From the East End to East Africa

Steve Foreman, former Soldier, Security Operative, Mountain Leader and Adventurer, arrived in Tanzania in 1992, when that country was on the cusp of great change, emerging from over a decade of self-imposed near isolation. In this lively memoir, he recounts his birth in 1952 to working-class parents and his early years in the smoke, bricks, and poverty of the East End of London. He tells in great detail of his childhood fantasies and teenage dreams of a life of adventure in Africa, the family move from the East End to the suburbs or Sussex and Kent, his love of the outdoors, his continually growing infatuation with nature and wildlife, and his later passion and desire to do something for wildlife conservation in Africa.
Poorly educated and unqualified, as he was, these dreams went unfulfilled, and he started his working life as a trainee motor mechanic in a dingy workshop. But being desperate not to stagnate in a typical, boring, working-class environment, in 1971 he joined the British Army. This being a memoir rather than a full autobiography, it jumps 20 years to recount events leading up to his arrival in 1992 in East Africa and his chance meeting with Dr.
Markus Borner of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who ran, at that time, the Tanzanian Rhino Conservation Project. Steve lived in a tent on Rubondo Island for two months, and the book provides a detailed account of his project activities and the exciting and dangerous incidents that befell him on the island, including an encounter with armed poachers and his relationships with the Rangers. It tells of the poor weapons, uniforms and quality of food that the rangers had to contend with.
The tale continues with his time on the mainland with the Conservation Project Leader, searching for the endangered black rhinos, by trekking on foot, day after day, through the vast wildernesses of Tanzania.. Following his part in the rhino project, Steve spends many subsequent years as a tour leader, leading photographic safaris throughout many of the National Parks and Game reserves of East Africa, leading a walking expedition across The Selous Game Reserve and a camel trek across the wilderness of the Maasai Steppe.
He take clients on gorilla trekking trips in The Virunga's in Zaire and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, and, as Mountain Leader, takes clients to the summits of Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru, climbs Mount Hanang and Mount Elgon and the active volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, which he ascends with his son, and two Maasai warriors. Steve recounts his in-depth and intimate relationship with the Maasai, and tells of how he immersed himself, as much as possible, in their culture and spends time in the bush with the warriors.
He is made an 'honorary warrior' and invited to stay and sleep in the manyatta and to have a Maasai 'girlfriend'. The book is full of incidents, adventures and misadventures (including several amorous ones!). He has three close encounters with lions, gets trapped in a shower block by elephants, survives a life-threatening hyena attack in his tent, and gets up-close with scorpions and snakes. Steve tells of how he became seriously ill and had to be evacuated by road from Arusha all the way to Nairobi, Steve has tea with famous paleoanthropologist Dr.
Mary Leakey at her house in Langatta, meets with her son, Dr. Richard Leakey in Nairobi (when Dr Richard was the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service), and sits for one hour with Dr. Jane Goodall on the veranda at her home in Dar es Salaam, where he interviewed her for African Travel Review magazine, of which, for two years, he was the Editor-in-Chief. He treks the Kibale and Ngogo rainforests, collecting snares, before he ends up running boat trips on the River Nile in Murchison Falls in northern Uganda, before retiring and returning to the UK in 2024, aged 72.