While it is easy, in Kenya’s 50th Independence anniversary, to dismiss all colonial writers as representing the imperial viewpoint, Elspeth Huxley comes across as an honest voice.

Her writing shows the Kenya she settled in with her family in 1912 in powerful and photographic detail.

Reading The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), the first and the most famous of her autobiographical books, makes her readers reconstruct the image of Nairobi as it looked between 1912 and 1925 when she and her family were in East Africa. But, while she may conjure up powerful images with her words, Huxley does not pretend to offer an anthropological viewpoint.

Her candour is evident in the foreword to her novel Red Strangers (1939), in which she admits that she does not speak with anthropological authority about the lives of the Gikuyu at the time of the white man’s arrival.

In a few cases she even admits to have “erred intentionally for the sake of clarity.” In short, this is a work of fiction that attempts to reconstruct life as it was during her time, using real characters and events, some of which would otherwise have been lost to future generations because Africans at the time were not documenting their own experiences.

There are attempts, though, by African anthropologists to get this African story documented. Julius Kiriga, the director of Development and Corporate Affairs at the National Museums of Kenya, is working on a film that he says will tell the African version of the award-winning movie Out of Africa based on the novel of the same title by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen’s pseudonym).

Kiriga has tracked down some of the Africans who lived on the Dane’s legendary farm and is working with them to reconstruct their own lives there.

But, reading Huxley, it is evident she is not just telling the story from a settler’s point of view. She tells the story of Njombo, Muthengi and the other African staff who made up her household and her world as the only child of a settler farmer.

Unlike Out of Africa, where the Africans come across as prop characters, in Huxley’s world the Africans are properly fleshed out. The story is told with honesty, perhaps because the Huxleys were not immensely rich settlers but ordinary people trying to scrape by in the African bush. This makes it possible for them to interact with the continent and their story is, therefore, not one-dimensional.

In The Mottled Lizard (1962), Huxley writes with undisguised disdain of her cousin Hilary, who, as a newly arrived European coming to visit them at their farm in Thika, believes the tropical sun “affects the spinal fluid and damages the ganglia, and in the end will certainly send you mad.”

Hilary, out to find the “something new out of Africa” that Roman statesman and author Pliny the Elder described in his Natural History, represents the hackneyed European view of Africa. He is quite alarmed at the tomboyish appearance of young Huxley, comfortable in her bush settler uniform of frayed khaki shorts and shirt with bulging pockets.

The Hilary character is used effectively to illustrate the attitudes of the Europeans towards the natives who, according to their thinking, “had skins of double thickness to protect them, as well as their pigment; even then the actinic rays (of the tropical sun) had so impaired the brain cells as to render them incapable of the intellectual growth achieved by races native to the temperate zones.”

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Reading such commentary it is not difficult to understand why African intellectuals would bristle at the mention of this literature.

But isn’t that exactly what literature is supposed to do: Lay out a character’s innermost feelings, however nauseating they may be, and as a result stimulate discourse? Wasn’t it by interrogating Conrad’s culturally overbearing works that Chinua Achebe felt fired up enough to pen a riposte in the form of the seminal Things Fall Apart?

One would think our own intellectuals, once they had attained formal education, would feel inspired enough to write what the African, deep in his heart, really felt about the mzungu.

The beauty of Huxley’s works is that she has the temerity to criticise her own people’s customs and traditions.

She aptly captures the complexities of the settlers without sounding condescending: “Perhaps that was their characteristic. They were romantics, and thought of themselves as torch-bearers of civilisation, while all the time in their hearts they loved the dark places, which they did not really think dark at all, and feared the torch.”

I certainly would enjoy such evocative writing coming from anywhere in the world.