On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures

by Wilbur Smith

  “By then the relaxation of the Censorship Board was such that the book was allowed. After these years, the number of copies in South Africa of When the Lion Feeds was considerable, as everybody who traveled came back with one or more copies. This shows the folly of censorship; the moment you draw attention to something, rightly or wrongly, it only enhances its popularity and people will move heaven and earth to get copies.”

  Charles was right. I had my own personal epiphany a little later. I was incensed when I read a review of When the Lion Feeds in the Los Angeles Times. It was a full two pages and it was savage, along the lines of “this guy should be locked up, and prevented from writing about all his racist crap.”

  At the time, I had become friends with Stuart Cloete, the blockbuster South African novelist of his time, who was living in Hermanus, a seaside town south east of Cape Town. He lived just down the road from me and he liked hot curry, which his wife, Tiny, used to cook, and I would be invited to eat with him.

  His first novel, Turning Wheels, about the Great Trek which was published in 1937—a year after the centenary celebrations of the Afrikaners leaving their farms in the Cape and traveling by ox wagon into the hinterland to escape British colonial rule—sold more than two million copies. It too was banned. Stuart was born in Paris to an Afrikaner father and a French mother, went to a British public school, became a second lieutenant at the age of seventeen, during the First World War, before returning as a very young husband to farm in South Africa. He divorced, found the love of his life and started writing. He would write fourteen novels in all, several volumes of short stories, three biographies, and even poetry, between 1937 and his death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight. I liked him a lot, he was an amiable gentleman, but it went further than that. When I signed the contract with Heinemann for When the Lion Feeds, their Johannesburg representative described me to journalists as “the Stuart Cloete of Rhodesia.”

  I went down to Stuart brandishing the offending review and said: “Look what they’ve done to me!” And he replied: “That’s wonderful, Wilbur, that’s one of the best reviews I’ve ever seen for a first-time author.” Puzzled, I said: “But you haven’t read it.” He said, “Wilbur, you don’t read the stuff, you weigh it. If you’re important enough for people to want to write two full pages about your novel in a big-selling publication like that, then it’s worthwhile.”

  Stuart was, like Charles Pick, one of my first mentors. His rough-hewn, unpretentious wisdom was a great source of inspiration. Both Stuart and I had the dubious honor of being banned authors in South Africa. It reflected the uncertainty of the times and how progress is invariably a many-sided thing. Stuart’s novels would remain banished until 1974, while the first work of mine that pleased the gimlet eye of the censors was Gold Mine in 1970.

  The courts finally unbanned When the Lion Feeds in South Africa eleven years after it had been published, following this up with the unbanning of my second novel, The Dark of the Sun ten months later, but it wouldn’t be the last time my books were banned in South Africa, or elsewhere.

  In 1977, I published A Sparrow Falls, the final installment in the trilogy that had begun with When the Lion Feeds. It starred Sean Courtney, returning as a general from the First World War to build up his country, put down the Rand Revolt of 1922 and then die because of the perfidy of his awful and evil son, Dirk. In perfect symmetry, the Directorate of Publications, the successor to the Publications Board, promptly banned it—for being indecent and obscene.

  Heinemann South Africa’s managing director Andrew Stewart went out to bat for me, telling the Directorate’s appeals board that the average person was unlikely to buy a 650-page book just to read three pages of sex. Andrew told the court the sex scenes were no more graphic than in any of my previous books, for which there had been no complaints. A Sparrow Falls was my eleventh novel.

  “People will buy the book because it is an adventure story and because Wilbur Smith is a well-known novelist. They will not buy it for the sex scenes,” said Andrew.

  Bizarrely, the Directorate briefed counsel to appeal its own committee’s decision—only the third time in history that this had happened. Quintus Pelser, who was appearing for the Directorate, told the court that the book had “great literary merit” and “that the sex scenes were functional.”

  “They form an integral part of the plot and help the reader to a better understanding of the characters. The book would not have the same impact if the sex scenes were left out.”

  The appeals board reserved its judgment in the same week as A Sparrow Falls and Cry Wolf, my novel published the year before, achieved the unique double of topping the British hardback and paperback bestseller lists respectively. By now I was getting sacks of fan mail from international readers, particularly in America following the breakthrough of Eagle in the Sky (1974), thanking me for writing about South Africa, clarifying the country’s complex and tumultuous history, highlighting the issues and dramatizing the nation in an entertaining and accessible way.

  The decision of the South African board underscored that they had exiled me just as the rest of the western world was welcoming me. The people I felt sorriest for were the local booksellers. They were already buckling under the pressure of the new nationwide television service introduced in South Africa the year before, in 1976. But I didn’t regret a word I’d written—and nor did the readers. A Sparrow Falls was one of my most successful novels.

  A South African returning to his country felt the full force of the ban. He was on his way home from London and had bought a copy of A Sparrow Falls to pass the time during the flight. With nothing to declare on arrival at Jan Smuts Airport (today Oliver Tambo International Airport) he casually went down the green aisle only to be stopped by a zealous customs official and told the book was banned.

  “Some twenty minutes later,” he wrote to the Star newspaper, “I was still filling in forms, having my name and address taken, my passport examined and being rather officiously lectured to about my contravention of the Act.”

  The paper took up his case in the editorial column the next day:

  “You have arrived at Jan Smuts Airport,” as the old joke would have it. “Would passengers please put their watches back 25 years.” The experience, which a reader described in a letter to the Star, made the apocryphal story ring uncomfortably true . . . The undesirability of the novel A Sparrow Falls is highly arguable to say the least. Last year a committee of the Publications Directorate found it indecent and obscene. However, the Directorate itself joined the publishers in a successful appeal against the ban. Then the Publications Appeal Board re-banned it citing eleven passages where sexual description was too explicit. Certainly it is no Kama Sutra or Das Kapital. It is a typical modern adventure tale in which an occasional dash of sex is almost an obligatory part of the formula and very much subsidiary to the main action. Are such books really worth making such a fuss over? Doesn’t banning them simply serve as a needless irritant to unknowing South Africans and make the country look petty rather than prim in the eyes of the outside world?

  The Publication Appeal Board lifted the ban on A Sparrow Falls in 1981. As always, they couldn’t resist taking a swipe at me. The descriptions it found were not “blatantly shameless and not so crude to taint the whole book with undesirability.” That was the good part. The book had no literary merit, the good burghers harrumphed, “but it will have a wide probable readership—it can be described as escapist fiction.”

  It was necessary to adopt a realistic approach in this respect, the Board said, because “escapist fiction has a place in the South African community and forms an integral part of many South Africans’ relaxation.” It would be absurd therefore to expect such fiction to be without sexual descriptions.

  Just why its committee could not have come to the same conclusion four years earlier and before the expenditure of tens of thousands of rands in legal fees, only it would know, but we would have the last laugh. A Sparrow Falls was to win me my fi
rst golden Pan award in 1982. Pan Books, the publishers who I had moved to after Heinemann, had created the award to recognize authors in their stable who had sold more than a million copies of any particular title. Standing 25 cm high, it was a golden statuette of an original bronze Pan figurine dating from between 1 BC and 1 AD held by the British Museum.

  There was one final twist in this strange saga of censorship. In 1980, I started writing what would become the four-part Ballantyne series. The novels chronicled the lives of the Ballantyne family from the 1860s to the 1980s against the background of the bitter struggle between black and white in Rhodesia’s (now Zimbabwe) brief history. The series ended with The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (1984) which the Zimbabwean government promptly banned.

  8

  THIS SEAFARING LIFE

  I had known Hillary Currey nearly all my life. We had first become friends at Michaelhouse, where Hillary, a popular boy who made a good fist of appearing responsible, rose to become Head Boy while I did everything I could to buck the system. Later, Hillary and I had gone to Rhodes University together. He was the sort of friend who proposed wild adventures in which I would become a more than willing participant. During the long varsity vacations, I would work, and on one Christmas vacation, Hillary suggested how we could make more than £60 a week. It would be easy, he said, we’ll get a job on the fishing boats.

  Now, somewhere in the middle of the Namib desert, this did not seem like such a good idea. I looked at Hillary, encrusted in the sand and grime of the sun-blasted landscape, and wondered if he was thinking the same.

  It was approaching Christmas, 1953. The bushmen of the Namibian interior called this place “The Land God Made in Anger.” The Portuguese sailors who once made landfall at the port where we were heading had called it “The Gates of Hell.” We were bound for the fishing town of Walvis Bay, sitting at the head of the newly christened Skeleton Coast, but between us and the water there was endless, unchanging desert. It was a journey of 1500 miles and would take us six days and we had now been two days without a lift. Until then we had cadged rides with local farmers and traveling salesmen, but good fortune had deserted us. We tramped in silence along the Trans Namib railway line that stretched all the way from the Namibian capital Windhoek to the coast, lost in our own thoughts of incipient despair and the folly of youth.

  From behind us came the creaking of something approaching along the rails. At first, I could see nothing in the heat haze—but slowly the sound grew louder, and an image began to coalesce out of the rippling air. It was a maintenance buggy, rattling its way along the tracks by means of a pump worked by a red-faced engineer.

  We flagged it down, gesticulating wildly. No doubt perturbed by the sight of two twenty-year-old white men tramping through the midday heat, the engineer slowed the buggy.

  “What’s happened here, boys?”

  “Room up there for two more?” Hillary asked.

  The engineer looked at us like we were about to steal his lunch.

  “Are you bedol [crazy]?”

  Nobody hitch-hiked on the railways.

  Then Hillary fished out a couple of bills from his pocket, and the driver took them.

  “Climb up back,” he said, “you’re going to die out here else.”

  And that was how we arrived, exhausted and stinking of the desert, into the fishing port of Walvis Bay.

  •••

  Walvis Bay was a natural deep water harbor where the seas were alive with pilchards, plankton and the whales after which the settlement was first named. There had been a town here since the fifteenth century, when the harbor was a valuable haven for European ships sailing around the perilous Cape of Good Hope. Out on the seafront lay half a mile of jetties, and at dusk the waters of the harbor thronged with more than a hundred fishing trawlers, each fit for seven or eight men. We wanted a job on one of the pilchard boats.

  We spent two days walking up and down the docks asking for work. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find a captain to take us on. Naturally, the first thing the skippers asked was how much experience we had. The answer was simple: none. I was used to boats, that much was true—we had spent long childhood vacations up and down the Zambezi and Kafue rivers, out on the Great Lakes in Malawi, or off the coast at Maputo in Mozambique, game fishing in the Indian Ocean—but I knew nothing about trawling for pilchards. The captains looked at my soft hands and laughed in my face. Everyone declined our services, some not so politely. “Go home to Mummy, little boy,” was perhaps the gentlest.

  Someone finally took pity on us. The Kingfisher—a little trawler owned, like several of these pilchard boats, by a pair of affluent Cape Town brothers—was at jetty and about to cast off when we approached. Her skipper, a giant of a man named “Boots” Botha, took us on for five weeks, on a commission-only basis. If we didn’t catch we didn’t get paid. At thirty-five years old, Boots was ancient to us—a hardened man of the sea—but he must have had a soft spot, or else he could see the desperation in our eyes.

  The work would be hard, he said, we would be the dogs of the boat, doing all the tasks his experienced crew hated to do themselves—but in the evenings the beer would flow freely at the hotel where all the fishermen gathered and we would get a place to bed down in the boat’s cabin.

  That same day, we went to sea.

  •••

  Like all new initiates, we were treated as pond life. True to his word, Boots gave us all the dangerous jobs which we jumped at because we knew no better. If there was a practical joke to be played, it was at our expense. My own initiation came early. Sent by the ship’s engineer to bring up cotton wastes from below deck, I plunged my arm into a container—only to discover it was the engineer’s latrine, the cotton wastes used in lieu of bog paper. From that day on I was christened Spook-gat or “ghost’s asshole” in Afrikaans.

  Those first weeks aboard the Kingfisher were back-breaking. Never had I put my body through so many sustained trials. Though I was barely twenty years old, my joints ached and my muscles groaned—and only after days of hard work did I grow accustomed to the grind. There was much to learn but, before the first week had passed, I gained a special position on board that went some way to elevating my standing.

  The casting of trawler nets was a complicated business. With one end of the line attached to the trawler, and the other to a little rowboat towed behind, we would head for what the skipper thought were the day’s best waters. At the back of the trawler, Boots Botha would survey the water for the first sign of a shoal. Usually it would be the darting of a pilchard just below the surface, perhaps even one or two cresting out of the swell. Pilchards gather in vast shoals, so as soon as one was spotted, we knew there were thousands more lurking underneath. It was at this point that the trawler would begin its circuit, lapping the shoal in ever decreasing circles, bunching it into a tighter and tighter space. Sometimes the shoals would be so big that we’d have to unleash the rowboat, working the shoal so that it separated into two or three smaller shoals, whatever size best fitted our nets. As soon as the shoal was constricted, the surface of the water would come alive, quivering and glittering with the agitation of so many fish.

  At the skipper’s command, the rowboat would be thrown loose, its ties unfastened so that it could stream off, trailing the net behind. Soon there would be two hundred feet of net out in the water. Only then would the skipper bring the trawler around the shoal to pick up the rowboat again and retie it, the shoal being surrounded by netting.

  The fish were crowded together close to the surface while, underneath them, the net hung open. Now came the moment to close the net, trapping the fish within. Around the bottom of the net ran the lead line, laden with lead weights to hold it down. It was this line that had to be gathered up, taken back on board the trawler and put onto a winch to draw the bag closed. Yet, the net could not be fully closed until the heavy steel rings around the lead line were taken off.

  The critical point came when the whole bunch of the net
was up. The rings had a thick cable running through them but, to take them off and bring in the net, another line had to be fed through so that the thick cable could come out and the steel rings be taken off one by one. A man at the back of the boat would reach for a stick and try to feed this new line around. It was a painstaking job, but nothing else could happen until it was done. The rest of us had to wait.

  After three days of watching the crew clumsily feeding the line through the rings, I jumped forward and put my arm through the rings and pulled the new line through. I was the only one on board whose hands could fit through the rings. The trawler men were amazed, even though it seemed to me like an obvious thing to do.

  The following day, when the net came up from the water, I was summoned. “Spook-gat!” cried the boatman. “Here, Spook-gat, put your hand through here . . .”

  I slipped my arm through the rings and fed the line again. I was pleased with my work. Every day I was saving the crew a half hour of frustration and impatience and, after that, the crewmen never looked at me with quite the same disdain.

  •••

  At the end of every day, back at the jetties, suction pipes drew up our catch from the deck of the boat, and Boots Botha was paid. Nights were spent in exhaustion, or in drink, and come the next dawn, we would be back on shore, warming ourselves with coffee and waiting for the sun to spill enough light over the water to make fishing possible again.

  We started to earn money. At first, it was enough for beer on nights when the hotels in Walvis Bay rang with the raucous sounds of fishermen who had come in from the sea. Then, as our catches grew bigger, so too did our cash and by the end of our trip I had made about £450, which was a king’s ransom in those days.

  But it was blood money, sometimes literally. At sea, men risked their lives daily. Fingers were sliced off at the knuckles when the sea suddenly surged, tightening or wrenching at the nets. Hands were mangled or crushed against the sides of the boats. And, on one occasion I will never forget, I saw a man lose his life to the fickleness of the sea—an experience I would later use in my novel The Burning Shore.