It was with my body curled into a bed of river sand, a malleable mattress carved by an ephemeral river, that I fell in love with Africa. Under a velvet black sky, I watched a boy wrapped in a blue blanket feed a fire – I was still young enough to worry more about whether the boy would ever kiss me (he never did), than the whooping of nearby hyena. But the magic of that unfiltered experience – waking to the plangent call of a grey-hooded bush shrike; the rhythmic bass hoot of a southern ground hornbill – would become a taproot, anchoring me to this continent.
More, here.
