This carefully constructed assemblage of ‘quaint’ stories with a colonial setting was written by John Stuart-Young, a palm-oil merchant who lived in Africa for decades. However, before this phase of his life, and after a period in prison for theft, Stuart-Young had first been published with an almost certainly entirely false account of his eroticised friendship with the recently deceased and widely derided Oscar Wilde. His life in Africa, despite at least two marriages to English women, was marked by a series of intense relationships with ‘houseboys’ which it is impossible to interpret as anything but abusive and paedophilic.