The Trouble with Africa: Stories from a safari camp

The Trouble with Africa: wonderful stories of life in Zambia by a German married to the daughter of the man responsible for a safari camp in eastern Zambia.
Guhrs, Vic
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978-0-14-302526-9
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Title: The Trouble with Africa
Subtitle: Stories from a safari camp
Author: Vic Guhrs
Genre: Travel report
Publisher: The Penguin Group (South Africa)
Cape Town, South Africa, 2010
ISBN 9780143025269 / ISBN 978-0-14-302526-9
Paperback, 13 x 20 cm, 243 pages

Foreword to The Trouble with Africa: Stories from a safari camp

The trouble with Africa is that it gets into your blood? It's a sentiment I have heard a hundred times, echoed, I'm sure, ever since the first white adventurer set foot on Africa's coast. Hunched over my computer in a snow-bound mountain cabin on the Idaho/Wyoming border, I think of Africa. It is cold outside, the landscape white except for a few green patches where the pines show through the snow, but my thoughts are of sundrenched plains and tall yellow grass. When I am not writing, I paint. My canvases are of elephants and lions, and the colours are saturated and bright. The Trouble with Africa: Stories from a safari camp has been a long time coming. I started making notes and writing bits of stories - beginnings, middles, and ends, but never a whole completed story - about nine or ten years ago. I'm not sure why it took me so long. Perhaps you have to leave a place in order to write about it. All my previous efforts failed, I think, because I was too close to it all, too involved, and not able to see the wood for the trees. The first time an elephant comes in the night and leans against your house and makes the walls shake, you wake up and tell your friends in the morning, you probably write a letter home and tell your mother. The tenth time this happens, you sleep through it. Your first encounters with lions, snakes, malaria, African thunderstorms, the first time you see the Southern Cross in the African night sky, you are moved beyond words. But these events tend to lose their significance with repetition, and it is only now, with distance, that I think these stories are worth telling.