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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.

Contents 1 Specifications 2 Background 3 Themes 3.1 Trials 3.2 Contrasts and opposites 4 Shadows on the Grass 5 Film, TV or theatrical adaptations 6 Notes 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] Specifications

• Author = Isak Dinesen
• Cover illustrator =
• Series =
• Genre = Memoir
• Publisher = Putnam (UK); Gyldendal (Denmark)
• Country = United Kingdom, Denmark
• Publication Date =
• Nature of Rarity =
• Number in Existence =
• Estimated Value =

[edit] 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.^[1] 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^[2] which, in many cases, had simply been theirs before the British arrived and claimed them.^[3]

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.^[4]

The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting safaris which Karen later remembered as paradisiacal.^[5] But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a talented hunter and a well-liked companion, was an unfaithful husband and a poor businessman.^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[8]

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.”^[9]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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:

"Two homogenous units will never be capable of forming a whole… Man and woman become one… A hook and an eye are a Unity, a fastening, but with two hooks you can do nothing. A right-hand glove with its contrast the left-hand glove makes a whole, a pair of gloves; but two right-hand gloves you throw away."^[10]

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Memoirs

[edit] External links

• Book Summary
• Out of Isak Dinesen The true story behind Out of Africa
• Karen Blixen-Isak Dinesen Site
• Photos of the first American edition of Out of Africa
• Literapedia notes for Out of Africa