Library

Imagine yourself into the landscape before you encounter it; enhance your foray into the wilderness by reading about the experiences of other travelers; immerse yourself in the romance, antiquity and adventure of Africa through literature. These books are worth adding to your safari collection:

Fiction

Oronooko, Aphra Behn
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The African Queen, C S Forester
The Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Hemingway
The Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley
Ladies’ Detective Agency (Series), Alexander McCall Smith
A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul
The Go Away Bird, Muriel Spark
The Seraph and the Zambezi, Muriel Spark

Non-Fiction

Born Free, Joy Adamson
Dark Safari, John Bierman
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals, Richard D Estes
Serengeti Shall Not Die, Bernhard & Michael Grzimek
King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild
Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir, Smith Hempstone
The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals, Jonathan Kingdon
West with the Night. Beryl Markham.
African Silences, Peter Matthiessen
The White Nile, Alan Moorehead
The Lunatic Express, Charles Miller
Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family, Cynthia Moss
The Scramble for Africa, Thomas Pakenham
The Man Eaters of Tsavo, J.H. Patterson
Africa: A Biography of the Continent, John Reader
In Darkest Africa, Henry Morton Stanley
Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa, Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe
Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux
My Kenya Days, Wilfred Thesiger

“All over the Colony it was possible to hear the subtle voice of the grey-crested lourie, commonly known as the go-away bird by its call, “go’way, go’way”. It was possible to hear the bird, but very few did, for it was part of the background to everything, a choir of birds and beasts, the crackle of vegetation in the great prevalent sunlight, and the soft rhythmic pad of natives, as they went barefoot and in single file, from kraal to kraal.”

“It was like a convalescence after fever, that frail rain after the heat.”

“By the mute flashes of summer lightning, we watched him ride the Zambezi away from us, among the rocks that look like crocodiles, and the crocodiles that look like rocks.”

“Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound.”

“She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.”