The fascinating Horatio Clare book, A Single Swallow, follows his experiences travelling with and staying amongst indigenous peoples as he travels through the African continent on the trail of the migrating swallows. His friendships, trials and triumphs make good reading, as do the descriptions of his mixed local accommodation and various modes of travel. Through his perceptive writing, he shows he has a particular empathy with those he meets and their circumstances – from his fellow travellers to border officials and local transport drivers. He neither judges nor seeks to compare his world to theirs, just enjoys living in the moment amongst those from whom he can learn. A rare and fascinating book in all these respects.
Having grown up in many countries, amongst many different peoples and cultures, I have always felt it a privilege to do so, with a sincere respect of the people and their customs and traditions; this comes through strongly also in Horatio Clare’s book.
His intriguing account of the ‘bandit laws of imperial cartography’ in his second chapter, on Namibia, where he describes how the country came to have such an unusual shape when common sense and the topography (rivers, ocean and mountain) should have dictated otherwise, culminates in the following conclusion: ‘The upshot is that Namibia looks like a child’s attempt to make a paper rectangle, a distracted child, which did not bother to tear off the last strip jutting off the top right corner: Caprivi.’
The author’s own experience of one such instance of the strange plotting of official cartographers at times of political change is noted in An Unexpected Journey in the tenth chapter on the formation of pre-independence Botswana boundaries in the 1950s. ‘We left on the train for Mafeking in the Transvaal which is located close to the South African border with Botswana. Only a few years earlier South Africa had also been a British Colony so the administrative headquarters of the British Bechuanaland Protectorate was therefore still located in Mafeking… The whole area was within a heavily wired enclave, with the Union Jack flying and an armed sentry on the gate. As someone explained to us, it was a bit of old England in a foreign field!
An Unexpected Journey: A Woman's Role 