African adventures
Finding Aluvisi
My father loved telling stories, particularly about his adventures in Kenya as a young man training farmers and researching better crops. Europeans in Kenya around the time of independence are usually portrayed as indolent, racist, Happy Valley kind of people, but there were also loads of folk like my Dad working alongside Kenyans – to the extent that Pa was referred to as the White Kamba by his (black) Kamba colleagues. Kamba is the tribe found around Machakos in central Kenya.
I’d got as far as buying the flip dvd recorder and doing a sort of mind map of these stories, then he died. I thought we had about another 10 years to put them down for posterity, but worst of all discovered I couldn’t remember the detail and nobody else could either.
Then my mother came across the address of Aluvisi, our housekeeper from those days, in Pa’s desk. He’d continued to pay for the schooling of Aluvisi’s son after they’d left Kenya. So I thought I’d write to him on the off chance he was alive and that he also had stories to tell.
Cooking in the wild
The next time you shoo a wasp away from making a raid on your lunch, spare a thought for chefs working in the African bush who have to deal with a variety of wildlife – and other challenges – on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »
Namibian adventures
If you judge a country by the standards of its public lavatories, then Namibia is the tops. Admittedly my sister in law came across a ‘long drop’ in the middle of Etosha Game Park that was a little whiffy but maybe an elephant had been there before her. (Am I alone in thinking there should be a Good Loo Guide?) Read the rest of this entry »
