A.
The scene you
mention in the movie "Out of Africa" is the creation
of the scriptwriter. Karen Blixen uses poetic license in
describing her actual departure from Nairobi in July 1931:
"Many
of
my friends
had come down to the station to see me off. Hugh Martin was there. . .
Lord Delamere. . . Most of the Somalis of Nairobi were on the platform.
The old cattle trader Abdallah came up and gave me a silver ring with a
turquoise in it, to bring me luck. Bilea, Denys's servant gravely asked
me to give his respects to his master's brother in England. . . The
Somali women. . . had been at the station in rickshaws. . . Gustav Mohr
and I
shook hands. . . ."
Denys Finch Hatton's biographer, Erroll Trzebinski, quotes a letter
written by an anonymous "friend":
". . . poor
Baroness Blixen. . . On
Sunday we went and saw the poor little broken Baroness away for good
and so pathetic. Only Lady MacMillan, the Delameres, the Munroes and
three others were there and we were very glad we went. Lady Delamere
was crying afterwards. . . . "(Silence
Will
Speak,
p. 316).
Trzebinski
identifies the "three others" as Gustav Mohr, Charles Bulpett and Hugh
Martin--all later immortalized in Karen Blixen's Out
of
Africa.
The Somalis and
other Africans who came to the station to honor Karen
Blixen's departure seem to have been invisible to the colonial writer
of
the letter.
| Coulsong