ALL YOU'LL SEE IS SKY

In this memoir, an automobile accident during a South African Canadian woman’s trip back to Africa results in tragedy.

In 2005, 25 years after leaving South Africa for a materially successful life in Canada as a nurse, Wilson came to feel that her life was emotionally empty. She and her South African husband returned to their native continent for an eight-month journey, driving from its southernmost point, Cape Agulhas, South Africa, to Egypt, through the varying landscapes of a total of 12 African countries. She had two goals: to experience the land she loved but had left due to the apartheid regime in South Africa, and to reconnect with herself and her spouse. The rugged trek encompassed natural wonders and roads that were challenging for Land Cruisers. Remote camping enabled close encounters with elephants, lions, gorillas, and other animals. Her compelling descriptions engage the senses, as in an account of seeing an elephant: “I listened to the crush of leaves, sticks, and rotting fruit on the ground as she walked around the tree….I breathed in the sweet, candy-like aroma of elephant-crushed marula fruit.” She also shows how Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum and memorials to enslaved people in Tanzania and the recent Rwandan genocide are reminders of past inhumanities on the continent. In a small village in Ethiopia, the journey took a horrifying turn when Wilson, driving slowly, accidentally struck a 9-year-old boy, who died of his injuries. Grief- and guilt-stricken, she was allowed to make amends to the family, and after she left them, she writes, she “wondered if I would ever be able to see anything again except that little boy’s terrified face sinking under the front of our Cruiser….nor was I sure I even had the moral right to see and enjoy the Africa I had wanted so much to find again.” Wilson writes honestly in the final chapters of her remorse over the child’s death, and how it changed her perspective on her own life and relationships with others; in doing so, she honors the lives that her choices changed.

A remembrance that doesn’t turn away from difficult facts.