John Western was brought up on the Kent coast, in Margate. An early fascination with maps developed into a love of history and geography, leading straightforwardly to an undergraduate degree in geography at the University of Oxford. From 1968–70, he taught at a rural high school in Burundi, Central Africa. After a Masters at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), he lived in Cape Town (South Africa) during 1974–76 while conducting research for a doctoral thesis. Thereafter he moved permanently to the United States. As a university academic in social geography, he has written three books: Outcast Cape Town (about urban spatial planning and apartheid), A Passage to England (about Barbadian settlers in London) and Cosmopolitan Europe: a Strasbourg Self-Portrait (about the city’s cultural and political complexities). For his fourth book, An Africa Ago, Western revisits several years spent living in and exploring the continent.