{"id":4923,"date":"2021-03-16T13:38:50","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T13:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toonsarah-travels.blog\/staging\/?p=4923"},"modified":"2021-03-16T13:53:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-16T13:53:14","slug":"out-of-africa-visiting-karen-blixens-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toonsarah-travels.blog\/staging\/out-of-africa-visiting-karen-blixens-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Africa: visiting Karen Blixen’s home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills<\/span><\/strong><\/p>Karen Blixen, Out of Africa<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

With this sentence Karen Blixen opens her <\/strong><\/span>account of life on a coffee plantation just outside Nairobi. It was the 1920s, and this was British East Africa, not Kenya – part of the (by then fading) British Empire. The book presents a vivid, if at times uncomfortable, picture of African colonial life and the relationships between colonists and native inhabitants.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some background<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Karen was born in 1885, as Karen Dinesen, into a wealthy Danish family. In 1914 she married her Swedish second cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, becoming Baroness Blixen. He was a keen big game hunter, a pursuit still considered acceptable at the time (something you must bear in mind when learning about Karen and\/or reading her book).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using an investment from their common uncle, the couple bought land in what was then British East Africa, planning to start a cattle farm. But they later changed their minds, having become convinced that coffee would be more profitable. With the uncle they founded the Karen Coffee Company and set about establishing their coffee farm. It did not go well as the First World War led to a shortage of workers and supplies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite this, they decided to move to a bigger farm and bought a property to the west of Nairobi, near the foot of the Ngong Hills. Of their 6,000 acres of land they used just 600 acres for a coffee plantation; the rest were used by the natives (known as \u2018squatters\u2019) for grazing or left as untouched virgin forest. But still the farm continued to struggle. The land here wasn\u2019t really suitable for growing coffee as its elevation is too high. There were other problems too. A fire destroyed the coffee processing factory; there were poor harvests; and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Karen and the Baron separated in 1921, and subsequently divorced in 1925, she was left to run the farm on her own, which she did until the company finally collapsed in 1931. Meanwhile she had fallen in love with the English hunter, safari guide and pilot Denys Finch Hatton. This romance is the main subject of the film \u2018Out of Africa\u2019, in which Hatton was played by Robert Redford, and Karen by Meryl Streep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I haven’t seen the film, I was reading her book<\/a> in preparation for this visit. Unlike the film, the book focuses more on the day to day life of the farm. It is thus very interesting background reading for a visit here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Low
The main house<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Visiting the farm<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We drove out of the city centre along the Ngong road. In her day this would, according to her accounts of it, have been little more than a mud track, impassable in wet weather. Today it is a busy dual carriageway, with a large slum to the right. Our driver Jackson told us, with a tinge of misplaced pride, that this is the second largest in Africa, after Soweto. In contrast, on the left is the affluent suburb of Karen, developed on land once part of her coffee farm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were met on arrival by a young guide, who did an excellent job of showing us around. Firstly, she told us something of Karen Blixen\u2019s story which echoed what I had read in the book. Outside the house she showed us some old farm machinery from Karen\u2019s time. There were ploughs that would have been pulled by her oxen; a wagon used to carry the sacks of coffee to the railway station in Nairobi for onward transport to the port in Mombassa; and a tractor.<\/p>\n\n\n