A Baker’s Dozen

A Baker’s Dozen, Stories of Africa, follows Frank, a photographer, as he travels that vast continent. As you travel with him, you experience what he does, the Sahara, the Serengeti, the bush, dozens of diverse cultures, and a scatter of unique individuals. The book begins in Uganda where he’s settled and is adapting to a society that includes a melange of tribal cultures and a wealth of corruption. From here you accompany him, backwards through time and through dozens of other cultures to a dozen other locales. In the Lower Omo River Valley of southern Ethiopia, you encounter the Hamer, Mursi, and Karo peoples who are historically nomadic pastoralists and have only recently been exposed to Western culture but are threatened with extinction by it and by a massive dam the Ethiopian government is building. Then you journey by land and via the Niger River in flood with Frank and Soungalo Traore, the son of a witch doctor, first to the fabled city of Timbuktu, then to Agadez, an old Saharan trading town. Here you mingle with the tribal people who dwell in this desert, the Tuareg, Fulani, Wodaabe, Hausa, Toubou, and Bella, and see the Cure Salle where the Tuareg and the Wodaabe arrange their traditional marriages. On the plains of the Serengeti, you lie with Frank in his tent as a lioness and her cub sniff round the outside of it trying to sort out if there’s anything inside it to eat. Later on these plains, you sit with Frank and his companions when their progress across the Serengeti is halted by a herd of 200 elephants crossing the road. As you move over rough, remote terrain with Frank and Nixon, his driver, you make the acquaintance of an American missionary couple who are proselytizing unsuccessfully to convert the Masai to Christianity. Here you also get to know Tonday, a young Masai warrior who became a local hero when he killed a leopard single-handed after it leapt the thorny perimeter of his family’s boma and attacked their cows. Traveling with Frank and Nixon through the Masai refuge, you see the tribe living much as they did before the white man came. The Hadza are some of the last hunter-gatherers remaining on the planet, making them some of the last of the first humans. You meet them and journey with Frank, Daniel, and Senik, their Hadza guide, into the tribe’s ancient, ancestral hunting ground deep in a thorny forest near Lake Eyasi in central Tanzania. There you come face to face with a deadly black mamba and witness Senik’s remarkable hunting prowess. In Egypt, you accompany Frank and Sami Hamzawi into the Western Desert where Frank discovers natural landforms that may have served as models, during the Old Kingdom, for the pyramids, the sphinx, and the mastabas where the nobles were buried. During their explorations, you fear for Sami and Frank, as they try to evade radical Islamists who’ve brutally murdered a group of European tourists.