This "retrospective introduction" to the African journals was written in 2014, exactly thirty years after the first visit to West Africa in 1984.  Since that year, which remains to this day the best period ever of my life, I have often thought about Africa.  The effects of that time on my life have been enormous and wide-ranging.  The debt I owe to the six months between June and December 1984 cannot be calculated.  

     I have felt it necessary to make some comments about the .pdf files uploaded into this website.  The scanning quality is not so good, and the appearance is somewhat scruffy.  Over the past thirty years, I have changed a lot, and some readers might wonder if the writers of 1984 and 2014 are the same person.  They are.  I felt it important to include the original journals, with their youthful inconsistency, naive dreams and bright-eyed observations, for they are a snapshot of a place that has changed and a time that has gone away.  Please remember that the journals are the observations of someone away from home for the first real time.  I still believe in what I saw and felt and did then, even though my present life would lead some to ask whether I had broken faith with my youthful vision.  Please remember Aristotle's comments in the "Poetics" -- let the text speak for itself.  

     So much has changed.  However, the experience and memories of chasing honey in the bush with the beekeeper and millet farmer Wombo, and eating millet and baobab leaf sauce from the kitchen of his wife Polenli will never fade away.  Polenli, after my grandmother, you are the world's ultimate cook.  Wombo, your stature in my life is the stature of continents.  I will never forget Burkina Faso, and also Niger.  

     --Stephen Van Wyck.  

        July, 2014.