Synopsis

'Innocent in Africa' is a tribute to the people of Lesotho. It came about through the writer's unexpected journey, at a time when she regarded England as the only home she would ever know. The prospect of cosy retirement in a suburban town near the North Downs in Kent, was beginning to appear an attractive choice, when suddenly she and her partner were catapulted into the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa - a land of electric storms and brilliant rainbows.

Instead of working with special needs children in outer suburbia, she came to know families with even greater needs, who lived in the foothills of the Maluti Mountains. Looking at life from both sides of the border, she observes contrasting attitudes of this Third World Kingdom with South Africa, two years after the end of apartheid.

She was totally unprepared and had no knowledge of Lesotho, not even where it was on the map of Africa. Her only preparation was a valid passport, four aggressive doses of vaccine and clothes suitable for meeting mosquitoes and elephants. Her partner, a civil engineer, had been contracted to work on a construction site in the Maluti Mountains - the last thing he expected was the arrival of his lady.

After leaving London in a stifling English summer, she arrived in a South African winter during their worst snowfall for twenty seven years. Nothing in her life could have prepared her for this extraordinary adventure.

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