Our Kenya

Karen Blixen and the Colonial Myth

5 min read

Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke (pen name Isak Dinesen) owned a 4,000-acre coffee farm on the slopes of the Ngong Hills, southwest of Nairobi, from 1914 to 1931. The farm failed financially, and she left Kenya in 1931. But before leaving, she decided to write about her experience. "Out of Africa," published in 1937, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and became the most influential literary work about colonial Kenya. It created a myth of colonial Kenya that persists to this day.

The Farm and Financial Failure

Blixen's farm was not a success. Coffee farming in Kenya required capital, knowledge, and fortune. Her farm was located in the Ngong Hills region southwest of Nairobi. The farm faced: low coffee prices (especially after the 1929 crash), pests and disease, labour challenges, and Blixen's own lack of agricultural expertise. By 1931, the farm was bankrupt. Blixen, now divorced from her husband (Baron Bror Finecke), had to leave Kenya. She departed having lost her investment and her home.

The financial failure is important because it colours the memoir that followed. Blixen did not write about Kenya from a position of settler triumph but from one of romantic loss. She was not the victor but the person who had tried and failed. This gave her writing a melancholy tone that appealed to readers.

Out of Africa and Myth-Making

"Out of Africa" is not a straightforward memoir. It is a literary construction, shaped for narrative effect and thematic coherence. Blixen wrote not as a farmer reporting on agriculture but as a writer creating a portrait of a world that was already dying (she was writing during or after the Depression, as colonialism was beginning to face challenges).

The book romanticises colonial Kenya. Blixen writes of her African workers with paternalistic affection: they are noble, wise, and tragic, but they are not modern or equal. She portrays colonial Kenya as a place where ancient ways of life persisted and where Europeans could experience authenticity and meaning unavailable in modern Europe. She describes the landscape with extraordinary beauty. She depicts herself as a woman of sensitivity and depth, making a home in an alien place.

What the book does not do is examine the injustice underlying the colonial system. It does not question the taking of land from African pastoral communities. It does not engage with the forced labour, the wage suppression, or the violence embedded in colonial governance. It romanticises these systems as part of Kenya's tragic beauty.

The Nobel Prize and Canonisation

The book won international acclaim. It was translated into numerous languages. It won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937, giving it canonical status. For decades, "Out of Africa" was how many people worldwide learned about colonial Kenya. It shaped perceptions of colonialism itself, presenting it as a system of tragedy and beauty rather than injustice and theft.

The book's literary quality is genuine. Blixen was an accomplished writer, and the prose in "Out of Africa" is beautiful. But literary beauty can obscure moral blindness. The book's elegance comes partly from its willingness to aestheticise systems of domination.

The 1985 Film

In 1985, "Out of Africa" was adapted into a major motion picture (directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford). The film won seven Academy Awards and reached a global audience. It reinforced the literary myth with visual images: the stunning landscapes, the romantic relationship between Blixen and Robert Redford's character, the elegance of colonial life.

The film, like the book, is not historically false. Blixen did experience loss. Colonial Kenya did have stunning landscapes. But the film, like the book, presents colonialism through a lens of romance and tragedy rather than injustice. For many viewers, the film became the definitive image of colonial Kenya.

The Legacy

The "Karen" suburb of Nairobi is named after Blixen, a choice that honours the literary figure while obscuring the fact that the area was colonised and alienated from African communities. The suburb is wealthy and exclusive, continuing (in a different form) the elite spatial segregation of the colonial era.

Blixen's legacy is complex. As a writer, she produced work of genuine literary merit. As a chronicler of colonialism, she produced a myth that romanticised injustice. Her contribution to global culture is real, but it is inseparable from her role in mythologising the colonial system that she experienced as a participant.

Understanding Blixen is essential to understanding how colonialism justified itself: through stories of beauty, tragedy, and the inevitability of cultural change. These stories are powerful. They make colonialism seem like something that happened, that was regrettable but inevitable, rather than something that was chosen and imposed by force.

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