Llewelyn Powys in Africa

'Had not I, in my time, heard lions roar?'1 Kenya (formerly known as British East Africa) has provided a favourable landscape for emigré authors - among them Elspeth Huxley, Karen Blixen, Gerald Hanley2 and Ernest Hemingway, who merged travel narratives with memoir and fiction. According to his amanuensis, Kenneth Hopkins, the years in Africa left an indelible impact on his life and work: ...right to the end ... there are allusions and references in his work which indicate how deeply the raw and cruel Kenya life had entered into his consciousness.6 In the 1930s Llewelyn emphasised the continued importance of his African experience: Whenever my mind is oppressed, hemmed in by smoky dwarfed chimneys, I have only to remember Africa, and it is given a wide release.7 In the following essay I attempt to assemble the story of Llewelyn's life in Africa - a period in which he lived in extremis, often depending for survival on his inner resources and letters from Powys siblings. The reader should bear in mind a caution by Peter Foss that Llewelyn's published diaries cannot be read as an accurate record of events, but as material to be reworked for literary purposes.8 In the early 1920s Llewelyn wrote a newspaper column, ostensibly recollections of his African experiences, in the New York Evening Post.