The memoirs of Karen Blixen are familiar to us as recounted in her book Out of Africa. Yet, she also wrote a slim volume of tales long after she left the continent in 1961 at the age of 76. Here, she gives a long description of the person with whom she felt the greatest partnership, whom she was forever separated from, in the midst of her other great losses. It is not about her lover Denys Finch-Hatton, but rather Farah Aden, the one who oversaw the running of her farm, while keeping his own household and family thriving as well.
She calls this simply, "Portrait of a Gentleman":
As here, after twenty-five years, I again take up episodes of my life in Africa, one figure, straight, candid, and very fine to look at, stands as doorkeeper of all of them: my Somali servant Farah Aden. Were any reader to object that I might choose a character of greater importance, I should answer him that that would not be possible.
Farah came to meet me in Aden in 1913, before the First World War. For almost eighteen years he ran my house, my stables and safaris. I talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew of all that I did or thought. Farah, by the time I had had to give up the farm and was leaving Africa, saw me off in Mombasa. And as I watched his dark immovable figure on the quay growing smaller and at last disappear, I felt as if I were losing a part of myself, as if I were having my right hand set off, and from now on would never again ride a horse or shoot with a rifle, nor be able to write otherwise than with my left hand. Neither have I since then ridden or shot.
The introduction into my life of another race, essentially different from mine, in Africa became to me a mysterious expansion of my world. My own voice and song in life there had a second set to it and grew fuller and richer in the duet.
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| As if her literary talents in portraiture weren't enough, here are examples of Karen Blixen's visual talents: this is of a Somali boy, who may be Farah's son, Saufe. The other two are of an unidentified Kikuyu girl and young man. Before emigrating to Africa, Blixen attended art schools in Copenhagen, Paris and Rome. |
The Somali are very handsome people, slim and erect as all East African tribes, with sombre, haughty eyes, straight legs and teeth like wolves. They are vain and have knowledge of fine clothes. When not dressed as Europeans— for many of them would wear discarded suits of their masters’ from the first London tailors and would look very well in them— they had on long robes of raw silk, with sleeveless black waistcoats elaborately embroidered in gold. They always wore the turbans of the orthodox Mohammedans in exquisite many-coloured cashmeres; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca might wear a green turban.
For Farah, although gravely posing as a highly respectable major-domo, Malvolio himself, was a wild animal, and nothing in the world would ever stand between him and God. Unfailingly loyal, he was still at heart… a cheetah noiselessly following me about at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding on to my finger with strong talons and turning his head right and left.
When Farah first took service in my house, or first took my house into possession— for from that day he spoke of “our house” “our horses” “our guests”— it was not a common contract which was set up, but a covenant established between him and me ad majored domus gloria, to the ever greater glory of the house. My well-being was not his concern, and was hardly of real importance to him, but for my good name and prestige he did, I believe, hold himself responsible before God.
Farah strictly saw to it that our Native servants groomed the horses and polished the silver of the house till they shone. He drove my old Ford car as if it had been a Rothschild’s Rolls-Royce. And he expected from me a corresponding loyalty to the paragraphs of our covenant. As a consequence of this attitude he was a highly expensive functionary in the house, not only because his salary was disproportionately larger than that of my other servants, but because he did without mercy demand my house to be run in grand style.
Then came the hard times on the farm, and my certainty that I could not keep it. And then began my ever-repeated travels to Nairobi with such sorry aims as keeping my creditors quiet, obtaining a better price for the farm and, at the very end, after I had in reality lost the farm and become, so to say a tenant in my own house, securing for my squatters the piece of land in the Reserve where according to their wish they could remain together. It took a long time before I could make the Government consent to my scheme. On these expeditions Farah was always with me.
And now it happened that he unlocked and opened chests of which till then I had not known, and displayed a truly royal splendour. He brought out silk robes, gold-embroidered waistcoats, and turbans in glowing and burning reds and blues, or all white— which is a rare thing to see and must be the gala head-dress of the Somali— heavy gold rings and knives in silver and ivory mounted sheaths, with a riding whip of giraffe hide inlaid with gold, and in these things he looked like the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid’s own bodyguard. He followed me, very erect, at a distance of five feet where I walked, in my old slacks and patched up shoes, up and down Nairobi streets. There he and I became a true Unity, as picturesque, I believe, as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. There he lifted me and himself to a classical plane…
When I had sold all the contents of my house, my paneled rooms became sounding boards. If I sat down on one of the packing cases containing things to be sent off, which were now my only furniture, voices and tunes of old rang through the nobly aired room intensified, clear. When during these months a visitor came to the farm, Farah stood forth, holding open the door to the empty rooms as if he had been doorkeeper to an imperial palace.
No friend, brother or lover, no nabob suddenly presenting me with the amount of money needed to keep the farm, could have done for me what Farah then did. Even if I had got nothing else for which to be grateful to him— but that I have got, and more than I can set down here— I should still for the sake of these months, now thirty years after, and as long as I live, be in debt to him.
