What was it like for a young English family to live and work in British East Africa in the fifties? Here the exotic scene is vividly recaptured. Domestic details, social and racial relations, political events, shopping, scandal, all serve to bring to life the confusion and uncertainty of those last few years of colonial rule. The historic movement towards independence was rapidly gathering momentum but the University College at Makere still seemed to many a center of hope for the whole of East Africa. This hope was excessive, as the world now knows, most dramatically, from the appalling example of Idi Amin. The author has had dealings with all manner of people in Makere--Governors, Africans, settlers, Asians, colonial officers, missionaries, and he recalls these people as they were, not as the political and racial stereotypes common both then and now. He paints a vivid and contrasting picture of East Africa in the fifties, visiting incense-scented Asian dukas, talking with Chagga coffee-growers on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, chatting with his Cambridge-educated Kabaka whose palace towers the villages of Kampala, and having tea in the garden with students.