The Red Pelican: Life On Africa’s Last Frontier is a historical novel that narrates the life and times of Dick Lyth, whose adventures and exploits in Africa are legendary to this day.

At that time few outsiders had visited the remote mountainous borderlands of southern Sudan. The first European explorers went through the area in the 1890s. They described the region as inhospitable and left as quickly as possible. In 1900, Major Austin put together a caravan and made plans to go through the region on an exploratory trip from Khartoum to Mombasa. Heat, mosquitos, disease and starvation plagued the caravan. Of the 62 men who began the expedition, only 17 lived to tell about it.

Lyth graduated from Oxford University in 1939 and at the age of 21 he went to southern Sudan to work as a teacher. At the onset of World War II, Lyth signed up to serve with the Sudan Defense Force. He was given the rank of major and went to the Ethiopian / Sudan borderlands to attack the incoming Italian forces and prevent them from reaching the Nile River. He trained 120 local warriors and waged an innovative and successful guerrilla war.

After the war, Lyth became District Commissioner for the Sudanese government over the Murle region, an area of 50,000 square miles. He fell in love with the region and its peoples. He lived with the Murle people and learned their culture and language. He walked thousands of miles to fulfill his administrative duties and over time he brought peace to the region. In this remote, harsh land he flourished where others perished. To this day, he is still revered by those who remember him as Kemerbong, which in the Murle language means, The Red Pelican.

During the ten years he served as District Commissioner, Lyth played many roles including judge, linguist, explorer, hunter, husband, father, anthropologist and peacemaker. His story is an epic tale of courage, daring and love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jon Arensen, PhD (Oxford University) spent many years in Sudan living with traditional ethnic peoples. He later became professor of cultural anthropology at Houghton College, a top-ranked college in western New York. While teaching there he also initiated and directed Houghton's study abroad program in Tanzania.

Today, Jon lives with his wife Barb in Fillmore, New York, but Jon still travels to Africa for consultancy work. Their three children live abroad and have worked in Cambodia, Sudan, Eritrea, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique.

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