Customer Reviews

Barefoot Over the Serengeti

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This is the autobiography of an English boy brought up by his farming family in Tanganyika (Tanzania), living in the middle of what is now the Serengeti National Park. The time of the story was the 1920s and 1930s, hard times in a very hard country, long before the arrival of any infrastructure to speak of; roughly contemporaneous with Karen Blixen of "Out of Africa" fame. David Read was mostly left to his own devices as a youngster and his best friend was a Masai boy. Together, they hunted and otherwise lived in the wilds of the East African savannah and lived together among the Masai.

In those days the Masai lived very much as they had done for the two hundred years or so since they arrived on the Serengeti, migrating down the Rift Valley from Ethiopia, conquering all the tribes they encountered along the way. This book is really a recounting of the traditional Masai way of life, much changed in these days when the Masai have been driven from the Serengeti to live exclusively in the Ngorongoro Crater, a lifestyle increasingly eroded by the inevitable encroachment of modernity.

Both the recounting and the way of life are intriguing. The Masai, for a fierce warrior people, were remarkably hospitable both to the young white boy and to all of his kin. And yet the Masai retained their warlike ways and their other habits, including sexual abandon and the single-handed killing of lions with spears by the young warriors - the Moran - all recounted faithfully by Read as seen though his young eyes. The book provides a very interesting insight into a very unusual people.

This is an enjoyable book that will appeal to anyone interested in East African culture, from the perspective of a "white boy" who, besides the colour of his skin, was every bit as Masai as the other kids he associated with.

Well worth reading if you want to get an insight into how the Masai lived in the 1920's.