When James Kilgo is invited on an African safari, he leaps at the opportunity--even though the only shooting he is slated for is with a camera. As the group's photographer and "intoxicated by sensation," Kilgo not only documents the hunt, but also relays every sight, sound, and scent of the long trek through Zambia's Luangwa River valley.
The expedition is made all the more significant because Kilgo has cancer, and his lifelong dream is to travel to the great continent with "the sound of life." A retired University of Georgia English professor and former hunter, Kilgo's expectations of the trip are heavily influenced by the literary tradition of big-game adventurers Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, David Livingstone, and Theodore Roosevelt. Kilgo's sometimes-religious account echoes Livingstone's: "The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great," he writes.
Kilgo, an avid bird watcher, offers exhaustive descriptions of the many avian species he and the hunting party encounter. He sets aside his status as observer, however, when given the chance to shoot kudu, a type of woodland antelope that Hemingway also pursued and depicted in Green Hills of Africa. Kilgo soon realizes that while the experience of hunting in Africa is much the same as it was in Hemingway's day, Africa has changed greatly. Outside of the bush country where the party hunts, there is "poverty, AIDS, and genocide." But for Kilgo it is the beauty of Africa that resonates, as it is a place where the sky changes moment to moment, and the leaves and the flowers fade and fall: "Only the colors of the earth remain constant--black and white, sienna, ochre, and umber." --C.J. Carrillo
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"I can think of few authors so well qualified to write a book like this. James Kilgo, naturalist, spiritual thinker, hunter, historian, and, above all, author extraordinaire, has written something 'about' an African safari—but only in the way, say, that Melville wrote 'about' whaling. A splendid accomplishment."--Sydney Lea, author of Hunting the Whole Way Home
"Not everyone who visits Africa gets there in spirit. Bad Africa books abound, the detritus of ill-conceived travel. After reading this sharp-eyed, deeply felt, and clearly thought account of a safari to Zambia’s Luangwa River valley, I can see that not only did Jim Kilgo get to Africa; he was preparing to go all along. In Africa, he confronts in vivid, searching prose the tragic relation between man and nature embodied in the hunt and the many paradoxes of self and culture hunting reveals to us. He has a keen eye for the beauty of wildlife and landscape and a great appetite for the pleasures of being afield. Colors of Africa is not only a fine Africa book, it is a key to Jim Kilgo’s art and life. He has taken the skills honed on his home landscape in fiction and nonfiction and tested them in the revealing light of Africa, where what is universal in his voice comes through loud and clear."--Christopher Camuto, author of Hunting from Home
"Literature is filled with stories of what the dark continent does to men and women, from Conrad to Hemingway, from Gordimer to Dinesen. Kilgo was an eager follower in their footsteps, seeking reaffirmation of life, and perhaps redemption. . . . Though Kilgo has come along merely as a photographer, when he is given the opportunity to stalk the elusive Kudu deer, he wonders if he is up to the same challenge conquered by his literary forebear, Ernest Hemingway. Colors of Africa is more than a travelogue—it is part literary exploration, part personal journey. . . . James Kilgo, who died in December 2002, was an exceptional, starkly honest writer. This literate, moving, unsentimental book—his last—will take you to a world you may have only imagined."--BookPage
"Kilgo was an American hunter, writer, and professor with a lifelong curiosity about and interest in Africa that he was given an unexpected chance to satisfy near the end of his life. He seized the day, and eventually this chronicle was published posthumously. The knowledge of this timing gives the narrative an added poignancy in its reminder that in the midst of life, and especially the unique and glorious life of the hills and plains of Africa, we are near death, both the deaths of the hunted and sometimes also of the hunters. . . . Kilgo is well attuned to Africa's changes from the racist, colonial land it was, and he often writes with insight about the large African entourage of mixed 'blood' and mixed African and European heritage."--North Dakota Quarterly
“Writers, the good ones, are lucky people. In life, they get to do this extraordinary thing, this writing. And in death, they leave behind these perfect, crystalline sentences, eternal insights into their thinking. The good ones do. . . . Throughout this memoir, Kilgo creates his distinctive sort of prose poetry, turning even an animal's death into something stunning."--Teresa Weaver, Atlanta Journal Constitution
"In the tradition of hunter-authors Ernest Hemingway and Isak Dinesen, Kilgo followed his dreams to Africa and then wrote about the journey, a deeply spiritual quest that came at the end of his life."--Covington News
"The book is a triumph, a literary travelogue obviously influenced by Dinesen, but with the likes of Hemingway, Conrad and David Livingstone also lighting the path.”--Creative Loafing (Atlanta)
"This spring, two of America’s most sophisticated travel writers . . . [have written] up their own recent journeys through Africa. . . . In contrast to Paul Theroux, who is constantly checking the measure of other people’s reaction to him, James Kilgo writes with such unfettered curiosity that it erases his presence and puts the reader in his shoes. Who wouldn’t want to be high-stepping through the bush, peering at magnificent birds and bulls, falling asleep at night to the cries of hyenas? OK, perhaps not everyone. But thanks to this book, we can be right there with him, while safely at home."--John Freeman, Cleveland Plain Dealer
