Forging a Country in African Wilds
By MARTIN RUBIN
Wall Street Journal Sept. 27, 2008
Kenya: A Country in the Making 1880-1940
By Nigel Pavitt
Norton, 303 pages, $50
“When most people think of colonial Kenya, the ‘Happy Valley’ comes to mind, that hellish paradise where rich English expats disported in an orgy of drinking, drug-taking and bed-hopping. ‘If he wants to be tight all the time,’ said Julia Flyte of her dipsomaniacal brother Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ ‘then why doesn’t he go and live in Kenya?’ . . .
“Some of the denizens of Happy Valley show up in ‘Kenya: A Country in the Making 1880-1940,’ an evocative collection of photographs chronicling 60 years of colonial life in the jewel of Britain’s African empire, gathered by Nigel Pavitt, a photographer and writer in Kenya. Local celebrities also show up—author Karen Blixen, aviatrix Beryl Markham—and visiting dignitaries, including British royalty and a broadly smiling Theodore Roosevelt. But the focus is very much on the people—African, Indian and British—who actually built the thriving colonial hub. The book’s black-and-white photographs, drawn from scrapbooks as well as from official sources, capture the amazing story of Kenya’s transformation from a colony concentrated mostly along a narrow tropical coastal strip into a vast country of diverse climates and topography. . . .”
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.wsj.com.