photo-collection-home

What’s this website all about?

This website displays around 400 photographs of animals, people and places in West Africa; all enlarge on-screen at the click of a mouse.  I first travelled to Cameroon in West Africa with Gerald Durrell who had asked me to accompany him on an animal collecting trip there in 1957, when I was nineteen years old and had just left Chipping Sodbury Grammar School.  This trip was subsequently written up by Durrell in his book ‘A Zoo in my Luggage’.  I returned to West Africa in 1963, this time to Nigeria, where I then spent sixteen years as Curator then Director of the Zoological Garden at the University of Ibadan.  During that period I developed the Zoo from a small teaching collection attached to the Department of Zoology to the most popular public attraction of any kind in Nigeria.  The photographs here feature many animal species native to West Africa – some rarely photographed –  as well as people and locations.  They tell the story of my work and life in West Africa.  They also demonstrate that, as is evidenced by emails and other messages I receive to this day, a properly targeted zoo can be highly effective in stimulating and maintaining an interest in animals and indeed the natural world in people from many different backgrounds.  Please click on the headings across the top of this page to explore this website further or go to the true short stories below.  Please note:-  the enlargeable images in the photo galleries on this website are designed to display on a desktop or  laptop computer screen;  they may not display in the same way on a tablet or mobile. 

——————–

 

OCTOBER 2021:-  This website will shortly receive a major update

December 2020

Animals, Africa and Other Secrets –

a selection of True Short Stories by Bob Golding

Click for Stories

I have recently written a number of short stories based on my experiences in Nigeria, West Africa, between 1963 and 1979 when I was Curator, then Director, of the Zoological Garden at the University of Ibadan. The stories tell something of my work and life in West Africa.

To access these stories, simply click here or above.  Each can be viewed on-screen as a PDF document or downloaded and printed.

Bob Golding, Bristol, England, 2021.