General

Book Review: Out of Africa

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ June 6, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

I picked up Karen Blixen’s book, Out of Africa at a flea market the other day. At 2CHF it was a bargain, even for someone that avoids books that are far too popular for logic. And this book has certainly carved a name in history, romanticizing Kenya to so many that followed Karen to her home at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Yet, as I set out to read it, I began to be disappointed. The book had no story, and seemed just a patchwork of places, events, and circumstances. It was only after 200 pages that I heard any mention of Karen’s husband. I was by then, very close to dropping the venture.

Yet, this very meandering of the book, also redeemed it. For someone who holds a very favorable view of Kenya, the book took me back, albeit briefly to my first grand view of the Great Rift Valley, to Mt. Longonot viewed from above, to the rains and how they suckled a parched land, and of the masai.

Then, there were the people - an uninterrupted stream of characters that come and go, seeminly at will and in any order. If nothing else, Karen Blixen proves to be an astute, neutral observer, explaining the difference between the natives and the white people, between the Kikuyu and Masai, the Somali and the Kenyan. I cannot say if she was right, but she paints them with nostalgia. There is some neutrality too - the shooting of lions, the death of a child, and the killing of a native servant told with equal nonchalance. Yes, there prejudice, but of a settler, not of a colonizer.

Between the place and the people, she weaves the story of a journey. Not necessarily her own, for she herself seems to be an onlooker to all and sundry that pass her by. In the many experiences of the nomad, the outlaw, the settler, and the native, she asks with great eloquence the bigger questions of life. She asks, for instance, of what if the ‘natives’ were willing to embrace technology - ‘will they be able to have our motor car at cost price then, as they can now have the doctrine of Transubstantiation?’ We are still struggling with that.

There are large parts of this book I skip over. The description of the storks does not interest me, nor what happened to Farah - her Somali servant - on any given Sunday. But in the places and people described is a reflection of myself - at another time and now. It is that which makes this book popular I suspect, for we can all find something of ourselves in it. The rest of the book can be skipped over.