I n  T h e  B e g i n n i n g  I am a child of Africa. I grew up in a kind of sophisticated wilderness and took for granted all that Karen Blixen so eloquently described in her writing. The star-filled sky was my roof at night and the rising sun my early morning call. Nature was my teacher and from her I learned my greatest lesson; that in Africa, God and the Devil are one. She taught me at an early age how all things, good and bad, in light and in darkness, walk hand in hand in the simple rhythms of life and death; from flowering to decay, from childhood to old age, in sorrow and in joy. For most of my teenage years I led a quintessentially physical existence, with instinctive visceral responses that sharpened my senses and heightened my awareness of all things beautiful and ugly; attracted by the first, I shrank from the other. Exposure to the extremes of Africa made me more of an observer than a participant. I can now understand how the lyrical writers of Africa, inspired and impassioned by such extremes of raw nature, fed the fantasies of their readers and drew so many to her siren song. From the great explorers who went in search of the source of the Nile, to the adventurers, empire-builders, writers and eccentrics, the story of Africa is riddled with names such as Livingstone and Stanley, Baker, Burton and Speke. The names of Conrad, Gide and de Brazza were later followed by colourful figures like Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the invisible enemy commander in the Kaiser's war who frustrated and ultimately captivated the British. There was Cape-to-Cairo Grogan, who undertook a two-year walk for the railway builders in 1898, from one end of Africa to the other, in order to claim the hand of his lady love. And Hugh Delamere, the English lord and founding father of Kenya, the British colony in East Africa, who arrived before the railway was built, became a blood brother to the Maasai, developed agriculture in a land riddled with disease, tsetse, flies and locusts and opened up the area to the ways and resources of the new world. There was John Boyes, the cabin boy from Hull who bought Mount Kenya from the Kikuyu for a dozen goats and cows, and was thereafter known as the king of the Wakikuyu and Denys Finch-Hatton, the upper-class Etonian big-game hunter immortalised by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. Johann Ludwig Krapf, the German missionary became the first white man to behold the spectacle of the snow-capped peaks of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro shimmering in the middle of the African jungle. He went on to inspire fellow-adventurers Burton, Speke and Grant to undertake a search for the sources of the Nile. Krapf was followed fifty years later by Halford McKinder, the first man to stand on the summit of the snow-clad Mount Kenya and look down at the equator. In his diary he wrote 'our thoughts and our words were divided between our conquest and the red cinders of the camp fire that spoke of home. As the fire dulled and our feet grew chilly the bark of a leopard ringing in the hillside opposite reminded us of the early rise on the morrow'. These were the men of action, the explorers whose effect on the interior was to be almost biblical in its conclusiveness; for what other reason did it exist, they asked, than to be penetrated. It is their writing, like that of Hemingway and Blixen later on, that enveloped the savage continent in a dark cloak of daring and hardship, of emotional marvel and haunting memories, for they had all drunk from the same magic chalice. Some returned to their birthplace to write their memoirs, others remained in Africa where their remains mingled with the sands, swept by the wind, across the continent they had penetrated. IN THE BEGINNING 1 of 3    next ---> FOREWARD | IN THE BEGINNING | VANISHING AFRICA | IN THE BOSOM OF MY FAMILY