Wow! eBook
Travels in the White Man's Grave
Author(s): Donald MacIntosh (Author)
- Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
- Publication Date: 25 Sept. 1998
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 189778483X
- ISBN-13: 9781897784839
Book Description
In the 1950s, the interior of West and Central Africa was still known as ‘The White Man’s Grave’. Its forests were primeval and inhabited the minds of Westerners as places of foreboding. But to Donald MacIntosh, a 23-year-old Gaelic-speaking Scottish forester, it was a dream come true when he found himself posted to the hot, cloying humidity of those fabled lands. During the next 30 years he was to work and live as a tree surveyor, prospector and forest botanist. He listened to the tales of ancient Africa from the lips of hunters, fishermen, chiefs and witch doctors from a vast diversity of tribes in myriad encampments and also had many encounters with the creatures of the forest, from the magnificent leopard to the homicidal buffalo, and from the indolent but horrendously venomous gaboon viper to the agile, irascible and instantly fatal spitting cobra. His odyssey contains a host of characters with exotic names like ‘Old Man Africa’, ‘Magic Sperm’, ‘Famous Sixpence’ and ‘Pisspot’, whose stories are all told here. But the Africa that MacIntosh describes is no more. The forests have been decimated, and with them have gone the people and the creatures that lived in them long before the coming of the white man’s chain saw. This is a rare, poignant and sometimes hilarious glimpse into a vanished past by one who was part of it.
Editorial Reviews
Review
One’s enjoyment of this excellent book lasts from the first to the final page. The Overseas Pensioner His stories … may be tall, but he can tell them. London Magazine … a poignant and humorous storyteller of the West African bush to rival Gerald Durrell. TLS … one of the surprises of the year … a richly entertaining memoir … a lament for a lost age, and a youth lost with it. Sara Wheeler, The Daily Telegraph Spellbinding. The Aberdeen Press & Journal A fragrant compost of anecdote, lore, survival tips and anthropological titbits. He has the same profound and almost loving relationship with the African forest that Thesiger has with the sands of Arabia. The Oldie
About the Author
Donald MacIntosh is the son of a Perthshire woodcutter and studied forestry in Argyll. He spent 30 years as a tree prospector/surveyor in the rainforests of Liberia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Nigeria. He now lives in the South of England and is still homesick for the Africa he knew.
