This bookcase shelf in our snug houses most of my books about East Africa, varying from those my father bought to learn Swahili - on the right along with a couple of more recent Swahili books of mine - through to two novels by Robert Ruark on the left. In the middle are some of the books which have been with me since I was a boy in Mombasa, including volumes by JA Hunter, JH Patterson and Alastair Scobie which are full of the stirring adventures of men who risked their lives hunting dangerous game.
There are other fascinating stories as, for example, told in the book just to the left of the antelope, 'The Groundnut Affair'. This is an account of the attempt to turn a vast and totally unsuitable chunk of African bush into peanut farms just after the Second World War, a fiasco in which my father was involved inasfar as his ships would have been used to import machinery to clear the ground and export the crop from Tanga.
The novels are there because, occasionally, a novel manages to capture moments in history better than a non-fiction book, and this is certainly the case with 'Something of Value', Ruark's grim story of Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising.
It seems pointless continuing to trail these books around with me unless they serve a purpose, so I'm steadily reading my way through them. In some cases, such as 'In the Wake of Da Gama' - just to the right of the antelope - I'm probably reading them for the umpteenth time. No matter: they are great stories which mature with time.
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