Shimon Tzabar (1926-2007) was an Israeli artist, poet and journalist whose travel account How I Discovered Africa was published in 1958, just as Israel—under the guidance of Foreign Minister Golda Meir—turned to postcolonial Black Africa in search of friendship and commerce. Tzabar's Introduction reminds us how the Israeli encounter with Africa was shaped by European perceptions of the "Dark Continent." This voyage, Tzabar playfully explains, was in fact his fifth journey to Africa: the first took place in a boat called "Tarzan's Adventures," when Shimon—then a toddler—reached a jungle teeming with African natives and wild animals. In later journeys he followed the African expeditions set out in Friedrich Wilhelm Mader's Ophir and in Henryk Sienkiewicz's In Desert and Wilderness (both translated into Hebrew in the 1920s), before joining the exciting treasure-hunt narrated by another Israeli writer-illustrator, Nahum Gutman, author of In the Land of Lobgengulu King of Zulu (1939).

Nevertheless, while Tzabar's sense of adventure and his beautiful ink drawings echo the colonial discursive and visual tradition which marks these "earlier" journeys, his real achievement lies in his ability to transcend the familiar stock of derogatory stereotypes. It is telling that, following the 1967 war, Tzabar was one of the first to denounce the Israeli occupation: exiled in London, he founded a satirical journal called Israel Imperial News—a new mouthpiece, he claimed, required for the new Israeli "empire." One is left to wonder whether Tzabar recognized the complex relationship between his bitter depiction of "colonial" Israel and the unabashedly nostalgic tone with which he lovingly recalled his first expeditions to Africa.