This article was written by Monique Filsnoel
"I had a farm in Africa. . ."
As I walk up the shrubbery-lined path to Karen Blixen's house in Kenya I spot the square clock, with its bold Roman numerals, over the verandah. Time played a big role in her life since she waited a lot. She waited for her philandering husband to return from safaris, she waited for her lover Denys Finch-Hatton to arrive in his single engine plane and she waited for the rains to quench her parched coffee plantation. Men and nature, they all failed her.
In January 1914, Karen Christentze Dinesen, a 28-year-old Dane arrived in the coastal city of Mombassa. Hours after getting off the ship she was married to her fiance, Baron Bror von Blixen. Although she had spent time in the capitals of Europe, this was her first trip to Africa. It took her a month all told--Copenhagen to Paris to Naples by train, then by steamer to Mombassa.
With the optimism of youth and financing from their families, Karen and Bror set off to manage a coffee farm called M'Bagathi. Two years later, they moved to a larger farm outside Nairobi at the foot of the Ngong Hills, acquired by Karen's family business, the Karen Coffee Company. This was M'Bogani, a Swahili word meaning "in the forest", and the setting for one of the most famous opening lines in literature: "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills."
I shiver and wrap my shawl around my shoulders, a reminder that Nairobi sits at an altitude of 1,000 meters. I climb up two steps, cross the narrow porch and walk into the silent one-storey grey stone house.
Obviously the city, and the country itself, have changed dramatically in the past 90 years. This area is now a suburb of polluted over-crowded Nairobi, and it is hard to imagine this home in the middle of a wilderness in which Karen's favorite dog Dawn was taken by a leopard.
As I enter the dining room I try to imagine what life was like here at the outset of WWI. The sound of my steps on the polished cedar wood floor fills the lonely space; I am the only visitor on this misty Tuesday morning. The long table is set with white and blue china, a large bunch of pale yellow roses rests in the middle, and the walls are paneled in dark Kenyan mvuli wood.
Karen organized memorable dinners for her many visitors in this room. She taught her Kenyan cook, Kamante, what sophisticated Europeans liked to eat. For a dinner in honor of the Prince of Wales, we learn from Judith Thurman, Karen Blixen's biographer, "the meal began with [Kamante's] famous clear soup and was followed by Mombasa [sic] turbot served with hollandaise, ham poached in champagne, partridges with peas, a pasta with cream and truffles, greens, pearl onions and tomato salad, wild mushroom croustades, a savarin, strawberries, and grenadines from the garden."
When Karen Blixen was not entertaining or supervising the operations of the plantation, this long wooden dining table became her literary workbench. "I used to sit and write in the dining-room, with papers spread all over the dinner table," she wrote in Out of Africa, "for I had accounts and estimates of the farm to do, in between my stories, and desolate notes from my farming manager to answer."
I could imagine her writing late into the night, undisturbed by the curious gaze of her houseboys with only the cuckoo clock punctuating the silence.
She wrote essays and theater and fiction, but she did not receive immediate success. In 1924 she wrote a long essay, "Modern Marriage and Other Reflections", which was only published posthumously in 1977. In 1926, her marionette play "The Revenge of Truth" was published in a Danish literary journal, a long-delayed satisfaction since she had started to write the play when she was a young girl in Denmark. During these years she drafted her first stories, which were published in 1933 in New York as "Seven Gothic Tales". And she also wrote numerous letters to her family, particularly to her mother and her brother Thomas. Five years after leaving Kenya in 1936, she wrote Out of Africa in the Danish fishing village of Skagen. The book, a memoir, was published in both Danish and English the following year.
I walk from the dining room on to the adjoining terrace, which opens into a large lawn where open air dances and festivities, ngomas, took place. I sit on a grey stone bench by the mill-stone table from where I imagine Karen would gaze at the hills at sunset or watched the stars with Denys Finch-Hatton.
It was not always an easy time for this strong and sensitive woman. First there was the problem with Bror. He had virtually given up on their marriage and spent much time away from home. His absence had a business implication as well as a personal cost--the coffee plantation was run down to the point that Karen's uncle, who was chairman of the Karen Coffee Company, fired Bror Blixen for incompetence and assigned all the responsibility for managing the farm to Karen. From this house Karen, with the help of Farah, her faithful Somali butler, managed a 4,500 acres farm that included 600 acres planted with coffee.
From where I sit I can also imagine Karen gazing at the pennants she had hung on a tall pole which marked the grave of her lover Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford in the 1985 movie Out of Africa) who crashed and died a few months before her departure from Kenya. "I bought at the dhuka a yard of white cloth which the natives call Americani," Karen wrote. "Farah and I raised three tall poles in the ground behind the grave, and nailed the cloth on to them, then from my house I could distinguish the exact spot of the grave, like a little white point in the green hill."
I inspect the rest of the house. In Karen's bedroom, the bed is covered with a lace bedspread. Here she recovered from long bouts of malaria. A pair of Jodhpur trousers, worn by Meryl Streep in the movie, lies on a chair close to a leather suitcase initialed KCB.
But it is the sitting room that touches me most. After dinner, Karen would gather her guests, and as a gifted story teller, she entertained them with tales in front of the fireplace. The flickering light animates the Chinese figures that seem to dance on the French screen.
Her rare book collection and Denys's as well, are still in this room. I touch the small oblong copper plates she had nailed in the wood with Denys--the initials DFH.
In a corner, the gramophone is ready to play, with a large black vinyl record sitting silently. "Mozart, Concerto D Minor K466" the round label reads. Was this music her accompaniment during the long evenings? In her memoir she writes of her isolation: "At times, life on the farm was very lonely, and in the stillness of the evenings when the minutes dripped from the clock, life seemed to be dripping out of you with them, just for want of white people to talk to."
In the end, she ran out of time and options. In 1925 her marriage with Bror ended in divorce. In 1929 her relationship with Denys was nearing its end--his death was just a final punctuation that closed that part of her life's story. The accumulation of debts, the droughts, and a succession of financial crises made the sale of the farm inevitable. In 1931, after fifteen years, Karen left Kenya lonely and bankrupt.
When she left, Karen gave her horses and dogs to friends. She sold most of the furniture, glassware and china and took only the most precious pieces with her back to Denmark. "In the end there were no things in the rooms at all..." Most of the furniture in the house today are replicas. The originals--the gramophone that Denys gave her, the hand-painted screen, the chest given to her by Farah--are in her family home in Rungstedlund. What does remain is peace and silence, where the three clocks have stopped to mark the passage of time.
Karen Blixen's house in Nairobi is now a museum. It is located on Karen Road and is open from 9:30 till 6:00 every day.
Karen Blixen Museum
http://www.isak-dinesen.dk/engelsk/museer1.html
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