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TRIBE
The Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon, An Autobiographical Study

'TRIBE is not simply a tale about a people tucked away in almost inaccessible African mountains totally removed from our world. For man in our increasingly mobile world is also losing his roots, his identity and the glimpse of grandeur. There is a sharing of tragedy here' W F Deedes, Daily Telegraph

TRIBE is a unique written record of the hidden history of an astonishing region and its people. Stacey has lived in thrall to another culture. He learned the Bakonzo tribe's language, delved their customs, and made the colobus skin the raiment of leadership. They called him musabuli (rescuer or redeemer). The way of life he first describes changes as the narrative unfolds over the author's 50-year involvement. This major work is an exceptional piece of travel literature, and an 'autobiography' of a people to whom the author belongs as an honoured mzee, or elder. It is an indelible portrayal of a disappearing world.

The Ruwenzori Mountains are so named because of the phenomenon of snow - five glaciered peak clusters, unmatched elsewhere in equatoria. Ruwenzori means 'the site of the snow-god.' One of the most remote regions on Earth, the all but impenetrable highlands of the massif rise to a glacier-land of over 16,000 feet. Herodotus wrote of them as the Mountains of the Moon nearly two and a half millennia ago; the playwright Aeschylus had already written of the river Nile 'watered by the snows of Africa'. The place remains to this day a surreal, awesome and cloud-encircled fastness; a lost world, suggestive of some other planet.

From TRIBE's overriding theme Stacey draws a universal proposition which will no doubt be considered controversial by those who deny the influence of ethnicity upon the spirit of Man. The setting of TRIBE may be central Africa, vividly recaptured, but in revealing the hidden history of the Mountains of the Moon, and the people therein, Stacey lays open a hidden truth of the human condition everywhere and always.

Over half a century ago, Stacey, aged 24, after crossing the Congo from the west, entered the Ruwenzori Mountains to live with the Bakonzo tribe. The Bakonzo Life History Research Society founded by Stacey and his chief companion, Isaya Mukirane, transmogrified into the Rwenzururu Secessionist Movement, in the name of which Mukirane raised the flag of rebellion in 1962.