Out of Africa

Blixen's memoir of the years she ran a coffee farm in colonial Kenya opens with the line that fixes the place forever: she had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The map holds that real country outside Nairobi, the farmhouse that is now a museum, the ridge of the Ngong Hills, the town and the settlers' club, and the coast at Mombasa where the journey began. It brings Kenya and the East African highlands into the atlas.

Karen Blixen

The farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills

The farm

The coffee farm on the highlands outside Nairobi is the centre of the whole book, the place Blixen loved and slowly lost as the crop failed and the debts grew. Her house still stands, kept as a museum, and the suburb that grew up around it carries her name. Everything in the memoir is measured against this ground.

Part One

explicit Blixen's farmhouse survives as the Karen Blixen Museum in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, which is named after her. The pin marks the real house and grounds.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Karen Blixen

The Ngong Hills

The farm

The four-knuckled ridge of the Ngong Hills stands over the farm, the horizon of nearly every scene and the place where Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton planned to be buried. The hills are real, a spur of the Rift Valley wall southwest of Nairobi, and they give the book its fixed point of longing. Finch Hatton's grave is on their eastern slope.

Part One

explicit Named in the book.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗