Squirting Milk at Chameleons: An Accidental African

The tale of an Englishman making a life for himself in Senegal.

Khady pulled out a breast and with a deadly aim fired milk at the chameleon. If I don’t offer it milk, our son will grow up to look like a lizard, she explained. Clearly I had a lot to learn about life in Africa.

When as a boy, Simon Fenton swung from a rope hung beneath a bridge across the A34, little did he think that 30 years or so later, he’d be swinging a machete on his own piece of Africa, watching men urinate snakes and battling a curse placed upon him via the medium of eggs. The Casamance is an undiscovered paradise just south of the Gambia in West Africa. A land where mystic Africa governs life, people walk to the beat of the djembe, when it rains it pours, and mangos are free. Simon, on the cusp of middle age, leaves England in search of adventure and finds Senegal, love, witch doctors, a surprise baby son, and a piece of land that could make a perfect guest house, if only he could work out how to build one.