by Wilbur Smith
I stood on an escarpment, staring into the fading evening light. It was 1988, and I was deep in the bush of the Karoo, some 250 km or two and a half hours by car due east from Cape Town. From one horizon to the next, the land belonged to me. It had once been a succession of farms that, one by one, I bought up to create a sprawling many–hectare ranch. I planned to reintroduce species of antelope and other buck, in particular eland that hadn’t been seen in the area for almost three hundred years. Behind me sat a complex of ramshackle buildings that I intended to demolish and turn into a traditional Rhodesian-style homestead, just as Craig Mellows had done in The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, and my father had done with his own ranch, almost fifty years before.
I had spent decades roaming the world, writing novels and living life to the full. For the first time, I was going to settle somewhere. I would call the land around me Leopard Rock.
•••
I had started writing the Ballantyne saga in the late 1970s, eager to return to the world of African history after a decade of contemporary thrillers. The Courtney series was, by then, only three novels, and they were published over a thirteen-year period. With the Ballantynes, I would work differently—writing all four novels in succession and chronicling the birth and growing pains of the country most dear to my heart: Rhodesia.
I had always known I would write about Rhodesia. I hadn’t lived in the country for more than fifteen years and, while I was away, Rhodesia had gone through incredible upheavals. As I sat down to write the first Ballantyne novel, A Falcon Flies—the story of Zouga Ballantyne and his sister Robyn, who arrive aboard a slave ship to explore the wilderness beyond Moffatt’s Mission in Kuruman, to evangelize, hunt, colonize and ultimately get rich—I had no way of knowing that the series would end with the death throes of Rhodesia and the birth of the country it was to become. History was unfolding all around me as I crafted my stories, real life blazing the trail along which fiction would follow.
While the Courtneys had been born from the stories of my father and grandfather, the Ballantynes had their roots even closer to home. The series was a labor of love and would be a celebration of the history and legends of a part of the world I was intimately familiar with. I planned to share the history that had fascinated me as a young boy, and the work of the Moffat Mission in Kuruman, South Africa. Robert Moffat was a Scottish pioneer missionary who traveled to South Africa in 1816 and settled in Kuruman, in the Northern Cape province, where he established the Moffat Mission. His daughter married David Livingstone, and Moffat’s son, John, aided Cecil Rhodes’s first steps in his colonial adventures.
The first Ballantyne novel, A Falcon Flies, had Zouga and Robyn Ballantyne arriving in South Africa and trekking north to the border of what would today be Botswana and Zimbabwe—while the second novel, Men of Men, saw Zouga meeting Cecil Rhodes among the diamond mines of Kimberley, and then helping that freebooter annex Matabeleland and Mashonaland for Queen Victoria and his own back pocket. It was a joy to write about the extraordinary enterprise of someone like Rhodes, who wasn’t a military man, but a die-hard empire builder and pioneer.
These were novels built on the long hours I spent immersed in that history, with moments also inspired by my favorite authors—H. Rider Haggard had given Allan Quatermain the nickname “Watcher-By-Night” after his own hero, the American military scout Frederick Russell Burnham, “He-who-sees-in-the-dark,” and I, in turn, gave Zouga the nickname Bakela, or “He-who-strikes-with-the-fist.” The third novel, The Angels Weep, opened in the midst of the Matabele rebellions of the late nineteenth century, and then pitched the story into a conflict I knew only too well: the Bush War which had recently torn Rhodesia apart. Meanwhile, the fourth novel, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, would move the story into what was then the present day—with independence from Britain, the formation of the new nation of Zimbabwe and its first faltering steps as the defeated colonists became common citizens, and former terrorists found themselves masters in the corridors of power.
•••
In November 1965, I had isolated myself in the Inyanga mountains to write. The success of When the Lion Feeds had encouraged me to pen The Dark of the Sun and then The Sound of Thunder. I was writing about war—in this case, the Anglo-Boer War. It was a time of violent conflict, with Sean Courtney rising to become the leader of a commando unit running guerrilla raids in the veldt, but it wasn’t only in fiction that the horns of war sounded. In the real world, the mountains where I had settled had become a frontier in a terror war of our own. Across the border in Mozambique, dissident Rhodesian terrs had made a base of operations, coming over the mountains in the dead of night to wreak chaos on our unsuspecting land.
Later that month, Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, made his unilateral declaration of independence, declaring Rhodesia a sovereign state independent from the British Crown. It was an act that intensified the disharmony already growing between the government and the black nationalist groups in the country, including the Zimbabwe African National Union—led by future tyrant Robert Mugabe—who stepped up their actions, indiscriminately killing citizens and inciting riots in townships across the country. This was the onset of the true Rhodesian Bush War, a barbaric conflict that would last fifteen tormented years and tear a once beautiful country apart. Every man of fighting age in the nation was called up in the defense of the country—and so, one morning, instead of receiving news of translation sales and movie deals, I opened my morning mail to receive papers summoning me to duty.
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence had been imminent for some time. We had all known it was coming; the only question was when the storm would finally break. Now it had erupted all around us. I returned to Salisbury where I managed to write during the day but my nights consisted of long, tense patrols around the townships that circled the city as a member of the reserve in the British South Africa Police.
As evening paled to dusk, men all over Salisbury were preparing to discard their daytime roles, pretend that they weren’t accountants, bank clerks, or salesmen, and report for another patrol. That night, I left my house and climbed into the waiting Land Rover. Inside were the three other men of my patrol. None of us had known each other before the start of the war, and we were unlikely to meet again after our service was over. It was tough work but we were stoic about it. We were not here as friends. Most of the men were like me, unmarried, in their early thirties, used to desk jobs by day. We had full-time police as overseers, but there had been no training. We were not drilled, and nor were we equipped as soldiers, not least because the international arms embargo placed on Rhodesia left us woefully short of gear. In standard-issue uniforms, with batons at our sides, we ran our patrols four or five times a week and, with whispers of all-out war on the horizon, hoped that a bullet wouldn’t find us first.
The patrols were stressful, endless circuits around the townships, where strangers looked at us suspiciously but never said a word. Sometimes there were rumors of riots, crowds incited by the men we called terrs, the black nationalists threatening open war, but often they were ill-thought-out gatherings, disorganized and quick to disperse. We would be called out as a show of force to stop the riots in the townships from starting. Once, as we patrolled on foot through the early-evening dusk, a glass bottle arced overhead, shattering on the ground at our feet. When we looked back, a group of men had gathered in the dust road between the shanties, anticipating confrontation. These were only the first signs of what was to come. As the weeks and months went by, the nationalists found more ways to inspire terror: random brutality, atrocious attacks that provoked disunity and fear, barbarism for which the country had not been prepared. We were being called up more and more.
One weekend, we attended the site of a terror attack on a farm, a typically soft target. The fighting of the Bush War was mostly rural and, while citizens living in Salisbury and other towns and cities were largely safe from attack, there were no such guarantees in the countryside. Farmers faced th
e threat of violence every day and night. In their remote homesteads, there was little they could do to protect themselves from armed guerrillas determined to murder and spread fear. Too often, farmers had been cornered, smoked out, or butchered in their homes. Tonight, the terrorists had struck again. They had killed the kids, disemboweled them and thrown them into the pit latrines. Two black kids and one white kid. The terrorists didn’t discriminate. They had also killed the mother, the farmer’s wife, but the farmer had survived because he was away at the time of the attack. There are some sights you can never unsee, that are burned into your brain, that will distort your entire view of humanity. Sometimes the images will reappear at night, mocking your hard-won sense of the rightness of things.
With the homestead locked down and soldiers swarming the land, we were dispatched to secure the dirt tracks leading in and out of the property. The hope of tracking the men responsible was small, and growing more distant every minute. That was how the terrs worked: one minute they were here, and the next they were gone, leaving ruin in their wake. The farmer would return to his homestead to discover he’d lost his entire family in the most awful way.
The incident crystallized my feelings that the whole Rhodesian situation was going to go one way. I didn’t share Ian Smith’s Battle of Britain defiance he was using to whip up white Rhodesian support. Having declared UDI, he committed his country to years of relentless bloodshed and horror.
I decided that, even though this country meant so much to me, I would have to leave. Also, I’d fallen in love again. This time it was with Jewell Slabbert, who I’d met at a party in Salisbury. In short order, we’d got married and she was pregnant, and I moved us down to Onrus River, just outside Hermanus in South Africa. I bought my parents a home in Somerset West. My dad was grateful but when I told him about my plans to get married, he just shook his head. “If you’re going to go through life marrying every woman who drops her panties for you, you’re going to be a very busy boy.” As always, he was spot on.
It was to be another fifteen years before the events I had absorbed would coalesce into the story of the Ballantynes. As they lingered in my mind, waiting to find an outlet, the Bush War exploded, found itself in a bitter stalemate, and then exploded again.
In 1984, as The Leopard Hunts in Darkness was being published, the insurgents who had waged war on Rhodesia were now in power in Harare—the city that Salisbury had become—but the same tribal rivalries of old continued, this time cloaked by a veneer of civility. Robert Mugabe, once a freedom fighter and now the nation’s leader, had already brutally suppressed the Matabele people. And as my novel became a bestseller across the world, Zimbabwe banned it from sale.
•••
We moved back to South Africa to evade the spreading tide of war, but there had been trouble brewing in that country too for a long time. I had been living in Port Elizabeth, writing my aborted first novel, when the Sharpeville Massacre occurred. In March 1960, the South Africa Police shot at crowds protesting the racist pass laws which were designed to segregate and restrict the black population. Black residents in urban districts were required to carry passbooks when outside their homelands or designated areas, and they could be arrested if the passbook didn’t contain valid authorization. A crowd of 5,000 to 7,000 demonstrators offered themselves up for arrest for not carrying their passbooks outside the police station in the township of Sharpeville in Transvaal (now part of Gauteng). Police reports suggested that youthful and inexperienced officers panicked and opened fire, killing sixty-nine people, including women and children, with 180 injured. Tear gas had been used, Saracen armored personnel carriers had ferried in platoons of police carrying Sten submachine guns, while Sabre jets had flown over the protestors at terrifyingly low altitudes. Since that moment, the militant resistance against apartheid had grown stronger and more organized than ever, and the government had become fiercer in its opposition to the ANC and the PAC. Only a year later, a Xhosa man named Nelson Mandela would be convicted of sabotage and treachery and begin his first year of imprisonment on the infamous Robben Island.
In 1984, terror returned to Sharpeville, as another protest march against apartheid turned violent and the deputy mayor of Sharpeville was murdered. A group of protesters known as the Sharpeville Six were sentenced to death. In The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, I had chronicled the devastating fallout of the civil war in Rhodesia; now, it was time to tackle apartheid, that most contentious and complex of African subjects, in my next series—a return to the world of the Courtneys. Rage was to be the beating heart of the second Courtney sequence. The first in the series, The Burning Shore, introduced a new branch of the Courtney dynasty when South African pilot Michael Courtney falls in love with beautiful French woman Centaine de Thiry, and when Michael is killed in action, Centaine enrolls as a nurse on a hospital ship only to be marooned in the desert of the Skeleton Coast when the ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat.
The second, The Power of the Sword, was a Cain and Abel showdown between Centaine’s two bastard sons: Shasa Courtney (who Michael had sired before dying in a plane crash) and Manfred De La Rey, whose father Lothar had an affair with Centaine after rescuing her in the Namib. The story charted the two men’s rise through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. It allowed me to weave fiction into fact, as Manfred ended up following a very similar route to the South African Olympic hope Robey Leibrandt, who stayed in Berlin after the 1936 Olympics and became a Nazi secret agent, reinfiltrating back to South Africa; while Shasa, having been wounded as a Hurricane fighter pilot in the SAAF in North Africa, returned as a special counter-intelligence officer, to hunt him down. It was another big book, broad in its scope, letting me tell a story against the wide canvas of South Africa’s recent history, but it was precisely this that would land me in so much hot water in the third volume of the saga, Rage.
In Rage, the long and deadly enmity between Manfred De La Rey and Shasa Courtney would come to a head, just as South Africa herself was engulfed in the fires of racial conflict. The novel would propel the bitter family rivalries I had always written about straight into a nation tearing itself apart.
Rage was a chronicle of South Africa itself, following Shasa Courtney and Manfred De La Rey as they get caught up in the politics of the fledgling nation and end up in parliament together. Shasa’s wife has an affair with an African Nationalist leader and she is forced into exile as South Africa buckles under the defiance campaign of the 1950s and the struggle against apartheid takes root. The novel opens in 1952 and charts a period of almost twenty years, as the country lurches from the Freedom Charter in Kliptown, through the Rivonia Treason Trial, Nelson Mandela’s incarceration on Robben Island, the horrors of the Sharpeville massacre and Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s assassination in 1966.
When I started my writing career, I looked for inspiration in the adventurers of days gone by. Now, with Rage, I was acknowledging the very real dangers that South Africans were bravely living through daily. I had already witnessed the horrors that could engulf a country like Rhodesia, and around me there was concern that South Africa could head the same way. Rage was written in the mid-1980s, at a time when the nation was at a tipping point. Glasnost, the end of the Cold War, was blowing its winds of change across the world, and as the Soviet Union and Communism fell, the shockwaves were felt across sub-Saharan Africa with huge consequences for South Africa. Internationally, apartheid had been universally condemned and, as the 1980s progressed, trade unions, church groups, student societies and the Black Consciousness Movement, wounded but defiant after the death of their leader Steve Biko in 1977, continued to demand change. Nelson Mandela himself would be released in February 1991 by President F. W. de Klerk and, three years later, would become president himself. The death throes of the apartheid regime were a heady time.
I thought highly of de Klerk’s predecessor, P. W. Botha, the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. He was a tough and gnarly old politician more famed for his finger-wagging rhetoric and “tota
l onslaught” campaign against terrorists and communists. It was Botha who had started talking to Nelson Mandela while he was still in prison and, though he refused to dismantle it, Botha had begun tinkering with the apartheid edifice, removing the most hateful of the petty apartheid laws such as separate amenities for blacks and whites, and the criminalization of sex between them. To many, Botha was the only reformist leader South Africa had had in 300 years. I told journalists on a publicity trip to the UK ahead of the launch of Rage in March 1987 that, though I saw South Africa becoming the third world country it actually was, I had hopes that, in the long run, a peaceful and just society could be built. My optimism was premised on the moderates triumphing in the space between the “comrades” in the townships and the “jackbooted followers of [right-wing extremist] Eugene Terre’Blanche.” For that to happen the outlawed African National Congress would have to be brought into the political process and a formula found that could guarantee equality for South Africa’s black population, while protecting the rights of the white minority. I said I would like to see Nelson Mandela released and included in a government of national unity. I still had deep reservations about the structure of the ANC and, if it was not controlled, feared it would go the way of African liberation movements before it and become a classic African one-party state, complete with a president-for-life. Whatever happened in the next few years was going to be vital for the longevity of this firebrand of a nation.
By the time Golden Fox, the sequel to Rage, was published in 1990, it would only be another year before Nelson Mandela was released and the first steps were being taken toward reconciliation, and healing the nation’s wounds. Nelson Mandela showed his true worth and justified his international acclaim when, in an unprecedented act of African statesmanship, he stepped down from the Presidency after only a single term.