A Journey from Zanzibar to the Cape.
Stephen Taylor travels from east to southern Africa uncovering vestiges of the continent's colonial past through its landscape, peoples and their stories. His trail starts with the exotic splendour of Zanzibar and a whirlwind tour of the island on the back of the vicar of Zanzibar's motorbike. Through Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Taylor talks to blacks and whites (the mzungu), on dirt tracks, in buses, at bars and on great latticed verandahs overlooking the southern lands.
He meets the last white landowner in Uganda and drinks beer with a man named Delicious; at the Great Lakes he walks in the footsteps of the early colonial explorers, Burton and Speke, and meets Victoria, a formidable female entrepreneur named after the lake and the queen.
In this present-day journey Taylor examines the identity of Livingstone's tribe (the whites who have stayed on in post-independence Africa), his own ambivalence towards the great continent in which he grew up and the future of Africa's southern countries.
'Livingstone's Tribe' combines evocative and philosophical travel-writing with a remarkable history of some of the most dramatic lands in the world.