The Original Karen Surbubs | Colonial Nostalgia
“A.K.A Upper Kibra
After Kenya declared independence from British rule in 1963, there came a flood of renamings. Schools, suburbs, and roads were rechristened in ways that spoke to a new idea of what it meant to be authentically Kenyan. In Nairobi, “Queens Way” became “Mama Ngina Street,” and roads named after the first four colonial commissioners were redesignated for African leaders: Dedan Kimathi, Muindi Mbingu, Daudi Dabasso Wabera, and Mbiyu Koinange, respectively.
One appellation that escaped the fate of the rest was “Karen” — the name of a Nairobi suburb, presumably christened for the Baroness Karen Blixen, the Danish writer also known as Isak Dinesen. Karen Estate lies seventeen kilometers west of the city centre and is one of a few Nairobi suburbs where tall jacarandas loom large, straddling long driveways onto huge mansions with plush gardens. It hosts diplomats, powerful business people, the upper strata of Kenya’s political class, expatriates, and much of Kenya’s privileged white, Asian, and Black populations.
Karen’s contemporary ethos was unintentionally revealed in a New York Times Style story about the suburb’s upscale boutiques in which every single shop-owner and fashion designer mentioned is a white woman, including the Swedish proprietor of a shop called “Bush Princess.” Karen, we learn, is “home to some of the city’s most intriguing and exclusive places to shop.” The two African women pictured, only one of them named, are both floor staff. The colonial undertones are even less veiled in a 1985 story in The Washington Post that devoted copious print inches to explaining the pains white homeowners in the “horsey suburb” took to protect their houses and “well-trimmed hedges” from Kenyan robbers. In Karen today, you can breakfast with the endangered Rothschild giraffes at Giraffe Manor, or adopt an elephant at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. And, of course, you can visit the Karen Blixen Museum, in the house where the baroness once lived.
Karen Blixen, a Danish aristocrat, moved to Kenya at the height of Empire, in 1913, with her new husband, 15,000 Danish crowns, and the intention to start a coffee farm. It was only later, after she returned to Denmark in 1931, that she gradually found fame as a writer. Her 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, offers a record of her time in Kenya, detailing her relationships with her lovers, her servants, and the two thousand “Natives” who lived on her farm. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the grand old man of Kenyan letters, later wrote, “As if in compensation for unfulfilled desires and longings, the baroness turned Kenya into a vast erotic dreamland in which her several white lovers appeared as young gods and her Kenyan servants as usable curs and other animals.”
And dreamland she made it. On safari, Blixen’s servants carried bathwater to her on their heads across the plain, and, she writes, “when we outspanned at noon, they constructed a canopy against the sun, made out of spears and blankets, for me to rest under.” She imagines herself a judge to the Kikuyu squatters, claiming at one point that she looks at her cook “with something of a creator’s eyes.” To Blixen, the Africans existed if not quite at the level of the bush animals, then somewhere just above them. “The Natives,” she writes, “could withdraw into a world of their own, in a second, like the wild animals which at an abrupt movement from you are gone—simply are not there.” She believed that “the umbilical cord of Nature has, with them, not been quite cut through.”
Deserted by her husband, Karen threw herself into the hedonistic social life available to the European gentry in the colony. When the Duke and Prince of Wales came to visit, she made the local Kikuyu perform a dance in their honor. She and her lover, British big game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, oscillated in and out of the “Happy Valley set,” described by Ulf Aschan, the godson of Blixen’s husband, as “relentless in their pursuit to be amused, more often attaining this through drink, drugs, and sex.” A popular question among British aristocrats at the time was, “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” None of this appears in Blixen’s memoir, which skips over wild parties in favor of providing lush detail about the landscape and the “Natives.”
In The New York Review of Books, American critic Jane Kramer called Out of Africa “without a doubt the most irresistible prose ever written about East Africa.” A bestseller, it was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, included in the Modern Library series “100 Best Nonfiction Books,” and translated into multiple languages. Blixen’s name was regularly floated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. When Ernest Hemingway — a regular hunting partner of Blixen’s husband, Bror — won the prize in 1954, he suggested it should have gone to her instead. (She was reportedly closest in 1961, when she was passed over for Ivo Andrić.)
In 1985, the memoir was adapted into a film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The plot, which draws on several additional sources including Blixen’s second memoir, Shadows on the Grass, and Judith Thurman’s biography of Blixen, is primarily focused on Blixen’s romance with Finch-Hatton. It brought in $227.5 million at the box office and swept the Oscars, winning seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and propelling the image of Kenya as a romantic gateway into popular imagination.
The year after the film’s release, Kenya saw a dramatic spike in tourism (from 152,000 visitors to 176,000 in a single year), and the house Blixen once lived in was converted into a museum. By 1987, the tourism sector had become a tentpole of Kenya’s economy, bringing in approximately $350 million annually. By the end of the decade that figure had grown to $443 million per year, roughly 40 percent of Kenya’s total foreign exchange.
Barack Obama recounted his first visit to Kenya in 1988, writing that he suspected some tourists “came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in forest lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races.” He was struck by Nairobi’s stark racial hierarchies, something he hadn’t anticipated seeing in his father’s homeland. “In Kenya,” he wrote, “A white man could still walk through Isak Dinesen’s home and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness.”
Prior to the violence of colonialism, the 6,000 acres Blixen called her own had belonged to the very “Natives” about whom she rhapsodized in her memoir. Wanton theft is at the core of colonial Kenya, which the British established as a settlers’ frontier, parceling off land to European adventurers. The first batch of settlers received their land grants in 1902. It included British aristocrats like Lords Delamere, Hindlip, and Cranworth, who set the gold standard for a gilded countryside hunter lifestyle. Later, the British government expanded lease offerings and exempted settlers from the land tax, and in 1920, the protectorate officially became a colony. But coffee and cattle, the colonial industries of choice, were expensive to produce, and Kenya earned a reputation as a “big man’s frontier,” a place where only the extremely wealthy could afford to settle.
The Blixens were part of this wave of settlers. Their land, previously Maasai pastoral country and Gikuyu farmland, became “a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills” — Out of Africa’s famous opening line. Ngũgĩ calls settlers like the Blixens “parasites in paradise.” He writes, “Kenya, to them, was a huge winter home for aristocrats, which of course meant big-game hunting and living it up on the backs of a million field and domestic slaves.”
With its warm climate and its stunning landscapes, colonial Kenya was an attractive getaway for European aristocrats looking to escape the winter chill, and colonial planners catered to their needs. In his 1902 book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, the British urban planner Ebenezer Howard had laid out his ideal “garden city,” which combined the best features of urban and rural life. The parts of Nairobi that were segregated for whites were planned as garden cities, with deliberate care taken, for instance, to plant jacaranda trees.
Meanwhile, Africans were consigned to live in what the architectural historians A. M. Martin and P. M. Bezemer have called “villages on garden city lines.” Africans were not even allowed to settle permanently within city limits. Their settlements, along with those of the Indian workers brought in by the British as railway builders, were viewed as potential public health threats to Europeans and deliberately placed far from white suburbs. A 1941 report by the African Housing Board proposed that this housing strategy would teach “Native” residents to observe elementary rules of hygiene. In white Nairobi, safe from the scourge of non-Europeans, residents could live charmed existences in a green paradise. It’s an idea — and a marketing strategy — that persists for both tourists and residents: Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s President and the scion of the nation’s richest family, made headlines in December for affirming his commitment to restoring Nairobi’s worldwide reputation as a “Green City in the Sun.”
After the Great Depression, Blixen was forced to leave Kenya and sell her family’s now-bankrupt plantation, Karen Coffee Company (which, confusingly, was either named after Blixen or her cousin). The buyer, developer Remi Martin, subdivided the land into ten- and twenty-acre plots and kept the name “Karen.” Heralded by advertisements in the early 1930s as a place for “contentment in retirement,” the new estate boasted such activities as golf, tennis, polo, fishing, and shooting. “All the Amenities without the Disadvantages of Town,”
View attachment 46035View attachment 46036View attachment 46037
