As long back as I can remember, I’ve had it in my head that I would end up in Africa, specifically the Serengeti. The long arid veldts (there's a word for you) with distant hills lost in the heat haze; the lone acacia tree standing sentinel with a leopard in the branches or a pride of lions sleeping in the shade...
Somehow I’m not there yet, but at least I’ve proven that I can make it outside of my own culture. I’ll get there eventually.
As I’ve been getting ready to make these next steps, I’ve also been thinking a lot about how it all came about. A guy named Greg Ballard introduced me to the music of Johnny Clegg when we were in university (although I already knew “Scatterlings of Africa” as it had been a dj favourite at a radio station I listened to). That took me a long way into exploring African pop music, and to this day I have an interesting if eclectic collection of songs from artists no one else I know has heard of.
But my interest in Africa pre-dates that. I remember when Toto came out with their song “Africa” and it just reinforced my already set goal of going there some day (as a side note, that is also the first song I ever heard on CD, and the sound difference was startling – it made me love the song all over again).
I also remember as a child religiously watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, a weekly TV show where these two guys went out and captured then released big game animals. Marlin Perkins would tell you about the animals while some guy named Jim would almost get his hand bit off catching them. I remember they drove around the everglades in those weird airboats, too.
I can't place exactly when in time that I used to watch a wildlife show hosted by Lorne Greene. I think it might have been after he starred in Battlestar Galactica. I do remember reading an interview with him where he encouraged everyone to go see Africa "before they pave it over." Browsing through the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), it looks like the show must have been Lorne Greene's Last of the Wild, although that was filmed four years before Galactica started.
But just this week, I think that I got to the root cause of my obsession. I saw, for the first time in I don’t know how long, the movie Born Free. I think more than anything it epitomizes my expectations of what the African experience would be. Of course, the movie is in stark contrast to the reality. In the movie, everything works out nicely. We even get a sappy song during the final credits. And that may have been the way it was then, but things changed later. Both George and Joy Adamson, the real life inspirations for the movie, met violent deaths: he was shot by poachers, she stabbed by an angry assistant.
But the mythology remains, alive and seasonally awake within me. I don’t know if I will ever get there, but from an April 2007 perspective, June 2008 is looking pretty good (but so is this coming Christmas, who knows).
Oh, and "In My African Dream" is the title of a song by Johnny Clegg, a South African musician.
