Savour International

Author Ernest Hemingway was totally smitten with East Africa – a region where he found romantic adventure in the guise of hunting, campfires, and the like. Five decades after this Nobel Prize winning author’s suicide, a trip whose itinerary includes both Kenya and Uganda is well worth undertaking.

A screeching howl and diabolic sniggering – that’s how hyenas sound; and they must be right in front of our tent. But then this sound morphs into laughter. “Good morning,” we hear a friendly baritone voice intoning. “Time to get up. Your tea’s waiting.”

Humour is part and parcel of the service at lovely Tortilis Camp at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, as is a bracing cocktail as you watch the sun set. It’s 6:30 a.m., time for our first foray down the elephant path at Amboseli National Park.

We’re in luck: it’s our first morning in Africa, and the continent’s highest mountain is visible in all its resplendence, a mere 30 hours after we departed Germany.

But back in the day, Hemingway once had to wait two weeks for a glimpse of Kilimanjaro: first the boat trip from Marseilles to Mombasa, then a night train to Nairobi, and after that two days by car – over a stretch that you can now easily cover in five hours.

And then Hemingway had to wait for a number of days until the clouds disappeared and he could actually lay eyes on Kilimanjaro, which was undoubtedly snow-covered at the time. Thanks to global warming, this is no longer the case; and so to see a snow-capped Kilimanjaro, you need to look at old postcards.

But you can also see it in the classic 1952 movie “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the screen adaptation of what is undoubtedly Hemingway’s most renowned Africa narrative, starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Hildegard Knef.

“Hemingway’s rose-coloured view of Africa remains as strong a driver of the desire to see East Africa as it ever was,” says Austria-born Gabi Nowak, who with her husband runs a company that offers customised trips to Africa.

Africa: the new drug

It’s been nearly 80 years since Hemingway first came to Africa, in whose eastern portion he sojourned for a total of ten months, in 1933 and then from 1953 to 1954. Based on this experience, he wrote “The Green Hills of Africa” (1935) and “True at First Light” (1999). “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (both 1936), which are set in Africa, are two of Hemingway’s best short stories.

“We hadn’t left Africa yet,” he wrote later, “but when I awoke at night, I lay there listening, already filled with nostalgia.” Even experiencing two emergency landings within the space of 48 hours – resulting in injuries that would eventually lead to depression and perhaps also to his suicide in 1961 –, did not dampen Hemingway’s love of Africa.

Hemingway was already a cult figure when, at the age of 34, he went on his first African wildlife safari. Hemingway ultimately gave the world not only literature, but also (as the “Stern” magazine wrote on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth), plenty of grist for legends concerning a life “during which untold amounts of alcohol were consumed, untold numbers of fish were caught, untold numbers of women were loved, all manner of game was shot, no theatre of war went unvisited – and now a wonderful new drug has been discovered: Africa.”

1 | Uganda’s relatively shallow but nonetheless powerful Murchison Falls count among the country’s biggest tourist attractions.
2 | Picturesque scenery such as that shown here may well have been one of the things that made Africa so appealing to Hemingway.

In Oloitokitok, a one-horse town on the Tanzanian border, we soon encountered the Hemingway of legend. Everyone there knows an old man named Darshan Singh, who as a child knew Bwana Ernest personally. Darshan’s grandfather, like thousands of other Indians, was brought in by the British to help build the railway to East Africa.

Darshan’s father operated a duka. “That was the only store on this side of Kilimanjaro that sold beer and whisky,” Darshan says. “Ernest stopped in often, always drank a few Tusker beers” – and, Darshan adds, bought each man at the store a beer as well. “And with good reason,” says Darshan, his eyes twinkling slyly from the deep furrows of his face. “He always ended up bedding down with one of the girls from here.”

“Truth at first light and a lie by noon”

Many feel that Hemingway’s African paramour was a figment of the author’s imagination – the macho fantasy of an aging hero for women. A man with a beer belly, thinning hair, and glasses who, on his second sojourn in Africa, didn’t kill nearly as many game and often missed when he fired.

About the Kamba woman, Debba, described in his posthumously published African novel, Hemingway said “My girlfriend is free of shame”. Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, who accompanied him on his second safari, is said to have shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears whenever Debba entered the couple’s tent.

Truth or fiction? “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there.”

“She really existed,” Darsham assures us. “But her name was Mueni, not Debba. She was married, and Bwana Ernest got her husband a good job on his safari team.”

As we’re leaving, we see a pretty young girl having her hair braided into cornrows in a building (now a hairdresser’s) next to which Hemingway once drank beer. She tells us her name is Mueni.

Thundering water, foamy mist and a rainbow: Murchison Falls in northwest Uganda long since lost its status as Africa’s deepest falls, but is impressively powerful nonetheless. Anyone who’s seen the 1951 John Huston movie, “The African Queen”, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, has also seen Blue Nile Falls, which is not far from Lake Albert.