Out of Africa—A Literary Pilgrimage by John Greeves

Out of Africa—A Literary Pilgrimage

by John Greeves

Are you one of those people who sees the film, then reads the book, or is it the other way around? For me this particular pilgrimage represented more than a trip to a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills. I wanted to find some tonal hues of Africa and combine this with the rich lyricalism I found in Karen Blixen’s book Out of Africa, and discover something of the author herself.

I am up at four this morning, probably due to a strange bed and the expectancy of this trip to Karen Blixen’s house. Drawing the curtains back, I see life beyond the tourist bubble- an unbroken line of city workers filing past (from the shanty towns), to their place of work. Nairobi it seems and its people are all early risers; a side of life many privileged outsiders never see.

After a poolside breakfast and a solitary car trip, I arrive alone at Blixen’s former home. No tourist buses can be seen and I’m fortunate to have the whole place to myself, except for the guide who has arrived early to meet me.

The location isn’t what I expected. The farm has gone and suburbia has crept in its outstretched arms. The squat bungalow with a long veranda, sits squarely beside several outbuildings including a separate kitchen block. The house is set in massive lawns with tall trees, shrubs and fragrant flowers with the distant backdrop to the blue knuckles of the Ngong hills stretching out.

Inside a blurring of identity exists, between the authentic and the assortment of film paraphernalia. It’s difficult to tell who has prominence here; the former cast of Out of Africa (Robert Redford and Meryl Streep) with their film costumes casually strewn across every room or the rightful occupants Denys Finch Hatton (the bald-headed interloper) and Karen Blixen with her hunting dogs?

Separating fiction from fact, in this house, becomes increasingly difficult as I pass from the living room, bedroom, bathroom to the dining room,

finding each theatrically staged and believing only the tin bath and commode hold a down-to-earth gravitas. What did I really expect, since 1931, three other families have lived here before the Danish government bought the house and thirty-six acres of adjacent land and presented it to the Kenyan Government in 1963?

Change is inevitable. When I visited, plans were afoot to build the biggest wind farm in Africa on the Ngong Hills. Continuity with the past appears waferthin, yet the distant Mountain of the Ngong which rises two thousand feet above the surrounding countryside stretch in a long unbroken ridge north to south. They still remain crowned as Blixen described them “with four noble peaks like immovable darker blue waves against the sky,” and give some assurance among this uncertainty of replicas like the cuckoo clock.

After all this time, I can’t expect the museum guide who has given up his time to know if her book presented an idealised view of colonial life between 1913 and 1931, or whether Karen left debts with the local Asian traders when she left Kenya? What I can appreciate, sitting here gazing from the window seat is the splendour of the hot shimmering air and changing patterns of the Ngong Hills so beautifully extolled by Karen Blixen in her book and knowing this image at least has not been eroded by time.

In her book she also talks of a port and starboard light to guide the traveller home. I expect someday it was always her intention to return to Kenya but she never did.

Outside, in the warmth, a huddle of talking gardeners remain my only connection now to this former writer. They smile and tell me I am early. ‘Would you like to see something, not many people see?’ they ask. They point to a path. I follow it down and come across the rusted remains of the coffee factory, a partial picture of something unique with a solitary coffee plant that has survived to carry away in my mind’s eye from her farm in Africa.

John Greeves originally hails from Lincolnshire. He believes in the power of poetry and writing to change people’s lives and the need for language to move and connect people to the modern world. Since retiring from Cardiff University, Greeves works as a freelance journalist who's interested in an eclectic range of topics.