If ever there was a single place that evokes a sense of romance, it would have to be Bogani, also called Mbogani, author Karen Blixen’s stately home where she lived in a leafy neighborhood just outside of Nairobi near the Ngong Hills.
The very first line of Blixen’s autobiographical “Out of Africa” is the lyrical, attention-grabbing, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” The iconic novel was first published in 1937 and is regarded as one of the greatest love stories of all time, one not so much about a love between a man and a woman, but instead between a woman and Kenya, the country she came to embrace as her own.
The novel, written under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen — she was born as Karen Christenze Dinesen in 1885 in Denmark — narrates the years from 1914 until 1931 she spent living on Bogani, her coffee plantation in Kenya during British colonialism of East Africa.
Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film “Out of Africa,” starring Meryl Streep as the strong-willed Blixen, Klaus Maria Brandauer as her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and Robert Redford as her mysterious yet self-interested lover, Denys Finch Hatton, won the Oscar for best picture and generated renewed interest in the book and, especially, Kenya itself. The movie, and then the book, were the catalysts that led me to Kenya some five times now.
The October morning was cool when I first visited Bogani nearly two decades ago, chilly enough for a jacket. Until then, I had never seen a jacaranda tree. The trip was women-only, ladies like me who wanted to visit Kenya for the romance and adventure that is Africa, and when I stepped out of the car at Bogani, the first thing that caught my eye was an enormous jacaranda, its massive clouds of amethyst-hued blossoms exploding against the bluest of skies. The wind plucked the weaker flowers from the top of the tree, where they floated slowly to the ground in spirals that resembled huge purple snowflakes and blanketed the grass in a kaleidoscope of wild color. I don’t believe that before or since have I ever seen Mother Nature at her most beautiful and peaceful, and it was there, right there at that moment, I fell in love with Africa and knew in my heart it would be a lifelong affair, just as it had been for Karen Blixen.
Bogani still stands today on the outskirts of Nairobi in a neighborhood now called Karen in Baroness Blixen’s honor. The big manor house, built of stones in the same warm rusty color of the Kenyan earth, is indeed perched at the foot of Ngong Hills, a set of verdant, low-slung knuckle-shaped hills. One of the stories about the Ngongs suggest it is the place where God rested His hand after He finished creating the world. In any case, Blixen lived in the shadows of God’s “hand,” probably as one of the first of many gutsy women who could have been the model of a steel magnolia, had she been born and bred in the South.
But she wasn’t, of course. While Karen grew up in Denmark, she moved to Kenya to marry the dashing Baron von Blixen. They wed in the coastal city of Mombasa in 1914, eventually moving to Nairobi in 1917 to Bogani, where they established their plantation on 4,500 acres with 600 of those cultivated for farming coffee. The baron, a womanizer and hopeless dreamer, left most of the responsibility of running the farm to Karen, leaving her alone for long stretches at a time except for her co-existence with the Kikuyu, one of the many local tribes and whose members helped her with the farm.
After the Blixens divorced in 1921, Karen ran the plantation for a decade, with Finch Hatton living with her on and off, depending upon his egotistic whims, until a tetrad of bad luck — farm mismanagement, drought, a drop in coffee prices and the death in an airplane crash of her beloved Finch Hatton — prompted her to sell the farm and return to Denmark. Although she would never see Africa again, she chronicled her life in “Out of Africa” and later published several other works including “Babette’s Feast” and “Seven Gothic Tales.”
The plantation, now Karen Blixen Museum, a Kenya national museum, has been restored with original and reproduction furniture to harmonize with the colonial decor of Blixen’s time. On the day I visited, only my group of five ladies were the sole guests—there can be crowds on busy days—and a benevolent guide let me slide behind the roped off office where Blixen once loved and even fretted over her farm and allowed me to just very, very briefly sit at her desk. It was an amazing moment.
Just down the road from Bogani is the Historic Swedo House, the hunting lodge and farmhouse built for the Swedo-African Coffee Company between 1906 and 1908 and now part of the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden Restaurant and Cottages. The 13 luxury ensuite cottages were built in 2001 so visitors can experience the romance and history of early Kenya. With Bogani, it’s the perfect stop-over before you go on to places like the Masai Mara, Amboseli or Tsavo for safari.
