MAGAN'S WORLD:I FEAR I MIGHT be stalking the ghost of Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, the Meryl Streep figure from Out of Africa. Within a month I've found myself outside two of her homes, one in Kenya, the other in Denmark, both of which have been turned into quaint, time-capsule museums of a romanticised era.
Her books were some of the things that turned me on to Africa as a teenager, so I felt duty bound to visit her compound in the Ngong Hills, outside Nairobi. It was as beautiful as it appears in the film, but I felt uneasy about the romantic associations we imbue these places with.
All around her home in the exclusive district of Karen are modern homesteads trying to ape the decadent colonial style she embodied. Tree-lined roads spread into the hills, with the sprawling mansions of expats set in manicured gardens behind high walls, each with a phalanx of staff to keep everything lush, clean and orderly. The only time I caught a glimpse of the owners or the lifestyle they led was when the automatic gates swooshed open and a freshly polished SUV came speeding out, leaving me and the gate guard spluttering in a cloud of red dust.
The few black people I saw in the area were invariably gardeners, laundry women or delivery boys. I kept having to remind myself that things had changed elsewhere in the world and that a black man was now US president.
On his visit to Nairobi back in 1988 Barack Obama had no such source of hope. At the legendary Thorn Tree Cafe, in the New Stanley Hotel – the axis mundi of colonial Kenya, made famous by Hemingway and Elspeth Huxley, and home of the traveller’s message board from which sprang the Lonely Planet web forum – he found himself ignored by staff in favour of richer-looking white customers. He and his sister tried repeatedly to order lunch. Eventually, an elderly waiter resentfully slapped a menu down. He never returned to take their order.
Reading Obama's book Dreams from My Fathernow, 14 years after he wrote it, when he is no longer the confused young man seeking an identity in the world, there's an element to his observations of the beggar king, travelling his kingdom disguised as a pauper. He too was perturbed by the eagerness with which white folk hark back to colonial times. "Not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife," he writes. "Some came because Kenya without shame offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of innocence . . . In Kenya a white man could still walk through Isak Dinesen's home and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness."
Obama was aware that tourists often appear ridiculous when dropped into a foreign culture. As a youth he used to laugh at them in Hawaii, but in Africa “the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting”.
He too was innocent in ways, suggesting to his Nairobi-born half-sister that they visit the game parks. She scoffed at him, asking: “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming? These wuzungu [white people] care more about one dead elephant than they do for 100 black children.”
It would be intriguing to know what Obama makes of his presidential predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, who bagged more than 500 big-game animals during his 1909 African safari. Many of them are still lying just down the road from him, stuffed and dusty in the vaults of the Smithsonian Institution.