The Call of the Savannah

A spear, a notebook, seven generations—and a truth that has waited 140 years.

When forensic scientist Zara Okello is called to the deathbed of the ancient Father Augustin Mbele, he tells her, over seven days, the story of her family: from Olengoti, who took up the spear in 1888, to an Ashcombe caravan that brought smallpox and death to a Maasai enkang in 1900, to a murder in 1978 that was never avenged. An epic saga of colonialism, guilt, and the echoes of the dead in the living—from East Africa to London, from 1872 to the present day.