Category: Africa

Last Survivor

5/2/2021

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $32.99

POACHING’S certainly nothing new in Africa, where entire species are being driven fast towards extinction by an ever-intensifying illicit trade in body parts.
Against this backdrop a relic from the age of dinosaurs has been rediscovered. This is the priceless breeding partner that a lone specimen preserved in London has been lacking – the missing link that could kick-start this living fossil’s resurrection.
Throughout South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and beyond, the slaughter of animals for their tusks, heads, hides and bones is catastrophic.
Almost entirely unknown is the equally furious targeting of the slow-growing, leather-leafed cycad: the rhinoceros horn of plants. Stripped illegally from the wild, these palm-like throwbacks are being smuggled to collectors around the globe, changing hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more.
In the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in England, the rarest of all cycads sits in a glasshouse: a single male Encephalartos woodii. Until now it’s been without a mate.
No longer: in Zimbabwe the most remarkable of rarities – a female woodii – has been found.
Almost as suddenly, though, it’s been stolen from the heavily guarded garden of its Kuwaiti owner, Prince Faisal. All evidence suggests the thief is part of the Pretoria Cycad and Firearms Appreciation Society, a club whose members meet every week to discuss horticulture and then fire off a few rounds. Joanne Flack left the country at the same time as the woodii vanished and has been ignoring her friends’ desperate messages.
But when Joanne resurfaces only to find herself in the sights of snipers, it seems there’s more than simple plant envy at play.
Fresh from a shootout with fundamentalist terrorists in Mali, CIA operative Sonja Kurtz is exactly the bodyguard Joanne needs – and perhaps the only person who can save not only this presumed thief’s life but also the future of the irreplaceable woodii.

Ghosts of the Past

26/7/2019

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $32.99

EDWARD Presgrave’s name has never been familiar to his fellow Australians but that could change quickly once readers start talking about Tony Park’s 17th novel, Ghosts of the Past.
Known for his love of southern Africa’s diverse landscapes and cultures, in his latest release Park combines a penchant for constructing adventure-rich storylines with an interest in military heritage.
In Ghosts, newly unemployed Sydneysider Nick Eatwell decides on a whim to travel to South Africa in the footsteps of a previously unknown great-great-uncle, Sergeant Cyril Blake – a young man accused of having tortured and murdered a prisoner before being executed in German South West Africa almost a century before it was reborn as modern-day Namibia.
A volunteer who served with the mounted British unit Steinaecker’s Horse during the Anglo-Boer War, Blake has been identified by an investigative journalist in Cape Town as a key player in an intriguing and dramatic search for Afrikaner President Paul Kruger’s vanished fortune: millions of dollars worth of solid gold bars.
Within hours of arriving in Kruger National Park, however, Eatwell has his safari cabin burgled and realises that both his family-historian aunt and a former colleague who’s assisting with document translation could also be potential targets. Clearly someone has a vested interest in staying several paces ahead of Eatwell in his attempts to retrace Blake’s movements across the continent.
As he strives to unravel the details of his relative’s time both in the army and later as a horse-trader, Eatwell must weigh up who can be trusted and who might want him and his contacts dead.
The character Blake is based closely on the real-life Presgrave, an Australian soldier who fought with British Empire forces in South Africa and eventually became embroiled in the slaughter of Nama tribespeople under German rule across the border in South West Africa.

The Colours of all the Cattle

25/1/2019

Alexander McCall Smith: Hachette Australia $29.99

FEW authors tell a modern-day fairytale with more astute moral insight, keenly biting wit and generous laugh-out-loud humour than Alexander McCall Smith.
Deftly weaving together life lessons in ethical behaviour with an exotic location and a cast of endearing characters, McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series continues to reward readers with its family-friendly exploration of moral dilemmas in a 21st-century African setting.
In the 19th Ladies’ Detective Agency novel, Mma Precious Ramotswe is challenged anew, not only in a professional sense but also on a personal level.
While busy delving into the hit-and-run crippling of one of Botswana’s most respected citizens and a long-time friend of her now-late father, Mma Ramotswe must weigh up her commitment to her husband and children in the face of an unexpected opportunity to publicly oppose the planned construction a “disrespectful” hotel bordering the local cemetery.
Should she stand for political office in order to have a meaningful say in the decision-making process? If so, how will she fare in a public popularity vote against the arch-nemesis of her business partner, Mma Grace Makutsi: the contemptible but glamorous Violet Sephoto? After all, what can Mma Ramotswe say about herself other than the simple truth: “I can’t promise anything – but I shall do my best”?
At the same time Mma Ramotswe’s offsider, part-time trainee detective Charlie, is wrestling with internal questions of his own. His girlfriend Queenie-Queenie is yet to introduce Charlie to her family, and a boyhood acquaintance appears to know more than he’s admitting about the accident that injured Doctor Marang.
Impoverished and sharing a tiny bedroom with two of his younger cousins, Charlie might finally have a chance to prove his true value as an investigator – and in so doing mark himself out as a worthy suitor for Habarone’s most beautiful shop assistant.

The House of Unexpected Sisters

9/3/2018

Alexander McCall Smith: Little, Brown $29.99

HAVING an uncommon surname is just one of many things distinguishing the “traditionally built” Mma Precious Ramotswe as a noteworthy Botswanan woman.
Another is running the country’s only all-female investigation outfit, an operation based on the outskirts of the capital, Gaborone: the nationally famous No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
It is to this agency that Precious’s fellow Batswana turn when a husband is suspected of cheating, a debt is not paid, a loved one vanishes – or, in the latest instance, a sister of a colleague of an associate is dismissed from her role as a sales assistant for allegedly insulting a customer.
The now-unemployed Charity is adamant there was no rudeness, leading Precious and her second-in-command, Mma Grace Makutsi, to suspect the employer might have concocted an excuse for the firing. Is he going to give the position to a mistress, perhaps?
As the two begin their covert sleuthing a longstanding nemesis reappears: Violet Sephoto, Grace’s former classmate at the Botswana Secretarial College. Is this shameless woman with her too-short skirts, her deplorable student record and her focus on attracting male attention somehow behind Charity’s dismissal?
Before that question can be answered a third conundrum arises: an unfamiliar Ramotswe, a nurse, is mentioned in a newspaper report.
Precious has never heard of this apparent relative. Is she a legitimate family member or an imposter passing herself off as a Ramotswe for unscrupulous reasons?
With Grace on the case of the seemingly unjustified layoff, Precious focuses on her own mystery and how it might relate to her beloved father, the now-late cattle baron Obed Ramotswe.
As his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, author Alexander McCall Smith is visiting Australia. He will speak about his latest releases and favourite characters in Melbourne and Warrnambool next week.

The Cull

16/2/2018

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $29.99

RHINOCEROS are dying, being shot under cover of night and having their horns lopped off to feed an illegal trade thousands of kilometres away.
Sonja Kurtz is frustrated. Not only has her work to establish an all-woman anti-poaching patrol ended disastrously in an ambush with the loss of two squadmembers’ lives but now it appears her boyfriend, ex-CIA agent Hudson Brand, has taken advantage of her absence from their home to indulge in a blatant affair.
Scouting for fresh work, Sonja is approached by high-profile British entrepreneur and animal lover Julianne Clyde-Smith, whose business interests are flourishing among the easternmost game reserves of southern Africa.
With seemingly limitless finances at her disposal, Julianne is determined to both rid the region of its illegal wildlife slaughter and expand her resort empire by acquiring any properties that fail to fortify their own operations against lawlessness.
Her plan has Sonja at its heart: a carefully chosen militia of experienced international mercenaries and local operatives will search out and neutralise the cross-border hunters before they have a chance to strike.
The exact composition of the line-up is at Sonja’s discretion: in addition to young former maid Tema Matsebula, a member of her now-disbanded Leopards squad, and tracker Ezekial Lekganyane, Sonja recruits Angolan career soldier Mario Machado, a proven killer with a murky past and an ever-ready trigger finger. The group is directed by Julianne’s head of security, fellow Brit James Paterson.
When events take an unanticipated turn Sonja finds herself on the run, fleeing from one out-of-the-way park to another in a bid to stay one step ahead of both the so-called “authorities” in countries where corruption among officials is well entrenched – South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania – and hired assassins.
The Cull reunites two key characters who first met in An Empty Coast, set in Sonja’s native Namibia.

Precious and Grace

21/10/2016

Alexander McCall Smith: Little, Brown $32.99

ASK anybody outside southern Africa to name a famous Botswanan and almost invariably they will respond with “that Precious woman – you know, the one in the book”. Much of the world knows little about day-to-day happenings in Botswana yet millions of readers are relatively familiar with the culture through a line-up of endearing characters created by British author Alexander McCall Smith.
In the latest instalment in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, McCall Smith has business partners Mma Precious Ramotswe and Mma Grace Makutsi turn their focus back 30 years to an era in which their city, Gaborone, was just a dusty country town. Their detective agency is engaged to help locate the childhood home and classroom friend of a visiting Canadian, born in Gaborone and cared for in her early years by a nurse known only as “Rosie”.
As Precious – a proud, independent Tswana “of traditional build” – and her less full-figured but more conservative business partner set about tracing their client’s roots, their investigative path diverges, testing their professional bond.
At the same time Precious is confounded by an occasional employee’s advocacy of a seemingly too-good-to-be-true cattle-fattening scheme that threatens both the friendships and the finances of their social group.
Throw the unplanned adoption of a stray dog and an ongoing feud with a fellow female entrepreneur into the mix and this is a heart-warming literary adventure that weaves together unexpected storylines played out against an exotic setting by a genuinely charismatic cast.
McCall Smith’s writing is generous and intimate, laying bare the types of issues that exist in contemporary Botswanan society.
As is the case with all good series, it is not necessary for readers to have met these people or places through any of the previous 16 novels; Previous and Grace stands comfortably on its own two feet.

Sightings of the Sacred

30/9/2016

Daniel Naudé: Prestel $US55.00/£35.00

LONG, wide, curly, straight or curved: the horns adorning the cattle that feature in photographer-writer Daniel Naudé’s dramatically handsome coffee-table book are as spectacular and distinctive as hairstyles or gowns at any red-carpet event.
South African Naudé captures with exquisite artistry the grandeur, grit and grace of his continent’s native breeds, beginning with the traditional Ugandan Ankole.
In its homeland the Ankole is critically endangered, not in the 21st century by trophy hunting – although its outrageously oversized horns are an obvious prize – but by crossbreeding with milk-rich imported Holsteins and wild plains buffalo.
Naudé sets his pen-portrait of present-day Ankole against the void left by the loss of the Watusi (neighbouring Rwanda’s equivalent), the now-extinct cattle whose horns were known to span up to three metres.
Today, populations of Ankole have been established on reserves in an attempt to protect this cultural icon from annihilation.
Off Africa’s east coast Naudé finds on Madagascar another eye-catching breed: the African-Indian humped Zebu.
Living in isolation on the island, the Zebu faces no threat of outbreeding; as the only bovine strain present, it is guaranteed a continuing pure bloodline.
Rounding out the collection, Naudé’s third chapter of portraits is set in India, where Nandi the Bull is venerated as a divine religious being and cattle in general are sacred to hundreds of millions of Hindus. In India he examines the practice of honouring animals as earthly incarnations of the Hindu gods and attends the annual Mattu Pongal festival celebrating the crucial role played by cattle in agriculture.
Naudé describes in words and pictures not only the breeds themselves in all three countries but also their human keepers, exploring the longstanding relationships that bind the species.
The concise text is educational and emotive, the images worthy of being framed and hung on any gallery wall.

Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

Elephant Dawn

29/7/2016

Sharon Pincott: Allen & Unwin $32.99

IF THERE'S one animal that symbolises Africa more than any other, it’s the elephant, yet within our lifetime, researchers predict, the last wild herds of this species will most likely disappear.
One of the most vulnerable elephant populations is in Zimbabwe, a country whose chronic social, political and economic conflict relegates wildlife conservation to the bottom of the priority pile for desperate subsistence game poachers and greed-crazed government officials alike.
Undaunted, in 2001 elephant-lover Sharon Pincott gave up an executive IT career in Australia and moved from inner-city Brisbane to the sparsely populated wilds of Zimbabwe’s western bushland. There, she set out to observe and then name and catalogue the hundreds of individuals that make up the Presidential Elephants, a group of 17 extended families ranging over a mix of private and public land adjoining Hwange National Park.
Elephant Dawn documents Pincott’s experiences, from her frustrating struggle to obtain a Zimbabwean entry visa to her brushes with the scorpions, black mambas and baboons that from time to time made themselves comfortable in her native-style hut. Most of all, it describes the author’s attachment to the elephants –young or old, newborn or battle-scarred – that, despite the supposed protection extended to them by President Robert Mugabe, 15 years after Pincott first began to identify them continue to face bullets, snares and poison as their numbers dwindle.
Her story is both a personal record of one woman’s endeavours and a first-hand analysis of the factors that together triggered the most self-destructive period in Zimbabwe’s history.
Elephant Dawn summons laughter and tears, smiles and grimaces, anger and pride at the determination with which Pincott carries out her mission, funded through her own efforts and in the face of considerable – at times life-theatening – opposition from parochial Zimbabweans determined to see white residents expelled from the country.

Leaving Before the Rains Come

27/5/2016

Alexandra Fuller: Vintage $22.99

GROWING up in the backblocks of rural Zambia, surrounded by the turmoil and terror of Rhodesia’s civil wars and the constant uncertainty of post-colonialism, life is never dull for Alexandra Fuller. As the daughters of an English-born farmer and his Anglo-Kenyan wife, Fuller and her sister learn to negotiate a hazardous landscape, potentially lethal wildlife, rampant diseases and political volatility. Complicating the mix is their mother’s emotional instability and both parents’ excessive drinking and financial recklessness.
Nothing prepares the girls, however, for life in the wider world.
Beyond the relative comfort of her father’s various farms, as a young wife living with her American adventurer husband in the capital, Lusaka, Fuller first encounters the unfamiliar insecurity of feeling alien. With each new life event – the birth of her children, the family’s move to the US, the couple’s search for work and acquisition of a mortgage – Fuller’s discomfort escalates.
Emotionally distanced from her husband, she begins to wonder if their marriage can survive the pitfalls of a materially driven Western existence in a culture completely at odds with her simplistic upbringing.
In Leaving Before the Rains Come Fuller grapples with the possibility that the union is beyond salvation: “Ours (has) contracted into a grocery-list relationship – finances, children, housekeeping,” she writes. She describes the loneliness and isolation of first-time motherhood and the lack of support that leaves her floundering.
At the same time she questions her own identity. No-longer truly African, she finds herself caught somewhere between her youth in tropical southern Africa and her adulthood in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Idaho, distanced physically from one place but never quite fully acclimatised to the other.
Fuller’s frank assessment of her uncomfortable circumstances creates a memoir that is likely to trigger self-examination in many readers and prompt some to review their own choices.

Heat

19/2/2016

Ranulph Fiennes: Simon & Schuster $32.99

WHAT a difference a handful of decades makes.
When Ranulph Fiennes began his career as a young soldier seconded from the British army to Oman, he found himself fighting with the Sultan’s forces to defend Muslims from Marxist rebels in the country’s southern-most province, Dhofar. In the mid 1960s, Russian-trained fighters flooding overland from Yemen were vehemently opposed to Islam – a far cry from the current generation of Yemeni terrorists with their pseudo-religious fanaticism.
From an isolated base at Salalah on the Indian Ocean coastline, Fiennes led foot patrols through the Arabian Desert – one of the world’s hottest, driest and deadliest wastelands. Also known as the Empty Quarter, this expanse abutting Saudi Arabia had to that point been little explored by Europeans, creating an opportunity for Fiennes to not only serve the Sultan but at the same time indulge his quest for adventure by setting out to search for a mythical ancient city known as Ubar. That Oman is today one of the region’s most politically stable, peaceful countries is due largely to that era.
His memories of those years, and of the challenges of an earlier hovercraft expedition up the Nile River from the Egyptian delta to Lake Victoria (along the way meeting dictator-to-be Idi Amin in Uganda), make up the bulk of Heat, Fiennes’ tribute to some of the world’s most inhospitable climates.
In full uniform Fiennes later trained in the sweltering equatorial jungle of Brunei and contemplated joining a British counter-insurgency force on the Afghanistan-India border; in civilian life he circumnavigated the planet and ran seven marathons on seven continents in a single week, including in Singapore.
Most recently, aged 71, he became the oldest Briton to complete an infamous 251-kilometre footrace through the Sahara Desert, shedding blood, sweat, tears and skin while raising £2 million for charity.

An Empty Coast

15/1/2016

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $29.99

FEW Australian authors write as convincingly on the subject of southern Africa as does reporter, press secretary, public relations consultant and soldier Tony Park. This should come as no surprise, however, given that Park has homes both in Sydney and adjoining South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
An Empty Coast – Park’s 12th African-themed novel – unites three characters first introduced in earlier books: Sonja Kurtz and Sterling Smith of The Delta and The Hunter’s Hudson Brand.
The circumstances that draw the trio together in the scrubland of modern-day Namibia are a direct result of almost a century of cross-border warfare between South Africa, Angola and the former German colony intermingled with internal uprisings.
When the desiccated body of an airman is uncovered in an archaeological dig just outside Etosha National Park, the find rekindles interest in the disappearance of a plane almost three decades earlier. International mercenary Kurtz is called in to help her archaeologist daughter Emma identify the dead man’s uniform. En route to the site – and a likely reunion with former boyfriend Smith – Kurtz crosses paths with private investigator Brand and the two are forced to team up.
With Emma suddenly in danger, the unlikely partners put their collective survival skills into action in the face of assassination attempts, repelling air and ground attacks while racing across a vast and treacherous Namibian landscape described in tantalising detail by Park.
An Empty Coast interweaves the history of three African countries with the suspense of wildlife poaching, smuggling and military subterfuge and the grandeur of the vast open deserts and isolated towns of rural Namibia.
Gunfights, explosions, kidnappings and espionage make the plot fast-paced and engaging, and sexual tension between several of the key figures ensures that this story is enthralling to the final page, with an option remaining for further adventures by this newly bonded group.

Walking the Nile

14/8/2015

Levison Wood: Simon & Schuster UK, $22.99

THERE'S a reason even the most adventurous expeditioners don’t usually attempt walk the length of the world’s longest river – in fact, there are multiple reasons, all exceedingly sound, as army-officer-turned-explorer Levison Wood knew when he fixed his sights on doing just that.
In December 2013 Wood (a veteran of service with a British parachute regiment in Afghanistan) set out to become the first person to follow the Nile entirely on foot from its burbling headwaters in the highlands of Rwanda to the silty Egyptian delta on the Mediterranean coast.
Wood’s journey – to be filmed in part for a television documentary series – would see him traverse six of Africa’s most challenging countries, beginning with Rwanda and including Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan.
The 6839-kilometre slog would pass through some of the least pleasant hiking terrain imaginable – slippery rainforests, crocodile-ridden marshlands, enervatingly humid savannah, parched sand dunes – all the while in an atmosphere that ranged from barely contained intertribal ethnic unrest to outright civil war. Into the bargain, the timing of his journey was such that he would need to cross a portion of the Sahara Desert at the height of summer – a feat rarely attempted by the most hardened nomadic camel herders, let alone Brits already weary and undernourished after months on the move. His only support would be occasional porters enlisted along the way.
In Walking the Nile, Wood’s experiences are documented in his own words and photographs, carrying readers with him and his minuscule party as they push ever northwards. He details the raw emotional extremes of his exploits: the anxiety borne of the likelihood that men whose hands he shakes have murdered their neighbours, the joys of adopting an abandoned baby monkey, the devastation of losing a travelling companion to heatstroke and the mateship cemented by trudging for weeks at a time in semi-silence.

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