142
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
143
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.
144
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
145
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
146
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
147
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
148
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
149
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
150
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
151
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
152
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
153
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
154
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
155
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.
156
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
157
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
158
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).
159
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
160
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
161
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
162
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
163
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.