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Three Years in Savage Africa
Lionel Decle
Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1974
ISBN 10: 0869201093 / ISBN 13: 9780869201091
"Lionel Decle's entertaining Three Years in Savage Africa - part travelogue, part adventure story and part scientific exercise - has been chosen . in the current Rhodesiana Reprint Series for two principal reasons. Firstly, the author was commissioned by the French Government to study and report on the life-styles, customs and character of the indigenous peoples of southern, central and east Africa. This he did after an exhaustive 7000-mile odyssey and, although his observations tend to be somewhat superficial, even inaccurate in places, they are both interesting and generally valid. . Moreover this is, in a sense, an important work, for the Africa which Decle knew in the early 1890s was at an historical watershed. When the author began his journey, says Henry Morton Stanley in his Introduction, 'the Great South African trunk railway had only reached Vryburg, the Chartered Company was but just then in possession of Mashonaland; Lobengula was still in his kraal in Bulawayo; Mr Rhodes was heavily subdidizing British Central Africa; the Germans had not yet advanced to Tanganyika; and Uganda was being nursed by Sir W. Mackinnon: consequently all the regions he visited were still somewhat benighted, though the dawn was breaking and the sounds foretelling the changes so soon to come were in the air.' Great changes indeed. Decle is writing about countries which had only recently been explored and were about to be colonised, exploited, and exposed to a mere half-century of civilising influence before being launched on the lonely and often hazardous path of independence. 'A last look around', Stanley goes on, 'cannot fail to be interesting.'".
Dustjacket has some wear, foxing and age-toning, in protective plastic. PLEASE CHECK IMAGES FOR CONDITION
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