Diary – 17 May 2018

The family ranch, which my father acquired when I was about six years of age, lay along the banks of the Kafue river in northern Rhodesia. Immediately above the river it was swampland. Then it rose up into ranching country where there were good, thick strands of what was then known as Rhodesian grass — a sweet, sweet grass, very nutritious to cattle and to any feeding stock. My father built a lovely old Rhodesian-style house with a thatched roof, adobe walls, and whitewashed verandas. I would come home from boarding school in July and August, which was winter and the best time to be in the African bush: not too hot and not too rainy. I was expected during that holiday period to work for five days on the ranch, doing anything my father decided I had to do. I spent a lot of time in the bush there and it was a good time to study birds, do a little bit of hunting on the side and watch our African neighbours cutting the wood. At the weekend I was allowed to take one of the Jeeps, my sleeping net and bag, and go off on my own, wherever the fancy took me. My life has carried on like that ever since — although my computer is now my Jeep and my stories the African bush which I roam.

I knew that apartheid was such an iniquitous doctrine that it couldn’t persist, but I wasn’t able to stand up and say so in public. I already had the Bureau of State Security (Boss) watching me constantly. I had a tap on my phone for years. Once I was walking down Muizenberg Beach in Cape Town, some time after apartheid ended, and a chap came up to me.