Pursuing Giraffe

by Dagg, Anne Innis

• ISBN13: 9780889204638
• ISBN10: 0889204632
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-28
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr

Summary

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffevividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa (before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey); her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journey, as well as her n+ivet_ about the complex social and political issues in Africa.Once in the field, she recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa. Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author's response to an "exotic" world far removed from the Toronto where she grew up, the book records her visits to Zanzibar and Victoria Falls and her climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Pursuing Giraffeis a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century. The book's foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Applesand Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg's narrative.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xv
Introduction	1	(127)
1 Setting Off	7	(15)
2 Adapting to Africa	22	(12)
3 Rhodes University	34	(11)
4 Driving to Giraffeland	45	(8)
5 First Days at Fleur de Lys	53	(15)
6 Settling in at Fleur de Lys	68	(15)
7 October	83	(15)
8 November	98	(14)
9 December	112	(16)
10 Dar es Salaam	128	(19)
11 Zanzibar	147	(13)
12 Up Kilimanjaro	160	(13)
13 To Study East African Giraffe?	173	(14)
14 Heading South	187	(16)
15 Mbeya to Umtali	203	(17)
16 Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls	220	(12)
17 Back at Fleur de Lys	232	(12)
18 Leaving the Giraffe	244	(15)
19 Return to England	259	(11)
Epilogue	270	(5)
Appendix 1	275	(2)
Appendix 2	277	(2)
Selected Readings	279	(2)
Glossary	281