About the Author: Kevin M. Denny
The author writes from experience, having spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi. In 1991, as AIDS began to devastate Africa, he returned to establish a community orphan support program which for the last twenty years has been providing for the health, educational and vocational needs of over 2,000 children annually, most who have lost their parents to AIDS.
While The Warm Heart of Africa is fictional, the author met Peter, the slave boy who became a priest, in 1964. It was a single meeting, way too brief to learn anything but the beginning of Peter's remarkable story, "My father was the first one to see Livingstone... and he almost killed him."
Since that meeting, the author has struggled to tell Peter's story, researching history and creating "facts" as needed to fill in the voids.
After many false starts, it became clear that Peter's story could not be told without telling the author's as well. The result is a story that is absolutely the truth...and absolutely the untruth. Even the author can no longer tell the difference.
The author, who served in the Peace Corps in Malawi from 1964 to 1966, subsequently gained masters degrees in Anthropology and Public Health before going to Afghanistan to assess the health needs of rural communities. At thirty-two he started medical school.
He is a child psychiatrist living in Western New York, where he works with children with severe mental health problems.
His constant joys are five children, four grandchildren and a wife who has never been jealous of time he spends with Peter. His place of escape is a cozy little cottage in county Mayo.
The Warm Heart of Africa, fifty years in the making, is the story of Susan, one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers. It is also the story of Peter, a ninety-two year old African who became her salvation. She meets him soon after attempting to quit the Peace Corps...but failing. Peter is at first reticent to talk of his past, for fear of opening old wounds. With time, he learns to trust and slowly shares his stories with Susan, beginning with, "My father was the first man to see Livingstone and he almost killed him!"
Later he tells her how Yao slave traders invaded his village when he was six, burning houses and killing the very old, the very young and the weak -- those who would not endure the cruel march to the Indian Ocean. He recalls the bitter memory of a slaver dragging his mother from his grasp to be sold for a sultan's harem, never to be seen again.
He then shares with Susan how he and his father were auctioned at the slave market of Zanzibar and crammed into an Arab dhow sailing to Yemen, to be sold once again, his only consolation being that his father was still with him. Two days in, a frigate fired a shot across the bow and Arabs began throwing their cargo into the sea in the grim hope of out sailing the frigate. Peter, too small to be of notice, watched in hiding as an ugly Arab hurled his father into the sea. Then a cannon shot from the frigate demasted the dhow, hurling him into the sea. Unable to swim, he survived by clutching the splintered mast until he was plucked from the sea by men in blue coat who brought him back to their frigate where he took his first step in his twenty-one years in the service of the Queen. As major domo to a young officer, Horace Smith-Dorrien, he would come to see battle against Zulus, Afridis, Pathans, Boers and Sepoys, before returning home to start a life in the service of God, a story he slowly and painfully shares with Susan, like him, a stranger in a strange land.
The author met Peter and was Susan.
