An Affair With Africa : Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent
by Alzada Carlisle Kistner

Travel Guidebook Series

Ecotourism Books

The publisher , July 1, 1998

There is probably no other book on myrmecophiles--the strange cricket-like insects that live with ants in their colonies--in which Richard Nixon and Idi Amin play important parts. But Alzada Carlisle Kistner has written a most unusual book: realistic descriptions of the hazards of insect collecting; a child's guide to sleeping next to lions; and, most of all, snapshots of an Africa that was disappearing even as she observed it.

David Kistner, who was married to Alzada, was determined to study myrmecophiles among tropical ants. So in 1960 the Kistners leapt at an opportunity to go to the then Belgian Congo. They got on a plane for Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in June 1960. A bad time for a visit, it seemed: their plane had been almost empty, but the place was thronged with Europeans trying to leave. Independence for what would later become Zaire was just three weeks away.

After a few days in the capitol, the Kistners flew up the Congo river to the first of the dozens of research stations they would visit in Africa: a compound of neat, whitewashed houses and offices, staffed by dedicated European scientists working on tropical diseases or agriculture, assisted by hundreds of local people.

In the newly independent Congo, these servants quickly joined by soldoiers intent upon erasing every vestige of colonialism. Soon the Kistners were at the airport, held at gunpoint. Finally, a US Air force DC-3 landed and took them to Uganda. Her father, Kistner learnt, had called eve! ry office in Washington begging for help--and Vice President Nixon had ordered the plane in. The American missionaries who declined to board it were killed soon after.

This hair-raising collection trip was followed by visits to Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South West Africa (Namibia). For each of them, Kistner offers vivid descriptions of the insects, big wildlife, terrain and people they found. She also provides an unvarnished look at colonial life--Land-Rovers, pith helmuts and stewards rising before dawn--that seems far more distant than 1973, when An Affair with Africa ends.

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