Out of Africa by Karen Blixen A Review for Bohemian Adventure

I recently read Out of Africa, Karen Blixen’s memoir published under the pen name Isak Dinesen. I had seen the movie many years ago, but until recently I had never given much thought to reading the book. What finally brought me to it was a conversation in a store here in the Birmingham area.

I was visiting Avontuur, a sporting lifestyle and craftsmanship store in Homewood, Alabama, whose name means “adventure” in Dutch and Afrikaans. There I met a gentleman named Kelvin Terry, and we began discussing our upcoming trips back to Africa. He asked whether I had heard of Peter Beard. I had not, but after looking him up, I became intrigued enough to read a biography of him and order his book The End of the Game. I recently posted a review of that biography here on the Bohemian Adventure website.

As I learned more about Beard, I discovered how deeply Out of Africa had influenced him. An artist and photographer whose attachment to Africa began as a young man, Beard established his Kenyan home, Hog Ranch, beside Blixen’s former property near the Ngong Hills. He also developed a friendship and collaboration with Kamante, her former cook, whose recollections and artwork became the basis of Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s Tales from Out of Africa. That connection made me want to read the memoir that had helped draw Beard to Africa in the first place.

I am glad I did. Out of Africa is a beautifully written account of Blixen’s years in colonial Kenya, and it fills an important gap in my own reading about the continent. I travel to Africa often, am always studying it, and have fallen in love with it. Each book adds something to my understanding, although the Africa described by one writer can be very different from that described by another.

Frederick Courteney Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa recounts adventures in southern Africa well before Blixen’s arrival in British East Africa in 1914. Their lives in Africa did overlap: Selous was killed fighting German forces at Beho Beho, in what is now Tanzania, in January 1917. Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails, which I have also reviewed on this website, describes his 1909–1910 expedition, including his travels in what is now Kenya, a few years before Blixen arrived. The journeys of Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Burton take the story further back into the middle and later nineteenth century.

Then come writers and sportsmen such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark. Hemingway’s first African safari began in 1933, shortly after Blixen left Kenya in 1931, while Ruark’s African writing belongs largely to the 1950s and early 1960s. His novel Something of Value, another book reviewed here, explores the tensions and violence surrounding the Mau Mau uprising, in which Kikuyu grievances over land and colonial rule played a central role. Beard first visited Africa in 1955, while that conflict was still underway, and maintained a connection to Kenya for decades afterward.

Blixen’s memoir sits between those earlier journeys and the upheavals that followed. For me, it supplies another piece of the puzzle, particularly in understanding the country once known as British East Africa.

Published in 1937, Out of Africa draws on the seventeen years Blixen spent in Kenya, from 1914 to 1931. Its center is her coffee farm near Nairobi, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Yet the farm is much more than the setting. It gives the book its rhythm and holds together the relationships, responsibilities, and memories that make up her African life.

Readers familiar with the film will find a different emphasis here. Denys Finch Hatton is an important presence, but the memoir ranges far beyond their relationship. Blixen builds her account through recollections, character portraits, and reflections rather than a continuous, chronological narrative. The pace is unhurried, and the pleasure lies as much in her observations as in the events she recounts.

Her descriptions of the country are among the book’s great strengths. She writes about altitude, weather, animals, and the changing light with an attention that makes the landscape feel immediate. For anyone who enjoys being outdoors, these passages have a particular appeal. They convey how closely a place can become bound up with a person’s sense of home.

Equally important are the people around her. Farah, her Somali aide and trusted companion, and Kamante, the Kikuyu boy who becomes her cook, emerge as memorable individuals. Her accounts of conversations, disagreements, illness, and daily work give the memoir much of its warmth and humor. They also make the eventual loss of the farm mean something beyond the failure of a business.

Blixen’s observations of Kikuyu, Maasai, and Somali life are fascinating, but they need to be read with an awareness of her position. She writes as a European settler within a colonial society, and some of her language and generalizations reflect that world. Her affection for particular people is evident, as is her concern for their future, yet affection does not remove the inequalities surrounding their relationships.

That tension makes the book more complicated and more interesting. It offers a personal view of colonial Kenya rather than a complete account of it. Alongside its beauty are questions about land, belonging, and what happens when one society imposes its arrangements on another.

This is also where I see a connection to Peter Beard. Blixen’s memoir and Beard’s work differ greatly in tone and purpose, but both are concerned with places and ways of life undergoing profound change. Her account conveys attachment and loss on the scale of a farm and its community. Beard’s later work, particularly The End of the Game, turns toward the pressures on wildlife and the land itself.

The closing portion of Out of Africa gives the earlier recollections their emotional weight. As the farm fails and departure becomes unavoidable, leaving means giving up a whole life built around a place and its people. Blixen’s restraint makes that farewell especially moving.

I would recommend Out of Africa to anyone interested in African literature, the history of Kenya, or writing that captures a deep attachment to the natural world. Its leisurely structure may require an adjustment for readers expecting the momentum of a safari narrative, but the reward is in the language and the accumulated detail.

For me, it has added depth to books I had already read and helped explain the fascination Blixen’s writing held for Peter Beard. What began with a conversation at Avontuur led me to a memoir I should have read years ago. It has earned a place among the books I would recommend to anyone who shares a love of Africa.