Drinking the Wind traces the life of Jon Arensen who arrived on the African continent with his parents in 1946. Growing up in Tanganyika in the bush by Lake Victoria, Jon learned Kisukuma before he spoke English. He loved the outdoors and as a young boy he helped feed the family with his shooting skills. But he couldn t grow up in the wilds of Africa forever and he went off to boarding school in Kenya to study and learn more about the wider world. After university in the USA, Jon returned to Africa as a teacher at Rift Valley Academy before moving to southern Sudan in 1976. He and his wife Barb surveyed the languages of southern Sudan for the Education Ministry before settling among the Murle people at Pibor Post where they learned the language and culture and translated the Bible into the Murle language. The author's love for Africa oozes from every page of this book, which abounds with adventures of all kinds in this memoir of a life lived in Africa.

Drinking the Wind

Jon Arensen

Old Africa Books

Richard Lyth: Oxford graduate, missionary, commando, Frontier Agent, linguist, District Commissioner, Anglican bishop. Lyth lived an epic life much of it spent in the remote southeastern Sudan. During World War 2 he served as Frontier Agent on the Boma Plateau, part of the traditional homeland of the Murle people. There he met a young Murle man named Lado, the subject of this book. The two men became lifelong friends. Over time Lado told Lyth the story of his difficult and extraordinary life. Lyth lived for many years among the Murle people, studying their culture and language. He penned an early edition of this book in 1945, drawing upon his knowledge of the setting and customs of the intriguing Murle culture and integrating them with Lado s personal story. This book follows the life of a man named Lado. He was born in Sudan approximately 1920. He grew up living the traditional life of his Murle people- herding the goats, planting sorghum and hunting antelope with a spear. But Lado was different. Even as a young boy he wondered about the world around him. As he grew older he was increasingly confused by the different manifestations of the tribal god named Tammu. As a teenager he was captured in a raid and taken away as a slave. He was later adopted into the tribe that enslaved him. Under these conditions his questions about suffering and God became more intense. He was rescued by British troops and learned Arabic under the protection of the District Commissioner. Eventually he returned to his home at Boma as the official translator for the military. It was here that Lado met Kemerbong (Richard Lyth). A meeting that changed the rest of his life.

Chasing the Rain

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

TRIBAL ORIGINS is the true story of a boy from a traditional Minnesotan family whose parents are called to Africa in the 1950s to become missionaries. They depart from their Minnesota island home in the summer of 1955, leaving friends and family, and travel overland to Africa, to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. While in Khartoum the mother contracts a deadly disease forcing the family to backtrack to Egypt for medical help. Despite the death of his wife, the father returns to the Sudan to carry out his new life s work and to make sense of his wife s death. The children are put into a boarding school. After one year at the boarding school in upper Egypt the children are sent home to the south Sudan to see their father. The father is immersed in becoming a missionary. Little do the children understand that they we have come to Africa during interesting times. They are living through the change of an era from colonial rule to national independence. The boarding school where Parr and his sister go to school moves to cosmopolitan Alexandria on the Mediterranean with its remnants of the Ottoman empire - the age of Europe-on-the-Nile. Alexandria is part-Europe, part-Middle East, part-Africa, part-Moslem, and part-Christian all of which profoundly influence Parr s growing up. Every summer the children leave Egypt and return home to the bush to see their parents. Throughout his growing up Parr is haunted by the memories of the death of my mother. Why God abandoned her. And why his father, such a tower of strength, could not save her.

Tribal Origins

Peter Parr

Endless Horizons covers 100 years of the Prettejohn family in Kenya. This book starts in 1904 when Jock 'Black' Harries came to Uganda with the King's Africa Rifles, moves on to Jock's pioneering cattle ranching near Njoro, to World War I, to Mike's grandmother coming to marry Jock, to Mike's father managing Jock Harries' stock operation, to Naro Moru where Mike's father bought his own farm, to Mike's schoolboy adventures, a trans-Sahara expedition, the Emergency, and then on to Mike buying his own ranch in Mweiga and becoming a professional hunter and managing massive cattle/game ranches in Galana and Taita before ending his career in conservation. The last chapter tells of Mike's efforts to save the critically endangered bongo. The book is epic in proportion, yet takes time to focus on the small details of life that make it authentic and personal. The book includes over 80 photographs, many published for the first time.

Endless Horizons

Prettejohn, Michael

When Bert and Diane Adams moved to Uganda in 1970 they had no idea that a few months later General Idi Amin would overthrow the government in a coup and rule Uganda with great force in the coming years. In this book, Bert Adams, a sociology professor from the United States, tells his family's story of their time in Uganda at the beginning of the Amin era. Bert's assignment was to teach sociology at the prestigious Makerere University. With a down-to earth writing style and a keen eye for observation, Bert has captured Uganda as it was in the early 1970s as his family met and fell in love with the Ugandan people and then traveled around the country in their old Volkswagen bus. An American Family in Amin's Uganda gives an inside view of one family's attempt to live a normal life - teaching, singing, making friends, putting on dramatic productions, sight-seeing - in a country that was beginning to unravel under Amin's increasingly erratic and brutal rule of terror.

An American Family in Amin's Uganda

Travel

Adams, Bert

Africa

Dick Lyth graduated from Oxford University in 1939 at the age of 21 and went to southern Sudan. With the start of WWII he signed up with the Sudan Defense Force. Lyth was given the rank of Major and sent to the Ethiopian/Sudan border to attack the incoming Italian forces and prevent them from reaching the Nile River. He trained 120 local warriors and waged a successful guerilla war - striking, withdrawing and eluding the Italian forces. After the war Lyth became District Commissioner over the Murle region, an area of 50,000 square miles. The Murle named him Kemerbong, meaning Red Pelican. During the 10 years he served as District Commissioner, Lyth played many roles including judge, linguist, explorer, hunter, husband, father, anthropologist and peacemaker. His story is an epic tale of courage, daring and love.

The Red Pelican

Arensen, Jon

The Sultan's Spymaster tells the story of Peera Dewjee, an Ismaili merchant who crossed from India to Zanzibar as a boy. Later he became Sultan Barghash's barber and valet, where he became a confidant to the Sultan and a trusted advisor. Peera Dewjee acted behind the scenes during momentous events in the history of Zanzibar and East Africa - the closing of the slave markets and imperial expansion by Germany and Great Britain. The Sultan's Spymaster displays 16 pages of rare photographs from Zanzibar as well as numerous old line drawings in the text of the book itself.

The Sultan's Spymaster

Aldrick, Judy

Community & Culture

In Daughter of the Dust, Marilyn Dodge recounts a life lived in courageous, compassionate service. She takes us from her early days as a child of missionary parents in India, to meeting her husband Cole in the Peace Corps, to struggles and friendships in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Somalia. In Uganda, the Dodge family lived through the civil war of the early 1980s, striving against violence and injustice to create lasting monuments to peace and hope. And in the Sudan, where Cole was head of UNICEF, they surmounted the obstacles thrown up by an oppressive regime to address suffering caused by drought and war. The tales of many others are woven into the narrative, which is often fraught with peril, but always maintains its message of hope.

Daughter of the Dust

Dodge, Marilyn S.

When Joan Booth and her sister Cicely came to Kenya in 1922 to help their brother Eric with his new ranch in Rumuruti, they had no idea the adventures they would encounter. Travelling by ox cart from the railway station at Gilgil to Eric’s farm on the edge of the Pesi Swamp, they soon found themselves building houses and nursing livestock. In the midst of her new and challenging life, Joan still had time for her painting and illustrating. Her watercolour of the Rumuruti landscape graces the cover of this book, and she created the first elephant head logo for Tusker lager in the late 1920s. The original Tusker label showed an elephant’s face head-on with large tusks and ears back. Joan’s version lasted until the early 1960s when it was replaced by the silhouette of an elephant’s head. Joan also drew the Mt Kenya image in 1932 that became the logo printed on the paper wrapping for Co-operative Creameries butter. When her brother Eric married Phyllis Armitage, Joan returned to England, but she came back to Kenya after Phyllis died to care for his young daughter Celia. She took Celia back to England for several years until Eric remarried. In England Joan had a deep spiritual encounter and devoted much of her time to working with the Oxford Group. Joan sailed back to Kenya in the autumn of 1952 with her sister-in-law Violet Armitage and found her adventures weren’t over yet. The ship they were travelling in sank off the coast of Mozambique and on arriving in Kenya they found the Emergency had just been declared and Joan had some harrowing experiences during those unsettled times.This book tells Joan’s story in her own words. She understates the experiences she went through and would not think of herself as a heroine. However, by persevering and working hard in difficult circumstances, Joan made a great difference in the lives of many.  

Among Whistling Thorns

Booth, Joan

This book follows the lives of Diana and Peter Simkin. It combines excerpts from two sources: Diana's weekly letters to her family in Buenos Aires and Peter's diary entries, spliced by explanatory sections. The narrative covers fifteen countries. We follow the adventures of the Simkins from their chance encounter on a plane making an emergency landing in Khartoum, and then to Swaziland with the British Overseas Civil Service. After Swaziland, Peter joined the United Nations, and they moved to Malawi, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Italy, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Macedonia and Serbia. We hear of their struggles and successes, and rejoice in the birth and lives of their children and grandchildren. The book is filled with warmth and a spirit of adventure, and stands as a testament to a couple who truly travelled hopefully.

To Travel Hopefully

Simkin, Peter

Diana, Simkin

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