A latter-day Out of Africa recalls its author's fifty years in the continent's most beautiful and most tormented nation
When Rosamond Halsey Carr first arrived in Africa, she didn't realize she would spend the rest of her life there. As a young fashion illustrator living in New York City in the 1940s, she seemed the least likely candidate for such a life of adventure. But marriage to a hunter-explorer took her to what was then the Belgian Congo, and divorce left her determined to stay on, in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation. In the ensuing half century she witnessed the decline and fall of colonialism, the wars for independence, the loss of her friend Dian Fossey and the relentless clashes of the Hutus and Tutsis. And, finally, 1994's horrific genocide--of which she provides a personal, first-hand account that is unparalleled and underscores her continued devotion to the country by her decision to care for more than one hundred of its orphaned children.
Land of a Thousand Hills unfolds against the backdrop of Rwanda's history from the royal Tutsi dynasty to the present, a landscape whose magic is aptly evoked. It is the epic story of a woman alone in an exotic land, struggling to survive untold hardships only to emerge with an extraordinary love for her adopted country and its people.
When Rosamond Halsey Carr first arrived in Africa, she didn't realize she would spend the rest of her life there. As a young fashion illustrator living in New York City in the 1940s, she seemed the least likely candidate for such a life of adventure. But marriage to a hunter-explorer took her to what was then the Belgian Congo, and divorce left her determined to stay on, in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation. In the ensuing half century she witnessed the decline and fall of colonialism, the wars for independence, the loss of her friend Dian Fossey and the relentless clashes of the Hutus and Tutsis. And, finally, 1994's horrific genocide--of which she provides a personal, first-hand account that is unparalleled and underscores her continued devotion to the country by her decision to care for more than one hundred of its orphaned children.
Land of a Thousand Hills unfolds against the backdrop of Rwanda's history from the royal Tutsi dynasty to the present, a landscape whose magic is aptly evoked. It is the epic story of a woman alone in an exotic land, struggling to survive untold hardships only to emerge with an extraordinary love for her adopted country and its people.
