Out of Africa, In Their Unique World: Kenya Tells Its Own Story

“I had a farm in Africa.” This famous opening line from Out of Africa had, in many ways, defined how Africa—especially Kenya, where I currently am—was perceived through the Western gaze. Farms, wildlife, and Kenya—these were once no more than backdrops to the stories of colonizers.

In the film, the Danish aristocrat Karen, played by Meryl Streep, recounted with wistful affection her memories of that former farm, echoing the tone of Karen Blixen’s same-titled autobiography. The book opened with: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.”

In that paradise nearly a century ago, fictional Karen ran a farm, cultivated coffee, and declared her ambition for “[her] Kikuyu to learn to read.” At a white colonial ball, her companion Denys, played by Robert Redford, scoffed at her sense of entitlement: “My Kikuyu. My Limoges. My farm. It’s an awful lot to own, isn’t it? [...] We’re not owners here. We’re just passing through.”

At least in Out of Africa—which won the Oscar for Best Picture exactly one year short of forty years ago—the director used Denys’s words to reflect on the role of colonizers in Africa. And indeed, his view was shared by real Karen, the farm’s original proprietor.

Earlier films that set their stories and productions in Kenya treated this wildlife haven purely as an exotic backdrop, where even animals often had more presence than the local people. As early as the 1930s, Hollywood shot several high-budget films on location in Kenya, including Trader Horn, African Holiday, and Stanley and Livingstone. These films typically portrayed local Africans as primitive curiosities—“animal companions” for the amusement of Western audiences.

By the 1950s, adaptations of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro showed a slight improvement in values. Yet local people remained mere set pieces in the adventures and/or romantic escapades of American stars—appearing as slaves, servants, or even exotic features of the landscape.

Ideas of equality have progressed with the times. Out of Africa emphasized that colonizers were merely passersby, but by the time The Constant Gardener came out in 2005, the protagonist had become an ordinary hero who defended the rights and survival of local people and stood up against multinational pharmaceutical companies.

One of the film’s lines went like this: “No, there are no murders in Africa. Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization, benefits we can afford so easily. Because those lives were bought so cheaply.”

Yet whether it was Rachel Weisz, the privileged heiress-turned-journalist, or Ralph Fiennes, the British diplomat, they were still white people sacrificing themselves for the welfare of Africans.

So how have Africans—especially Kenyans who were so often relegated to the background of other people’s stories—used film to tell their own? Their visibility has been limited by barriers in local film education, low production volume of local films, and limited distribution reach. It wasn’t until 1986 that Kenya produced its first widely recognized local film, Kolormask, which told the story of a Kenyan student who returned home with his white British wife, attempting to integrate her into tribal life.

Coincidentally, on my flight to East Africa this time, I watched a film with a similar premise: Boda Love, which was released just last year. In this film, a British woman was deceived into a sham marriage by a fellow Briton living in Kenya, who then vanished with all her belongings—including her passport. A local motorcycle taxi driver from the slums came to her aid. From initial wariness to emotional openness, the two eventually fell in love and built a life together.

While such narratives may seem clichéd, they are vital for developing genre cinema in small film industries.

On my first night in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, I stayed on a noisy street in the CBD called River Road, and only later realized it was once known by another name: Riverwood. In the early 1990s, groups of Kenyan youth gathered here to dub Hong Kong kung fu films into Swahili. These dubbed versions would be screened in makeshift video halls, with live narration and commentary added by local “video jokers.” The tapes were then duplicated and circulated, creating a unique form of secondary storytelling.

Just last year, a friend of mine visited a small town near the Maasai Mara National Reserve and stepped into a video hall showing a Jackie Chan movie. The film had Swahili voiceover—and German subtitles.

Moving into the new millennium, the young filmmakers of Riverwood—encouraged by Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry (the world’s second-largest by volume)—began producing their own genre films at ultra-low cost and distributing them through DVDs. The results often felt like a stripped-down version of Nollywood. But with the arrival of the streaming era and Kenya’s relatively decent internet coverage, Riverwood gradually declined.

I walked along River Road to the once-bustling Odeon Cinema, only to find it completely transformed into a flea market stacked with cheap secondhand sneakers.

We rarely get to see such shoddy, crowd-pleasing commercial films now. Arthouse films that occasionally make it to international festivals are equally hard to access. That said, Kenyan cinema has had a modest presence on the international stage over the past two decades. Some of the films were screened during cultural exchange events, while a number of them have made it to major European and American festivals, even winning minor awards.

In 2009, Pumzi received the Citta Di Venezia Award (Award of the City of Venice) at the Venice Film Festival. In 2010, Soul Boy won the Dioraphte Audience Award at Rotterdam. Kati Kati earned the FIPRESCI (short for Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique or International Federation of Film Critics in English) Prize at Toronto in 2016. In 2018, Supa Modo won Best Film in the Berlinale's Generation KPlus section. That same year, Rafiki became the first Kenyan film to be selected for the official competition at Cannes, receiving a Queer Palm nomination.

Among these, Rafiki is the only one I’ve seen—a rarity with a lesbian theme in the Kenyan context. It told the story of two girls from rival political families who developed a relationship that evolved from mutual curiosity to love, only to be forcibly torn apart. In terms of its visual language, narrative pacing, and emotional intensity, the film stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other festival entries on the same theme.

There’s an arthouse cinema in Nairobi called Unseen Nairobi, which regularly screens high-quality independent films from across Africa, including Kenya. On the evening of June 25, I had planned to visit there to deepen my very limited experience of African cinema.

But that night, a massive protest—led by Gen Z—broke out. Amid clouds of tear gas and chants of “Ruto Must Go”—the crowd’s sole demand being the resignation of President William Ruto—any kind of cultural event was impossible.

Reality, as always, is more dramatic than the movies.