The answer in contemporary times often been a resounding “yes.”Ī 2017 essay in Quartz Africa by Abdi Natif Dahir, “Celebrating Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa Shows Why White Savior Tropes Still Exist,” argues: So, the question of whether the book Out of Africa is racist, and by extension, its author, is a valid one.

It’s easy (and lazy) to answer charges of whether a writer or other public figure was racist by dismissing the question with, “They were a product of their time.” But isn’t that facile answer a loss of opportunity to see a person or their work through a new lens? A reconsideration: Is Out of Africa racist? In recent years, Out of Africa, still arguably Dinesen’s best-known work, has been subject of reconsideration through the lens of decolonization. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds.”ĭinesen’s account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called “one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century.” (from the 1992 Modern Library edition of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen) In Africa, “I learned how to tell tales,” she recalled many years later. For his amusement, she would make up stories “like Scheherazade.”

When they separated, she stayed on to manage the farm herself.ĭuring those years she was frequently visited by her lover, the big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. There she owned a 4,000-acre coffee plantation in the hills outside of Nairobi, Kenyaīorn Karen Dinesen, she had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, Baron Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Finecke. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885 – 1962) is the Danish-born author’s 1937 memoir of her years in Africa from 1914 to 1931.