Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story

Rating:
Summary: A Vivid Portrait of South Africa, A Tender Boyhood Story
Review: Brilliantly, achingly rendered, a wonderful read. Spend some time with the Pifer family in South Africa in the 1930's and '40s. You'll come away with a love of these people and a deep affectionate knowledge of this vast and challenging country.

Rating:
Summary: Charming account of a childhood in Africa
Review: Inside all of us there is a compelling need to read something of our own history, something that is quaint and undiscovered. And it is here that the attraction of Innocents in Africa lies. It is a beautifully written book, about Drury Pifer's childhood growing up in Africa - the unique insight of an American family, unfettered by the conventions of British, German and Afrikaner society, trying to make their way in the world. The reader is easily transported back to Southern Africa of the 1930s and 40s, to Nigel, a dreary mining town near Johannesburg, and to the windswept desert beaches of South West Africa. It is a story of childhood memories, charmingly told, lyric sentences bringing alive a place whose history needs to be delved. But more than that, it also manages to pose the important questions of the day, in a delightfully apolitical but nevertheless pertinent manner. Most of all however, I will treasure this book because of what it records - an account of unchanging small-town life somewhere in Africa, where previously I only had my parents' oral anecdotes of their own childhood to rely on. When Pifer describes 'Time in Oranjemund' as bearing 'no relationship to whatever time has since become. A day then lasted a year, or a lifetime'...even I can relate. It is nostalgic. It is the poignant tale of a family's quest for a living in the mining towns of Southern Africa, based on their blind American optimism that ability will bring promotion. In Africa, the Pifer family would ultimately only find disappointment, and yet the author notes, 'these would be our family's happiest few years, but how could we know that?'

I discovered the book accidentally, read it, and was delighted. I am now recommending it to everyone.