When Ian Mathie first returned to Africa to work, he kept a series of journals. In these he recorded his work, the places he visited and stayed in, people he encountered and lived among and many of the startling and extraordinary events that make Africa so fascinating. Now he has brought together some of these stories to make this book.

A mysterious and alluring female who, it turns out, is not quite what she seems to be; a good 'ol boy from the American Deep South who gets more than he bargained for when a grateful chief offers him a wife; the Scotsman who has to change sex in order to pass through immigration control; a girl named Ian; and the mysterious Man of Passage of the title. These are a few of the real-life characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection of short stories, all of them true and based on first-hand personal experience, with which Ian Mathie captures the spirit of Africa as it emerged from the colonial era into the early years of independence.

These stories will take you from the searing heat of Ethiopia's Danakil desert to the steamy darkness of Africa's deep jungle; through the intricacies of African bureaucracy to encounters with bone-tossing witch doctors, wild animals, a man with stainless steel teeth, a 100 year old chieftain with eighty-two wives and on through the fascinating forest world of the pygmies to the complications of bush midwifery.

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