Representation of the Native People in Out of Africa

Abstract

This study focuses on the representation of Kenya and its native people in Sydney Pollack’s film Out of Africa. The film depicts the suppression of the colonized people as they are different in color, race, and ethnicity from the white colonizers. Karen goes to Kenya with a mission of coffee plantation. By establishing coffee plantation and luring the natives to work over there, not only does she obliges the natives to follow the rules and regulations developed by the colonizers. Though the blacks are laborious and innocent, the film represents them as uneducated, violent, irrational, superstitious whereas the positive attributes like rational, kind, educated are assigned to whites. The derogatory images, as observed from the western perspective of Karen, have become the determining factors of the native people.