Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 35: Information about the "mill-stone table?"

Q. I am trying to find information about the millstone used as a tabletop in the garden of Karen Blixen's house in Kenya. Can you help me?

A. There are actually two millstone tables on Karen Blixen's veranda looking out on the Ngong Hills.

From OUT OF AFRICA:

"A Shooting Accident on the Farm": chapter "Wamai" (p. 118): Karen Blixen says that, a year before the shooting accident on the farm, two Indian men who ran a flour mill on her property, grinding maizemeal for the Africans, were murdered. This frightened away all the Indians in the district, except for Pooran Singh, who operated her own mill, and who insisted that she give him a shotgun to protect himself.



Looking East

"A Shooting Accident on the Farm", chapter 5: "A Kikuyu Chief" (p.152): Karen Blixen describes how she made a table from the mill-stones. The stones had come from Bombay, because the soft conglomerate rock in Kenya was not hard enough for milling. The Africans believed that some discolorations on the millstones were blood stains. Karen Blixen used to conduct business with the Africans from a stone seat behind the mill-stone tables. She also entertained there, and she and Denys Finch Hatton watched the stars from this location.

"Visitors to the Farm, chapter 2, "A Visitor from Asia": "I went and sat down with [the Indian High Priest] on the stone seat to the West."

"Visitors to the Farm", chapter 8, "Wings" (p.253): When I came back to my tea-party, the teapot on the stone table was still so hot that I burned my fingers on it."



Looking West

Photos Copyright © 2001 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved