Ngong Hills

We Were Here ~ ‘Out Of Africa’ Revisited

“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.

“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’

“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’

“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.

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’.

Lens-Artists: Memories This week Tina sets the theme to inspire us. Please see her post.

Out in the Midday Sun: Running Ostrich and Ngong Hills

This week over at Paula’s Thursday’s Special she is inviting us to break rules with our photo taking. This shot of a camera-shy, and thus fleeing male ostrich was taken in Nairobi National Park. I expect when I started to focus on him, he was facing the other way; after all, who wants a snap of an ostrich bum. (I should say that ostriches, so G tells me, are the only birds with external genitalia, and believe me they are surprisingly impressive when glimpsed, though thankfully not visible here).

Also one of the main rules of photography in Africa, particularly when you are close to the Equator, was simply not to bother trying during the middle of the day. All colour tends to leach away; there may be a heat haze and also dust in the air; and the landscape maddeningly flattens out and stops looking magnificent.

But that is all very well. What else can you do when you find yourself in a Kenyan game park is in the middle of the day. It’s the kind of thing mad dogs and English persons do. Photos had to be taken, and of course later discarded.

The thing I like about this photo, being hooked on Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, and the ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills’ line, was that while I was concentrating on the ostrich, I inadvertently captured the Ngong Hills in distant blue profile. Though largely static, earth tremors apart, they were also hard to photograph. Here, though, I caught them, and you can well appreciate how they got their name, derived from a Maasai word meaning fist. See those four clenched knuckles.

Otherwise, nothing much is in focus here except perhaps for big bird’s blousy white feathers. All sense of movement is truncated, ‘frozen’ in time under the fierce tropic sun. I still like the photo though.

My Most Read Post in 2014:

Caught inside a Kikuyu garden: a memorial to Karen Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton

I wrote this piece back in March. Every day since several people have clicked on it, and on one single day in the summer this rose to 170 viewings. I have no idea why this happened, or why, judging by the search terms, Denys Finch Hatton’s grave in Kenya’s Ngong Hills is of particular fascination. I thought it was just me who was fascinated. Anyway, here is the post again – a tale of loss and romance in the tropics. It is timely perhaps too, since in the UK at least, now is the season for showing Sydney Pollack’s film Out of Africa once more on TV. Happy Holidays everyone.

This was not supposed to happen. In fact you could say it adds insult to irony: that a man so steadfastly dedicated to an unfettered life in the wilds should, in death, end up hemmed in, and so very domesticated within this small Kikuyu shamba. Yet here it is, the mournful stone obelisk, marking the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, son and heir of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, Great White Hunter, and lover of two women far more famous than he is: writer Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) and aviator and race horse trainer Beryl Markham (West with the Night).

Yet another woman, the one whose shamba this is, shows him a new kind of love, taking care of the garden around the obelisk. If you want to visit the place it is not easy to find – either her little smallholding on the Ngong Hills, or the grave within. When we visited years ago we found only a hand-painted signpost nailed to a tree. We parked in a paddock outside the farmhouse door and were charged a few shillings. We could have bought a soda too, if we’d wanted. We could not see the grave though, and soon found that it was deliberately hidden from view by an enclosure of old wooden doors. More irony here of course. More symbols of shut-in-ness.

Denys spent most of his life in Africa avoiding any kind of confinement – out in the Tsavo wilderness, running shooting safaris for the rich and aristocratic. His clients included the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) . In fact it was during the safaris for the Prince in 1928 and 1930 that Finch Hatton began to promote shooting on film rather than with a gun.

His lover, Karen (Tanne), Baroness von Finecke-Blixen lived in a small house below the Ngong Hills, some twelve miles outside Nairobi. By the time she started her affair with Denys she was divorced from her charming, but philandering husband, Bror, although they always remained friends. Her family had invested a great deal in the couple’s coffee farm, and Karen struggled to make a success of it. But the location was entirely wrong, and in the end she was forced to sell up and leave Kenya. It was during the period of selling the farm that she heard news of Denys’s death.

Looking towards the Ngong Hills from inside the veranda at Karen Blixen’s house. The house now belongs to Kenya’s National Museums.

Denys Finch Hatton’s untimely end may be put down to his passion for flying. For those of you who remember Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film Out of Africa, some of the most elegiac moments of the film are when the celluloid version of Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) takes Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) into the skies above the Rift Valley. Denys died in his Gypsy Moth in 1931, and in unexplained circumstances. He was taking off from the airstrip down in Voi in southern Kenya when his craft exploded. He and his Kikuyu co-pilot were killed. Denys was forty four.

View towards Nairobi from Denys Finch Hatton’s Grave, and overlooking another Kikuyu smallholding.

By the time of his death, his relationship with Karen was well on the wane, and he had already started an affair with the younger Beryl Markham. His biographer, Sara Wheeler says in Too Close to the Sun, that there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Beryl was pregnant with Denys’s child, but that she then had an abortion. To have known this would have truly broken Karen Blixen’s heart: her letters show that she had longed to have a child with Denys.

With yet another twist of irony, it was with his death, that Karen somehow reclaimed him, remembering that he had told her of his wish to be buried in the Ngong Hills. The spot he had chosen was one that Karen had decided on for her own grave.

Denys Finch Hatton

Karen Blixen with her deerhound Dusk.

“There was a place in the hills, on the first ridge of the Game Reserve, that I…had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: ‘Let us drive as far as our graves.’ Once when we were camped in the hills to look for buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look. There was an infinitely great view from there; the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there.” Out of Africa

The obelisk was only put up later by Denys’s brother. During Karen’s last days in Kenya she had the site marked with white stones from her own garden, and as the grass grew up after the long rains, she and Farah, her Somali house steward, erected a pennant of white calico so she could see the spot from her house, some five miles away.

Sometime after she had returned to Denmark she received a letter with some strange news about the grave:

“The Masai have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch Hatton’s grave in the the Hills. A lion and lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time…After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace. I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there thy can have a view over the plain, the cattle and game on it.” Out of Africa

Caught inside a Kikuyu garden: a memorial to Karen Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton

This was not supposed to happen. In fact you could say it adds insult to irony: that a man so steadfastly dedicated to an unfettered life in the wilds should, in death, end up hemmed in, and so very domesticated within this small Kikuyu shamba. Yet here it is, the mournful stone obelisk, marking the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, son and heir of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, Great White Hunter, and lover of two women far more famous than he is: writer Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) and aviator and race horse trainer Beryl Markham (West with the Night).

Looking towards the Ngong Hills from inside the veranda at Karen Blixen’s house. The house now belongs to Kenya’s National Museums.

View towards Nairobi from Denys Finch Hatton’s Grave, and overlooking another Kikuyu smallholding.

Denys Finch Hatton

Karen Blixen with her deerhound Dusk

There was a place in the hills, on the first ridge of the Game Reserve, that I…had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: ‘Let us drive as far as our graves.’ Once when we were camped in the hills to look for buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look. There was an infinitely great view from there; the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there.

Out of Africa

Sometime after she had returned to Denmark she received a letter with some strange news about the grave:

The Masai have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch Hatton’s grave in the the Hills. A lion and lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time…After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace. I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there thy can have a view over the plain, the cattle and game on it.

Out of Africa

Tish Farrell is an award winning writer for young people. Her latest novella is on Amazon Kindle (5 star review):

Secrets, conspiracies, tragedy, dark comedy – a fast-paced novella of interwoven tales set somewhere in East Africa. For young adults and adults alike.