Out of Africa Study Guide

At first glance much of the book, especially the section titled“From an Immigrant’s Notebook,” seems to be a string of loosely related episodes organized from Blixen’s memory, or perhaps from notes she made while in Africa (indeed, in one of the early chapters she describes discussing the beginning of her work on the book with her young cook Kamante).

A closer look, however, yields a more formal approach.

Trials

Blixen examines the details and ethical implications of two separate“trials.” The first is African: a gathering of tribesmen on her farm to adjudicate the case of a Kikuyu child who accidentally killed one playmate and maimed another with a shotgun. This process seems largely devoid of Western-style moral or ethical considerations: most of the energy expended indeliberations is directed at determining the proper amount of reparation the perpetrator’s father must pay, in livestock, to the families of the victims. Later, Blixen describes a British colonial criminal trial in Nairobi: the defendant is European settler Jasper Abraham who is accused of causing, by intention or indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named Kitosch. Blixen does not directly compare the two proceedings, but the contrasts are stark.

Contrasts and opposites

These two trials, separated by most of the book, may also be part of a deeper exploration by Blixen into one of her pet notions: the“Unity” of contrasts. Perhaps her greatest elucidation of this idea comes in Shadows on the Grass , which she wrote thirty years after leaving Kenya:

Her life in Africa offered her no shortage of such contrasting dualities: town and country, dry season and rainy season, Muslim and Christian. Her most constant theme is the contrast of African and European.

Africans

Much of Blixen’s energy in Out of Africa is spent trying to capture for the reader the character of the Africans who lived on or near her farm, and the efforts of European colonists (herself included) to co-exist with them.

Although she was unavoidably in the position of landholder, and wielded great power over her tenants, Blixen was known in her day for her respectful and admiring relationships with Africans– a connection that made her increasingly suspect among the other colonists as tensions grew between Europeans and Africans. “We were good friends,” she writes about her staff and workers. “I reconciled myself to the fact that while I should never quite know or understand them, they knew methrough and through.”

But Blixen does understand– and thoughtfully delineates – the differences between the culture of the Kikuyu who work her farm and who raise and trade their own sheep and cattle, and that of the Maasai, a volatile warrior culture of nomadic cattle-drovers who live on a designated tribal reservation south of the farm’s property. Blixen also describes in some detail the lives of the Somali Muslims who immigrated south from Somaliland to work in Kenya, and a few members of the substantial Indian merchant minority which played a large role in the colony’s early development.

Her descriptions of Africans and their behavior or customs sometimes employ some of the abrasive racial language of her time, but her portraits are unusually frank and accepting, and are generally free of the period’s European preconceptions of Africans as savages or simpletons. She saw in the ancient tribal customs a logic and dignity which many of her fellow colonists did not. Some of those customs, such as the valuation of daughters based on the dowry they will bring at marriage, seem ugly to Western eyes; Blixen’s voice in describing these traditions is largely free of judgment.

She was admired in return by many of her African employees and acquaintances, who saw her as a thoughtful and wise figure, and turned to her for the resolution of many disputes and conflicts .

Europeans

The other characters who populate Out of Africa are the Europeans– colonists as well as some of the wanderers who stopped in Kenya. Foremost among them is Denys Finch Hatton, who was for a time Blixen’s lover after her separation and then her divorce from her husband. Finch Hatton, like Blixen herself, was known to feel close to his African acquaintances –as, indeed, do virtually all of the Europeans for whom Blixen expresses real regard in Out of Africa .

Blixen limits most of her reflections to those Europeans who were her frequent or favorite guests, such as a man she identifies only as“Old Knudsen,” a down-and-out Danish fisherman who invites himself to take up residence on her farm, and then abruptly dies there.

Edward, Prince of Wales, also makes an appearance; his 1928 visit to the colony was an event of the utmost importance in Kenya’s aristocratic social circles (the Governor of the colony ordered the streets of Nairobi repaved for the occasion).