Wahoga: Bror Blixen in Africa

By Lucia Adams

This is a book about a Swedish baron who lived in Africa between 1912 and 1938 and who, after his coffee farm and marriage to the author Karen Blixen failed, became a white hunter, leading safaris for the international social elite in East Africa. He organized every detail of opulent safaris for the Prince of Wales, the Vanderbilts, and the wealthiest Americans and titled British between the wars. This contributed to the decimation of wildlife in East Africa in the face of the growing conservation movement. He was also a market hunter of ivory in Kenya, Tanganyika, and the Congo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728312255

Lucia Adams

Lucia Adams is the author of several biographies and memoirs including, Memoria Academia, Bird’s Custard Island, Duchamp Fell Off the Mantlpiece. She was nominated for the M.F.K.Fisher award for distinguished writing by the James Beard Foundation.

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© 2019 Lucia Adams. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/20/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1226-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1224-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1225-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019942691

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: The Farmer

Before Africa

Vita Nova

Finding Workers

Marriage

Shauries

War

Hope And Despair

Ends And Beginnings

Post War

Part Two: The Hunter

Into The Bush

Starting Over

Big Ivory

White Hunter

Charles Markham

More Elephants And Gorillas

Dick Cooper

Lords Of The Sahara

The Prince Of Wales

Singu Estates

The Guests

Deaths And Hunting

Beryl Markham

Hemingway

The Vanderbilts

The Pilar

Journey With Beryl

Last Safaris

After Africa

Notes

Glossary

Photographs

We are the fire which burns the country

The Calf of the Elephant is exposed on the plains

Bantu proverb*

INTRODUCTION

Bror Blixen had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills that he transformed from forest and grasslands into bright green coffee fields. For seven years he tried to make it prosper but doomed by location, World War I, undercapitalization and his wife Karen’s illness he gave up in 1921. To remain in Africa, for the Swedish baron still the land of freedom and opportunity, he became a white hunter, leading lions in the morning champagne in the evening safaris for the international social elite.(1)

Between the world wars, the Golden Age of safaris, he hunted down East Africa’s primary resource, its wildlife, its elephants, rhinos, lions, buffaloes, hippos, leopards, cheetahs, antelope, the rare okapi. He stalked the dwindling game in the long grass, taking the risks while the Vanderbilts or the Prince of Wales, stationed at the right spot, fired off heart shots or brain shots. Having experienced carefully orchestrated safe danger they left Africa with crates of tusks, horns, hides, films, photographs, and enough adventure for their memoirs.

Bror had organized every detail of their opulently outfitted camps, their long motorcades and post-hunting entertainment which he likened to being 75% a butler though he was more like a military commander of an army of gun bearers, porters, drivers, skinners, cooks, second white hunters, camp managers, mechanics, pilots. Between safaris he was a market hunter of ivory wandering alone in unchartered lands of cannibals, pygmies, and tribal chiefs who called him Wahoga, the wild goose, one who is in one place and then another.

A global celebrity with a dazzling personality who could, according to his friends Ernest Hemingway and Beryl Markham, outwalk, outshoot, outdrink and outcharm anyone he led an intrepid, spectacular life in colonial Africa. Today however he is only remembered as Karen Blixen’s unfaithful husband in the film Out of Africa the very same causing Markham to wonder who in the world these completely unrecognizable persons were. He would have remained a footnote in hunting history had his life in Africa not been bookended by famous writers who created the legend of Bror Blixen.

The sources for this chronicle of his life from 1913-1938 are his two hunting memoirs, his clients’ memoirs, Karen Blixen’s Africa letters and the numerous biographies about her. These romanticized dramas are often embellished with second guessing and suppositions conflating her fiction with fact, never questioning her version of the truth in which Bror was an uneducated barbarian who didn’t know if the Crusades came before or after the Renaissance, always the diametrical opposite of her lover the Swinburnian dandy Denys Finch Hatton. In this account the facts speak for themselves, clearly, brutally, without too much interference, a book for the digital age, pared down, underwhelmed with interpretation and most importantly, well-illustrated.

Bror’s godson and only biographer Ulf Aschan called him a radiant sunburned extrovert who was so irresistible that women pursued him, not the other way around, in The Man Whom Women Loved .(2) Gustaf Romulus Kleen, his nephew, described him as likeable, generous, intelligent, at one with everything, fearless, formidable, tough, unpretentious, one of the greatest hunters in East Africa, a courageous tracker, a perfect shot and inventive pursuer of big ivory.

His free-spirited behavior which caused so much consternation was typical of his noble caste’s during the decline of the 800 year old European aristocracy when noblemen became disoriented servants to plutocrats, the New Men of the Second Industrial Revolution. Born into the loftiest of the four estates in Sweden he remained, like his contemporary nobleman Winston Churchill, a spendthrift, self indulgent, disreputable, wayward, rootless, self confident, indifferent to consequences and what others thought, and —the badge of the aristocrat — disdainful of money matters.

His first memoir Nyama (Meat), published in Swedish in 1937 and translated the next year into English as African Hunter appeared right before Out of Africa. A perceptive reviewer in the New York Times remarked that except for the locale and the same people the books had nothing in common, nor does each have a place of importance in the other’s writing. A Times reviewer of Bror’s second memoir The Africa Letters,published in 1943 and translated into English in 1988 in the tidal wake of Sydney Pollack’s film, declared his greatest claim to fame was giving his wife syphilis. Both memoirs, written with a ghostwriter, reveal emerging attitudes about wildlife conservation in Africa often at dramatic odds with Bror Blixen’s profession as a death-dealer.

Lucia Adams

Chicago

May 2019

PART ONE

THE FARMER

BEFORE AFRICA

Baron Bror Frederik von Blixen-Finecke was born July 25, 1886, a few minutes after his identical twin Hans Gustaf, into a Danish noble and Swedish baronial family, the third son of Countess Clara Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs whose father was Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Baron Frederik von Blixen-Finecke, aide-de-camp to King Gustav V of Sweden. The first born son Carl Emil, 12 years older than the twins, inherited the estates in Denmark and Sweden where nobility had been linked by marriage since the 14th century.

Bror descended from an unbroken line of military knights serving the kings of Sweden since the 13th century when King Magnus shored up regal defenses with the largest landowners. Henricks Blixen was listed in the 1239 Pomeranian Urkundenbuch, a noble in Greifswald, granted fiefs in exchange for money and military service. Swedish Pomerania had been ceded to Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars but retained its military aristocracy, Bror’s family sold their estate there in 1847 and located to the family seat in Nasbyholm, Skane, southern Sweden, where Bror was born.

He recalled his happy childhood, facts selected to prefigure his future as a white hunter, I cannot say how old I was when I had a gun in my hands for the first time, but that my fingers itched to hold a weapon rather than a notebook is beyond question. In Nasbyholm’s forests and fields, where royalty had hunted since the Middle Ages with its abundance of foxes, pheasants, boars and stags, he embraced the joy of wandering about at will. (3)

For noble sons hunting was a birthright as was defying conventional rules; he and Hans invited their father, called the gentle baron, to lunch at the best restaurant in Copenhagen and with not a kroner in their pockets, pawned his fur coat which he laughingly redeemed. A friend said that Bror was the only person she knew who truly believed that when he signed a bill it had been paid for. Hans, said to be the dominant twin, was even more extravagant and his mess bill in school was legendary. He chose the traditional path of disinherited sons, becoming a cavalry officer, a lieutenant in the Scanian Dragoon Regiment, winning the bronze medal in dressage in the 1912 equestrian Olympics in Stockholm on his horse Maggie, and marrying into the high aristocracy.

Bror forged his own path rejecting university and the military, instead attending the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture to study the new developments in agriculture after the collapse of prices and land values in western Europe. After graduation he became manager of a dairy farm, Stjernholm, on the Nasbyholm estate and ever the husbandsman retained the stockman’s pastoral mentality, a vagabond at heart, disdaining possessions and permanence.

He rather gallantly said he would have remained a dairy farmer in Sweden had it not been for his second cousin Karen Dinesen, Between us we built up in our imagination a future in which everything but the impossible had a place. After he proposed marriage three times she reluctantly accepted, still infatuated with Hans, with neither family approving the match of the older rich bourgeois spinster to the poor unsteady aristocrat. They were engaged on December 23, 1912, a conventional dynastic union, having known each other from childhood, sometimes fraternizing with the same set, though Karen, one of the 40% of upper class unmarried women in Denmark, was the only one without a title or personal servant.

Bror’s father Frederik admired her father Wilhelm Dinesen’s Letters from the Hunt about life among the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin where he contracted syphilis, and fearing madness, hanged himself in an apartment in Copenhagen. It was thought highly scandalous that he had not shot himself like a gentleman. A Danish army captain in the Franco Prussian war and liberal member of Parliament he descended from old landed gentry, his sister marrying into the same aristocratic family as Bror’s grandmother. Karen’s maternal family was progressive Unitarian, her mother a suffragette whose brother Aage Westenholz owned a rubber plantation in Malaysia. After the engagement was announced he offered Bror a position there.

Far more alluring was the offer from his uncle Count Mogens Frijs of Frijsenborg Castle, the former attache to the Danish Embassy in London, friend of Edward VII and his Danish wife Alexandra, the greatest landowner in the country. He had a hunting lodge on Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley in the Protectorate of British East Africa, (the territory renamed Kenya in 1920, henceforth called that here) and assured Bror that an African farm would make him a millionaire. As Karen finally admitted though always claiming otherwise, their relations on both sides financed the purchase of the farm. Bror sank every kroner of his inheritance into the project and declared, I was after gold.

After a lengthy correspondence with a land agent 750 acres were purchased, sight unseen, near Nairobi on the advice of Mogens’ friend Ake Sjogren a coffee planter, engineer and former Swedish consul who told them of land for sale by English dairy farmer J.T. Oulton, a pioneer cattleman whose son Henry was the first English child born in Nairobi.

VITA NOVA

In late February 1913, as soon as he possibly could, he sailed to Africa a year before his fiance, the norm for colonial ship-to-cathedral marriages. After a 19-day voyage through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean he arrived on the pink coral island of Mombasa, an ancient Arab port with automobiles, ivory, hemp and bags of coffee piled up on the docks. He later recalled that everything was fresh and exciting then compared with the Thirties when it had become the hackneyed theme of so many writers, a measure of the