Reconstruction:Green Hills of Africa

You are reading a reconstruction.

Quick guide (IMPORTANT): please read our quick reading guide.

Spoiler note: we advocate a “spoilers don’t matter” stance. Read more about it.

Copyright note: we do NOT generally own the rights to the reconstructed content. Reproduction is made under the provisions of fair use for educational purposes.

For more info on reconstructions, we refer you to our manifesto or the online book.

Green Hills of Africa starts with the narrator and a group of natives hunting. The narrator shows a clear <dislike>⁠DEF for one of the natives:

❝ We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt-lick when we heard the truck coming. At first it was far away and no one could tell what the noise was. Then it was stopped and we hoped it had been nothing or perhaps only the wind. Then it moved slowly nearer, unmistakable now, louder and louder until, agonizing in a clank of loud irregular explosions, it passed close behind us to go on up the road. The theatrical one of the two trackers stood up.

“It is finished,” he said.

I put my hand to my mouth and motioned him down.

“It is finished,” he said again and spread his arms wide. I had never liked him and I liked him less now. ❞

The truck belongs to a non-native (like the narrator) called Kandisky. They end up meeting on the road. They find a common interest in literature, but Kandisky has trouble <bridging>⁠DEF the narrator’s interest in both literature and hunting, to which the narrator replies he just “likes it:”

❝ “So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?”

“He is no good.”

“You believe it?”

“All I know is that I cannot read him.”

“He is no good at all. I see we have things in common. What are you doing here?”

“Shooting.”

“Not ivory, I hope.”

“No. For kudu.”

“Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to shoot kudu. […] Why do you do it?”

“I like to do it.” ❞

Kandisky suggests the narrator should, instead of hunting, <pursue>⁠DEF an interest in the natives, citing the “big dance festivals.” As Kandisky turns to the narrator’s wife, the narrator, showing more interest in talking hunting, talks to Pop, a fellow hunter, about the hunting prospects. It is made mention of his friendly rivalry with Karl:

❝ “I kill nothing, you understand,” Kandisky told us. “Why are you not more interested in the natives?”

“We are,” my wife assured him.

“They are really interesting. Listen…” Kandisky said, and he spoke on to her.

“The hell of it is,” I said to Pop, “When I’m in the hills I’m sure the bastards are down there on the salt. The cows are in the hills but I don’t believe the bulls are with them now. Then you get there in the evening and there are the tracks. They have been on the lousy salt. I think they come any time.”

“Probably they do.”

“I’m sure we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that one. If he’d only killed it clean instead of following it through the whole damn country-side. Christ, if he’d only kill any damn thing clean. Other new ones will come in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course they can’t all know about it. But he’s spooked this country to hell.”

“He gets so very excited,” Pop said. “But he’s a good lad. He made a beautiful shot on that leopard, you know. You don’t want them killed any cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.”

“Sure. I don’t mean anything when I curse him.”

[…]

“So,” Kandisky was saying to my wife. “That is what you should see. The big ngomas. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.” ❞

Then, resuming his discussion with Kandisky, he mentions his passion for both hunting and writing:

❝ “I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

“And what do you want?”

“To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.”

“Hunting kudu?”

“Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.” […]

“You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?”

“Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.”

“One is better than the other?”

“One is as necessary as the other. […]”

“This is getting awfully serious,” my wife said.

“It’s a damned serious subject.”

“You see, he is really serious about something,” Kandisky said. “I knew he must be serious on

something besides kudu.” ❞

They part ways with Kandisky insisting on him <pursuing> interests other than hunting:

❝ “When you come back another time we must take a safari to study the natives. And shoot nothing, or only to eat. Look, I will show you a dance and sing a song.” ❞

Later, the narrator’s relationship with a native called M’Cola shows how relationships with the natives <depend>⁠DEF on the hunting:

❝ In the early days, before we became good friends, he did not trust me at all. […] He did not like me nor dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama. […] Until P.O.M.’s licence ran out, she was his favourite and we were simply a lot of people who interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her licence was out and she was no longer shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with him and as we began to hunt kudu and Pop stayed in camp and sent us out alone with the trackers, Karl with Charo and M’Cola and I together, M’Cola dropped Pop visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary of course. He was Pop’s man and I believe his working estimations were only from day to day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning. But something had happened between us. ❞

This <dependency> on hunting also affects the relationship between him and Karl, with Karl’s bigger trophies affecting his morale:

❝ There we were, the three of us, wanting to congratulate, waiting to be good sports about this rhino whose smaller horn was longer than our big one, this huge, tear-eyed marvel of a rhino, this dead, head-severed dream rhino, and instead we all spoke like people who were about to become seasick on a boat, or people who had suffered some heavy financial loss. We were ashamed and could do nothing about it. I wanted to say something pleasant and hearty, instead, “how many times did you shoot him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We didn’t count. Five or six, I guess.”

“Five, I think,” said Dan.

Poor Karl, faced by these three sad-faced congratulators, was beginning to feel his pleasure in the rhino drained away from him.

“We got one too,” said P.O.M.

“That’s fine,” said Karl. “Is he bigger than this one?”

“Hell, no. He’s a lousy runt.”

“I’m sorry,” Karl said. He meant it, simply and truly.

“What the hell have you got to be sorry about with a rhino like that? God-damn it, he’s a beauty. Let me get the camera and take some pictures of him.” ❞

After several days of being unable to find a kudu, 2 natives, which the narrator seems to <dislike> at first, offer their help:

❝ “The hell with lunch. The thing is, Pop, we’ve never seen them on the salt in the evening and we’ve never seen a bull in the hills. I’ve only got tonight. It looks washed up. Three times I’ve had them cold and Karl and the Austrian and the Wanderobo beat us.”

“We’re not beaten,” said Pop. “Drink another one of those.”

We had lunch, a very good lunch, and it was just over when Kati came and said there was someone to see Pop. We could see their shadows on the tent fly, then they came around to the front of the tent. It was the old man of the first day, the old farmer, but now he was got up as a hunter and carried a long bow and a sealed quiver of arrows.

He looked older, more disreputable and tireder than ever and his get-up was obviously a disguise. With him was the skinny, dirty, Wanderobo with the slit and curled-up ears who stood on one leg and scratched the back of his knee with his toes. His head was on one side and he had a narrow, foolish and depraved-looking face.

The old man was talking earnestly to Pop, looking him in the eye and speaking slowly, without gestures.

[…]

“He says,” Pop began, “They have found a country where there are kudu and sable. He has been there three days. They know where there is a big kudu bull and he has a man watching him now.”

“Do you believe it?” I could feel the liquor and the fatigue drain out of me and the excitement come in. ❞

The new country proves to be “the loveliest that [the narrator] had seen in Africa:”

❝ The road was only a track and the plain was very discouraging to see. As we went on we saw a few thin Grant’s gazelles showing white against the burt yellow of the grass and the grey trees. My exhilaration died with the stretching out of this plain, the typical poor game country, and it all began to seem very impossible and romantic and quite untrue. […] By now there was no more road, only a cattle track, but we were coming to the edge of the plain. Then the plain was behind us and ahead there were big trees and we were enteringa country the loveliest that I had seen in Africa. ❞

This leads to a friendly gesture toward the Wanderobo native whom he initially <disliked>:

❝ I could not believe we had suddenly come to any such wonderful country. It was a country to wake from, happy to have had the dream and, seeing if it would clown away, I reached up and touched the Wanderobo’s ear. He jumped and Kamau snickered. ❞

Not only is the country beautiful, but also the natives who live there:

❝ I told Kamau to start and slowly we pushed through them, they all laughing and trying to stop the car, making it all but run over them. They were the tallest, best-built, handsomest people I had ever seen and the first truly light-hearted happy people I had seen in Africa. […] They had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. ❞

The beautiful country and natives <coincide>⁠DEF with the event of kudu being finally killed, leading to the narrator learning a dance of celebration even with the now befriended Wanderobo, thus implicitly <pursuing> the interest in the natives that Kandisky prescribed in lieu of hunting:

❝ Then the Roman had his arms around my neck and M’Cola was shouting in a strange high sing-song voice and Wanderobo-Masai kept slapping me on the shoulder and jumping up and down and then one after the other they all shook hands in a strange way that I had never known in which they took your thumb in their first and held it and shook it and pulled it and held it again, while they looked you in the eyes, fiercely. […]

I slapped the Roman on the back and we went through the thumb-pulling again; me pulling his thumb too. I embraced the Wanderobo-Masai and he, after a thumb-pulling of great intensity and feeling, slapped his chest and said very proudly, “Wanderobo-Masai wonderful guide.”

“Wanderobo-Masai wonderful Masai,” I said. ❞

As the hunt goes on, the narrator notes that in hunting they form a <united>⁠DEF group, independently of origin, skin or language:

❝ I told the outfit to stay where the were in the woods, except for M’Cola and the husband who would go with me, we keeping in the timber and grading up our side of the valley until we could be above and see into the pocket of the curve at the upper end to glass it for the sable. You ask how this was discussed, worked out, and understood with the bar of language, and I say it was as freely discussed and clearly understood as though we were a cavalry patrol all speaking the same language. We were all hunters, except possibly Garrick, and the whole thing could be worked out, understood, and agreed to without using anything but a forefinger to signal and a hand to caution. ❞

The narrator manages to hit a bull, but not killing it, making him feel <empathy>⁠DEF for the uncleanly shot animal:

❝ I was thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out of that country. He never showed any tendency to circle back. Tonight he would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive. The first one that hit that blood spoor would stay with it until he found him. Then he would call up the others. I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killng that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. We ate meat and kept the hides and horns. But I felt rotten sick over this sable bull. ❞

On their way back to the main camp, the narrator even feels <empathy> for Garrick, whom he hurt from exasperation:

❝ Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about when we were cutting brush and shovelling, until I was certain I would have to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child does for a spanking. […]

Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly, and he sat down backwards. I never looked towards him, and M’Cola, Kamau, and I could not look at each other for fear we would laugh.

“I am hurt,” he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.

“Never get near a man shovelling,” I said in English. “Damned dangerous.”

“I am hurt” said Garrick holding his belly.

“Rub it,” I told him and rubbe mine to show him how. We all got in the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless, theatrical bastard, so I told M’Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got one out from under the loads in back, we were going through the deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely again. ❞

While he reflects on the way back, the narrator notes how he “likes the natives” who are therefore made a <united> group with no mention of Garrick or any other <disliked> native. He also notes how he can <remember>⁠DEF pictures:

❝ I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were what I liked to do. ❞

Back to camp, his satisfaction at having killed kudu sinks as he learns of Karl’s latest prowess:

❝ Then Karl came out and I said, “Hi, Karl.”

“I’m so damned glad,” he said. “They’re marvellous.”

M’Cola had the horns down by now and he and Kamau were holding them so they could all see them in the light of the fire.

“What did you get?” I asked Karl.

“Just another one of those. What do you call them? Tendalla.”

“Swell,” I said. I knew I had one no one could beat and I hoped he had a good one too. “How big was he?”

“Oh, fifty-seven,” Karl said.

“Let’s see him,” I said, cold in the pit of my stomach.

“He’s over there,” Pop said, and we went over. They were the biggest, widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine again; never, never. ❞

But the bitterness is short-lived as the narrator sees the trophies <united>:

❝ “You can always remember how you shot them. That’s what you really get out of it, ” Pop said. “They’re damned wonderful kudu.”

But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning, though, it was gone. It was all gone and I have never had it again.

Pop and I were up and looking at the heads before breakfast. It was a grey, overcast morning and cold. The rains were coming.

“They’re three marvellous kudu,” he said.

“They look all right with the big one this morning,” I said. They did, too, strangely enough. I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see him and that Karl hard him. When you put them side by side they looked all right. They really did. They all were big. ❞

The <united>-ness and the narrator’s <empathy> for the natives <coincide> with the climax of the hunting (for both him and Karl) on which the morale <depends>. They <bridge> hunting with the <pursuit> advised by Kandisky (most notably with the narrator learning a celebratory native dance after a successful hunt). The <bridge> between writing and hunting, that Kandisky couldn’t understand, is then completed as the narrator remarks to his wife that he would <remember> J.P. (aka Pop) and write about him and therefore hunting:

❝ A month later P.O.M., Karl, and Karl’s wife who had come out and joined us at Haifa, were sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of Galilee eating some lunch and drinking a bottle of wine and watching the grebes out on the lake. […]

“You know,” P.O.M. said. “I can’t remember it. I can’t remember Mr J.P.’s face. And he’s beautiful. I think about him and think about him and I can’t see him. It’s terrible. He isn’t the way he looks in a photograph. In a little while I won’t be able to remember him at all. Already I can’t see him.”

“You must remember him,” Karl said to her.

“I can remember,” I said. “I’ll write you a piece sometime and put him in.” ❞