Full Description
In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa (before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey); her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journey, as well as her näiveté about the complex social and political issues in Africa. Once in the field, she recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa. Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author's response to an ""exotic"" world far removed from the Toronto where she grew up, the book records her visits to Zanzibar and Victoria Falls and her climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century. The book's foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg's narrative.
Contents
Table of Contents for Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure by Anne Innis Dagg Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Setting Off 2. Adapting to Africa 3. Rhodes University 4. Driving to Giraffeland 5. First Days at Fleur de Lys 6. Settling in at Fleur de Lys 7. October 8. November 9. December 10. Dar es Salaam 11. Zanzibar 12. Up Kilimanjaro 13. To Study East African Giraffe? 14. Heading South 15. Mbeya to Umtali 16. Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls 17. Back at Fleur de Lys 18. Leaving the Giraffe 19. Return to England Epilogue Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Selected Readings Glossary
