Nairobi

At the Karen Blixen Museum, which commemorates the Danish writer, a myth is shattered.

I visited a museum in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. A legend died there. When I saw the film “Out of Africa” based on the book by Karen Blixen for the first time, I wept so much that I frightened myself. When I saw it a second time, I again cried buckets and it was clear to me that Robert Redford ought to wash my hair. When I saw it the third time, I wept ostriches and zebras. Then, when I decided a few weeks ago that I would go to Africa for one month, to Nairobi, I watched the movie once more to see the landscape and get myself in the mood. I cried lions and gnus.

“Nairobi was our town, twelve miles away, down on a flat bit of land amongst hills. (It is still there.) Here was the Government House (Colonialists!), and the big central office (Exploiters!), from here the country was ruled (It still is today – by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga – and not exactly in the best interests of all Kenyans). It is impossible that a town will not play part in your life (could be Frankfurt); it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation (could be homesickness).” Karen Blixen, known to her friends as Tania and her readers as Isak Dinesen, the old Danish lady.

Needless to say, I planned a visit to the Karen Blixen Museum in the Nairobi suburb of Karen (!). Finally, I, too, could see the Ngong Hills from afar. Simply pronouncing this name caused the terraced crowns of the acacia trees dotted in an endlessly broad savannah landscape to appear before my eyes. On the horizon, in front of the setting sun, a magnificent lion chases after a clever zebra, which he naturally is unable to pull down because this time I – with a dose of kitsch – am the director of the film, and not real life. “I had a farm in Africa …” Oh, sigh, a deep sigh and a confession: I only began reading the book Out of Africa before my journey to Nairobi. It has about as much in common with the film as a cup of fragrant and invigorating coffee made of freshly ground beans has in common with a cup of lukewarm, lumpy instant coffee. I read and I read and was thrilled by the plain, strong language and the images that hung before my mind’s eye in splendid frames. A changing exhibition after every page. It is the Manesse edition in a ladylike size with pages made of that thin paper that sounds very distinguished when leafed through.

Inevitably, your face contorts in that somewhat smug expression with raised eyebrows to read sentences such as this: “Out on the safaris, I had seen a herd of buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.” By the way, the buffalo are today one of the reasons that an unarmed lady ought not travel alone to the Ngong Hills, which lie about 30 kilometres from the city on the land like the knuckles of a hand. The other reason is two-legged villains.

Now in Africa, lying under the mosquito net in the evening, I leafed further through the Manesse booklet and became increasingly restless. Not because of Denys Finch Hatton, alias Robert Redford, who appears astonishingly rarely in the book. I slowly became angry with Mrs Blixen for sentences such as this one: “The dead lions (Finch Hatton had just shot a lion and Baroness Blixen a lioness) close by, looked magnificent in their nakedness (skinned!): there was not a particle of superfluous fat on them, each muscle was a bold controlled curve, they needed no cloak (!), they were, all through, what they ought to be (dead).”

Shortly after my rising feeling of alienation, however, I did visit the Karen Blixen Museum, the house she lived in. Denmark gave it to Kenya as a gift in 1963 for its independence. It is a house. It is small. You are far from alone in it with your thoughts. Very many English-speaking persons are there with very different physiognomies than Meryl Streep in the film. It is from here that she sallied forth to feel grand feelings whilst killing lions.

In the souvenir shop, I bought a bookmark with the head of a Kikuyu girl painted by Karen Blixen for the Manesse booklet that bears the same image on the cover. I ate overpriced salad in the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden and bought a bracelet of coloured glass beads in the gallery next to it. This was in Africa, not out of it. Kenya has red earth and its most pleasant climate is near Nairobi. You are sceptical, but do not wish to leave. You cannot stay. Again, you understand the pain of the woman who lived here, loved here, yes, hunted here and fought. Who could be a different woman than the one she was in Denmark. Yet, the thing is to let the people who this country belongs to be who they are here and not what the wealthy whites who still lead plentiful lives here let them be. Yes, the Mzungus give the Kenyans jobs: cook, nanny, gardener and housekeeper. But, what work would they have and what work would they themselves give others if they had the opportunity, just a chance …

A dream, pain, naïveté, wound and shame. What I will keep is the cathartic blubbing at the end of Out of Africa – the film and the book. There will be more reasons for this weeping now.

Swahili of the Day: Simba means lion.