Michael McKeown - Halfway Down an African Moon. Travels in Sub-Saharan Africa

HALFWAY DOWN AN
AFRICAN MOON

Travels in sub-Saharan Africa

Michael McKeown

HALFWAY DOWN AN AFRICAN MOON

Travels in sub Saharan Africa

The journeys that Michael McKeown undertook in some of the remoter regions of West Africa in the early 1970s provided him with a rich and rewarding experience. Delays, detours and breakdowns were routine and it was then as the recipient of a hundred acts of simple, unfeigned kindnesses that his love of Africa took root. Through them he came to know an older Africa, of ancient story-telling, wisdoms and old-world courtesies living on unchanged beside the almost seismic political and social changes that marked the post-Independence era.

Halfway Down an African Moon continues those early travels, transporting the reader through a diverse range of habitats from equatorial forests to highlands and semi-desert; from the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean to golden grasslands and the Zambezi Valley. Written at a time when unrelenting human demand for land and natural resources is pushing many species of wildlife to the brink of extinction, these accounts are a reminder that in everything else, but economics, the destruction being wrought is irreversible.

Michael McKeown was born in London of English and Irish descent. He has lived and travelled extensively throughout Africa where he has contributed articles for wildlife magazines and travel guides as well as establishing his own quarterly magazine Impressions of Africa. In 1988 he moved to Crete for six years, a time which provided the impetus for a book Headlines Crete attesting to his deep interest in the classical past, traditional societies and the natural world.

The first inkling of the gravitational pull Africa was to exert on me occurred in a remote area of northern Cameroon. Accommodation in beehive huts was rudimentary; the rusted showers long past their prime and the long-drop latrines, with their alarmingly creaking cross-poles, a disaster waiting to happen. None of that mattered however. There was a fticheur outside the kitchen who divined your future by the way a chameleon moved along your arm and the chef played lilting makossa tunes on a flute-like instrument around the campfire. Jugs of palm wine circulated convivially and lions roared from across the valley. A feeling of still unchartered space and freedom prevailed, radiant with possibilities. Circe-like, Africa wove her spell and I couldnt wait to see more.

Later, my travels took me from the tropical forests, high plateaux and colourful grassland kingdoms of West Africa to the acacia studded savannas of the east, from the old walled Swahili cities of the Indian Ocean coast down to the Zambezi Valley. Many of these came about as a result of writing assignments whilst others, like a magical evening of Mali music under the desert stars, were the result of random events and chance. Vast, complex and at times unfathomable to the Western mind, Africa continues to confound, delight, mystify and amaze.

Inevitably, many of the descriptions of wildlife and their habitat that appear in these pages have changed. Expanding populations and the relentless plundering of natural resources by global corporations are transforming forests, wetlands and waterways almost beyond recognition. The forests and animals I grew up with will never return, an elderly Kikuyu farmer living on the foothills of Mt Kenya lamented as we stood together by a once crystal clear stream now silted with topsoil from the once pristine forest. Hapana never. There was no need for him to elaborate.

More than one hundred and fifty years ago Chief Seattle of the North American Suquamish Indians was moved to say: Man does not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. And whatever he does to the web he does it to himself. He spoke after witnessing the carcasses of countless rotting buffalo on the American prairies casually shot down from a passing train by the white men who were soon to take away his lands.

Plus a change, plus cest la mme chose.