Marabou Stork Nightmares His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for the marabou stork. When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing) in Muirhouse, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. The family relocates to apartheid-era South Africa when he is an adolescent, where he
Marabou (ethnicity) Marabou (ethnicity) Marabou () is a term of Haitian origin denoting multiracial admixture. The term describes the offspring of a Haitian person of mixed race: Africans, Europeans, Taíno Indian and South Asians (East Indians) ancestry. The Marabou label dates to the colonial period of Haiti’s history, meaning the offspring of a mullato and a griffe person. However, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, in his 3-volume work on the colony describes Marabous as the product of the union of a black and a quadroon, he says nothing concerning East Indians. The East Indian association with that term is probably due solely to