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My father spent 45 years living and working in East Africa. During the first 15 years he worked with the Sukuma people in northern Tanganyika. The Sukuma people are the largest ethnic groups in Tanzania and they live in the plains just south of Lake Victoria. My father learned their language and culture and was intrigued by their ceremonies and the parallels with Christianity. He used some of these rituals as parables in his sermons. The following ritual is called Kupalanghanya.

About 70 years ago a young Sukuma man decided he was old enough to marry. He went and asked his father to arrange for a wife and his...

Today, not even the most adamant critic of living in Sub-saharan Africa, would suggest that it was a particularily unhealthy area in which to live.

This shows how very far medicine has advanced in the last 100 years, because for well in to the 20th century, Africa, and West Africa in particular, was called ‘The White Man’s Grave.’

If the snakes did not get you, then disease would! Caucasians dared not venture into Africa without donning a pith helmet and a spine pad, otherwise heat stroke or brain damage would strike them dead. Jackboots were strongly advised for both male and female attire because behind every bush...

I had a memorable encounter with a rhino when I was five or six years old. My parents had been transferred from Katangulu to Nassa, where they continued to minister among the Sukuma people. I had become more fluent in Kisukuma than English because I played daily with the African children.

            One day they asked my dear dad to shoot a marauding rhinoceros that was destroying peoples’ gardens, stomping all over their food supply of nearly-ready crops. A truckload of men, one or two with guns, had come to drive this rhino away from the area, hoping to persuade it to head back onto the Serengeti plains. They weren’t very good at aiming their rifles. They hurriedly drove off, leaving a very angry beast behind. Now the rhino was a threat to peoples’...

The Good Old Days of Platform Parties

From the end of WWII until the Kenyan Emergency was declared there were around 40,000 expats in Kenya at any one time, mostly from the UK and mostly on contracts that included ‘passages.’ Some of these expats working for the administration had longer contracts, but even the shorter ones had mid-term home leave and in the times before jet travel all this added up to much coming and going by sea via Suez. Any younger reader who might imagine the eight-and-a-quarter hours in a jumbo jet between Heathrow and Nairobi as being vastly preferable to a fortnight on a passenger liner making...