If ever there was a single place that evokes a sense of romance, it would have to be Bogani, also called Mbogani, author Karen Blixen’s stately home where she lived in a leafy neighborhood just outside of Nairobi near the Ngong Hills.
The very first line of Blixen’s autobiographical “Out of Africa” is the lyrical, attention-grabbing, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” The iconic novel was first published in 1937 and is regarded as one of the greatest love stories of all time, one not so much about a love between a man and a woman, but instead between a woman and Kenya, the country she came to embrace as her own.
The novel, written under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen — she was born as Karen Christenze Dinesen in 1885 in Denmark — narrates the years from 1914 until 1931 she spent living on Bogani, her coffee plantation in Kenya during British colonialism of East Africa.
