Escape Into the Kenyan Wild and Find Fresh Inspiration, Fame, and Money

Living near it a few years ago, it was my pleasure to wander into its large grounds, partake of the many fruits which she may have personally planted, and generally be inspired by the writing paraphernalia housed in the Museum.

Joy Adamson

Joy Adamson was unknown when she arrived in Kenya to start “life in wild” as a conservationist. But by the time she met her sad death in 1980 she was being described as a world famous naturalist and author. The best known of her books is Born Free which describes her experiments with a cub she named Elsa and which she raised to a lioness.

The book became an instant world seller and was translated into several languages. A film based on it and also titled Born Free became an academy winning movie.

Ernest Hemingway

American writer Ernest Hemingway was probably already well-known when he first came to Kenya as a hunter in the 1930s. He however, obviously got a lot of inspiration by visiting the country. His wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway in her book, How It Was, devotes many pages to a description of his big game hunting trips to Kenya.

Describing her first hunting trip with him, she writes, “As we rattled from Mombasa inland and upward to Kenya’s 6,000-foot high central plateau, we entered a life entirely new to me, with herds of wild animals stretching across the yellow plains evoking happy memories for Ernest who had hunted there twenty years before.”

Several years ago, while on a writing assignment at Loitokitok, a town that lies whose one half lies in Tanzania and the other in Kenya at the foot of the snow-covered Mt. Kilimanjaro, I met a few of Hemingway’s surviving Maasai friends. A woman who said her husband was Hemingway’s best friend told me, “Hemingway was a good natured huge man who loved beer, hunting and Maasai dances. He even frequently asked to be smeared with ochre to appear like a Maasai.

“That’s what used to annoy his wife, Mary, most. Mary was a short, quiet woman who would break into tears when she saw her husband dressed like a Maasai.”

The woman introduced me to her daughter, Mary, whom she told me that Norman Ole Kapary, her husband, named after Mary Hemingway on request from Ernest Hemingway. Norman had since passed on.

Robert Ruark

However, not so famous before arriving in Kenya, was another American journalist Robert Ruark. anxious to make money and fame, Robert Ruark decided to imitate Ernest Hemingway’s eventful hunting life into Kenya.

And he found something of value, became famous, rich and a successful writer just as he had hoped he would. His book, Something of Value, based on the Mau Mau, an armed indigenous Kenyan anti-colonial uprising, became so successful it was adapted into a great film of the same name in 1957. Highly impressed with his success Ruark returned to Kenya to research the novel’s sequel which he wrote under the title Uhuru, a Swahili word for freedom. It is said, he was working on several other sequels when he died.