Karen Blixen called her house in Kenya ‘Bogani’ or ‘Mbogani’ meaning ‘a house in the woods’. [1]
In 1914 Karen Dinesen packed her trousseau, took her Scottish deerhound, and set off to join her fiancé on their joint adventure in Kenya. The wedding took place on 14 January 1914, the day after she came off the boat.
As a child, Dinesen spent many of her holidays with her paternal cousin’s family, the Blixen-Fineckes, in the south of Sweden. The family included dashing twin brothers, Hans and Bror Blixen. It was the handsome Hans, a keen rider, who captured her heart, but he failed to reciprocate her passion. So Karen decided to accept the favours of his twin brother, Bror, and much to the family’s surprise, they announced their engagement on Christmas Eve 1912. Bror was carefree, impetuous, and eager to enjoy life to the full without taking real responsibility. He was temperamentally unsuited to his fiancée and probably to marriage itself.
Both were restless, so made plans to emigrate to Africa and grow coffee. Karen’s mother and their common uncle agreed to invest in the enterprise. Kenya seemed to be a fine place for a plantation, and Bror went out to inspect the land they’d purchased sight-unseen (in his ignorance about coffee farming he bought land that was too acidic for coffee plants). Karen followed later in the year.
Their farm was in the Ngong Hills and home was a modest brick bungalow (it still exists and today is in a suburb called Karen). Life together in Africa was initially happy, and both enjoyed taking shooting safaris across the African plains. But eventually this gave way to the realities and hardships that would severely challenge them. Woefully inexperienced as farmers, Karen and Bror struggled with their plantation. Bror was not a faithful husband, indulging in many affairs and infecting his wife with syphilis.
Their marriage, based on the idea of sharing an adventure, did not last and they separated in 1921 when Bror departed, leaving Karen to run the coffee plantation alone. They divorced in 1925.
Blixen’s seventeen years in Kenya became the basis of what remains her best-known work, the memoir Out of Africa published in 1937. It begins with the simple yet memorable line: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
Selected links for relevant websites, books, movies, videos, and more. Some of these links lead to protected content on this website, learn more about that here.