The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood in The Roundtable

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Mar 28, 2012 El rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: wanderlust, cultural-studies-and-other, 20th-centurylit-late

When we were kids we played in a field down the street from our house. If memory serves correctly (always a joke when it comes to my memory) the space was almost entirely undeveloped, so there was ample space for us to run and play. We rode our bikes down there, we chased butterflies, we caught bugs for science projects; I won't speak for my brothers or the friends I played with, but I also spent time down there letting my imagination go absolutely effing wild.

Reading Elspeth Huxley's memoirs of When we were kids we played in a field down the street from our house. If memory serves correctly (always a joke when it comes to my memory) the space was almost entirely undeveloped, so there was ample space for us to run and play. We rode our bikes down there, we chased butterflies, we caught bugs for science projects; I won't speak for my brothers or the friends I played with, but I also spent time down there letting my imagination go absolutely effing wild.

Reading Elspeth Huxley's memoirs of growing up in Kenya reminded me of the land at the bottom of Main Street. We certainly had no lions or giant pythons in that field, but I encountered plenty of them in my imagination. The field was our African wilderness, or anything else we wanted it to be.

Elspeth's family moved to British East Africa when she was a little girl. The land was almost entirely unsettled when they arrived, and she talks about colonialism from the viewpoint of a child. Certainly she wasn't involved in the more serious, adult subject matters, but she wasn't entirely blind to what was going on around her either. She picked up on quite a bit, the smart little whippersnapper that she was.

But she primarily concerned herself with the other aspects of living in Africa. She lived in fear that the wild animals would eat her pet. She wrote about being stuck in a rainstorm that made her wonder if the Kikuyu tribe was right in believing that storms were the product of an angry god.

Not unlike Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, the best part of this memoir are Elspeth's detail about the land on which she lived. I've never been particularly drawn to Africa (I really don't like the heat), but this girl makes me want to go, even though I know Kenya of today would be nothing like the Kenya she knew and experienced.

Aside from Dinesen, I also thought of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career: My Career Goes Bung, though Franklin's story (not a memoir) takes place in Australia instead of Africa... yeah... welcome to my head, this is how I make connections.

A great read, and I have her second memoir The Mottled Lizard to read when I'm ready, which excites me 'cause I'm a dork like that. Elspeth's family left Kenya during the war, and I'm curious to see what her life was like after the war when she returned to Africa.

For myself, I have no desire to return to the bottom of Main Street to see what that field is like now. Certainly there's a Wal-Greens or a Wal-Mart or fifteen gas stations in place of the hills and tress and grass that I remember. I would like to preserve that memory. Sometimes it's just not worth going back. ...more

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Jan 29, 2016 Liz M marked it as do-not-own

Shelves: 500-women

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Mar 17, 2016 Lise Petrauskas added it

Shelves: 500-women, africa

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