Preface

As I was growing up in Toronto, my life's ambition was to go to Africa and study the giraffe there.In 1956, when I was twenty-three years old, my dream came true.This book is based on an extensive journal I kept during this adventure, the high point of my life, and on long, excited, twice-weekly letters I wrote home to Canada.It focuses first, of course, on giraffe, which I observed mainly on a twenty-thousand-acre ranch in South Africa near Kruger National Park, but also in Tanganyika, Kenya, and Southern Rhodesia.As a result, in part, of this work, I was able later to publish scientific papers not only on the behaviour of giraffe but also on their subspeciation, distribution, food preferences, gaits, and sexual differences in their skulls (Appendix 1).This memoir also has two lesser areas of focus: the culture of racism and colonialism extant in the countries I visited at that time, and my own naïveté as a young woman educated at a private girls' school in Toronto.The racism of most white people in the Africa of that day astonished me; I was unaware of such discrimination because I grew up in Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s, where there were few blacks or recent non-European immigrants, while aboriginal peoples lived largely out of sight on native reserves or in the North.Virtually everyone I knew was white.It did not occur to me that colonization in Africa was mirrored in the treatment of Indians and Inuit (then thought of as Eskimos) in Canada who, at that time, did not even have the vote.Nor did I realize that most Canadians were white because the country had a restrictive immigration policy.Canadians (unjustifiably) felt superior to Americans who, in the 1950s, were in the throes of trying to solve the problems of deeply entrenched racial discrimination.xi

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.