Hunting Captain Henley

In the context of the 2025 publication of my book Hunting Captain Henley and the subsequent journey to the heart of Africa, the essay offers insights into the impact of memory, personal history, and conscience on the life-writer. It suggests there exists an unsettling conflict of interest in recalling empirical historical detail to fit the intellectual process required for the accurate construction of emotional memoir – that of my father’s torture in an Egyptian police cell whilst serving as a soldier during the Suez Campaign and his periodic telling of the story to me as a child. My thinking draws on William Zinsser’s book Inventing The Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Memory is not a faithful reproduction of an individual’s experiences but a reconstruction process that can lead to errors. In this case the consequences of thinking about possible errors trigger further journeys of exploration to test the accuracy of other historical accounts, namely following the footsteps of explorer David Livingstone to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. The journey becomes not a re-trialling of Tomkins’ seminal book on Livingstone, David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story, but a reflective reconsideration of precise aspects of memoir in the creation of my own book.