Comparing Kenya Diary By Rudyard Kipling And Meinertzhagen

During the British Empire’s reign, many people had opposing views on the rest of the world. While some viewed colonized people as equals, others felt superiority over the rest of the world in many ways. Rudyard Kipling was an English writer who was someone who believed that even people from different ends of the earth could still get along. Richard Meinertzhagen, a British man who traveled to Kenya, wrote about his experience in his journal. He demonstrated in many ways his sense of superiority among the native people. Both of the men’s opinions were shaped by the vastly different lives they lived as British citizens: Kipling as a writer and Meinertzhagen as a soldier. In Rudyard Kipling’s life he experienced many interactions between him …show more content…
In his book, Kenya Diary, he writes of his experience in Kenya and how he interacts with the natives and animals. Meinerzhagen thought of himself as more important than the people of Africa; he hunted their animals and treated their land as his own. He also writes about the military campaigns fought against the native people. In his expedition to Africa, he wrote about building a bridge on the land. His complete disregard of the land is contrary to the way Kipling felt about the world outside Britain. There is one part of the diary when he recounts running upon a few human skulls from natives that had died the year before. He decides to take them back with him with no regard to the native rituals to honor the …show more content…
Even so, they both had different experiences that led them to have different views on the rest of the world including colonies controlled by Britain. During this time, slave trade had been abolished in most colonies yet conditions were unfavorable for the colonized people. Their land was taken, they weren’t able to find work, and communities were often forced to move. This is what Kipling and Meinertzhagen disagreed on. Kipling viewed the people of these colonized areas as equals to British citizens while Meinertzhagen viewed them as far less superior. He viewed their land as Britain’s possession. This difference in viewpoint may be due to the experience they both had when they were younger regarding the British colonies. When Kipling was younger he worked at a newspaper company in India for nearly ten years. This drastically affected his view of the colonized Indians and colonized people in general. Meinertzhagen on the other hand, was born to a rich British family and spent his life as a soldier fighting in India and colonized parts of Africa. This led to him as viewing the colonized people as inferior. Both men were born of British descent. Yet because of the experiences they had in life, they had very opposing beliefs of colonized civilizations and how they should be