Out of Africa

by Isak Dinesen

  Young, big-nosed Gustav Mohr from Norway, of an evening suddenly swooped on the house from the farm he managed, on the other side of Nairobi. He was a rousing farmer and helped me in the work of the farm in word and deed, more than any other man in the country,—with a simple vigorous readiness as if it were standing to reason that farmers, or Scandinavians, were to slave for one another.

  Here he was now flung on to the farm by his own burning mind, like a stone out of a volcano. He was going mad, he said, in a country which expected a man to keep alive on talk of oxen and sisal, his soul was starving and he could stand it no longer. He began the moment he came into the room and went on till after midnight, holding forth on love, communism, prostitution, Hamsun, the Bible, and poisoning himself in very bad tobacco all the time. He would hardly eat, he would not listen, if I tried to get a word in he shrieked, glowing with the fire within him, and butting the air with his wild light head. He had much in him to rid himself of, and was generating more as he spoke. Suddenly, at two o’clock at night, he had no more to say. He would then sit peacefully for a little while, a humble look on his face, like a convalescent in a hospital garden, get up, and drive away at a terrible speed, prepared to keep alive, once more, for a while, on sisal and oxen.

  Ingrid Lindstrom came to stay on the farm when she could get away for a day or two from her own farm, her turkeys and market-gardening at Njoro. Ingrid was as fair of skin as of mind, and the daughter and wife of Swedish officers. She and her husband had come out with their children to Africa on a joyous adventure, a picnic, to make a fortune quickly, and had bought up flax-land because at that time flax was £500 a ton, and when, just after that, flax fell to £40 and flax-land and flax-machinery were worth nothing, she put in all her strength to save the farm for her family, planning her poultry farm and her market-garden, and working like a slave. In the course of that strife she fell deeply in love with the farm, with her cows and pigs, Natives and vegetables, with the very soil of her bit of Africa, in such a great desperate passion that she would have sold both husband and children to keep it. She and I, during the bad years, had wept in one another’s arms at the thought of losing our land. It was a joyful time when Ingrid came to stay with me, for she had all the broad bold insinuating joviality of an old Swedish peasant woman, and in her weather-beaten face, the strong white teeth of a laughing Valkyrie. Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so gallant that they shine a long way away.

  Ingrid had an old Kikuyu cook and houseboy named Kemosa, who filled a number of offices with her, and looked upon all her activities as his own. He slaved for her in the market-garden and poultry-yard, and also acted as a Duenna to her three small daughters, travelling with them to and from their boarding school. When I came up to visit her on her farm at Njoro, Ingrid told me, Kemosa lost all his balance of mind, let go his hold of everything else, and made the grandest possible preparations for my reception, killing off her turkeys, so much was he impressed with Farah’s greatness. Ingrid said he looked upon his acquaintance with Farah as upon the greatest honour of his existence.

  Mrs. Darrell Thompson of Njoro, whom I hardly knew, came out to see me when the doctors had informed her that she had only got a few more months to live. She told me that she had just been buying a pony in Ireland, a prize-jumper,—for horses were to her, in death as in life, the height and glory of existence,—and that now, after she had talked with the doctors, she had at first meant to cable home to stop him from coming out, but then she had made up her mind to leave him to me when she herself should die. I did not think much about it until, after her death half a year later, the pony, Poor-box, made his appearance at Ngong. Poor-box when he came to live with us, proved himself the most intelligent being on the farm. He was not much to look at, stumpy and long past his youth, Denys Finch-Hatton used to ride him, but I never cared much to do so. But by pure politics and circumspection, by knowing exactly what he wanted to do, amongst the young shining fiery horses brought out for the occasion by our wealthiest people of the Colony, he won the jumping competition of Kabete, which was held in honour of the Prince of Wales. With his usual collected unassuming mien and countenance he brought home a big silver medal and, after a week of extreme anxiety, raised great radiant waves of rapture and triumph in my household and on all the farm. He died from horse-sickness, six months later, and was buried outside his stable under the lemon trees, and much lamented; his name lived a long time after him,

  Old Mr. Bulpett, whom the Club called Uncle Charles, used to come out to dine with me. He was a great friend of mine, and a kind of ideal to me, the English gentleman of the Victorian age, and quite at home in our own. He had swum the Hellespont, and had been one of the first to climb the Matterhorn, and he had been, in his early youth, in the ’eighties perhaps, La Belle Otéro’s lover. I was told that she had ruined him altogether and let him go. It was to me as if I were sitting down to dinner with Armand Duval or the Chevalier des Grieux themselves. He had many lovely pictures of Otero, and liked to talk about her.

  Once, at dinner at Ngong, I said to him: “I see that La Belle Otero’s memoirs have been published. Are you in them?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am in them. Under another name, but still there.”

  “What does she write about you?” I asked.

  “She writes,” he said, “that I was a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months, but that I had full value for my money.”

  “And do you consider,” I said and laughed, “that you did have full value?”

  He thought my question over for a very short moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I had.”

  Denys Finch-Hatton and I went with Mr. Bulpett for a picnic to the top of the Ngong Hills on his seventy-seventh birthday. As we sat up there we came to discuss the question of whether, if we were offered a pair of real wings, which could never be laid off, we would accept or decline the offer.

  Old Mr. Bulpett sat and looked out over the tremendous big country below us, the green land of Ngong, and the Rift Valley to the West, as if ready to fly off over it at any moment. “I would accept,” he said, “I would certainly accept. There is nothing I should like better.” After a little time of thought he added: “I suppose that I should think it over, though, if I were a lady.”

  7 the noble pioneer

  As far as Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton were concerned, my house was a communist establishment. Everything in it was theirs, and they took a pride in it, and brought home the things they felt to be lacking. They kept the house up to a high standard in wine and tobacco, and got books and gramophone records out from Europe for me. Berkeley arrived with his car loaded up with turkeys, eggs, and oranges, from his own farm on Mount Kenya. They both had the ambition to make me a judge of wine, as they were, and spent much time and thought in the task. They took the greatest pleasure in my Danish table glass and china, and used to build up on the dinner table a tall shining pyramid of all my glass, the one piece on the top of the other; they enjoyed the sight of it.

  Berkeley, when he stayed on the farm, had a bottle of champagne out in the forest every morning at eleven o’clock. Once, as he was taking leave of me, and thanking me for his time on the farm, he added that there had been one shadow in the picture, for we had been given coarse and vulgar glasses for our wine under the trees. “I know, Berkeley,” I said, “but I have so few of my good glasses left, and the boys will break them when they have to carry them such a long way.” He looked at me gravely, my hand in his. “But my dear,” he said, “it has been so sad.” So afterwards he had my best glasses brought out in the wood.

  It was a curious thing about Berkeley and Denys,—who were so deeply regretted by their friends in England when they emigrated, and so much beloved and admired in the Colony,—that they should be all the same, outcasts. It was not a society that had thrown them out, and not any place in the whole world either, but time had done i
t, they did not belong to their century. No other nation than the English could have produced them, but they were examples of atavism, and theirs was an earlier England, a world which no longer existed. In the present epoch they had no home, but had got to wander here and there, and in the course of time they also came to the farm. Of this they were not themselves aware. They had, on the contrary, a feeling of guilt towards their existence in England which they had left, as if, just because they were bored with it, they had been running away from a duty with which their friends had put up. Denys, when he came to talk of his young days,—although he was so young still,—and of his prospects, and the advice that his friends in England sent him, quoted Shakespeare’s Jaques:

  “If it do come to pass

  That any man turn ass,

  Leaving his wealth and ease

  A stubborn will to please …”

  But he was wrong in his view of himself, so was Berkeley, and so perhaps was Jaques. They believed that they were deserters, who sometimes had to pay for their wilfulness, but they were in reality exiles, who bore their exile with a good grace.

  Berkeley, if he had had his small head enriched with a wig of long silky curls, could have walked in and out of the Court of King Charles II. He might have sat, a nimble youth from England, at the feet of the aged d’Artagnan, the d’Artagnan of Vingt Ans Après, have listened to his wisdom, and kept the sayings in his heart. I felt that the law of gravitation did not apply to Berkeley, but that he might, as we sat talking at night by the fire, at any moment go straight up through the chimney. He was a very good judge of men, with no illusions about them and no spite. Out of a kind of devilry, he was most charming to the people of whom he had the poorest opinion. When he really chalked his soles for the job he was an inimitable buffoon. But to be a wit in the manner of Congreve and Wycherley en plein vingtième siècle takes a few more qualities than Congreve or Wycherley themselves had got in them: a glow, grandezza, the wild hope. Where the jest was carried far in its daring and arrogance, sometimes it became pathetic. When Berkeley, a little heated, and as if translucent with wine, really got on his high horse, on the wall behind him the shadow of it began to grow and move, falling into a haughty and fantastical canter, as if it came of a noble breed and its sire’s name had been Rosinante. But Berkeley himself, the invincible jester, lonely in his African life, half an invalid,—for his heart always gave him trouble,—with his beloved farm on Mount Kenya every day more in the hands of the Banks, would have been the last to recognize or fear the shadow.

  Small, very slight, red-haired, with narrow hands and feet, Berkeley carried himself extremely erect, with a little d’Artagnanesque turn of the head to right and left, the gentle motion of the unbeaten duellist. He walked as noiselessly as a cat. And, like a cat, he made every room that he sat in, a place of comfort, as if he had had in him a source of heat and fun. If Berkeley had come and sat with you upon the smoking ruin of your house, he would, like a cat, have made you feel that you were in a picked snug corner. When he was at his ease you expected to hear him purr, like a big cat, and when he was sick, it was more than sad and distressing, it was formidable as is the sickness of a cat. He had no principles, but a surprising stock of prejudices, as you would expect it in a cat.

  If Berkeley were a cavalier of the Stuarts’ day, Denys should be set in an earlier English landscape, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. He could have walked arm in arm, there, with Sir Philip, or Francis Drake. And the people of Elizabeth’s time might have held him dear because to them he would have suggested that Antiquity, the Athens, of which they dreamed and wrote. Denys could indeed have been placed harmoniously in any period of our civilization, tout comme chez soi, all up till the opening of the nineteenth century. He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but it did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him.

  The particular, instinctive attachment which all Natives of Africa felt towards Berkeley and Denys, and towards a few other people of their kind, made me reflect that perhaps the white men of the past, indeed of any past, would have been in better understanding and sympathy with the coloured races than we, of our Industrial Age, shall ever be. When the first steam engine was constructed, the roads of the races of the world parted, and we have never found one another since.

  There was a shadow cast over my friendship with Berkeley by the circumstance that Jama, his young Somali servant, was of a tribe at war with Farah’s tribe. To people familiar with the clannish feelings of the Somali, those dark deep desert glances that were exchanged over our dinner table, when the two were waiting on Berkeley and me, bode as ill as possible. Late in the evening we fell to talking of what we were to do when we should be coming out in the morning to find both Farah and Jama cold, with daggers in their hearts. In these matters the enemies knew neither fear nor sense, they were held back from bloodshed and ruin solely by their feelings of attachment, such as they were, for Berkeley and me.

  “I dare not,” said Berkeley, “tell Jama to-night that I have changed my mind, and that I shall not this time be going to Eldoret, where lives the young woman that he is in love with. For then his heart will turn to stone against me, it will be a matter of no importance to him if my clothes are brushed, and he will go out and kill Farah.”

  Jama’s heart, however, never did turn to stone towards Berkeley. He had been with him a long time, and Berkeley often talked about him. He told me how once, over a matter in which Jama held himself to be right, Berkeley had lost his temper and had hit the Somali. “But then, my dear, you know,” said Berkeley, “at the very same moment I had one straight back in my face.”

  “And how did it go then?” I asked him.

  “Oh it went all right,” Berkeley said, modestly. After a little while he added: “It was not so bad. He is twenty years younger than me.”

  This incident had left no trace in the attitude of either the master or the servant, Jama had a quiet, slightly patronizing manner towards Berkeley, such as most Somali servants have got towards their employers. After Berkeley’s death, Jama did not want to stay in the country, but went back to Somaliland.

  Berkeley had a great, ever unsatisfied, love of the Sea. It was a favourite dream of his that he and I should,—when we had made money,—buy a dhow and go trading to Lamu, Mombasa and Zanzibar. We had our plans all worked out and our crew ready, but we never did make money.

  Whenever Berkeley was tired or unwell he fell back on his thoughts of the Sea. He then grieved over his own foolishness in having spent a lifetime anywhere but on salt water, and used strong language about it. Once when I was going to Europe and he was in this mood, to please him I conceived the plan of bringing out two ships’ lanterns, starboard and port, to hang by the entrance door of my house, and told him of it.

  “Yes, it would be nice,” he said, “the house would be in that way like a ship. But they must have sailed.”

  So in Copenhagen in a sailors’ shop by one of the old Canals, I bought a pair of big old heavy ships’ lanterns, which had for many years sailed in the Baltic. We had them up on each side of the door, it faced East and we were pleased to think that the lamps were correctly placed; as the earth, on her course through the ether, throws herself forward, there would be no collision. These lamps gave Berkeley much content of heart. He often used to come to the house quite late, and ordinarily at a great speed, but when the lamps were lighted he drove slowly, slowly, up the drive, to let the little red and green stars in the night sink into his soul and bring back old pictures, reminiscences of ship-faring, to feel as if he were indeed approaching a silent ship on dark water. We developed a signalling system in regard to the lamps, changing their place or taking down the one, so that he should know, already while in the forest, in what mood he would find his hostess, and what sort of dinner was awaiting him.


  Berkeley, like his brother Galbraith Cole and his brother-in-law Lord Delamere, was an early settler, a pioneer of the Colony, and intimate with the Masai, who in those days were the domineering nation of the land. He had known them before the European civilization,—which in the depths of their hearts they loathed more than anything else in the world,—cut through their roots; before they were moved from their fair North country. He could speak with them of the old days in their own tongue. Whenever Berkeley was staying on the farm, the Masai came over the river to see him. The old chiefs sat and discussed their troubles of the present time with him, his jokes would make them laugh, and it was as if a hard stone had laughed.

  Because of Berkeley’s knowledge of, and friendship with, the Masai, a most imposing ceremony came to take place on the farm.

  When the Great War first broke out, and the Masai had news of it, the blood of the old fighting tribe was all up. They had visions of splendid battles and massacres, and they saw the glory of the past returning once more. I happened to be out, during the first months of the war, alone with Natives and Somali, with three ox-waggons, doing transport for the English Government, and trekking through the Masai Reserve. Whenever the people of a new district heard of my arrival they came round to my camp, with shining eyes, to ask me a hundred questions of the war and the Germans,—was it true that they were coming from the air? In their minds they were running breathless, to meet danger and death. At night the young warriors swarmed round my tent, in full war-paint, with spears and swords; sometimes, in order to show me what they were really like, they would give out a short roar, an imitation of the lion’s roar. They did not doubt then that they would be allowed to fight.