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“Have you seen ‘Out of Africa’?” Petra asks. “It’s our favorite movie. It really shows the beauty of Kenya.” I dimly recall a visual flash of Robert Redford striding across the Athi plains with an ivory tusk over his shoulder while Meryl Streep makes goo-goo eyes at him from a carriage on the Lunatic Express. “I will organize a copy,” Petra concludes.

Yesterday's ghosts. Karen Blixen and Denis Finch-Hatton as portrayed by Meryl Streep and robert Redford

In Kenya, people talk a lot about organizing things. It’s a term that can be stretched to cover enough territory to encompass buying, arranging, bartering, or improvising. And any deal worth the label probably involves some combination of all four.

That’s how I wound up with a glass of brandy in hand sitting in an overstuff chair on a farm on the edge of one of Kenya’s thorn savannahs watching Robert Redford flash his million dollar smile.

Karen Blixen's house in the Ngong Hills

Ray sits in another chair. His thick snowy hair sticks out from under his faded baseball cap and matches his beard. He looks a lot like what Redford hopes he will look like when he gets to be Ray’s age. Ray used to be a horsepacker in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, but he says he sold off his string of horses about fifteen years ago when his insurance company raised his premiums once too often and moved to Kenya. I get the impression he left the U.S. because he just didn’t like the paperwork life here requires.

“I’m a nomad,” Ray says when I ask if he owns a home in Kenya. Most of the time, he’s further south living among the Maasai and giving them advice on such arcane matters as running a bulldozer when they want to dig a watering pond for their livestock. He shows up at Petra’s when she needs some help with her horses.

“Besides, you never know when the government here might pull a Mugabe,” he adds. Ray is referring to Zimbabwe’s kleptomaniacal President-for-Life Robert Mugabe and his predilection for stealing anything not bolted down. Mugabe usually gives what is bolted down a few experimental tugs as well. “I’m not saying it’s likely, but…” Ray shrugs. So he’s a nomad and pretty shrewd one at that.

Earlier in the day, Ray and I walked about four miles into the thorn savannah to meet with Githaiga, a friend of Ray. Githaiga knows the location of a cave the Kikuyu used when they rose up against the British during the Mau Mau rebellion. We stopped on the wide expanse of flat rock to wait for Githaiga.

He points across the wide ravine towards the sun blasted crest of the far ridge. “See those trails? Elephant used to come down through here from the Aberdares, and then cross over to Mount Kenya. But not anymore.” He stops and pulls off his baseball cap to scratch his head. “I’ll tell you, I’m glad I was born when I was.”

I get the impression a fair number of ex-pats live in Kenya because they couldn’t figure out how to invent time machines in their garages, and it’s the only way they having of going back, no matter how flawed. For them, the movie “Out of Africa” – where people listen to Beethoven under Africa’s stars on wind-up gramophones and tell fables by the fire – is just a way to watch the ghosts that haunt their own lives.

As a psychological reference point, the soft focus world of Karen Blixen, her husband Bror, and her lover Denis Finch Hatton is the original Garden of Eden, the lost paradise where the gin fizzes are always cool, the sun is always hot, the sentences are always clipped, and the manners always impeccable.

The funny thing is, they aren’t all that delusional.

Worried about the stray buffalo, I took Petra’s pack of dogs with me on a long walk across the savannah in the shadow of Mount Kenya and stumbled across a small lake filled with Egyptian geese and hippos. Impala and giraffe grazed on the far shore next to a papyrus swamp. Even if you were hobbled with the aesthetic perception of a mud clam, you’d still say it was a fair imitation of Eden.

But for some, the ghosts of the past aren’t just the misty feelings of nostalgia that strike as the sun sinks below the Aberdares Mountains during the “sundowners,” the Colonial hangover of having cocktails before dinner.

One such man is Niels Fjastand. Niels is the embodiment of Scandinavian genes gone beserk – the quintessential big Swede -- and even now, in his 70s, he can only be described as oversized. In his younger days, he must have been formidable from his bushy eyebrows all six-feet four-inches down to his toes.

At a beery lunch, it doesn’t take Niels but few minutes to work into the conversation that his father was a great friend of Bror Blixen. Maybe I looked skeptical for a fraction of a second, but Niels jumps up and fetches a worn copy of Blixen’s autobiography. He flips to an even more worn page and points to the name Nils Fjastand. There is something very atavistic about it all. I have the image of a Fjastand ancestor in a smoke-filled, mead-stained Trondheim feast hall about 1200 years ago declaiming on his direct descent from Thor.

As the lunch goes on, Niels’ voice gets louder and his stories become a bit woolier. He was in the Swedish special forces. No, it was the Danish. He came back to fight against the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau rebellion but somehow missed being actually called up for duty. Sat it out on his farm. But he set up a patrol in a Willies jeep with six, no eight, no a dozen loyal Kikuyu. He glares around the garden with his bushy eyebrows flaring as if he half expects a Mau Mau fighter to suddenly jump out of the hibiscus bush.

“It’s all gone to the dogs,” he bellows and locks a squinting, reddened eye on me. He jabs a finger towards my nose. “And it’s your fault.”

“Huh?”

“You bloody Americans. You’re the ones who pulled the rug out from under the British Empire,” Niels shouts. The gardener, who up till now had been ignoring us, looks up in alarm. “We had this country ticking over nicely when you lot came along and ruined it.”

I’m totally lost because I know for a fact that most Americans have a tough time locating the state next door, never mind Kenya. But every Garden of Eden fable has to have its Satan, and apparently in Niels mind, the U.S. can conveniently play that role. One thing is for sure: it’s a lot easier to swallow than the idea that Niels and his fellow white settlers screwed up their idyllic little world without anyone’s help.

But talking to others in Kenya, you might be forgiven for getting that impression. Just a few days before this alcohol fueled lunch, I had been out with Ayub Ndunga. His grandfather was a herbalist who had memorized the collective wisdom of the Kikuyus about which plants can be used to treat which aliments. The grandfather in turn passed the knowledge onto Ayub who was now trying his best to teach me at least some of this. It wasn’t that successful. About the only plant I can still recall is one he made me chew on that was so full of quinine it turned my tongue into a fur ball. No points for guessing it’s a malaria cure.

But after a few outings, Ayub mentioned his grandfather served in a Mau Mau unit in the cloud forests of the Aberdares as a medic. When I asked why his grandfather joined the uprising against Colonial rule, Ayub explains. His grandfather worked on a white settler’s farm. After an altercation between the settler and another Kikuyu worker, the settler tied the worker to the back of his horse and dragged him a few miles through the thorn. The worker lived, but just barely, and Ayub’s grandfather took off into the mountains.

“He said that it would be better to die fighting than to continue to live like that,” Ayub explains.

Ayub's grandfather was a medic in a Mau Mau unit. John Kibrenga Richang, on the right, was a Mau Mau foot soldier. He is proud he fought the British. 

Eric Eshikumo, another friend, has a story about his own great-grandfather as well. Being a Luo, his great-grandfather didn’t fight in the rebellion, but he did get drafted to help build the railway that ran from Kenya’s coast all the way to Kampala, Uganda. It’s from this train that Meryl Streep starts making her bedroom eyes at Robert Redford.

“My great-grandfather said they had to work very hard,” Eric said. “They worked all day building the track. But the worst was that he and the other workers had to sleep outside even with lions around. The whites had their guns but the workers slept with no protection. Many, many, many people were taken by the lions, but the whites did not care.”

In another section of the railway -- down in an arid thorn belt that was so thick it earned its own name, the Nyika country – a pair of man eaters shut down construction for months at a time until Colonel Patterson tracked them down. Patterson rode his moment of international fame to publish a ponderous account of the hunt. He later achieved infamy when he went on a safari with a husband and wife in the Mount Kenya area and the husband wound up with a lethal gaping gunshot wound to the head. Patterson claimed the husband shot himself in a fit of depression but his story was undermined somewhat when the merry widow moved in with Patterson before the grass grew on her dead husband’s grave. Hemmingway used those ghosts for his story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

But not all ghosts are vengeful.

Tutti Hessel, a prim women in her seventies who looks as if she might just have strolled out of Bloomingdales, lived through the Mau Mau rebellion on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya, probably the most dangerous spot in the whole colony at that time. She doesn’t much care for heroes, and it takes a companion to bring up the fact that Tutti practiced every morning on her front lawn with a .38 caliber pistol during the years of the heaviest fighting. Of course, as her friend pointed, she became a crack shot. But Tutti said she did it as a way to avoid fighting at all because blasting away with a .38 every morning tends to send a signal. Whether or not she was right, she said her farm was never attacked although many neighbors fought off raids by Mau Mau fighters.

Which isn’t to say that the Mau Mau somehow overlooked her farm. Quite the contrary, she says she knows for a fact her workers were putting out baskets of food for the fighters. But, she quickly adds, she understands. She would have done the same if the roles were reversed.

For some older settlers, 1963, the year the Union Jack was lowered at midnight while the band played Last Post, is the start of the Great Decline, the point when the wheels started popping off their neat little colony. Not for Tutti. She recalls it as a time of great joy and relief.

“Oh, it was so wonderful to be able to come together again. All those years of strain and…” Tutti’s voice dies away and her eyes are shining.

Sadly, the ghosts in Tutti’s life are close at hand. Her husband, Hans, has been stricken with Alzheimers although he must have been a man who brimmed with life’s great forces when he was younger. Besides being a White Hunter, he was the stunt pilot who played Robert Redford in Out of Africa. Hans achieved some local notoriety from the scene when he pilots the plane with Meryl Streep in the front seat, and she reaches back her hand for him to take. What isn’t in the movie was his fairly serious crash landing when the movie directors insisted, against his advice, that he land on a soft sand beach.

During the colonial years, Kenya earned quite a reputation playing host to the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Hemmingway, a dozen or so movie stars and the Prince of Wales to name a few. Princess Elizabeth stayed in the highlands on her honeymoon, and the joke is that when she went to bed one night, she was a princess and when she woke up, she was a queen. Her father had died while she slept in the Treetops Hotel.

At the tip of this great social structure stood the five English lords who decamped from 20^th century restrictions of their homeland to set up 12^th century feudal existences in the colony. Eric and I decide that hunting down the ghost of one of these men, Lord Eggerton, is worthwhile so we head for his former manor.

“There is an old joke,” Eric tells me. “In the old days, Lord Eggerton and Lord Delemere had an argument about who was richer. Lord Eggerton claimed he could line the entire length of the Mombasa-Kampala railroad with five shilling notes. Lord Delemere said he could build a pipeline the same length…” Eric pauses for the punch line. “And fill it with milk.” Eric bends over at the waist, laughing uproariously.

I don’t really get the joke but politely chortle along. What’s more on my mind at the moment is the immense dust cloud a milk truck is kicking up ahead of us. The dust is so thick, we have to use the windshield wipers to clear a porthole to peer through.

We arrive at Eggerton’s house, known as Ngata house which looks like a field stone Sussex manor that has been wrenched up by the roots and dropped down wholesale in the belly of the immense Rift Valley. We are greeted by Joshua, a man whose eyes are going a bit milky from cataracts, and who walks with hunch. He has a booming voice because he’s also going a bit deaf, and he will be our guide once inside this splendid pile. He has probably been told to keep an eye on us so that we don’t try to swipe anything.

When you step inside, you realize that’s not going to be a problem. The house has been completely and totally stripped of anything and everything. Light fixtures: gone. Kitchen appliances: gone. Hell, some one has even mounted a credible effort to yank the oak planking off some of the walls leaving black holes like a set of teeth after a good fist bashing. Look up at the roof, and you can see bits of the endless turquoise sky through the holes.

There in the center of the dining room, really a grand Norman feasting hall that I could slip my own house in without much effort, sits an organ that’s been wrenched from its moorings, pipes and wires still sticking out the back. Through some of the gaps in oak paneling, you can see enough organ pipes to fill Saint Paul’s cathedral with sound.

“During the season, Lord Eggerton used to bring a man down from Europe to play the organ,” Joshua announces with his profundo basso voice echoing off the walls. “He would bring him down and pay him just to play the organ. The man would come down on ship all the way from Europe.” Joshua plows ponderously onward in this repetitive vein for a little longer, clearly still trying to cope with this absurd extravagance even all these years later.

“And this floor,” Joshua points to the dusty, warping parquet floor. “Was painted in many colors. Oh, it was most beautiful.”

His comments perk up my ears. I ask him how he knows this. Joshua says proudly he grew up on Lord Eggerton’s estate and worked for the great man himself as a herd boy in the 1950s.

“When the man from Europe played the organ, we would sit out on the lawn and listen to this music. We had never heard such sounds before,” Joshua says.

That’s a safe bet. You just don’t stumble over cathedral quality organs around every corner in the Rift Valley. Even today, it’s still the only one even if it’s not working. My interest stokes Joshua’s enthusiasm.

“Lord Eggerton lived like a king. He even refused to allow police men to enter his house while in uniform,” Joshua said.

But before I can mention this, Joshua is taking us to the kitchens where he tells us the Lord insisted that all workers shower before beginning work. The butchers had to take a full bath. Joshua just shakes his head in wonder at the strange ways of kings and hustles us up to the second floor where even greater wonders await such as two bathrooms, one for the Lord and one for the Lady.

By any standards, the bathrooms are spacious, but this is a country with an annual average wage of about $480. The bathtub itself is worth more than Joshua earns in 12 months.

But extravagance takes a shift towards darker realms, literally, as Joshua leads us into a room and slams the door. He then goes to the window shuts the shutter suddenly plunging us into utter blackness.

“This is the room for the Lord’s camera machines. When a worker did the wrong thing, the Lord would lock him inside here for half an hour or an hour before summoning him,” Joshua tells us. “Many people broke down in here and told him everything.”

I can imagine so.

We continue upwards a narrow, spiral staircase to a roof patio. Perched on one side is an office with sliding glass doors. For some reason, the thieves have overlooked Lord’s immense desk which is still here. But maybe they just haven’t quite figured out how to get it back down those narrow spiral stairs.

Behind the desk sits an empty drinks cart. It seems a fairly fitting symbol, overall.

“Up here, the Lord had a telescope, and he would watch over his farm to see who was working and who was not,” Joshua said.

Or, at least, that’s the story the overseers bandied about and no doubt the idea the all seeing eye of God rested on your shoulders during the day kept herd boys, like Joshua, from goofing off. Because, in truth, the lord had a lot to look at if he had chosen to swing his telescope around. At its height, this farm alone covered about 50,000 acres and was home to 18,000 head of cattle.

In reality, Eggerton’s strongest point, no doubt, was his ability to read accounts. The farms he owned were set up as separate businesses and would submit yearly profit/loss statements. Managers who turned a profit enjoyed employment. Those who failed were sacked. How managers squeezed a profit from the farms was not a polite subject of conversation.

But those days are long gone. Eggerton died an old man in 1958, after a hunting accident in which his elephant gun kicked into his chest instead of his shoulder. “For two years, twenty-five doctors attended to him, but they couldn’t help,” Joshua tells us.

During his waning years, Eggerton became somewhat of a liberal, or perhaps, he just saw the writing on the wall that he and his fellow lords were an endangered species. He urged his fellow settlers to offer concessions on land re-distribution in order to maintain peace, but his appeals were rejected.

Looking back, Karatua Justus, a man who runs a steam equipment company in Nairobi, thinks he was right.

“If only the settlers were willing to share, a lot of what happened would have been avoided,” he points out regretfully.

Even though the organ is silent and the aristocratic guests have long since died away, the lord’s ghost still roams the dusty floor of the Rift Valley. To keep it in its proper place, Joshua says he and many other men and women who used to work for Eggerton still make an annual pilgrimage to his gravesite in Nakuru even now, fifty-one years later, to place flowers and hold a remembrance service.

Back at Petra’s guesthouse, a number of guests, including a passel of missionary kids from the Rift Valley Academy, are out on the back lawn for a barbecue. Some one puts on dance music and soon people are twirling through the moonlight. Petra is dancing with her boyfriend, a pilot who got started in his career landing Huey’s in jungle clearins in Vietnam, while behind them, the heat lightning is crackling all around Mount Kenya’s summit.

In the background, the securi-net, two-wave radio hisses and spits. During the Mau Mau rebellion, the settlers started the practice of using the radios to keep in touch and to rush reinforcements to any isolated farm under siege. Today, farmers use it in much the same way to alert each other if a gang of bandits is on the loose.

Kenya’s ghosts never really die.