FROM DARK HEART TO KALAHARI: THE NOT-SO-ECOLOGICAL ADVENTURES OF AN ECOLOGIST IN AFRICA.

# 2006 1st edition. 4to paperback. Pp307. B/w photographs, maps, bibliography.

# The author began his time in Africa in Kenya in 1953, "but did not become a professional wildlife ecologist until 1964 when he conducted antelope research in Uganda". This book is an account of his subsequent career in ecological field research, his attempts to gain a degree in zoology as he went along and a great many observations on the life and politics of the countries he worked in. The action takes place in Burkina-Faso, the Central African Republic, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Botswana, and the reader is given first hand accounts, amongst others, of Idi Amin and emperor Bokassa's coronation. The author is well read in the European literature of these countries and devotes a lot of time to revisiting places described in the nineteenth century, such as the Kagas of the Central African Republic, otherwise unvisited by Europeans since. Well worth reading.