First Catch Your Eland

Van der Post wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction about Africa ["A Story Like the Wind", "A Far-Off Place", and "The Lost World of the Kalahari"]. This book is unique. It is not a cookbook, there are no recipes; rather it is a memoir of meals, food, and hospitality encountered over decades of living and traveling in Africa. Anyone with an interest in African cuisine would do well to obtain this book. Van der Post is very much the intellectual; he shares his thoughts as well as a description of interesting, unusual, and just plain good African food. He is an African of European ancestry. His views of Africans are never racist nor prejudiced, and it is clear he has a genuine respect and admiration for traditional African people and their mode of living, but at times his writing may strike some contemporary readers as a bit dated. Nevertheless, he is always an interesting and informed writer who has written much that is worth reading. Some (not all) of this book is similar to the text of his "Recipes: African Cooking--Foods of the World" (published by Time-Life, 1970), which is a complete cookbook with recipes as well as much introductory text (It is a two-volume publication: large coffee-table book of text and pictures, plus a small spiral bound book of recipes).