“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”
Karen Blixen 1932 ‘Out of Africa’
A view of the Ngong Hills from Karen Blixen’s veranda (above). The house (below), now belongs to the National Museums of Kenya. It was built in 1912 by a Swedish settler and engineer, Ake Sjogren, who owned the Swedo-African Coffee Company, and in 1914 sold the house and land to Bror Blixen who hoped to make his fortune from coffee growing. Six hundred of the 6,000 acres bought were planted with coffee bushes, but the enterprise foundered from the start. The site was wrong (too high for coffee). It also took several years for the bushes to bear, during which time, the rains often failed.
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“The Mountain of Ngong stretches in a long ridge from north to south and is crowned with four noble peaks like immovable darker blue waves against the sky. It rises eight thousand feet above the sea, and to the east is two thousand feet above the surrounding country, but to the west the drop is deeper and more precipitous – the hills fall vertically down towards the Great Rift Valley.”
Karen Blixen 1932 ‘Out of Africa’
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“I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown.”
Karen Blixen 1932 ‘Out of Africa’
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“Bror and I came up here for a weekend…It is delightful here – I think Naivasha is a paradise on earth, very like Scotland, with the water and the mountains around the lake, and the air so lovely here”
Karen Blixen July 1917 ‘Letters from Africa’
Naivasha is the only large freshwater lake among Kenya’s several soda lakes. The first commercial flights into Kenya on Imperial Airways, and later BOAC flying boats (1930-1940) landed on Lake Naivasha. Travellers then had a sixty mile road trip to Nairobi.
For a time in 1918 the Blixens lived on the lake shore in a shanty hut made of sheet iron, lined with local papyrus, this while Bror supervised a ploughing contract with his ox teams and steam plough at a settler farm at nearby Longonot.
Longonot is one of the landmark old volcanoes on the Rift Valley floor. In the next photo there’s also a foreground view of Kikuyu shambas, the kind of smallholdings we were surveying for Graham’s smutted Napier Grass research in the late 1990s. More of that story HERE.
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On 14th February 1992 I flew to Nairobi, Kenya, intending only on a three month stay. Graham had a short-term consultancy contract, working on controlling the Larger Grain Borer. This was an introduced storage pest, arrived with food aid from the Americas, and was then infesting farm granaries. I was ‘camp following’. (More of this story HERE.)
After that, who knew where we’d be. On my first day in Africa we went to Karen Blixen’s house. It seemed to fit with our own uncertain futures. Eight years later, in January 2000 we finally left Kenya. Much happened in between, and these are a few ageing glimpses from the ‘old Africa album’.
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Lens-Artists: Memories This week Tina sets the theme to inspire us. Please see her post.
