ABSTRACT
The evolution of literature and drama in East Africa has been deeply marked by the ideological transitions that characterized the region’s progression from colonialism to independence to socialism to neoliberalism.3 White settler writing of the colonial phase from Margery Perham’s Major Dane’s Garden (1926) to Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) perpetrated nostalgic, Edenic myths of Kenya and Tanganyika as the “hunter’s paradise,” the “Happy Valley,” the “promised land.” Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) famously opens by describing her family’s Kenyan coffee plantation as “a bit of El Dorado” and continues by imagining East Africa as a Prester John-inspired space “of riches and mystery” and “a picture of the Garden of Eden.”4 Overlooking the savannahs, Huxley reiterates the imperial overseer’s perspective of the New World: “You had the feeling that you were the first human being ever to stand upon the verge and gaze across the tufted grasses, like Cortez and the Pacific.”5
