This painting is one of an ongoing series that I am working on that celebrates the peace and tranquility found in the African wilderness when the sun is setting. The same place in the midday sun would be an unbearable hell-hole of intense heat, glare and tsetse flies. However as the sun drops towards the horizon, serenity, cool air and moody low-level lighting take over and the true beauty of Africa emerges. This scene is of the Sapi floodplain of the lower Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe. Those hills on the other side of the river are in Zambia but this could be anywhere in Africa where there is a big river, some mountains and a lot of wildlife to be seen. It's not the locality that counts. What is timeless is the atmosphere that the onset of evening produces. Peace and tranquility - this is the true treasure of the African wilderness.

The Sapi area of the Zambezi Valley used to be the Sapi C.H.A. (controlled hunting area) but was incorporated into the Mana Pools National Park in the 1970s. Since then it has reverted back to being the Sapi Safari Area and has switched back and forth between hunting and photographic safaris. My own experience in this area comes from when my mother left Kenya in 1964 and we settled in Zimbabwe where I went to senior school. Many of my school holidays were spent in the Zambezi Valley at Mana Pools and and Chirundu (Nyakasanga C.H.A.) and in the Urungwe at both A and B camps. In the 1960s black rhino were common at Mana Pools and on several occasions black rhino wandered into where we were camped at night. The jewel of the Zambezi Valley is the incredible Mana flood plain with its forests and beautiful pools and at Sapi there is a smaller but identical floodplain which I visited twenty years ago.
The Zambezi Valley is everything one would expect of an iconic wilderness. On the floor of the valley, which is a Southern extension of the Rift Valley, the heat is intense. There are tsetse flies everywhere, wildlife is abundant and one is allowed to do things that are not sanctioned in most other conservation areas - you are not confined to your vehicle, driving off road is permitted, all of which reflects the type of visitor that used this area when it was just a Game Reserve and the regulations were being formulated. The Zambezi Valley inflamed my imagination and was an adventure resource close to where I lived in the capital. I loved the place and it features in many of my paintings for that reason.

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