Out of Africa Study Guide

Written under the nom de plume, Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa is Karen Blixen's account of her time in Kenya. The story opens as she describes the land and environment around the Ngong Hills, at the base of which stood her farm, a coffee plantation of six hundred acres. In all, she had six thousand acres of land, part of which was native forest and about a thousand or so acres were accounted for by squatters. On this land, they eked out an existence by subsistence farming growing maize and keeping livestock such as chickens, cows and goats. In return, they worked for the owners of the land a number of days each year. It takes four of five years for the coffee-plants to bear and once they do, the beans are harvested, dried in coffee-dryers and then hulled, graded, sorted and packed into sacks for shipment to London, where they are auctioned off. (read more)