Lionel Decle mountaineer, explorer and amateur scientist was commissioned by the French Government in 1890 to study and report on the ethnology and anthropology of southern and east Africa, and his travels in these regions are the subject of this informative and entertaining book. Three Years in Savage Africa is a panoramic canvas of travelogue and scientific observation. The author's 7 000-mile odyssey look him, by devious routes, from Cape Town to Mombasa, and throughoutthe journey he managed to sustain a remarkably fresh curiosity, a sense of high adventure and a capacity for frank appraisal (too frank, some of his contemporary critics thought). The end result is an eminently readable book, full of perceptive comment on the life styles and customs of the indigenous peoples, pen-portraits of the early white settlements, and tales of the hardship, sickness and danger which were inseparable from cross-continent travel in the 1890s.

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