Farah Aden was a Somali man who served as Karen Blixen's major-domo — running her household, managing her farm staff, and accompanying her on safari for close to two decades. He appears throughout Out of Africa not as a footnote but as one of its central relationships: a friendship built on mutual respect that crossed the vast distance between Blixen's world and his own.

Farah was, by every account in the book, capable, dignified, and quietly indispensable — the person Blixen turned to when things went wrong, and the one who kept her farm and her household running through years of hardship. Theirs was a friendship that outlasted the farm itself.