'Green Hills of Africa'

A while ago, I used to love to read Ernest Hemingway’s works. The non-nonsense approach his characters take towards obstacles and life in general somehow appealed to me so much, that over the years I have read most of this books. Apart from Green Hills of Africa which I had stowed in some box and forgotten until it resurfaced recently during moving. I started reading it. By the time I completed the first quarter of it, the writer’s intention – “to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.” [foreword] – hadn’t been fulfilled.

The suspicion which had arisen during reading the first part closely became confirmed when skipping through the rest of the pages. In colonial style, Hemingway’s self-loving narrative unfolds in a setting which consists of the white folks like himself and his fellow hunters - and the native gun-bearers, the abundantly hunted animals and the scenery.

The former ones are what everything revolves around, Hemingway himself in particular. The natives are accessories which are condescendingly described. This act reduces them to extras in their own land, extras to everything that really matters, namely the white folks’ hunt. Naturally, Hemingway interacts with them, quotes bits in their language; as in an attempt to show how generous he is, taking to savages of this kind. He calls them ‘friends’ and so forth but the way they are depicted in their second-ratedness only underlines the hypocrisy.

The killing or failed hunting attempts are related in either utter indifference toward living creatures or in boring elaborations on how, for instance, “there was the short barreled explosion of the Mannlicher (…) I hit him [a lion] with the Springfield (…) and the grass was very green.” More often than not, both elements coincide.

Green Hills of Africa is garbage. It reeks of Old Spice, urine-stained underwear and foul Whiskey breath. If this is what Hemingway’s safari was like, then he met his objective to narrate the “shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action” in order to see whether the outcome could “compete with a work of the imagination”. One might suspect, however, the surroundings had more to offer.