Preface to A Winter in Africa

I went to look at human origins in the gold light of Africa’s days: to the desert, the highveld, the brushveld and caves. It didn’t change my winter, it changed my life. For though they say that everything in Africa can kill and will if it can, what they don’t tell you is that everything in Africa can pierce your soul and steal your heart; and, does.

For it was not hours in a zoo, but weeks in a tent hearing jackals wailing at night as different tribes negotiated under a full moon's glow; or walking where erosion revealed bones and tools that have been buried a thousand centuries; or watching fires spread over kilometers changing tawny grasses to black earth; or looking at the skulls of the Taung child or Mrs. Ples; or gazing at 50,000 year old ochre paintings of men-eland, hunters-dancers, shaman-men transforming back-and-forth; or feeling the imposing silence of the Kalahari's night sky; it was all of these and so much, much more that came into my life. How could they not change the conformation of what Heaven, Earth and Hell now mean to me.

The poems that follow are some of these feelings of Africa.