Africa Book Views

General Goods

Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, a pen name 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.

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.”[8]

Out of Africa is divided into five sections, most of which are non-linear and seem to reflect no particular chronology. The first two focus primarily on Africans who lived or had business on the farm, and include close observations of native ideas about justice and punishment in the wake of a gruesome accidental shooting. The third section, called “Visitors to the Farm,” describes some of the more colorful local characters who considered Blixen’s farm to be a safe haven. The fourth, “From an Immigrant’s Notebook,” is a collection of short sub-chapters in which Blixen reflects on the life of a white African colonist.

Out of Africa has been noted for its melancholy and elegiac style – Blixen biographer Judith Thurman employs an African tribal phrase to describe it: “clear darkness.”[9] It is not an insignificant fact that Blixen’s tales encompass the deaths of at least five of the important people in the book. As the chapters proceed, Blixen begins to meditate more plainly on her feelings of loss and nostalgia for her days in Africa. As she describes the economic realities of her failed business closing in on her, she comments wryly on her mixture of despair and denial, until the last days are upon her and she gives in to the inevitable.