LUKEWARM INTEREST : ‘AFRICA’ ISN’T DOING WELL IN KENYA

“Out of Africa,” which had been nominated for 11 Academy Awards and is one of the season’s biggest hits in the United States, has attracted only lukewarm interest in the country where it was filmed.

One reason audiences here are not flocking to see the Sydney Pollack romantic epic is because it is not a Kenyan movie but a film about the East African nation’s colonial period.

“There is not a single Kenyan who comes out strong,” the Kenya Times said in a column. “They are . . . romanticized ‘houseboys,’ servants whose existence seems to be owed to the presence of the ‘memsahib’ and their various masters.”

The film, based on the romantic writings of Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, has received superlative reviews in the United States, where it had its world premiere in December. Besides the 11 Oscar nominations, it has won three Golden Globe awards and has inspired a fashion line of safari garb.

“Out of Africa” opened in Nairobi on Jan. 31 for its first showing outside the United States. After a charity premiere that attracted a full house to the 1,524-seat 20th-Century Cinema, it drew 9,349 customers for 21 showings in the first week of a scheduled four-week engagement, according to the theater’s management.

The movie, which slowly unravels Blixen’s romance with Oxford-educated hunter Denys Finch Hatton, has little appeal for most Kenyan moviegoers who clamor for the action and violence of low-budget martial arts pictures and slick James Bond productions.

However, many Kenyans have stayed away from “Out of Africa” for political reasons. During filming, charges were leveled that white extras received twice as much pay as black extras. At the same time, some Kenyans called Blixen, who used the pen name Isak Dinesen, a racist and her books repugnant.

The Kenya Times repeated those charges during a scathing attack on the author last year and questioned why the government had allowed her story to be filmed in Kenya.

However, during her stay in Kenya in the 1920s, Blixen was attacked by white settlers as being “pro-native” because she opposed regulations that permitted forced labor and advocated educating the children on her coffee plantation. She left Africa in 1931 and died in Denmark in 1962.

Despite all the hoopla, “Out of Africa” may be a financial blessing for Kenya, which is gearing up to sell Americans everything from beer to safaris.

Abercrombie and Kent, Kenya’s largest travel agency, has added an “Out of Africa” itinerary to its list of tours. The tour includes a drive through the Ngong Hills where Blixen owned a coffee farm and a stop at her now dilapidated farmhouse, which the government is turning into a museum.

David Markham, the agency’s operation director, said 5,000 Americans visited Kenya in 1985 and he expected that number to increase this year, largely because of the movie.

Besides attracting American tourists who like to spend money, Kenya also is hoping to capitalize on “Out of Africa” by peddling its premium beer in the highly competitive U.S. market.

Privately owned East African Breweries Ltd. signed an agreement with Creative Import Marketing Co. of Milwaukee, Wis., on Feb. 5 to market Tusker Malt Lager in the United States beginning in June. The deal calls for 150,000 cases to be shipped the first 12 months; the beer will cost about $6 for a six-pack.

While “Out of Africa” might have warmed American interest in Kenya, problems associated with making the film here have left some Hollywood movie producers cold.

Terence Clegg, who co-produced the $28.6-million movie with Pollack, complained in a letter to a Nairobi newspaper of uncooperative government ministries and bureaucratic roadblocks during the filming.

He followed up his complaint with the announcement that Universal Pictures had dropped plans to film a movie in Kenya this year about Steve Biko, the black South African activist who died in police custody in 1977. “We shall probably go to Zimbabwe because I believe we can get a better deal there,” Clegg said.

However, Brian Tetley, a British-born photographer who has lived in Africa for 19 years, said the Hollywood film makers were not doing Kenya a favor by filming here.

He said the film’s producers should “stop pretending to be philanthropists” when in fact a prime motive for doing the movie was commercial gain. The film makers, he said, “stand to make themselves wealthy beyond the dream of any ordinary Kenyan out of the use of our Kenya background.”