This is the self-published story of a Colonial Agricultural family, moving from
Scotland to Sierra Leone, Uganda and Mauritius and finally to life as a freelance
tropical agricultural consultant. I particularly liked the novel idea of the introduction
to the MacDonald and McAndrew clans. It also has a more sombre theme, the
struggle and hardship and the courage needed to bring up a daughter with cystic
fibrosis.
Having myself been born in Kenya and having lived in Uganda as a Colonial
Administrative spouse at about the same time as the MacDonalds, I am well able to
identify with their Uganda story. I was also particularly intrigued by the contrast of
their time in Sierra Leone. It is difficult for pampered East Africans to believe that
life for expatriates can have been so primitive in the West Coast as recently as the
early fifties.
The story, which focuses on Andrew MacDonald’s wife Olive, carries you along
and is written in the family anecdotal style that is typical of this genre. The trouble,
as the author himself acknowledges, is that when you came on leave, bubbling with
enthusiasm and ready to impress with exciting accounts of life in the tropics, no-one
was much interested. And the same is tme of the books that so many of us have
written since. To those of us who have served in Africa, these books strike a warm
and familiar chord. Sadly, Joe Public is apt to find it all less intriguing.
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