How to Write a Book on Africa and the Iron Snake and Survive

“Go to Africa,” an inner voice told me. I had been trained up as an ecologist in the States but had been languishing in American universities reading and thinking about tropical plants. My special area was swamp ecology and I was intrigued by the most famous marsh plant of all times, papyrus, a prolific aquatic sedge. I learned that it can grow up to 15 ft. in height along the river Nile in Africa, yet the ecology of the plant was still unknown thousands of years after it was first used by man.

Shortly thereafter I accepted a job to teach biology in Uganda where many of the tropical papyrus swamps were located. I also obtained a research grant from the National Geographic Society and was soon established in Uganda as an expert. As time went on, I worked so extensively on papyrus that African villagers in several places knew me as ‘Bwana Papyrus.’ And I found I was teaching at the most prestigious university in East Africa. Makerere University, in Kampala, was a place where former Ugandan president Milton Obote, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere and Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki were alumni.

But what about writing? I had taken creative writing courses as an undergraduate, but the spirit did not move me until I began to realize that the university I was in was also a focal point for the literary movement that was central to African nationalist culture. Many prominent writers including, Nuruddin Farah, Ali Mazrui, David Rubadiri, Okello Oculi, Ngugi wa Thiongo, John Ruganda, Paul Theroux, and Peter Nazareth, were all at Makerere University at one point in their writing and academic careers.

Thus the environment was perfect and the germ of an idea for a novel had already sprouted in my mind until I became aware that Uganda of those days was a difficult place to survive. Idi Amin had become President and had consolidated his rule with a series of bloody massacres carried out in the military barracks. It wasn’t until he turned his attention on the general populace that his murderous intent became obvious. Over the course of the next seven years he was responsible for 100-400,000 deaths.

This affected me directly because he had dozens of bodies dumped in local swamps every night. People would see them the next day when they floated into Lake Victoria. This made any idea of swamp research difficult if not impossible. Then I heard about a large swamp on a lake in Kenya, Lake Naivasha, that was virtually unknown ecologically. So after two years under Amin I decided it was time to get out and I moved to the University of Nairobi in Kenya.

Once in Kenya my work began to attract attention, first in the British journal, Nature, by Peter Moore, then on the BBC show Science Now, and still later in The New York Times in an article by Alan Cowell, called, Kenya Lake Outlives Comedy of Ecological Errors. While all this was going on I began the first draft of The Iron Snake, my first attempt at fiction.

I had not heard of the Iron Snake until I came to Kenya, but I could never forget what the Victorian tabloids called it, the ‘Lunatic Express.’ It was built by the British from the coast inland to Lake Victoria, and I had the idea that I could write about that railroad and the way it affected a host of ethnic tribes and historic characters.

As an ecologist I felt I could deal with the habitats that the railroad passed through, deserts, savannahs and forests, but after the first draft I realized I had left out an awful lot, especially about people. It took me several years to correct that. I had to find particular types in order to develop the characters. Some came from historical real life, such as the African tribal leaders who knew and understood the implications of the railroad; others were modeled after resourceful white adventurers, including second and third sons of British aristocrats with no inheritance and thus no future back home.

The amazing thing was that even in those days Kenya was overrun by unusual and interesting people, black, white, male and female, missionaries and vagabonds. Once I began writing in earnest, it was easy to see how the main characters could get so involved, even in the face of resistance from the original owners of the land, the local African tribes. The book was set in the last few years of Victoria’s reign when the British were intent on opening up their East African colonies. My main characters arrive in the steamy, exotic port, Mombasa; along with them come many other immigrants, including an American, Roger Newcome, who throws his lot in with the Kikuyus, Brian Stanford, the Fifth Baron of Manchester who takes up with the local Somalis, and Stephen Hale, a reformed alcoholic, recently appointed district political officer, who brings out his new wife, Dorothy, and her step-sister Alice. They are soon involved in a series of adventures including fighting off man-eating lions, carving out settlements, building the railroad and the future city of Nairobi.

In a parallel development, the Shimmers, a family of German provocateurs in Kenya, funded by private interests in Berlin, set out to feed on the discontent that must follow from this. All the while, Alice develops into a robust and adventuresome person. Brian Stanford, married, living separately from his free-wheeling wife, falls in love with Alice and swears to Heaven he’ll change. He intends to become the ideal husband and helpmate, but can he?

Besides the Africans, Kimani, Jakoby, Muthuri, Karegi, and Syonduku, I included a cast of army men, railway officers, Indian railway workers, missionaries, settlers, and hunters in a story that ends with a wild train ride on a dark escarpment. It was published this year by Brandylane Publishers of Richmond, VA. For more information, go to The Iron Snake

Some of the action, by the way, foreshadows what happened fourteen years later with the outbreak of WWI and the bitter fighting between British and German colonial troops in East Africa. In many, ways living in Africa was as wild a ride as the characters had in the book, but that was part of the fun.