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Top Ten Reasons to Read Vanity Fair’s Article - A Flowering Evil
Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Nducu Wa Ngugi (2007-10-31)
In the essay, A Flowering Evil, by Mark Seal that appeared in Vanity
Fair Magazine (2006), we learn that there are two types of people living
in Kenya — the White landowners and the Black, 'lawless, immigrant'
Kenyans. Earlier this year it was announced that Julia Roberts will star
in a movie to be shot in 2008 inspired by this essay. Wanjiku Wa Ngugi,
Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Nducu Wa Ngugi deeply believe Kenyan White
landowners should speak for themselves. Using direct quotes, they offer
you the top ten reasons why you should read the full essay.
1) You get to know the true nature of the African.
“When I ask one Lake Naivasha landowner and his wife if the cure was
more violent than the crime, he hands me a thick and wicked whip.
"That's hippo skin," he says. "It hurts. The only thing these people
respect is fear. The only way we can live here is by having them fear
us." "For the Kikuyu the closest word to respect is 'I fear you,'" adds
his wife.
2) You learn about the true Africa and things to avoid.
"Nothing happens halfway here. Everything is wild, violent, savage," a
local woman tells me as the sky explodes in a thundering deluge and the
mourners crowd around the bar in a tent after the memorial service.
"People live dangerously in Africa," says another. "They crash planes,
get killed by wild animals, have disastrous love affairs. My husband's
mother got bitten by a hippo. A woman we know got hit by a train."
3) You learn about African marriage customs.
“Joan Root stood out, as did David Chege, who soon replaced his torn
T-shirts and moldy swimming trunks with mitumba clothing, the second
hand apparel that arrives in Africa by the bale. He took Joan's maid as
his second wife, a badge of honor in a country where status is gauged by
the number of wives a man has, and returned to poaching, although a much
subtler form of it”…“He was a wily Kikuyu," says Joan's friend and
former tenant Annabelle Thom of David Chege. A resident of the Karagita
slum, Chege was a polygamist with two wives and four children.”
4) You learn about European marriage Customs.
Yet over time Alan entered into a relationship with Jenny Hammond, a
married woman with two children, with whom Joan and Alan had been long
time friends.
"I had an affair with Jenny, which was pretty tumultuous, but after a
while I realized that I wanted to be with Joan," Alan tells me. "I had
actually given Jenny a settlement and found her a place to live. She
didn't want to go back to her husband, and she wasn't too happy that I'd
decided to go back with Joan. But she accepted that.
5) You get to see the real eco-system, nature in the wild—Africans, wild
animals and those that bravely tame them.
Her diary became filled with despair: sleepless nights, staff betrayals,
neighbors getting robbed and shot, and, always, the insatiable needs of
black Naivasha. "Isaac came to request a loan to buy [a]donkey to cart
water," reads one diary entry. "Gave him a lecture about having seven
children but loaned him 7,000 [shillings, or $96] for a start." Leopards
killed her Thomson's gazelles, Masai tribesmen sent her and other white
landowners menacing letters saying that they should "vacate
Naivasha"—which the tribe still claims to own—and her increasingly
undisciplined Task Force was falling apart.”
6) You Learn the Real African History.
“Decades before wildlife films such as March of the Penguins, Joan and
Alan Root pioneered filming animal migrations without interference from
human actors…They introduced American zoologist Dian Fossey to the
gorillas she would later die trying to save, took Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis over Kenya in their balloon, and covered much of Africa in their
famous single-engine Cessna…”
7) You get to learn about Lord Delamare’s Grandson Tom Cholmondeley.
Tom Cholmondeley in “2005 was arrested but never prosecuted after he had
shot a plainclothes Masai game warden whom, he later explained, he had
mistaken for a thief on his land. In May of this year, [2006]
encountering a group he insists were poachers, who had bows and arrows
and a pack of dogs and were hauling an impala across his land,
Cholmondeley took aim again. He killed a black man who worked as a
stonemason, and has been jailed and charged with murder.”
8) You get to see why for Tom Cholmondeley Justice is Blind.
"Desperate measures for desperate times," says Cholmondeley as he drives
me across his vast acreage, [83,000 acres] where fat warthogs run in
circles and where poachers can find plenty of places to hide.
"The balance of power had turned completely in their favor," says Tom
Cholmondeley, who once watched the Task Force chase a poacher into a
swamp, from which they later pulled his buffalo-mauled remains.
9) You see the other side of colonialism in Kenya and learn it was not
all about hunting the Mau Mau.
“Joan was beautiful," remembers Parker, who was with four fellow
soldiers on weekend leave from the Kenya Regiment in 1955 when they
dared one another to ask out Nairobi's five prettiest girls, "whether we
knew them or not." Parker chose Joan Thorpe, the tall, shy blonde who
had an almost magical way with animals.
10) The article contains the best research on the African continent and
its future.
"Welcome to Africa," a young, white big-game hunter says to me by way of
consolation over drinks one midnight in Nairobi, insisting that this was
just one more tragedy in a country full of them, and urging me to delay
my return to the U.S. and go deeper into the continent. "We can
investigate French forces fighting for control of oil in Chad, the war
over conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, the slaughter of the local Pygmy
people by foreign tribes in the Congo, and the Chinese raping the rain
forest. That," he says, "is deepest, darkest Africa."
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www.pambazuka.org
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/joanroot200608
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