From the East End to East Africa – Guest blog by Steven Foreman

From the East End to East Africa by Steven Foreman is a remarkable memoir that traces the extraordinary journey of a man who defied the odds to pursue his dream of working in African wildlife conservation. Born into the hardship of London’s East End, Foreman’s story is one of resilience, adventure, and an unrelenting passion for nature.

We invited Steven to tell us more about his book in a guest blog.

Part One of the book recounts my birth in 1952 to working-class parents and my early years in the smoke, bricks, and poverty of the East End of London. I go on to tell of my childhood fantasies and teenage dreams of a life of adventure in Africa—my love of the outdoors, and my continually growing infatuation with nature and wildlife.

Poorly educated as I am, these dreams go unfulfilled, and I start my working life as a trainee motor mechanic in a dingy workshop. But I am desperate not to stagnate in a typical, boring, working-class environment, so in 1971 I join the British Army.

Being a memoir and not a full autobiography, Part Two jumps twenty years from Part One to recount the events that lead up to my arrival in 1992 in East Africa, and my chance meeting with Dr. Marcus Borner of the Frankfurt Zoological Society’s Rhino Conservation Project. He gives me my first job—conducting an anti-poaching and security survey of Rubondo Island in Lake Victoria—where I live in a tent on the shore for two months.

I detail my project activities and the exciting and dangerous incidents that befall me on the island: encounters with armed poachers, hippos, and safari ants, and my growing relationships with the Rangers. The tale continues with my time on the mainland, where we search for the endangered black rhinos by trekking on foot, day after day, through the vast wildernesses of northern Tanzania. This story has a very happy ending, both then and continuing to the present day, with the black rhino coming back from the very edge of extinction.

I spend many subsequent years as a tour leader, guiding safaris throughout the national parks and game reserves of East Africa. I lead a walking expedition across the Selous Game Reserve and a camel trek across the wilderness of the Maasai Steppe.

I lead gorilla trekking trips in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and in the rainforests of the Virunga Volcanoes National Park in the Congo. As a Mountain Leader in Tanzania, I take clients to the summits of Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru, climb Mount Hanang and the active volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai. In Uganda, I climb the awesome Mount Elgon.

I become a Licensed Professional Guide and work in Botswana, visiting the national parks and the Okavango Delta. It is in Botswana that I have two close encounters with lions, get trapped in a shower block by elephants, and survive a life-threatening hyena attack while in my igloo dome tent

With tongue-in-cheek humour, I recount scores of incidents and ridiculous situations—vehicle breakdowns, horrendous weather, hilarious mishaps with tourists, and other occurrences that befall a safari guide working with clients in the bush.

I develop an intimate relationship with the Maasai in Tanzania and tell how I immerse myself in their culture. I am made an ‘honorary warrior’ and invited to stay in the manyatta—and even have a Maasai ‘girlfriend’.

The book is full of incidents, adventures, and misadventures (including several amorous ones). I get up close and personal with scorpions and snakes. I tell of how I become seriously ill and have to be evacuated by road from Arusha to Nairobi.

In 2004, I marry and have a child, and I enter the world of security management and contracting. I end up working in Dar es Salaam for Security Group; in Juba, South Sudan for Warrior Security and Saladin Security (VSS); and in Turkana, northern Kenya for Salama Fikira/Newport Africa.

In 2019, I trek the huge and ancient Kibale and Ngogo rainforests of western Uganda, surveying them for camp locations and collecting illegal wire snares.

In 2020, I am the team leader for distributing emergency relief rations to the porters in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda. The porters assist clients on gorilla trekking trips, and their sole source of income is from tourism. With COVID halting that resource, the porters and their families suffer.

Finally, from 2023 to 2024, I run boat trips on the River Nile in Murchison Falls National Park in northern Uganda, before retiring and returning to London in 2024, aged seventy-two.