A review by sidharthvardhan
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

5.0

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

This very first line of Dinesen's memoir is like down Alice's rabbit hole; Platform Nine and three quarters, King's Cross or that cyclone that took Dorothy to Oz. Except this time, the world is a real one. Though not imaginary, it isn't lacking in adventures because of that and is unlike anything that modern city dwelling readers can know.

“It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.”

What sets this book apart from other books on Africa by European travellers who always seemed to be filled with horrors, is that she probably loves it more than her homeland and is at one with it:

"Here I am, where I ought to be.”

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”

And Dinesen is filled with love for everything she found in this world. And she has a beautiful prose with which to describe this love:

"As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: "Speak again. Speak like rain." Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know."

“People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.”

And, since she is an avid reader, she is able to further beautify her prose with quotes from other books:

"Kepler writes of what he felt when, after many years' work, he at last found the laws of the movements of the planets:     "I give myself over to my rapture. The die is cast. Nothing I have ever felt before is like this. I tremble, my blood leaps. God has waited six thousand years for a looker-on to his work. His wisdom is infinite, that of which we are ignorant is contained in him, as well as the little that we know."

"So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."

The two criticisms it has drawn is that it is racist and talks about hunting. As regards hunting, a lot of it is rendered neccesary by conditions though she does sometimes do for fun of it, also she manages to show a compassion for animals. Moreover I never really understand why it should be a taboo. People never really care about the number of lives they take in doing pest controls at homes.

As regards racism, I don't think she is racist. Racism, like every other prejudice, guards the ignorance which is at its roots and is unapreiciative and uncomprenhending of beauty in the prejudiced. Dinesen is the very opposite of that, she shows a great love and respect for African people and their culture as well a great willingness to understand them:

"The Masai when they were moved from their old country, North of the railway line, to the present Masai Reserve, took with them the names of their hills, plains and rivers; and gave them to the hills, plains and rivers in the new country."

"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."

“Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue, and ultramarine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the 'nègre' - that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin - that had created the life of the bracelet.”