When Jackie Rhodes, a British daughter of a wildlife protection officer living in Kenya with her family, finds a sick animal called a bush baby, she adopts it, names it Murphy, and nurses it back to health. Murphy, Jackie, her family, and their friends go on many adventures involving wild animals, poachers, and Mount Kilimanjaro. Soon it’s 1963, and Kenya has finally achieved its independence. Jackie and her family are then ordered to leave the country, and after some confusion, are separated. With the help of Tembo, an African family friend of the Rhodes, Jackie and Murphy navigate their new lives in now-independent Kenya.
The story of the anime is set in Kenya during the end of its time as a British colony. The family starts out in what’s depicted as a British community near a nature preserve outside Nairobi. A flight in the professor’s bush plane takes Jackie above the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia. A trip is also taken to Mount Kilimanjaro. Towards the end of the anime, they take a real train route to Mombassa, where some landmarks like the Pembe Za Ndovu and the Makupa Bridge can be identified. It was hard to verify whether the station in between Nairobi and Mombassa was a reference to a distinct and precise historical place.
In scenes depicting the British neighborhood the Rhodes call home, some buildings can be seen which sit at a raised elevation and feature metal roofs and and verandas with X-shaped railing supports, such as the schoolhouse. This design is common feature for prefabricated structures built in England for use in the Commonwealth.
This shot of their starting location at the Marangu Gate makes it fairly clear that the gang is tackling Kilimanjaro from the Marangu Route. This is further reinforced by the design of the permanent huts shown later on.
In the English dub of Episode 8, Professor Crankshaw specifically refers to Murphy as a specimen of Galago senegalensis braccatus, the bushbaby subspecies also called Kenya Lesser Galago. The IUCN Red List places this critter at Least Concern according to a 2019 report.
The undercurrent of colonial discontent in The Bush Baby is hard to ignore, and at times it can be hard to watch when one considers that through the Canadian author of the source material, the Rhodes are painted as exclusively virtuous. We know that the Rhodes live in a colonial community with all-white English-speaking schools and all-white churches, and that they and their affluent friends employ Kenyan servants. Arthur Rhodes is framed as a noble hero here to use the authority of the Crown to save native Kenyans from their supposed ‘inability’ to counteract the (mostly white) poachers. In so doing, he denies the agency, self-determination, and intelligence of the people who have already lived there. However, Arthur is unable to go against the directive he receives from the British government telling him to pack up. The racial undercurrent of the series gets more dramatic when Tembo, Arthur’s former servant, is pursued as having ‘kidnapped’ Jackie. However, the show doesn’t have any real answers to these sorts of issues outside of an uneasy general showing of mutual respect and human decency.