Michael Paterson-Jones was born in the UK but went to Africa as a baby. He grew up in Kenya and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He went to university in South Africa. His early career was as an agronomist, industrial chemist and teacher. He married his Rhodesian born wife, Thora, in 1970. That year they bought a coffee farm in The Vumba, on the Mozambique border and lived there for seven years through the “Bush War”. They travelled extensively in Mozambique. They then moved to South Africa firstly to Cape Town and then to Durban. After twenty two years there and in Swaziland, as an academic, he and Thora lived for seven years in Upstate New York before returning to the UK.