CSU, Chico News

Alzada Kistner, wife of well-known California State University, Chico biology professor emeritus David Kistner, has described their experiences in Africa in a new book.

Based on 40 years of research, Professor Kistner, a former CSU system-wide outstanding professor, has written more than 200 scholarly papers and named roughly 500 new species of beetles. Now Alzada Kistner has written a book about what it was like for their family to travel throughout Africa over a 12-year period and do field work in the bush.

“An Affair With Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent,” published in hardcover this month by Island Press, is part adventure story and part memoir, as Kistner relates the agony and ecstasy of traveling throughout Africa with specimen boxes, butterfly nets – and two children – in tow.

The book has already received favorable reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, and Kistner has been invited to speak about the book at the world-famous Explorer’s Club in San Francisco this fall.

Kistner will be signing copies of her new book at Magna Carta in Chico tomorrow night, June 18, starting at 7 p.m.

While the Kistners have traveled around the world on expedition, the book focuses on the period between 1960 and 1973, when the family took five trips to Africa to do research on beetles and other insects.

Although David Kistner has been the published biologist and teaching professor, Alzada has been his research partner throughout. They met when both were graduate students at the University of Chicago. She elected to end her graduate work while he pursued his career, but her interest and expertise in biology did not stop; Alzada Kistner is associate editor of the journal Sociobiology, and David is editor.

The book is not a scholarly treatise on biology or African culture; Kistner has instead shared stories, anecdotes and insights on what it was like to be a wife, mother and researcher in Africa when the continent was often in post-colonial turmoil.

In 1960 the family was air-lifted by the U.S. Air Force out of the Congo during political upheaval. In 1972 they were in Angola when it fell apart. Later that same year, they almost caused an international incident in Guinea because of a misunderstanding, and were escorted back out to sea on a river lined with gun turrets.

“We were forever tip-toeing into one confrontation or another,” Kistner said.

Nevertheless, Kistner and the family persevered, assisting David Kistner – almost comically at times – with his research while political unrest was all around them. “There’s something delightful about a white-haired man flitting around with a butterfly net,” she said. “You could say the same thing about a whole family on hands and knees looking at an ant colony.”

Kistner went to Rhodesia and saw apartheid “when it was in full swing.” She met Louis and Mary Leakey, the legendary anthropologists who found the first traces of early humans in Africa. She also saw Adi Amin, the infamous brutal dictator of Uganda.

Kistner, who took two years to write the book, and her husband still travel on expeditions. David Kistner, while an emeritus faculty member, still teaches at CSU, Chico, and works with graduate students. They have lived in Chico since 1957.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 1998 at 8:14 am and is filed under 1998 Spring.