Out of Africa

Karen (Isak) Christenze Dinesen von Blixen-Finecke was a woman well ahead of her time. There is no denying her courage, independence, intelligence and strength. To be a Danish woman living alone on a four thousand acre coffee plantation in the early 1900s takes fortitude. Her famous memoir, Out of Africa, covers her adventurous life in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. Whether it is keeping a pet antelope named Lulu, being caught in the middle of a shooting tragedy, or being at the bedside of a dying Kikuyus chief, Dinesen seems to have a deep understanding of, and respect for, her surroundings. She understood the cultures of the tribes with whom she lived. Agreeing with Kikuyus custom of not burying their dead and letting the African wilderness show more take care of their remains is one such example. She was respected within the tribal communities.
Personally, the elephant in the Out of Africa room was who was the real squatter on this plantation. Dinesen acknowledged that the squatters (who she employed) were born there, and their fathers' fathers before them. Instead of saying the land is their birthright she states, "they likely regarded me as sort of a superior squatter on their estate" (p 10). Note the use if the word likely. Dinesen, being from Denmark, technically had no right to claim the land as inheritably hers. By the end of Out of Africa she came to a different conclusion by saying, "It is more than their land that you take from the people, whose Native land you take" (p 385). This, as she was returning to Denmark and leaving her squatters to displacement. show less

Di solito non ho mezze misure con le scritture di tipo intimistico (diari, resoconti di viaggio o di esperienze private, flussi di coscienza, ecc.). O li odio e li butterei nel fuoco, o li adoro e mi faccio catapultare nell'interno di un'animo. Questo è il secondo caso. Probabilmente il tema "esotico" aiuta, come aiuta il bellissimo stile scrittorio della Blixen, che ha una incisività nel descrivere in modo piano luoghi, persone e stati d'animo. Certo è uno di quei libri che non ha una trama precisa, ma ogni capitolo alla sua chiusa ti ha lasciato qualcosa di quella strana vita. Qualcuno potrebbe (e lo hanno fatto) ribadirmi che trovano la visione dell'Africa da parte dell'autrice "paternalistica". Ma bisogna anche collocarsi sul show more piano storico di inizio Novecento, e a me la Blixen non pare che sia una europeista convinta, almeno per l'epoca, non manca mai di sottolineare non la supremazia quanto la differenza di approccio tra uomo bianco e uomo di colore, con il primo che lotta contro il Destino e il secondo che se ne lascia trasportare. E in fondo, quando parla delle difficoltà e del fallimento finale della sua fattoria, sembra quasi che consideri l'abbandonarsi al fato una reazione più valida dell'affannarsi europeo. Insomma, non troverete una autrice "rivoluzionaria" negli atti, per quanto una donna con il fucile all'epoca forse non fosse assimilabile alle regolari; ma se leggete tra le righe troverete l'amore per l'Africa e per il suo popolo, e a me che credo nei sentimenti più che nelle rivoluzioni come saldi educatori, piace proprio per questo: è un primo ponte, quando intorno a lei molti compatrioti pensano semplicemente che l'abbandonarsi al destino degli indigeni sia disonestà di base unita a poca voglia di lavorare. Il colonialismo non è stato una bella cosa, ma la Blixen non mi pare essere affatto uno dei teorizzatori, o perlomeno non in questo testo. show less

Out of Africa is a memoir by Danish woman, Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, about her life in British East Africa (Kenya) between 1914 and 1931. It begins with the famous first line: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…” Karen moved to Africa with her husband to set up a coffee plantation near Nairobi. They owned 6,000 acres of land on which Kikuyu “squatters” lived on the proviso that they worked for the estate 180 days of the year. She and her husband separated in 1921 and she continued to manage the plantation alone, in fact he barely rates a mention in her book.

The book is not really about people or relationships, but rather about her relationship with Africa. She describes Kenya as “the country show more of my heart” and this feeling comes through in her vivid description of the place, the people and the wildlife. There is a sense of yearning and nostalgia, as the book is written in 1937 after a drop in coffee prices, drought and locusts force her to sell her beloved farm and return to Denmark.

Not a great deal actually happens in the book and at times it became boring background noise for me. There were little stories I enjoyed like the tale about Lulu the bushbuck antelope who she rears at home before releasing her to the wild. There are the visits of big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, apparently the love of her life, but her feelings for him and the details of their relationship are never made explicit, the words on the page just feel like they glow with warmth whenever he is mentioned. She tells Denys stories she makes up, “like Scherazade” and he listens receptively.

This is a book that is definitely a product of its time, complete with colonial attitudes that are astounding at times to the modern reader. However, I am not a supporter of the cancel-culture where anything that does not meet modern standards of tolerance and enlightenment is discarded. I believe there is much to learn from our history and our past, in particular not to repeat its mistakes. What I found interesting was the discordancy between her obvious love for the African people and the colonialistic sense of inherent superiority she carries. On the one hand she has some awareness of the evils of imperialism, yet her unconscious bias that the whites are naturally destined to be managers and overseers whilst “the natives” automatically fall into the servant and labourer category is evident throughout. Despite this, I enjoyed (most of) her observations on everything she sees around her, the people, the ways of the Kikuyu, the Maasai and the Somalis. She clearly has great respect for them, and they for her, and views their differences with interest, and at times amusement, rather than frustration or disdain as many colonial voices seem to.

As a 21st century reader I also struggled with the hunting of zebras and lions, but this was not a major focus of the book. She mainly comes across as deeply respectful of the wildlife and the place. She paints a picture of the grandeur and magnificence of her surrounds. Karen is unapologetically aristocratic but shows great courage and determination, as she fights to keep the plantation afloat during difficult years, and fights the government officials to secure land for her workers to live on after the farm is sold. Overall I enjoyed this book as an insight into colonial Kenya in the 1920s during the era of coffee plantations. show less

If you’re expecting a “book version” of the 1985 movie (you know, the one with the always-stunning Meryl Streep and the always-wooden Robert Redford that won seven Oscars), don’t bother picking this up because it’s not that, but I tell you, it’s a love story nonetheless, and a better one at that. This is the story of Isak Dineson’s love for Africa: her love for the people, the animals, and her life on a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. The novel truly transports you to Africa in this time period, and is a great read from beginning to end.

Dineson (Karen Blixen) was a tough, stoic, philosophical woman who led a fascinating life: her father committed suicide when she was 9, she married her 2nd cousin but show more contracted syphilis from him (“There are two things you can do in such a situation: shoot the man or accept it.”), divorced and ran the coffee plantation on her own, and had her romance with Denys Finch-Hatton (which of course started out as an affair) until a tragic plane crash took his life.

Dineson was incredibly brave; one of the more hair-raising adventures has her trembling as she holds a flashlight, trying to shine it on two lions for Finch-Hatton to shoot while hearing their menacing low growls in the pitch blackness from 25-30 yards away. Another is having a lion drag off an oxen three yards from where she was changing the wheel of a wagon which had broken down.

I confess it was a little hard reading of her shooting animals but she did have very high respect for them and did it mostly to feed her farm laborers (zebra) or to protect their cattle (lions). It’s also a little hard to read her generalizations of the “Natives” at times (e.g. “there are times when coloured people cannot themselves clear to save their lives.” ), but they’re not over the top, and I believe one needs to remember the time she lived in, and not judge by today’s standards.

Dineson’s descriptions of the people and their customs reflect respect, a quiet joy, and genuine love for them. The Masai have a particular aura about them which is fascinating, and while World War I was a distant echo, there were maneuvers and operations with the Masai that are described briefly, resulted in one of the more hilarious lines in the book, “A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man…”.

The book has it all – grasshopper plagues, the joy of flying over Africa at a time when flying was somewhat miraculous, dances under the moonlight, and interesting characters both European and African. It was clearly with great sadness that Dineson had to leave Africa after her plantation failed financially, and the final chapters that describe this as well as Finch-Hatton’s death are poignant and touching.

Big thumbs up.

Quotes:
On beauty:
“Native women shave their heads, and it is a curious thing how quickly you yourself will come to feel that these little round neat skulls, which look like some kind of dusky nuts, are the sign of true womanliness, and that a crop of hair on the head of a woman is as unladylike as a beard.”

On dancing:
“In one of the dances the girls would stand demurely upon the feet of the young men and clasp them round the waist, while the young warriors with an outstretched arm at each side of the girl’s head, held on their spear with both hands, from time to time lifting it and striking it down to the ground with all their might. It made a pretty picture, of the young women of the tribe having taken refuge at the bosom of their men against some great danger, and of the men guarding them, even by letting them stand on their feet, protecting them against snakes or any other dangers from the ground. As the dance went on for hours the faces of the dancers took on an expression of angelic fantasy, as if they were really all ready to die for one another.”

On the death of a great man:
“The yeast was out of the bread of the land. A presence of gracefulness, gaiety and freedom, an electric power-factor was out. A cat had got up and left the room.”

On death and burial:
“The Kikuyus, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the Hyenas and vulture to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.”

On dreams:
“The ideas of flight and pursuit are recurrent in dreams and are equally enrapturing. Excellent witty things are said by everybody. It is true that if remembered in the daytime they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one who dreams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency. All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, and unearthly bliss.”

On God:
“For of the Lord they knew from the great years of drought, from the lions on the plains at night, and the leopards near the houses when the children were alone there, and from the swarms of grasshoppers that would come on to the land, nobody knew where-from, and leave not a leaf of grass where they had passed. They knew Him, too, from the unbelievable hours of happiness when the swarm passed over the maizefield and did not settle, or when in Spring the rains would come early and plentiful, and make all the fields and plains flower and give rich crops.”

On leadership:
“There is a paradoxical moment in the relation between the leader and the followers: that they should see every weakness and failing in him so clearly, and be capable of judging him with such unbiased accuracy, and yet should still inevitably turn to him, as if in life there were, physically, no way round him.”

On nature:
“Out on the safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.
…
I had followed two Rhinos on their morning promenade, when they were sniffing and snorting in the air of the dawn, - which is so cold that it hurts in the nose, - and looked like two very big angular stones rollicking in the long valley and enjoying life together. I had seen the royal lion, before sunrise, below a waning moon, crossing the grey plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears…”

On oneness:
“We ourselves, in boots, an in our constant great hurry, often jar with the landscape. The Natives are in accordance with it, and when the tall, slim, dark, and dark-eyed people travel, - always one by one, so that even the great Native veins of traffic are narrow footpaths, - or work the soil, or herd their cattle, or hold their big dances, or tell you a tale, it is Africa wandering, dancing and entertaining you.”

“How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the water-hole where we were to outspan, travelling in a long file. The plains with the thorntrees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity,- and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz. The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorntrees.”

On peace:
“…I felt that to him nothing at all could be awkward. He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.”

On poetry, I love this one:
“I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: ‘Speak again. Speak like rain.’”

On progress:
“We of the present day, who love our machines, cannot quite imagine how people in the old days could live without them. But we could not make the Athanasian Creed, or the technique of the Mass, or of a five-act tragedy, and perhaps not even of a sonnet. And if we had not found them there ready for our use, we should have had to do without them. Still we must imagine, since they have been made at all, that there was a time when the hearts of humanity cried out for these things, and when a deeply felt want was relieved when they were made.”

On simplicity:
“What they really remembered in him was his absolute lack of self-consciousness, or self-interest, an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him I have only met in idiots. In a colony, these qualities are not generally held up for imitation, but after a man’s death they may be, perhaps, more truly admired than in other places.”

On solitude:
“When I was with other white people, lawyers and business-men of Nairobi, or with my friends who gave me advice about my journey, my isolation from them felt very strange, and sometimes like a physical thing, - a kind of suffocation. I looked upon myself as the one reasonable person amongst them all; but once or twice it happened to me to reflect that if I had been mad, amongst the same people, I should have felt just the same.”

On zoos; this as giraffes were on their way out of Africa to a zoo in Germany:
“The giraffes turned their delicate heads from the one side to the other, as if they were surprised, which they might well be. They had not seen the Sea before. They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed, and closed round them.
They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening.
…
Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads, that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa.
As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the Giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.” show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3575849.html

Blixen is no anthropologist, but she makes a serious effort to engage with Kenya and the people on their own terms and to describe it respectfully to her European audience. She goes fairly deeply into religion, which is not mentioned on screen at all. As already noted, she carefully distinguished between the different African and non-African groups, and it's clear that her Kenya is very racially mixed, and that the days of white rule, only a few decades old, are already numbered.

It's not actually a novel. It's a collection of short reflective pieces, all of course linked, four of the five sections pursuing their own internal thread (though the penultimate sections is a grab-bag of vignettes). I show more think perhaps a third or a quarter of what's in the book made it to the screen. The core plot of the film, her romance with Finch-Hatton, is not at all explicit in the book, though it's pretty obvious what is going on from the number of times his name is mentioned, and it's almost a shock when her husband is mentioned for the first time on page 193 of 283. There is not a lot explicitly about racism, but here's one of the short pieces in full:

The Elite of Bournemouth

I had as neighbour a settler who had been a doctor at home. Once, when the wife of one of my houseboys was about to die in childbirth, and I could not get into Nairobi, because the long rains had ruined the roads, I wrote to my neighbour and asked him to do me the great service of coming over and helping her. He very kindly came, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm and torrents of tropical rain, and, at the last moment, by his skill, he saved the life of the woman and the child.

Afterwards he wrote me a letter to say that although he had for once, on my appeal, treated a Native, I must understand that he could not let that sort of thing occur again. I myself would fully realize the fact, he felt convinced, when he informed me that he had before now, practised to the élite of Bournemouth.

And there is some gorgeous description, especially of the landscape. Here's the description of her first plane flight with Finch-Hatton:

We flew in the sun, but the hillside lay in a transparent brown shade, which soon we got into. It did not take us long to spy the buffalo from the air. Upon one of the long rounded green ridges which run, like folds of a cloth gathered together at each peak, down the side of the Ngong mountain, a herd of twenty-seven buffalo were grazing. First we saw them a long way below us, like mice moving gently on a floor, but we dived down, circling over and along their ridge, a hundred and fifty feet above them and well within shooting distance; we counted them as they peacefully blended and separated. There was one very old big black bull in the herd, one or two younger bulls, and a number of calves. The open stretch of sward upon which they walked was closed in by bush; had a stranger approached on the ground they would have heard or scented him at once, but they were not prepared for advance from the air. We had to keep moving above them all the time. They heard the noise of our machine and stopped grazing, but they did not seem to have it in them to look up. In the end they realized that something very strange was about; the old bull first walked out in front of the herd, raising his hundredweight horns, braving the unseen enemy, his four feet planted on the ground – suddenly he began to trot down the ridge and after a moment he broke into a canter. The whole clan now followed him, stampeding headlong down, and as they switched and plunged into the bush, dust and loose stones rose in their wake. In the thicket they stopped and kept close together: it looked as if a small glade in the hill had been paved with dark grey stones. Here they believed themselves to be covered to the view, and so they were to anything moving along the ground, but they could not hide themselves from the eyes of the bird of the air. We flew up and away.

There's also a lovely anecdote about a young Swede teaching her Swahili, who is embarrassed by the fact that the Swahili for "nine" (tisa) sounds like the Swedish for "pee" (tisse), and convinces her that there is in fact no number nine in Swahili until someone puts her straight. I sympathise a little. I have known a number of baronesses in my time, and I don't recall ever saying the word "pee" in front of any of them.

One other point that I noted while researching this post: they were all younger than we see on screen, the men much younger. When Karen married Baron Blixen in 1914, she was 28 and he was 27. She first met Denys Finch Hatton in 1918, when she was 33 and he was 31. Meryl Streep was 36 when the film was made, Klaus Maria Brandauer 42 and Robert Redford 49. Knowing the real ages of the protagonists does change the way you understand the story, I think.

Kenya is not a country I know much about - I changed planes in Nairobi three times in my South Sudan days, with long stopovers but no tourism each time, and the only other books I've read that explore it in any detail are also autobiographies, by Barack Obama and Vince Cable. Unlike the other two, this book made me want to know more. show less

I had a farm in Africa. One of the best opening lines.

What glorious writing. I first read this in 1998, and re-read it for my book club in 2013. I revisited it again in 2017 and now, here I am again. If you're expecting the movie you'll be greatly disappointed - Denys Finch-Hatton is barely mentioned. No, the great love of her life was Africa itself.

While I still love Dineson’s writing, and love the way she puts me right into early 20th century Africa, I am more attuned to social justice these days, and have to cringe a bit at some of the references to the indigenous tribes. The colonialists had such a superior attitude. But this a product of the era and of the social status of the writer, and we must give her her due. She worked show more long and hard to try to succeed in this doomed effort to grow coffee at too high an altitude, and with a husband who basically abandoned her as soon as she arrived.

Here are a couple of passages:
Night on the farm: It rained a little, but there was a moon; from time to time she put out her dim white face high up in the sky, behind layers and layers of thin clouds, and was then dimly mirrored in the white-flowering coffee-field.

The view from a plane: You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild black storms, all swing round you in a race and a dance. … You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.

The view from the perfect spot: “To the South, far away, below the changing clouds lay the broken, dark blue foothills of Kilimanjaro. As we turned to the North the light increased, pale rays for a moment slanted in the sky and a streak of shining silver drew up the shoulder of Mount Kenya. Suddenly, much closer, to the East below us, was a little red spot in the grey and green, the only red there was, the tiled roof of my house on its cleared place in the forest. We did not have to go any further, we were in the right place.”

For this, my fourth re-read of this work, I choose to listen to the audible audio, performed by the marvelously talented Julie Harris. Unfortunately, this is an abridged version of Dinesen’s memoir. While I really enjoyed Harris’s performance, it’s worth the time to read the entire book.

Entire review UPDATED, March 2021 show less

Out of Africa is more a meditation or anthropology of Africa than an autobiography. It is a memoir of Danish author Karen Blixen. Karen Blixen ran a coffee farm in Kenya for 17 years in what was British East Africa. Blixen brings to life the people important in her life. She married her second cousin the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who is barely mentioned in the book. Nor is her divorce mentioned. After the divorce, Karen continued on the farm. The farm was never very good, it wasn't in the best place to be a successful coffee farm. Karen tried other things to make the farm successful but nothing was successful. She made it through WWI and returned to Denmark after and bedore the next war. I loved Karen Blixen's independence show more and willingness to work hard and her respect for the people and animals of Africa. Out of Africa is divided into five sections and is not necessarily linear. 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 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. The he 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 disappear behind her. The first part is fun and such a wonderful look at Africa (the anthropological section). I learned a lot about Somali African and I appreciated that having quite a few Somali in my home area. The final parts are reflections of the author's losses and love of Africa. This was the time of colonialism and many could fault the author for being a colonist but her love of Africa and friendship with the people and land tells me she was not a typical colonist. In her writing, the reader can picture the natural beauty and animal life being destroyed by the modernization that Europeans brought with them and Karen grieved this loss as well as her own loss. Themes include the difference between Africa and European justice and there are two trials that she details in the book. 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 emigrated 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. I felt her writing was free of prejudice and judgement. She was admired and loved by many Africans who continued contact with her even after she left the farm.

Karen Blixen according to the book, 1001 Books You Must Read, only narrowly missed the Nobel Prize for Literature. It calls this a novel about the death of imperialism in Africa and hailed as the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism. It is a book about Africa and the language is beautiful.

Rating 3.83 show less