Some childhoods are ordinary.

Scott van Niekerk’s was anything but.

Raised on the shores of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe — where elephants drifted through the yard at night and crocodiles owned the shallows — Scott learned early that the bush was both teacher and test. From canoeing the Zambezi to wrestling teenage chaos at Peterhouse, from anatomy labs in Cape Town to wandering alone through East Africa with a backpack and parasites, each chapter of his young life carved a deeper understanding of courage, instinct, and belonging.

From dodging hippos on the Zambezi to climbing baobabs in leopard country…

From surviving border guards in Mozambique to stitching wounds by lantern light on Lake Malawi…

From studying the human body in the same hospital where the first heart transplant occurred to wandering among mountain gorillas in Rwanda…

This is the extraordinary true story of one boy’s life in Africa — and the man he became because of it.

In African Becoming, he returns to the landscapes that shaped him: the red dust, the fish eagle’s cry, the heat that shimmered across childhood afternoons. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a boy forged by wildness, a young man pushed into the world by ambition, and a healer shaped by everything he once feared.

Decades later, he returns home to find his mother changed, fragile, and fierce in new ways. Her stroke becomes the quiet axis around which the entire story turns — revealing what it means to truly return, to witness the matriarch take a knee, and to understand the full circle of a life.

This is a memoir about wild places, love of wild animals, and the unbreakable thread between a man and the land that raised him.