The Gentlemen of the Jungle is a fable written by Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta is famous due to the work he has done with the rights and for the independence of Kenya. He was arrested because he was a member of a radical anti-colonial movement. The British used to call him the African leader to darkness and death. The story is about a man living and speaking with animals, but the animals trick him, even though they pretend that they are his friends. In the end the man kills the animals.
In my analysis and interpretation I’ll be focussing on the use of genre and style of writing and at last I’ll talk about the message of the story.
The genre is, as said before, a fable. It is a fable because Kenyatta uses animals to represent what he means. The animals are given human feelings and actions and on top of that they are able to speak and think as humans. He also uses sentences as “once upon a time” and “lived happily ever after”, which are typical fable sentences.
It is an omniscient narrator seen from another point of view, which is already seen in the first line, where it says “Once upon a time an elephant made a friendship with a man.” In which none of the characters are described as I or we but described from another point of view. This is also a typical thing from a fable, because it often has a deeper meaning, and therefore everyone should be able to relate to it, which can be difficult when using personal characters.
The animals are talking to each other with titles before their names, like; “No sooner had Mr Rhinoceros seen it than he came rushing in, only to find that Mr Elephant was already inside.. “ [7th paragraph line three]. This is a reference to the human world, where we use titles when speaking formally. Another reference to the world as we know is that the animals are ranked, where the lion is the king, then the elephants and so forth, which we know from the general, the lieutenants and so on.
What Kenyatta really meant when he wrote this story leads back to the colonisation in Kenya, where the Europeans came and conquered the land. At that time the natives didn’t have anything occupying their time, they just had to follow and try to keep up. In the story Kenyatta uses the man as a reference to the natives and the animals as the white people that came and stole the natives “huts”.
Kenyatta refers to the animals as being sly; because the man is gullible and he just follows the instructions he gets from the animal leader, the lion king. Therefore, Kenyatta must mean, that the white people were sly and the natives were gullible.
In the fable, we hear that the lion king says that there has to be what we know as a trial. In that trial we only get to hear what the elephant has to say about the situation, because the other animals believe him, and therefore the man only gets to answer a simple question. “My good man, please confine yourself to relevant issues. We have already heard the circumstances from various unbiased sources; all we wish you to tell us is whether the undeveloped space in your hut was occupied by anyone else before Mr Elephant assumed his position?” In which the man can only answer no, but of course we know, that that wasn’t the way it actually happened. There is no evidence, the animals just stick together, and the man is alone. Later on the animals pretend that they are doing him a favor, because they are saying, that they will protect the man, when he builds a new hut, but he just has to build new huts again and again. This refers to the colonization again, where Kenyatta believes that the whites were telling the natives, that they were actually just doing them a favor, but in reality they just wanted to be by themselves.
The title “The gentlemen of the Jungle” resembles that the animals are the gentlemen, which they actually weren’t when speaking of the colonisation, but it symbolises that they are the ones, that had the power, and had a higher status than the one man, who stood alone against all the animals. Therefore, it must mean that it was the natives against a lot of white people. The natives weren’t really able to do anything; they just had to obey the orders, because the white people were higher ranked. This, of course, leads to the end of the story, where the man ends up killing the animals. After the man killed the animals he felt relieved and the text says: “Peace is costly, but it’s worth the expense”. That we now know wasn’t the truth, therefore, it’s important to remember, that Kenyatta is a black man himself, and of course, when writing a story, he must write it in a perspective, that makes people fight for their rights. The quote means that maybe it will be hard and it will take time, but in the end the effort and all the hard work will be worth the time. That leads to the moral of the story, and as I wrote earlier, the Gentlemen of the Jungle is a fable, which means that there is a moral, and here the moral is to fight for your rights, and never give up, even though it can be hard, and it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

All in all, the entire message of the story is racism and how it occurred under the colonisation. Kenyatta uses a lot of the typical things from the fable genre and that helps the readers to understand the story easier, because it is told with animals, and therefore both grown ups and children are able to listen and understand most of what he really means.