The Shadow of Kilimanjaro - On Foot Across East Africa
by Rick Ridgeway
Bloomsbury, $135
Ten years after making a three-week journey from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the shores of the Indian Ocean in Kenya, Rick Ridgeway's book of the trek has been reissued by Bloomsbury. The Shadow of Kilimanjaro - On Foot Across East Africa sought to reconcile modern man with a timeless landscape and its threatened wildlife. In an introduction for this paperback edition, Ridgeway, a professional climber and trekker, considers the need to protect what he has 'come to think of as environmental baselines, of what landscapes were like before humans altered them'. At the same time he talks of the boom in environmental tourism that followed first publication of this book, and the mini-industry of 'champagne' safaris that has grown around its original guides. It seems the only people not to profit are the same ones whose fate he lamented the first time - the Waliangulu, a tribe of archers who used to hunt elephants with arrows, now reduced to farming or prison for poaching. The words of one former hunter said more than a decade ago still haunt this book: 'In the old days, we did important things.'