Hilversum, the Netherlands April, May 2023 5/5 I am Kenya-born and raised in a little village at the foot of the Ngong Hills, the place that Karen Blixen writes so vividly about in her classic memoir, “Out of Africa” (1937), which was made into a film in 1985. My grandmother lived a stone’s throw away from my home in the Dagoretti reserves, where Blixen’s servants trekked to go work on her “farm in Africa.” My childhood was happy.
I have beautiful memories of chasing wild rabbits in the plains and skinny dipping in streams so clean, we drank water right out of them without the risk of disease and ate the fruit of the land in complete abandon. Until very recently, I never set foot outside my country, and when I did, I stayed within Africa. That changed two summers ago, when I got a chance to visit North America and then Europe.
Nothing could have prepared me for the culture shock. I encountered a different kind of beauty and the ugliness of anti-black racism, but that’s a story for another day. My European tour began in Berlin, where, as a guest of the state, travelling in the company of four women, from the 2022/23 William Southam Journalism Fellowship cohort of Massey College, I visited the Holocaust memorial site, a sombre assembly of tombstones stretching as far as the eye can see, laid down in memory of six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis.
My solo adventure began right after the five-day tour of Germany. I had planned to kill three birds with one.
