I hate everything about this decrepit series, and have hated everything about since I saw it in my childhood.<br /><br />This is the worst kind of colonial narrative. The presumption of competence of Whites and the presumption of incompetence on behalf of the African population. The very concept of a family 'getting on' and 'making a future for themselves in the wilds of Africa' is in itself racist and ignorant. The very unrepentance of it's racism, as well as the historical revisionism make this garbage. At least "Jewel In The Crown" and "Passage To India" put some serious questionmarks over the British presence in India and colonialism. The writer of Thika still doesn't understand why they had to go.<br /><br />Those wild open spaces with no Africans in them didn't come to exist on their own. The people who lived there were driven out with all the force and firepower that the British state could muster at the time. Tribes (meaning anything from bands of nomads to empires, but specifically in Kenya, the Kikuyu) were forces to pay taxes to the British and make way for any "settler" that wanted their land. If they refused, they and their families were massacred. That is colonialism. Like in all other British colonies, Africans were driven onto 'reservations' which went by various names, and mainly starved because a lack of land. The British atrocities in the 1950s against the Kikuyu, whose entire population they put into concentration camps, was only slightly less brutal than Germany's prelude to the Holocaust in early 20th century Southwest Africa (now Namibia), which led to the genocide of the Herero. (Read: Imperial Reckoning, by Caroline Elkins on the treatment of the Kikuyu after WWII.)<br /><br />Looking at "Flame Trees Of Thika" is like watching racially correct Germanics being resettled in Eastern Europe under Nazism. If Hitler had won, my own family (the Dutch side) would have been 'resettled' in Poland as farmers, to clear out the subhuman Poles (even though going back 250 years, their common ancestor was a shepard from Silezia). The point being that racism makes no sense, even though it is very much incorporated into the fabric of this series. Notice how the Masai are noble, tall, cattle herding folk, contented to tend to their cattle (on bad land, of course), while the few Kikuyu and other people are grafting, if they don't blow themselves up with loose explosives. It is still ironic how the 'inferior' Kikuyu have managed to get all the good land, while the 'superior' Masai managed to only get land fit for cattle herding.<br /><br />Oh and by the way, the reason why most of the White people in these series speak with South African accents, is because... THEY'RE SOUTH AFRICANS. Most White Kenyans didn't come from England, they came to Kenya from South Africa. <br /><br />This is another series of the time, almost all about a group of White people in Africa. You would never understand from watching this garbage that Whites only make 1% of the population of Kenya. Remember that in 1981, Zimbabwe had only been free for 2 years, and that Apartheid was still the system of the day in both Namibia and South Africa. The Portuguese had only fled Angola and Mozambique 6 years earlier when Portugal and Spain threw off the fascist yoke themselves. The CIA was getting ready to create UNITA to "fight communism" and in the process, kill 500,000 people. (Read: CIA Station Chief John Stockwell's "In Search Of Enemies".)<br /><br />Even to this day, the land has not been redistributed to the people who know how to use it. Ordinary African farmers have been eking out a living on tiny 3 hectare plots of land to this day. I would say the greatest drag on African development and food security today is the lack of land that is available to it's farmers. That is why there is hunger today. Most arable land in Kenya and Africa today is going untilled, because it is locked up in huge estates like in Thika, that belong to individual White people who do not have the capability to farm it all.<br /><br />The reason is that when the British government received the huge pieces of land in the Berlin Conference of 1884, they simply did not know what to do with it all. As an empire, they were on the wane. They had already used most of their surplus population in the rather thin population of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. As a result, many of the "settlers" who migrated to Kenya were from South Africa. Most of the "settlers" in Zimbabwe didn't arrive there until after 1945.<br /><br />The main reason for British expansion in Africa was to (1) exploit its massive natural resources (oil, gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, platinum, gemstones and many more) and (2) get there before the Germans did. This was especially relevant in South Africa, where Lesotho and Swaziland were created by then Cape governor Cecil Rhodes to hem in the Boer republics, and Botswana was created to create a barrier between German Southwest Africa and the Boer Republics. (Read: "Rhodes: Race for Africa", by Antony Thomas)<br /><br />The problem of the British state then became - how can we have these new colonies pay for themselves? The answer was to give away huge tracts of African land for almost nothing to any White person who wanted to "have a go at farming". And give it away they did - thousands, usually tens of thousands of hectares at a time. This is while the African population was driven together on the worst pieces of land. Add to that a population that has increased in size 4 fold since the 1950s, and the problems in food sufficiency and land erosion are obvious.<br /><br />Oh, did I forget to add... I hate this series and everything it stands for?