I Dreamed of Africa
By Kuki Gallmann
Viking, 315 pages, $22.95
The news came as a shock. . . . Jack Block had died while trout fishing,” writes Kuki Gallmann of a fellow Kenyan who, after apparently having had a heart attack, was swept away by a river in Chile.
Though not described in great detail, Jack Block is emblematic of many of those who appear, a hemisphere away, in the pages of Gallmann`s ”I Dreamed of Africa.” Daring and energetic, they seek out lives of adventure in an exotic land-Kenya-only to meet premature deaths through risky hobbies or the vagaries of daily life.
Gallmann, a native Italian, moved to Kenya in 1972 with her husband, Paolo, and a young son. There, the family searched the country for a home before settling on Ol Ari Nyiro-a cattle and sheep operation stretching over 98,000 acres of arid plains, dense bush, virgin cedar forests and dramatic gorges.
There is beauty in ”I Dreamed of Africa,” and Gallmann writes evocatively of the vast spaces and rugged beauty of Kenya`s interior. She also writes of violence, both tragic and random, and that, ultimately, is what propels this book.
A meticulous journal-keeper since childhood, Gallmann clings to detail and analyzes it. Her writing is often filled with foreboding, and for good reason. She experiences so many tragedies-losing her husband in a car accident; her son, a snake collector, to the bite of a puff adder; a brother- in-law, a hunter, to an elephant attack; a close family friend, a flying student, to an airplane accident-that one begins to wonder who is left.
Gallmann lingers long over her grief at the loss of the two most important men in her life; the account of her son`s death is especially touching. She also writes of the slow healing process that followed those deaths.
As a tribute to her husband and son, Gallmann established the Gallmann Foundation to explore ways of reconciling development and conservation, and developed Ol Ari Nyiro into a highly successful game sanctuary, which today has the largest concentration of black rhinos on private land in East Africa. Still, through much of ”I Dreamed of Africa,” Paolo and Kuki seem little more than adventurers, outsiders looking in.
Paolo`s passion is big-game hunting; it isn`t until after a nighttime ambush by road bandits that he begins hanging out with the local African wazee, village elders who ”smoked strange grasses, chewed strong tobacco and sniffed at the acrid sort of snuff which Paolo liked. . . . They accepted him, and he gained from those times with them a different outlook which was part of the new awareness he had acquired.”
”I Dreamed of Africa” does offer several insightful encounters with African Kenyans. In these passages a refreshing counterpoint to Gallmann`s highly analytical point of view emerges. At the funeral of one of Ol Ari Nyiro`s security workers, a young woman stepped forward to speak. She spoke in the Turkana language. A man translated. Nobody stirred. Her speech could have been an African epitaph for those who came to Kenya looking for adventure, and died in pursuit of it:
”I tell you that the sun dies, and it comes back. I tell you that the rains die, and they come back. But when a man dies, he does not come back. He is dead. … I remember this man, and the window he has left will be filled by no other. And so be it.”
