There is a passage in Denys Reitz's classic book Commando, on the Boer War, that never fails to make me home-sick for the Africa I never knew. There he describes how in the South Africa of the late 1880s he and his brothers led a Tom-Sawyer-like existence 'riding over the game-covered plains by day and sleeping under the stars at night, hunting African mammals, fishing and camping to our hearts content'. That, for me, sums up why many of us keep going back to Africa - to recapture that sense of vanished african safari freedom.