The Trouble with Africa

German-born artist Vic Guhrs came to Africa at the age of twenty-two to fulfil his boyhood dream of a life in wild places among wild animals. He lived for twenty-five years in an isolated bush camp in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia and knows that, despite its paradoxes and its mysteries, he can never leave Africa. The trouble with Africa, he says, is that once it is in your blood, like malaria, it is almost impossible to get rid of. And the trouble with Africa is also the trouble with those of us who settle here: as long as we insist on judging it from a Western perspective, we will be the outsiders – we will be forever baffled by it. The complexities of African attitudes that seem to confound us are perhaps not so complex after all; it is their very simplicity that we fail to understand. On the road to our civilised enlightenment have we lost the ability to see life in its most fundamental essence?