Karen

I mentioned yesterday my "colonial-like surroundings." Kenya was, of course, a British colony before independence was gained on December 12, 1963. From the late 1880s when the British East Africa Company arrived here until independence, British influence was widely felt in Kenya. English is used extensively here; anyone who has been to school speaks it. Virtually all signs and billboards are in English. It's the language of business and government. Foreigners easily get by here in English, even though Swahili is the primary language people speak on the street.

From the 1880s increasing numbers of British subjects went "out to Africa," some to make their fortunes, others to run away from problems at home and start life over. And along with the Brits came assorted other Europeans claiming a piece of the action, among them the Baroness Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), a Dane who married a penniless Swedish aristocrat for his title, but divorced eight years after their marriage. You know the story from her book, Out of Africa, or the movie by the same name. It's my wife, Carolyn's all-time favorite movie. One of my favorites, too.

Today I visited Karen Blixen's home, now turned into a museum after the Danish government bought it and gave it to Kenya as an independence gift in 1964. It looks just like the house in the movie. The movie, I learned today, however, was filmed in a slightly larger version of the same house just down the street. It has a lovely view of the Ngong Hills out the back, part of what attracted Karen to this particular place and made her want to spend her life here after her arrival in 1914. When you walk through the house, there sits her dining room table layed out with her precious Limoges. And her books, together with those of her lover, Denis Fynch Hatton, sit on the shelves just as they did nearly a century ago. My guide, Rosemary, took me through the house with a well-rehearsed speech detailing Karen's life story, including her failed attempt to grow coffee here where everyone but she knew it would not grow.

Rosemary stuck to the script pretty well, until she could help herself no longer: she told me I looked like Robert Redford. (Carolyn, I can just see it, is now afraid I will let this go to my head, and she's probably right.) Rosemary blushed (at least I think I saw a trace of red in her black skin), because she has a huge crush on Robert Redford, she let me know. Ahem... When we went into Karen's bedroom, she told me that everything was just as Karen had left it -- all the pieces of furniture were original. Only one thing was not: a pair of boots standing next to the chair. She told me that Meryl Streep had given those boots to the museum after she had worn them in the movie. Well, now I had to confess that I've always had a crush on Meryl Streep -- a near double for my own stunning wife! We had some fun with it.

The town of Karen is named for Karen Blixen. Her house, as I mentioned in my post the first day here, is just a short distance from where I am staying, an area that continues to be home for many expatriates living in Nairobi. After I had spent some time walking around the grounds and the museum shop (and buying something special for someone special to me -- don't tell her!), seeing the coffee processing plant that burned, causing Karen to go bankrupt, and taking lots of pictures of this idyllic scene, I walked the two miles or so back to Alice's house. I found myself wondering, as I passed people along the road, including a whole herd of cattle and sheep, just what the Masai and Kikuyu who lived in this area must have thought of such a strange woman moving into their neighborhood. And I wonder if she ever really took the time to try to understand them. If Edward Said, the post-colonial theorist, is correct, then Karen and others like her hardly took an interest in the countries they inhabited that was far from their status as British colonies. Sad.

But Karen is remembered fondly here all the same. She did some good things for the people, even if she sometimes seemed eccentric by local standards. A museum to her memory seems like a benign tribute to a colonial past. Colonialism's legacy, as we know, however, is less benign. We learned that in the recent violence here in Kenya, brought on largely because of land disputes that go back to the ethnic cleansing that was also part of colonialism's legacy.

You never know, your own romantic image of a bygone era just might be someone else's nightmare.