December 1960
This author - often known as Baroness Blixen - is a Dane who writes the most beautiful English, and if you have never read her, this small book would make an excellent introduction. It consists of four episodes of her life in Kenya before the First World War and is chiefly remarkable for the wonderfully live, comprehending pictures of her relationships with her Somali servant, Farah, with the Kikuyu Masai and other tribes of this country which she loved so much. There is an extraordinary - and now rather sad - innocence about these accounts: of the mutual friendship and kindness, the distinctions plainly acknowledged but a matter of dignity which existed between the lady and her servants, farmers and neighbours, who all treated one another as individual, particular people, with the most astonishing consequence of reciprocal affection and respect.
There is one story which illustrates this most clearly. She had been treating a young Kikuyo boy for bad burns on his leg, but before the treatment was completed, he went back to his village. When she went to see how he was, she discovered his leg plastered with cow dung, and feeling her own failure with sudden bitterness, she stood weeping in his hut and rode slowly home with many of the villagers having watched her tears. The next morning there was a great crowd silent round her house, and for a wild moment she thought that perhaps they had come to kill her. But they had each one cut or burned himself superficially, and each one said that she must heal them - she had been tried too hard and must now be indulged. They had made a fool of her, but with such delicate generosity that she must laugh, and they, who knew how to laugh, laughed with her. But this book is altogether worth reading for its beautiful, sharp recollections of entrancing country and people.