If you've never seen Out of Africa or read any book about Kenya, this novel will give you a cursory overview of Kenyan history from 1919 to the present. It is easy to follow, its characters are uncomplicated, and it certainly never lacks for plot. Using simple vocabulary and very short sentences, Wood presents the interconnected stories of three generations of two families--the African family of a shamba-living, fig-tree worshipping witch doctor and the very British Treverton family of aristocrats who have come to Kenya, taken over the land, and torn down the sacred fig tree to build a polo field.
The British, as exemplified by Lord Treverton, are arrogant and insensitive in the course of their decades of power, leading the local population to form the guerilla Mau Mau secret society, committing all manner of murder and mayhem indiscriminately against both the British and those Kenyans who reject Mau Mau-style violence. Eventually, as we know from history, the Kenyans win their independence.
The march toward independence is buried within a series of melodramatic plot elements: a witch doctor putting a curse on the Treverton family, a wife steadfastly rejecting her husband's sexual advances from the beginning of her marriage, two mothers pretending for years that their own children do not exist, a lover hidden successfully for months in the garden, two passionate interracial affairs between "good" characters, a long-unsolved double murder, several suicides, secret betrayals, rapes, imprisonments, numerous love affairs both serious and casual, a gay relationship, and even the belief of a contemporary female doctor, who has straight hair and "creamy skin," that she is half Kikuyu. There are also a couple of graphic sex scenes and a series of genital mutilations, not for the faint of heart. Mary Whipple