I'm still here !

... but I've got/had shingles, and its knocked the stuffing and energy out of me, so I haven't done anything in the past ten days except read.   BUT ... I have been reading several books about Africa, so my time hasn't been entirely wasted !

I reckoned the other day that my 'library' of African books in my sitting room contains over 300 books ... covering subjects like the wildlife, plants, explorers, different countries within the continent, history of the independence struggles, African writers novels, lots of 'glossies' of photos taken by people such as Leni Reifenstahl and Mirella Richardi ... but virtually nothing about the Joluo  or Nyanza !   I don't think it can be that I didn't buy any when I lived there or visited since ... I suspect its just that there have been too few written !  I must research and see if I can find some ...

In the meantime, I've been reading up on the early explorers ... Speke, Mungo Park, Stanley ... and of the incredible women who in their long Victorian clothing, big hats and corsets (!) went with their missionary husbands into 'darkest Africa' !! 

Then the early white settlers in Kenya wrote books too which I have re-read in the last ten days ... Elspeth Huxley who settled as a child with her parents near Thika, north of Nairobi, and wrote 'The Flame Trees of Thika'.  The author of my favourite Africa book wrote of her struggles with her coffee farm ... Karen Blixen with 'Out of Africa'.  

Finally, I'm now re-reading 'Island Africa' by Jonathan Kingdon, about the evolution of Africa's rarest plants and animals.   His own painted illustrations are superb.

So quite a diversity of background reading; none of which is really applicable to working in a shanty town in Kisumu, but its diverted my mind off the itching and soreness, and has kept me occupied when I couldn't sleep nights for the pain ...



"If I know a song of Africa, I thought, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back ... does Africa know a song of me ?  Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was ... "    Karen Blixen