Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Out of Africa

”Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”


Karen Blixen in 1913. Her whole life was before her.

When Karen Blixen married her second cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and followed along as a devoted wife should to help him run a coffee plantation in Kenya, I’m sure she had an idea of what her life was to be, but the story of our lives generally deviates from the perceptions our youthful fancies conceive. Her marriage was in shambles. Her husband proved a poor manager of the farm, and his sexual indiscretions had left her with a parting gift of a case of syphilis. She let him live, which was touch and go, booted him off the farm, and took over the management of the Kenyan farming enterprise.

Baroness Blixen kept her title though.

Most people would have, given the nature of these events, thrown in the towel and made their way back to Denmark, battered and bruised and hoped that people had short memories of them ever being gone, but Blixen was made of sterner stuff. She decided she was going to turn this series of unfortunate events into a triumph, and for a decade and a half she did just that.

She created an oasis for her friends to visit. ”To the great wanderers amongst my friends, the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it. They had been over vast countries and had raised and broken their tents in many places, now they were pleased to round my drive that was steadfast as the orbit of a star. They liked to be met by familiar faces, and I had the same servants all the time that I was in Africa. I had been on the farm longing to get away, and they came back to it longing for books and linen sheets, and the cool atmosphere in a big shuttered room.”

I can imagine the thrill that they must have felt when they first spotted the red roof of her house and knew that they were about to step out of Africa and back into Europe for an evening of discourse, food, and wine.



She collected an eclectic group of friends, mostly lost Europeans who escaped to Africa from something or came in search of themselves. None made a bigger impression on her than Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford in the movie). ”He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but he did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him.”


Denys Finch Hatton

I certainly understand the dilemma of being a person out of time. I believe I’ve been born into one of the most boring eras ever in the history of the world. Fortunately for me, I have the ability to time travel and escape this world at will by simply opening the pages of a book. By the way, I’ve just returned from an expedition to a coffee plantation circa 1925 in Kenya where I drank wine with Baroness Blixen, listened to the lions roar, and luxuriated in the stillness that follows on the heels of such a proclamation of dominance.

There is the moment when Blixen witnessed giraffes being loaded on a ship to be sent to Hamburg. ”They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed around 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 the world in which nothing is ever happening.”

Will they dream of their country? Do I wish that they can? Or do I hope they forget the freedom they once had?

I’ve been to several zoos in my lifetime, and someone will have to hold a very large gun to my head to ever have me set foot in one again. When I go to a zoo, I don’t see the majestic animals or their beautiful fur or the pretty colors of their plumage. All I see is a deadness in their eyes, an accusation of, how can you do this to me? How can you let these smelly, noisy creatures mock me, yell at me, rattle my cage, and stare at me when they should be bowing their heads in reverence?

So do you free the giraffes and watch them gallop away? Do you shoot them in their alien looking heads so they die free? Or do you do what we all generally do in such circumstances, which is to watch them be hauled away in chains? We think about the sadness of it and then move our thoughts on to something else.

Blixen experienced the typical problems that afflict farmers everywhere, which is Mother Nature not cooperating.

Drought.

”One year the long rains failed.

That is a terrible, tremendous experience, and the farmer who has lived through it will never forget it. Years afterwards, away from Africa, in the wet climate of a Northern country, he will start up at night, at the sound of a sudden shower of rain, and cry, ‘At last, at last.’”

My father is a farmer, and though I’ve never seen him do a jig, there was one year, after months of drought, that a gully washer appeared over the horizon and dropped four inches of precious rain on us. His smile looked like he was capable of just about any expression of joy, even dancing, in that moment when the first drops began to fall.


Karen Blixen showing some of the elegance her visitors in Kenya must have enjoyed.

Drought, grasshopper plague, and being situated too high in altitude for coffee beans to grow as well as they should, all contributed to the final demise of the Blixen Kenyan farm. In 1931, the place was sold, and she moved back to Denmark. There was probably relief for a while from the stress and strain of the daily trials and tribulations of keeping a farm in working order, but I’m sure, within a matter of months and maybe even weeks, she felt the loss of her home as astutely as those giraffes missed their home from their cage in Hamburg. The only way she could return to it was to write about it. With pen in hand, her blood could move a bit more briskly about her body, her hands could remember the labor, and her mind could sift back through those conversations she had with the people she cared the most about. Highly Recommended!

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