The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

"The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood" by Elspeth Huxley, is an absolutely lovely recollection of childhood as it should be for every child. The daughter of two financially strapped, adventurous, and eternally optimistic parents, Elspeth recounts life in Thika in the bush of Kenya, where she spent her youth amongst the Kikuyu and Masai. She lived with nature, with superstitions, with death and love, and certainly writes about it all with great equanimity. She is able to capture the way a child hovers around the fringe of certain events, yet seems to understand events with a certain unique wisdom. It is a wonderful book. The writing is excellent, the story actually quite amazing, and the people are fascinating, one and all. Read it!

In 1913, when the author was six years old, she and her mother and father went to British East Africa (B.E.A.) to start a coffee plantation. This was nearly 100 years ago, when that area was mostly unsettled. Her father bought some property, sight unseen, in the middle of nowhere among the Kikuyu people. This book was especially fascinating for me because everything was so incredibly different from modern times.
The story is very simply told from her very early memories, although I suspect she must have consulted some diaries or letters her parents kept. The book only covers about a two year period, because World War I intervened and people went back to Europe to wait it out.
I did not want this story to end. As I got to the last few pages, I found myself longing for a sequel, and I was happy to discover that she did write one, The Mottled Lizard.

3.5 Stars

Children see people as kind, interesting, fun, or not. Little Elspeth accepted each person as they were, unlike the adults around her, some of whom were appallingly racist. Even basically decent people like Elspeth's parents had the sense of British superiority and entitlement of their time. This is a picture of a way of life now gone, and good riddance, except for the stories about the good people Elspeth met, and the memories of their kindness, humor, intelligence, and courage.

This is meant to be a memoir. Unlike other memoirs/diaries/correspondence that some GR readers think are novels, this one really is a novel presented as a memoir. We are told it covers the years when she was aged five to eight. How could a child as young as Elspeth supposedly is during the action, hear those detailed adult conversations and remember them, let alone comprehending what was going on?

It's excellently well written, and one could argue that the author talked to people as an adult and reconstructed the scrappy memories of childhood from rumor and gossip and fact remembered by others. But then we get the dream she relates in enormous detail, only to state in the very next sentence: "My dreams were always jumbled, and the next morning I could only remember bits of this one." Yeah...bits that form a detailed, coherent (for a dream) whole. Uh-huh.

Another thing that annoyed me was the repeated statement that the Masai and other African groups had no conception that an animal could feel pain. This is surprising when you consider how important, indeed basic, cattle are to their entire culture! But then both she and all the white adults around her simply assume that they are superior in every way to the people who have lived there since time was. That's the reason I've shelved it as "social realism"--it really does reflect the attitudes of the European (settlers? invaders? colonists?) of the time.

Many years ago I picked up The Mottled Lizard in a second-hand shop, which covers her adolescent years. At the time it made sense, as for many people the adolescent memories are the most lasting, coming as they do at an age when the youth feels their powers coming to them; everything is immediate and makes a lasting impression. Now, I feel that Huxley (who also wrote mystery novels) simply wove a good story out of what memories she had. Reading that volume I interpreted her constant criticisms of her parents as being the voice of that adolescent we've all been, which finds our parents' every word and action embarassing beyond belief. Putting this same patronising attitude in the mind and mouth of a small child who is supposedly sent miles on horseback to run errands for her parents as if she were a mini-adult, just makes the main character seem very mean-spirited.

Firstly: the only horse in this book seems to be on the front cover. That's why I bought it, but it's not a horse book in the slightest.

This autobiography tells the story of 6 year old Elspeth and her early years in Africa before World War 1. Her parents (who she calls by name) travel to Thika where they begin a farm by utilising locals for labour.

The story is very slow, and it took me a long time to get into it, but once I did I loved it. It's descriptive about the things around her, and Elspeth often describes the smells of the people around her and I love that touch. I enjoyed the innocence which is bought to the story - one of her neighbours is obviously having an affair, and she cannot work out why the husband doesn't get along with the lovely man who visits.

I umm'd and aah'd about whether to give this a 4 or a 5, but settled on a 4 because of how long it took me to get into the slow pacing.

There are so many novels, memoirs, non-fiction, and travelogues about Africa, that a separate book-hub, such as GR, can be established for this wondrous continent itself.

In 1958, at the age of 51, Elspeth Huxley wrote her memoirs of her life as a child in Africa. She was born in July, 1907 and arrived in Kenya in 1913, where her parents, Major Josceline and Nellie Grant already established themselves on a small farm near Thika. For some or other reason they were named Robert and Tilly in the book. There was optimism and dreams-which kept them trying forever more, battling the wild with little money, even less experience, and mountains of challenges to overcome. To reach their land, and then build a house out of nothing, was the first one. Her dad as the perpetual optimist: delving for diamonds in Mozambique, gold in Peru, oil wells in Turkey. His old nanny said he was born with a hole in his pocket. Still, his next endeavour was a coffee farm in Kenya.

Compared to books such as Travels Into The Interior of Africa by Mungo Park (two journeys in 1795 and 1805), or even n  Travels in West Africa by Mary H. Kingsley, (1897)n , and add more context with Thomas Pakenham's historical writings in his ginormous book n  n    The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (1991)n  n, and Elspeth's story becomes light and fluffy in comparison.

However beautiful, atmospheric, poetic, or lyrical her memories were, folks like her, were the colonialists who later would become the target of Doris Lessing's wrath in her writings about the British colonialists in Africa. Her book n  n    African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwen  n(1994), made mincemeat out of Lessing's fellow Brits.

Huxley was a young girl of 6 years old, with little or no knowledge of the geopolitics which were rendered all around her. Huxley chose to ignore it all in this memoir, and shared her memories of her life as a little girl on her father's coffee farm with her pony Moyale, her tortoise Mohammed, the chameleons, George and Mary, and the spaniel, Bancroft. In the typical British superiority mindset, other nations were way beyond their social standing, and fellow Europeans, which already firmly established themselves all over Africa as per the scramble did not make it into her hall of admiration. Some of those neighbors already arrived during the 1600s and had quite a different story to tell as the nouveau arrivals in the early 1900s from Britain, like Elspeth's circle of Brits in Kenya.

Nevertheless, her writing style and her adventures, corresponds well with the memories of Alexandra Fuller:
n  Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood(2001)n,
n  Scribbling the Cat(2004)n,
n  Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness(2011)n. - my favorite.
I loved this author's work.


Earlier authors in this (Eurocentric)genre, such as Kuki Galman, will enfore the reader's impressions of a continent which captured the souls of everyone stepping a foot on it.
n  n    I Dreamt of African  n(2000), and
n  n    African Nightsn  n(2000).

Don't forget n  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.n

There really are so many excellent African authors, both black and white, that my enthusiasm for this genre cannot be listed in a review of one book. There are still
a few hundred more I would love to read. But if you want to find more African novels, travelogues, and everything else I particularly have read about Africa (not many listed, since I read most of it before joining GR) please visit my n  Africa Shelfn.

Elspeth Huxley was a good read. Sometimes we need to skip geopolitics and just venture off into the magic rendition of a simple life, written well. This memoir was one of them.

I seem to be one of the few readers who didn't love this tale of a young British family trying to start a coffee plantation in British East Africa (Kenya) in the period 1912-1914, their friendships with the other British colonials, and their interactions with the Kikuyu and Masai people who lived nearby, or worked for them. Actually, it completely bored me.

There was also something mildly unsettling about the narrator's "voice:" she's writing the memoir as an adult, about 50 years after the events she's narrating, which took place when she was a young girl, from ages six to eight. There is a sweetness and innocence in the narration, but also a very un-childlike sophistication about the romantic goings-on of adults. In other words, there is no way at age six or eight she would have grasped the subtle sexual tensions between Lettice Palmer and Ian Crawfurd, or comprehended the coded language used by the memoir's characters to discuss the romantic possibilities between these two. There are also long conversations which obviously would not have been remembered so faithfully, unless she was undertaking stenography at age six. So I felt like, as a reader, the authorial wool was being pulled over my eyes. I also read, perhaps on Wikipedia, that some of the characters were composites. Which, you know, is utterly fine unless you're James Frey - go for it. Novelize your memoir. But don't pretend it's some kind of accurate account of people and events when it's a fictionalized montage. It would have been nice to have an author's or editor's note in the edition explaining what was going on, but there wasn't in my Penguin edition.

A memoir, written much later in life, of the author as a six year old, arriving in Kenya with her parents in 1913. The story follows her life for a few years, before her father leaves for the war and she and her mother return to England.
At the time Thika was a remote area of Kenya, and their neighbours were other settlers, English, Scottish, Dutch and South African. There were of course native people in the area.
Written with the author as a child, she displays the childlike naivety in some areas, but also demonstrates a complete understanding of the adult interactions, which is a little strange. I couldn't pick whether she embellished the memories she had, was filled in on details later, or this is more fictionalised than memoir.
Having said that, it was well written, interesting and very readable.