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CHAPTER SIX

TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT

True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway, is about his 1953-54

East African safari with his fourth wife Mary. This book was released

posthumously in his centennial year in 1999. In January 1954,

Hemingway and Mary were injured in two successive plane crashes in

the African bush within two days. To the international press, in

Entebbe where he was to face questions from reporters he was in fact

reported dead. The severity of his injuries were not completely

diagnosed until months later when he returned to Europe. Hemingway

spent much of the next two years in Havana, recuperating and writing

the manuscript of what he called the Africa book. This book remained

unfinished at the time of his suicide in July 1961. In the 1970s, Mary

donated his manuscripts to the John F. Kennedy Library, including

the Africa book. The manuscript was released to Hemingway’s son

Patrick in the mid-1990s. Patrick edited and restored the work to half

its original length to strengthen the underlying storyline and

emphasize the fictional aspects. The result is that True At First Light

is a blend of memoir and fiction.

In True At First Light Hemingway explores the conflict within

a marriage, the conflict between the European and the Native cultures

in Africa, and the fear a writer feels when his work becomes

impossible. True At First Light is set in mid-20th century Kenya

Colony during the Mau-Mau rebellion. In his introduction to True At

First Light, Patrick Hemingway describes the Kikuyu and the Kamba

tribes at the time of the Mau-Mau rebellion. He explains that if the

Kamba had joined the rebellion, Ernest and Mary Hemingway “would

have then stood a good chance of being hacked to death in their beds

as they slept by the very servants they so trusted and thought they

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understood.”1 The book takes place in December while the narrator

Ernest and his wife Mary are in a safari camp in the Kenyan highlands

on the flank of Mt. Kilimanjaro, where they find themselves

temporarily at risk when a group of Mau-Mau rebels escape from jail.

Hemingway, like so many other Western travellers, sought a

simpler, more primitive life among third world people. Although the

official duties of Papa as a game warden in True At First Light are

inconsequential, he nevertheless takes them seriously. While there is

no real reason for him to engage in “Councils of war” or “strategy and

tactics”, he does so on a modest scale when the Mau-Mau uprising

seems to threaten his area (85). Richard Fantina writes “Hemingway

maintained a comfortable relationship with imperialism on his

African journeys in 1934 and 1953. He travelled in the company and

felt himself part of the British colonial establishment in Africa”

(132). As we here see the character of Papa in True At First Light

holds the official, though minor, position of game warden in the

military apparatus of the occupying power in Kenya. Hemingway’s

narrator, whose job is of some importance to him, expresses

apprehension at the thought of fighting the Mau-Mau if they

conducted a “full-scale raid” on his camp (85). “I had no police

authority and was only the acting Game Ranger and I was quite sure,

perhaps wrongly, that I would have very little backing if I got into

trouble” (85). Hemingway, through Papa, does not blame the Mau-

Mau for their uprising “And now their game had been killed off by

the white men ………. Their own Reserve was overcrowded and

overfarmed and when the rains failed there was no pasture for the

cattle and the crops were lost” (67). Clearly, he sympathizes with the

predicament of the colonized but there is still doubt on whose side he

would be if fighting broke out.

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Despite a few mild remarks acknowledging the contradiction of

his position concerning colonialism, such as “[W]e are the intruders”

(GHOA 285), and confessing that he wants “to know more about this

country than I had any right to know” (TAFL 39), Hemingway

accepts the imperial patronage and never seriously questions the

legitimacy of British colonialism. Susan Gubar notes that in The

Garden of Eden, “presenting a portrait of the artist as colonizer,

Hemingway admits with some guilt his reliance on an Otherness with

which he cannot abide,” which she identifies as “African

wildness/sexual wildness”.2 This comment highlights Hemingway’s

deep ambivalence about the conflict between the colonial and sexual

projects.

The blend of travel memoir and fiction opens with the white

hunter Philip Percival leaving the safari group to visit his farm,

handing over control of the camp to Ernest Hemingway who had

intimate relations with the white hunter, of whom he writes:-

I respected him as I had never respected my

father and he trusted me, which was more than I

deserved. It was, however, something, to try to

merit. He had taught me by putting me on my

own and correcting me when I made mistakes”

(P. 13).

When the white hunter leaves the camp he feels lonely for

sometime. In True At First Light Hemingway presents very vividly

the cross-cultural relationship. All the members of the safari crew

belonged to different religions and tribal cultures. Keiti was the chief

and the authority figure of the white hunter’s safari crew. Mthuka was

a black African driver. He was quite deaf. He was the son of Mkola,

Hemingway’s gun bearer in the previous safari. On this safari, Ngui

was his gun-bearer and tracker. Charo was a truly devout

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Mohammedan and Miss Mary’s gun-bearer. Most of the safari crew

belonged to the Kamba tribe. Hemingway had been their very close

friend for a long time. He loved and trusted them a lot.

As Moddelmog points out, “Africa serves Hemingway as an

imaginative space onto which he can project white characters and

conflicts without considering the ethics of their occupation of Africa

or the humanity of the black people who stand before them” (113)3.

Hemingway’s engagement with British colonialism seems casual,

lacking any deep commitment.

The accompanying map, delimits the culture areas of Africa

projected against present political boundaries. The areas are given

according to their spread at a time which may roughly be designated

as the beginning of intensive European expansion in Africa. That

changes in these cultures have occurred since that time is obvious. To

quote Melville J. Herskovit:-

Fifty years of linguistic and cultural contact with

persons of differencing ways from their own,

Holding positions of power and hence of

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prestige, did not fail to affect the general African

cultural picture. But outside the new centres of

population and within them, more than is

commonly held – pre-existing patterns continue.

In the back country, all over Africa, life in its

basic configurations moves largely as in pre-

European days, and where contact has been close

and pressure of a social, political, economic, and

religious nature have been strong, the

mechanism of cultural reinterpretation has come

into play. As a result, pre-existing values are

retained, but given expression in new outer form

(16)4.

Hemingway is at pains to point out, in this story, the space and

time aspect of ethical behaviour in different cultures. Western ethics

allows polygamy and polyandry sequentially by death or divorce but a

person can have only one spouse at a time. At the time of this story

Mary is married to a spouse who has one spouse, within the ethical

framework of the West, Hemingway already had two spouses by

divorce and a third, Pauline, by both divorce and death, Mary has

been married before twice herself. She is protected from her husband

taking a second wife by the ethics of the West, but not from

sequential polygamy, which troubles her a great deal. It is this that

lies behind her desire to kill a lion – this African tribal ethics that

allows polygamy. Hemingway quotes:-

Ngui had five wives, which we knew was true,

and twenty head of cattle, which we all doubted.

I had only one legal wife due to American law. It

was generally presumed even by the most

conservative and skeptical of the elders that if

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Ngui had five wives I must have at least twelve

due to the difference between our fortunes

(TAFL 218).

Hemingway was fond of tribal culture and wanted to live by the

ethics of that culture. Herskovit writes “African peoples have known

how to maintain old ways as well as to accept new ones. Granting the

primacy of the African in the African scene ……….” (20). Richard

Fantina writes:

Hemingway’s journeys to Africa, especially his

1953 safari – during which he told his wife,

“This has been the happiest week of my life.”3 –

can be compared to T.E. Lawrence’s quest in

Arabia, although on a much less grandiose scale.

Both men, while on exotic locales, adopted

native dress. Lawrence, of course wore the entire

outfit of the Bedouin and essentially “Arabized”

himself to the degree to which it was possible.

Hemingway’s adoption of native dress was much

less complete” (130)5.

But his wife Mary reports that upon her return to Kimana

swamp from Nairobi, she “found Papa with his head shaved and

shinny and showing all its scars” and “a portion of Papa’s wardrobe

[dyed] into various shades of the Masai rusty pink ocre.”6 Writing of

Lawrence, Dennis Porter refers to such makeovers as “cultural

transvestism” that “enhanced the ambiguities of a self already subject

to doubt in the sexual sphere.”7 Hemingway’s own cultural cross-

dressing in Africa allowed him to “go native” and invent his own

version of “tribal law.”8

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Hemingway is worried about being attacked and robbed by

Mau-Mau because there are guns, alcohol, and food in the camp.

Being deputized as an assistant game warden, he makes daily rounds

in the game reserve. In the course of this book, then, Hemingway

should be learning how “to command” by himself, without anyone “to

correct my mistakes”(14). He maintains communication with the local

tribes. He is accompanied by two African game scouts, Chungo and

Arab Meina and, for a period, the district game warden G.C. Gin

Crazed. Other camp members include Keiti, who runs the camp, the

safari cook Mbebia, and two stewards, Nguili and Msembi. In True At

First Light the glorious days of the “great white hunters” are over and

the Mau-Mau rebellion is violently dislodging European farmers from

Kenya’s arable lands. But to the African gun bearers, drivers, and

game scouts who run his safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro,

Hemingway remains a lordly figure – almost a god.

Franz Fanon comments on African American folktales (i.e.,

Br’er Rabbit Stories) in which the characters identified as blacks

outsmart and ultimately defeat their supposedly more sophisticated

opponents. Fanon writes that “The Negro makes stories in which it is

possible for him to work off his aggression and gives it worth by

turning it on himself, thus reproducing the classic schema of

masochism.”9

True At First Light shows the nature of mid-20th century

conflict in Africa. Colonialism and imperialism pressurised African

tribes and wild life. Hemingway shows an awareness of the political

future and turmoil in Africa. Patrick Hemingway who, had himself

lived in Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) for decades, was surprised at

the degree of perception apparent in his father’s mid-century writing

about Africa. Hemingway scholar Anders Hallengren notes the

thematic similarities in Hemingway’s posthumous fiction, particularly

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in the final books. The genesis of True At First Light was an African

insurrection, also symbolically depicted in ‘The Garden of Eden’

“The conviction and the purposefulness of the Maji-Maji in The

Garden of Eden, corresponds to the Kenyan Mau-Mau, context of the

novel True At First Light.

Hemingway explores tribal practices through the clash of

cultures. Christianity and Islam are juxtaposed against native

religions. Miss Mary symbolizes Christianity she takes a vow to kill

the black-maned lion by Christmas. She even searches Christmas tree

in the grassland for Christmas celebration. Mary’s intent to decorate a

tree for Christmas mystified the native camp members. Charo is a

devout Moslem. Against this is posed the native religion symbolized

by Debba, Mthuka and other natives of Africa. Patrick Hemingway

explains that his father was interested in D.H. Lawrence’s belief that

each region of the world "should have its own religion” – apparent

when the male character invents his own religion. Miss Mary

desperately wants to shoot a lion. But she’s too short to aim her rifle

accurately in the tall grass of the Kenyan savannah. Hemingway

writes:- “It was necessary for the religion of the Memsahib that she

killed this particular lion before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus”(45).

Further the writer comments “Everybody understood why Mary must

kill her lion. It was hard for some of the elders who had been on many

hundreds of safaris to understand why she must kill it in the old

straight way”(26). Mary herself describes killing this particular beast

as comparable to “the search for the Holy Grail and for the Golden

Fleece.” She misses her shots with other game; and he thinks she to

too soft-hearted to kill the animal. Part of her difficulty is that she is

so short which makes Hemingway so very protective. They both know

that a major goal for him is to have confidence in her shooting ability.

Hemingway seemed to realize that Africa was a place without an

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influential and established religion – place where religion could be

redefined.

Hemingway admits to himself that he wished “something

spectacular would come up” so that he could be a hero in his wife’s

eyes and not be seen solely as “her unpaid and annoying bodyguard”,

protecting her from Africa(89). Their wait for a confrontation with the

lion is complicated by “marauding elephants”. But nothing ever

becomes of those elephants; they just fade away like old soldiers.

Charlene Murphy points out, “Hemingway’s writing reveals a

reverence for nature and a sensitivity that may seem to present a

dichotomy when combined with the undeniable part of Hemingway

that was the exuberant big –game hunter” (165).10 Hemingway’s

perspective on animals, on shooting, and on the entire safari endeavor

has changed significantly in this narrative of his second trip to Africa.

Instead of the representation of men “exploit[ing] the natural world

for its self aggrandizing properties” that critics such as Glen A. Love

have seen in Green Hills of Africa and True At First Light features

hunting marked by what we might call a concern for an ecological

order (203).11

But while Mary is busy in her pursuit of killing lion,

Hemingway becomes increasingly obsessed with Debba, a beautiful

young African woman. Hemingway indulges Mary’s obsession,

hauling her out into the bush day after day until she finally hits the

lion in one shoot. He himself finishes off the lion with a lucky shot.

The local shamba (village) gathers for a ngoma (dance). Debba is the

queen of the ngoma. Mary takes pictures of the natives while

performing ngoma. The nearly two dozen representations of hunting

for meat, combine with the concern for the sporting code, paint a

portrait of a mature hunter. And with this maturity comes an

awareness of the problems inherent in the sporting traditions he

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upholds and promotes Kevin Maier comments “so rather than reject

Hemingway the hunter, we must read this new text with an eye toward

placing Hemingway’s killing in historical context (122).12

As the time passes, Hemingway indulges with Debba

immensely. From her and the villagers he wants to learn tribal

practices and customs. Hemingway explains the drinking habit of

different races. Mohammedans do not drink beer and women and girls

from the shamba also do not take beer or wine. Even in the native

tribes of Africa “drinking was foreign to Masai as it was natural to

Wakamba.” Since the narrator and G.C. belonged to white race,

drinking is their custom. “But G.C. and I were drinkers and I knew it

was not just a habit nor a way of escaping. It was a purposeful dulling

of a receptivity that was so highly sensitized, as film can be, that if

your receptiveness were always kept at the same level it would

become unbearable” (176). Hemingway felt wonderfully at the

mixture of races while he visits the small town, Laitokitok. In that

small town, there are the people of different races. Mr. Singh is an

Indian, The interpretor is an English, then there are the Masai. He

freely mixes up with the people of different races whether they are the

blacks, Indians, Mohammedans or the whites. He does not suffer from

any prejudices. He often shares drinks with his safari crew and drinks

from the same bottle with mouth which no other white man does. "I

passed the quart of beer to Mthuka and he drank his share rapidly

leaving the rest for Mwengic and me" (185). He feels that he himself

belongs to Kamba as Richard Fantina remarks “Hemingway, like so

many other Western travelers, ostensibly sought a simpler, more

primitive life among third world people” (131). While watching Ngui

in the early morning he thinks

How we were brothers it seemed to me stupid to

be white in Africa and I remembered how twenty

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years before I had been taken to hear the Moslem

missionary who had explained to us, his

audience, the advantage of a dark skin and the

disadvantages of the white man’s pigmentation I

was burned dark enough to pass as a half cast

(201).

Hemingway through his writings also criticizes the practices of

the whites who grab the other people’s lands. He comments “the

white people always took the other people’s lands away from them

and put them on a reservation where they could go to hell and be

destroyed as though they were in a concentration camp” (209). That is

the policy of the colonizers – to establish their colony in foreign

lands. They exploit the land, animals and natural resources to make

high profits. And this practice of the colonizers is bitterly criticized

by Hemingway when he writes

Old rich people died and there were always new

ones and the animals decreased as the stock

market rose. It was a big revenue-producing

industry for the colony too and because of this

the Game Department, which had control over

those who practiced the industry, had, with its

development, produced new ethics that handled

or nearly handled everything (210).

Some critics level charges against Hemingway that he engaged

actively in the plunder of Africa, although, he directed his violence at

the continent’s animal life with his prodigious big game hunting. His

daily contact with the Masai and other Kenyan people appears to have

had little effect on his basically apolitical position regarding Africa, a

position that tacitly endorses colonialism Fantina writes about his role

as Great White Hunter, Hemingway viewed. Africa as a playground to

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which he had a perfect right. The empathy he so often displays deserts

him here (134). Gubar, writing of The Garden of Eden, remarks

“African wildness/sexual wildness furnish the aphrodisiac to fuel the

writing that sentences them to extermination” (194). He point is that

Hemingway fed off Africa without any intention of nurturing it, much

as Western Imperialism did, as Walter Rodney so eloquently explains

in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. These critics point out that

Hemingway’s attitude toward colonialism bears a resemblance to that

of the major Victorian writers before him. Edward Said writes of the

Victorians:

What Ruskin, Tennyson, Meredith, Dickens,

Arnold, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, Mill –

in short, the full roster of significant Victorian

writers – saw was a tremendous international

display of British power virtually unchecked

over the entire world. It has both logical and

easy to identify themselves in one way or

another with this power, having through various

means already identified themselves with Britain

domestically (CandI 105).13

But these charges of the critics are unfair as Hemingway

himself writes, “The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long

past with me. I still loved to shoot and to kill cleanly. But I was

shooting for the meat we needed to eat and to back up Miss Mary and

against beasts that had been outlawed for cause and what is known as

control of marauding animals, predators, and vermin” (TAFL 98). A

serious, utilitarian, dutiful Hemingway persona replaces the swash

buckling bragging figure of Green Hills of Africa.

In True At First Light Hemingway portrays his wife and his

relationship with her very beautifully. He casts Mary as a dutiful

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wife. He acknowledges that his efforts to lord over her as her

husband/protector are largely “unnecessary” or “stupid”. She likes

everything which is loved by her husband. She likes Africa and Spain.

She had loved the sea, fishing and the West of the United States. He

writes “It is stupid to expect or hope that a woman that you love

should love all the things that you do” (213). Hemingway flirts with

the young African woman, Debba. Mary knows all about Debba and

accepts her as a “supplementary wife”, she tolerates her husband’s

philandering. But she is more concerned that he will fall in love with

a white woman than she is about competition from the Kenyan

natives. Referring to Debba as Hemingway “fiancée”, Mary tells her

husband that she likes his fiancée very much because she is a lot like

her she thinks she’d be a valuable extra wife if he need one. Because

she had dysentery, Mary leaves for Nairobi to see a doctor and to do

her Christmas shopping. She adds “I don’t mind about her being your

fiancée as long as you love me more. You do love me more don’t

you?” Hemingway answers, “I love you more and I’ll love you more

still when you come back from town” (225). But she loses no

opportunity to rake her husband over the coals for his drinking, lack

of discipline in camp, and condescending protectiveness. Thus

Hemingway points out the contrast between the white and the black

women. Mary is jealous only of the white women not the black ones.

It seems that she believes in the goodness of the primitive culture of

Africa. Hemingway points the colour psyche very beautifully when

Mary says:

The speech is for white women only. It certainly

does not apply to your fiancée. Since when does

a good loving husband not have a right to a

fiancée if she only wishes to be supplementary

wife? That is an honourable position. The speech

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is directed against any filthy white woman who

thinks that she can make you happier than I can”

(TAFL 188).

When Mary kills her lion, everyone congratulates her. She

kisses G.C. and Hemingway but not Charo the black African.

Hemingway points out the colour psyche of the whites when he writes

“They kissed and then we kissed and Mary said, I’d like to kiss Charo

too but I know I shouldn’t.” ……………. She shook hands with Charo

(134).

Hemingway’s enjoyment of the sensual pleasures of Africa and

its people is evident, especially in the relationship of Papa and the

young African woman Debba. Siegel writes that “the urge to possess a

daughter of nature seems almost interchangeable with the urge to

enter a country perceived as primitive” (38). Papa’s sexual interest in

Debba is emblematic of Hemingway’s interest in Africa. But

Hemingway’s sexuality in Africa was anything but heteronormative.

The new names that he, writing in his wife’s journal, devised for

himself and Mary include “Mary Peter Hemingway” and “Kathryn

Ernest Hemingway”14

While Hemingway is having a nice time with his wife, in the

primitive culture of Africa, simultaneously he is also having a fling

with a young African beauty, Debba. Through Debba, the writer

highlights the culture practices of African tribes, their rituals and the

marriage ceremonies etc.. Debba is a character worth liking. The

walls of her room in her family’s lodge are covered with ‘Look’

magazine photographs of Papa Hemingway and advertisements for

American kitchen appliances. She likes to ride in Hemingway’s car.

Her favourite thing seems to be stroking the holster of his pistol.

When she can not stroke his holster, she squeezes the muscles of his

thighs.

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It is in the novel of this Kenya trip, ‘True At First Light’; that

Papa falls in love, despite the presence of his wife, with the Wakamba

girl Debba. In a letter, Hemingway describes his own adoption of

African rites “Have my head shaved because that is how my fiancée

likes it” (SL 827)15, to match her shaved head. He continues

describing how “she likes to feel all the holes in my head and the

welts [Sic]” (SL 827). This recalls the colonel in Across the River

examining his welts after an encounter with Renate, and David in The

Garden of Eden examining his scars (“red wells”)16 in the mirror. In

the letter, Hemingway adds “My girl is completely impudent, her face

is impudent in repose but absolutely loving and delicate rough” and

continues, “I better quit writing about it ……… it gives me too bad a

hard on (SL 827). Clearly, on his 1953 African journey, Hemingway

allowed his fantasies to emerge more forcefully than he might have in

a more “civilized” setting. The 1953 safari, more than his journey of

1934, places Hemingway in the company of other artists who

indulged in “colonial fantasy” or “sexual imperialism”. The

adventures of Andre Gide and Paul Bowles in North Africa, and Jean

Genet in Palestine, correspond to what Hemingway also indulged in

on his last trip to Africa.

Debba is an intelligent girl, she knows what she wants. She

wants not to be “a play wife or a wife to leave.” When Hemingway

asks, “who would leave you?” Her instant answer is, "You" (143)

However the white/black romance seems to break the barriers of races

and class. He writes “I loved everything about her from her feet to her

head (143). It is not only the whites who have dislikeness for the

blacks but the natives also. The widow in True At First Light tells

Hemingway that “All people with the color of skin I had smelled very

badly usually ………… You smell like Shamba” (141). He kills a

leopard for the sake of Debba because he killed sixteen goats in one

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night, then too, eight of the goats belonged to Debba’s family. He

caresses Debba, her family and the Shamba beyond his powers. He

picks up the racial questions after killing the leopard “There was no

White Man to speak softly ………… nor any White Man to give

violent orders astonished at the stupidity of his “boys” and cursing

them on like reluctant hounds” (239). He does not consider himself a

white man. He feels he is an African belonging to Wakamba tribe.

Hemingway writes “Why you want to be African?” “I’m going to be a

Kamba” (242).

As Carl Eby suggests that True At First Light may be one of

Hemingway’s most complex political books. This is especially true of

the text’s environmental politics. Ignoring Hemingway’s hunting – or

worse yet, rejecting the book for its hunting – will leave the reader

without a full sense of Hemingway’s political and ethnic vision.17 In

Africa Spanish was regarded Hemingway's tribal language. The

natives did not identify them with Britishers. He was regarded as a

brother or a friend by the safari crew as well as by the people of

Shamba. He writes “We were supposed to have anything in common

with the British except the color of our skin and a mutual tolerance”

(128).

In the technical sense of the term “race” as a major division of

mankind, the racial factor overall this region is a constant, for all the

Africans belong to the Negro race, despite variation in stature, in

body build, in hair form and facial characteristics, even in

pigmentation

“The importance of the racial problem obviously

derives from the fact that Africans and

Europeans differ sharply in skin colour, that

human physical trait which marks off groups of

man most readily and is the first to be noted on

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initial contact. This trait provides a ready frame

for drawing racial lines.” (P. 12.)

writes Melville J. Herskovit. Hemingway talks with the natives either

in Swahili or Spanish language, sometimes he uses English while

talking with those who understands it. He talks with Debba also either

in Swahili or Spanish. He explains that for understanding each other’s

emotions no language is required. This is proved in his relationship

with Debba – thus shedding even the language barrier in cross-

cultural love-affair. Hemingway writes- “We did not have a great

vocabulary and were not great conversationalists and had no need for

an interpreter except on Kamba law” (264). He becomes much too

friendly with love-interest Debba and tries to bed. But he is chastised

for this impropriety by his African headman. Hemingway writes

“Keity killed it in the name of his loyalty to the Bwanas, to the tribe

and to the Moslem religion ……….. This was the beginning of the

end of the day in my life which offered the most chances of

happiness” (265-266).

Herskovit writes:-

Yet the African, despite the wide variety of their

languages, have not been linguistically

provincial. There is ample evidence in the early

literature of travel that tribesman with the ability

to speak a number of tongues besides their own

were regularly encountered, and this is reflection

of intertribal contacts …….. European languages

in different African territories, when considered

from the point of view of Africa as a whole,

seems to function as a division force, ………. (P.

13).

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Hemingway in ‘True At First Light’ writes about tribal laws

and marriages. Marriage in Shamba is only a certain formality. There

is not even a customary law but there are only variations. Hemingway

comments:

“There is no question of payment. Only of a certain formality.

There are certain ceremonial beers ………. Let me tell you that for

the people of this Shamba you and Bwana Game are the law ……… it

was a Kamba custom and there was nothing to be paid but a fine” (36,

37, 269). But Hemingway puts an end to this affair. He decides

against it after Keity’s intervention. As Chinua Achebe remarks,

writing of Conrad, such distancing characterises, “Africa as setting

and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor” (12).18

Hemingway keeps on thinking on this incident as Mary’s away

for shopping at Nairobi. He raises moral questions on the cultural

practices followed by people who themselves do not observe that

customs/morals. Keiti raises the question of morality in the name of

his loyalty to the tribe. But he himself does not have that morality.

Hemingway comments:-

But I knew Keiti was more shocked that Debba

and the widow and I should eat together at the

table in the mess tent than he was worried about

Kamba law because he was a grown up man with

five wives of his own and a beautiful young wife

and who was he to administer our morals or lack

of them” (268).

But Keiti by passing that judgment whipped them on that day

with no “Ostentation”.

Hemingway’s relationship with the real-life counterpart of

Debba appears to have been chaste, which as we have seen, is

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characteristic of some masochistic encounters. In this and other

regards, he is similar to Michel Leiris, the eccentric French

anthropologist and author of L’Afrique Fantome, who “fell in love

while in Gondar with an Ethiopian woman” (140) writes Richard

Fantina.

Hemingway in ‘True At First Light’ juxtaposes the Africans

with the Europeans and the American. The Africans are the strong

people. They do not feel bad about anything. That is characteristic of

the Europeans and the American. The writer identifies himself with

the African. He writes-

Africans are not supposed to ever feel bad about

anything. This is an invention of the Whites who

are temporarily occupying the country. Africans

are said not to feel pain when it is received is a

tribal thing and a great luxury. While we in

America had television, motion pictures and

expensive wives with soft hands ……….. to get

it out; the African, of the better tribes, had the

luxury of not showing pain. We, Moi, as Ngui

called us, had never known true hardship except

in war which is a boring (269).

Hemingway usually portrays African and African Americans as

cringing or docile as Tony Morrison points out. A discussion of

Hemingway’s racial attitudes and Morrison’s interpretation of his

work seems appropriate here, especially in the light of the presumed

relation between masochism and colonialism, which always involves

racism. Hemingway’s attitude toward African Americans and black

people in general, whether North American, Cuban or African (the

areas of his experience) is one of general disinterest. To be sure, he

interacted with the blacks often. He boxed with black fighters in Key

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West. He lived among the Masai people on his two journeys to Africa.

At the Florida bar in Havana, Hemingway mixed easily with

Afrocuban musicians and told Kenneth Tynan, “I’m an honorary

Negro” (152). But in all these cases, the social dynamics were

characterised by an essential inequality. The blacks – often athletes,

entertainers or service personnel – were always in positions of social

inferiority. Hemingway practices everything which is tribal. He goes

to hunt with a spear in the night when the moon rose. This is the

primitive culture of Africa to hunt with a spear.

In True At First Light Hemingway the hero is shown adopting

religion only technically. He writes that “We had the backing of a

serious religion, and I had explained that this religion in its origin

was as old if not older than the Mountain.” As Robert Gajdusek puts

it in another review of True At First Light when he gives, to the

author the attribute, seemingly inseparable from his character, and the

character’s vices. We tend to indict the writer for the banality and

flows that emerge in Hemingway's character (33). Hemingway was

against the practice of slavery, and capital punishment. It is clear in

True At First Light when he writes:-

But in our religion there was not going to be any

Game Department and white we planned to

abolish both flogging and capital punishment

against anyone except our enemies and there was

to be no slavery except by those we had taken

prisoner personally and cannibalism was

completely and absolutely abolished except for

those who chose to practice it (267, 277).

He also criticizes the natives like Keity who had taken

conversion to Mohammedanism just to take advantage of the liberties

provided by that religion. To quote Melville J. Herskovits “African

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preference for Mohammedanism as against Christianity is held to

result from the fact no element of color difference enter with Negro

Mohammedans converting Negroes, and no color line drawn in any

mosque” (13).

Hemingway comments:-

“Msembi and I were good brothers and on this

night, without mentioning it, we both

remembered that the slave raiders who had come

up the different routes from the sea were all

Moslems and I knew that was why Mthuka with

the slashed arrow on each cheek would never,

nor could ever, have been converted to the

fashionable religion his father, Keiti, and dear

honest Charo and Mwindi, the honest and

skillful snob, had been received into (270).

He scorned those who indulged in what Gubar calls

“racechange”, that is, “the traversing of race boundaries, racial

imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white

posing as black or black posing as white, pan-racial mutability (5).

Yet Hemingway conforms to at least one criteria of Gubar when in

what seems a major slippage in True At First Light, Papa reflects on

“wishing again that I had a black skin like any other Kamba” (15).

The writer even after being identified with the natives does not

violate the American ethics. He does not marry the African girl,

Debba. He writes “I will do everything according to Kamba law and

custom. But I can not marry the girl and takes her home because of

stupid law”. At this Keiti replies- “One of your brother can marry

her” (279). But he closes the case and says “we were the same good

friends as always ……….. Sharing is for money and you do not share

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a woman nor would I share the night” (279-280). He has deep belief

in ethics. May be it is so because of his fidelity to his wife Mary, of

whom, he writes “how lucky I was to know Miss Mary and have her

do me the great honor of being married to me and to Miss Debba the

Queen of the Ngomas” (281). Writing for the Hemingway Review,

Robert Gajdusek says the clash of cultures is “massively active” in

the book with Hemingway exploring tribal practices Christianity and

Islam are juxtaposed against native religions; and the Mary/Debba

triangle is symbolic of the White “Memsahib and the native girl”

(321).19

Hemingway engages in sexual fantasy of Africa as he relates

Papa’s affair with Debba in True At First Light. In the narrative, Papa

conducts his courtship of Debba virtually before the eyes of Miss

Mary who is based on Hemingway’s wife. In a letter, Hemingway

wrote of this relationship that “Miss Mary stays the hell away from it

and is understanding and wonderful” (SL 826). Papa sees Debba as

superior to most Western women (Miss Mary excepted) as he recalls

some female companions of the past.

[H]ow lucky I had been to have known some

really terrible ones who had only gone there to

have been there and I had known some true

bitches and several alcoholics to whom Africa

had been just another place for more ample

bitchery or fuller drunkenness ………… Africa

took them and changed them all in some ways. If

they could not change they hated it (138).

In these comments Hemingway remarks on Africa’s effects on

Westerners. He remains largely silent on the West’s effects on Africa.

164

Hemingway is extremely nice to the natives. He never

discriminates them because of their race or class or culture. He helps

them in every way. He invites the native tribes for the celebration of

every event. He brings them drinks and other eatables when they visit

their camp. He gives them medicine when they are sick. He even kills

a leopard to save the people of Shamba and their cattle. He freely

mixes up with the safari servants and even shares drinks with them.

Arap Meina is a game scout. A game scout was the lowest ranked

game law enforcement officer in Kenya. There were no white game

scouts. At the time of this safari there were no black game ranger

because of the policy of the Britishers. But Hemingway does not

follow such practices of the whites. He saves Arap Meina’s life by

giving him medicine. Arap Meina calls Hemingway “his father”

because he saved him from dying when he lay dead in Bwana

Mouse’s tent. He comments:

We were all servants since I served the

Government, through the Game Department, and

I also served Miss Mary and a magazine named

Look ……… But neither Msembi nor I minded

serving in the least and neither of us had served

our God nor our King too well to be stuffy about

it” (264).

But he serves the poor African natives. At one point in True At

First Light, when he is talking with G.C. about Churchill who had

been awarded Nobel Prize for Literature, for oratory G.C. felt that

Hemingway also should be awarded that prize. He writes “He felt that

I might well be awarded it for my work in the religious field and for

my care of the natives” (160).

Meanwhile, Mary returns from Nairobi. She was well beloved,

well received. She loved the designation of Memsahib. Miss Mary

165

asks Hemingway whether he is not glad to have her back. He answers

“We’ll all practice up and be nice to you ………..”. Further he makes

comments that “I joined the white or European race as easily as a

mercenary of Henry IV saying Paris was worth a mass” (290). They

prepare for Christmas celebrations. They had planned to invite all the

Masai and the Wakamba tribes for the great Ngoma. Mary

Hemingway reports in her journal of a party at Kimana swamp

[S]omebody had brought the local Wakamba

girls to help the celebration Papa took them to

Laitokitok and brought them new dresses for

Christmas, brought the girls back to camp and

invited them to dinner but no dinner was served.

He took the girls to our tent and the celebration

there was so energetic that they broke the bed.20

The descriptions of Mary Hemingway relate revels with local

people – Hemingway with local African girls partying in a tent in the

bush.

The hero worries that if the things are not managed properly

that may be the end of all the coming Ngomas because the natives

may be mistaken about Mary’s Christmas tree. Hemingway writes

“Today we were in suspense, suspended between our new African

Africa and the old Africa that we had dreamed and invented and the

return of Miss Mary” (298). Miss Mary asks Hemingway for an

airborne sightseeing tour of the Congo Basin as a Christmas present.

Morrison pinpoints Hemingway’s view of Africa as a romantic

state of mind that functions as a regained Eden. His fantasy life

appears exceptionally rich on his 1953 safari with his wife Mary. As

Eby remarks, it was on this safari that Hemingway indulged in some

of his most significant fetishes, shaving his own head and washing

166

and dyeing his wife’s hair. This is where he placed the entry in

Mary’s diary, “She loves me to be her girl, which I love to be.”21

Mary records in How It Was that Hemingway wrote that “Mary has

never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy”

(467).

Eby also discusses how in 1953 Hemingway’s fetishistic “and

transvestic behaviour in Africa links his cross-racial and cross-gender

identifications directly to the games of Catherine and David Bourne

in The Garden of Eden” (179). These behaviours, as we have seen,

included shaving his head and expressing a desire to have an ear

pierced, and also an eagerness to receive tribal marks. So while David

in that novel expresses the wish to become a “special dark race of our

own,”22 this may include some degree of “Africanization”, even if not

to the extent that Morrison suggests, and even if it merely represents a

stage on the way to a new sexual Otherness. Hemingway himself

acknowledges this in a handwritten entry in 1953 “ After a while Miss

Mary came into the bed and I put the other Africa away somewhere

and we made our own Africa.”23 Here Africa represents the forbidden,

but it is mutable to Hemingway as he and his wife make “our own

Africa”.

But Hemingway’s love for Africa is very distinctive. He loves

the place where he is and does not want to go anywhere. He writes:

I knew I was in the best place I had ever been,

having a fine, if complicated, life learning

something everyday and to go flying all over

Africa when I could while flying over our own

country was the last thing I wished to do (304).

Hemingway seems to take a modified Jungian approach to race.

In 1935 article in Esquire, he mentions creativity and imagination as

167

enigmas but suggests that “racial experience” (BL 215)24 may account

for them. In a 1958 interview with George Plimpton, he refers to

“inherited racial experience” and “forgotten racial or family

experience.”25 In all these instances, he speaks about himself and his

race. Yet in the same interview, he directly condemns segregation.

Asked what he thinks of Ezra Pound’s influence on the

“segregationalist Kaspar”, Hemingway defends Pound as a poet

despite his fascism, his imprisonment, and commitment to a mental

institution, but adds that “I would be happy to see Kaspar jailed as

soon as possible” (37). In the light of such comments it would be too

extreme to call Hemingway a racist despite his easy use of epithets.

True At First Light is an open-ended novel. Moreover, the

manuscript has been cut short, with all the loose ends hanging

unconcluded. But the War novels of Hemingway are not unconcluded,

nor the The Sun also Rises or The Old Man And the Sea. The plots of

these novels reach the logical end. But True At First Light has no

such ending. The dead artist however can not be blamed for an

unfinished manuscripts. Had it been completed, he would have

brought it out in his own life time. Also, it is the memoir of a journey

which remains unconcluded.

Hemingway always said that a writer’s greatest duty was to be

true – both to himself and to his readers. But he writes in this

“Fictional memoir” that

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by

noon and you have no more respect for it than

for the lovely, perfect weed fringed lake you see

across the sun baked salt plain. You have walked

across that plain in the morning and you know

that no such lake is there. But now it is there

168

absolutely true, beautiful and unbelievable

(189).

Perhaps with this book Hemingway learned how mutable the

truth really is. Or he might be referring to the editing What a writer

thinks is true at first light can evolve in his eyes and become a lie by

noon.26

It can be concluded that Hemingway in True At First Light

exhibits his genuine love and respect for African tribal ethics. In the

narrative, he projects multicultural relation through different

characters in the small town of Laitokitok, His approach to the people

of different cultures is liberal rather than imperialistic. The charge

that some critics like Susan Gubar, Frantz Fanon, Tony Morrison et-

al. have brought against Hemingway to see a

colonialistic/imperialistic approach to Africa in him is baseless.

Hemingway himself gives several instances in the text to prove his

democratic and liberal approach to Africa. He, instead of, preaching

his own cultural ethics in Africa, adopts tribal ethics of Africa.

Hemingway writes:-

Men know that they are children in relation to

the country and as in armies, seniority and

senility ride close together. But to have the heart

of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honour. A

man must comfort himself as a man. He must

fight always preferably and soundly with the

odds in his favor but on necessity against any

sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome.

He should follow his tribal laws and customs in

so far as he can and accept the tribal discipline

when he can not. But it is never a reproach that

169

he has kept a child’s heart, a child’s honesty and

a child’s freshness and nobility – (TAFL. P. 25).

Hemingway had always maintained that he worked towards the

truth of something, and here he may have been trying to do that. In a

review of True At First Light, Robert Fleming points out that

“Hemingway is trying hard to learn more about Africa than he did on

his 1933-34 safari” (30).27 Fleming refers to Hemingway’s

interactions with the African peoples and “varied cultures of Kenya”,

but we can add that his education also extends into the multicultural

world.

Needless to say that True At First Light is symbolic of learning

the truth about life and life in Africa. Though centred in Kenya – the

scale of exploration is vast and varied. Ethics, rituals, relationship,

customs and tribal laws are all delved deep into. And the results are

worth the effort. The basic, the deep naturalness, simplicity and

frankness, the spontaneity in joyous achievements that he unearths

time and again claim his heart for ever. Here is the man ‘with the

heart of a child’ as we all were initially and what we seek to be when

disillusioned with the divisive suffocating institutions of

advancements', of money, of power at the individual and collective

level. Hemingway's writings are a call for an objective unbiased

approach to Africa.

170

REFERENCES

1True At First Light (New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999).

P.9. All references are cited by page in the text.

2Susan Gubar, Racechanges White Skin, Black Face in

American Culture (New York and Oxford; Oxford University Press,

1997), 194. All references are cited by page in the text.

3Debra A. Moddelmog, Reading Desire, In Pursuit of Ernest

Hemingway (Ithaka, NY University of Cornell Press, 1999). All

references are cited by page in the text.

4Melville J. Herskovits “Peoples and Cultures of Sub-Saharan

Africa” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science,

Vol. 298. Contemporary Africa Trends and Issues (Mar. 1955), PP.

11-20. All references are cited by page in the text.

5Richard Fantina, Ernest Hemingway Machismo and Masochism

(New York Palgrave McMillan, 2005.

6Quoted in Mary Hemingway, Mary’s African Journal,

Manuscripts (Hemingway collection, Kennedy Library, Boston), JFK

355A, P. 202.

7Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys Desire and Transgression in

European Travel Writing (Princeton, Princeton Uni. Press, 1991), P.

230. All references are cited by page in the text.

8Mary Hemingway, How It was (New York Ballantine, 1976),

P. 467. All references are cited by page in the text.

9Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York Grove

Press, 1967), P. 176. All references are cited by page in the text.

171

10Murphy, Charlene, “Hemingway's Gentle Hungers

Contradiction or Duality?” in Hemingway and the Natural World. Ed.

Robert Fleming (Moscow Uni. of Idaho P, 1999) 165-175.

11Glen A. Love, “Hemingway's Indian Virtues An Ecological

Reconsideration” Western American Literature 22.3 (Fall, 1987) 201-

213.

12Kevin Maier, “Hemingway's Hunting An Ecological

Reconsideration” – The Hemingway Review 25.2 (Spring 2006) 119-

122.

13Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York Vintage,

1993).

14Mary Hemingway, Mary's African Journal, JFK 355A, P. 204;

quoted in Eby, 179.

15Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. by

Carlos Baker (New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981). All

references are cited by page in the text.

16The Garden of Eden, JFK 422.1, 23, P. 18.

17Carl Eby, Hemingway's Fetishism Psychoanalysis and the

Mirror of Manhood (New York SUNY Press. ……… “‘He Felt the

Change so that It Hurt Him All Through’ Sodomy and Transvestic

Hallucination in Late Hemingway,” in The Hemingway Review , 25.1

(Fall 2005).

18Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's

Heart of Darkness”, in Hopes and Impediments (New York

Doubleday, 1989).

19Gajdusek, Robert. “One Man Exploring a Pretty Big

Elephant.” Rev. of True At First Light. The Hemingway Review 191.

(Fall. 1999) 31-34.

172

20Mary Hemingway, Mary’s African Journal, JFK 355A, P.

200.

21Mary Hemingway, How It Was, 467; qtd. in Eby, 176.

22The Garden of Eden, qtd. In Burwell, 105; qtd. In Eby, 158;

JFK 422.12, P. 3.

23African Book, JFK, 223a, 29, PP. 748-749.

24Ernest Hemingway, By-Line Ernest Hemingway (New York

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967).

25George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”, in

Hemingway And His Critics. Ed. by Carlos Baker, (New York Hill

and Wang, 1961, P. 19-37), 26, 36.

26Ernest Hemingway, African Book, Manuscripts (Hemingway

Collection, Kennedy Library, Boston), JFK, 34, P. 579.

27Robert Fleming, “Africa Revisited.” Rev. of True At First

Light. The Hemingway Review 19.1 (Fall 1999) 28-30.