Out of Africa

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Book Two, A Shooting Accident on the Farm: "The Shooting Accident" to "Riding in the Reserve"

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Summary Book Two, A Shooting Accident on the Farm: "The Shooting Accident" to "Riding in the Reserve"

The idea that the native and European minds operate in different ways returns again to Dinesen's presentation of Africa as a pastoral landscape. A key element in this theory is the belief that Africans and Europeans live on two different planes of existence, because of their relationship to culture and modernity. Africans, who have not experienced modernity, remain closer to the earth. As such, their minds maintain the ability to mythologize, which most Europeans no longer have. Europeans are further from the original state of man, and therefore no look make meaning and mythologize in the way they once did.

Dinesen's proposal that Africans and Europeans have fundamentally different minds has been criticized as not cultural sensitive. Certainly, her ideas do rely upon outdate notions that stress the separation of races. Modern biological studies prove that African and European brains have no fundamental difference. Migration and modernization have also demonstrated no difference in the way that African and European minds work. Therefore Dinesen's ideas appear to be wrong. Since they implicitly suggest that Africans exist in a more "primitive" form than Europeans, many have labeled Dinesen's perspective racist, even though Dinesen hypothetically argues that it is better for humans to exist in their more natural state.

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