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The Last King of Africa

The corrugated gravel road known officially as Tanzania Route B144 provides a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, bladder-testing connection between two of the great wonders of Africa. At its eastern end stands the massive green slopes of Ngorongoro Crater, a giant caldera, more than ten miles wide, formed by the collapse of one of the many extinct volcanos of the Great Rift Valley and home to more than 25,000 large mammals. To the west lays the vast plains of the Serengeti, our destination on a cloudless postcard- perfect day in 1968. My family and I were on the way to address the student body of the International Baptist Seminary in Arusha, Tanzania, as part of a plan between me and Dr. Lorne Brown, a medical missionary in Kisumu, Kenya. Lorne had made arrangements for me to talk to the students about; “TRANSFORMATION ADVENTURES” After my talk, we stayed for another week. It was during chats with faculty that I began to put the story together. The Seminary was about 10 miles from Mount Kilimanjaro on the road to Mombasa, Kenya and close to the railroad that runs from the port at Mombasa to the border of Uganda. My curiosity about the facts was satisfied from books in the Wake Forest University library. The rest was creative imagination. And that’s the truth.