West of the Moon: Early Zululand and a game ranger at war in
Weight | 0.460000 |
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ISBN13/Barcode | 9781920143329 |
ISBN10 | 1920143327 |
Author | Ron Selley |
Binding | Paperback |
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Date Published | 1st July 2020 |
Report Date | 2021/07/01 |
Pages | 284 |
Publisher | Blue Weaver Marketing |
West of the Moon evokes a bygone era of the 1940s' colonial Natal through to the cruel intensity of the 'Bush War' that ravaged Rhodesia in the 1970s. The book is in two distinct parts;
Part 1 chronicles the author's earlier years, an idyllic childhood spent roaming and hunting among the empty, rolling hills of northern Zululand; of the inaccessible St Lucia waterway; the nostalgia of yellow fever trees; of building railway bridges into the wild interior; of colonial scallywags and native witchcraft; of shipwrecks; and the sweaty cantinas and backstreets of Lourenco Marques.
Part 2 recounts the author's move across the Limpopo where his love of adventure, hunting and the bushveld lead him to Rhodesia where he became a game ranger, dealing with problem animals in the farming areas and the escalating terrorist war in the Gona re Zhou National Park in the beleaguered south-eastern Lowveld of the country. Trying to care for an environment and the animals that depend upon it, while the people around commit barbaric acts in the name of political ideology, brutally awakens the author to the reality of the disintegration of an organised colonial subcontinent.