Red Strangers

Huxley, Elspeth. Red Strangers. With an introduction by Richard Dawkins. London: The Penguin Group, 1999 [1939]. 406 pp.

Elspeth Huxley is something of an enigma in the study of African history and literature. Often understood, possibly because of her almost childish adoration of Lord Delamere in her biography of him, as the veritable proponent of British imperialism in Africa, careful reading of her childhood memories of Kenya, The Flame Trees of Thika and the Mottled Lizard, reveal a surprising sympathy for, and sensitivity to, the situation of Africans experiencing the colonialism she seems elsewhere to advocate so strongly. The republication of her 1939 novel, Red Strangers, will only heighten her enigma. Nonetheless, this is an important novel and one we are grateful to have available to ourselves and to our students again.

In Red Strangers, Huxley constructs a history of four generations of a Kenyan Kikuyu family from the years immediately preceding the arrival of British colonialism through the late 1930s. Historic events like WWI, the Influenza Epidemic, and in an almost eerier anticipation of things to come, the increasing resistance to the British that would eventually result in independence, serve, consequently, as a backdrop to the characters' drama. We see segments of the family reduced to poverty and galling frustration by the invasion while others.adapt with amazing speed to the new circumstances, exploiting the British even as they are corrupted by them to establish wealthy dynasties that are strangely prophetic, given what was to happen in British Africa in the years following independence.

The real fascination with the novel, however, is her portrait of the Kikuyu immediately before the British invasion. While disclaiming any expertise in anthropology, she uses and identifies, besides her memory of her own experiences, impeccable secondary sources to build a thoroughly comprehensible and sympathetic picture of the logic behind Kikuyu society. With her help, the reader comes to understand magic, "witchcraft," bride prices, honoring ancestors, familial obligations and an economy that is based on the worth of a goat instead of a precious metal, and this without the usual Western value judgemenu that accompany most fictional and early scientific writing about "primitives" and "savages." There is not a hint of the usual, "isn't this quaint, curious, or strange what these 'primitives' will do?" She has an objective, to make a statement for a people, now largely gone, who "cannot present their point of view to us because they cannot express it in terms we can understand" (viii). She makes her point convincingly: the Kikuyu had a well ordered, logical social arrangement without the benefits of western "civilization."

This accomplished, she only then introduces the red strangers with their respect laws, courts, jails, money, modern farming and medicine, and the scientific method. What follows is an expose of the utter confusion of logic and design that surely surrounded the arrival of the West in African society. A simple example will illustrate her accomplishment. In Kikuyu traditional society, the criminal was handled by establishing guilt or responsibility and then administering a fine in goats. Part of the fine went as compensation to those harmed and part as what we might think of as "court costs," recompense for the trouble of elders having to render a judgement. Few crimes would be so great that this method would not suffice. What then was a Kikuyu miscreant to make of the English system of justice that placed him in a jail where he was fed and sheltered but was unable to provide for his family or to meet his other social obligations? How could it make sense to pay a fine in coinage to a court while the criminal's victim went uncompensated? The reader leaves these passages bewildered and asking "whatever did these strange aliens think they were doing?" Huxley uses her setting to expose such nonsense time and again, and in the process makes the British and their imperialism appear absolutely alien, ridiculous, and even comic, were it not so tragic.

It may seem strange that Penguin Books would re-issue this novel with a new introduction by Richard Dawkins, an internationally renowned zoologist. His role is that he, having had a childhood in Kenya's colonial society, issued the challenge resulting in the novel's republication. He did this because he admires, despite admittedly despising the "fashionable nostrums of 'cultural relativism"' (viii), how skillfully Huxley "transforms her readers into Kikuyu" (vii). I would argue, besides, that part of his admiration for this book is how completely Huxley captures the Kikuyu's love of the natural world without subjecting the reader to silly romanticism. Huxley makes no bones about it, the Kikuyu were a forest people at war with the forest, but literally hundreds of passages see the natural world sublimely through the eyes of her Kikuyu characters. Given what was to come, the West's dismissal of Africans, supposed destroyers of the environment lacking the insight or interest to take their environment seriously, these sublime passages are immensely important. They remind us that Africa's environmental disaster arose from the devastation wrought by colonialism and its aftermath rather than a flaw in the African personality.