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.
