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In 1913, newly qualified physician Albert Schweizer decided to wave goodbye to an easy life in Europe

and made his way to the jungles of French equatorial Africa with the intention of

building a hospital within the colony of Gabon.

It was a remarkable move given Schweizer as a talented organist and theologian,

not to mention doctor, could have become quite wealthy had he remained in Alsace Lange.

It's also worth pointing at us, but just a few years before he went there, the very worst

excesses of colonialism had been exposed after the King of Belgium turned the

neighbouring Congo into a huge plantation run with the same kind of brutality as a concentration camp.

Meanwhile the Germans had committed what later came to be viewed as a genocide

within their own colony in southwest Africa.

So to say Schweizer was ahead of his times in terms of his views on

colonialism, race and well, human decency is something of an understatement.

70 years later, another outsider, American Eric Madine,

now an award-winning author whose varied work has resulted in him being described as unclassifiable in terms of genre,

followed in Schweitz's footsteps. In this episode, I speak with Eric about the legacy he found the Nobel Prize winning Spitzer had left behind.

His own experiences in the country and the impact it had on him as a writer.

How did Swites' hospital, considering it was built in the middle of the jungle, so presumably

...