When hopes were high

Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction.

For those who follow African affairs, these are not happy times. Once regarded as passé, the military coup is enjoying something of a come- back. Men formerly hailed as Renaissance leaders seem bent on being crowned presidents-for-life. From Sudan to Kenya, Somalia to Zimbabwe, carefully negotiated peace deals and coalition governments have either already foundered or quiver on the brink of collapse.

So this book possesses a terrible poignancy. The years it covers — a time when black nationalists in the territories that went on to become today’s Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia campaigned to shrug off white rule — are still comparatively recent history. Yet the hopes of that era were so bright, the belief that an independent Africa would prove a better place than its colonial predecessor so unquenchable, this story almost seems to hail from a different century, or perhaps a parallel universe.

Like many demobilised British soldiers, Peter Mackay — a former captain in the Brigade of Guards — migrated to Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, planning a new life as a farmer. That appears to be just about the only characteristic he shared with his fellow whites, whose racism and small-minded, money-grabbing ways he quickly found repellent. Disgusted by his own, Mackay was steadily drawn into the campaigns of a generation of idealistic would-be revolutionaries working to dismantle the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and with it the system of settler rule.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent man, possessed of vast reservoirs of compassion, blessed with an instinctive understanding of his fellow man and tireless energy. Having decided early on that it would be inappropriate for someone of his ‘pinkness’, as he puts it, to play a prominent public role in the independence movements, Mackay proved the most valuable of backroom assistants to the likes of Hastings Banda, Dunduzu and Yatuta Chisiza, Sketchley Samkange, Masauko Chipembere, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe.