Below are a list of books, stories, etc. that I read before (and partly during) my trip to Kenya. Some are more obvious than others (Out of Africa and the African works of Hemingway being the most obvious Western works of course!). Nicolas Best's Happy Valley was an interesting account of the British in East Africa through independence, but had a certain condescending tone that was a bit off.The historical travel accounts (from Thompson's 1885 work through Waugh in the early 1960s) were the all too typical "white man" accounts that left the local people silent witnesses to the travelers. Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt (who visited at nearly the same time - 1909/10) provide interesting contrasts of the former President and the future Prime Minister. Churchill provides insights into the Colonial government and Roosevelt discusses natural history (as he was on a collecting expedition for the Smithsonian).
I was only able to read a few works (one fiction, one non-fiction) by a Kenyan (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, perhaps the most noted of 20/21st century writers) and a very good coming of age memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina (as well as Wainaina's biting essay, "How to Write About Africa").
Nonfiction
- Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya (1979) by Nicholas Best
- Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001) by Richard E. Leakey
- Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
- "How to Write About Africa." Granta 92 (19 Jan 2006): The View from Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina
Memoirs
- Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass (1937, 1960) by Issak Dinesen
- Bill Bryson's African Diary (2002) by Bill Bryson
- One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir (2011) by Binyavanga Wainaina
- The River Between (1965) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
- Hemingway short stories:
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro
- The Good Lion
- An African Story
Travel Accounts
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| "Reading" at the Botanic Garden at the Nairobi National Museum |
- Through Masai land: a journey of exploration among the snowclad volcanic mountains and strange tribes of eastern equatorial Africa. Being the narrative of the Royal Geographical Society's Expedition to mount Kenia and lake Victoria Nyanza, 1883-1884 (1885) by Joseph Thompson
- My African Journey (1909) by Winston Churchill
- African Game Trails (1910) by Theodore Roosevelt
- African Camp Fires (1914) by Stewart E. White
- Green Hills of Africa (1935) by Ernest Hemingway
- True at First Light (1953-54, 1999) by Ernest Hemingway
- A Tourist In Africa (1960) by Evelyn Waugh
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