The line "I had a farm in Africa" is famously spoken by Karen Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) in the film *Out of Africa*, directed by Sydney Pollack (1985). This iconic opening sets the stage for a memoir that delves into Blixen's life in Kenya, then known as British East Africa.
Karen Blixen in Africa
The Memoir: Out of Africa
*Out of Africa* is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen, first published in 1937. The book recounts events of the eighteen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades under the British Empire. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there.
The book's title was likely derived from the title of a poem, "Ex Africa," she had written in 1915, while recuperating in a Danish hospital from her fight with syphilis.
Structure and Style
*Out of Africa* is divided into five sections, most of which are non-linear and seem to reflect no particular chronology. The first two focus primarily on Africans who lived or had business on the farm, and include close observations of native ideas about justice and punishment in the wake of a gruesome accidental shooting. The third section, called “Visitors to the Farm,” describes some of the more colourful local characters who considered Blixen's farm to be a safe haven. In the fifth and final section, “Farewell to the Farm,” the book begins to take on a more linear shape, as Blixen details the farm's financial failure, and the untimely deaths of several of her closest friends in Kenya.
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*Out of Africa* has been noted for its melancholy and elegiac style - Blixen biographer Judith Thurman employs an African tribal phrase to describe it: “clear darkness.” As the chapters proceed, Blixen begins to meditate more plainly on her feelings of loss and nostalgia for her days in Africa. It is not an insignificant fact that Blixen's tales encompass the deaths of at least five of the important people in the book.
Kenya as a Lost Paradise
But Blixen's wistfulness is fueled and informed by a loss greater than her own farm: the loss of Kenya itself. In the first two decades of the 20th century, many of Kenya's European settlers saw their colonial home as a kind of timeless paradise. Settlement was sparse; life followed the slow, dreamy rhythms of annual dry and rainy seasons. A few thousand European colonists, many of them well-educated Britons from the landed gentry, held dominion over vast plantation estates covering tens of thousands of acres. Their farms were home to herds of elephants and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards - to a culture accustomed to the traditional pleasures of European aristocrats, Kenya was a hunter's dream. This belief in Kenya as a pre-historic Utopia left its mark on its inhabitants (and remained an idealised world of the imagination even for generations that came after).
But by the time that Blixen was finishing the manuscript for *Out of Africa* at the age of 51, the Kenya protectorate of her younger years was a thing of the past. Aggressive agricultural development had spread the colony's human footprint far out into the game country; many of the new farmers were middle class retired Army officers recruited by a government settlement programme after the First World War. The popularity of hunting safaris, especially after Roosevelt's world-famous journey in 1909, had depleted the big herds precipitously.
Life on the Farm
Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony known today as Kenya. When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to 2,400 ha (6,000 acres). She was well suited to the work - fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers. But the climate and soil of her particular tract were not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields as well as a pestilence of grasshoppers one season - and the falling market price of coffee was no help. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it.
Blixen moved back to the family's estate of Rungstedlund (in Rungsted, Denmark) to live with her mother, and took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a fiction collection, *Seven Gothic Tales*, and in 1937 her Kenyan memoir, *Out of Africa*.
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Key Figures in Blixen's Life
The other characters who populate Out of Africa are the Europeans - colonists as well as some of the wanderers who stopped in Kenya. Foremost among them is Denys Finch Hatton, who was for a time Blixen's lover after her separation and then her divorce from her husband.
A love Triangle:Karen Blixen,Bery Makham & Deny Finch Hutton
Denys Finch Hatton
The Hon. Denys Finch Hatton - Blixen's portrait of Finch Hatton is as a kind of philosopher king, a man of exceptional erudition and natural grace, at one with nature, who fit in everywhere and nowhere: “When he came back to the farm, it gave out what was in it - it spoke… When I heard his car coming up the drive, I heard, at the same time, all the things of the farm telling what they really were.” Such glowing reports of the aristocratic Finch Hatton are not uncommon; by all accounts he radiated, from a young age, a kind of warmth and serenity that many people found irresistible.
But while Blixen is generally believed to have been Finch Hatton's lover, and she writes of him with unbridled adoration, in *Out of Africa* at least she refrains from ever clearly defining the nature of their relationship. Finch Hatton came from a titled British family and was educated at Eton and Oxford. But he turned his back on his British noblesse, and came to Africa in 1911, at the age of 24. He began as a farmer and trader, but later became a white hunter - and he was well liked by many Africans. Blixen met Finch Hatton at a dinner in 1918. He was, to judge by Blixen's correspondence as well as some passages from *Out of Africa*, the great love of her life.
Farah Aden
When Blixen first met Farah, she mistook him for an Indian. However, Farah was a Somali of the Habr Yunis, a tribe of fierce, handsome and shrewd traders and cattle-dealers. It was common among the British colonists of the early period to hire Somalis as major-domos. Most Somalis were, by the accounts of their employers, highly organised, effective managers. In *Shadows on the Grass*, Blixen would describe the Somalis as aristocrats among the Africans, "superior in culture and intelligence" and well matched in terms of hauteur with the Europeans they chose to serve.
According to Dinesen's biographer Judith Thurman, “it was upon meeting Farah in Mombasa that Dinesen’s Vita Nuova (new life) truly began.” Blixen entrusted Farah with the farm's cash flow, and eventually with her complete trust. Farah shared her daily life, mediated her relations with the Africans, and relieved her of many practical burdens.
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Kamante Gatura
A young boy crippled by running sores when he enters Blixen's life, Kamante was successfully treated by the doctors at the “Scotch" Christian mission near the farm, and thereafter served Blixen as a cook and as a wry, laconic commentator on her choices and her lifestyle. There is a strong suggestion that Blixen and Kamante were well suited as friends because both were loners and sceptics, who looked at their own cultures with the critical eye of the misfit.
The Hon. Berkeley Cole
Cole was, like Finch Hatton, a British expatriate improvising a charmed life among the colony's well-to-do. Reginald Berkeley Cole (1882-1925), an Anglo-Irish aristocrat from Ulster (being a son of the 4th Earl of Enniskillen), was a veteran of the Boer War, a possessor of a sly wit who affected a dandy's persona in the Kenya colony. Cole was a close friend of Finch Hatton and the two men supplied Blixen with much of the wine she served on her farm. She famously described him drinking a bottle of champagne every morning at eleven, and complaining if the glasses were not of the finest quality. Cole died in 1925 of heart failure, at the age of 43. “An epoch in the history of the Colony came to an end with him,” Blixen wrote.
Kinanjui
Kinanjui was “the big chief” of Blixen's neighborhood - “a crafty old man, with a fine manner, and much real greatness to him,” Blixen writes. British colonial authorities had appointed him the highest-ranking chief among the Kikuyu in Blixen's region because they couldn't get along with his predecessor; as such he was a significant authority figure for the Kikuyu who lived on her farm. Upon Blixen's arrival in Kenya, it was Kinanjui who assured her that she would never lack for labourers. Although the book does not fail to point out some of Kinanjui's vanities (such as the large car he buys from an American diplomat), Blixen depicts the king as a figure with a deep sense of his own dignity and royal presence.
Bror von Blixen-Finecke
Conspicuously absent from the stories in *Out of Africa* is any explicit appearance by Blixen's husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke. Although the Blixens remained friendly through their separation and divorce, Bror's associations with other women caused Karen embarrassment.
Trials and Contrasts
Blixen examines the details and ethical implications of two separate “trials". The first is African: a gathering of tribesmen on her farm to adjudicate the case of a Kikuyu child who accidentally killed one playmate and maimed another with a shotgun. Later, Blixen describes a British colonial criminal trial in Nairobi: the defendant is European settler Jasper Abraham who is accused of causing, by intention or indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named Kitosch. These two trials, separated by most of the book, may also be part of a deeper exploration by Blixen into one of her pet notions: the “Unity” of contrasts.
Her life in Africa offered her no shortage of such contrasting dualities: town and country, dry season and rainy season, Muslim and Christian. Although Blixen was unavoidably in the position of landholder, and wielded great power over her tenants, Blixen was known in her day for her respectful and admiring relationships with Africans - a connection that made her increasingly suspect among the other colonists as tensions grew between Europeans and Africans. Her descriptions of Africans and their behaviour or customs sometimes employ some of the racial language of her time, deemed now to be abrasive, but her portraits are frank and accepting, and are generally free of perceptions of Africans as savages or simpletons. She transmits a sense of logic and dignity of ancient tribal customs.
Olive Schreiner
The Film Adaptation
In 1960, at the age of 76, Blixen published *Shadows on the Grass*, a short compendium of further recollections about her days in Africa. Many of the people and the events from *Out of Africa* appear again on these pages.
Sydney Pollack directed a film adaptation in 1985, starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. The film is less a direct adaptation of the book than it is a love story. Written by Kurt Luedtke and drawing heavily on two biographies of Blixen, it is a compressed chronological recounting of Blixen's Kenyan years that focuses particularly on her troubled marriage and her affair with Finch Hatton.
Some of Blixen's more poetic narration and a few episodes from the book do appear in the film, such as Blixen's work running supply waggons during the war, the farm's fire and its financial troubles, and her struggles to find a home for her Kikuyu squatters.
The film does not closely based on the book. Bror comes off quite poorly in the film, as a womanizing cad who leeches off of Blixen financially. Second, and rather more jarring, the book makes no clear mention of the romantic relationship between Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, played of course by Robert Redford.
The relevant dates for Blixen’s life in Africa are quite clear. She emigrated to Africa in 1914, where they purchased a coffee plantation. She returned to Europe in 1915 to seek treatment for the syphilis she contracted from Bror, and returned to Africa the next year. She met Finch Hatton in 1918, close to the end of the war, and soon after he completed his pilot training. In 1921, she and Bror separated and by 1922, she and Finch Hatton had begun sleeping together (although this could have started two years earlier). She divorced Bror in 1925, by which point she and Finch Hatton had been living together quite openly.
The effect of all these chronological distortions is to give the viewer the sense that she turned to Finch Hatton romantically only after her marriage had irretrievably broken down because of Bror’s personality. The reality seems to have been more complex. By 1920, she was already deeply interested in Finch Hatton because she began to see herself in competition with Bror for Finch Hatton’s attention.
By concentrating so tightly on the romance, the film glosses over another issue. The European community in Kenya in the 1920s and 30s was notoriously libertine. Blixen was not a member of the Happy Valley set, but when you watch the film you can see hints of the sexual goings-on in the period.
The film ends with a mournful quote by Blixen, “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1913 | Moves to British East Africa (Kenya) |
| 1914 | Marries Bror von Blixen-Finecke |
| 1915 | Returns to Europe for syphilis treatment |
| 1916 | Returns to Africa |
| 1917 | Expands coffee plantation holdings |
| 1918 | Meets Denys Finch Hatton |
| 1921 | Separates from Bror |
| 1922 | Begins relationship with Finch Hatton (approximate) |
| 1925 | Divorces Bror |
| 1931 | Sells the farm and returns to Denmark |
Legacy
When her farm was sold, it was bought by a developer who turned it into a subdivision of the sprawling Nairobi. He named the subdivision Karen in her honor.
The making of *Out of Africa* revived Kenyan interest in Blixen. Her house, which was quite dilapidated, was repaired, and the furniture used in the film was donated to establish a museum in the house.
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