In the summer of 1974, three years into my newspaper career, I got married. Mike had just landed a job he’d been longing for — in Africa. He would be teaching for two years at The American School of Kinshasa (TASOK), in what was then called Zaire (later to return to its previous name, Democratic Republic of the Congo). I’d leave my work covering Colorado’s state legislature. I hoped to do some freelancing (communication challenges would render that virtually impossible), but my job would be to run the school library. Behind this radical change was a dream we shared: During all our school breaks, and for several months afterward, we hoped to explore this vast and wondrous continent, so little-known to so many.
Two-and-a-half years and 25 countries later, Mike and I boarded an overnight ferry in Tunis bound for Sicily, leaving Africa for the first time since we’d touched down. We had indeed fulfilled our dream. We had hiked to the snowy top of Kilimanjaro, the fiery lip of the Nyiragongo volcano and the glacial massif of the Ruwenzori Mountains. We’d trekked into the rain forest to find mountain gorillas and paddled through the Okavango swamp, camping on tiny islands so our guide might hear the sound of any lion who might decide to join us. We hitchhiked through South Africa, rode riverboats up the Congo, and sat on top of a beer truck to view the elusive Okapi in the Ituri forest. We walked the 10-mile white-sand beach of Lamu, seeing not a single soul. These experiences and many more were breathtaking, but our Africa days affected us more deeply, too, enriching our understanding of art and culture and history, geography and natural beauty, economic and political systems — of the human experience, our variety and our commonalities.
I wrote about this remarkable period in our lives while we were living it, in journals and letters home. From D.C. to Des Moines to Cambridge to L.A. to New York, these papers were carted — ignored and largely forgotten. Then, last year, my husband David and I traveled in Morocco. Our travels stirred memories. Back home, I sought out the journal entries from the days Mike and I spent in Morocco on our drive up out of Africa. My curiosity was piqued. At the beginning of 2025, I dug around in several collapsing memorabilia boxes, assembled the various Africa writings and, for the first time in half a century, began to read them.
What follows are excerpts, along with some of the photos we took.
Chapter 1: Arrival
September 1974. “In Amsterdam’s gorgeous Schiphol Airport, we boarded a mammoth jet that insulted our sense of geography by showing us the Alps as we skirted Paris, serving us lunch over the Mediterranean and tea over the southern Sahara, and depositing us before nightfall in Lagos, Nigeria.”
A couple of days and a short flight later, we arrived in Kinshasa.
“We are on a lovely palm-thick campus, in a comfortable two-bedroom duplex, separated from the classroom buildings by an honest-to-goodness jungle, though a jungle devoid of monkeys. We have a toad living in a planter in front of our house and a wonderfully multi-colored lizard living in the vicinity of a certain corner. At times, I feel distressed to be penned in to A Compound. But we are beginning to make our way out into this huge, bustling, funny, beautiful/ugly city in this fascinating land, and this whets our appetites for adventure and travel greatly.
“Yet where we can go and when — these are the unknowns. Much of how you determine how to live here depends on what the people you first meet tell you can be done. And we’ve begun to realize that THAT, in turn, depends entirely on what THEIR predecessor-informants said. It’s just received wisdom that you can’t hop on one of those ferries crossing the huge river to Brazzaville, whose city lights so beckon. No one says exactly why. Normal standards of accountability, dependable procedures — these simply don’t apply, making life here feel sometimes frightening, sometimes amusing, always mysterious and apparently predictable only in its unpredictability.
“What is available here, in terms of necessities, is a point of interest. The things that are not local are likely to be in great supply at SOME store in this vast city, though no one can tell you where. Or, again, they may be completely out of stock everywhere, until, literally, the boat comes in. There are huge stores scattered about the city, but aisle after aisle may be filled with bar soap, while nary a bottle of shampoo can be found. Next week, aisles of shampoo, no soap.
“Things are VERY segregated here, only not (any longer) according to color as much as according to wealth. There are some VERY wealthy people, white and black, and masses of very, very poor. And their lives are poles apart. There is no one in the middle. At one end of the spectrum are the people with multiple huge Mercedes (more than I’ve ever seen) and at the other those who must crowd like cattle into dilapidated buses, barely able to breathe.”
It turned out that the lizard in the corner was a gecko, one of many with whom we lived. I wrote a poem about them:
“I like Africa because
Of the lizards
Who run high up on
Their toes
Pulling their tails
Behind them
Carefully
Like long skirts.”
We were settling in okay, but we were a bit disappointed by the challenges of traveling, and we began to plan ways to overcome them. But first, something would come to town that would enthrall the world, and it would surely enthrall us. The Rumble in the Jungle was about to happen in Kinshasa.