Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak
Dinesen, a
nom de plume used by the
Danish author Baroness
Karen von
Blixen-Finecke.
The book, first published in 1937, recounts
events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya
, then
British East Africa. 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. It is also a vivid snapshot of African colonial
life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the
book in English and then translated it into Danish.
Background
- "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong
Hills..."
Karen
Dinesen 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.
The young
Baron and Baroness bought farmland in the Ngong hills
about ten miles southwest of Nairobi
, which at
the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot
on the Uganda Railway.
The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed
their farm as a coffee plantation instead. It was managed by
Europeans, including, at the start, Karen’s brother
Thomas – but most of the labor was provided
by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local
Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180
days of labor in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm
on the uncultivated lands which, in many cases, had simply been
theirs before the British arrived and claimed them.
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 six thousand
acres. The new acquisitions included the site of the house which
features so prominently in
Out of Africa.
The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting
safaris which Karen later remembered as
paradisiacal. But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a
talented hunter and a well-liked companion, was an unfaithful
husband and a poor businessman. In 1921 the couple separated, and
in 1925 they were divorced; Karen took over the management of the
farm on her own.
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 was not ideal for coffee-raising;
the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields, 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. The buyer,
Remi Martin, who planned to carve it into
residential plots, offered to allow Blixen to stay in the house.
She declined, and returned to Denmark.
Blixen moved back to the family’s estate of Rungstedlund and lived
with her mother; there she took up again the writing career that
she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a
fiction collection,
Nine Tales, now known as
Seven
Gothic Tales, and in 1937 she published her Kenyan memoir,
Out of Africa. 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. The poem’s title is probably an
abbreviation of the famous ancient Latin adage (credited to sages
from
Aristotle to
Pliny to
Erasmus)
Ex Africa
semper aliquid novi, which translates as “Out of Africa,
always something new.”
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 colorful local characters who considered
Blixen’s farm to be a safe haven. The fourth, “From an Immigrant’s
Notebook,” is a collection of short sub-chapters in which Blixen
reflects on the life of a white African colonist.
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.
The book ends with the farm sold, and with
Blixen on the Uganda Railway, heading
toward the steamer on the coast, looking back and watching her
beloved Ngong
hills diminish behind her.
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.” It is not an
insignificant fact that Blixen’s tales encompass 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. As she describes the
economic realities of her failed business closing in on her, she
comments wryly on her mixture of despair and denial, until the last
days are upon her and she gives in to the inevitable.
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. One frequent
explorer referred to the atmosphere as a “tropical, neo-lithic
slumber.” President Theodore Roosevelt, who explored the region in
1909, compared it to “the late Pleistocene.”
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. Although the colonists imposed British
law and economic control upon this new domain, they saw themselves
not as conquerors or oppressors, but as benign stewards of the land
and its people. Blixen herself commented in 1960 that when she
arrived in Kenya in 1914, “the highlands were in very truth the
Happy Hunting Grounds… while the pioneers lived in guileless
harmony with the children of the land.”
This belief in Kenya as a pre-historic Utopia left its mark on its
inhabitants (and remained an idealized 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 program after
World
War I. The popularity of hunting
safaris,
especially after Roosevelt’s world-famous journey in 1909, had
depleted the big herds precipitously. And as the clouds of war
threatened Europe once again, the colony became as famous for the
misbehavior of the wife-swapping, hard-partying
Happy Valley set as it was for being a
dreamy horizon of Empire.
In Blixen’s descriptions of the Africa she knew, a note of mourning
for this irretrievably lost world frequently colors her stories of
magnificent isolation and the redemptive qualities of a life lived
in partnership with nature.
Themes
At first glance much of the book, especially the section titled
“From an Immigrant’s Notebook,” seems to be a string of
loosely-related episodes organized from Blixen’s memory, or perhaps
from notes she made while in Africa (indeed, in one of the early
chapters she describes discussing the beginning of her work on the
book with her young cook Kamante).
A closer look, however, yields a more formal approach.
Trials
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 a
European settler who is accused of causing, by intention or
indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named
Kitosch. Blixen does not directly compare the two proceedings, but
the contrasts are stark.
Contrasts and opposites
These two trials, separated by most of the bulk of the book, may
also be part of a deeper exploration by Blixen into one of her pet
notions: the “Unity” of contrasts. Perhaps her greatest elucidation
of this idea comes in
Shadows on the Grass, which she
wrote thirty years after leaving Kenya:
Her life in Africa offered her no shortage of such contrasting
dualities: town and country, dry season and rainy season, Muslim
and Christian. But her most constant theme is the contrast of
African and European.
Africans
Much of Blixen’s energy in
Out of Africa is spent trying
to capture for the reader the character of the Africans who lived
on or near her farm, and the efforts of European colonists (herself
included) to co-exist with them.
Although she was unavoidably in the feudal 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. “I
reconciled myself to the fact that while I should never quite know
or understand them, they knew me through and through.”
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. Blixen also
describes in some detail the lives of the Somali Muslims who
immigrated south from Somaliland to work in Kenya, and a few
members of the substantial Indian merchant minority which played a
large role in the colony’s early development.
Her descriptions of Africans and their behavior or customs
sometimes employ some of the abrasive racial language of her time,
but her portraits are unusually frank and accepting, and are
generally free of the period’s European preconceptions of Africans
as savages or simpletons. She saw in the ancient tribal customs a
logic and dignity which many of her fellow colonists did not. Some
of those customs, such as the valuation of daughters based on the
dowry they will bring at marriage, seem ugly to Western eyes;
Blixen’s voice in describing these traditions is largely free of
judgment.
She was admired in return by many of her African employees and
acquaintances, who saw her as a thoughtful and wise figure, and
turned to her for the resolution of many disputes and
conflicts.
Europeans
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. Finch Hatton, like Blixen herself, was known to feel close
to his African acquaintances – as, indeed, do virtually all of the
Europeans for whom Blixen expresses real regard in
Out of
Africa.
Blixen limits most of her reflections to those Europeans who were
her frequent or favorite guests, such as a man she identifies only
as “Old Knudsen,” a down-and-out Danish fisherman who invites
himself to take up residence on her farm, and then abruptly dies
there.
Edward, Prince of Wales also makes an
appearance; his 1928 visit to the colony was an event of the utmost
importance in Kenya’s aristocratic social circles (the governor of
the colony ordered the streets of Nairobi repaved for the
occasion).
Major Characters in Out of Africa
- 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 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. She was bound,
she wrote to her brother, "to love the ground he walks upon, to be
happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death
many times when he leaves." After August 1923, when not on safari, Finch Hatton used Blixen’s farm as his home
base. Like her, Finch Hatton was a lifelong non-conformist, and it
was apparently a cause of great heartache to her that he resisted
her efforts to form a more permanent “partnership.” Blixen is
believed to have miscarried at least one child fathered by him.
From late
1930 to early 1931, as their romance was ending, Finch Hatton took
Blixen flying over her farm and other parts of Africa in his de
Havilland Gipsy Moth
biplane, which she described as “the most transporting pleasure of
my life on the farm.” In May 1931, when their affair was likely
over for good, Finch Hatton was killed when his Gypsy Moth crashed
after takeoff at the Voi
aerodrome; those events are recounted in the last
chapters of Out of Africa.
- 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 organized,
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. Farah had
been hired to work for Bror Blixen as a steward, and Bror sent him
to Mombasa to greet Karen when she got off the steamer from
England. 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. The two would grow exceedingly
close, with Blixen herself describing their relationship as a
"creative unity". The chapter in which Blixen describes the sale of
her farm is titled, “Farah and I Sell Out.” After Blixen and her
husband divorced, Farah remained loyal to her, sometimes leaving
Karen's service temporarily to work on one of Bror's safaris.
- 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 are
well-suited as friends because both are loners and skeptics, who
look at their own cultures with the critical eye of the
misfit.
- Berkeley Cole – Cole was, like Finch Hatton, a
British expatriate improvising a charmed life among the colony’s
well-to-do. Cole was a veteran of the Boer War, a possessor of a
sly wit who affected a dandy’s persona in the Kenya colony. He was
also the founder of the Muthaiga
Club, the legendary private Nairobi enclave of the colony’s
demi-monde. 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. “The yeast was out of the bread of the land.”
- 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
laborers. Although the book does not fail to point out some of
Kinanjui’s vanities (such as the large automobile he buys from an
American diplomat), Blixen depicts the king as a figure with a deep
sense of his own dignity and royal presence. Kinanjui is also one
of the figures in the story who dies toward the end of the memoir,
leaving her – as do the deaths of Cole and Finch Hatton – ever more isolated and
uncertain.
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. Although the Blixens remained friendly through
their separation and divorce, Bror’s associations with other women
caused Karen embarrassment. Decorum drove her to withdraw from
social events where Bror would be present with a mistress (one of
whom became his next wife), and she was, privately, resentful of
these social strictures.
Shadows on the Grass
In 1961, 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. Due to its brevity and its
closely-related content,
Shadows on the Grass has in
recent years been published as a combined volume with
Out of
Africa.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Sydney Pollack directed a
film adaptation in
1985, starring
Meryl
Streep and
Robert Redford.
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 Kenya 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 wagons during the war,
the farm’s fire and its financial troubles, and her struggles to
find a home for her Kikuyu squatters. Most of the main characters
are identified by their real names, though substantial liberties
are taken with some of the details.
Out of Africa won seven Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay
Adaptation.
See also
Notes
- Lorenzetti, Linda Rice, ‘Out of Africa': Karen Blixen's
coffee years, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, September 1,
1999
- Dinesen, Isak, Out of Africa, from the combined
Vintage International Edition of Out of Africa and
Shadows on the Grass, New York 1989, p. 9
- Thurman, Judith, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a
Storyteller, St. Martin’s Press, 1983, pp. 128
- Lorenzetti, 'Out of Africa': Karen Blixen's coffee
years
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
132
- Herne, Brian, White Hunters: The Golden Age of
Safaris, Macmillan, 1999, p. 115
- Herne, White Hunters: The Golden Age of Safaris, p.
117
- Feinberg, Harvey M., and Solow, Joseph B., “Out of Africa,” The
Journal of African History (2002), 43: 255-261 Cambridge University
Press
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
123
- Clark, James Lippitt, memorial essay on Carl Akeley, copy in
the archives of the Explorers Club, New York City
- Roosevelt, Theodore, African Game Trails, Charles
Scribners' Sons, 1909, page 2
- Dinesen, Isak, Shadows on the Grass, from the combined
Vintage International Edition of Out of Africa and
Shadows on the Grass, New York 1989, p. 384
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International Edition,
p. 20
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
121
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
171
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International Edition,
p. 19
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
246
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International Edition,
p. 217
- Herne, White Hunters: The Golden Age of Safaris, p.
109
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
191
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
184
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, pp.
184-188
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International edition,
p. 229
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
114
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
114-115
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
115
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, p.
168
- Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, pp.
153-155.
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International edition,
p. 216
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International edition,
p. 136
- Dinesen, Out of Africa, Vintage International edition,
p. 256
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