Catherine Keese was born Catherine Allison Glen in Nairobi, Kenya, on Christmas Day in 1944. She was the second child and only daughter of James and Helen Glen who had emigrated from Scotland to Kenya in 1939. Her older brother Robert Glen is a renowned wildlife sculptor and ornithologist, and her younger brother David Glen is a photographer, writer and publisher, and runs a foundation for homeless and otherwise endangered children.

Catherine lived for over thirty years in Kenya during the period immediately following the Second World War, through the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, until soon after Kenya obtained its independence from Britain.  When she was just 19 years of age, Catherine married Louis Keese, a South African farmer whose family had settled in Kitale, in northwestern Kenya. They eventually were forced to sell their farms in a political atmosphere not dissimilar to that which affected farmers in Zimbabwe who were forced off their properties with little or no compensation.

In 1974, Catherine, her husband Lou, and their three children Helen, Christian, and Shayne, moved to Perth in Western Australia to begin their lives again. But things didn’t turn out quite as they had hoped, with financial losses, ill health, and the tragedy of losing their son Chris in an automobile accident. Not only has she had to deal with her son’s untimely death, and her husband’s poor health, Catherine was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and had to undergo the subsequent agonizing treatment and therapy.

Despite her trials and tribulations, however, Catherine has emerged ever resilient, and with an indomitable spirit and a smile for which she is well known and loved. This positive temperament is clearly apparent in Beneath an African Sky, her recollections told with humor and in an easy-to-read style of a life in a magical time and place that are now gone but never forgotten.