Looking for Denys
How a stray book on a list of the 100 greatest led me to Karen Blixen's farm, up the Ngong Hills, and to Denys Finch Hatton's grave — and to the woman who keeps it.
Ngong Hills, Kenya8 min readkaren blixen, ngong, out of africa
We first came to Ngong because of Karen. And I was looking for a grave to pay my respects…
I’d read her book, Out of Africa, and it was phenomenal because she’d opened it with a chapter about Ngong on her farm… to my utter bewilderment!
I stumbled upon it by randomly googling Wikipedia's list of the top 100 books ever written… She came up. And I went… what in the world is a polar bear doing in the middle of Arlington, Texas?!
Most of the books on that list — The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Catch-22 — I'd read, and they made so much sense…
Why no Chinua Achebe, no Wole Soyinka… but Out of Africa? And how come I'd never heard of it? I'd read the Kenyan books most people lauded, and they never moved a dial in me (looking at you, The River and the Source). So why was this on there?
So, relishing the mystery, I downloaded it. I suspected it had to do with some lady in rural Zimbabwe hiking the hills along the Zambezi. Boy, was I wrong…
The book opens by painting the landscape the way you'd paint it in words from the top of a hill, only this time it was Ngong.
I read it in three days… possessed. Possessed by every single word, every emotion, every character. She, from 100 years ago, had me enthralled, like a witch!
She took me from Nairobi when it was little but tin houses in the twenties… to the aristocrats streaming in from all over Europe, England and India with their teas… the Cholmondeleys (Delameres), the Coles…
Well-kept ladies drinking imported Indian tea on porches in Ngong, Rongai and Nakuru…
Indians coming up the railway from Mombasa, Afrikaners trekking up from the south… taking one look at Nairobi, smirking, and heading all the way to Eldoret… Eldorado.
As Kenyans, all we'd heard about the colonists were their atrocities… and by all accounts, atrocious they were… This story, however, showed her humanity… as a colonist. It turns out I'd never read a human story about a colonist. Not to vouch for them, but the weird thing about life is, if you stumble into a market chock full of clowns, every once in a while you'll get a sensible wanderer. And Karen was the most sensible colonist I'd ever read.
There's something weird about being human… that at the core, we are all alike. Pose this question to a professor of metaphysics, and they'll chat your ear off about how we are all manifestations of the same being. But all that's complicated by whatever alchemical bullshittery the spirit had to go through… for us to think we are separate. Boy, ever since those two discount orchard thieves decided to steal apples, it's all been downhill. Couldn't even steal right! Anyway… the plight of the human is that there's so much fluff to get through before you reach that core. So much flesh: tribe, culture, country, gender… so much flesh on top of all that spirit.
But great art, great books, give us all glimpses of that eternity… and through Karen, I caught one.
I saw her struggle in a new country plagued by colonisation. How she'd come to try her hand at dairy, and ended up a coffee farmer instead…
How she'd married her cousin, a perennial wanderer, and how that marriage had turned sour, with her getting ill and all…
How every person on her farm came to her for help, and yet she had no one to turn to… and how she had to become that person for them. She had to wear the hat of a man when she was left all alone on the farm; of a doctor when Kamante, a little Kikuyu herd boy, turned up with his legs covered in sores; of a mediator when the families on her farm feuded…
How she'd fallen for Denys, a free spirit… and how Beryl Markham, another free spirit, had swooped in… free-spiriting on steroids.
How she'd resorted to painting, birdwatching and managing her farm, a farm that was a solace to all the aristocratic families in the country… while she herself was tragically falling apart.
Her home was a rendezvous point for travellers en route to Tanganyika… prospecting for gold, hiking on foot all the way to Namanga.
A couple of years after reading it, I made it to the Karen Blixen Museum. An Angel of the Lord had been there, and when she heard me rave about the book… she wondered why I'd never been. I wondered too. I was in my "reader metamorphosing into a deranged museum visitor" era. Everyone needs a metamorphosis once in a while. She said she'd take me… and that's how we turned up at the museum, me running through Karen's story, the guide wondering why I knew so much… and me finding out that she was a remarkable painter, a poet… and lots more. Seeing bougainvillea, hydrangeas and coffee trees crowding the porches of a house that had been the heartbeat of the entire landscape a hundred years ago…
And I went off on a tangent and read Beryl's book too, West with the Night. A racehorse trainer turned pioneering aviator, taught to fly in Nairobi by Tom Campbell Black of Wilson Airways, who in 1936 became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west… How she, Denys and Karen oozed the energy of carefree wanderers, just living, thriving, as free spirits, despite life's upheavals… How love came and buoyed all of them… and how Denys, flying back from the coast, died in a crash at Voi. Karen buried him in '31 in the Ngong Hills, overlooking a city that had just started trading its tin houses for concrete.
I promised that when I made it to Ngong, I'd visit his grave and pay my respects… to his free spirit. An aristocrat out of Eton, England, who left all that to walk with caravans to fetch cows in Isiolo.
The first time I came to the hills, I never got to see his gravesite. No one quite knew where it was… I asked the discount hikers; I asked the Maasai, but none knew. On the last hill, though, overlooking Kiserian, a man with amber eyes, in a little caravan selling fruity sugarcane and ginger juice, told me where it was…
It was, however, too late in the evening to go looking for graves… the first batch of baboons had started grinning at us through the bushes, and we still had to walk all the way to Kiserian.
And so we went back this October… which, it turns out, is not a good time to see Ngong. Raging winds, dried-out grass, and rumours of rain. Still… even on its worst day, Ngong is a remarkable hike. The Rift Valley falling away on one side, the whole of Nairobi sprawled out on the other, and the wind doing its very best to blow you off the ridge. We made it to the last hill, where the man with the amber eyes had said it would be. That turned out to be a Paramount Chief's grave — Olenana ole Mbatian. Denys, as it would turn out… was on the other side of the hills, 10 km in, overlooking Karen's farm in Karen.
It was tended by the great-great-granddaughter of Kamante, Karen's cook… and for 40 minutes, she enthralled me with a grand tour. How Karen had marked Denys's grave, on the very spot she'd once chosen for her own, and put up an imposing white flag so she could see it from her farm… How she'd struggled with the country, and how the book was the only thing that ever really worked for her. The coffee farm, the dairy farm that never was, her lift-off out of Kenya that same year, barely three months after Denys's death… her fight with her illness, and the mercury. How, before she left, she'd fought the government for land for the families on her farm, and asked Kamante to look after the grave. How she left the country and her heart in '31, and the spot she'd marked for herself stayed empty beside him. How Kamante's descendants kept it ever since… passing it down generation after generation as the city grew, towns popped up around it, and visitors from all over the world, pulled by the story, came.
I relished every minute. Then the grave itself: the imposing obelisk, the fragrant roses, bougainvillea and rosemary around it… and the plaque, engraved with the lines from Denys's favourite poem:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
And then Damaris, telling me hers. The story around the real story. How she’d collected all of Karen’s letters… how her great-great-grandfather, Kamante, had turned into a writer too… how the plaques and the grave had been desecrated… how she was taking driving lessons now, and taking care of all her siblings… plagued by material wars in a site that had been the heartbeat of something spiritual. Something real had been felt, experienced on that landscape… even if the world moved on, as it always does… She ran her narration in the Queen’s English. I’d prompt her in Swahili, and she’d carry right on in English. Most of her visitors, she said, were English and European, buoyed and moved by Out of Africa… I’d been the only visitor that day. And boy, did she give me the full-on treatment. Side-quests on side-quests, like how I should look up the Baron’s relatives to hear their side of the story… And in her, somewhere buried, you could see the effect that landscape, and that story, had on her too. Her utter realness and humanity, imbued in her by it… Many thanks, Damaris…