![]() ![]() It’s often said that Blixen represents everything that’s bad about colonialism, and yet as we get to know her, we also come to see that she recognises enough in different tribal cultures to realise that while she ‘should never quite know or understand them, they knew me through and through’. While some readers will find Blixen’s Out of Africa unstructured and inconsequential, others will be enthralled by her writing from memory as she disentangles how the Rich White Lady can co-exist with the Poor Black Men that work on her farm. All this would spoil Blixen’s myth created by Sydney Pollack’s loose 1985 adaptation of the book in which Meryl Streep plays Blixen opposite Robert Redford’s Denys Finch Hatton. ![]() These days, no-one ever seems to mention that the gentlewoman who lived in the smart colonial villa just outside Nairobi battled syphilis and died of anorexia. Part legacy snapshot of colonial Africa, but mostly a lyrical meditation on the landscapes and people who touched her heart, it’s a favourite of dusty backpackers with a literary mind and a romantic soul. ![]() It’s one of those lines that every traveller knows: ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.’ They are the first words of Out of Africa, a gorgeously old-fashioned and out-dated memoir by a Danish woman expat living in British East Africa almost a century ago, in the days when European aristocrats owned coffee plantations in what’s now Kenya. ![]()
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