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Kenyan
Literature - Books |
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| It
sounds like a fable or a fairy tale. The main characters are
an orphaned baby hippopotamus and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.
The hippo was rescued from a natural disaster of biblical
proportions, and the tortoise was meant to be dinner a century
ago. But the story of Owen the hippo and Mzee the tortoise
is absolutely true.
The animals are both
the wards of Dr. Paula Kahumbu, general manager of Lafarge
Ecosystems, which runs a sanctuary in Mombasa, Kenya. She
tells Jennifer Ludden the story of a highly unlikely friendship
and the children's book she helped write to tell the tale. |
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| In
Unbowed, Wangari Maathai offers an inspiriting message of
hope and prosperity through self-sufficiency. We witness her
numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government. She makes
clear the political and personal reasons that compelled her,
in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread
from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous
forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant
trees in their villages. We see how Maathai's extraordinary
courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government
into the democracy in which she now serves as assistant minister
for environment. |
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| Birds
of East Africa is the first comprehensive field guide to this
spectacular birding region--and one of the best to any region
in the world. Covering all resident, migrant, and vagrant
birds of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, this
small and compact guide describes and illustrates a remarkable
1,388 species in convenient facing-page layout. Featuring
287 new color plates with 3,400 images painstakingly rendered
by three experienced artists, the guide illustrates all the
plumages and major races likely to be encountered. Set opposite
the plates are range maps and concise accounts describing
identification, status, range, habits, and voice for each
species. Introductory sections provide notes on how to use
the species accounts, the nomenclature adopted, conservation
issues, where to send records, and maps of protected and other
important bird areas. |
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| This
simple memoir is the extraordinary story of a poor nomadic
boy in Kenya who literally travels across the world but never
abandons home. Lekuton grew up in Kenya's poorest tribe, herding
cows and playing in trees and hyena holes before he entered
a missionary boarding school and went to college in the U.S.
Now he teaches in Virginia, but he has never lost his Maasai
roots, and he returns home to help his people several months
a year. Looking back without romanticism or self-pity, he
remembers how it was: the joy and excitement, the constant
hunger and moving, and the traditions, including the circumcision
ceremony that made him a man. The Cinderella theme begins
in Kenya where he's the shabby kid accepted at a fancy Nairobi
high school. Later he travels to his college interview in
a cattle truck with the cows. What gives this short, readable
book its power is Lekuton's authoritative, intimate view of
now and then. |
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| The
White Masai combines adventure and the pursuit of passion
in a page-turning story of two star-crossed lovers from vastly
different backgrounds. Corinne, a European entrepreneur, meets
Lketinga, a Samburu warrior, while on vacation in Mombasa
on Kenya's glamorous coast.Despite language and cultural barriers,
they embark on an impossible love affair. Corinne uproots
her life to move to Africa—not the romantic Africa of
popular culture, but the Africa of the Masai, in the middle
of the isolated bush, where five-foot-tall huts made from
cow dung serve as homes. Undaunted by wild animals, hunger,
and bouts with tropical diseases, she tries to forge a life
with Lketinga. But slowly the dream starts to crumble when
she can no longer ignore the chasm between their two vastly
different cultures. |
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| The
Worlds of a Maasai Warrior |
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| This
is an autobiography of the authour from his birth into a traditional
society in Tanzania in 1949, through his youth, education
in a mission school, and initiation as a warrior, to his career
as a game park guide and ranger (subject of a National Geographic
film, Man of the Serengeti ); to his studies in Munich and
Boston and at the University of Michigan (where he received
an M.S. in natural resources), to his return home, to be received
back ritually into his family. |
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