Out of Africa Book One, Kamante and Lulu: From "The Savage in the Immigrant's House" to "A Gazelle" Summary & Analysis

One evening Lulu does not come home and no one can find her. After a week, the narrator sadly decides that Lulu is dead. Farah, her main servant, suddenly informs her that Lulu is not dead, but simply married. The next day Lulu eats some grain that Kamante puts out, while a male deer waits for her on the periphery of the landscape. Even with her mate, Lulu continues to visit and is relatively friendly. Eventually, Lulu has a small baby whom she also brings to the house. With her baby, Lulu shies from human contact and eventually the whole deer family returns to the wild and the narrator rarely sees them anymore. With Lulu's arrival, the narrator feels that the African landscape and her household have merged in a union. Lulu knew the secrets of the African landscape and brought them with her to the farm.

After the narrator leaves Africa, Kamante writes frequently to her, and even though he hires someone to write for him, the letters are not clear. Kamante usually explains that he is out of work and begs her to return to Africa.

Analysis

These two chapters complete the first section of Out of Africa. With them, Dinesen finishes sketching her farm, within a metaphor of it being a utopic, pastoral location. Her sections on Kamante and Lulu round out the previous discussion of the farm by discussing two of its major elements in detail: the native people and the wildlife around it.

Kamante and Lulu both serve as representations of their larger communities. By profiling them in detail, the idea that the farm exists in connection with its landscape becomes clear. Kamante indicates the relationship of the native community to the farm. They play an essential role both in the farm's culture as well as in making it run. In the same way, Lulu's domestication shows that the farm is connected with nature. The narrator herself proposes that Lulu came in from the forest to show that "we were on good terms with it" and that she made the house "one with the African landscape, so that nobody could tell where the one stopped and the other began." The unification of the animal realm and the native cultures within the house of a European immigrant presents a portrait of a farm in harmony with its landscape, thereby continuing Dinesen's metaphor of her farm being akin to a type of paradise.

Dinesen references her own attempt to act as a mythic storyteller in this section as well. The narrator's discussion with Kamante about the nature of writing testifies to Dinesen's own perspective on the matter. The narrator proposes that she could write about anything, including Kamante. Furthermore, she describes the plot of The Odyssey to Kamante and Kamante comes to compare himself with Odysseus. This comparison of Kamante to Odysseus is telling because The Odyssey is perhaps the most mythic of tales and the author wants to evoke a mythic context for her own narrative. The conversation between Kamante and the narrator directly recounts the narrator's own purposes and goals in telling her story, the story that shall turn into Out of Africa.

The narrator's desire to create a myth or story out of her own life explains her interest in the figure of Old Knudsen. Knudsen is an old Danish man who appears out of nowhere and asks to stay on the farm. He is only on the farm for six months before dying, yet the narrator discusses him here as well as in other sections of her book. Old Knudsen is Dinesen's ideal because he is a wandering storyteller who has successfully turned him life into a myth. He has no property or known family and defines himself only through the stories that he tells. Knudsen represents the true ideal of storytelling.

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