Introduction

When I was a child growing up in East Africa, I thought the picture on the box of porridge oats was the Scottish Highlands. My father would always make porridge when we were camping in the bush and I would ask about the man in the kilt and the green hills. The picture was both familiar and distant – the landscape around me wasn’t all red dust and thorn trees; there were hills that were green, tribal cloths that looked like tartan and my father wore the kilt of our Highland clan. And there was talk of the Scottish Highlands amongst some of the coffee and cattle farmers, the wildlife conservationists and doctors. It sounded like a mystical place of misty glens, salmon-filled rivers and tumblers of whisky. I wanted to go there one day.