I’VE almost talked myself into upping sticks and filling in immigration papers for Tanzania. This follows a fortnight of reminiscence about growing up in East Africa and the discovery that a surprising number of people also grew up on that part of the continent, and whenever I have spoken to them I get the “Oh, yes, it was wonderful” sigh.

My memories of East Africa are necessarily fragmented. We had a long-wheel-base Land Rover with which my family and I went on safari, and recollections of these trips are inextricably linked with the Super-8 films that my dad made of our journeys. So there is jerky footage of us all loading up the vehicle and setting off down the road, the red earth gleaming after the rain and baobabs on the horizon. We arrive at Lake Naivasha where my brother, with great gravity, takes his trusty fishing rod, sets off with fanfare on a rowing boat through the water lilies and then promptly overturns, losing his takkies in the water (where they are most likely still at the bottom of the lake). Super 8 doesn’t have a soundtrack, otherwise we would hear the howls of laughter from the bank.

Another shaky episode has my Swiss aunt arriving on a DC10 from Nairobi for a visit. We go to a coffee farm, stay at a red-roofed lodge with Kilimanjaro floating in the sky behind us, traipse through the shadows to the underwater viewing tank at Mzima springs, where we see hippos taking a stately walk along the bottom of the lake. There is faded footage of those old fin-backed American cars driving along the main road of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, us sitting on rickety little chairs drinking coconut milk straight out of the nut in Zanzibar, a collective leaping out the way of a lion at Tsavo Park. The lion looks bored.

The greatest excitement is a mock charge of an elephant in the Serengeti. Dad is hanging out the window, filming. The elephant looks a lot smaller in the viewfinder than it does in real life. So Dad is happily whirring away while we minnows are leaping around in the back, yelling: “Dad! It’s getting closer! Let’s go, Dad!” Eventually Dad takes his eye away from the viewfinder, discovers that the whole horizon is entirely full of elephant and we make a wheel-spinning retreat while the elephant swings its trunk after us and trumpets in triumph.

In its speeded-up way there is great romance and atmosphere in these old films, hooked up as they are with fond memories of a wonderful country and the rose-tinted glasses of youth. At the bustling inland harbour at Mwanza we see the Land Rover being lifted up by a crane and swung aboard the ferry to cross over Lake Victoria from Mwanza to Kisumu. There is a short sequence of voyaging across the water with huge golden rocks like elephants’ rear ends marching along the shore. In another reel we are flying in a small plane over the Rift Valley and can clearly see the shifting shadows between the giant cliffs.

My dad, who fancied himself as a filmmaker, put some of his productions into a proper film format where he edited them together with a very elaborate opening sequence and an animated map (using a vacuum cleaner and reverse filming and all these technical trade secrets that we experts are familiar with). These movies follow a primitive timeline interspersed with our route and destinations outlined on a map.
Our final safari features very largely the route taken – believe it or not – by the ancient Greeks in search of the source of the Nile. A Greek merchant called Diogenes was supposedly the first to follow the Nile for long enough to find that it flowed from a range of massive mountains into a series of large lakes. He reported that the locals called this range the Mountains of the Moon because of their white peaks. Ptolemy and other ancient geographers reported this account and the Mountains of the Moon appeared on all their maps.

But later explorers were unable to find these fabled mountains. Only in 1889 did European explorer Henry Stanley find something matching this description – the Ruwenzori. Explorers had been missing them for years because they are usually shrouded in mist. But the Nile does not come from the Ruwenzori, it flows mainly from a tiny channel out of Lake Victoria at Jinja in Uganda and further along erupts through the Murchison Falls – one of the most spectacular sights in Africa.

So our final documentary has us travelling in fits and starts from the mighty Nile in its formative stages to the so-called Mountains of the Moon. There is my mother, standing on the road with a group of pygmies under a high forest canopy and this is the part where we all chorus, on cue: “Which one is Mother?” as she is not much taller than these tiny people. Then there is another shot of a solid wall of green forest vegetation rising up next to the road, and a small group of people (us) coming out of the wall as if through a door, holding bunches of lilies that are so large that we are carrying them over our shoulders like sheaves.

So there they are – the glories of a country held like butterflies in amber on these dusty reels of film. I would like to go back and revisit all these places – they are all still there and I am sure they are just as magical as I remember them.