Livingstone's Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape Paperback - 2000

From the rear cover

''BAGAMOYO, ' which in Swahili means, "lay down your heart", is a ruin of dishevelled loveliness which lies at the beginning of the 800-mile Arab trade route to the Great Lakes. This was the terminus from which caravans set out for the interior, and where the returning journey ended before crossing into Zanzibar. "Lay down your heart " said the grateful porters after months, years away in the perilous interior. But the words might as easily have been spoken by the millions who passed here in chains, pausing perhaps to looks back for the last time on their native land before the voyage into bondage.

Stephen Taylor travels from eats to southern Africa uncovering vestiges of the continent's colonial past through its landscape, peoples and their stories. His trail starts with the exotic splendour of Zanzibar and a whirlwind tour of the island on the back of the Vicar of Zanzibar's motorbike. Through Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Taylor talks to blacks and whites (the mzungu), on dirt tracks, in buses, at bars and on great latticed verandahs overlooking the southern lands. He meets the last white landowner in Uganda and drinks beer with a man named Delicious; at the Great Lakes he walks in the footsteps of the early colonial explorers, Burton and Speke, and meets Victoria, a formidable entrepreneur named after the lake and the queen. In this present-day journey Taylor examines the identity of the whites who have stayed on in post-independence Africa, his own ambivalence toward the great contentment in which he grew up and the future of Africa's southern countries.

'Livingstone's Tribe' combines evocative and philosophical travel-writing with a remarkable history of some of the most dramatic lands in the world.

"Stephen Taylor, a third-generation migr of British descent, finds a melancholy collection of white misfits and failures... as well as a heroic, dwindling clutch of missionaries still holding the line... The catalogue of theft, corruption, murder and superstition that Taylor chronicles makes appalling, fascinating reading. Yet Taylor is no Colonel Blimp, rather an anti-apartheid liberal who fled the old South Africa and welcomed independence for Mugabe's Zimbabwe... The most honest and enthralling account of Africa for years"
DAILY MAIL

"At the book's heart is a riveting examination of Livingstone's tribe... the whites of post-independence Africa"
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"Sights and travel experiences are vividly described and people from both Livingstone's and from other tribes are handled particularly well"
SUNDAY TIMES

Media reviews

Citations

• Library Journal, 06/01/2001, Page 198
• New York Times, 06/03/2001, Page 37