Where It All Goes Down
Africa, 1914-31
Sorry, We're All Out of Africa
There is no mistaking it, and it's not a metaphor for anything else. This memoir is about Africa. To be specific, the colony of British East Africa, in what is present-day Kenya. We do hear about some trips back home to Europe, but for the most part everything is happening on the continent. Even the final scenes, where the narrator bids farewell to her farm, take place while she's still in Kenya.
Nostalgia for the Colony
The memoir covers the years that Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, lived in British East Africa, from 1914 to 1931.
While Blixen was in British East Africa, its name was being changed to the Kenya colony, but people were starting to make noises about losing the whole colony title altogether. In fact, Kenya only turned 50 in 2013, so it's just a whippersnapper in nation-years.
You catch glimpses of the changes occurring throughout the memoir, like when Blixen mentions some new law forbidding, say, old Natives dancing at parties (yeah, this was actually a real law). The Baroness gets the feeling that the Kenya she knew is slipping away, and she wants to capture her memories before they slip away from her head, too. The memoir is really about preserving that time that can never be recovered, because everything has changed so much.