Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the eighteen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades under the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish. The book has sometimes been published under the author's pen name, Isak Dinesen.
Background Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony known today as Kenya. The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland below the Ngong Hills about 16 km (10 mi) southwest of Nairobi, which at the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot on the Uganda Railway. The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed their farm as a coffee plantation instead. It was managed by Europeans, including, at the start, Karen's brother Thomas – but most of the labour was provided by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180 days of labour a year in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands. When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to 2,400 ha (6,000 acres). The new acquisitions included the site of the house which features so prominently in Out of Africa. The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting safaris which Karen later remembered as paradisiacal. But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a talented hunter and a well liked companion, was an unfaithful husband and a poor businessman who squandered much of the money to be invested in the farm. In 1921 the couple separated, and in 1925 they were divorced; Karen took over the management of the farm on her own. She was well suited to the work – fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers. But the climate and soil of her particular tract were not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields as well as a pestilence of grasshoppers one season - and the falling market price of coffee was no help. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it. The buyer, Remi Martin, who planned to carve it into residential plots, offered to allow Blixen to stay in the house, but she declined, and returned to Denmark. Blixen moved back to the family's estate of Rungstedlund (in Rungsted, Denmark) to live with her mother, and took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a fiction collection, Seven Gothic Tales, and in 1937 her Kenyan memoir, Out of Africa. The book's title was likely derived from the title of a poem, "Ex Africa," she had written in 1915, while recuperating in a Danish hospital from her fight with syphilis. The poem's title is probably an abbreviation of the famous ancient Latin adage (credited to sages from Aristotle to Pliny to Erasmus) Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, which translates as “Out of Africa, always something new ”
Structure and style
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