Death from Torture as a Thing of Beauty? Karen Blixen and Kitosch’s Story

For more than 4 decades, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a longtime Nobel Prize in Literature favorite, has been an intense and vocal critic of Karen Blixen’s literary rendering of life in the British protectorate-turned-colony where she resided from 1914 to 1931, designated as British East Africa (BEA) when she arrived, and as Colony of Kenya when she left. This has been a part of his pioneering campaign against the rampant racism that did not die out with the downfall of colonialism. Karen Blixen wrote about her experiences as a coffee farmer in two memoir works, the best-selling and cinematically popularized Out of Africa, from 1937, and the later, smaller, and lesser-known collection of essays Shadows on the Grass, from 1960. A number of points and passages from these two works are recurrently castigated in the postcolonial critique of Karen Blixen, which Ngũgĩ launched in the early 1980s, and which he has sustained until today (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1980, 1981, 1993).

One section of Out of Africa, in particular, has continued to draw Ngũgĩ’s attention: the merely six pages in Book IV where Blixen tells about the so-called “Kitosch trial,” taking place in 1923, against an English settler charged with murdering an African employee named Kitosch (sometimes spelled “Kitosh”) (Blixen 1937, 298–304; Dinesen 1938, 278–83). Kitosch had mounted and ridden one of the settler’s horses instead of just leading it, as he had been told to do.¹ For that reason, his master took the law in his own hands, punished Kitosch, hogtied him, and placed him into custody in a storeroom of the farm, where he died on June 10, 1923. When the settler was brought to court for this crime in Nakuru, in early August 1923, he received a verdict of “grievous hurt” and a conspicuously light punishment of merely 2 years of imprisonment.

Fourteen years later, Karen Blixen told the tale of this brutal case of interracial violence in Out of Africa, in “Kitosch’s story,” which has become the target of some of the fiercest and most persistent attacks against Out of Africa and against her.² It is included among a number of trials represented in the text, displaying the author’s preoccupation with law and legal culture and the different notions of justice and injustice that she had observed among Europeans and Africans. Many of the micro-narratives and anecdotes in the meandering text revolve around such issues, especially the entire Book II, “A Shooting Accident on the Farm.”³ But none of these stories have drawn as many and as harsh condemnations as “Kitosch’s story.” Due to Ngũgĩ’s efforts, the account of this trial often appears at the center of the controversies over Blixen’s colonial legacy. Repeatedly, Ngũgĩ has returned to the case and taken offense to Blixen’s apparent acceptance of the theory introduced in the trial by the settler’s defense: that Kitosch did not die primarily because of the injuries inflicted upon him by his master but also because of his own wish to do so.

As recently as in 2016, in his memoir Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening, Ngũgĩ again took on Blixen for promoting racist modes of thought and for eulogizing cruelty:

Though the way she tells Kitosch’s story, the clarity of the details in particular, would suggest that the case disturbed her, Blixen, who writes as Isak Dinesen, ends up not denouncing the travesty of justice but seeing in the death of the native, “a beauty all its own.” In his will to die is “embodied the fugitiveness of the wild things who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence; who go when they like; of whom we can never get hold.” Death from torture becomes a thing of beauty. It’s the way of the wild, a mystery, at which a rational mind can only marvel.

(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2016, 8...