Essential Kit // Lightning Bird – Llyal Watson (1982)

Adrian Boshier was sixteen years old when he walked into the African bush alone. No weapon. No team. A pocket knife and a bag of salt. He’d read about that world in Livingstone and Selous and decided that was sufficient preparation. It wasn’t, and he nearly starved for it. The locals left food for him in the bush because he was too proud to approach them directly. That detail alone tells you everything about the man you’re about to spend two hundred pages with.

What follows is one of the stranger and more compelling biographical accounts I’ve come across. Boshier had two traits that the Northern Sotho people read as marks of a spiritual man: an almost supernatural ease with venomous snakes, and epilepsy. The seizures that would have sidelined him anywhere else earned him access to initiation rites, elder knowledge, and eventually the role of practicing diviner. He also happened to discover what is believed to be the oldest known mine in the world along the way, contributed to early Stone Age research, and documented cave paintings and rock art that rewrote pieces of African prehistory.

Furthermore, Adrian is a living time machine. Upon meeting a professor in Johannesburg who is studying the bone age, an era where tools were not yet made from stone, Adrian stuns the professor. What’s thought to be an example of a tool thousands of years old in his collection was something the bushman had seen just the year before. He knew what it was, how it was used, and most importantly who was still using it.

The mythos of the African bush decorate all other aspects of the book. The chapter with the spitting cobra is intoxicating and will awaken the primordial senses of danger, manifestation of your will, and initiation.

It’s essential kit. Get a copy on your shelf.