Review of: Hemingway, Ernest. True At First Light. New York: Scribners, 1999.

            Published on the 100^th anniversary of his birth in 1999, Ernest Hemingway’s True At First Light, the last of his posthumous novels, is a fictionalized account of his final hunting trip in Africa in 1953. The novel covers three main themes, running mostly parallel. The first relates to an uprising of Kenyan terrorist, called the Mau Mau, composed largely of the Kikuyu tribesmen. The second theme revolves around his fourth and last wife, Miss Mary, and her blood lusty desire to kill a lion. The final major theme (we never really do find out if it is fictional) is Hemingway’s flirtation with an African mistress. One has the sense this last subject is another dirty old man’s ego-driven fantasies.

            While another masterful work of Hemingway’s unique American prose, his first theme, the Mau Mau uprising, has a relevance to a modern crisis: the war against terrorists. The Mau Mau were terrorists themselves, ill-trained irregulars fighting a national war of liberation insurgency against British Imperial rule. The Mau Mau murdered white settlers in what was at the time British East Africa. Having dealt with numerous rebellions throughout three centuries of empire, the British applied the harshly learned lessons fighting the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the 20^th century. They eventually deployed 50,000 troops and policemen to hunt down, sometimes assassinate, or just arrest Mau Mau leaders, like the eventual Kenyan Prime Minister, Joseph Kenyatta, who was incarcerated until the end of the emergency.

            The real secret to the success of the British against the Mau Mau was the role that Hemingway actually played. He was the “white” Imperial representative of the area in which he hunted the “Big Game.” He was magistrate, pro-consul, police, militia, court, “bush” doctor and welfare provider in his official role as an Assistant Game Warden. In his multiple roles, Hemingway used his decades of experience in Africa and in war to anticipate the terrorists, solving the local population’s social crises. Focusing counter-insurgency tactics on securing the cooperation of the people, not killing them, officials like the Assistant Game War dried up the people’s support which was needed by the guerillas to succeed in their revolution.

            Hemingway knew the language competently and understood the culture and the people, though from an imperialist’s perspective. It was “knowing” the enemy, and doing little administrative things (i.e. policy) that prevented outright Mau Mau success in their murderous revolution. In the end, after the Mau Mau had been decisively defeated in military terms, the British quit their colony when the expense of ruling an empire outweighed the benefits of colonial exploitation. The war of national liberation itself was another hollow victory of the West over a local people’s wish to be left alone. In the end, political reality caused the British to evacuate and cultural “laws” left the rebels in power afterward.