Amistad: Joseph Cinqué and All the Other Nameless Blacks

Tags

19th Century America, Amistad, Colonial Africa, David Franzoni, Debbie Allen, Djimon Hounsou, Joseph Cinqué, Morgan Freeman, Racial Issues, Sierra Leone, slavery, Steven Spielberg

The story of La Amistad is an important story in the history of black Americans. When Debbie Allen discovered William Owen’s Slave Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (1953, republished in 1968 under the title Black Mutiny), she became convinced that this was a story that Americans, particularly black Americans, needed to know. So she persuaded Steven Spielberg to make the film in 1997. His previous foray into a “black” film, The Color Purple, had been criticized within the black community for both softening Alice Walker’s novel too much and for its harsh depiction of black men as abusive to women. Unfortunately, decisions that Spielberg made while editing the film produced a film that is much less about the Africans on the Amistad than the white Americans who helped them win their freedom.

The film opens aboard the Amistad, with Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) slowly prying a nail from a piece of wood. Once he has worked the nail loose, he uses it as a simple lock-pick to open the cuffs he is wearing, and then liberates the other slaves. (Historically this is wrong; the slaves used a file that they found, not a nail, and it’s not clear that Cinqué is the one who accomplished their liberation. I’m not sure that it makes too much difference, other than situating Cinqué as the leader of the whole revolt.) Having armed themselves, they attack the crew, take Ruiz and Montez prisoner, and attempt to sail back to Africa only to be tricked by their prisoners. They are taken captive by Lt. Gedney and put into a Connecticut prison.

From that point on, the focus of the film is almost entirely on American characters, with the exception of Cinqué. The Africans are treated largely as an undifferentiated group. Apart from Cinqué, only one of them, the fictional Yamba, gets any character development. There is one scene that highlights the ethnic differences between the various Africans, but since the scene deals with an argument about where to place a table, the scene mostly acts to demonstrate how irrational the Africans are rather than to illuminate anything about their culture.

A contemporary image of Cinqué

Language Matters

Part of the reason for the obscuring of the Africans apparently has to do with Spielberg’s decision about how to deal with language. Early on, Spielberg and screenwriter David Franzoni made the decision to treat the language realistically; the Africans speak Mende rather than English. He could have done what many previous Hollywood films did and simply have everyone speak English anachronistically. So Spielberg deserves some credit for trying to treat the Africans realistically on this point. This choice has the effect of highlighting the cultural barriers and differences between the Americans and the Africans, and that enables the film to set up a story arc in which Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and Cinqué gradually come to understand each other’s perspective.

Cinqué and other Africans at the first hearing. Note how crudely they are dressed.

But the decision to have the Africans speak Mende creates a problem for the film; since the audience is unlikely to know Mende, the film will have to subtitle all their dialogue for the audience to understand it. But American audiences in the 1990s were notoriously resistant to subtitled films (and not much more receptive today), so there was a good deal of concern that the subtitles would keep audiences away from the film. As a result of this concern, Spielberg chose to minimize the amount of subtitling he provides in the film. Most of what the Africans say goes untranslated.

Spielberg’s guiding principle in deciding what to subtitle seems to be how critical the dialogue is to understand what’s happening on the screen. In the opening scenes, most of the Mende goes untranslated, but the Portuguese spoken by Ruiz and Montez gets translated. Later, Cinqué’s dialogue gets translated while other Mende does not. Once a translator is found who speaks Mende (Chiwetel Ejiofor in one of his earliest roles), Cinqué’s dialogue is no long translated, except when he is talking to Yamba.

The unfortunate effect of this choice is to render the Africans the exotic Others in the eyes of the audience, because most of the time the viewer has no idea what the Africans are saying. The choice strips these characters of much of their identity and agency. Perhaps the worst moment in the film for this comes after Judge Juttson renders his verdict in the first trial. The Africans do not understand that the judge’s verdict has been appealed and that there must be a second trial. Instead, they celebrate by lighting a bonfire in the courtyard of their prison and dancing around it, because apparently Africans dance around bonfires. When Cinqué learns that there has to be a second trial, he responds by angrily stripping off his Western-style shirt and going over to the bonfire. Cinqué’s angry speech is translated, but the rest of the Africans are not translated.

The effect of this is to present the Africans as primitive savages in contrast to the more civilized (and clothed) Americans. Unfortunately, this undermines what Spielberg seems to have intended with the film, the idea that the Africans are people like the Americans.

While the film is to be commended for trying to present the complexities of communicating across linguist barriers, to accomplish this it greatly exaggerates the challenge involved. The film devotes a great deal of time to Baldwin’s attempts to communicate with Cinqué, when in fact the abolitionists found translators fairly quickly, which allowed several of the Africans to offer testimony in court.

 

The Role of Christianity

Another problem is the way the film treats Joseph Cinqué, whose actual name was Sengbe Pieh. Descriptions suggest that the real Cinqué was a fairly small, unimpressive-looking man, and not the tall, muscular Hounsou, but that’s a fairly minor point. Cinqué became the spokesman for the Africans after their arrival in the US, but it seems less clear that he was the leader of the initial revolt as the film shows.

Cinqué on modern Sierra Leonese currency

The historical Cinqué converted to Christianity at some point during his captivity, as did a number of the other Africans. Many of the abolitionists were opposed to slavery for religious reasons, and others were eager to establish a Christian mission in Sierra Leone and saw the Africans as useful intermediaries for evangelization. When the Africans were finally liberated by the Supreme Court ruling, they were hosted in Connecticut by abolitionists who arranged for them to receive some education in English and Christianity. President Tyler was unwilling to help the return of the Africans, so instead, the abolitionists raised money by taking the Africans on tour to various churches where they demonstrated their knowledge of Christianity.

By the end of 1841, the abolitionists had raised enough money to charter a ship to send both the Africans and five missionaries to Sierra Leone. Most of the surviving Africans abandoned the missionaries as soon as they returned home, but enough stayed that a mission named Mo Tappan in honor of Lewis Tappan was established.

Cinqué’s history after his return is somewhat unclear; he discovered that his wife and children had disappeared, probably victims of the civil war raging in the country. What he did after he left the mission is unclear, but at the end of his life, he reportedly returned to the mission and requested Christian burial. How important Christianity was to Cinqué is unclear, but it is clear that he at least nominally converted to Christianity and cared about that conversion at the end of his life.

The Africans during the first trial. Note the clean white shirts

In the film, however, the role of Christianity is sharply downplayed. The main abolitionist characters (Joadson and Tappan, basically) never seriously mention Christianity as a motivation. There is a group of Christians who sing “Amazing Grace” and offer Bibles to the Africans, but they don’t have any actual lines and there’s no clear explanation that they are abolitionists. There is no suggestion that Cinqué converts to Christianity. Instead, the fictitious Yamba somehow teaches himself enough English to make sense of the story of Jesus, thanks to a Bible he’s given by the missionaries. He explains Jesus’ story to Cinqué, or at least an inoffensive Hollywood version of that story, but never clearly converts either.

The result of this is that once the liberated slaves arrive in the US, the film wanders away from the genuine elements of their story. It focuses almost exclusively on Cinqué’s story, as if only his experience mattered. It almost entirely removes Christianity from the story, even though Christianity was a major motivation for the abolitionists. The actual Africans navigated their situation in a fairly sophisticated way. They recognized that getting back home required them to please the Christian abolitionists by embracing Christianity long enough to return home; in doing this they adopted a common strategy, often employed by powerless or lower status people, of appeasing those with the power long enough to achieve their ends. But the film completely strips them of their agency by presenting most of the Africans as passive recipients of American benevolence.

In doing this, Spielberg unfortunately turned what Allen had apparently seen as an important story about a group of blacks liberating themselves from slavery and finding a way to return home to Africa into a story of how white Americans graciously fought to liberate blacks who weren’t really very civilized until they encountered the transformative power of American benevolence and love of liberty.

Adams and Cinqué before the Supreme Court. Note Cinqué’s Western clothing

Spielberg reinforces this notion of transformation with a costuming choice he made for the slaves. When the Africans are slaves, they are naked. After the rebellion on the Amistad, the slaves wear random pieces of clothing. Over the course of their time in jail, their clothing slowly gets more sophisticated. Partway through the first trial, they begin wearing clean white shirts; by the Supreme Court trial Cinqué is dressed more or less as a well-off American. When they are returned to Africa, most of the Africans are wearing white shirts, but Cinqué is just wearing a sheet wrapped around his torso and a pair of pants. I think this last detail is intended to suggest the most famous painting of Cinqué (which depicts him as a noble savage), but it comes off as a suggestion that he can’t dress properly without American help. The closer Cinqué is to his natural African state, the more crudely he dressed, while the more he depends on Roger Baldwin and John Quincy Adams, the more sophistication his clothing shows.

Nathaniel Jocelyn’s 1840 painting of Cinqué

Allen recognized that the story looked very much like one in which white men rescue oppressed black people. So she insisted on the insertion of the fictitious Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman). As she has said, “There were wealthy educated black men at this time. And hundreds of them were involved in the abolitionist movement.” Unfortunately, because Joadson was inserted into a story whose narrative was already fixed, that left the character without much to do dramatically. So Allen’s worthy attempt to show a black man working to free other blacks isn’t enough to overcome the thrust of the narrative as Spielberg presents it.

Cinqué returning to Africa. Note the white sheet.

So on the surface, Amistad is about the struggle of Joseph Cinqué and Theodore Joadson to free Cinqué and his fellow prisoners. In reality, it’s about how wonderful it is that white men struggled to free Cinqué and the others with a little bit of help from a black abolitionist.

Want to Know More?

Amistadis available in different formats on Amazon.

Markus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedomputs the focus squarely where it belongs, on the Africans fighting for their freedom, rather than on the faux-heroic abolitionists and lawyers of the film. In doing this, he breaks from earlier treatments of the Amistad incident and writes the story that Spielberg ought to have.

Advertisement

Amistad: All the Legal Bits

Tags

19th Century America, American Presidents, Amistad, Anthony Hopkins, Colonial Africa, David Franzoni, Debbie Allen, Djimon Hounsou, John Quincy Adams, Joseph Cinqué, Legal Stuff, Lewis Tappan, Martin Van Buren, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, Racial Issues, Roger Sherman Baldwin, Sierra Leone, slavery, Steven Spielberg

In 1839, a Spanish slave ship, La Amistad (“Friendship” in English), was travelling between Havana and Puerto Principe, Cuba, when the slaves in the hold found a file and were able to liberate themselves from their chains. They armed themselves and staged a rebellion. They killed one of the owners of the ship and took the other two, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, prisoner and tried to force them to sail back to Sierra Leone, where the Africans had been taken captive, but instead Ruiz and Montez sailed north, until the ship was intercepted by an American naval vessel off Long Island. That triggered an important legal battle and was ultimately the inspiration for Amistad, (1997, dir. Steven Spielberg).

 

The Legal Issues of the Amistad Case

The arrival of the liberated slaves caused an extremely complex legal problem. Lt. Gedney, who was captaining the ship that found the Amistad, took it to Connecticut rather than New York, because slavery was still technically legal in Connecticut, and that allowed him to present a claim for salvage that included the slaves as part of the cargo. Two other men  also claimed salvage rights over the ship because they had apprehended some of the slaves who came ashore in search of food and water. Ruiz and Montez filed a claim that the ship and the slaves were their rightful property. The Spanish government, acting through the Connecticut district attorney, claimed the ship and its slaves as Spanish property. Finally, the liberated slaves claimed that they were not property at all and that therefore none of these suits had authority over them.

The slaves were supported in their position by the British government, which had by this point taken the lead in opposing slavery, signing treaties with various countries to ban the international slave trade, which the United States did in 1808. As a result, the issues at play in the Amistad case were intimately connected to international law. Since Spain had not outlawed slavery, and since the US had a treaty with Spain (Pinckney’s Treaty) that required the return of Spanish property to its rightful owners, the question was whether the liberated slaves counted as property or people.

Just as important were questions of Admiralty Law (or Maritime Law), which deals with matters relating to maritime commerce, crimes at sea, and the like. The chief issue here was Gedney’s decision to take the Amistad to Connecticut instead of the closest harbor, which was in New York. Gedney’s claims for salvage rights over the liberated slaves would not have been admissible in New York, which was a free state rather than a slave state. So a key question was whether the Amistad had been found in New York waters or international waters.

Fortunately for the slaves, their case was taken up by Lewis Tappan, a Christian abolitionist from New York. He put together the legal team, led by Roger Sherman Baldwin, that represented the slaves, worked to improve their living conditions while they were in captivity, attended the trial on a daily basis and wrote newspaper reports on it for an abolitionist newspaper, and arranged to have the slaves tutored in English. After their release, he worked to raise money to return them to Africa.

Roger Baldwin

The case made its way through three courts. It was initially heard in the Connecticut Circuit Court under Judge Smith Thompson where the charge was mutiny and murder. Thompson ruled that the court lacked jurisdiction because the acts in question had happened outside American waters on a Spanish ship. The case was simultaneously heard in District Court under Judge Andrew Judson (not Juttson, as the film spells it) to address the issues of Admiralty Law. The chief issue here was initially the question of salvage, which Judson was skeptical of, doubting that the liberated slaves could be regarded as property.

Despite the fact that the central issue was whether the case should be heard in New York or Connecticut, Baldwin made the origins of the liberated slaves an important element of the proceedings, even though it was readily conceded by almost everyone that the slaves were Africans and not Cubans. The centerpiece of this was the testimony of Joseph Cinqué, a leader of the liberated slaves, who told the story of his capture in Africa, his journey across the Atlantic, his purchase in the Cuban slave market, and his role in the mutiny. After that, Gedney’s lawyer dropped his claim for salvage rights over the slaves, saying that his client had only ever wanted salvage rights over the ship and its non-living cargo.

Judson ruled that Gedney and his crew had taken possession of the Amistad on the high seas, not in New York waters, and so Admiralty Law was relevant. Gedney was therefore entitled to 1/3 of the appraised value of the ship and its non-human cargo. The slaves, he ruled, were born free and therefore had been unlawfully enslaved in violation of a treaty that prohibited the Spanish from importing slaves, and ordered the Executive Branch to take possession of the liberated slaves until their return to Africa could be arranged.

The Van Buren administration decided to appeal the case to the Circuit Court, because the matter had begun to rile up the southern states and Van Buren was hoping to be re-elected. Rather than hearing lengthy arguments that he realized would result in an appeal regardless of which way he ruled, Judge Thompson affirmed Judson’s ruling and sent the case to the Supreme Court because it involved two major international powers and significant issues of American law.

Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the United States

When the case got to the Supreme Court, the US Attorney General, Henry Gilpin, argued that the Amistad’s records showed the slaves were Spanish property and that therefore the courts had no right to reject the documents’ validity. Therefore, the slaves must be turned over to the Spanish. It was a weak argument, but Gilpin spent two hours making it. Baldwin spent the next four hours repeating the same arguments he had already made; he added that the Spanish had failed to appeal Judson’s liberation of the slaves, and so were arguing the wrong issue.

Former President John Quincy Adams then delivered an 8-hour speech that took up the following two days. The centerpiece of his argument was an attack on the powers of the Executive. He argued that if the President had the power to return the liberated slaves to Havana, the President would also have the power to order American citizens sent to other countries to stand trial. He also argued that Pinckney’s Treaty did not cover the return of people, only property. He also invoked the Declaration of Independence and its statement that all men have an inalienable right to life and liberty.

John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States

Justice Joseph Story issued the Court’s ruling, which was that the Africans were unlawfully kidnapped and therefore entitled to their freedom. It rejected Gilpin’s argument that the Court had no right to rule over the legitimacy of the documents in the case, since the documents were elements of a fraud. Gedney was entitled to salvage rights. When the Amistad came into American waters, it was under the possession of the liberated slaves, and was therefore not Spanish property, so no treaty required its return to Spain.

As you can see from this very long summary (assuming you haven’t given up and gone somewhere else by now), the Amistad case was an extremely complex one that ranged across a variety of issues (and let me admit here, I’m certainly no expert on legal history; I relied heavily on a couple of good summaries of the case, and may well have made a few mistakes on the legal details). But the issues being debated in the case were not primarily the legitimacy of slavery as a legal institution in the United States; rather the chief issues were various international treaties, Admiralty Law, and ultimately the power of the Executive branch.

Spielberg’s Version of the Amistad Story

The Amistad case has long been acknowledged by historians as an important case in the history of American slavery. It has not, however, always been well-known to the American public, having been overshadowed in the public consciousness by the later Dred Scott case since the latter case was far more important for domestic law. Debbie Allen, the well-known black actress, director, and producer, learned about the Amistad case from a historical novel by William A. Owens, Slave Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (1953, republished in 1968 under the title Black Mutiny), which she optioned for a film. She persuaded Steven Spielberg to make what he eventually called his “most important movie”. The subject is certainly worthy of a film, but it unfortunately didn’t get the film treatment it deserved.

Slave Mutiny, the book that inspired the film

The chief problem with adapting the Amistad case to film is obviously that American audiences were unlikely to go to a movie about the legal complexities of international treaties and Admiralty Law. So, in typical Hollywood fashion, a decision was taken to focus instead on an uplifting story of American freedom that would affirm viewers’ notions that America was a country of liberty and equality where the court system was ultimately opposed to slavery. Getting the Amistad case to speak to those ideas would require considerable torture of the facts.

Since law was so critically important to the case, Spielberg and screenwriter David Franzoni (one of the screenwriters on Gladiator) decided to fall back on cinematic conventions of trial movies, so they made the film into a story about the lawyer, Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) , and his client, Joseph Cinqué (whose African name was Sangbe Pieh, played by Djimon Hounsou). These characters were given strong story arcs that focus in Baldwin’s case on his journey from thinking about the slaves as property to thinking about the slaves as human beings and in Cinqué’s case on his journey from anger and despair to discovering the beauty and promise of American justice.

McConaughey as Baldwin and Hounsou as Cinqué

John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) undergoes a less central but still important arc in which he moves from not caring about abolitionism to being a passionate proponent of it, thanks to his meetings with Cinqué. In fact, it wasn’t necessary for him to be persuaded to take the case; Adams volunteered to represent the Africans.

This is an uplifting story that has little basis in fact. Far from being a poor struggling lawyer who has to chase after the case as the film seems to present him, Roger Sherman Baldwin was the grandson of one of the Founding Fathers and a highly respected lawyer who was also a member of the Connecticut legislature and a committed abolitionist. He was elected Governor of Connecticut just three years after the Amistad case. Nor did Baldwin approach Lewis Tappan about hiring him as a lawyer; Tappan recruited Baldwin because of his solid credentials as an abolitionist and the fact that he was prominent politician of Connecticut.

I’ll talk about the film’s treatment of Cinqué in a later post, because there’s a lot to say about it, but here I’ll just say that there’s no evidence that Cinqué went through a period of angry refusal to co-operate with Baldwin. That element of the story is entirely Hollywood’s trope of the hero who goes through a period of self-doubt before finding his confidence. That part of his story line meshes rather poorly with the film’s treatment of him as a ‘Magical Negro’ who helps white people become better human beings by being inspiring.

To give Baldwin his fictitious character arc, the film had to largely sideline Lewis Tappan, who in reality was central to the entire effort on behalf of the slaves. After having a couple meetings with Baldwin and the fictitious black abolitionist Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman), Tappan essentially vanishes from the film, apart from watching some of the courtroom proceedings. Replacing Tappan, who was in many ways the driving force for the case, with the fictitious Joadson is a serious disservice to Tappan.

The Joadson character is a particular problem. Joadson has neither back story (other than a few hints that he was a former slave) and no motive for being an abolitionist apart from the presumed motive that a black man would obviously care about the legal rights of blacks. Freeman is given no real character development and, apart from one scene where he helps Baldwin search the Amistad for evidence, has very little to actually do except occasionally talk to Adams. The character seems to have been added to increase black audience interest, since in 1997, Freeman was already a solidly established actor while Hounsou, playing the other major black character, was a relative unknown at the time. It’s unfortunate that a film that purports to be about the humanity of blacks resorted to this sort of tokenism in casting Freeman as a made-up person.

Freeman as Joadson

 

The Legal Elements

Despite the character arcs that Franzoni made up, the film is still at its heart a courtroom drama. But the case was far too complex, and turned on legal issues that were unlikely to captivate American audiences, so the legal details required considerable massaging. As I noted, the main legal issues in the actual case were the question of where the Amistad was taken by Gedney and whether various treaties applied. The film shifts the issue considerably, to the question of whether the slaves were African or Cuban in origin.

That choice is not an unreasonable one. It focuses the audience’s attention on the easy-to-understand issue of whether the liberated slaves were legally or illegally enslaved, and allows the central issue of the film to be the well-loved issue of ‘freedom’, in this case understood as literal freedom from slavery. It allowed Spielberg to use chains as a recurring symbol of the issue weighing on Cinqué, so that after the Supreme Court decision, Cinqué’s handcuffs can be removed right there in the courtroom as a symbol of his triumph, despite being entirely invented since Cinqué was not present at the Supreme Court portion of the case. This choice also allows the film to get away from the much thornier issue of where Gedney found the ship.

But this choice does distort the case considerably. There seems to have been relatively little real debate in the courtroom over whether the slaves came from Africa or Cuba, despite Baldwin’s emphasis on this issue in the trial. Ruiz and Montez said they were Cuban slaves, but witnesses were presented that Ruiz had admitted they were African. A Yale linguist testified that the slaves spoke Mende, and two interpreters were found so that the slaves could provide their own testimony. (The film actually gets almost right the way the translators were found. The linguist learned to count to ten in Mende and then walked around the docks counting loudly until someone recognized what he was doing and approached him. But it wasn’t Joadson and Baldwin who did that.) But Cinqué actually did tell his harrowing story of enslavement in court, so the film is not just shoehorning that in for drama.

More problematically, if the main issue is where the slaves came from, it means that by Hollywood convention, there needs to be a stock scene in which the lawyer personally searches for evidence to prove his case. We’ve seen a scene like this in just about every courtroom drama ever filmed, and in this case it takes the form of Baldwin and Joadson searching the Amistad. Joadson finds a lion’s tooth, which allows the film to introduce what is supposed to be an inspirational story about how Cinqué killed a lion in Africa. The film later keeps returning to the metaphor of ‘slaying the lion’ (slavery, in case you needed to be hit over the head with it, which the film thinks you do) as a way to show how inspiring Cinqué is, but it all feels very contrived and it is entirely made-up.

On-board the Amistad, Joadson panics when confronted with the sight of slave chains, drops his lantern, and has to be helped by Baldwin, who then conveniently discovers the log-book of the Tecora, the slave ship that brought the Africans to Cuba. It’s used to prove that the liberated slaves were actually Africans, although it’s never explained why the Tecora’s log-book was on the Amistad in the first place.

The film also significantly changes the details of the courts and the judges involved. As I noted, the case was first brought into the Circuit Court under Judge Thompson, but was heard simultaneously in the District Court by Judge Judson as a bench trial (in which there is no jury, only a judge making a ruling). After Judson’s ruling, it briefly returned to Thompson and then was sent to the Supreme Court after Van Buren ordered an appeal.

In the film the case starts under Judge Judson, apparently in the District Court. But Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) somehow contrives to have the jury and the judge dismissed and replaced by a bench trial in front of a young ambitious judge who will do what Van Buren wants, which is to find against the Africans so he can be re-elected. But Cinqué’s cause is so obviously righteous that the judge has a crisis of conscience and does the right thing and frees the Africans. He also rules against Gedney. Then the case gets appealed straight to the Supreme Court.

The removal of the Circuit Court from the storyline makes sense; it smoothes out a complex detail that would only confuse the viewers. But the fabrication of Van Buren manipulating the court system is both unfair to Van Buren and rather nonsensical. It’s not explained how Van Buren does this, and since the film has decided to remove Adams’ attack on the power of the Presidency, it doesn’t really go anywhere in terms of the narrative arc. All it does is introduce some extra tension that could more easily have been introduced by making Judson less sympathetic to the case. It also turns Van Buren into a villain for the film, but he’s a villain who is given very little to do other than fret about the how the South will react to the case. From a script perspective, it just feels clumsy.

As they prepare for the Supreme Court trial, Cinqué suddenly develops a keen legal mind, pestering Adams with legal questions about Admiralty Law and international treaties. This is just silly, because throughout the rest of the film, Cinqué’s understanding of the American system is limited to referring to Adams as a ‘chief’ and not understanding how he can be a former chief.

At the Supreme Court level, Adams delivers a fairly brief speech (compared to the actual 8 hour oration) that acts as the film’s climax. Instead of arguing against the powers of the Executive branch, he makes an impassioned plea for liberty that, apart from a mention of the Declaration of Independence, bears no resemblance to Adams’ actual speech because it mostly turns on what a hero Cinqué is. He declares liberty to be the natural state of mankind. The film also tries to heighten the tension by claiming that 7 out of the 9 Supreme Court justices were southerners; that’s false; while I didn’t look up all the justices in 1841, at least four of them were northerners. (On a side note, the film does have a nifty piece of casting here; Justice Story is played by actual Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun.)

(Ignore the opening and jump to about 1:45)

As a result of these changes, the audience is led to think that the Amistad case basically put the whole system of American slavery on trial, and it essentially provoked the American Civil War two decades later. In fact the closing scenes of the film show the Civil War and the epilogue text mentions it. In reality, the case was about international law and the international slave trade and while its outcome certainly didn’t please supporters of slavery, it had no direct impact on American slavery. In fact, in 1841, American slaves traveling on the Creole mutinied and escaped to the Bahamas; the American government, despite the Amistad precedent, badgered the British government into paying compensation for the slaves. So rather than being sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, the American courts were generally hostile to it.

 

Why is the Amistad Case Important?

The film situates the Amistad case as a cause of the Civil War. Several characters mention how the southern states are ready to fight over the issue. That’s a considerable exaggeration. The Civil War wouldn’t come for another twenty years. It played a role in raising tensions over slavery, but the states were a long way from being willing to fight militarily over the issue.

Nor did the case lead to the political defeat of Martin Van Buren in his bid for a second term as president as the film says. The case started in 1839, but it didn’t reach the Supreme Court until 1841, by which time Van Buren had already been defeated by William Henry Harrison. Harrison died less than two months into his term, and was succeeded by his vice president, John Tyler, a pro-slavery southerner who refused to assist in returning the Africans to Sierra Leone.

Nor did it lead to the destruction of the Lomboko Slave Fortress in Sierra Leone. The film shows the British navy liberating the slaves and blowing down the walls of the fortress with a naval bombardment. But the Lomboko fortress was destroyed in 1840, before the Supreme Court had rendered its verdict. It’s hard to see how the case would have influenced the British to do this, since the British were already very active in opposing the slave trade.

So if the Amistad case didn’t accomplish any of the things the film attributes to it, why is the case important? What does it matter in the larger scope of history?

The Amistad case was a turning point in the abolitionist movement. Prior to 1839, abolitionists had sought to overthrow the American slave system primarily through persuasion. They had emphasized the immorality of slavery and sought to win converts to their cause that way. The House of Representatives had imposed a gag rule that automatically tabled all petitions against slavery, so that it was impossible for the issue to be addressed legislatively. What Tappan did in 1839 was open a new front in the struggle; he went to the courts and began to fight slavery legally. In that regard, the Amistad case was a significant victory for the abolitionists, even though it did not set a very strong legal precedent as far as domestic law was concerned. The case also helped rally support for abolitionism because Cinqué’s testimony dramatically illustrated the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, and Van Buren’s efforts to get the Judson’s ruling overturned seemed to suggest that the Federal government was complicit in the slave system. The case is also important in the history of international law and American diplomacy; it resolved questions about the treaties the US had with Spain.

About the only thing the film gets right about the impact of the case is that it ultimately led to the return of the Africans to Sierra Leone, but that gets to issues of how the film depicts the liberated slaves, and that’s something I’ll save for next time.

Want to Know More?

Amistadis available in different formats on Amazon. As I noted, it’s based on William Owens’ Slave Mutiny, later reprinted as Black Mutiny: Revolt on the Schooner Amistad.

Unless you’re a legal scholar, I suspect that the legal issues are going to make dry reading, but Amistad: The Federal Courts and the Challenge to Slaveryis a short, cheap Kindle book that surveys the whole case and all the people involved.

Out of Africa: Taking the Africans out of ‘Africa’

Tags

Colonial Africa, Colonial Kenya, colonialism, Denys Finch Hatton, Iman, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Meryl Streep, Movies I Love, Out of Africa, Racial Issues, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack

Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack) is a wonderful film in many ways. It’s one of those movies that draws me in any time I run across it on cable. But its depiction of colonial Africa leaves a good deal to be desired.

The film is loosely based on Karen Blixen’s memoire of life in Kenya in the 1920s, Out of Africa (written under the pen name of Isak Dinesen). Consequently, the film is not truly a depiction of colonial Kenya so much as it is a depiction of Blixen’s memoires about colonial Kenya. As a result, we have to recognize that the film’s view of Africa is at two removes from history, since it is showing the Africa of Blixen’s memories more than the Africa of history. At least, it claims to be about Blixen’s memoire, although it substantially deviates from the book, as I pointed out in my previous post.

The book is, at a fundamental level, about the contrast between European and African society, and the movie tries to capture that by showing the exoticism of African’s wildlife, scenery, and peoples. The cinematography is at times breath-taking and lyrical. But while the film successfully captures some of Africa’s beauty, it does a much less effective job of capturing African culture. Where Blixen’s book spends a good deal of time exploring her relationship with various Africans and her efforts to make sense of their society, the film’s focus on the relationship between Blixen (Meryl Streep), Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), and Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) means that much of the heart of the book gets crowded out.

The major African characters in the film are all taken from the book. Her loyal aide Farah, her young cook Kamante Gatura, and the Kikuyu chieftain Kinanjui are all prominent characters in the memoire. In fact, they are all far more important characters in the book than they are in the film, especially the latter two. Nearly a fifth of the book is devoted to Blixen’s reminiscences about Kamante, and Kinanjui gets a whole chapter. Farah does not get his own section like the other two, but is a constant presence in many of her anecdotes.

Farah was an exceedingly important figure on her coffee farm, handling much of the daily management of the estate and becoming a major confidant. Blixen describes their relationship as a “creative unity”. She describes Kamante’s efforts to get married, and makes frequent references to his comments about various unusual situations. (When a brush fire breaks out nearby, he tells her that she had better get up because “God is coming.” After she points out that it is only a brush fire, he comments that he thought he would be on the safe side, just in case it actually was God.) Kinanjui is a complex figure, wise, proud, and somewhat vain, whose support was vital to her getting the workers she needed for the farm. What makes the book such excellent reading is the way that all the characters emerge clearly as human beings.

Blixen and Kinanjui in the film

Unfortunately, none of these characters emerge strongly as people in the film. Farah (Malick Bowens) appears frequently, but rarely shows himself to be anything more than an obedient servant. Kamante (Joseph Thiaka) features in several scenes regard his sore-covered legs, which Blixen persuades him to get treated at a Nairobi hospital. One of the more memorable scenes involves a conversation in which the two of them discuss Kamante’s leg as if it has its own will; sadly this scene seems to be an invention of the screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. Kinanjui (Stephen Kinyanjui) acts primarily an opponent of Blixen’s plan to educate the Kikuyu, although he eventually changes his mind. This too seems to be Luedtke’s invention.

The film does not permit Kamante and Kinanjui to be real people in their own right. Whereas Blixen and Finch Hatton are permitted to grow and develop as people, Kamante and Kinanjui only grow and change in reaction to Blixen’s actions. We are not allowed to see their personal conflicts or even the moment when they change their minds and agree to Blixen’s wishes; in both cases, they simply show up and demonstrate that their thinking has changed. Whereas the historical Farah and Kamante had wives and children, in the film they are apparently single, because their personal lives are unimportant.

The real Kamante Gatura

The film wishes to portray Blixen’s benevolent paternalism (maternalism?) toward the Africans around her. In several scenes she is shown giving medical help to the Kikuyu (something Blixen actually did a good deal, although she admits she had only a first aid course for training). She wants to educate her Kikuyu (and persuades the missionary she recruits to hold off on evangelizing his students). When she has to sell the farm, her last struggle is to arrange a new home for the tribe that will be displaced when her farm is developed. To a considerable extent, the film uses its named African characters to demonstrate her benevolent generosity. She persuades Kamante to get his leg treated over his initial resistance, and she persuades Kinanjui that literacy would be a valuable skill for his people.

Because the film is more interested in using Africans to demonstrate the cinematic Blixen’s character than in accurately capturing the real Blixen’s experiences with them, Luedtke resorts to inventing scenes that didn’t happen, so that he can show off her character. Most of the more notable scenes with Kamante and Kinanjui are not based in her writings, as far as I can tell. So too is the scene at the end of the film in which Farah expresses his devotion to her (she tells him that she will go ahead of him and light a fire to guide him to her, an odd thing to tell a man who will be staying behind to take care of his family). Kinanjui’s opposition to her school also seems to be an invention. So rather than letting the real characters say what they actually said, we are given Hollywood ideas of what Africans would say to a white woman they have come to love because she’s so benevolent.

(As an aside, another memorable scene at the end of the film is also a Hollywood invention. Although Blixen did persuade the British government to provide the Kikuyu tribe with land, she did not do it by creating a scene by publicly embarrassing the incoming governor and impressing his wife.)

Disguising Colonialism

All of this is emblematic of a wider problem with the film, which is that it has little interest in exploring the negative impact of colonialism on the Africans. In the film, Finch Hatton is worried about the loss of wildlife and untouched land, which is accurate, but he has no such concern for the native peoples. If you watch the film closely, in fact you will see that he is quite condescending toward the natives. He has a black servant that he never speaks to, and tells Blixen to ignore the man entirely. He casually mentions the man’s death later in the film as if he doesn’t care that the man has died. Finch Hatton also asserts that the Masai are incapable of thinking about the future; they die if they are put into prison because they cannot understand that they will ever be let out. He makes a similar comment that animals have no sense of time. While the film presents these comments as a profound insight, as an observation that Africans and animals live in the moment, what Finch Hatton is actually doing is saying that Africans are more like animals than humans mentally (a point reinforced by the fact that both the Kikuyus and the animals are fascinated by his gramophone). One might defend this as representing an historically accurate way that some Europeans viewed Africans, but in the film these comments are offered as examples of his wisdom, not as a way to suggest he looks down on the Africans. (And at his funeral, Blixen briefly sees a glimpse of Finch Hatton’s dead Masai servant, suggesting that this servant, much like Murron in Braveheart, was supernaturally loyal to him, despite his condescension and apparent disregard.)

The theme of African devotion to white superiors runs through the film. In addition to Finch Hatton’s Masai servant, the European Berkeley Cole has a Somali servant Mariammo (Iman) who is also revealed to be his lover; he says that he “thinks” she likes him (one would hope so; otherwise he’s basically been raping her). Farah and Kamante are both devoted to Blixen and want to go to Europe with her when she leaves. Since both men were actually married, the film has subtly stripped away their families in order that they can regard Blixen as a substitute wife or mother. The Kikuyu workers never express any emotion more negative than a certain wariness of Blixen, a wariness that dissipates once they realize she’s a good person.

Iman as Mariammo

What is especially problematic here is that the film makes few efforts to show us what these white characters did to earn the devotion of their servants; it’s just taken as a given. The film never contemplates the possibility that this devotion might be a calculated strategy of self-interest, in which a lower status person chooses to serve a more powerful person as way of getting employment, shelter, legal protection, or whatever else might be needed. Instead, Africans just seem to love their benevolent colonial masters. Mariammo seems content to be treated as Cole’s servant instead of being acknowledged publicly as his de facto wife.

What makes this so frustrating is that the memoire takes a very different attitude toward its African characters. Blixen recognized that the relationship between Europeans and Africans was complicated. She discusses the fact that Africans are slow to trust Europeans and often dislike speaking to them. She contrasts the native justice system favorably to the British system, which allows a man to kill his native servant without punishment. She discusses the fact that the colonial authorities repeatedly tried to suppress the native Ngoma dances out of fear that they will encourage resistance to colonial authority. So it’s not that Blixen herself was oblivious to these issues; the film mostly chooses to remove these elements from her story.

The film touches on these issues only briefly and obliquely. At Cole’s funeral, Mariammo is forced to stand outside the fence around the graveyard. When Blixen tries to get the British government to provide for the Kikuyu, Blixen comments that ‘we’ have taken their land from them. At first glance this seems a rather enlightened comment, until you consider that the reason Blixen can hire the Kikuyu for her farm is that she herself (and her husband Bror) are the ones who dispossessed this tribe of their land. Her benevolence is shown by the fact that, having taken the Kikuyu’s farmland, she is willing to pay them to help her farm it and worries about what will happen when she leaves.

The film is not entirely blind to the power imbalance between Africans and Europeans; it simply doesn’t want to call any serious attention to it. It does at least acknowledge the way Europeans dispossessed Africans of their lands and turned them into servants. Cole’s relationship with Miriammo speaks volumes about the treatment of Africans, but it speaks quite softly.

But the most effective way the film does this lies in a subtle but repeated theme of the challenge of communication between Africans and Europeans. Finch Hatton and his servant do not speak to each other, and he tells Blixen to ignore the man. Mariammo has no dialogue (so the film has literally deprived her of her voice), and Blixen briefly contemplates speaking to the woman at the funeral but chooses not to. No one in the film, even Cole, explicitly acknowledges the reality of the relationship. The servants in the Muthaiga Club bar do not speak to Blixen, and are reluctant to acknowledge her drink order at all. Blixen speaks to Kinanjui only through a translator, because he “has no British”. Only Kamante and Farah have significant speaking roles, and both call her Msabu, indicating their subservience; when Farah finally does speak her name, it only because she orders him to do so as they are parting. In all of this, the film subtly emphasizes that Africans and Europeans could not speak openly and honestly to each other as equals, but only as master and servant. Only Blixen is able to bridge that gap, and even then only briefly at the end of the film.

A Different Kind of Power Imbalance

It’s not that Sydney Pollack wasn’t thinking about inequality in this film. It’s that he’s more interested in gender inequalities than racial ones. Once the decision was made to focus on Blixen’s romance with Finch Hatton, it was natural to develop this into a ‘woman’s film” by focusing on other issues relevant to women in the 1980s, namely sexual liberation, the ability to work, and equal treatment socially, all three of which are addressed in the film. At the start of the film, Blixen is at the end of a pre-marital love affair when she untraditionally proposes to Bror (he wryly asks her “are you sure you’re not being too romantic?”). Later, after Bror and she separate, she starts another unconventional love affair with Finch Hatton, but is dissatisfied that he will not permanently commit to her and ultimately she breaks it off. So she is presented in some ways as a sexually liberated woman, but one who longs for the security of a conventional marriage after her failed marriage.

The film also shows her working on the coffee farm right alongside her workers, planting trees, processing the beans for roasting, bagging up the roasted beans, and so on. She frequently leads her workers in tasks such as repairing the dikes. In Hollywood tradition, this demonstrates her genuineness, because she is a lower class worker at heart, even if she’s actually a woman of money and leisure.

At the start of the film, when she arrive in Nairobi, she makes the mistake of walking into the Muthaiga Club’s bar, which is a male-only space, and she is immediately rebuked and forced to leave. In real life, this is a nonsensical scene; a woman of Blixen’s social standing and training would have known that she didn’t belong there, but in the film it acts to remind viewers that this was a period when women were explicitly excluded from many spaces. At the end of the film the men of the club invite her in for a going-away drink, as a sign that they have come to have respect for her. Again, in the context of her day, this is a false note; the men would have seen themselves as respecting her since in both scenes, the men all stand up when she enters the room, which was a standard gesture of courtesy to a woman at the time. So the purpose of the scene is to vindicate her hard work and virtue.

However, at the same time, the film works to undermine Blixen in subtle ways. When she arrives in Africa, she is scared of the natives and at one point tries to literally shoo them away. Although she knows how to hunt (at the start of the film she is participating in a shooting party), and although the historical Blixen went on safaris with her husband before she met Finch Hatton, in the film, Finch Hatton is the one who teaches her how to hunt. But when she is charged by a lioness, she manages to shoot it herself, impressing Finch Hatton. She needs Finch Hatton’s protection, but not completely. So while the film ignores the racial imbalances in colonial Kenya, it explores the gender imbalances.

Blixen shooting the lioness

And it does this by injecting gender in a way that Blixen never does in the memoire. In the book, she makes almost no reference the fact that she’s a woman (and, given that she was using a male pen name, it might have been odd if she had). So, in a way, the film colonizes Blixen’s memoire the way the Europeans colonized Kenya, taking her story as its own and exploiting it for its own purposes rather than respecting hers.

 

Want to Know More?

Out of Africa is available on Amazon.

If you want to read something about colonial Kenya and the race issues there, Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change is the memoires of a provincial administrator who lived in Kenya the whole time Dinesen was there. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion, 1912-1930looks at the labor system that Dinesen benefitted from on her plantation. It is rather pricy, however.

Out of Africa: Wonderful Movie, Fuzzy History

Tags

Bror Blixen, Colonial Africa, Colonial Kenya, Denys Finch Hatton, Isak Denisen, Karen Blixen, Meryl Streep, Movies I Love, Out of Africa, Robert Redford

After the unmitigated silliness of Reign, I was in need of something to remind me that our country can actually tell good stories. So I went from the ridiculous to the sublime and opted for Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack). Has there every been a more perfectly-delivered line than “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills”, especially when delivered by Meryl Streep? (She reportedly practiced her accent by listening to recordings of Isak Dinesen reading her stories.) The cinematography is truly breath-taking, especially in the scene with the biplane. As a romance, the story is almost perfect, the performances are brilliant, and unsurprisingly it won 7 Academy Awards.

The film is, of course, based on Out of Africa, the memoir of Isak Dinesen,  the pen-name of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke about her 17 years running a coffee plantation outside Nairobi in Kenya. And by ‘based on’ I mean ‘very loosely based on’. Unlike the movie, the book is not a simple narrative. It has five sections in which she reflects on various facets of her time in Africa, but in no particular order and without a strong chronology. Much of the book is a reflection on people she has met, both her experiences with Africans and the Europeans she met, and in many ways the book is a study of the contrasts between the two cultures.

(The title of the book and film, incidentally, is usually thought to be a reference to a phrase from the Roman author Pliny, Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, meaning “There’s always something new coming out of Africa”. The sentiment itself goes back to Ancient Greece. However, the direct reference is to a poem she wrote by that name.)

From this collection of stories, screenwriter Kurt Luedtke extracted material about Blixen’s romantic relationships and some of the more dramatic incidents, added material from Blixen’s later work, Shadows in the Grass, and a good deal of fact and speculation from Blixen’s life to weave a story that emphasizes Blixen’s romantic relationship with Denys Finch Hatton.

Karen Blixen in Africa

Right off the bat, two major details of the film demonstrate that it is not closely based on the book. First, the book makes only a single passing reference to Blixen’s husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, without even mentioning him by name, whereas Bror has a very substantial role in the film, being played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Bror comes off quite poorly in the film, as a womanizing cad who leeches off of Blixen financially. That may be true, but he was more than that. He was an extremely skilled hunter and was renowned for his abilities as a safari guide. Beryl Markham (about whom more below) described him as the greatest of the “white hunters”, praising his ability to shoot a charging buffalo while discussing what drinks to have back at camp, and Ernest Hemingway was impressed enough with Bror that he based a character in one of his stories on Bror. While Blixen clearly loved Finch Hatton, at the end of her life she said that the thing she longed for most was another chance to go on safari with Bror (who had died in a car crash in the 1940s).

Bror

Second, and rather more jarring, the book makes no clear mention of the romantic relationship between Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, played of course by Robert Redford. She speaks adoringly of him, and says that he used her farm as a base for his various safaris and journeys, but discretely passes over whatever sexual elements their relationship had. So the more explicitly romantic sections of the film are substantially Luedtke’s additions rather than part of the book the movie is ostensibly ‘based on’.

Denys Finch Hatton

The Film’s Chronology

The relevant dates for Blixen’s life in Africa are quite clear. She emigrated to Africa in 1914, where they purchased a coffee plantation. She returned to Europe in 1915 to seek treatment for the syphilis she contracted from Bror, and returned to Africa the next year. She met Finch Hatton in 1918, close to the end of the war, and soon after he completed his pilot training. In 1921, she and Bror separated and by 1922, she and Finch Hatton had begun sleeping together (although this could have started two years earlier). She divorced Bror in 1925, by which point she and Finch Hatton had been living together quite openly. When the Great Depression hit and drove down the price of coffee, the family corporation that owned her farm forced her to sell it. As this was being finalized in 1931, Finch Hatton was killed when his plane crashed.

Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen

However, in typical Hollywood fashion, the chronology of the film is quite vague, confused, and compressed. Blixen arrives in Africa in 1913, a year too early, and meets Finch Hatton immediately. Then the war comes, and her interest in Finch Hatton slowly develops. Then she is diagnosed with syphilis and returns to Denmark. The war ends in 1918. When Kenya achieves full Crown Colony status in 1921, she and Finch Hatton kiss for the first time; the same evening, she tells Bror to move out. After this, the film loses all sense of time. Finch Hatton moves in, he takes her flying (having learned to fly the day before), they have sex for the first time, she and Bror divorce, and she and Finch Hatton quarrel about marrying and break up. Then the coffee factory burns down, she sells the farm, and Finch Hatton is killed. The uninformed viewer could be forgiven for assuming that her relationship with Finch Hatton really only lasted a year or two, rather than the 9 years it actually lasted, and that she left Africa perhaps in 1923 or 24, since none of the characters age perceptibly.

The effect of all these chronological distortions is to give the viewer the sense that she turned to Finch Hatton romantically only after her marriage had irretrievably broken down because of Bror’s personality. The reality seems to have been more complex. By 1920, she was already deeply interested in Finch Hatton because she began to see herself in competition with Bror for Finch Hatton’s attention. When she asked Bror to move out, her goal seems to have been to teach him a lesson, not to initiate a permanent separation, but then she began sleeping with Finch Hatton, and a reconciliation with Bror probably became impossible.

Robert Redford as Finch Hatton

The Economics of the Farm

The decision to farm coffee at Ngong was a bad one, because the climate was not really suitable for coffee. The farm took five years to mature and bear coffee, and while the Great War drove up the price of coffee, over the 1920s, the price of coffee dropped, so that the farm was never truly profitable. Additionally, the Kenyan economy was vulnerable to fluctuations in the currency that disastrously increased the amount the Blixens owed on the farm.

The film depicts Bror as sponging off of his ex-wife and suggests that he constantly asked her for money. The reality was more complex. By the early 1920s, it was clear that the farm was unprofitable, and Bror pressured her to sell the farm to take advantage of a jump in land prices. He had sunk all his own money into it, and selling the farm would have given him a profit and untangled their finances. Blixen refused to sell, however, which left Bror dependant on her even after the marriage had ended, because she controlled his investment. Bror was a bad businessman, but he recognized that walking away from the farm was the wiser option, and Blixen refused to accept this. In the later 1920s, Finch Hatton sunk a good deal of his own money into the farm, which is how she was able to keep the farm afloat for so long, but the film fails to acknowledge this.

In the film, the thing that triggers the sale of the farm is a fire that destroys the coffee factory. The coffee factory did burn down once, but much earlier, and was rebuilt. The scene where Kamante wakes her to tell her about the fire actually happened, but he was telling her about a brush fire, not a fire on her property. Instead, what forced her to sell was impersonal economic factors that would have been hard to address on-screen, so the fire is a reasonable invention to dramatize the crisis.

Colonial Decadence

By concentrating so tightly on the romance, the film glosses over another issue. The European community in Kenya in the 1920s and 30s was notoriously libertine. Somewhat north of Nairobi was the Wanjohi Valley region, home to the so-called “Happy Valley set,” who became rather infamous for their extra-marital affairs, open marriages, drug use, and other scandalous behavior.

One well-publicized Happy Valley affair ended with the murder of the 22^nd earl of Erroll, possibly by the 11^th Baronet Broughton, the husband of Erroll’s lover Diana.  Another member of the group, the Countess de Janzé, attempted the murder-suicide of herself and her lover in a Paris train station. (Rather emotionally unbalanced, she reportedly gained access to Erroll’s corpse at the morgue, and kissed and masturbated over it.) A third member of the group got Prince George, the duke of Kent, addicted to morphine and heroin. (There’s actually a whole film about the Happy Valley set, White Mischief; perhaps I’ll tackle it on this blog.)

Blixen was not a member of the Happy Valley set, but when you watch the film you can see hints of the sexual goings-on in the period. At the start of the film she married Bror after a failed love affair with his brother. Blixen meets Baron Delamere (who was a member of the Happy Valley set) right after her arrival in Nairobi; he’s in the middle of telling a joke about bestiality. Bror was unfaithful to her and gave her syphilis soon after they were married. The film acknowledges this and shows her dealing with the sickness, but it presents her as having been cured, when in fact it’s far from clear that she was cured. Later in life she suffered from symptoms that have usually been attributed to the disease, although one biographer, Doctor Linda Donelson, has disputed this (and Blixen never developed the mental degeneration associated with the disease). Although they did not marry, Blixen and Finch Hatton lived together on a semi-regular basis and she is thought to have miscarried at least one and perhaps two children of his.

Klaus Maria Brandauer as Bror

Finch Hatton maintained a relationship with Beryl Markham (an important figure in the history of aviation, as well as a noted memoirist). In 1924, Markham aborted what was believed to be Finch-Hatton’s baby. Later she had an affair with Prince Henry, the duke of Gloucester, before apparently returning to Finch Hatton as his relationship with Blixen was winding down. So what the film presents as a traditional monogamous romance (despite the lack of marriage) may have been, at least from Finch Hatton’s side, an open relationship; he seems to have been involved with both Blixen and Markham at the same time. (He impregnated Blixen in 1922, Markham in 1924, and Blixen again possibly in 1926.)

In the film, Markham has been replaced with a young ingénue named Felicity, who fumblingly asks Blixen for sexual advice. Toward the end of the film, Blixen becomes jealous of Finch Hatton’s friendship with Felicity, but her concerns about the friendship are presented as being somewhat irrational. Given that most of the people in the film are real people, this substitution is probably due to the fact that Markham was still alive in 1985.

On the surface it seems absurd that Redford is playing someone with the quintessentially British name of Denys Finch Hatton as an American. Reportedly he originally planned to play him with an appropriately British accent; however Pollack evidently disliked the result, because after shooting a few scenes, he told Redford to use his regular accent.

The film also leaves out Blixen’s friendship with Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow-Vorbeck was a German soldier who met Blixen on a steam liner while they were traveling. They became life-long friends. When the First World War broke out, Lettow-Vorbeck took command of the German forces in German East Africa, recruited a very large force of native soldiers, and fought the British ferociously, inflicting far higher casualties on them than he took. He only surrendered at the end of the war. As a friend of his, the Danish Blixen and her Swedish husband were naturally suspected of supporting the Germans during the war, which may have left Bror feeling obligated to fight for the British. In the film, the only hint of this whole issue is when Felicity asks Blixen if she supports the British; Blixen seems offended by the question.

A Final Thought

The film ends with a mournful quote by Blixen, “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plains quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

When her farm was sold, it was bought by a developer who turned it into a subdivision of the sprawling Nairobi. He named the subdivision Karen in her honor. The making of Out of Africa revived Kenyan interest in Blixen. Her house, which was quite dilapidated, was repaired, and the furniture used in the film was donated to establish a museum in the house. Both the house and Finch Hatton’s grave have become tourist attractions as a result.

Finch Hatton’s grave now

So in a way, the answer to her question is “yes, Africa knows a song of Karen Blixen.”

Correction: An earlier version of this essay identified the colonial-era murder victim as the 22nd Earl of Atholl; he was actually the 22nd Earl of Erroll.

Want to Know More?

Out of Africa is available on Amazon.

You should read Isak Dinesen’s wonderful memoire, Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass. You just should. Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storytelleris a prize-winning biography of this important writer. You might also consider Linda Donelson’s Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen’s Untold Story. Finally, since I mentioned Beryl Markham, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her West with the Night, which has been called one of the best memoires ever written. She lived a remarkable life in her own right and deserves some attention.