A New Earth – An Experiment in Colonialism –

“Elspeth Huxley follows her Flame Trees of Thika, a Book Society Choice last spring, with an unusual travel book which describes a revolution in the daily lives of Kenya’s six million Africans as they forsake their ancient communal traditions for a Western individualism. Her journey took her into the primitive huts of Suk and Tugen tribesmen, among Nandi and Kipsigis herdsmen, to irrigation schemes and settlement experiments and Masai game reserves, among women’s progressive clubs and egg circles, to African coffee factories and tea plantations, into tsetse research camps, satellite towns, modern council chambers and housing estates. She tells in full the remarkable story of the transformation of rural Kenya by carving it into tens of thousands of individually-owned smallholdings, the first stage of an ambitious plan to raise the living standards of the people and create the economic strength to support a structure of self-government.

No one who wants to know what is really happening in Africa at grassroot level, below the froth and steam of politics, can ignore this book by an acknowledged expert on African affairs. it can also be enjoyed for its first-hand, sympathetic accounts of people and place swell off the special correspondent’s track, en countered on a three-months’ exploration of one of the most attractive and controversial countries in the world.”