Juliet Barnes > Quotes

“The use of history is to give value to the present hour and its duty.’ But I’d add Goethe’s view, that the ‘best thing which we derive from history is the enthusiasm that it raises in us’.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats

“A woman was sitting just outside the door knitting something at great speed in violently orange, synthetic wool. Beside her grazed a sheep in need of a haircut.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats

“But Solomon frowned when he saw the Chinese workers in their traditional pointed hats. ‘Since they arrived in this area many colobus monkeys have been trapped. The Chinese are buying the skins,’ he told us furiously, then with his voice cracking, ‘and there was even an elephant killed, the tusks were gone, and it is the first time I see an elephant killed in this area.’ Somebody else in the car pointed out that the Chinese had required 14,000 work permits, when as many unemployed Kenyans could have done the work.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats

“today’s moneyed crowd, mainly black politicians, own all the glitzy palatial dwellings, surrounded by security gates and electric fences and are watched vigilantly by minimally paid guards. Sometimes there are even walls topped with slices of broken glass, in case anyone wishes to shred their hands and feet trying out that particular route in to steal whatever it is the wealthy Kikuyu bigwigs are protecting so fiercely.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats

“Erroll’s remains lie in the Kiambu churchyard beside those of the Countess. St Paul’s, fifteen minutes’ drive from Nairobi’s upmarket suburb of Muthaiga, is a small pinkish-red stone church, English in style with its stout wooden door adjacent to its bell tower.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats

“They broke my knee, they tried to twist my head so they could break my neck and they told me to stop interfering,’ said Solomon, who’d ended up in hospital. ‘I was saved by some dogs who began to bark. They stopped those men from killing me.’ ‘But were they Chinese?’ I asked. ‘No, they were Africans,’ said Solomon, still limping two months later, ‘It was the Chinese who hired these bad people.”
― Juliet Barnes, The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa's Infamous Aristocrats