Scottish actress gap year as student aid worker ridiculed by Africans on Twitter
When Louise Linton went to Zambia in 1999, at the age of 18, she found herself hiding from rebel soldiers, protecting an HIV-positive orphan girl, contracting malaria, and having close encounters with “lions, elephants, crocodiles, and snakes,” according to her recently published memoir, In Congo’s Shadow: One girl’s perilous journey to the heart of Africa. It was a gap year that turned into a nightmare, she recalls, as she quickly learned that “Africa is rife with hidden danger.”
In her self-published memoir, Linton’s descriptions of her temporary home smack of the kind of exoticism and oversimplification that films such as Out of Africa were criticized for. Linton—young beautiful, and naive—describes wanting to help “some of the world’s poorest,” coming off as something of a real-life White Savior Barbie.
Over the course of almost half a year this “skinny white muzungu” or foreigner “with long angel hair” is caught up in the fringes of war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo
Linton eventually escaped home to the safety of her family and castle in Scotland. In the end, she looks back at her time in Zambia fondly:
