Dalrymple notes that Llewelyn Powys
detested the Kenyan colonists, whom he saw as greedy philistine brutes.
In one of the stories in Ebony and Ivory (1923),
a farm labourer is so badly treated by his employer, but has so little chance of escape, that he decides not to kill himself but simply to lie down and die – and he does, his corpse being burned as ‘Rubbish’, the title of the story.
In another story,
a young man just out to the colony starts out better and more refined than the other colonists but is gradually coarsened by them. He takes a local girl as a lover but contracts syphilis from her, so virulent that the doctor tells him that even Salvarsan cannot help him. He takes a pistol and shoots himself in the head.
