Early Zululand and a Game Ranger at war in Rhodesia * A sweeping canvas of southern Africa,
from colonial northern Zululand to guerrilla
warfare in the Gona re Zhou of Rhodesia.
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 Lourenço 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.
