Alex Keto has long been a friend of the Women of Mystery. He is a fabulously artistic photographer and as The Rainbird War confirms, his writing is as provocative as his photos. I am overjoyed that Alex has agreed to talk with us today to explain the historical significance of the Mau Mau Revolution and how he was able to write a book that places the reader exactly in that moment in time. I can tell you that this story kept me tied up in suspenseful knots until the very last sentences.
Alex, thanks so much for visiting the Women of Mystery. I’d like to start by asking what led to your fascination with Kenya in the 1950s?
Actually, my interest extends throughout eastern and southern Africa. I’ve long been fascinated by history, and, starting in the late 1980s, I began learning about the region. It doesn’t take very long before you realize these are countries with big stories of hubris that read almost as if they are Greek tragedies.
Cecil Rhodes sent a column of less than 400 men north from South Africa in the late 1890s, and they conquered a land larger than Western Europe. But within four generations, the settlers had lost everything in a brutal bush war of unbelievable ferocity. We know about colonial era Kenya through Karen Blixen’s lyrical book “Out of Africa.” But we tend to forget that Kenya was where she lost every penny she had, and she left Africa a broken woman.
On top of that, eastern and southern Africa is a region of incredible physical beauty. Sadly, poaching is once again on the rise, and now rivals the levels seen in the 1980s, but even so, there are still untouched pockets of Africa where it’s possible to believe you are in the Garden of Eden.
Why did you decide to write this story?
I knew I wanted to write a novel based in Africa and began hunting for a setting for it. I shied away from writing about South Africa because, to put it bluntly, that is a rather crowded field. South Africa has already produced some of the greatest writers ever whether we want to talk about Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Bryce Courtenay, or Alan Paton. I’m not sure I have anything meaningful to add to what South African writers have already said.
However, Kenya seemed less well known. The two great writers out of Kenya were Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley, and both of them write exclusively about the heyday of colonialism. There are modern Kikuyu novelists but their books don’t necessarily follow the western tradition of a story with a beginning, middle and end. As a result, they are not well known outside of Kenya. Since I already knew Kenya’s history, it didn’t take much effort to figure out the two obvious events were the Mau Mau Rebellion or the East Africa campaign in World War I. I settled on the Mau Mau Rebellion because it is such a complex story. There is a lot moral ambiguity involved in the rebellion. It is easy to sympathize with the Mau Mau who fought against an unjust colonial system, but the brutality of their tactics also makes them very frightening and somewhat repulsive. After all, they did behead children.
At the same time, the settlers and the British army reacted with almost unprecedented ferocity. They declared the cloud forests of the Aberdares Mountains and Mount Kenya free fire zones and locked over 100,000 Kikuyu men in a vast prison system on very flimsy evidence.
This sense of moral ambiguity exists even today. The Kenyan government has never shown much enthusiasm about commemorating the Mau Mau for a number of reasons. But the main one is a reluctance to talk about what actually took place.
For a writer, moral ambiguity is a wonderful thing although I’m sure it was less nice for those who were involved.
How did you research the era and the locale?
When I started doing research, I knew I wanted to create a story that takes place during the Mau Mau Rebellion, but I had no idea what the story would be. I figured I would find the story in the history. I am very lucky in that I live just outside of Washington DC where the Library of Congress is. I obtained researcher credentials, which is very easy, and spent 30 days straight in the main reading room of the library just reading histories of the rebellion for 8 hours a day. The Library of Congress is an amazing institution. You request your books and within 45 minutes they deliver them to your desk, even if they have been out of print for fifty years. I don’t know how they do it.
But, I was able to read diaries and memoirs written during the rebellion as well as the more standard histories. I found the memoirs and diaries were invaluable because of the emotional impact they had. People were terrified during the rebellion. Because of the way colonialism developed in Kenya, often you had women living on their own in isolated farm houses while their husbands fought in the cloud forests. These women never knew when the Mau Mau might attack, and if the Mau Mau broke into the farmhouses, they simply killed everyone inside. And since the Mau Mau Rebellion also triggered a civil war within the Kikuyu tribe itself, all of this applied to Kikuyu women as well.
But it took about three weeks of reading before I stumbled on what became the core of the book. Without giving away the plot line, there was a British deception operation that took place during the fighting. Deception became the theme of the book and runs pretty much through every character in the book.
So I started writing the first draft of the book, and promptly ran into a wall about six weeks later when I realized I couldn’t visualize the landscape where the fighting took place. I had been to Kenya before but not to the Central Highlands where the rebellion took place. So I went to Kenya for three weeks and stayed on a farm run by Petra Allmendinger called Sandai. Petra is a wonderful person who knows just about everyone in the highlands it seems. She introduced me to several people who had lived through the rebellion, both as settlers and Mau Mau fighters. They were happy to tell me their stories.
One fascinating woman was Tutti Hessel who lived by herself on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya during the rebellion. Her husband, Hans Hessel, had been drafted and served as a guide because he had been a big game hunter. When I asked Tutti how she got through the rebellion, she said that every morning she took out her .38 revolver and practiced shooting. She would draw a head sized circle on a tree on the boundary of the farm and stand back 50 feet. Needless to say, she hit that circle. She said she was sending a message to the Mau Mau that not only was she armed but she knew how to use her gun. Apparently, the message got through. The Mau Mau never attacked her farmhouse, but they did overrun Arundel Leaky’s farm next door. They buried him alive with a goat in a witchcraft ritual. Arundel was the brother of the more famous Louis Leakey.
By the way, Hans Hessel later became a stunt pilot. He is the guy flying the airplane in the movie “Out of Africa” when Meryl Streep reaches back her hand and he, not Robert Redford, holds it. His flying days in the movie came to an abrupt end during the scene when he lands his biplane on a Kenya beach. In the movie, the scene cuts just before the plane lands. In real life, the wheels jammed on the soft sand, and the plane flipped, wrecking it and sending Hans to the hospital.
Tutti’s story was pure gold for a writer. And yes, she shows up in the book, somewhat, in the form of Syrie Sorensen who is a crack shot. Syrie’s expertise with a revolver is a defining character and key to the plot line.
On top of that, I was able to hike through the cloud forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya as well as across the thorn savannah between them where the fighting took place. Every scene in the book is drawn from the places I visited and it made it very easy to describe the landscape once I had seen it.
I thought you did a fine job of preventing the turmoil of the era from overshadowing your characters. Was that difficult? Did you ever find yourself wanting to wander deeper into the “troubles” than the story line warranted?
Yes, this was a big consideration. The history needed to serve as the backdrop to the story but it is not a history book. There is a lot that I had to leave out because it was not critical to the plot line. To give you some idea of what was left out, I skipped over the issue that while all the Mau Mau fighters were from the Kikuyu tribe, not all Kikuyus supported the Mau Mau.
Many Kikuyus, particularly those who had converted to Christianity, despised the Mau Mau because the Mau Mau forced people to go back to traditional beliefs in Ngai, the Kikuyu god. So, even as the Mau Mau fought the settlers, they also fought their fellow Kikuyu. But it would have taken almost another book in itself to bring out the religious differences.
Another bit of history that got swept aside was the Mau Mau oathing rituals. In the Kikuyu tradition, blood oaths are binding unto death, and the Mau Mau oaths were, frankly, bizarre and gruesome. I refer to the oaths in one scene but don’t explore them. In several early drafts, the oaths are part of the book, but when it became clear it was not essential to the plot, I jettisoned them.
Princess Elizabeth’s visit to Kenya in 1952 also got jettisoned although it is a fascinating story. She was staying at the Treetops Hotel in the Aberdares the night her father died. The story is that she went up to her room a princess and came down a queen. Sadly, it just didn’t add anything to my book, and it got chopped also.
My editor and publisher, Robin Stratton at Big Table Publishing, was excellent at guiding me through the process of cutting. Without her, the book wouldn’t have been possible. She is the best and most thorough editors I know. She constantly posed the question, is this necessary? What is the purpose of that character? Why do we need this scene? Sometimes you fall into the trap of thinking that because something happened in history, it needs to be in the book. It doesn’t. Every time I fell into this trap, she dragged me back out, sometimes kicking and screaming.
Did you find your background as a news reporter to be a help or a hindrance in writing fiction?
Yes and no. The Rainbird War is my first published novel, but it is not the first novel I have written. There is not much similarity between journalism and creative writing other than the love of writing. With journalism, you are presenting a series of facts and you need to be straightforward. With creative writing, you also want to convey information, but there are many levels of information that you need to bring across such as emotion, tension, and action. I’ve often said the difference between writing a news article and a novel is like the difference in building a slingshot out of tinker toys and drawing up the blue prints to a nuclear power plant. Novels are much more complex by many orders of magnitude.
However, knowing how to research a subject, which does come from journalism, was invaluable. A habit I picked up as a journalist was what I call daisy chaining. If you are talking to one person about a subject, one of the questions you want to put to them is, who else knows about this subject? This will lead you to your next interview. And so forth. This is how I got to talk to so many people in Kenya about their experiences. It also helped that I was used to talking to people I had just met. Interestingly enough, the easiest interview I ever had both as a writer and a journalist came about when I met John Kibrenga Richanga. He was a former Mau Mau fighter and only spoke Kikuyu. A friend, Ayub Ndunga, translated for me. But John told me his story of taking part in the rebellion from 1952 until late 1954 when he was captured by the British. He started at the beginning of the story and went through it logically and step by step until the end. It is the only interview I have ever done where I had no follow up questions.
And he also gave me the most memorable line I have ever heard about the rebellion. In mid-1954 as the rebellion was being crushed, John looked at me and said, “At this time, everyone was just running for their lives.” I tried to convey that sense of terror in the book and, yes, in the end the characters are scattered by the forces unleashed by the rebellion.
So there you have it folks, a sweeping novel of intrigue and suspense woven in a history lesson you will never forget. Alex Keto has been kind enough to offer a free copy of The Rainbird War to one lucky commenter. Feel free to tell us if you’ve ever visited Africa, are longing to visit, or just want to see it through Alex’s writing.
Comments will close at midnight on Friday, and as always please make sure we have an email addy for you in case you win. The winner will be announced in a special post on Saturday afternoon.
Terrie