True at First Light

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Portions of this work were previously published, in different form, in Sports Illustrated.

THIS STORY opens in a place and at a time which for me, at least, remains highly significant. I spent the first half of my grown-up life in East Africa and have read extensively the history and literature of the British and German minorities who lived there for a brief two and a half generations. The first five chapters may be hard to follow today without some explanation of what was going on in Kenya in the Northern Hemisphere winter of 1953–54.

Jomo Kenyatta, a well-educated and widely traveled black African, a Kikuyu who had married an Englishwoman when he lived in that country, had, according to the British colonial administration of the time, returned to his native Kenya and unleashed there a black farm laborers’ insurgency called Mau Mau against the landowning immigrant farmers from Europe whom the Kikuyu believed had stolen the land from them. It’s Caliban’s grievance in The Tempest:

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