gathering was done in person, on foot as often as not. You landed in a strange place, found a hotel, and ventured out into the streets to see what was happening. Sometimes you watched from the safety of your hotel window, and seasoned hands always asked for a room on the third or fourth floor. The view is better. So is the security.
When Ruark arrived, there were so many conflicting currents at work in Africa that it would take an entire book even to skim the surface. It was a huge continent, with two hundred million people divided by tribe, geography, history, and culture. Attempting to cover even a portion of it, and provide readers back home with a coherent picture of what was happening as the various colonies lurched toward independence, was a truly daunting prospect. What had seemed like a great idea at home in Palamós, on the beach looking out at the Mediterranean, became an impossible task when seen up close, with Roy Howard waiting at the other end of the line for the dispatches to flow in.
Ruark was not physically well when he landed in Nairobi, either. His chronic health problems, the ailments that always seemed to bedevil him in Europe and America, had reduced him almost to invalid status. He and Selby set out from Nairobi by Land-Rover to drive to Somalia, a round trip of several thousand miles over either bad roads or no roads at all. They reached Mogadishu, the uninspiring Somali capital with its heat, sand, camels, goats, and flies, spent a couple of days, then headed back for Nairobi. Ruark was not impressed by Somalia, nor was he encouraged. He foresaw only disaster for the Somalis when the Italian and British colonial masters departed, as they would later that year. Worse, he realized the immensity of the task he had set for himself. In a letter to Virginia, mailed on his return to Nairobi, he said, “I don’t know if I can do it. It’s a job for a several man team. There’s so many places and so much going on that I frankly don’t know where to turn.” He even suggested that unless he saw something on which he could focus as a theme, he might give up and go home.
Meanwhile, he stuck it out. He flew to Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, and was given an audience with Emperor Haile Selassie. Ethiopia was not part of emerging Africa — it had been an independent country longer than the United States, and its civilization dated to the time of Christ — but it was about to be threatened by the emergence of newly independent countries all around it: Somalia to the east, Sudan to the west, Kenya to the south. The Sudan, independent for only four years, was already deep into a civil war between the black people of the south and the Arabic north. This war would continue from 1956 until 1972, pause briefly, then resume and continue until this day. It soon spilled over into the surrounding countries as refugees sought safety and the guerrillas a haven and base of operations. Then there was Somalia. The Somalis are fierce, warlike people. Their neighbors are frightened to death of them (they were the chief perpetrators of the elephant and rhino poaching that became rampant in the 1970s and ‘80s), and as soon as independence loomed, they announced their intention of carving off part of Ethiopia. The Ethiopians were no slouches when it came to war, but Haile Selassie had seen enough bloodshed during the Italian occupation of his country before the second world war. Overt American support for the Somali claim, Ruark said, would drive Ethiopia into the arms of the Russians. It was the beginning of a long chess game, involving Ethiopia, Somalia, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R., that continued for twenty years.
Russian encroachment in Africa was one of the themes Ruark dwelt upon in his columns, along with his view that no African country was even remotely prepared to govern itself after the colonialists left, nor to get along with its neighbors. In general terms, Ruark saw Africa as a tribal bloodbath just waiting to happen, with the Russians and Americans providing the firepower that would take hundreds of thousands of lives, rather than the mere thousands who would die if the wars were fought with old-fashioned bows and spears. It was not an optimistic outlook; unfortunately, it proved to be more accurate than not.
In February, Ruark made his first visit to Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), the capital of the Belgian Congo. He went on his own, without Selby for once, and returned for a second look in May. The Congo was scheduled to become independent on July 1, and the politicians were frantically jockeying for position. Names like Joseph Kasavubu, Patrice Lumumba, and General Joseph Mobutu would soon become familiar to anyone who read a newspaper. Ruark looked into the abyss and did not like what he saw. He predicted chaos for the Congo. It had no institutions, no political traditions, no stability. The province of Katanga, which was rich in minerals and bordered on the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), was poised to secede. Katanga’s president, Moise Tshombe, was supported by the Belgian mining giant, the Union Minière.
Civil war broke out as the government in Leopoldville attempted to force Katanga back into the fold. What ensued was a melee of warring factions, foreign mercenaries, assassinations, and United Nations military intervention. This translated ultimately into the horror stories of white hostages, raped nuns, mutilated priests, and tribal bloodbaths that were splashed over front pages around the world.
In April, South Africa made headlines when police opened fire on demonstrators in the black township of Sharpeville, killing sixty-seven people and wounding several hundred more. Ruark and Selby headed for Johannesburg. Again Ruark did not like what he saw, but for vastly different reasons. Instead of warring black tribes, he saw a “fascist” state in which the white minority kept the black majority in virtual slavery. He was openly fearful that his telephone was tapped. He wrote that South Africa “lacks only an official Gestapo to be a complete police state.” Ruark should have looked more closely; they did have one. Because his health was so poor, Ruark did not venture up into Southern Rhodesia, the self-governing colony that would unilaterally declare its independence in 1965 under Prime Minister Ian Smith. Instead, he dispatched Harry Selby to Salisbury (later Harare) to get the lay of the land. After a few days, Selby reported back to Ruark, and the two of them fled South Africa for Nairobi, which more and more looked like home and mother, as Ruark put it, “if you had a home, and liked your mother.”
Once safely ensconced in Brian Burrows’s penthouse suite at the New Stanley, with unfettered access to telephone, typewriter, cable office, and the hotel’s excellent Grill, Ruark was free to write what he really thought about events in the stronghold of apartheid south of the Limpopo. Again, his condemnation of the South African government for its official racist policies are a better indication of Ruark’s real beliefs about race than his anti-independence columns from Somalia, the Congo, or rural Kenya. Ironically, his later support for “fortress Kenya” to keep the colony as “white man’s country” was exactly what the Afrikaners were trying to do in South Africa, and a few years later, the Rhodesians. Ruark rightly saw that as unjust and ultimately unsustainable — but then, he had no personal stake in the problems of white farmers in the Transvaal, or on the high veldt of the Orange Free State. He did have, on the other hand, a very real, very personal, stake in what happened in the Aberdares.
Kenya was then in the last throes of its approach to independence, Jomo Kenyatta was still in prison, serving the final years of his seven-year sentence for running an illegal organization. A conference was taking place in London — the Lancaster House conference — involving the settlers, the British government, and the Asian and black populations of Kenya. What was happening was widely perceived in Kenya as a betrayal of the white settlers, and Ruark glumly adopted that viewpoint. The conservative prime minister of Great Britain, Harold Macmillan, the man who coined the phrase ‘winds of change,” was resigned to the fact that all of Britain’s colonies in Africa would become independent; he was determined that if it had to happen, it may as well happen soon. Anti-colonial sentiment was strong in the United States and growing in Europe, and even in Britain there was only negligible support for the Kenya settlers. A few conservative members of parliament owned property in Kenya, but aside from them the general attitude was that the Kenya settlers were nothing but an irritation who should be left to fend for themselves. The costly military intervention of the Mau Mau Emergency had not sat well with a country that was deep in debt and whose balance of payments problems, by 1960, had forced the government to implement a severe austerity program. A colony that contributed little and cost a great deal, both financially and politically, was unlikely to get much sympathy from a motherland that was fast becoming a second-class power, and more dependent on the goodwill of the United States.
Altogether, the African continent was in political turmoil from one end to the other — in “ferment” as Ruark later described it. During his five months there, he travelled thousands of miles by jeep, airplane, and any other mode of transportation that came to hand — from foot to camel-back. His description of the odyssey, fictionalized for Alec Barr, captures the surreal, kaleidoscopic effect of seeing so much in so short a time, one country after another, one hotel after another, packing and unpacking, seeing one customs officer after another go through your bag looking for contraband, and having newly liberated black prostitutes demand money simply because they were black. In The Honey Badger, Barr’s eighteen-month assignment in Africa was the way Ruark perhaps wished it could have been. Barr saw everyone and everything; he spent time with Dr. Schweitzer and Tom Mboya and Haile Selassie, and he saw the inside of the Mogadishu Jail. By the end he was exhausted but not unhappy, with a new non-fiction book wrapped up and the idea for a fictional series firmly in his head. Barr was deeply tanned and lean, and the grey hair on his temples was a distinguished contrast to his faded safari jacket.
For Ruark, the truth was just the opposite. Five months of living like a gypsy, of driving himself by day and drinking by night, had caused his already fragile health to collapse. On his return to Nairobi from the Congo in early May, he suffered what he later called “a nervous breakdown due to overwork, nervous tension, whiskey, too much travel and the usual.” If anything, he understated the case. He was admitted to Nairobi Hospital for a week of drying out, then caught a plane for Spain.
Hugh Foster says Ruark’s health problems can really be reduced to one thing: alcohol. In letters to Harold Matson and Roy Howard, Ruark alluded to other factors — overwork, tension, travel, obscure Congolese illnesses, stress, and even pneumonia. But the fact was, Ruark had become an out-and-out drunk. In Brian Burrows’s penthouse at the New Stanley, he had suffered a severe blackout; Ruark referred to them as “cutouts,” and they had been occurring with increasing regularity. Burrows said he had crawled around on the floor “on all fours, acting like a dog.” There were three such blackouts toward the end of the African trip. The friend who drove Ruark to Embakasi Airport said he was suffering from one of the most severe cases of delirium tremens he had ever seen.
There are contradictions in the various accounts of what happened. For one thing, it is unlikely Ruark would still have been suffering from DT’s if he had just been released from a week in hospital, during which he had at least started to dry out. And even in those free-wheeling days, it is unlikely he would have been allowed on an airplane in that condition. It is obvious, however, that his drinking had now reached crisis proportions. More than his liver was at risk; blackouts and DT’s are symptoms of serious alcoholism affecting the brain. While he tried to place at least part of the blame on other factors, Ruark was too intelligent to lie to himself. He knew the root cause of his problem; after all, he had seen the effects of alcohol and drug abuse on his parents. In London for his annual checkup, the doctors confirmed his diagnosis, and warned him that his drinking was seriously affecting his liver. Unless he stopped, he could look forward to the certainty — not merely the possibility — of cirrhosis. Back in Spain, he wrote again to Matson and Howard, advising them he was going on the wagon, “including wine, beer and vermouth,” for the next six months.
The summer of 1960 marked a serious change for the better in Robert Ruark. It was long overdue, and unfortunately only temporary, but he had acknowledged his physical problems and seemed to be making an attempt to deal with them. He was only forty-four years old, and he should have been in the prime of life, professionally and physically. Yet he was literally facing death, and soon, if he did not alter his self-destructive ways. First and foremost, he had to quit drinking for good. If the first step to a cure is recognizing the disease, then Ruark was well on his way. In letters to his close friends and associates, and even to his parents, he confessed that he knew alcohol was his mortal enemy, and he even went so far as to claim “I was so close to death this time that I don’t ever want to drink again.” In order to be close to his doctors and save on hotel bills, the Ruarks rented a flat in London, and he spent the summer drinking mineral water and watching events in Africa unfold from afar.
***
In the spring of 1960, Robert Ruark was little more than an invalid by any standard. Although he stopped drinking and managed to stay on the wagon for nine full months, he did little else to speed his recovery. In fact, if the pace of his existence was the root cause of his problems, he may have actually aggravated them. From May, 1960 until July, 1962, Ruark lived as if he was in a race with death. In that twenty-six month period he wrote a major novel, watched his marriage break down, went on several major safaris, and managed to get himself chewed by a wounded leopard in India. It is a wonder he survived, given the frantic, driven pace he set. During that time, as well, Congolese paratroops took Stanleyville, a young American reporter, Harry Taylor, was killed in Kasai Province of the Congo, a white Kenyan named Peter Poole was hanged in Nairobi for murdering a black man, and Ernest Hemingway shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho. All these events had a serious impact on Ruark, but they helped to shape his next novel, Uhuru, the major accomplishment from this period of his life.
Ruark had returned home from Africa with the idea for this book firmly in his mind. It would be a novel about emerging Africa, the new Africa he had witnessed being born, a sequel to Something of Value that would look beyond the past. Ruark had learned much about Africa in his nine years as a regular visitor and in the five-month journalistic safari. He was confident he could pour this knowledge and understanding — this feel for his subject — into the definitive novel about a huge and frightening continent that was, in its own way, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
It was all there, everything he needed: The solid facts of history, the contacts among the actual people, both white and black, and his eyewitness memories of tragedy and blood. As well, Ruark owned a tangible emotion about his subject. By this time, he loved Africa the way a man loves a woman, and Africa could betray such a love in the most feminine of ways. If all this was not the raw material from which to build a great work of literature, then Ruark did not know what was. Unfortunately, merely having the raw materials at hand was no guarantee that intent would turn effortlessly into art. Anything but. The smooth vision he had in his mind turned into a very rocky road of writing. He encountered more difficulty writing Uhuru than any other book he ever attempted.
When he arrived back in Palamós, Ruark wrote to Harold Matson that he was planning a series of four novels, all with African settings and all tied together. In addition to Something of Value, there would be a sequel, tentatively titled Burnt Offering, about the current situation of countries emerging to independence through fire and blood. This pair would be bracketed by two more: the first, A Long View from a Tall Hill, would cover Africa from the turn of the century to the rise of the Mau Mau in 1952, while the fourth, Act of God, would be what Ruark called a “post-freedom thing,” taking place sometime in the future. It was a great, all-encompassing plan. The first step to realizing it was to write Burnt Offering, and Ruark set a deadline for himself of spring, 1961. As events proved almost immediately, he had set himself an impossible task.
Pablo Picasso once said “A clear vision — that is the thing.” Robert Ruark may have had a very clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish with Burnt Offering, but his vision of how to get there was anything but. The main problem was that his raw material was the events occurring in Africa, and that was a very fluid, very unpredictable situation. No one, Ruark included, knew what was going to happen in Kenya from month to month, much less the ultimate outcome for the colony. Unlike journalism, which is a breathless account of what has just happened, a novel is a distillation — an in-depth examination of events with the perspective that time allows. Ruark was trying to build a novel from current events, while anticipating what would happen tomorrow. It almost never works, and Burnt Offering was no exception. He worked away at it throughout the summer of 1960, getting basically nowhere. He went fishing with his friend Ricardo Sicre, entertained other friends at his home in Palamós, stayed on the wagon, and sat down at his typewriter each day, with little to show for it when the sun went down.
Looking for a reason, Ruark naturally began to worry that not drinking was affecting his creativity. He was a writer who not only was able to function while he was drinking, to actually put words on paper while he was drunk, but one who could do it well. Other writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, drank heavily, but usually after the day’s serious work was done, and as a way of unwinding. Ruark wrote while he was drinking, as often as not, so it is not surprising, finding his work not going well while he was on the wagon, that he seized on sobriety as the culprit for non-production. He did not really want to be on the wagon in the first place, and he fretted that perhaps he needed alcohol to lubricate the wheels of imagination. Still, he stayed sober and pounded away at his typewriter, hoping desperately for either inspiration or an event that would pull everything into focus.
In August, Ruark invited Harold Matson to Palamós to see what he had accomplished so far. What ensued was a scene Ruark later used in The Honey Badger, in which Matson read his manuscript, then described it as “an elaborate treatment,” a framework for a novel Ruark might write “when he really got down to it.” In other words, what he had accomplished so far was lifeless, if not formless. All Ruark’s knowledge of Africa, and all his good intentions, could not compensate for his lack of a coherent vision of who was who in the book, what was what, and why the events were taking place. In an attempt to find the answers, Ruark left for Kenya once again.
Political conditions in Kenya were already perilous. All the conflicting forces — black nationalists, white settlers, British colonial-office representatives, Asians, Communists, and loudmouthed Belgian refugees — presented a steaming pot that did not require much stirring. The Lancaster House Conference in London had ended with a startling result in early 1960: After five weeks of debate, the colonial secretary, Ian Macleod, announced that Kenya would become a parliamentary democracy with a universal franchise. A white Kenya moderate, Michael Blundell, was at the conference as leader of the New Kenya Party. He accepted the decision reluctantly, but left London believing Britain would not grant the colony full independence for at least ten years. This, he felt, was enough time to prepare the population (estimated at 60,000 whites and six million blacks) for the effects of full majority (i.e., black) rule. Blundell might have accepted it, but there was a white element that did not: On his arrival at Embakasi Airport, he was cheered by a crowd of blacks, while a white settler threw thirty pieces of silver at his feet. The divisions within the colony were becoming deeper, wider, more confusing, and more bitter by the hour.
The Belgian Congo became independent on July 1. Almost immediately the Congolese Army mutinied against its white officers, the country descended into civil war, and more than thirteen thousand Belgian settlers fled in panic, leaving everything behind. More than two thousand of these refugees made it to Kenya, penniless and bitter, and soon the sound of Belgian accents in the hotel bars, raised in condemnation of black nationalism, was common throughout the colony. White Kenyans welcomed these “reinforcements,” but black Kenyans resented them and urged them to keep right on going. One trainload of Belgians arrived in Nairobi on July 14 to be met by a mob of a thousand blacks rioting in protest. As the situation in Kenya grew uglier, the settlers demanded the colonial government form a European “defence force,” and local politicians reported that white Kenyans were stockpiling weapons and supplies. Britain responded by airlifting a battalion of troops to Nairobi and sending an aircraft carrier with six hundred Royal Marines.
At this point Mau Mau activity broke out once again, small in scale and limited in area, but enough to send some settlers over the edge. The threat of a return to conditions of the Emergency sent property values tumbling, and “For Sale” signs went up on houses and farms all over the colony. Prices on the Nairobi stock exchange tumbled by fifty per cent and capital poured out of the colony as settlers tried to get their savings out. A new governor, Sir Patrick Renison, had been appointed to replace Baring. He tried to restore both civil order and settler confidence by refusing demands for the release of Jomo Kenyatta. Sir Patrick was a colonial civil servant of long standing, but a man who knew little about Kenya or the Mau Mau. For the latter he relied on a government report on the origins of Mau Mau prepared by an official named Frank Corfield. The Corfield Report was thorough in some ways, superficial in others. Robert Edgerton dismisses it as a document that relied exclusively on government and Kikuyu loyalist sources. Robert Ruark, on the other hand, cited the Corfield Report more than once to support his views on the roots of Mau Mau and his increasingly dire predictions about impending chaos in the colony. Considering Frank Corfield prepared his report at a time of political upheaval, with Jomo Kenyatta and many acknowledged Mau Mau leaders still in prison, and with many central figures having a vested interest in presenting only one point of view, the chances of his preparing a document that would withstand the test of time, hindsight, and emerging information was as unlikely as Ruark’s attempt to write a coherent novel based on the same events.
Conditions in Kenya were, to put it mildly, confused and fearful. In August, 1960, while Ruark was still in Palamós, a small drama rich in symbolism ground to its tragic close. A year earlier, a young white Kenyan named Peter Poole, a former member of the Kenya Police Reserve, shot and killed a black African for abusing Poole’s dog. The KPR had been heavily involved in many operations against the Mau Mau, and was made up mostly of farmers, settlers, and professional hunters, so Poole was well-known among the more extreme elements. He was tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to hang. Whether he would in fact become the first white man in the colony’s history to be executed for the murder of a black man became the pivotal issue of a summer that had no shortage of issues.
Looking back, it is easy to say what the government should have done. Poole was clearly guilty. The question was, should he die for the crime? Was the shooting premeditated, thereby warranting capital punishment? Ruark’s later assessment was that Poole signed his own death warrant because he saw the African kicking the dog and went into his house to get his gun. Had the gun already been in his possession, Ruark felt, Poole could have argued the shooting was a reflex action; given the temper of the times and the events of the preceding eight years of the Mau Mau Emergency, he would probably have been given a stiff prison sentence instead. Poole having been condemned, the issue then became whether the British Government would ask the Queen to commute the death sentence. The risks were obvious both ways. There was no easy way out. There was no solution that would not enrage one faction or the other.
If Poole did not hang, it would be a clear statement that a white life was more valuable than a black one. If Poole died, it was an equally clear statement that Kenya was no longer a white-run colony. As white extremists made veiled threats and black politicians delivered thundering condemnations, tension mounted. Settlers took their guns and drifted into town to be close to the event. There was talk of storming the prison to free Poole. In the end, Ian Macleod, the colonial secretary, declined to ask the Queen to commute the sentence, and Peter Poole was hanged in Nairobi Jail. A crowd of three hundred whites hung about glumly outside the gates. When word emerged that the execution had been carried out, they drifted off in groups to drink away the day and reflect on the end of the colony as they knew it. But there was no violence.
The event gave Ruark what he was looking for: an incident upon which to base the plot of Burnt Offering. He arrived in Nairobi shortly after the hanging and set about gathering information. Then occurred one of the pivotal events of this period in his life. In the Congo, Kasai Province was threatening to secede, backed by Moise Tshombe in the also-rebellious province of Katanga. Federal Congolese troops were sent in by Patrice Lumumba to occupy Kasai and heavy fighting ensued on the border between the two provinces. On September 6, a Scripps-Howard reporter by the name of Harry Taylor was shot and killed while covering the fighting. Ruark, who knew Taylor and was very fond of him, was devastated by the event. To him Taylor’s death symbolized everything that was pointlessly bloody and tragic about Africa. He wrote a newspaper column on September 15 that Hugh Foster calls “the most vicious and altogether savage” of his twenty years as a columnist. Most people today would add “racist” to the description. It was a blanket condemnation of black liberation in Africa, and its central theme was a personal attack on Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese premier. In trying to force Katanga and Kasai back into the federal fold, Lumumba was playing all sides against the middle. To Ruark, Lumumba personified everything that was wrong, corrupt, and perverse about black African politicians. His attack was also directed at black troops who still filed their teeth (as many did then, and some still do) and went about armed with machine guns, looting in the name of “the true God of all Black Africa, the God of Give Me, the God of Take.” The column was undoubtedly hyperbolic and would almost certainly never be published in the mainstream press today, but anyone judging it objectively would have to say, with the benefit of forty years of hindsight, that Ruark’s assessment was dead on.
Taylor’s death provided Ruark with more than the subject matter for one enraged piece of journalism. In its curious juxtaposition to the death of Poole, another young white man who died in Africa, it gave Ruark a peg for ruminating on the importance of blood and death. Four years later he incorporated it into The Honey Badger. The young reporter became Larry Orde, a foreign correspondent sent out to assist Alec Barr in his assignment of covering all of Africa for the magazines. It also provided Ruark, through Barr’s fictional article, an opportunity to reflect on life as a foreign correspondent, and on mortality and disillusionment.
While Ruark was in Kenya in late 1960, his friend Eva Monley helped him a great deal as he dug around for facts and reaction to Poole’s death and the ongoing political developments. Miss Monley then gave him the final, vital element he needed to give Burnt Offering the depth it needed. She took him to see the Nightingale family, who had raised her, and who owned a farm near Kinangop. The Nightingales were a different element altogether from the white hunters and extremist elements Ruark knew so well. They were moderate Kenya whites who recognized that black people had rights and a place in an independent Kenya — that, in fact, Kenya was their country. Yet they felt they too belonged in Kenya, had rights there, and would stay regardless what happened. This was the moderate element of which Michael Blundell was leader. They believed bloodshed could be avoided, that Kenya need not become another Belgian Congo, and the way to do this was for moderate blacks and whites to work together to defeat the extremist elements on both sides.
Ruark spent some weeks at the Nightingale farm, talking with the family members and black workers who lived there, including some ex-Mau Mau. By the end of his stay he had found a new direction for Burnt Offering. Ruark and Eva Monley held a small private ceremony in which he burned the original manuscript and prepared to start on the novel all over again.
***
November is the time of the small rains in East Africa. This is the shorter rainy season, a time of fine weather punctuated by sudden downpours. In high-altitude cities like Nairobi and Kampala, the small rains are a blessing that brings green grass and washes the streets clean, leaving the air sparkling crisp in the sunshine. Sometimes, though, the clouds roll in for days at a time and the rain falls in sheets. Trees drip sullenly, and dirt tracks turn into quagmires that swallow vehicles with a happy gulp. The small rains in Kenya can be as depressing as any monsoon out of Somerset Maugham.
Before returning to Spain, Ruark took a couple of weeks off for an impromptu safari with professional hunter Ken Jesperson. It was the kind of safari that happens rarely these days — two guys, a couple of trackers, and a truck full of camping equipment, heading off in whatever direction offers the best chance of adventure. Because of the heavy rains, Ruark and Jesperson did not have many options. Roads were washed out or impassable, and few of the hunting blocks were even accessible, much less in any condition to be hunted.
Ruark was insistent, however, and eventually they booked a picturesque little block down toward Amboseli, and pulled out of Nairobi with their lorry leaving a bow-wave in the driving rain. As safaris go, not much happened. They were not really after anything except a break from sodden, sullen Nairobi. What they found, for a few days at least, was a peaceful, sunny little slice of paradise. They lived quietly, drinking little (according to Ruark), shooting only for camp meat, and going to bed early. By day they cruised around just to see what they could see. They looked at the animals. The animals looked back at them. Everyone was happy.
All of this Ruark reported in an article titled “A Leopard in the Rain,” which appeared in Field & Stream the following July. He set up the piece as an object lesson in the importance of all-out effort, of never taking no for an answer, of persevering against all odds. Theirs was not an epic quest in the sense of Moby Dick. But the trip itself supported the contention that, as Ruark said, very few leopards get shot in saloons, and if you want to get something, you head out after it regardless of the conditions. An astounding piece of insight? Hardly. But the article was Robert Ruark at his best, capturing Africa at its best. As the title indicates, the only animal of note they bagged was a leopard, taken just as the rains swept over their little oasis and put an end to the safari. The real message of the piece, reading it almost forty years later, is even more gentle than the one Ruark intended: That the value of a safari lies not in what you shoot, but in what you do. What counts is the journey, not the destination.
***
Back in Palamós by December, Ruark was rested, eager to get to work, “full of his subject,” as he wrote to Harold Matson, and aiming to complete the manuscript by April, 1961. To do so, he added, he would be writing at “white heat.” All through Christmas he labored away at his typewriter, and the pages piled up. Even as the novel was taking shape, however, many of his old problems returned to haunt him. He was still on the wagon — barely. He was writing his column — just. His health was under control — sort of. Virginia went home to the States to spend the holidays with her family near Washington, leaving him in Palamós. Even with Alan Ritchie for company it was a lonely time, and although Ruark claimed to love solitude and being on his own, he did not deal well with the loneliness only Christmas can bring.
The long period of abstinence had effectively ended in Africa after about nine months, when he began having wine with meals again, then a sherry or two before dinner, and from there a gradual return to his old ways. There were several reasons for this. According to Harry Selby, this long period on the wagon was the only time in their decade-long friendship that he ever saw Ruark despondent or depressed. Rather than raising his spirits, strict sobriety depressed Ruark. This is contrary to what happens with most alcoholics, who go through an endless round of alcohol-induced happiness alternating with hung-over depression, then renewed drinking to counter the depression. The drinking naturally affects sleep patterns and induces insomnia, and sleep deprivation adds to the depression. This is the cycle that needs to be broken. After the first few days of not drinking, the heavy drinker finds himself sleeping better and awakening each morning feeling considerably improved both physically and mentally. Once this reverse cycle begins, it feeds on itself. The trick, of course, is the first few hours, the first day, the first week. It is obviously more complicated than it sounds, and is never easy.
Ruark acknowledged this pattern in The Honey Badger. Alec Barr, though not an alcoholic, purposefully abstains from drinking when he is seriously “stuck into” a book, and Ruark describes in considerable detail the beneficial effects this regimen has for his protagonist. For his part, however, Ruark never stopped wanting a drink. He was not cheered up by sobriety and feared that the lack of alcohol was adversely affecting his imagination and his literary skills. In late 1960, when his doctor in London wrote to him advancing the opinion that Ruark’s blackouts in Kenya earlier that year had been due not to booze but to a “glandular fever,” it was a license to reach for the Scotch bottle. Privately he may have insisted that he was still restricting himself to a little “dietary wine,” but the truth was he quickly slid back into all his old habits.
Once again the demands of writing a novel damaged his column, and now the cumulative effects started to show. Newspapers began running it sporadically or dropped it altogether. Since United Features’ revenue was based on usage, and Ruark’s own remuneration was based on United Features’ revenue, his income began to suffer along with his reputation. By then Ruark thought of himself (and wanted to be thought of) as a novelist first and foremost, and a serious novelist at that — not merely a producer of slick popular fiction. Trying to be both a national syndicated columnist of the first order and a serious novelist was too much for anyone, even for a writer of Ruark’s indisputable energy. Something had to suffer, and in the end everything did. The column declined in quality, circulation, and readership, and the novel went unfinished, missing deadline after deadline. For his part, Ruark continued to drive himself hard. And he continued to drink.
As he labored in Palamós, conditions in much of Africa went from bad to worse. The Congo, especially, was in the headlines day after day. The bodies were piling up as mutinous troops, tribal warriors, and out-and-out thugs fought private wars that soon ceased to have much meaning. Few people understood who was fighting whom, much less over what. The fighting also spilled over into neighboring territories as Congolese troops raided across borders. The main conflict inside the country still pitted the mineral-rich province of Katanga against the central government in Leopoldville. Finally Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, setting the stage for the army chief, Joseph Mobutu, who eventually seized complete control and proceeded to bleed the country dry for the next thirty-five years. Lumumba’s death, however, gave Ruark an opportunity for a journalistic epitaph that set a new standard in vitriol. Lumumba may have symbolized everything Ruark disliked about emerging Africans, but he did not embody it: There were plenty more to take over after he departed the scene.
In January, Ruark sent Matson a big chunk of the new manuscript. He evinced great optimism about the direction it was taking and said he was still aiming to have it completed by spring. Matson handed the manuscript over to the editors at Henry Holt & Co. for their opinion. Almost incidentally, amidst all this literary labor, Holt had put together a sequel to the highly successful anthology, The Old Man and the Boy. This second volume of Field & Stream columns was called The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older, and it was published in March, 1961.
Two months later Ruark informed Matson that his new novel was finished. He had scrapped the title, Burnt Offering, in favor of the Swahili word Uhuru — Freedom — that was sweeping East Africa. Like most great titles, in hindsight it is hard to see what else he could have called the book. In early May Ruark boarded a plane in Barcelona and prepared, as had become his custom, to hand over the finished manuscript in person.
Unfortunately, he did not receive a hero’s welcome. The editors at Holt were less than enthusiastic about what they had seen. In their opinion, the manuscript required extensive rewriting before it could be published. It was too long. It was too expository. It had to be cut, and most of what was left would need thorough revisions. This criticism was not what Ruark had expected or wanted to hear. Harold Matson, seeing what was happening, began to consider looking for a new publisher. This search led him to McGraw-Hill. Ruark, meanwhile, rather grudgingly accepted Holt’s request for revisions — their contractual demand, actually — and decamped to Florida to spend several weeks going over the manuscript, assisted by one of his former secretaries from the New York days. In June he came back to New York, handed over the revised manuscript, and caught a plane for points east: Spain first, then Nairobi. He was planning to meet Harry Selby to set off on a safari into the Northern Frontier District, the desert region of northern Kenya that was known for its warlike tribes and its big tuskers. A new remote area had just been opened for safaris, limited to foot, camel, and horse-back — no safari cars — and the two friends wanted to be the first to see it with gun in hand. Professional hunter John Sutton — “Little John” of Ruark’s writings — noted tersely in his diary for Saturday, June 24, 1961: “Ruark arrives 8:15.”
***
On July 1, 1961, the new area opened up for hunting. On that same morning, ten thousand miles away in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway held the muzzles of his Boss game gun to his forehead and tripped the trigger. Ruark was in Kenya when he received the news, just back from a quick flying trip to the Masai Mara before heading north into the NFD. There are conflicting accounts of how he was given the news, and also his reaction to it. According to Ruark’s published accounts, he climbed out of an airplane and was handed a newspaper story. According to Harry Selby, they were at the Mount Kenya Safari Club having a drink. Then there is the reaction: Ruark claims to have been shocked and saddened; Selby insists he was almost elated, shouting, “You know what this means? It means I’m the herd bull now!” Regardless of Ruark’s initial reaction, however, what he subsequently wrote in his newspaper column and in magazine articles, and later in The Honey Badger, was sincere and eloquent. He may have seen Hemingway as a rival, but he never denigrated Hemingway’s writing or his place in the modern world of literature, and his tributes to “the master” were heart-felt.