Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Louis Leakey was very interesting – a major intellectual figure in the history of paleoanthropology. He grew up in very close contact with the Kikuyu, but this book is squarely in the language of the time, which was that Mau Mau represented an atavism, that they had regressed back to their savage, pre-settled, pre-Christianised state and what was being unleashed was a kind of innate violence.
Your fourth book?
Mau Mau and the Kikuyu. It’s by Louis Leakey, who’s very interesting, a major intellectual figure in the history of paleoanthropology. He grew up in very close contact with the Kikuyu. Leakey was the son of missionaries and spoke Kikuyu better than English. As a child he built, and moved into, a Kikuyu-style hut in the back garden, so he’s very close to that world. He was a Christian and very much a believer, but also a doctrinaire Darwinist. What’s interesting about his take on the Mau Mau uprising and what it did to the Kikuyu people is that, despite his integration and his knowledge of them, he doesn’t at all describe the kinds of systematic social deprivation that colonial settlers produced for the Kikuyu. They are a cattle-grazing agricultural people with a social system dependent on land ownership, and one of the impacts the settlers wouldn’t necessarily have known about is that young Kikuyu men couldn’t get married, as they no longer had land dowries to provide. So there was a very serious breakdown in Kikuyu society entirely caused by the settlers, and therefore some kind of armed rebellion is a pretty understandable response. Although it’s very judgmental of me in this a posteriori position to think this, you feel that Leakey might have seen that, but that’s not at all the terms in which he describes the conflict. It’s squarely in the language of the time, which was that Mau Mau represented an atavism, that they had regressed back to their savage, pre-settled, pre-Christianised state and what was being unleashed was a kind of innate violence. That was an interesting work of the period to read.
Read full interview
Adam Foulds is a novelist and poet whose most recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 and won the 2010 Southbank Show Award for Literature. His ‘verse novella’ The Broken Word, an epic poem set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2008. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2008.
