Natives and Strangers Author:Louisa Dawkins From the dust jacket: — Natives and Strangers is the absorbing, subtle, often painful story of a European girl coming of age in Africa during the tumultuous years before and after independence from colonial rule. Torn between two heritages - that of Africa, the land and people she identifies with so deeply, and that of England, to which ... more »she is inextricably bound by blood and the color of her skin - Marietta Hamilton grows up desperately seeking a place for herself in a country that will forever regard her as a stranger.
Born in Songo, Tanganyika Territory, in the Great Rift Valley, to the beautiful and restless Virginia Hamilton, Marietta is brought up by African servants. They become her friends and counselors as this makeshift family moves through remote areas of East Africa, where Virginia manages guest houses for touring British officials. Only through the fragmented tales recounted by her mother's motley array of visitors and lovers does Marietta begin to piece together the facts about Virginia's past in Kenya and about a father she never knew. But as Africa changes through times of war and uncertainties, so do mother and daughter, who learn to negotiate unusual relationships with both natives and strangers.
Like Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, this is the story of European women living in an exotic country and of the political and personal strife around them. Moving from East Africa to England and to the United States, Natives and Strangers follows Marietta through her studies in London, her marriage to the charming but tormented white hunter Jonathan Sudbury, whose Kenyan farm Marietta comes to love more than her husband and her love affair with the brilliant African scientist and politician Michael Kagia. Out of the rich melange of Marietta's past and present emerges a portrait of Africa that reflects the lure of a distant culture and reveals the painful process of self-discovery by one woman determined to call that culture her own.« less