Out of Africa: A Journey Through Colonial Kenya

Nov 06, 2025 0

Out of Africa, published in 1937, is a memoir by Danish author Karen Blixen, also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. The book recounts her experiences as a white settler on a coffee farm in Kenya during the early 1900s. Blixen's memoir offers a vivid snapshot of African colonial life under the British Empire, exploring themes of personal freedom, cultural understanding, and the changing landscape of a continent.

Karen Blixen in 1960.

The Setting: A Farm at the Foot of the Ngong Hills

The story unfolds on a 6,000-acre farm located at the foot of the Ngong Hills outside of Nairobi, in present-day Kenya. The farm sits at an altitude of six thousand feet. The farm grows coffee, although only part of its six thousand acres is used for agriculture. Most of the natives on the farm are from the Kikuyu tribe. In exchange for living on the land, they labor on it a certain number of days per year. There are many other tribal Africans nearby.

The Swahilis live in Nairobi and down the coast.
The Masai live on a large Reserve just South of the farm.
Many Somalis live in the area as well, including Farah, the chief servant who helps the narrator run the entire farm.

The narrator herself is a Danish woman.

Blixen's Connection to the Land and Its People

The narrator is actively involved with the natives on her farm. She runs an evening school for both children and adults. She gives medical care to anyone who needs it every morning. Once she treats a young Kikuyu boy Kamante, who has open sores running up and down his legs. When she cannot heal him, she sends him to a nearby hospital runs by Scotch Protestants. Kamante is healed and returns home a newly converted Christian. He becomes the farm chef and is an expert at preparing the most complex of European dishes.

Blixen makes many interesting observations on how the African Natives differ in their outlook on life to the Europeans, also noting differences between tribes such as the Masai and Kikuyu. There is much talk of their justice system and ‘indemnifications’. The Native justice system worked on a principle of compensation that matched the consequences of the crime, irrespective of the intent. She describes the people’s dislike of ‘pedantry’ and while they had ‘no luxuriance’ they had ‘freedom’ born from a relaxed sense of time.

Map of Kenya and surrounding regions.

Key Events and Encounters

For the majority of Out of Africa, the narrator remembers different incidents that took place on the farm, although these events are not described in chronological order. One time there is an accidental shooting in which one native boy shot two others, killing one and seriously injuring the other. Eventually, the elders of the Kikuyu tribe determine that the father of the boy who shot the gun must pay the other families for what they suffered.

The narrator also has many visitors to her farm. These visitors include many Europeans living around Nairobi, natives who come for large native dances or Ngomas, a old Dane named Knudsen who lives out his days on the farm, and an Indian high priest. Two of her closest friends, Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton, spend a large amount of time on the farm. Berkley Cole has his own nearby farm, but he helps keep the narrator's up to standard by bringing in wine, food, and gramophone records. Denys Finch-Hatton has no home in Africa except for the farm, although he spends most of his days on safari.

Finch-Hatton and the narrator frequently hunt together. On two separate occasions, they shot two lions together. Finch-Hatton and the narrator have a special relationship. For those of you that have seen the film and hope to find a sweeping romance between the pages of this book, I can reveal that Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, doesn’t really appear until two thirds of the way through the memoir. Instead, the romance is primarily contained within Blixen’s passion for the essence of Africa and its people. I felt through her memoir that she possessed an almost spiritual attachment to the place.

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Blixen maintains a deep connection between the wild animals of Africa and the people, often describing the latter with animal traits. She attempts to get under the skin of what Africa is - its identity.

The Impact of Global Events

Blixen lived in Africa through tragic global events, such as the Great War and the Spanish Flu, but also more localised sufferings such as the draughts and grasshopper swarms. Blixen’s descriptions of the landscape and these events are exquisitely crafted and luminously real. Africa is a place that longs for and welcomes rain - without it the crops fail and there is much suffering.

During the Great War Blixen helped transport supplies for the government. Despite the suspicion being lifted after her brother was awarded a medal, the feeling of being distrusted stayed with her until the end of her time in Africa.

One significant moment of Blixen’s life was her diagnosis of syphilis. While this is addressed in the film, there is a comparable silence surrounding this matter in her memoir. In fact there is almost no mention of her husband in the book, who she divorced in 1925.

The Decline of the Farm and Departure

After describing life on her African farm as idyllic, the narrator concludes the tale in tragic tones. The coffee farm goes bankrupt because of the difficulties of growing at such a high altitude. Soon after the farm is sold, another tragedy strikes. Denys Finch-Hatton is killed when his airplane crashes south of Nairobi. The narrator has him buried on the Ngong Hills at a location that looks over the plains. Eventually, Denys's brother, the Lord Winchilsea, places a large obelisk on the grave.

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Before she leaves Africa, the narrator also works to relocate the natives who live on her farm, since the new owners want them to leave. After much effort, the colonial government agrees that they can all move to a portion of the Kikuyu Reserve. The failure of the coffee plantation meant she had to leave her beloved Africa and return to Denmark in 1931.

By the early 1900s parts of Africa were under British protectorate and became an attraction for big-game hunters. The influence of the white settlers on the natives is discussed at intervals, such as the introduction of the ‘written word’ to the Native of Africa. Some of the other European influences appear more interfering, such as the outlaw of the traditional Ngoma dances and the English appointing the ruler of the Kikuyus because they disagreed with the former chief. Later on, Blixen herself began to witness a change in Kenya, from a place of ‘Happy Hunting Grounds’ to a country that was slowly changing into a ‘business proposition’.

Themes and Interpretations

As the narrator weaves through her memories of Africa, she shapes a landscape that resembles a type of paradise. On her own farm, she lives in unity with the natives and even some of the animals. At one point, a domesticated deer, Lulu, comes to live with them, which symbolizes the connection of the farm to its landscape. The narrator in general proposes that Africa is superior to Europe because it exists in a more pure form, without the modernizing influence of culture.

Essentially this memoir is a window to an Africa that was, and no longer is. Blixen poignantly captures the internal ‘maelstrom’ that comes with life-changing circumstances.

Dinesen believed that Africa belonged to the natives, not to the European colonizers, although as a landowner she was in fact a colonizer herself. In her role of a farm owner, she took care of the native people living on her land, assisting them with curing simple ailments and paying for hospital in cases of emergency. She also established an evening school on her farm to fight illiteracy among Kenyans and paid for one of her servants to go to a high school in Mombasa. Dinesen felt a strong sense of obligation to the native people living on her farm: When she went bankrupt and had to sell the farm, she pleaded with the government to find for the tribe enough land to resettle so that they could stay together.

Dinesen’s focus on overcoming hardships and achieving personal freedom, the fragmentation and irregularity of her narrative, and the author’s liberty with time and chronology placed Out of Africa in the focus of critical attention as a work of female biography.

Despite the features that are typical of the genre, Out of Africa remains an enigma: In what many call Dinesen’s memoir, the author never mentions her childhood, her first love, her husband’s womanizing, her miscarriage, her infection with syphilis and the painful treatment she had to undergo, and the constant financial struggles on a nonprofitable farm.

Critical Reception

Ironically, critical reception to Dinesen’s Out of Africa was mainly positive everywhere except in her native Denmark, where, with the attacks being mostly ad hominem, the critics accused Dinesen of snobbery and noblesse oblige. The latter criticism, however, was openly embraced by the author, who believed that her status of nobility and of a plantation owner inferred obligation to assume responsibilities and behave nobly toward the native people living on what was now her land.

Narrating Isak Dinesen’s experience in Africa, the book does more than just provide a romantic view of the “paradise lost,” commented on by several critics; it creates an understanding and respectful attitude toward the native people, challenging the then current colonial view of the natives as uncivilized savages. Some critics have pointed out that the picture of Africa that Dinesen presents is too rosy: Apparently she omitted some well-known atrocities committed by British soldiers in Kenya.

In Dinesen’s defense, others say that her work is not a historical chronicle. It is not even a chronological narrative. Rather, it is a distanced fragmentary recollection of events in the life of a woman struggling for personal freedom and independence.

Noteworthy, the book, while talking in detail about Dinesen’s Kenyan servants, has only one reference to her husband; nor does the author focus on her romance with Denis Finch-Hatton.

The Legacy of Out of Africa

If you are interested in learning more about Karen Blixen’s life, her house in Rungsted is a museum open to the public. Or, if it’s the wilds of Africa that you’d prefer, you can also visit her house at the foot of the Ngong Hills in Kenya.

Karen Blixen's tale encompasses the deaths of at least five of the important people in the book. As the chapters proceed, Blixen begins to meditate more plainly on her feelings of loss and nostalgia for her days in Africa. But Blixen's wistfulness is fueled and informed by a loss greater than her own farm: the loss of Kenya itself.

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.

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.”

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. This process seems largely devoid of Western-style moral or ethical considerations: most of the energy expended in deliberations is directed at determining the proper amount of reparation the perpetrator's father must pay, in livestock, to the families of the victims.

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.

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. “We were good friends,” she writes about her staff and workers. But Blixen does understand - and thoughtfully delineates - the differences between the culture of the Kikuyu who work her farm and who raise and trade their own sheep and cattle, and that of the Maasai, a volatile warrior culture of nomadic cattle-drovers who live on a designated tribal reservation south of the farm's property.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conspicuously absent from the stories in Out of Africa is any explicit appearance by Blixen's husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke. Blixen refers to her younger days on shooting safaris, safaris which she is known to have taken with Bror, but doesn't mention him in that context. There is a reference or two to “my husband," but she never uses his first name.

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.

Adaptations

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 won 7 Oscars: film, direction, unoriginal screenplay, photography, set design, soundtrack, and sound.