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I'm in the midst of listening to the audiobook version of An Affair With Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent by Alzada Carlisle Kistner, and am enjoying it quite a bit. Kistner and her husband were entomologists who went on several trips for fieldwork across Africa between 1960 and 1973, bringing their kids with them on a couple of the trips.
They were hot on the trail of myrmycophiles - bugs that live with ants - in army ant colonies, and I'm all over the bits of science that pepper the text. :) The 1960s and early 70s were the last gasp of colonialism as revolution and self-rule took over many African countries, and they ended up in danger in several areas - Kistner, her husband, their research assistant, and their many, many specimens had to be airlifted out of the Congo in 1960 after the Belgians relinquished control and the Congolese political atmosphere became unstable and violent.
The book feels like home to me - my family was in essentially the same situation minus the threat of armed insurrection - as we were researchers in Africa at the end of the colonial period, and much of it rings true.and I can't seem to write in anything but cliched phrases today, so I'll just go with it. I promise I won't use the phrase 'The Dark Continent.'
What I really want to bitch about is the Amazon reviewers, though. There's one who falls square into the "if it doesn't mention the Plight of the Natives it's not a good book!" trap. I have issues with that, first of which being that when you're a researcher in the area, you don't actually have much contact with the locals. We had more contact than they did, because we never had a guide or other type of employee to arrange shopping and other thigns for us, because we were there for a logner period of time. The Kistners were there for short trips, and in those cases you need to concentrate on your work, so you hire a local to arrange for food and housing and what-all if it's not being supplied by the research station you're at. And if you're in Africa for a short time, the very few days you've got off you want to go watch the wildlife, not gawk at the Poor Oppressed Native. And treating the locals as Poor Oppressed Natives is just bloody patronizing. They're people.
Another review pointed out that the book was indeed about the Africa the Kistners experienced and that they didn't get a lot of chance to see much of it outside of the research stations and the European expats, but he held a slighting attitude towards the science, which makes me wonder what the hell he thought the book was about. It's not a book about overlanders or tourists or backpackers, it's about scientists sciencing their way across the continent.
One more thing about the book, other than a frenzied Read it!!: I had a natural feminist knee-jerk reaction to the beginning, when Kistner mentions that when she and her husband were in grad school together, she got pulled aside on several occasions by (male, as it turns out) professors who asked her to support her husband because he has one of the most brilliant minds in entomology. She eventually gave up her plans for a Ph.D., which made me wince for a moment until I reminded myself that it was the 1950s. And as the book develops, it becomes apparent that she's the best research assistant EVAR. She's educated and experienced enough in the subject to be invaulable to him, and she loves the fieldwork, which is the fun part anyway, and finds the majority of the rest of the work back home - sorting, mounting, labelling, and describing the specimens they collected - tedious, while her husbands loves that sort of stuff. They're the perfect team; even their daughters end up helping with the fieldwork and their parents are thrilled that the girls are natural scientists. (And since granting agencies usually offer money for the scientists' families to go with them on long-term fieldwork expeditions like this, having her function as a research assistant means that when they do have another research assistant, they can get twice as much work done.)
I don't know how much my mom aided my dad with his research in the Serengeti, certainly not to the extent that Kistner did. I'll have to ask. I know I mostly functioned as a geologist's hammer - Dad posed me next to grass and took photos with me acting as a scale of how tall the grass was - and a nuisance. XD
They were hot on the trail of myrmycophiles - bugs that live with ants - in army ant colonies, and I'm all over the bits of science that pepper the text. :) The 1960s and early 70s were the last gasp of colonialism as revolution and self-rule took over many African countries, and they ended up in danger in several areas - Kistner, her husband, their research assistant, and their many, many specimens had to be airlifted out of the Congo in 1960 after the Belgians relinquished control and the Congolese political atmosphere became unstable and violent.
The book feels like home to me - my family was in essentially the same situation minus the threat of armed insurrection - as we were researchers in Africa at the end of the colonial period, and much of it rings true.
What I really want to bitch about is the Amazon reviewers, though. There's one who falls square into the "if it doesn't mention the Plight of the Natives it's not a good book!" trap. I have issues with that, first of which being that when you're a researcher in the area, you don't actually have much contact with the locals. We had more contact than they did, because we never had a guide or other type of employee to arrange shopping and other thigns for us, because we were there for a logner period of time. The Kistners were there for short trips, and in those cases you need to concentrate on your work, so you hire a local to arrange for food and housing and what-all if it's not being supplied by the research station you're at. And if you're in Africa for a short time, the very few days you've got off you want to go watch the wildlife, not gawk at the Poor Oppressed Native. And treating the locals as Poor Oppressed Natives is just bloody patronizing. They're people.
Another review pointed out that the book was indeed about the Africa the Kistners experienced and that they didn't get a lot of chance to see much of it outside of the research stations and the European expats, but he held a slighting attitude towards the science, which makes me wonder what the hell he thought the book was about. It's not a book about overlanders or tourists or backpackers, it's about scientists sciencing their way across the continent.
One more thing about the book, other than a frenzied Read it!!: I had a natural feminist knee-jerk reaction to the beginning, when Kistner mentions that when she and her husband were in grad school together, she got pulled aside on several occasions by (male, as it turns out) professors who asked her to support her husband because he has one of the most brilliant minds in entomology. She eventually gave up her plans for a Ph.D., which made me wince for a moment until I reminded myself that it was the 1950s. And as the book develops, it becomes apparent that she's the best research assistant EVAR. She's educated and experienced enough in the subject to be invaulable to him, and she loves the fieldwork, which is the fun part anyway, and finds the majority of the rest of the work back home - sorting, mounting, labelling, and describing the specimens they collected - tedious, while her husbands loves that sort of stuff. They're the perfect team; even their daughters end up helping with the fieldwork and their parents are thrilled that the girls are natural scientists. (And since granting agencies usually offer money for the scientists' families to go with them on long-term fieldwork expeditions like this, having her function as a research assistant means that when they do have another research assistant, they can get twice as much work done.)
I don't know how much my mom aided my dad with his research in the Serengeti, certainly not to the extent that Kistner did. I'll have to ask. I know I mostly functioned as a geologist's hammer - Dad posed me next to grass and took photos with me acting as a scale of how tall the grass was - and a nuisance. XD