Beauty, Adventure, and a Connection to Kansas: Four Years in Paradise

Four Years in Paradise

by Osa Johnson

Osa Johnson is one of my personal heroes. Kansas Dad finds this enormously amusing since (as he says) the only thing we have in common is that we are both white women who lived in Kansas. She married Martin Johnson and travelled the wild Pacific Southwest islands and Africa in the 1930s. She and her husband were photography and videography pioneers. Among other accomplishments, they created the first silent films of the wildlife on the plains of the African Serengeti. Spoiled by modern documentaries, it's impossible for us to imagine how people felt watching herds of elephants, giraffes, and antelopes leaping across a screen. There is a small but fantastic museum dedicated to Martin and Osa Johnson in her hometown of Chanute, Kansas.

This coming school year, First Son will be exploring Africa in his tenth grade geography course. The high school beta plans from Mater Amabilis™ recommend The Flame Trees of Thika for the Travel/Adventure book of Africa, which I read earlier this year. It was lovely and there wasn't really a reason to choose anything else...except...I kept feeling like it wasn't exactly what I wanted. After a while, I realized what I wanted was a book about the Johnsons. I glanced through the options from our library and then read Four Years in Paradise. In it, Osa describes, in a wandering kind of manner, their experiences living in Kenya, near what they called Lake Paradise, filming and photographing the life of Africa.

We were attempting what all but a few regarded as fantastic and impossible, to make an authentic film record of vanishing wild life as it existed in its last and greatest stronghold. And if in some over-civilized future, cities should crowd out the elephants and wars should bomb the giraffes from the plains and the baboons from the treetops, our films would stand--a record for posterity.

Like every European or American in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, Osa and Martin Johnson brought their own prejudices. Throughout the book, they refer to the African men who worked for them as "boys." Mrs. Johnson often writes disparagingly of their work ethic, though it's clear she respected some of them tremendously. She also sometimes writes about the Africans' natural "savage" state and compares them to children. These kinds of attitudes are pervasive and simply have to be addressed.

Over the years, Mrs. Johnson built a home in the forest complete with garden and multi-course meals every evening. But she also fished and hunted for their meals and protected her husband by covering fire when necessary as he filmed the more dangerous wildlife like lions, elephants, and rhinos.

Below us stood a big bull elephant, knee deep in a pool. He was the very picture of drowsy contentment. Save for the slow swinging of his trunk and the languid fanning of his huge ears, he was almost motionless. His bath was built of great rocks, covered over with beautiful lichen and mosses, green and gray and rusty-red. Floating on the water were large blue and white water lilies. The pool was shaded by magnificent trees festooned with silvery moss. Thousands of butterflies--blue, yellow and white--fluttered around the animal.

First Son will probably not be very interested in the handful of recipes included in the book, but there are plenty of exciting and fascinating stories, revealing the richness of the Johnsons' lives in Africa.

"Life is just too short," Martin went on. "It's a pity we can't live five hundred years with so much beauty to enjoy and so much work to accomplish."

I first borrowed this book from the library. I tried to find a copy to purchase like theirs, in hardcover with photographs, but ended up with one on slightly thinner paper. I hope it lasts through all the kids reading it. As a bonus, it is autographed by Osa Johnson. I linked to a recent paperback version above, but I am not sure it includes the photographs which are a wonderful addition to the text.

I have received nothing in exchange for this post. All opinions are my own. I borrowed this book from the library and then purchased a used copy online. Links above to Amazon are affiliate links.