His prejudices were too fierce and direct for him to take Blixen’s improbable course of enlisting native Kenyans in the battle to keep mercantile values at bay. Compared to most settlers, Blixen treated the Africans on her 4,500-acre plantation with largesse. She protested the heavy taxes exacted from them and the pass system which controlled their movements; she allowed them to cultivate crops in corners of the plantation; and, when the farm was sold, secured a piece of reserve land large enough to ensure that “her” people, some two hundred families, were not hopelessly dispersed. But the problem with Blixen’s relatively benevolent attentions, and with her regard for Africans in general, is that she perceived her relation to them as a species of philanthropic feudalism, with her at the center exercising noblesse oblige and anticipating a deferential loyalty in return. It is this spirit that informs some of her most discomfiting writing. Of Ka- mante Gatura (the youth with the infected leg in the film), she observes: He stuck to the maizecobs of his fathers. Here even his intelligence sometimes failed him, and he came and offered me a Kikuyu delicacy, a roasted sweet potato or a lump of sheep’s fat—as even a civilized dog, that has lived for a long time with people, will place a bone on the floor before you, as a present. .indeed, what is most startling about the entire Out of Africa enterprise— books and film—is the general readiness to take Blixen’s Kenya at face value. Reviewers and commentators have been single-mindedly incurious about imagining how a reverse angle on Kenya, a.few shots from an indigenous perspective, might look. Judith Thurman, for instance, in her eloquent and deeply researched biography, falls under the spell of Blixen’s'feudal habits of mind when she drowsily ventriloquizes her subject’s opinion that [Kenya’s] inhabitants take their places in the hierarchy according to the degree of pride they manifest, with the Africans—mystically forbearing and amused—at the top. The European aristocrats—the , great atavisms like Denys, Berkeley, and the narrator—defer to them, but just slightly and in the same spirit a gentleman feels himself to be morally inferior to a lady. The New York Times was also bewitched. The Travel Section offered a special four-page feature on Kenya to coincide with the film’s release. There was a long piece on game viewing; a guide to restaurants; an essay by Trzebinski, herself a Kenyan settler, on relics from the Blixen era (the old farmhouse, Finch Hatton’s grave, a millstone Blixen once fashioned into a table). And a concluding article, “Kenya through the eyes of writers it inspired,” announced that “when viewed through some of its great memoirists, Kenya reveals its intimate self.” “Inspired,” presumably, was the cue that only white colonial authors were to be expected. Blixen was cited, along with Reviewers and commentators have been single-mindedly incurious about imagining how a reverse angle on Kenya, a few shotsfrom an indigenous perspective, might look. the aviatrix Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley, doyenne of Kenyan racists and author of thirty-five books of bottomless settler jingoism. (Huxley’s novel, The Flame Trees of Thika, was one of imperial nostalgia’s quieter successes in the BBC/PBS version of two or three years back.) None of Kenya’s black authors was to get a word in. The framing of this article to exclude them suggests an impatience with rival perspectives, a sentiment once expressed most candidly by an American reviewer of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God: Perhaps no Nigerian at the present state of his culture and ours can tell us what we need to know about that country, in a way that is available to our under- o Clinton St. Quarterly standing... in the way W.H. Hudson made South America real to us, or T.E. Lawrence brought Arabia to life. All in all, the Times feature succeeded in capturing “the spirit of place,” in a manner deferential to the mood of the film, by a sustained bit of abracadabra that whisked all native Kenyans from sight. B the fata morgana onto which the film’s director and the critics hold most steadfastly is that image of Kenya as paradise or Arcady evoked by some of Blixen’s most transporting prose. Robert Langbaum is surely correct in describing Karen Blixen was obsessed with “brilliant breeding” and the style that went with it, and her unalloyedly aristocratic values provide the key both to her choice in male companionship and to her attitudes to the Africans and the continent itself . Out of Africa as “perhaps the best prose pastoral of our time.” But as the British literary scholar Raymond Williams has underscored, some of the best pastoral commits the most extravagant vanishing acts, the genteel myth of a spontaneously providential Nature hiding from view many hired hands and landless peasants. Certainly the pastoral resonance in Blixen’s writings is no stronger than her faith in Africa as a pure and bountiful beginning, a faith expressed most rapturously in the description of.her maiden flight with Finch Hatton: The language is short of words for the experiences of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names. The image of such a free and original space is hard to resist. Pollack, steeped in Blixen’s prose, recalls moments when, sitting in front of a tent on a Kenyan night in the ‘80s, “you realized this is where it all started. If there was a Garden of Eden, this was it.” And speaking of the immense challenge of hazarding the film, he reflects on how “you have to re-create the paradise to feel the loss.” Others, however, have stayed with the metaphor in order to topple it. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenya’s foremost writer, and one of Africa’s two or three most influential writers, ranks Blixen among the “parasites in paradise.” Ngugi has long quarreled with her vision of Kenya and the undue attention it has received. One can only wonder what he thinks of the film, but in essay after essay in Homecoming, Writers in Politics and Detained, he has inveighed against her as an example of someone who “by setting foot on Kenyan soil at Mombasa was instantly transformed into a blue-blooded aristocrat.” Blixen is certainly, at times, so intoxicated by her quest for a pure Africa, for the unadulterated soul of the continent, that she seems oblivious to her soaring romanticism’s capacity to drag racism in its wake. Ngugi has an eye for such passages, the sort which Thurman’s biography judiciously skirts: When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music. What I learnt from the game of the country was useful to me in my dealings with Africans. And again, The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. The tall extinct volcano of Longonot that rises above the Rift Valley, the broad Mimosa trees along rivers, the Elephant and the Giraffe, were not more truly Africa than the Natives were.... All were different expressions of one idea, variations upon the same theme. Such passages are doubly disquieting when coupled to recent photographs of Maasais grouped under a sultry Kenyan • sky, as in the Sierra Club's Isak Dinesen’s Africa. _ ^n the hullabaloo surrounding the film, the only glimpse of a Kenyan perspective came in one very brief, very gruff report in People magazine that the Nairobi newspapers had “tried to stir up trouble” by questioning the value of glamorizing Blixen’s Kenya. To gauge why this lionizing (as it were) of the settler days should so rankle with black Kenyans, one has to bring into focus a little of the history that passes hazily beneath both Blixen’s prose and Pollack’s cameras. Rumors of blacks banding together and taking traditional oaths in theforest, along with sporadic attacks on the estates, were sufficient to allow whatever racial hysteria the settlers had held down to burst to the surface. At issue is whether the paradise of the 1910s and ‘20s was the fruit of divine providence or the product of colonial social engineering. As in most pioneer societies, any number of scribblers-cum- adventurers testified that “this place was empty of men, awaiting the coming of white settlers.” One reads of “a howling wilderness that no one wanted,” of European blood, toil, sweat and tears, and finally, of a “flourishing concern.” But the settlers did not stint themselves in insuring that paradise was enlarged. A few years before Blixen disembarked at Mombasa in 1914, the governor of the territory had written home: Your lordship has opened this Protectorate to white immigration and colonization, and I think it well that in confidential correspondence at least, we should face the undoubted issue—viz, that white mates black in a very few moves.... There can be no doubt that the Masai and many other tribes must go under. It is a prospect which I view with equanimity and a clear conscience. Those “very few moves” were as follows. To break the back of the flourishing peasant agriculture, African lands were seized and the inhabitants crammed into reserves. By 1915, a year after Blixen’s arrival, over four and a half million acres of African land had been turned over to about one thousand white farmers in this manner. The purpose was not only to extend the borders of paradise by clearing the land, but to drive Africans into wage labor. By removing the peasants' land with one hand and imposing leaden taxes (Europeans were tax-exempt) and a “pass” system of surveillance with the other, the authorities succeeded in herding the Africans toward the white plantations. And neither Africans nor Asians were permitted to hold land in the White Highlands, the territory’s horn of plenty, while, in a gesture of apocalyptic hubris, whites weregranted 999-year leases from the Crown. Africans also were barred from cultivating the most lucrative crops such as coffee and cotton. f J o r d Delamere, the silver-haired leader of the settlers in the film, was a great champion of these methods and, at the least sign that Africans were becoming self-supporting again, he would urge that their reserve lands be cut back further. Delamere himself came to hoard a million acres. “Possess” would be quite the wrong word, for he was at least as intent on withholding this land from the Africans as he was on keeping it to himself, cultivating only a fraction of it. So much for the colonists’ reasoning that, even if the land had not been empty in the strictest sense, it could be justifiably appropriated because the peasants had not realized its full potential. . In this wdy the Kenyan settlers were blessed with an ample and inexpensive body of labor. By the twenties, they boasted, it was probably the cheapest in the world. And so too the African population, laid waste by famine and disease in congested reserves, dwindled from four million in 1902 to two and a half million in 1921. Ever eager to give their actions a humanitarian veneer, the settlers continued to argue that their arrival had rescued the Africans from the ravages of intertribal warfare. Yet the 47,000 black Kenyans who died after being press- ganged into the Europeans’ First “World” War far outnumbered those killed in generations of intertribal feuding. Blixen was both a beneficiary of these colonial policies and an opponent of some of them. Though not as heartless as most settlers, she did nonetheless gain from the squatter system which, having stripped the Africans of their land, permitted them to leave their allotted reserves and live on the white estates only in exchange for a given quota of labor days per year. By brushing Kenyan history against the colonial grain, so to speak, one may hope to disturb the film’s roseate image of a world pristine in its rugged luxury, in which duress, when it intrudes, is inevitably that of the settlers. And one where, apart from Kamante’s gamy leg and the servants’ sorrow at their mistress’s departure, Blixen is granted a monopoly over pain. A film that so tidily sharpens a tragedy of lost settler love with a tragedy of lost settler land cannot afford to glimpse, far less face, landless suffering which would dwarf and trivialize its central action. It the colonials could spirit away the land issue and busy themselves with their own problems, it was otherwise with the Kenyans. As one of them remarked: When someone steals your ox, it is killed and roasted and eaten. One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence. Doubly so if you are forced to work that land for others. This bitterness came to a head with the Mau Mau revolt from 1952 to 1958, fully twenty years after Blixen had returned to Denmark. It is, more than anything, the events and literature of Mau Mau which explain why Pollack’s celebration of the “glory-days” of settler- dom rankles so badly with Kenyans today. Mau Mau, though it helped clear the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz