Read Articles

Great African Balloonograph Safari Fizzles

1909 Charles Hughes spent his honeymoon in Kenya as the writer and secretary for the great African Balloonograph Expedition. His bride Anna didn’t join him. She spent their honeymoon with her mother in Europe. The couple’s strange start to married life is entwined with the African Balloonograph Expedition of 1909...

Pioneering Postman Delivers the Mail

1912 “I need a volunteer to inspect the new road from Kibigori Station to Eldora River,” announced J. T. Gosling, then Kenya’s Postmaster-General. Alif Din volunteered for the trip, which would take him from Nairobi to present day Eldoret. Din, accompanied by an African companion named Omolo, loaded six 45-pound bags of mail onto the train and began a 24-hour rail journey to Kibigori Station...

We Pushed the Governor Out of the Mud

1946 We rounded a curve on the wet road, chains spitting mud into the air, and found a big fancy car stuck in a mud hole...

Epic Safari Marred by Disasters

1967 As I drove the Land Rover through Uganda on the way to Kidepo National Park, I felt a jolt behind me. The trailer tyre hurtled past me and into the grass. I stopped to check the damage. The wheel had sheered off at the axle...

Italian Expedition Scales Ruwenzoris

1906 The Italian adventurer, Luigi Amedeo di Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi, spearheaded an expedition to explore, map and photograph the mysterious Ruwenzori Mountains in the heart of Africa. No stranger to harsh conditions, Luigi Amedeo began his life in a palace...

Missionaries Murdered at Golbanti

1886 Maasai warriors, armed with long heavy spears and terrible clubs, met Methodist missionaries, John and Annie Houghton, just outside the stockade of their mission station at Golbanti on the Tana River. A second group of Maasai joined the first on the open road and surrounded the Houghtons...

Russian Officer with King Menelik's Army

Despite its bland title, this is the most important book on the history of eastern Africa to have been published for a century. And it was written over a century ago!

The book consists of translations of two books, From Enttoto to the River Baro, originally published in 1897, and With the Armies of Menelik II, published in 1900, both written by a Russian cavalry officer named Alexander Bulatovich, Lieutenant of His Majesty’s Life-Guard Hussar Regiment. It is the second book which we are reviewing here. Based on his day-by-day diary, it is not only the sole but an astonishingly vivid first-hand description of how Menelik II created his Ethiopian Empire..

Only in Africa - Quirky tales that happened in Africa

The Lion Roars at Dawn

On a camping trip to Maasai Mara I had a new kijana as my camp helper to make the fire in the morning for chai. We slept in different tents. Early one morning I called to him to go make the fire. I heard the kijana getting up and the tent zipper opening. Then I also heard the unmistakable low grunts of a simba very close to camp. I called out, careful not to tell the kijana there was a lion or he might have panicked. “Maingi, come back.”

“Why?” Maingi asked. Suddenly the lion roared, shaking the air. Maingi dove into his tent. We stayed in our tents until the lion had gone and the sun had risen. We drank our chai late that day.

Dominik Kamonde Kitonyi, Tala