I Dreamed of Africa is Kuki Gallmann’s heartfelt, honest memoir of her life on the Ol Ari Nyiro ranch in the Laikipia plateau in Kenya, detailing her adventurous self-discovery and consuming love for Paulo, her son Emmanuel, and her close-knit group of friends and family with lyrical prose that is essentially transcendental, vividly bringing the transformation of Africa and the Gallmann’s later project to restore Kenya to pre-poacher and traditional approaches to life.
This remarkable memoir tells the story of an Italian woman who leaves behind her life in Europe to start somewhere else: Kenya. There, in Africa, she finds true joy in her life but also true misery.
The book outlines hardships that followed her dream including the death of her husband, Paolo, death of her son, Emmanuelle and being a single mother in a foreign country. She keeps fighting though, and she keeps loving her land in Africa which she calls home. This book is a testimony to the human spirit and how one can overcome extreme adversity and channel that into productive life altering experiences.
The memoir was well written and easy to follow. I liked the way that the author organized the material and had a quote at the beginning of each chapter. Her writing style was almost poetic, descriptive and I felt taken away to Africa, was able to visualize the Kuki’s experience. I found the description of the relationships with her neighbors, the wildlife and the environment to be clear.
This is a memoir about an Italian woman that brought her family to Kenya and made a life for herself and her family. Kuki Galllmann, the author, described how throughout her childhood, she dreamed of living in Africa and that she eventually made that a reality.
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One day when Mrs. Gallman was 12 years old her teacher in Italy told her class to write an essay about where they would be and what they would be doing in 20 years. She wrote about how she would be living in Africa and seeing the giraffes and the lions and the buffalo where ever she went, and when she got the essay back, there was a big check on it but no grade. When she asked her teacher why she didn’t get a grade, her teacher replied, “It is well written as usual, but totally absurd…Why did you have to write about Africa?”
She replied, “But I do want to live in Africa, I do not want to stay here all my life. One day I shall go to Africa. I shall send you a postcard from there, signora, in 20 years time.” Twenty years later, she did.
Memoir reading is something very personal - it requires your own personal identification with the experiences of the author. As you can tell by my 5 star rating, this book touched me deeply. It made me think long, and hard, about my death, the death of the ones I love ... and about what I'm doing with my life in the here-and-now. Soul-searching. Self-examination. Whisking the cobwebs away, and looking, really looking at my life.
The book is about an Italian woman who moves to Kenya with her husband, and young son. Many, many things transpire over the years that are covered in the book, some are heart-rending, some are euphoric, and everything in between.
If you're looking for a travel book about the glories of Africa, this isn't quite that. If you're looking for a memoir of a life lived in Africa, then this might suit you.
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It made me feel as though I could accomplish anything by merely wanting it enough. Visiting Kuki at her resort was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Her book is truly what she represents. I still dream of Africa and its intoxicating scents, the magical wild animals that inhabit her world, the starry nights so close you feel you can reach up and touch them. My hope is to return to Lakipia and recapture the beauty of Africa.
This book moved me deeply and I still often find myself thinking about it. I am amazed how Kuki Gallman contiued to move forward in her life, after losing her husband and son. She truly is an inspirational women of great courage and compelling wisdom. This book is the type of rare work that draws its readers into a whole other world by making them see and feel everything that the storyteller does.
Each one of us dreams of some place or ideal as we grow, but few of us are fortunate or determined enough to turn those dreams into realities and go on to live them. Kuki Gallman along with her husband and children shows us what it is like to achieve and live our dreams and at what cost our dreams sometimes come. "I Dreamed of Africa" is a lyrical, magical account of one woman, her family, and the people and customs of the last continent in our world that truly has a soul.
Kuki Gallmann write so well, the reader can almost smell and taste the dust of the African savannas. Her books are a personal account of their happiness and sorrows in a tough environment and also confirm why Africa is born in everyone who lived there. Loved the book and the sequel 'African Nights' I couldn't put the book down.
I Dreamed Of Africa is about how she raised her family in Africa, and all the happy and sad experiences she had. She owns a game reserve and is trying to save its wildlife by educating the local villagers in the area about the effects of poaching and why they should stop. She is also trying to conserve Kenya’s amazing wildlife and vegetation.
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I Dreamed Of Africa is an excellent example of a mix of an autobiography and a biography, because the book is written in such a way that she is telling her own story, and the stories of people who she loved and some of who died. This book also refers to some families who were good friends of the Gallman’s, such as the Leakey’s, who are leading archeologists, and the Blocks, who started the first international hotels in Kenya. She also made friends with some members of the Turkana and Tharaka tribes.
I Dreamed Of Africa is special to me because I met the author and she told my class and me from Lycee Denis Diderot (the French school in Nairobi) some of these stories. She told us these stories at a lodge on her ranch. We all sat around a campfire and I looked at her across the flames while she told some of these stories and pictured them in my mind.
Kuki Gallmann is a determined woman, despite accidents and losses she firmly maintains her desire to survive and stay in Kenya, in the Rift Valley, where she has felt at home since her first arrival.
"The unchanged magic of the African landscape remained. The mornings began with birds, a gray sky that colored itself with a pale lilac like the inside of an oyster. As the silver turned to gold and the dew evaporated in the heat of the new day, the celestial light of another dawn found me awake and ready to go."
Recovering from a car crash that killed many of her friends, still in the shadows of divorce at a young age, Kuki finds reassurance in the arms of Paulo, a man who lost his wife in the car crash. Together, they go through the long months of recovery as Italy blossoms around them once more and grief gives way to love and adventure.
Embarking on a life-long dream together, newly healed Kuki and her soon to be husband go to Africa together, discovering Kenya.
As someone who has had a similar obsession with Africa since before my earliest memories (specifically Congo and Sudan), this brave and honest memoir has always comforted me that, perhaps, someday I can belong there as well. Race, something that many readers are going to go into this memoir with foremost in their mind is dismissed, put aside. It’s humanity that matters.
I did volunteer work at Kuki's Ol Ari Nyrio and it was the most amazing experience of my life. I also had dinner with Kuki and she is an artist- attentive, creative, intelligent, and misses nothing.
Africa is a place like no other-you cannot expect the norm - truth is always more interesting & stranger than fiction, remember. Kuki is an amazing person and the work she has done for the people & animals in the area, without spoiling the natural habitat or trying to change the people's ways, is well told. The death of her son and husband, so tragic, has led her to different levels in life, where so much work has been done for the good of generations to come.
Mrs Gallman articulated the surroundings so well that it made you feel as though you were sitting next to her.
A moving memoir, one of the few stories I have ever read multiple times, it still calls to me, the elegance of the written word, the divulgence of the adventurous life of someone who wasn’t afraid to pursue her dreams, to live freely, to love, to stand up for what she believes in. A remarkable memoir.
Here, Gallman the writer finds her wings. She whirls us across open savannah dotted with acacia trees, untouched cedar forests and pale hills lapped by lagoons and sleeping islands, blue with waterlilies.
It is the mid-’70s, still a time of safaris, big-game hunting and legendary white hunters--a time when game was so prolific that it was unimaginable to think it would ever end. Both this memoir, and “Starlings Laughing,” which is set in Botswana, show the devastation of that dream.
The Gallmans have a vast ranch at Laikipia, in a region that stretches from Mount Kenya to the Great Rift Valley. Here, cattle and sheep graze freely with the wildlife and are rounded up at nightfall to protect them from leopard and lion. Here, one meets buffalo and elephant on an evening stroll, and can nip off in a small plane to take lunch at one of the Arabic villages along the coast.
On the coast (where once Arabs collected slaves and spices), the air is hot and humid, overripe with the scent of jasmine, frangipani and mango. In palm-lined villages, people of Italian and French extraction dine on Neopolitan food served by red-fezzed servants in villas reminiscent of home.
The Europeans living here-- having retired from large estates in the highlands--have an overripe quality too, as they down pink gins at the club and remember the good old days: the fading intoxication of a life of too much ease and beauty that went quickly to rot.
All this comes vividly to life in “I Dreamed of Africa.” Not so the people closest to the author, who are sketchy and insubstantial. Gallman views the men in her life in romantic and mythical terms: as warriors, hunters, princes.
They are frequently light of foot, bronzed of cheek and golden of hair. The book as a whole suffers from overblown descriptions. As her story progresses, it is further marred by an impending sense of doom, often exacerbated by unfortunate cliff-hangers at the end of chapters.
Then the tragedies begin. It seems that all her life the author surrounded herself with sad or spiritual men who, one way or the other, were intent on fleeing this world. Gallman’s husband, before his fatal car accident, had made plans for his reincarnation and given instruction for his funeral.
After Paolo’s death, Gallman’s son begins to sidle closer and closer to self-destruction, by means of a dangerous passion for snakes. It is only after the death of her son that the author--earthbound, practical, intent on not knowing--suddenly turns and the book swells with her transformation.
At last, facing the anguish of Emanuele’s death without the cloaking habits of self-control and denial, she connects with something profound within herself. As a result, the final sections of the book are enriched by the wisdom of acceptance and reconciliation.
Gallman creates a memorial for her dead by starting a foundation to preserve the endangered wildlife, land and people of her adopted country. She has learned that to live deeply, one must find the ability to connect fully with the earth and the people on it; in doing so, Gallman transcends her personal sorrow.
Here's a table summarizing the key people in Kuki Gallmann's life as described in "I Dreamed of Africa":
| Person | Role in Kuki's Life | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Kuki Gallmann | Author, Protagonist | Italian woman who moves to Kenya and transforms her life through love, loss, and conservation. |
| Paulo Gallmann | Husband | Kuki's second husband, with whom she shares a deep love and adventurous life in Africa; his death profoundly impacts Kuki. |
| Emmanuel | Son | Kuki's son from her first marriage; his passion for snakes leads to his tragic death, further shaping Kuki's path. |
Strength of a Woman: Kuki Gallmann
She has learned that to live deeply, one must find the ability to connect fully with the earth and the people on it; in doing so, Gallman transcends her personal sorrow.
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