F o r e w a r d The roots of my family tree sank deep into the soil of Africa and for three generations, Africa was home to us. I grew up with my brother and sister on the shores of Lake Naivasha, a volcanic lake with deep subterranean derivations, on the floor of the great Rift Valley of East Africa. It was here that the seeds of my family tree fell, blown by the icy winds of European winters and the urge that drives people into the unknown in search of the light missing in their lives. Our lives were bathed in that light. But this was not white man's country and as I became an adult the winds of change began to blow; the land from which our three generations drew life became threatened, dark clouds gathered on our horizons and gradually infiltrated the light, until the Africa we had been born to became hardly recognisable. I lifted my face to the sun one day and knew that it was time to move on, to move away, but to where? When you have been born in Africa you are marked by Africa and wherever you go, you are a displaced person, for you have two identities; you are a white man with a black man's soul. When you meet a kindred spirit you recognise one another, for you have both drunk from the magic chalice whose mysterious alchemy creates a bond that sweeps aside unnecessary prelude. Karen Blixen, one of the great writers on Africa, drank so deeply from this chalice, she never recovered. 'My relationship to the world of ancient Africa,' she wrote in Out of Africa after she left, 'was indeed like a kind of love affair: love at first sight and everlasting...its landscape had not its like in all the world.' My own love affair with Africa had far deeper roots, for it was not love at first sight and everlasting, but a gentle and progressive ripening of many summer fruits which slowly soured and fermented into fetid waste; a symphony of sounds that rose to a crescendo and then degenerated into noise. It became one of unrequited love with all its ensuing torment that tore me apart and left me aching, but it also widened my horizons and made me a wiser being. Long contact with Africa has put into perspective the human folly of its evolution, from the Arab occupation and subsequent slave trade in the sixteenth century to the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 that carved up Africa, apportioning it among the foreign invaders. It was this conference which created the colonial frontiers that disregarded existing tribal and racial boundaries and led to what Joseph Conrad aptly termed in Heart of Darkness, 'the vilest race to plunder ... in the history of European colonisation of Africa, neglecting the human element and environment of the people they colonised'. That was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being human. Conrad wrote of the prehistoric men who appeared from the trees, hands clapping, feet stomping, bodies swaying, eyes rolling under the heavy droop of motionless foliage, as Conrad's alter ego, Marlow descended the Congo River in 1890 to rescue Kurtz, the ivory agent degraded from idealism to savagery, taken back to the earliest ages of man by wilderness, solitude and power, his house surrounded by impaled human heads, half crazed by fever and disease. Seventy years later V. S. Naipaul wrote in A Bend of the River, 'Something like Conrad's fantasy came to pass. But the man with the inconceivable mystery of a soul, was black not white. He had been maddened, not by contact with wilderness and primitivism, but by the civilisation established by those white pioneers who now lie on Mount Ngaliema, above the Stanley Rapids in the Congo capital of Kinshasa.' FOREWARD | IN THE BEGINNING | VANISHING AFRICA | IN THE BOSOM OF MY FAMILY