Karen Blixen's Coffee  Years

by Linda Rice Lorenzetti

In November of 1937, Karen Blixen's eloquent memoirs about the years she spent living on a British  East African coffee farm were published in the U.S. The book, Out of Africa, was so successful that it was chosen as the prestigious "Book-of-the-Month" in February of 1938. In 1957, on the merit of that work and others, Blixen was repeatedly named the leading candidate for that year's Nobel  Prize for Literature, though she did not receive it. A second book about her experiences in Africa, Shadows on the Grass, was published in the United States in 1961, two years before her death at age  77.

In 1985, the movie "Out of Africa," starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, won both the Oscar  and the Golden Globe Award for "Best  Picture."

I had a farm in Africa," Blixen's book Out of Africa begins, "at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these  highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over  six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the  nights were cold."

It was 1914 when 28-year-old Karen Dinesen arrived in  British East Africa by ship from Denmark. She was met in Mombasa by her Swedish cousin and fiance, the Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who had come to Africa ahead of her to purchase the land where they were sure to make their fortune. When they married the day after her arrival, she became a Baroness, a title she  coveted. Shortly after the simple wedding ceremony, the couple left Mombasa for  MBagathi, their modest new home in the Ngong Hills outside of Nairobi. This, the  Baroness wrote to her mother, "...was the real Africa..." She quickly adjusted  to her new life, never tiring of riding into the nearby Masai Reserve where she could see buffalo, eland, rhinoceros, lions, zebras and leopards; or of the long safari's that she and Bror would take together.

Cattle was what they had agreed to raise before Bror's departure from Denmark, but he was later convinced they would have a brighter future if they planted coffee. Neither Karen nor her family, which had loaned them the money to start their business, had been consulted. The newly acquired  land was already being cleared and young coffee seedlings planted when she arrived.

"Coffee-growing is a long job It does not all come out as you imagine, when, yourself young and  hopeful, in the streaming rain, you carry the boxes of your shining young coffee  plants from the nurseries...patiently, awaiting coming  bounties."

Karen had taken to Africa everything she thought she would need to make a proper home in a strange and unfamiliar environment. She carried plants of mint, sage, and lavender. She brought family furniture, Persian rugs,  Chinese screens, fine china, glassware, and silver. Two Scotch deerhounds that she had received as a wedding present accompanied her on her initial journey.  They would spawn generations of canine companionship, be worthy safari dogs, and  cut a striking pose in photographs. Even in her earliest days in Africa, the  Baroness Blixen was already more than a young story-teller she was an artist  adept in many mediums, creating a visual image of herself, as later she would  create a verbal one. She loved fashionable clothes and remarkable hats, but did not necessarily follow mainstream trends. She was a lover of music and art, of books and words.

"You can't imagine how much I miss music, and for that matter all the arts...," she later wrote her mother from Africa, "...my gramophone is rapidly becoming only a hoarse echo of distant melodies." Far  removed from the familiar and with a lot of time to spare, she tried her hand at  writing and painting, while simultaneously cultivating a mind and method which  did not necessarily fall into line with what others said and thought. Her independent and creative nature made her enormously respected in some circles, shunned as an oddity in others. But despite many cultural frustrations, from the farm she gained solace.

"There are times of  great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain..."

Simultaneously, she was developing a deep appreciation for the African people. Upon her first-time arrival at the farm, she was greeted by more than a thousand field hands who had gathered there to give the newlyweds a noisy and joyous welcome. Over the years, she and many of the Africans working on the coffee farm formed a close interdependence. Initially, they looked to her  solely as an employer, but watchfully they came to respect her on other levels. Blixen, on the other hand, received from the Africans something less tangible a deep connection to the land that she now called home. Their cultural backgrounds  - Somali, Masai, Kikuyo -were diverse, and Blixen never seemed to tire of seeing Africa through the eyes of those who understood it far more deeply than herself. Long passages in her books about the African people who most influenced her  illuminate her writing and show her deep appreciation. For her, the experience  of Africa was embodied in its people.

Karen Blixen had fallen in love with Africa immediately. Years later she would write, "...a coffee plantation is a thing that gets hold  of you and does not let you go..." However, her relationship with Bror Blixen  was less successful. Though a personable fellow, ultimately liked by everyone  including Karen, he proved not to be a very good husband. His philandering was legendary and sometime during their first year of their marriage, she developed  syphilis, which was to undermine her health for the rest of her life. In those  days, the treatment for the disease was mercury, which was administered to her in Nairobi. Later, because those treatments had not been successful, she  returned to Denmark where she spent three months in a hospital being given doses of an arsenic-based drug. It was more than a year before she had recuperated enough to return to the coffee farm. Upon her arrival, she wrote her mother, "It  seems like a dream to be here, and like a dream to walk around and look at  everything again," and later she would write, "...Ngong, Ngong, it is written in  my heart." But perhaps she stated it most succinctly in Out of Africa when she wrote, "Here I am where I ought to be."

Bror had joined her in Denmark. Coffee prices were up due to World War I shortages and Karen's family wanted to further invest in their venture. By the time of their arrival back in Africa, the business had been  incorporated and the Karen Coffee Co. formed, with many of Karen's family  members as shareholders and with her uncle serving as chairman of the board. They had raised more than a half a million dollars in capital. An additional 1,500 acres was purchased making the farm a total of 6,000 acres, one of the largest in the region.

"All the country around Nairobi...lives a people, who are constantly thinking and talking about  planting, pruning, or picking coffee, and who lie at night and meditate upon  improvements to their coffee-factories."

Their newly acquired land included a house into which Bror and Karen moved in 1917. This home, called Bogani, which meant 'forest house,'  would be the backdrop for her African stories.

Though he was a renowned marksman with an honorable  reputation for leading safari's, Bror's talents at managing a coffee farm were  not so highly respected. In 1921, at the insistence of her family and with the  stipulation that Bror have nothing more to do with it, Karen took over its  management. Bror left to live elsewhere and eventually developed a reputation as  an excellent safari leader whose clients included celebrities such as the Prince of Wales and Ernest Hemingway, who is said to have used 'Blickie' as the model for one of his fictional characters.

But Bror's relationship with Karen was never reconciled and  in 1922 they were divorced at his request. Karen would manage the Karen Coffee Company alone for the next 10 years, a troublesome responsibility considering that it was already very much in debt, and that the farm was suffering severe  droughts.

"It is a heavy burden  to carry a farm on you. My Natives, and my white people even, left me to dread and worry on their behalf, and it sometimes seemed to me that the farm-oxen and  the coffee-trees themselves, were doing the same. It appeared to be agreed upon, then, by the speaking creatures and the dumb, that it was my fault that the rains were late and the nights cold. And in the evening, it did not seem right  that I should sit down quietly to read..."

In the spring of 1918, Blixen met Denys Finch Hatton while having dinner with some mutual friends at the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. She was immediately captivated by the charming English aristocrat who had come to Africa  to hunt and trade. They continued to see each other sporadically between his frequent sojourns into Africa and occasional travels back to England.  Eventually, he would move his belongings to Bogani and use it as the base from which he traveled. The relationship between Blixen and Finch Hatton seems to have been based largely on the fact that they were both intensely independent people, though Blixen would become increasingly dependent on his visits and depressed upon his departures. She wrote often of Finch Hatton to her brother Thomas, but implored him never to mention it. In fact, she asked him, if he should be introduced to Finch Hatton, to pretend that he had never heard of him.  In a letter to Thomas in May 1923, she wrote, "That such a person as Denys does  exist ...compensates for everything else in the world, and other things cease to  have any significance."

After learning to fly on one of his trips to England, Finch  Hatton purchased a bright yellow Gypsy Moth airplane, which he named Nzige, the Swahili word for locust. He often took Blixen flying and she wrote of that  experience, "To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa."  When together on the farm, they flew over the coffee fields or the Masai Reserve  nearly every day. It gave Blixen a visual perspective, of life and Africa, which  she had never known. "And now I understand everything," she wrote about flying in Out of Africa.

"Later on, when I flew in Africa, and became familiar with the appearance of my farm from the air, I was filled with admiration for my coffee-plantation, that lay quite bright green in the gray-green land..."

Karen Blixen was not destined to spend the rest of her life  in Africa as she envisioned. In 1931, she returned to Denmark to live  permanently. In the interim 17 years, her marriage had failed, as had her health  and the coffee farm. She would never return to Africa, though her memories of  those years nurtured her for the rest of her life.

'The African Farm,' the working title for Out of Africa, was written several years after she returned to Denmark. Having  trouble concentrating on the writing of it, she retired to a Jutland fishing  village, in the northernmost part of Denmark, until it was completed. Its publication established her as a modern classic writer. Blixen, forever a lover  of words, names and titles, published it under the pseudonym, Isak Dinesen.  Dinesen was, of course, her family name. Isak means 'the one who laughs.' Not  long after the book's publication, she was revealed to be its author.

The entire coffee farm was purchased by a developer in 1931  who named the district Karen in her honor and offered to let her continue to  live in the house. She refused. In the 1960's the house was used as a girl's  school. Today Bogani is a Museum in the Karen residential district just outside  of Nairobi.

My husband and I visited the Blixen home on a quiet, sunny day in late October 1997. We were startled to find Bogani so like it must have  been when Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton spent their days there that we  would scarcely have been surprised to hear Stravinsky's Petroushka - Finch Hatton's favorite music - coming from the veranda. The coffee trees are,  of course, gone, as are the leopards which used to stalk the premises. Nor does one hear the roar of lions coming from the grasslands. But the grounds are still lush green and tree covered. The Ngong Hills stand clearly in view just as Karen Blixen so often observed them. The house is furnished in the style of Karen  Blixen, though most of her actual belongings were sold when she left  Africa.

After visiting the house and walking the grounds, we were  approached by a young African. Had we seen the mill, he asked? We told him that we had not, and he led us down an out-of-the-way, unmarked path to where it used to stand. The coffee-dryer so lovingly cared for by Blixen's Indian carpenter,  Pooran Singh, still stands. He would be proud, I thought, to know that even though the dryer is no longer, "...rumbling the coffee in its iron belly with a sound like pebbles that were washed about on the seashore..." that at least it is kept painted and free from rust. Of the days when the dryer was used  regularly, Blixen had written,

Sometimes the coffee would be dry, and ready to take out of the dryer, in the middle of the night. That was a picturesque moment, with many hurricane lamps in the huge dark room of the factory, that was hung everywhere with cobwebs and coffee-husks, and with eager glowing dark faces, in the light of the lamps, round the dryer; the  factory, you felt, hung in the great African night like a bright jewel in an  Ethiope's ear."

By 1931, Karen Blixen had resigned herself to leave Africa.  In the end, she could no longer hold her life and the farm together. Her family refused to put more capital into the failing farm and the coffee harvests were  never plentiful enough to make up the difference. She had thought up many  "...devices for the salvation of the farm...but...had no luck...."

Unwittingly, Bror had chosen the right location for raising  cattle and the wrong one for coffee - the soil was too acidic and the rains would never provide what was needed for a bountiful coffee harvest. Years of parching droughts interspersed with long-awaited rains, dreaded frosts, the  horror of a locust plague, and the devastation of a fire which leveled the  coffee mill -- had finally taken their toll.

"With every day, in  which we now waited for the rain in vain, prospects and hopes of the farm grew  dim, and disappeared. The ploughing, pruning and planting of the last months  turned out to be a labour of fools. The farm work slowed off, and stood  still."

As if heavy economic problems, failing crops, loneliness and ruined health were not enough to leave her in complete despair, Finch Hatton was  killed in a plane accident in May of that year. He had flown to Voi to scout a herd of elephants rumored to be there. While he was away, she drove into Nairobi  to run errands. There was a marked strangeness in the air, she recalled. At every stop along the way, she received blank stares and no one seemed willing to  talk to her. Feeling lonely, Blixen went to the Muthaiga Club and joined a group of friends for lunch. But they too seemed very distant. Only later did it become shockingly clear when Lady Macmillan took her aside to tell her, what she had not yet heard, that Finch Hatton's plane had gone down in a fiery crash while  taking off at Voi. Neither he, nor his servant who accompanied him, had  survived.

His death was a devastating emotional blow. In Out of Africa, she wrote, "...at the sound of Denys's name even, truth was revealed, and I knew and understood everything." Blixen buried Finch Hatton high in the Ngong Hills at the place he had always called his grave. Shortly  afterward, she went back to Denmark. Though she often dreamed of returning to Africa, it was never to be. But it was said that in her study she kept a map of  Kenya, and that every night before retiring, she would go to where it was,  facing south. Many years earlier, anxious about the droughts and her failing  coffee trees, she had written her mother, "I have a feeling that wherever I may  be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain in Ngong."

Linda Rice Lorenzetti is a writer  who lives in Florida and Montana. She and her husband were in Kenya researching  and photographing for their own book project recently published by Random House, The Birth of Coffee. Both of them wish to thank Jeremy Block, at Dorman East Africa Co., for assistance in  the project. She may be contacted via e-mail at: linda@lindaricelorenzetti.com

*References:

Dinesen, Isak, Out of Africa, The Modern  Library, New York, 1952

Dinesen, Isak, Shadows on the Grass, Random  House, New York, 1961

Lasson, Frans & Born, Anne, Isak Dinesen, Letters  from Africa 1914-1931, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,  1981

Pelensky, Olga Anastasia, Isak Dinesen, The Life and Imagination of a Seducer, Ohio University Press, Athens,1991

Thurman, Judith, Isak Dinesen, The Life of a  Storyteller, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1982

*All quotes are from Out of Africa except  those noted as letters, which are taken from Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa 1914-1931.