Soti the wanderess

Michael Nicholson, Across the Limpopo: a family’s hazardous 4,000-mile journey through Africa, 1984.

Homeward bound to England in 1977 after four years, South Africa-based TV correspondent Nicholson, accompanied by his wife and two young sons, spent four months traversing black East Africa in a Range Rover from Johannesburg to Cairo. Their 4000-mile route took them to Victoria Falls, Mount Kilimanjaro and the still primitive Serengeti Game Preserve where they witnessed the earth-shaking mass migration of animals toward new grassland. Their adventures and impressions are recounted in lively fashion: sharply contrasting landscapes from park-like areas to mountains, forests, savannah, farmland, bush and desert, and hospitable, large families eking out an existence on the land or in cities under brutish conditions, victims of political and religious strife.