Louis Leakey (1903–1972)

Adam Foulds, novelist and poet, has chosen to discuss L S B Leakey’s Mau Mau and the Kikuyu, on FiveBooks (http://five-books.com) as one of the top five on his subject - The Mau Mau Uprising and The Fading Empire, saying that:

“…Louis Leakey was very interesting – a major intellectual figure in the history of paleoanthropology. He grew up in very close contact with the Kikuyu, but this book is squarely in the language of the time, which was that Mau Mau represented an atavism, that they had regressed back to their savage, pre-settled, pre-Christianised state and what was being unleashed was a kind of innate violence...…”.

The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/adam-foulds… (altro)

I found this a very inspiring autobiography of Dr. Leakey. The son of missionaries to the Kikuyu people, he aspired to be a missionary himself for much of his early life. It was only after realizing that he could not in good conscience treat science as a "part-time job" that he decided against it. To quote his own words, "I had become firmly convinced of the truth of the theory of Evolution as distinct from Creation as described in Genesis, and I had also begun to hold much more liberal views about some native customs than my parents did".

He spent a childhood immersed in African culture and language and maintained a love for the Kikuyu throughout his life. Much of this book recounts his experiences with scouting, hunting, and exploring the African landscape that eventually set him on his pioneering path of archeological discovery. How he navigated his way through the British system of higher education is some of the better material in this book. At one point he himself was the author of the material on the subject matter for which he was examined and graded. His telling of the challenges and hardships of setting up archealogical camps in remote areas of East Africa is anything but dry, dusty and boring.

One should also not overlook the eight full pages that the author has devoted in his autobiography to the game of Mankala, sometimes called the Oldest Game in the World.… (altro)