Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Chapter 7: Whites Lost and Found: Immigration and Imagination in Savanna Africa

Chapter 7 Whites Lost and Found Immigration and Imagination in Savanna Africa David McDermott Hughes I had a farm in Africa. . . . The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility. . . . In the Highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa I have sometimes thought since of the Elkingtons’ tea table—round, capacious, and white, standing with sturdy legs against the green vines of the garden, a thousand miles of Africa receding from its edge. It was a mark of sanity. Beryl Markham, West with the Night Sympathetic authors frequently describe African whites as a “lost tribe.”1 The phrase suggests a population marooned, wandering, or scattered (from Israel) or otherwise out of step with its surroundings. Indeed, in this metaphorical sense, Europeans partly failed as settlers and immigrants to Africa in the twentieth century. Of course, at various times and places they nearlymonopolizedpower,wealth,and/orland.Butintherealmof ideas,few could convince themselves and others that they belonged.Barronness Blixen, under the pen name Isak Dinesen, wrote with unmatched certainty when she declared,“Here I am, where I ought to be.” (If everyone knew it be true, of course, she would not have needed to say it, and bankruptcy sent her back to Denmark anyway.) At almost the same time and about the same Kenyan  | David McDermott Hughes landscape, Beryl Markham gave voice to a deeper ambivalence and fear: beyond the veranda of colonial control lay a strange, uncontrolled vastness. To understand and depict that world, whites engaged in what I call the “imaginative project of colonialism.”2 Particularly the writers among them imagined European immigrants living, working, and becoming one with African savanna. From roughly 1930 onward, this uncoordinated, unplanned literary effort gave shape to an ethic and sensibility of landscape. As Anthony Vital and Byron Caminero-Santangelo both suggest in this volume, such artistic work runs tangent to explicit politics. Yes, a sense of belonging encouraged white settlers to stay in Africa and to dominate Africans.“Literature,” as Edward Said argues,“participat[es] in Europe’s overseas expansion and . . . creates . . .‘structures of feeling’ that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire.”3 But literature and the imagination are not reducible to a struggle for or against power. Settler fiction, memoir, and travelogue ran on a separate track, sometimes dangerously inattentive to nationalism and other political currents. Writers undertook an endeavor that, to their white readers, was more emotive and profound: to find whites in Africa. In ways that were partial, fleeting, and only semiconscious, white Africans convinced themselves and others that they belonged on this savanna. Nowhere was this process of literary integration more necessary than in British East Africa and southern Africa. The settler colonies of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) suffered from a mismatch of power and population, what Dane Kennedy calls a “demographic conjuncture.”4 Having pacified native polities by 1900,whites sought to monopolize politics and the economy as settlers had done in the United States and Australia.Yet they immigrated in numbers far smaller than on those frontiers. White enclaves never topped 1 percent of the national population in Kenya, 5 percent in Zimbabwe, and 20 percent in modern South Africa.5 Minority status led to fear and restraint in cultural expression. Whereas Americans of the eastern seaboard began to romanticize Indians in the nineteenth century, when most Indians were safely exterminated or expelled, white Africans preferred not to dwell on the native masses surrounding them.6 And they chose not to dwell with them either. In contrast to French, Portuguese, or Dutch administrators , British colonial officers sought to prohibit rather than shape social and sexual intercourse.7 Such regulations kept intermarriage and even the learning of African languages to a minimum.8 In this context of self-imposed isolation, writers from the late 1930s onward implicitly took responsibility for adapting Euro-Africans to Africa.9 And these authors did so on broadly environmental terms. Female writers frequently romanticized the savanna and its wildlife,expressing love,yearning,and rejection.With many Whites Lost and Found |  exceptions, a smaller number of male authors conveyed a similar man-land bond through narratives of exploration and adventure on vivid African topographies . By writing landscape in these and other ways, writers and their readers overcame the feeling of territorial exile.Also, by...