"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.

This was a tough read.

On my TBR list since 1982 (!) when I was assigned it by one of my 5th grade teachers. I never read it, and I lied to my teacher. So here I am... but how times have changed. This violent, gory, mostly pro-Colonialism book would never be assigned to students today.

Huxley's 1959 novel is a *heavily* fictionalized "memoir" of her British family's life in colonial Kenya in 1913, when she was six years old. In the book, she arrives on a mule, covered in ticks, to an uncultivated patch of veldt with only her somewhat clueless but eager parents. In reality, the real Elspeth came much later, with a maid and a nanny. Even her parents' names are changed (and for some odd unexplained reason, she never calls them mother or father, they're "Tilly" and "Robin").

"How much does one imagine, how much observe." (pg 155)

I think much of this book is imagined, not observed, especially most of the adult interactions and conversations, which are the bulk of the novel. In fact, the book really is about the adults and the struggles of life in Africa at that time, rather than "an African childhood" of the narrator.

And it truly is a struggle. Unlike the semiautobiographical novel "Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms" by Katherine Rundell, which has some joy and wonder of the place as seen through the eyes of its author/narrator (sadly only half of that book takes place in Africa), Flame Trees is pure misery from beginning to end. The land is miserable, the Kikuyu natives are miserable, the European settlers are miserable, and especially the animals are miserable and are being continually slaughtered and abused throughout the book. Everyone is dying, sick, subject to violence, or being eaten alive by insects, lions, leopards, or cannibals.

Then, there's the master/servant, parent/child, relationship between the European settlers and the natives.

"'Surely that's the whole point of our being here,' Tilly remarked. 'We may have a sticky passage ourselves, but when we've knocked a bit of civilization into them, all this dirt and disease and superstition will go and they'll live like decent people for the first time in their history.' Tilly looked quite flushed and excited when she said this, as if it was something dear to her heart." (pg 120)

That's her *mom*! The men are even worse and want to lash everyone or shoot their cattle... when they're not out shooting elephants and gazelles for "sport". If the author is at all critical of her parents' and neighbors' attitudes towards the native Africans, it's not obvious.

Overall, the pacing was slow, and the narrative was a bit tedious and impersonal, except when punctuated by an endless list of horrible incidents.
The one positive thing I will say is that, for the most part, Huxley doesn't romanticize anything. How much is fact or fiction, though, especially when it comes to her descriptions of the Kikuyu, I can't say.
Well, at least I finally finished that school assignment, and only 41 years late.

Ever get to the end of a book and contemplate flipping back to the first page and starting all over again? This is a book whose world I just want to continue living in but, like the ending of a book, is a world that just doesn't exist anymore. So much of the book, though it deals with people trying to start a new frontier life in Africa, is really about the ending of things, specifically the end of old Europe with the onset of World War 1.

Elspeth, in the last chapter, writes about how she realized, quite suddenly and with some fright, how strangely interconnected all things are in life. She blames herself for the death of Kate, not because of any direct fault of her own, but the indirect responsibility she had in the wounding of a buffalo. All of a sudden the rational world she felt so sure of was gone and now replaced with uncertainty. One could also quite easily see how people might then turn to superstition and folk magic to explain their place in the universe. Charms, sacrifices, ceremonies, all the ways of life for the native Africans don't then seem so strange when we look at it through the lens of our own uncertainty in the scheme of the universe.

But this one death and this one series of events is, all the while, back-dropped by the war in Europe. Events there of a much larger scale were colliding and would claim the lives of millions of people who were caught up in events they could not foresee or control. Ian being the earliest example of a victim to circumstance.


The whole book is filled with the parallels of their lives and that of WW1: the irrigation trenches being filled with water mirror the trenches of the un-moving fronts, the tribal warfare parallels the conflict between nation states. In some ways the book is as much about what happened to the whole world at the beginning of the 20th century as it is about one young girls' experience growing up in Africa with her pioneering and liberal thinking parents.

Elspeth makes a strong case for how the world should behave. She always details the solutions that people come up with be it how best to grow coffee in Africa, deal with tribal politics, or deal with some unusual neighbors - she is always looking for a way to make things work. And it's no wonder because much of the world was totally breaking down.

But she never becomes sentimental about her experiences. Yes it is a very romantic setting and stunningly beautiful, but Elspeth is a realist who leans towards cautious optimism. The characters in the book earn all their emotions, and there is never any melodrama or silliness here. And a lot of how she makes this work is by seeing the world through such a young persons eyes. She only ever gets to see and hear snippets of what's going on around her so she, like us, have to piece so much together.

This books great strength is that it takes us to that time and place, makes us empathize with this little girl and gets us to see the world for what it could be without ever cheating us emotionally. This is a brilliant story; one of the greatest books I have ever read. In fact, I place this book right alongside Sergey Aksakov's "A Family Chronicle" as one of the finest pieces of writing ever published.

I absolutely adore this novel like nothing else I have ever read.

Read this several times over the years and also watched the BBC series which I just love. Never got around to reviewing the book, but recently my sister handed me her copy of the sequel, The Mottled Lizard, so I figured it was about time.

Elspeth Huxley just knows how to write. It is the beginning of the end of British cultivation (?) of the African frontier. It is the clash of cultures, religions, sexes, ages, and times—just before the outbreak of WWI. Everything has come together but there is a sense that it is all falling apart.
Huxley writes with wisdom, wistful humor, deep irony and nostalgia which belies the perspective of the child narrator. True it is the grown Elspeth who is relating the story, but she is convincingly young and yet at the same time infinitely older than the adults around her.

A great adventure story, all the more so for being based on the author’s life. Some reviewers here on GRs have taken issue with Huxley and the liberty she has taken with characters and conjectured dialogues. If you are looking for a ‘just the facts’ biography, it isn’t. And yet it is a story which doesn’t grow old; I can see reading it again. It is one of those books you HATE to see it end. But don't worry, the sequel has started off GREAT!

*Special Content only on my blog, Strange and Random Happenstance during Ashford April (April 2013).

In the late twenties, Kenya became known for it's "Happy Valley." A place of paradise and pleasure, where you could start your life over a make a fortune in coffee or dairy. But to those who settled there before the first world war, it was an entirely different world. In 1913 Elspeth Huxley's family moved to Thika to start a coffee plantation. They had heard there where fortunes to be made... only coffee takes at least five years to bring in any crop, and that's if everything goes right. With insects that would make anyone's skin crawl, to fighting amongst their workers who belonged to waring tribes, to curses and black magic, life is far harder than any of them would have expected. Yet the friendships they make with their workers, who are loyal in their own way, and with their fellow settlers, leads to an interesting and diverse community that Elspeth grows up in.

The beauty of Africa, while harsh, still is inspiring. Elspeth sadly reminiscences that the days when the plains would be covered with a plethora of game and where there were some areas in which you were probably the first human ever to set foot was soon to end. The settlers would change the landscape forever, but luckily, there was an inquisitive little five year old who saw Thika for the magical world it was and forever preserved it in these pages.

A few years back I was driving back with a friend through southern Missouri from another friends wedding in Arkansas when I spied a billboard for the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Mansfield. As you can imagine, he was a bit dismayed by the fact that he now had to go on a tour of Laura's Rocky Ridge Farm. Before the house tour, which hand some interesting carpentry thanks to Laura's husband Almonso, there was a nice museum to wander through. In one of the cases with pride of place was Laura's own guns, which she used often to kill small game. That's when it struck me, the reality of Laura's life versus her books. Thankfully I was not the other two tourists who where having issues coming to gripes with the fact that the tv show was pure fiction, while Laura's books where, not fiction, but her interpretation of her life.

The Little House Books had presented a a sort of glorious golden childhood of living in sod houses and tapping maple syrup. Right about now you might be wondering why I'm going on about Laura Ingalls Wilder in a book review for Elspeth Huxley, but the truth is that Huxley's book, The Flame Trees of Thika, is Little House without the softened edges. They are both fictionalized but at the heart is the truth of their upbringing. Unlike Little House, you are not spared details about ticks and ants and dead animals and goat sacrifices. You will get terrified of what could happen to your pets in Africa. You will not be thinking, oh, how lovely to life in a sod house, no, you will be thinking, dear lord, I am so glad someone didn't have to heat up a needle and use it to extract an egg sack from under my toe nails. Because that is what Kenya was for Elspeth.

Now, I'm not saying that Kenya isn't Elspeth's her version of heaven and paradise combined, it's just that she doesn't stint on the whole picture, the good and the bad. This is what makes it such a great read. You are not just contained only in her little world of house and hearth, but all the characters in her life. Because of the farm needing so many workers, you get a glimpse of tribal life and the strong differences between the Kikuyu and the Masai. How the natives should never be underestimated in their cunning, a story about the Masai stealing cattle but shipping it via railway under the "true" owners name is one example. I say "true" owner, because Elspeth digs deep into the mindset of the Africans, and how their definition of property is far more fluid than Europeans.

Elspeth, growing up around these people, has a way of not condemning them for being different, but being able to see both sides. She understands why her parents and other settlers would be annoyed, but she sees that, through the natives eyes, that they aren't to blame, it's how they live. This is so refreshing. She is more an anthropologist, seeing everyone for what they are, versus the typical British Imperialist's view of do as I say, live as I do, that is the only way. In fact, by the time I got to the end of the book all the characters had become my friends so deeply that I didn't want to leave them, even if World War I was starting. Thankfully I see there is a sequel!

Now I must sidetrack everything to do a little review of this edition. This edition was released with a new introduction in the late 80s after the success of the BBC miniseries. Sadly it is long out of print, which baffles me. The book is far more beautiful then the little paperback one you can currently get. There are luscious illustrations by the Kenyan artist Frances Pelizzoli. Not only do they bring Kenya alive, but they so sync with the story. Their placement in the text is perfect and they are so accurate to the story. Nothing annoys me more then when a book is illustrated and the illustrations don't go with the text. The point of illustrations is to illuminate and expand your connection with the text. The most recent grievous perpetrator of this was in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, where Dave McKean, a frequent collaborator with Neil, has Bod dressed in clothes before Silas gives him clothes. Um, yeah, not meshing together and pulling me out of the book. Whereas Pelizzoli just dragged me further in the world of Elspeth.

Though I have a feeling this edition was more for admiring then reading. The paper stock is glossy, so it's hard to read in some lighting situations because the pages reflect the light. Also, the font is so small and the lines so long per page, it's easy to lose you place and makes it far longer to read. I'm a fast reader and I struggled with the book just for this reason. So, your paperback copy you have sitting on your shelf will serve you better for the daily readings, but if you ever see a copy of this at your local used bookstore, pick it up for your coffee table, it's beautiful and, well, it's about coffee too, so thematic with your table. A win win situation.