Out of Africa

Last night we watched the movie Out of Africa starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. It has been years since I had seen it and of course at that time we were living in the US. I enjoyed it so much more last night, not for the romance, because so many things were familiar.

Oh, the landscape. There are beautiful shots of the Rift Valley, the savannah, the wildlife. We would say, “We’ve seen that.” “That’s just like we remember it.”

We’ve been to the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden twice for meals. It is located at the house of her farm supervisor. The house has been restored to that time period and the gardens are beautiful. It is a fun place to visit and eat lunch. We’ve been on the grounds of her house, but not inside. They obviously shot part of the movie there, because the drive, gardens and area around it we’ve seen with our own eyes.

Lord Delamere was a character in the movie. He was a successful British farmer with vast holdings near Lake Naivasha. We go past his “plantation” on the way to Nairobi. Although we have never stopped, his family has a nice area to rest, eat, and shop where they sell dairy products and meat from their farm.

It was fun to see what Kenya was like in the early 1900s. The period date was 1913 when she first moved to Kenya. Members of the high society of England were living here with their fine china, extravagant lifestyles, time spent in the club socializing.

We could understand the Kiswahali spoken in the movie.

It was interesting to see the two tribes depicted in the movie. The lifestyle of the Maasai haven’t changed much in the past hundred years, but the Kikukus are now the dominate tribe having most of the Kenyan owned businesses. They are considered to be the most well educated and richest tribe in Kenya.

This morning I did a little research about the movie. Of course, they have taken some liberties with the truth, but it is essentially factual. The major characters in the movie are based on real life people. She did lose the land due to the failure of the coffee crop and moved back to Denmark but lived in Kenya for 17 years rather than just a few.

"I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills..." begins both the book and movie. If you get a chance, you ought to see the movie again. It is long, but it is a real charmer and lives you a slice of what life was like in Kenya once upon a time. Now I want to read the book.