Hemingway's Own Jungle Story and The Trial of Mau Mau General China ( 3 Parts )

London, Picture Post. 1954. 1st edition. Very good pictorial paper covers. 3 no. This is a very rare unique set of 3 Picture Post Magazines from 1954 that record the visit of Hemingway and His Wife to Africa on a hunting expedition.

Hemingway’s popularity would be firmly restored in October 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize, as if to compensate him for two plane crashes earlier in the year.

Hemingway and his fourth wife of 10 years then, Mary Hemingway, were nursing injuries in Butiaba, in the then Tanganyika.

This was during Hemingway’s second and longer safari in East Africa (The first had been in 1933 and had resulted in the publication of Green Hills of Africa).

Those injuries were the result of a crash on January 24, 1954, after Captain Reginald Cartwright, the pilot of a de Havilland Rapide aircraft, was unable to take off from a dilapidated airstrip at Butiaba.

The plane crashed halfway down the airstrip, burst its right wing tank and began to burn.

The pilot and two passengers, Mary and Captain Roy Marsh, got out and fled. Hemingway was the last to get out.
Thinking he was trapped inside, he head-butted a door open and ran towards his companions. “...His hair was on fire and he was crying,” recalled a Butiama village elder named Abdul, who witnessed the crash when he was in his teens.

Includes:-

London, Picture Post. 1954. 1st edition. The Trial of Mau Mau General China.

Waruhiu Itote (1922 – 30 April 1993, aged 70-71), nom de guerre General China, was one of the key leaders of the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960) in British Kenya alongside Dedan Kimathi, Stanley Mathenge, Kurito ole Kisio, Musa Mwariama and Muthoni Kirima.

General China was the first senior Mau Mau leader to be captured by the government, when he fell into a trap in 1954. He was jailed alongside future Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta.

Because of his cooperation with the colonial government, General China's legacy is often controversial. To most of his compatriots, he was a turn-coat who saved his neck by betraying others. He is regarded one of the few moderates among the Mau Mau leadership.