A PLANTATION IN KENYA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23500, 14 May 1938, Page 4

A PLANTATION IN KENYA

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF AFRICA "Out of Africa." By Karen Blixen. London: Putnam, 19s 6d. Everyone who has read “Seven Gothic Tales ” will know that Baroness Blixen can write. She displays a mastery of a language not her own that puts to shame many authors who use it for a living. It is true that now and again one gets the sense of a medium' not quite familiar. There are some odd coinings of words. “Arrestation” was not a happy thought, and “ decennaries ” is hardly an improvement on “decades.” There is also one amazing and explosive use, early in the book, of the word “lousily which, coming after passages of rich and ornamented protfe, positively assaults the ear. These, however, are but the flaws in the diamond. The prose on the whole is an excellent example of really good word-painting. This is-the story of the author’s life for a number of years, during and after the war, on a coffee farm in Kenya. The farm unfortunately was just a little too high for coffee; and life there was always h struggle. But that did not prevent the author loving her Africa, and being able to interpret to us the reasons for her love. The picture is of a Kenya that to some extent is a less civilised and standardised Kenya, where individualities flourished in freedom. She has much to say of her friends, Berkeley Cole, Denys Finch-Hatton, and Hugh Martin, men of a culture which her own old culture could well appreciate. They are limned here for our delight so skilfully that in the face of all probability one feels that the author’s life there must have been continually entertaining, forgetting the long intervals when the time ran empty on that upland farm. Even the ra,seals she met are somehow transmuted by her kindly pen, for the Baroness records the lights and only glances at the shades. What particularly gives value to the book, however, for armchair travellers, is the way in which the scenery, the wild life, and the native life of the country are described. The author knows how to bring scenes before our eyes as if we had ourselves been there, and still more she knows how to describe native life, native ways, so that we see the people, not as strange and unnatural creatures moved by incomprehensible impulses, but as very human and quite lovable creatures, wedded to the soil of their own country, formed by it and forming it, a true peasantry as right in its own place as any peasantry of Europe. This Baroness Blixen accomplishes because she has herself that natural instinct for the soil without which no one can understand the motives and thoughtprocesses of the peasant. It was for this reason that the natives accepted her in the unusual degree they did, allowing her the freedom of their huts and, more, of their judgment-seat, and honouring her. on her eventual departure. with an unfeigned regret. Throughout these pages, in spite of the unity of scene there is constant variety, a corning and going_ of unusual and interesting people, interestingly described, and the whole is bound together by the powerful influence of that ancient land, so newly settled but in reality inhabited since before the memory of man, on which the recent English have not yet imposed more than the thinnest of veneers. Baroness Blixen, receptive and intuitive, has given us a memorable picture of a moment in Kenya’s history, and at the same time a description of the deep and underground influences. heritages of the centuries, which interact with and condition the newer civilisation. H . W. N.

Nazis on Parade In “Germany Speaks.” which is to be published in an English edition by Thornton Butterworth, the chief members of the German Cabinet have been invited to stale the policies and the objectives of their respective departments. The attitude of Germany towards the Jews, her economic policy, her armament, her foreign policy and her colonial ambitions: all these, and other aspects of German life, are dealt with by the respective Ministers.