This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.

A Tourist in Africa was Evelyn Waugh's final travel book, and one of his most interesting. Restless and intolerant of the English winter, Waugh boards the Pendennis Castle for East Africa by way of Italy and Suez, going on to retrace the routes of journeys he took as a much younger man through Kenya, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias, and other East African countries. He embarks on his trip at the very moment when many of these countries are beginning to assert their independence after decades of British rule. As he travels, Waugh contemplates the changing face of an Africa he has known intimately as well as his own increasingly awkward fit in the modern world. Even as he contends with his own encroaching age and the unwelcome changes to international travel, his usual zest for adventure and discovery asserts itself at every turn. A much better sailor than flyer, Waugh laments the impending eclipse of sea travel as well as the declining appetite for danger and daring he witnesses in some of his companions. This edition provides hundreds of contextual notes to illuminate the historical, cultural, and biographical details of most interest to readers of Waugh, travel writing, and African history; a complete textual history which traces every change made to the text from Waugh's first drafts to the first published British and American editions; new and original illustrations; and a thorough but eminently readable introduction by Patrick R. Query.