`I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." The dreamy opening-line of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen's nostalgic memoir of life in British East Africa, was immortalised by Meryl Streep in the eponymous Oscar-winning, 1986 film. The adaptation won the Danish baroness millions of new fans for its romantic portrayal of Africa and her affair with Denys Finch Hatton, a dashing British hunter played by Robert Redford.
But Blixen's reputation as a writer had been solidly established long before Hollywood discovered her work. In Nairobi the wealthy suburb of Karen was named after her, and her house, where part of the film was shot has been carefully restored into a museum. Blixen lived in Kenya between 1914 and 1931, during which time the house was surrounded by a 6,000 acre farm planted with coffee and inhabited by the Kikuyu tribespeople, for whom she developed a close affinity. These days, however, the farmland has been sold and the house jostles for space with the luxury residences of monied Kenyans and well-heeled United Nations workers.
Although some of the furniture has been replaced with replicas - such as the gramophone Blixen and Finch Hatton waltzed to in the bush - the restoration is convincing. Visitors to the cool mahogany interior can imagine heated conversations over candlelit dinners, or the African servants in white gloves carefully treading along the parquet floor.
The bedroom floors are laid with lion and leopard skins and the museum staff provide intriguing, if unlikely, details: "She wore that hat because she feared the tropical heat would melt her brain," my guide confides. In the study a series of large photographs sketch the characters of Blixen's turbulent life. In one, the writer stands by a distracted looking baron Bror Blixen, the philandering husband who caused her to contract syphilis and whom she divorced in 1925. In another is a slightly balding Finch Hatton, the lover who won her heart but was stolen away again in a 1931 plane accident. He is buried a few miles away, in a grave on the brow of a hill where lions were reported to sleep after his death. Recent biographers suggest he may have been bisexual. And in the corner is a harsh black and white image of the writer taken three years before her death in 1962: an emaciated figure with wiry hair and jet black eyes, clutching a cigarette between bony fingers and staring into the Danish winter. Blixen wrote Out of Africa (1937) and her acclaimed novel Seven Gothic Tales from the family home in Rungsted, Denmark, which has also been preserved as a museum. Her books were first published under the male pseudonym, Isak Dinesen, a foil against the anti-female prejudices of the time. Outside, the blue ridge of the Ngong Hills can still be seen from the veranda, where Blixen offered basic medical treatment to her Kikuyu neighbours. And further away, behind a stand of trees, are the remains of the coffee factory. Blixen had a reputation as a single-minded but ill-fated farmer: successive crops were plagued by drought, locusts and, finally, the realisation that highland soil was too acidic for coffee cultivation.
She left Kenya penniless in 1931, shortly after Finch Hatton's death, never to return.
The Karen Blixen Museum is 15 kilometres from Nairobi city centre. Opening hours: 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m.