How to Describe an African Landscape

How do you communicate to Western world readers the uncivilized, nature-controlled land that is Africa. If your story includes an African setting, you must get that untamed, mysterious feel across or you lose credibility.

Here are a few books you can read that will drench you in the scents and colors of Africa:

• In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall (or any writing by Jane Goodall)
• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (about the discovery of Lucy, but filled with the smells of the habitat)
  

  Photo credit: Kibuyu

• Letters from the Field 1925-1975 by Margaret Mead (many on Africa, and some on other world locations in which she researched)
• The Forest People by Colin Turnbull (about the BaMbuti Pygmies and their environ)
• The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen (about the African Cradle of Mankind)
• The Land’s Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick (translates the visual pictures of Africa to the other senses)
• The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior by Tepilit Ole Saitoti (the African habitat of the Maasai)
• Bunyoro: An African Kingdom by John Beattie (case study based in Uganda)

Here’s a list of descriptions, in part drawn from these books:

• Flat, dry, and monotonous, a seemingly limitless scrub waste without landmarks or water or other relief
• because of the time and the approaching rain
• followed small antelope trails instead of the larger buffalo trails
• Oxbow lake
• Narrow rocky defile
• Beneath the jutting stone ledge, she sat hunched into a ball, knees tight against her chest, her damp clothes about her.
• Olduvai appeared like a dark rift
• Along its length, cottonwoods had sprung up; young trees little more than twice a man’s height.
• Thick grass had carpeted the narrow strip
• distant harsh mountains composed of granite, covered with thorny shrubs and acacia trees
• mountains, thrusting spires of naked rock into the heavens so high that you would believe the very sky was pierced
• thickly scented spruce branches clutched at his clothes, slapped against his chest and shredded his hand
• thick forest that carpeted the uplands
• dust was everywhere—on leaves, branches, even on my teeth and lips
• Easing over humps and trenches, potholes and stone rivers, bashing through the trees where a track is blocked, the bucking climbs up steep eroded banks
• the cloud mist lifted, gradually came the dull patches of red glowing far beyond the cliffs. Two active volcanoes
• mouth of a thick sulfurous stream
• watch the river to see the coiling of its muscular currents, catch the shimmering of waves that caught the sunlight like scales
• swallowed up by the jungle
• dry creek bed
• bounded on three sides by basalt outcrops and partially screened by brush
• followed the ridge down toward a patch of grass
• back to a rotting log that some long-forgotten flood had deposited crossways on the spit
• Cracks like hardweed through a broken sidewalk
• Gordian knot of …
• he saw  its fields, steppes, villages and towns, all bleached white by the moon and bright stars.
• the gallery forests of river red gum, various grasses, that lined the channels. Maybe a low-lying area where runoff from high ground collected after rain. Sometimes dense stands of mulga (acacia) woodland would grow there, where water was easiest to find in a desert.

About these ads