The memoir, Ice Cream in Sololo: Journeys to the Heart of Life, takes its name from an episode in author Rhodia Mann’s life. While researching the Borana on the remote Kenya-Ethiopia border, she befriended an Italian woman while attending one of the tribe’s ceremonies. The lady was the wife of the resident surgeon and ran a small ice cream machine off the hospital generator for a couple of hours each night, thus producing delicacies in the desert.

The incident epitomises Rhodia’s ability to land in remote places, to dedicate herself to unique research and to meet innovative people. These abilities reveal themselves time and again during her life, adding spice to her writing.

Rhodia Mann’s memoirs start with the snippets of information she has gleaned about the lives of her grandparents. It then moves to her Jewish parents’ hair-raising escape from Eastern Europe during the early days of World War II.

She gives us glimpses of this journey -- or series of journeys -- highlighting her

parents’ travails in Romania, in Poland, in Turkey, in Cyprus and in Palestine, until they

finally board a boat to Africa. After enduring refugee camps in South Africa and Northern

Rhodesia, her mother and father finally find work in Kenya where Rhodia -- named for the

country in which she was conceived – makes her appearance.

Rhodia’s early days were spent on a farm at Athi River. Through the eyes of a child, we meet a number of wild and domestic animals; we come to know her eccentric parents; and we are taken on safaris to remote destinations. We see Kenya first being torn apart by the Mau Mau emergency and then finally attaining independence.

This early introduction to adventure and exploration influenced Rhodia’s life dramatically. The first time she spread her wings without her parents, she took off to England and America where she studied, made a naïve marriage, and suffered an agonising divorce and child custody case.

The book is also a tapestry of anecdotes of Rhodia’s travels, her ethnographical studies and her collection of rare beads. Ice Cream in Sololo: Journeys to the Heart of Life not only gives readers an insight into one woman’s journey, but into the development of a country and the traditions of its peoples.