Sleeping with Lions: A Year in Tanzania

by Lee Anne McIlroy

Faced with an empty nest, a single mother and linguist from California embraces the opportunity to return to East Africa where she had once worked as a young woman.

Living with four priests in Bukoba, Tanzania on the western shores of Lake Victoria, the author teaches at a small college and works closely alongside her research partner, a Kenyan linguist and poet. Throughout her year in Tanzania, she establishes new friendships and also travels throughout the country, visiting places like Kilwa, the Serengeti Desert and Zanzibar.

In this true story, Lee Anne McIlroy celebrates the rich cultural, historical, natural, and linguistic landscapes of Tanzania while reflecting on her own life, exploring what it means to be a mother, a woman, and most importantly, a human being in the modern world.

Genres: Africa, Travel, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

Reviews

[Joelle Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilariously awkward, and an honest take of a year in Africa. She doesn't rhapsodize about "The Africans," but does describe their culture in entirety. It was refreshing to read what is, essentially, a travelogue, without disparaging critiques of "culture." I admit to wanting to live in a houseful of monks now. There is an animistic and agnostic perspective, but I was usually laughing too hard at her fantastic self - admissions to be offended.

[Daphyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this look at Tanzania. Mellroy tells us what she learned from the people and culture of Tanzanian during her one year academic exchange. Her descriptions of the country are beautiful. The friends and characters she meets are complex and show a rich diversity devoid of the stereotypes so often found in books on Africa by Europeans. I would love to visit this country.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible experience to read this novel highlighting the authors time spent in Tanzania while simultaneously experiencing some of the same locations

[Book Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Ann McIlroy's Sleeping With Lions: A Year in Tanzania documents her time spent as an English Language Fellow for a university in Bukoba, Tanzania. The author's memoir is a poignant portrayal of the landscapes and people who shaped her journey as a woman following a difficult divorce.

McIlroy describes the scenery in Bukoba with eyes of wonderment. Unlike some of her peers, who only see the economic poverty of Tanzania and greater Africa, she indulges in the cultural richness of local life. She sees her time in Tanzania as a way to rediscover herself in a land that has always felt dear to her heart. From the food to the sounds and sights she experiences, she uses vivid descriptors that give the landscape a magical feeling.

The people she meets are a formative part of her journey. She makes an active effort to do more than coexist with her colleagues and the locals around her; she strives to learn from them, even in the most minute ways. She gets to know the family of Ocham, the professor she partners with at the university, and even visits their family home. She has a particular affinity for the priests with whom she stays for the duration of the trip. The priests help her rediscover her womanhood; unlike her ex-husband, who never fully understood her, they respect her career and offer her a set of fresh perspectives.

Finally, as an educator and mom of daughters raised in California, she often considers the conditions in which her students learn and operate. Despite lacking the socioeconomic privilege that her daughters had throughout their childhoods, she describes her students as some of the brightest and hardest-working she has encountered. In contrast to her students in California, students frequented her office hours in droves to reinforce their commitment to their education. In the end, she discovers that it is not wealth that makes a person's life rich; the richness of spirit and passion makes it so.

Sleeping With Lions: A Year in Tanzania is an emotional memoir that shares one woman's journey discovering parts of herself while learning about a new culture. Her strength shines through her stories and is inspirational to those that read them.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were three ridiculous beliefs the author held that made this book irredeemable for me:

Strike one: she believes in ghosts and discusses these beliefs and her "experiences" with them extensively and several times throughout,

Strike two: she and her siblings think their dead grandmother visits them in dreams,

Strike three: she kept and buried her kids hair after hair cuts and teeth when they fell out...

Oh and a bonus complaint: her weird horny hallucination/day dream/creepy fantasy about the fruit in her hotel room that led to her crying that her ex (that she talked to on a daily basis throughout her trip) wasn't with her... but then ended with her literally hallucinating he was there with her all night. Yeah wtf was that??


With the emphasis on her being a linguist and describing her travels listed in the description, I expected to hear more about those things. For as high a word count as she had when describing certain animals and trees, I really don't feel as though I learned much about Tanzania(other than the people are extremely kind, polite, courteous, and communal, and there are a lot of monkeys, birds, and butterflies.) Through the last 50 pages or so all I was looking forward to was the end. Instead of feeling contemplative, intrigued, or in any way satisfied when I reached the end however my only thought was, "what was the point of that?"
I'm not a big memoir fan, but the ones I like are usually ones of lives very different from mine,describing things I will never see or do. So I expected to give this at least four stars. Disappointed.

[Yegor Voronin · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author received some kind of grant to go to Tanzania for a year and do some training of teachers, and these are autobiographical notes from that trip. These would have worked fine as a travel blog, but they make a rather miserable book.

Perhaps a lovely lady in RL, the author comes off in the book as whiny and self-absorbed, with a writing style of a middle schooler doing an essay for a class assignment. Here's a randomly picked example: "My interest in Africa grew as my love of languages did because Africa is the home of one-third of the world's languages." The whole book is like this. The only reason I read beyond several of the first chapters is to see how much worse things can get (and they did).

There are some apparently interesting characters the author encounters, but having finished the book, I can't recall a single one with any certainty. She's more interested in recounting her own impressions of these people than in describing the people themselves.

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn a bit more about Tanzania, but I got almost nothing from it. It's a shagalabagala of a book.

[Tanja Nayak · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Sleeping with Lions: A Year in Tanzania" by Lee Anne McIlroy is not the book I expected. I was expecting to go on a literary safari for a year and learn more about Africa's wildlife, instead, I found myself willingly following every word as McIlroy navigated her way as a teacher in Tanzania and found herself unexpectedly living in a community with a group of priests.

McIlroy decided to spend a year in Tanzania after her children left home and she had some time for herself. She writes with a very subtle and delightful sense of humor, and a lot of heart. A great story that is true. She did manage to find a few days in her busy schedule to take a wildlife safari by the way, and it turned out to be quite the adventure. Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

[Sidney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sleeping with Lions is a strong companion book for traveling to Tanzania or for reflecting on what life is like in Tanzania. In the 2020m’s, the author, Lee Anne McIlroy, receives a teaching fellowship in Bukoba, and, upon returning writes about her experiences. Either her writing style or my engagement with her experiences improved as I read. From reflecting on peaceful and/or unique experiences, to looking at her year through a mature woman’s eyes, to capturing the pace of daily life in Tanzania, the short chapters caused me to more deeply reflect on my Tanzanian trip and my life observations and experiences. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a profoundly beautiful and well written book. I am deeply in awe of Lee Anne’s kindness, bravery, selflessness, and badassery that we as the reader are able to feel on every page. She wove in history - both personal and cultural - into adventures from her year-long journey in ways that will stick with me for many years to come. I feel privileged to have been able to experience Tanzania through Lee Anne’s prose.

[Christine Herbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was blown away by the depth and intimacy of this narrative. This is not simply a story about an American woman’s experience of living in Tanzania and how it changed her. The author explores many wide-ranging topics, ripe for book club discussion and debate: the evolution of the human species, the maternal instinct, the supernatural, animal sentience, colonialism, proselytization, racism, feminism — the list goes on! A thought-provoking read from cover to cover.

[Molly Elkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Anne’s curiosity, honesty, and vulnerability leap off the page— I could hardly put it down once I started reading.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book as I’m headed to Tanzania. I liked the book but fear it would not have wide audience appeal. I enjoyed her story and learned a lot about the culture, which was my goal.

[Cath · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at living in Tanzania for one year. Good companion piece for my trip!

[Danielle · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is more of a memoir of a middle aged woman trying to find herself than a dive in culture and life into Tanzania. I was pretty disappointed by it, but mostly because I had the wrong expectations.