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Ernest Hemingway — Green Hills of Africa
“ We had breakfast before daylight and were started before sunrise, climbing the hill beyond the village in single file…”
Many are now very squeamish about the big game hunting of the past, and rightly condemn the illegal poaching of, for instance, elephants and rhino for their tusks and horns today. The latter is a deplorable practice born out of corruption and poverty that will see more of those two species killed in a few months than Hemingway and his fellow hunters were ever able to gun down in a lifetime of safaris.
Hemingway’s superb book, Green Hills of Africa, about his first African safari in 1933, published in 1935, is much more than a book about big game hunting; it is also about British Colonial Africa, and its people, and what made them tick. It is also a narrative about Hemingway the writer, and many another writer he knew, and was influenced by, whose works he took with him in the book bag to read at camp (which was the original ‘glamping’) in the evenings before dinner.
My copy of the book is a 1966 Penguin paperback edition that cost all of five shillings, £5 at today’s values, with a very iconic cover by Dennis Rolfe, one of several eclectic photos for the whole Hemingway canon.
As Christopher Ondaatje, in his 2003, Hemingway in Africa — The Last Safari writes that:
“ …despite the persistence of Hemingway mania, Hemingway in Africa is relatively neglected both by the reading public and by scholars. His two African short stories, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘ The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ are rightly judged to be among his best work, but his non-fiction book Green Hills of Africa, which recounts his first safari, remains underrated…”
Ondaatje is spot on, but he doesn’t say why, which surprises me: with the book’s subject matter the obvious reason, which is a pity because the writing is Hemingway in his writing prime, with the following, single, magnificent, and prescient sentence, a fine example:
“ If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further…
