Title: Out of Africa Author: Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) Creation Date: 1937 Location: London (Putnam) and Copenhagen (Gyldendal) Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa in Danish and English simultaneously, publishing both in 1937 — Den afrikanske farm in Copenhagen, Out of Africa in London — under the male pseudonym Isak Dinesen she had adopted to enter literary life. She was fifty-two, living in her family home on the Danish coast, and the Africa of the book was already an act of memory: charged, selective, intensely stylised, organised by the grief of loss. Six years earlier she had been forced to sell her coffee farm in the Ngong Hills south of Nairobi after seventeen years of trying to make it pay; the farm was gone, the man she had loved was dead, and what remained was prose. Hemingway later suggested at his Nobel speech that Blixen deserved the prize more than he did.
The thematic core is the paradox of belonging to a place without legitimate claim to it. Blixen arrived in British East Africa in 1914; the six thousand acres she farmed until 1931 had been Kikuyu territory before colonial land laws cleared it for European settlement. Her prose enacts a difficult double movement — genuine attentiveness to the land and to the people who worked it, and a systematic failure to examine the structural conditions that made her presence possible. The pastoral elegiac mode she perfected is both genuinely beautiful and the aesthetic register of imperial ownership; you cannot separate the one from the other.
What makes the book canonical inside the Empire and Its Shadows collection is its self-implication. Out of Africa is not propaganda for empire but something more uncomfortable — an honest account of what it felt like, from inside a particular class and racial position, to love Africa with a love that was also possession. It pairs naturally with the Kenyan literature that came after independence — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, Blixen's farm read against the country whose land it was eventually reclaimed by. The prose is the settler's most accomplished art form. The art does not exonerate the settlement.
The Imperial Machine
British East Africa was organised around white settlement in a way that distinguished it from most of Britain's African possessions. From the early 1900s the central project was recruiting European farmers to occupy the highlands, and the colonial government promoted settlement through land grants, preferential loans and the systematic dispossession of indigenous populations. The settlers were the colony's reason for being.
The legal mechanism was the Crown Lands Ordinances of 1902 and 1915, which declared all land not under "beneficial occupation" by Africans to be Crown land available for European acquisition. The definition excluded the pastoral practices of the Maasai and the rotational farming of the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu in particular were confined to reserves that were a fraction of their original range. Blixen's six thousand acres in the Ngong Hills were part of this system, and her coffee operation depended on Kikuyu "squatters" — people who had been on that land before colonial seizures and who now remained as tenants, providing labour in exchange for the right to cultivate small plots of what had recently been their own.
The labour system was enforced through the kipande, a pass card that all African men over sixteen were required to carry, restricting their movement and recording their employment history; and through the hut tax, payable only in cash, which forced subsistence farmers into wage labour on European farms. Together these mechanisms produced the workforce the settler economy required without appearing, to its beneficiaries, to use force at all. The labour came; the rents were paid; the system seemed to operate of its own accord. Blixen does not describe these mechanisms because for her class they had the invisibility of plumbing. She recounts the coffee harvest, the wagons, the smell of the drying beans. She does not recount the kipande in the pocket of every man who carried a sack. Her silence is not deliberate evasion but the normal consciousness of the settler, for whom the operations of the system were the air she breathed.
The Subjected People
The Kikuyu of Blixen's farm appear with a vividness that is simultaneously generous and limiting. She knew their names, their family arrangements, their disputes. She sees them more carefully than most Europeans of her station bothered to. But she sees them from above: from the elevated position of the landowner whose authority over their lives is the unexamined ground of every observation. "My Kikuyu," she writes, with natural possessiveness — and the possessive is not metaphorical.
Kamante, the book's most fully drawn Kikuyu figure, arrived at the farm seriously ill, was sent by Blixen to the Scottish Mission hospital, converted to Christianity and was trained as her cook. She writes about him with evident fascination: his strangeness, his silence, his capacity for precision, his ability to reproduce European dishes from taste alone. But Kamante in her account is always seen — never the one seeing. We do not know what he made of her, of his conversion, of the arrangement in which a Kikuyu boy became cook in a Danish household on formerly Kikuyu land. His subjectivity is absorbed into hers.
The Somali servants — Farah Aden, her head servant, and others — occupy a different position in her racial taxonomy. She admires them unreservedly, attributing a dignity she compares to medieval European chivalry. The comparison reproduces the colonial racial hierarchy that ranked "Hamitic" peoples above Bantu-speaking populations and tells us less about the Somali than about the European categories through which Blixen organised what she saw. The Maasai are treated as a landscape feature — magnificent, ancient, part of the scenery she loves, their tall figures moving across the plains like elements of the natural world rather than as people with political grievances. The Maasai being confined to reserves, their grazing lands seized for European ranching, their resistance suppressed by force — this Maasai does not appear in her book. Her Maasai are admirable because they are no longer dangerous; they are part of what she owns.
The Reckoning
The reckoning in Out of Africa is conducted by the reader rather than by the author. Blixen does not reckon with the colonial system; she inhabits it, mourns its passing and writes an elegy for a life she experienced as genuine happiness. The reckoning happens when a contemporary reader — informed by the Mau Mau uprising, by Kenyan independence in 1963, by ongoing land redistribution debates — reads her pastoral against the grain.
The book's implied reader is the European of the 1930s who would recognise in Blixen's Africa a world of beauty and personal authority that industrialised Depression-era Europe could not provide. The colonial farm is presented as an alternative to modernity — a place of direct relationship with land, animals, human beings. This is the pastoral mode at its most seductive, and its seductiveness is inseparable from the colonial arrangement that made it possible. The dawn she watches over the Ngong Hills is beautiful; it is also the dawn over six thousand acres legally hers because the law was made by people like her.
The book's most troubling passage is the chapter on Kitosh, a young Kikuyu man beaten to death by his employer. Blixen frames the death as an African existential choice — a kind of stoicism Europeans cannot understand. She aestheticises a murder, performing the operation the colonial system depends on: the conversion of structural violence into cultural difference. Kenya became independent in 1963. The settler farms were redistributed. The Kikuyu returned to lands taken from them. The reckoning Blixen could not perform, history performed for her. Out of Africa remains in print because the prose is great and because the prose is the most accomplished record we have of a particular blindness — the mind that loved Africa with sincere love and could not see the conditions of its own loving.
The Reading
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The past tense holds the sentence's entire meaning. The farm is gone; what follows is the reconstruction of a world that no longer exists, seen through the particular lucidity that loss can give. I can see the Ngong Hills more clearly now, from Denmark, from far away, than I could from inside them.
The Farm
Six thousand acres in the highlands of British East Africa, at an altitude of just over six thousand feet, where the light has a clarity I have never found elsewhere and where the air at dawn is so thin and cool that one's first breath of it after sleep feels like the first breath of a new species of being. I managed the farm alone after my husband's departure — we separated early, though the formal divorce came later — through years of drought, financial trouble, locust plague and the cascading failures that finally forced the sale in 1931. What I am writing is not continuous narrative. It circles the farm in episodes, sketches, portraits and reflective passages without following a chronological line. What I am making is not memoir but elegy — a sustained act of remembrance shaped by the knowledge that what is remembered has been irrevocably lost.
The material groups itself into sections — "Kamante and Lulu," "A Shooting Accident on the Farm," "Visitors to the Farm," "From an Immigrant's Notebook" — each with its own tonal register, ranging from anecdote to meditation, from the pastoral to the philosophical. The cumulative effect is a portrait rendered with the completeness of a Flemish interior, every surface visible, every object placed with care.
The Squatters
The Kikuyu who live on the farm as squatters — tenants whose right to remain on what was recently their land is now mediated through my ownership — are the farm's most complex presence. I write about them with fierce attention. I know their faces, names, cattle disputes, family arrangements, ritual obligations; I have strong opinions about their dignity and humour. But I understand them in relation to myself — my people, my squatters, my responsibility — and the possessive is not metaphorical.
When Kinanjui, the paramount Kikuyu chief, comes to see me, I read his dignity as a kind of African aristocracy corresponding to my own. The reading is generous and reductive — assimilating his authority to my categories. The Kikuyu's own understanding of their relationship to the land does not appear in my account, not because I am dishonest but because the settler's consciousness does not include this information as relevant. What I see is real; what I do not see is also real; and the gap between the two is the account's unintended subject.
Kamante
Kamante arrived at the farm seriously ill, with sores that refused to heal. I took him to the Scottish Mission hospital, where he was treated and converted to Christianity. I trained him as my cook, and he became a culinary genius capable of reproducing from taste alone dishes I had only described to him from European memory. I write about him with affection and attentiveness to his strangeness, his silence, his capacity for precision.
But Kamante in my account is always seen — never the one seeing. I do not know what he makes of me; I know only what I make of him, which is a character in my book and a cook in my kitchen. The asymmetry is the colonial relationship in its most intimate domestic form: I possess him narratively as I possess his labour practically, and neither form of possession registers as possession in my consciousness. His conversion, his culinary education, his transformation from sick child to indispensable servant — all are presented as gifts I gave him, and the presentation is sincere, which makes it more rather than less revealing. Late in his life Kamante dictated his own memoir, Longing for Darkness, edited by Peter Beard — and the cook's account of his employer is markedly different from mine of him.
Denys
Denys Finch Hatton — the English big-game hunter who was my companion for my last decade in Africa — is the male protagonist of these pages, their romantic centre, though I approach him obliquely, through conversations and hunting expeditions and the quality of his mind. I do not describe our relationship as a love affair, though it was one; I describe him as an ideal — an English gentleman who had managed to live outside English convention, who read Greek and listened to gramophone records in the bush, who moved through the African landscape with a freedom available only to a man whose class and race made every landscape available.
He died in a plane crash near Voi in 1931, three months after I had decided to leave. His death, told without sentimentality in a single paragraph, is the emotional centre of gravity — the loss of the man folded into the loss of the farm, the two griefs inseparable because they were inseparable in life. His plane — a Gipsy Moth he flew over the Ngong Hills, sometimes with me beside him — provided the aerial view, the surveyor's perspective from which the landscape becomes a map, a possession visible in its entirety from above.
The Light
The Ngong Hills at dawn, the quality of highland light I have never found elsewhere — a light with a particular clarity that makes colours more vivid and distances more readable than any European light — the silence of the African night and the sounds inhabiting it: lions coughing in the dark distance, hyenas whose calls carry for miles, the chorus of insects at different elevations, the single bird cry that comes from the darkness's far edge and is answered by nothing.
I write about the way the dew burns off in the first hour after dawn, the way cattle move across the landscape in formations that seem choreographed, the flight of flamingos over the lake at Naivasha. These passages are the record of genuine observation — the controlled precision of someone who has thought about every word and placed it where it must go. They are also the record of a European sensibility making an African landscape available to European aesthetic consumption. The beauty and the possession are the same act. To describe the Ngong Hills with this quality of attention is to claim them as objects of sensibility, and the claim is made possible by the legal arrangements that gave me the leisure to observe what the Kikuyu who worked my farm had no leisure to aestheticise.
Lulu the Bushbuck
A young female bushbuck antelope — orphaned, brought to the farmhouse, raised at my table — comes and goes between the wild and the domesticated for years. Lulu eventually returns fully to the forest, then reappears with a fawn at the edge of the lawn, then disappears again into the bush, and the rhythm of these returns and absences is one of the recurring images of the African world: visible at the edge of the European clearing, never fully captured by it, present and other.
The Somali
Farah Aden, my head servant, and others from the Somali community in Nairobi occupy a different register from the Kikuyu chapters. I admire the Somali without reservation, attributing to them a kind of medieval European chivalry; they remind me of characters in Cervantes or in the old Norse sagas. The attribution tells less about the Somali than about the European categories through which I organise what I see.
The colonial racial hierarchy that ranks peoples against each other — Somali above Kikuyu, Maasai in a category of aesthetic magnificence divorced from political reality — operates throughout my text as unexamined assumption. Farah is rendered with great affection, his loyalty taken as natural. The Somali wedding I attend is rendered as ceremony, as colour, as instance of an admired culture. The Somali community as economic actors — traders, intermediaries between European farms and Indian merchants and the African interior — is invisible to my account, which has no economic categories at all.
Kitosh
There are episodes that break the pastoral register. Kitosh, a young Kikuyu man, was beaten to death by his European employer for some minor refusal of a task. I frame his death as an act of will, a kind of African stoicism Europeans cannot understand: the African will not survive a violation of his honour, I suggest, and Kitosh chose to die rather than continue living after this beating.
A modern reader will note that Kitosh did not choose to die. Kitosh was murdered. The death was a crime. To aestheticise it is to aestheticise a crime — evidence of how thoroughly the colonial consciousness can transform structural violence into cultural observation. I can see almost everything that occurs on my farm; I cannot see, or cannot bring myself to write, the simple fact that an unarmed Kikuyu boy was killed by a European with a stick.
The Hunt
The hunting scenes — safaris with Denys, encounters with buffalo and lion — are rendered with the precision of someone who has handled firearms and watched animals at close range. I am not squeamish; I describe killing with the same attention I give to landscape. The buffalo's charge, the lion's patience, the giraffe's strange silent height — these are presences worthy of attention. The hunt is the colonial relationship in miniature: the European in the African landscape, exercising dominion over its largest inhabitants, experiencing the encounter as both danger and mastery.
From an Immigrant's Notebook
My most directly philosophical writing — reflections on the nature of time in Africa, on the relationship between the European and the African understanding of causality, on what it means to live in a place whose rhythms are older than any human arrangement. Africans, I argue, live in a different relationship to time than Europeans — more patient, more cyclical, less driven by the linear urgency that makes European civilisation productive and restless.
The observation is acute and condescending in equal measure. I am describing a genuine difference in temporal experience and attributing it to racial character rather than to economic condition. The subsistence farmer experiences time differently from the coffee planter because their work demands different rhythms, not because their minds are differently constructed. But I cannot make this distinction, because it would require me to see the Kikuyu as economic actors shaped by material conditions — which would require seeing myself as part of that same economy rather than as a philosophical observer of timeless Africa.
The Hills
The Ngong Hills appear throughout as the presiding image — visible from the farm, changing colour with the light and seasons, their four peaks providing orientation in a landscape that might otherwise feel featureless to a European eye. Blue at dawn, purple at dusk, sometimes lost entirely in cloud, sometimes sharp-edged against a sky of a blue that exists nowhere else. The hills are my horizon, my compass, the visible boundary of the world I have claimed. After my departure, I continue to see them in dreams.
The Selling of the Farm
The end comes with the loss of the farm: the sale negotiations, the dispersal of the squatters who have nowhere to go because the land around Nairobi is all owned now, the last weeks before departure. Finding land for the Kikuyu squatters — negotiating with the colonial government, pleading with officials, eventually securing a parcel at Dagoretti for the oldest members of the community — is the most straightforwardly ethical act I perform and the most politically revealing.
The squatters have no rights. They exist at the discretion of the colonial administration. The land they had lived on before colonialism was taken by laws predating my arrival. My efforts on their behalf are genuine and limited by the same system that made them necessary. The irony is structural: the woman who owned what was once theirs must now petition the government to give them somewhere else to go, and the government's willingness to listen depends on her status as a European landowner — the very category that dispossessed them in the first place.
Denys's Grave
Denys Finch Hatton's funeral on the hill — the grave overlooking the Rift Valley, the lions that were said to come to the grave site afterwards and lie there in the long grass, the sense that the land itself was mourning. Whether the lions actually came is beside the point; what matters is that the prose creates a world in which they would come, a world in which the relationship between the European and the African landscape is so intimate, so deeply felt, that even the animals participate in the European's grief. The land mourning the coloniser is the colonial fantasy in its most seductive form — the dream that the possessed loves the possessor.
The Departure
The departure is rendered with controlled grief — the last views, the last conversations with people I have known for seventeen years, the last sight of the hills from the road to Nairobi. I do not weep on the page; I compose myself with the discipline of someone who understands that restraint produces more powerful effects than abandon. What I am describing has already become impossible. The Africa I am remembering is not a place that can be revisited but a condition of consciousness that departure has permanently altered.
The Ngong Hills, at the end, remain. They will still be there when all the European farms are gone, which will be in thirty years. I cannot know this, but the reader can.
What Endures
What makes this account endure as a document of empire, rather than merely as a period piece, is the sincerity of a love for a place I had no right to and the completeness with which the prose enacts a contradiction I cannot see. I write the African dawn with a beauty that makes you want to be there, and the beauty is built on six thousand acres of stolen land worked by people whose names I know and whose dispossession I cannot recognise as dispossession.
The reader who is moved by the prose and troubled by its conditions is having exactly the experience the book, without intending to, provides — the experience of feeling the seductiveness of the colonial pastoral from inside, and understanding, at the same time, why it had to end. The farm has gone. The hills are still there.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Two paperbacks are the standard recommendations. The Penguin Modern Classics edition is the British scholarly text, with a useful introduction by Tim Youngs that situates the book in its colonial context. The Vintage International paperback is the standard American edition, often bound together with Shadows on the Grass (1960), Blixen's later return to the same material.
The Penguin Modern Classics paperback. Introduction by Tim Youngs. The standard British scholarly text.
The Vintage International paperback, frequently bound with
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