Out of Africa Book Four, From an Immigrant's Notebook: From "The Wild Came to the Aid of the Wild" to "Of the Millennium" Summary & Analysis

Many iguanas live on the farm. They have beautiful, multicolored skin that shines iridescent. As the narrator learns, however, once you shoot them, the color goes away and their skin is simply dull and gray. Likewise, the narrator once sees a unique blue bracelet on the arm of a native girl and bought it. Once removed from the girl, however, the bracelet also appears dull, and the narrator realizes that she had been tricked by the light. The narrator has concluded that one should not kill things unless you know what they shall be worth when they are dead.

The narrator receives a letter from a friend in Europe about a new staging of The Merchant of Venice. She feels so pleased that she recounts the play's plot to Farah. Farah considers the issue very seriously and concludes that Shylock could have managed his way out of his situation if he dealt with it properly. Farah's seriousness on the subject amuses the narrator who sees it as consistent with the legalistic, detailed nature of a Somali.

The narrator asks a nearby neighbor, who is a doctor, for help one night when a native woman is about to die in childbirth. The doctor saves the woman and child's life. Several days later, however, he sends the narrator a letter explaining that although he helped a native woman once, he certainly could not do so again. He knows the narrator shall understand, since he once treated the elite of Bournemouth.

The vastness of the farm with its accessibility to nature makes one realize the nature of pride. Pride involves having faith in becoming what God wants one to be. A proud man aspires to realize himself and fulfill his fate. People without pride rely upon a sense of self provided by others around them, or they proceed by thinking that they have no self at all.

The narrator believes that oxen are self-sacrificing creatures that alone have carried the burden of advancing European civilization on African soil. They toil all day before plows and carts. Many carts even lack brakes and the oxen have the bear the weight of the cart to slow them down. Men claims success for farms, but the glory truly belongs to the oxen.

The relation of the white and black race in Africa resembles the relationship between the sexes. The male and female sex each play an equal part in each other's lives. If you were to say a husband is more significant to the wife than the wife was to the husband, this would be wrong. Likewise in Africa, natives and whites each play an equal part in each other's lives, which many fail to recognize. Both are equally significant to one another.

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