Longing for Darkness: Kamante's Tales from Out of Africa (1990)

Published in 1975. This is the 1990 reprint.

On the surface, it looks like a simple companion piece to Isak Dinesen’s (Karen Blixen’s) famous 1937 memoir Out of Africa. In reality, the backstory of how this book came to be, and the convergence of characters involved in it, is a fascinating intersection of 20th-century literature, high society, and post-colonial reclamation.

Flipping the Colonial Lens: Kamante's Voice
In Out of Africa, Kamante Gatura was immortalized by Blixen as her brilliant, eccentric, and fiercely loyal Kikuyu chef and major-domo. For decades, the world only knew Kamante through Blixen’s romanticized, aristocratic European gaze.

Decades later, the photographer Peter Beard (who had bought land adjacent to Blixen's old coffee farm in Kenya) tracked Kamante down. Beard encouraged Kamante—who could not read or write in English—to dictate his own memories of life on the farm, his impressions of Blixen, and his versions of Kikuyu fables. Kamante's sons wrote down his words in longhand, and Kamante illuminated the text with his own beautiful drawings. It stands as a rare, invaluable historical inversion: the "servant" writing back, offering a direct counter-narrative to a classic piece of colonial literature.

The Title’s Bitter Irony
The title Longing for Darkness sounds enigmatic, but it carries a poignant historical punch. It is drawn from a conceptual contrast with the European Enlightenment concept of "bringing light to the Dark Continent." Kamante noted that before the arrival of European settlers and their rigid system of fences, taxes, and wage-labor, Africa existed in a state of natural freedom. To him, the "darkness" the Europeans claimed to cure was actually the untamed, pristine past that he and his people deeply longed to return to.

A Strange Nexus of 20th-Century Celebrities
The credits at the bottom of the cover reveal an astonishingly eclectic group of collaborators that could only have come together in the mid-1970s:

Peter Beard: The wild-card American artist, photographer, and international playboy who embedded himself in Kenya's vanishing wilderness.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen): Her historical photographs and original captions provide the visual anchor.

Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis: The former U.S. First Lady (Jackie Kennedy) wrote the afterword. Following her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, she began a career as a high-profile book editor in New York at Viking Press and later Doubleday. She was a close friend of Peter Beard, and this book was one of her landmark early editorial projects, showing her personal investment in African literature and conservation.

Very slight edge wear.
205mm x 305mm

R1,000