I was checking out of the hotel when I heard a commotion further along the reception area. Outside, it was a blistering day beneath the bare Australian sun, and I had been staying in Sydney for a book signing for my latest novel, Rage. As I stood at the desk, I could hear someone imploring the receptionist: “But I have to see him, I have to see him.” I didn’t take much notice, but then I heard my name. The hotel receptionist was saying to a young man who was about seventeen or eighteen: “I’m terribly sorry, but Mr. Wilbur Smith has already checked out of the hotel.”
I went over to them and said: “Excuse me, I’m Wilbur Smith. Do you want to talk? Did you want to speak to me?”
At first the boy was speechless. He looked like he’d seen the ghost of his mother. Then, stumbling over his words, he said: “Oh thank goodness I have found you. Thank goodness I’ve been able to meet you because I’ve traveled five hours by train to see you and I have to tell you my story.”
I looked down and noticed his right leg was missing and he had a prosthesis attached. There was something heartbreakingly earnest about him. “Okay, fine,” I said, “I’ve got ten or fifteen minutes. Let’s have a cup of tea together and talk.”
We found a table in the hotel bar and he told me how, as a youngster of thirteen or fourteen, he’d been going to school on the train with his friends and they were horsing around, as kids do. They climbed up onto the roof of the train and, as it plowed through the Australian desert, they were pushing each other and racing up and down, daring themselves to perform ever more dangerous stunts like they were action heroes in a movie, and the young boy fell—in a second he was gone, tumbling from the roof and under the wheels of the train. His leg was severed, and its mangled remains were left miles up the track.
He looked at me with pain in his eyes. “Mr. Smith, I tell you, my life ended right at that moment. I was no longer interested in anything. I was done for with this disability, useless; there was nothing for me, no future, life wasn’t worth living.” He reached into his bag at his side. “Then I picked up your book.” He laid down a copy of The Leopard Hunts in Darkness. I had written the novel three years ago, and it was the fourth story in the Ballantyne series. In those pages, the hero, Craig Mellows, had lost a leg in a mine field during the Rhodesian Bush War, but he doesn’t let it stop him succeeding in life. He triumphs over his disability and comes out almost a better man for it.
The boy was smiling. “It changed me, this book,” he said. “Today I’m Head of School. I’m the chairman of the debating society and the chess society and I’m an A student straight through. I owe this all to you.”
I almost burst into tears hearing that this young man had found hope, was given new heart because of a story I’d invented and a character I’d plucked from my imagination. These were the kind of readers who made me happy, who made me think of myself as a boy who loved books and reminded me of what was important, the transformative power of all stories.
•••
The Leopard Hunts in Darkness inspired a great change in my life as well. Hollywood action star Sylvester Stallone, at the time famous for Rocky and Rambo, purchased the film rights, and for a fleeting moment the spotlight of the movie world was back on me. He called me up in person, named a price. I said that sounds good, and the next day the check arrived in the mail! He was keen to film it in South Africa and he wanted to play the character of hero Craig Mellows, but, like so many film projects, there was a lot of talk and, despite Stallone’s reputation, very little action and the film never got made. In the novel, Craig Mellows—wounded veteran and bestselling author—returns to a newly independent Zimbabwe to discover that the ranch that used to belong to his family is in a state of ruin. Determined to revive his family’s heritage, he sets about restoring the ranch to its former glory, bettering the world around him in the process. Four years on from that novel, Craig’s dream of owning his own corner of Africa had become mine. It had been many years since the golden age of my youth living wild on my father’s ranch, but the idea of one day carving out my own wild corner of the continent had become a dream that would not let go. Craig Mellows’ story had been, to some extent, an act of wish fulfillment. I decided to make it real.
I stood on an escarpment, staring into the fading evening light. It was 1988, and I was deep in the bush of the Karoo, some 250 km or two and a half hours by car due east from Cape Town. From one horizon to the next, the land belonged to me. It had once been a succession of farms that, one by one, I bought up to create a sprawling many–hectare ranch. I planned to reintroduce species of antelope and other buck, in particular eland that hadn’t been seen in the area for almost three hundred years. Behind me sat a complex of ramshackle buildings that I intended to demolish and turn into a traditional Rhodesian-style homestead, just as Craig Mellows had done in The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, and my father had done with his own ranch, almost fifty years before.
I had spent decades roaming the world, writing novels and living life to the full. For the first time, I was going to settle somewhere. I would call the land around me Leopard Rock.
I had started writing the Ballantyne saga in the late 1970s, eager to return to the world of African history after a decade of contemporary thrillers. The Courtney series was, by then, only three novels, and they were published over a thirteen-year period. With the Ballantynes, I would work differently—writing all four novels in succession and chronicling the birth and growing pains of the country most dear to my heart: Rhodesia.
I had always known I would write about Rhodesia. I hadn’t lived in the country for more than fifteen years and, while I was away, Rhodesia had gone through incredible upheavals. As I sat down to write the first Ballantyne novel, A Falcon Flies—the story of Zouga Ballantyne and his sister Robyn, who arrive aboard a slave ship to explore the wilderness beyond Moffatt’s Mission in Kuruman, to evangelize, hunt, colonize and ultimately get rich—I had no way of knowing that the series would end with the death throes of Rhodesia and the birth of the country it was to become. History was unfolding all around me as I crafted my stories, real life blazing the trail along which fiction would follow.
While the Courtneys had been born from the stories of my father and grandfather, the Ballantynes had their roots even closer to home. The series was a labor of love and would be a celebration of the history and legends of a part of the world I was intimately familiar with. I planned to share the history that had fascinated me as a young boy, and the work of the Moffat Mission in Kuruman, South Africa. Robert Moffat was a Scottish pioneer missionary who traveled to South Africa in 1816 and settled in Kuruman, in the Northern Cape province, where he established the Moffat Mission. His daughter married David Livingstone, and Moffat’s son, John, aided Cecil Rhodes’s first steps in his colonial adventures.
The first Ballantyne novel, A Falcon Flies, had Zouga and Robyn Ballantyne arriving in South Africa and trekking north to the border of what would today be Botswana and Zimbabwe—while the second novel, Men of Men, saw Zouga meeting Cecil Rhodes among the diamond mines of Kimberley, and then helping that freebooter annex Matabeleland and Mashonaland for Queen Victoria and his own back pocket. It was a joy to write about the extraordinary enterprise of someone like Rhodes, who wasn’t a military man, but a die-hard empire builder and pioneer.
These were novels built on the long hours I spent immersed in that history, with moments also inspired by my favorite authors—H. Rider Haggard had given Allan Quatermain the nickname “Watcher-By-Night” after his own hero, the American military scout Frederick Russell Burnham, “He-who-sees-in-the-dark,” and I, in turn, gave Zouga the nickname Bakela, or “He-who-strikes-with-the-fist.” The third novel, The Angels Weep, opened in the midst of the Matabele rebellions of the late nineteenth century, and then pitched the story into a conflict I knew only too well: the Bush War which had recently torn Rhodesia apart. Meanwhile, the fourth novel, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, would move the story into what was then the present day—with independence from Britain, the formation of the new nation of Zimbabwe and its first faltering steps as the defeated colonists became common citizens, and former terrorists found themselves masters in the corridors of power.
•••
In November 1965, I had isolated myself in the Inyanga mountains to write. The success of When the Lion Feeds had encouraged me to pen The Dark of the Sun and then The Sound of Thunder. I was writing about war—in this case, the Anglo-Boer War. It was a time of violent conflict, with Sean Courtney rising to become the leader of a commando unit running guerrilla raids in the veldt, but it wasn’t only in fiction that the horns of war sounded. In the real world, the mountains where I had settled had become a frontier in a terror war of our own. Across the border in Mozambique, dissident Rhodesian terrs had made a base of operations, coming over the mountains in the dead of night to wreak chaos on our unsuspecting land.
Later that month, Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, made his unilateral declaration of independence, declaring Rhodesia a sovereign state independent from the British Crown. It was an act that intensified the disharmony already growing between the government and the black nationalist groups in the country, including the Zimbabwe African National Union—led by future tyrant Robert Mugabe—who stepped up their actions, indiscriminately killing citizens and inciting riots in townships across the country. This was the onset of the true Rhodesian Bush War, a barbaric conflict that would last fifteen tormented years and tear a once beautiful country apart. Every man of fighting age in the nation was called up in the defense of the country—and so, one morning, instead of receiving news of translation sales and movie deals, I opened my morning mail to receive papers summoning me to duty.
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence had been imminent for some time. We had all known it was coming; the only question was when the storm would finally break. Now it had erupted all around us. I returned to Salisbury where I managed to write during the day but my nights consisted of long, tense patrols around the townships that circled the city as a member of the reserve in the British South Africa Police.
As evening paled to dusk, men all over Salisbury were preparing to discard their daytime roles, pretend that they weren’t accountants, bank clerks, or salesmen, and report for another patrol. That night, I left my house and climbed into the waiting Land Rover. Inside were the three other men of my patrol. None of us had known each other before the start of the war, and we were unlikely to meet again after our service was over. It was tough work but we were stoic about it. We were not here as friends. Most of the men were like me, unmarried, in their early thirties, used to desk jobs by day. We had full-time police as overseers, but there had been no training. We were not drilled, and nor were we equipped as soldiers, not least because the international arms embargo placed on Rhodesia left us woefully short of gear. In standard-issue uniforms, with batons at our sides, we ran our patrols four or five times a week and, with whispers of all-out war on the horizon, hoped that a bullet wouldn’t find us first.
The patrols were stressful, endless circuits around the townships, where strangers looked at us suspiciously but never said a word. Sometimes there were rumors of riots, crowds incited by the men we called terrs, the black nationalists threatening open war, but often they were ill-thought-out gatherings, disorganized and quick to disperse. We would be called out as a show of force to stop the riots in the townships from starting. Once, as we patrolled on foot through the early-evening dusk, a glass bottle arced overhead, shattering on the ground at our feet. When we looked back, a group of men had gathered in the dust road between the shanties, anticipating confrontation. These were only the first signs of what was to come. As the weeks and months went by, the nationalists found more ways to inspire terror: random brutality, atrocious attacks that provoked disunity and fear, barbarism for which the country had not been prepared. We were being called up more and more.
One weekend, we attended the site of a terror attack on a farm, a typically soft target. The fighting of the Bush War was mostly rural and, while citizens living in Salisbury and other towns and cities were largely safe from attack, there were no such guarantees in the countryside. Farmers faced the threat of violence every day and night. In their remote homesteads, there was little they could do to protect themselves from armed guerrillas determined to murder and spread fear. Too often, farmers had been cornered, smoked out, or butchered in their homes. Tonight, the terrorists had struck again. They had killed the kids, disemboweled them and thrown them into the pit latrines. Two black kids and one white kid. The terrorists didn’t discriminate. They had also killed the mother, the farmer’s wife, but the farmer had survived because he was away at the time of the attack. There are some sights you can never unsee, that are burned into your brain, that will distort your entire view of humanity. Sometimes the images will reappear at night, mocking your hard-won sense of the rightness of things.
With the homestead locked down and soldiers swarming the land, we were dispatched to secure the dirt tracks leading in and out of the property. The hope of tracking the men responsible was small, and growing more distant every minute. That was how the terrs worked: one minute they were here, and the next they were gone, leaving ruin in their wake. The farmer would return to his homestead to discover he’d lost his entire family in the most awful way.
The incident crystallized my feelings that the whole Rhodesian situation was going to go one way. I didn’t share Ian Smith’s Battle of Britain defiance he was using to whip up white Rhodesian support. Having declared UDI, he committed his country to years of relentless bloodshed and horror.
I decided that, even though this country meant so much to me, I would have to leave. Also, I’d fallen in love again. This time it was with Jewell Slabbert, who I’d met at a party in Salisbury. In short order, we’d got married and she was pregnant, and I moved us down to Onrus River, just outside Hermanus in South Africa. I bought my parents a home in Somerset West. My dad was grateful but when I told him about my plans to get married, he just shook his head. “If you’re going to go through life marrying every woman who drops her panties for you, you’re going to be a very busy boy.” As always, he was spot on.
It was to be another fifteen years before the events I had absorbed would coalesce into the story of the Ballantynes. As they lingered in my mind, waiting to find an outlet, the Bush War exploded, found itself in a bitter stalemate, and then exploded again.
In 1984, as The Leopard Hunts in Darkness was being published, the insurgents who had waged war on Rhodesia were now in power in Harare—the city that Salisbury had become—but the same tribal rivalries of old continued, this time cloaked by a veneer of civility. Robert Mugabe, once a freedom fighter and now the nation’s leader, had already brutally suppressed the Matabele people. And as my novel became a bestseller across the world, Zimbabwe banned it from sale.
•••
We moved back to South Africa to evade the spreading tide of war, but there had been trouble brewing in that country too for a long time. I had been living in Port Elizabeth, writing my aborted first novel, when the Sharpeville Massacre occurred. In March 1960, the South Africa Police shot at crowds protesting the racist pass laws which were designed to segregate and restrict the black population. Black residents in urban districts were required to carry passbooks when outside their homelands or designated areas, and they could be arrested if the passbook didn’t contain valid authorization. A crowd of 5,000 to 7,000 demonstrators offered themselves up for arrest for not carrying their passbooks outside the police station in the township of Sharpeville in Transvaal (now part of Gauteng). Police reports suggested that youthful and inexperienced officers panicked and opened fire, killing sixty-nine people, including women and children, with 180 injured. Tear gas had been used, Saracen armored personnel carriers had ferried in platoons of police carrying Sten submachine guns, while Sabre jets had flown over the protestors at terrifyingly low altitudes. Since that moment, the militant resistance against apartheid had grown stronger and more organized than ever, and the government had become fiercer in its opposition to the ANC and the PAC. Only a year later, a Xhosa man named Nelson Mandela would be convicted of sabotage and treachery and begin his first year of imprisonment on the infamous Robben Island.
In 1984, terror returned to Sharpeville, as another protest march against apartheid turned violent and the deputy mayor of Sharpeville was murdered. A group of protesters known as the Sharpeville Six were sentenced to death. In The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, I had chronicled the devastating fallout of the civil war in Rhodesia; now, it was time to tackle apartheid, that most contentious and complex of African subjects, in my next series—a return to the world of the Courtneys. Rage was to be the beating heart of the second Courtney sequence. The first in the series, The Burning Shore, introduced a new branch of the Courtney dynasty when South African pilot Michael Courtney falls in love with beautiful French woman Centaine de Thiry, and when Michael is killed in action, Centaine enrolls as a nurse on a hospital ship only to be marooned in the desert of the Skeleton Coast when the ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat.
The second, The Power of the Sword, was a Cain and Abel showdown between Centaine’s two bastard sons: Shasa Courtney (who Michael had sired before dying in a plane crash) and Manfred De La Rey, whose father Lothar had an affair with Centaine after rescuing her in the Namib. The story charted the two men’s rise through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. It allowed me to weave fiction into fact, as Manfred ended up following a very similar route to the South African Olympic hope Robey Leibrandt, who stayed in Berlin after the 1936 Olympics and became a Nazi secret agent, reinfiltrating back to South Africa; while Shasa, having been wounded as a Hurricane fighter pilot in the SAAF in North Africa, returned as a special counter-intelligence officer, to hunt him down. It was another big book, broad in its scope, letting me tell a story against the wide canvas of South Africa’s recent history, but it was precisely this that would land me in so much hot water in the third volume of the saga, Rage.
In Rage, the long and deadly enmity between Manfred De La Rey and Shasa Courtney would come to a head, just as South Africa herself was engulfed in the fires of racial conflict. The novel would propel the bitter family rivalries I had always written about straight into a nation tearing itself apart.
Rage was a chronicle of South Africa itself, following Shasa Courtney and Manfred De La Rey as they get caught up in the politics of the fledgling nation and end up in parliament together. Shasa’s wife has an affair with an African Nationalist leader and she is forced into exile as South Africa buckles under the defiance campaign of the 1950s and the struggle against apartheid takes root. The novel opens in 1952 and charts a period of almost twenty years, as the country lurches from the Freedom Charter in Kliptown, through the Rivonia Treason Trial, Nelson Mandela’s incarceration on Robben Island, the horrors of the Sharpeville massacre and Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s assassination in 1966.
When I started my writing career, I looked for inspiration in the adventurers of days gone by. Now, with Rage, I was acknowledging the very real dangers that South Africans were bravely living through daily. I had already witnessed the horrors that could engulf a country like Rhodesia, and around me there was concern that South Africa could head the same way. Rage was written in the mid-1980s, at a time when the nation was at a tipping point. Glasnost, the end of the Cold War, was blowing its winds of change across the world, and as the Soviet Union and Communism fell, the shockwaves were felt across sub-Saharan Africa with huge consequences for South Africa. Internationally, apartheid had been universally condemned and, as the 1980s progressed, trade unions, church groups, student societies and the Black Consciousness Movement, wounded but defiant after the death of their leader Steve Biko in 1977, continued to demand change. Nelson Mandela himself would be released in February 1991 by President F. W. de Klerk and, three years later, would become president himself. The death throes of the apartheid regime were a heady time.
I thought highly of de Klerk’s predecessor, P. W. Botha, the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. He was a tough and gnarly old politician more famed for his finger-wagging rhetoric and “total onslaught” campaign against terrorists and communists. It was Botha who had started talking to Nelson Mandela while he was still in prison and, though he refused to dismantle it, Botha had begun tinkering with the apartheid edifice, removing the most hateful of the petty apartheid laws such as separate amenities for blacks and whites, and the criminalization of sex between them. To many, Botha was the only reformist leader South Africa had had in 300 years. I told journalists on a publicity trip to the UK ahead of the launch of Rage in March 1987 that, though I saw South Africa becoming the third world country it actually was, I had hopes that, in the long run, a peaceful and just society could be built. My optimism was premised on the moderates triumphing in the space between the “comrades” in the townships and the “jackbooted followers of [right-wing extremist] Eugene Terre’Blanche.” For that to happen the outlawed African National Congress would have to be brought into the political process and a formula found that could guarantee equality for South Africa’s black population, while protecting the rights of the white minority. I said I would like to see Nelson Mandela released and included in a government of national unity. I still had deep reservations about the structure of the ANC and, if it was not controlled, feared it would go the way of African liberation movements before it and become a classic African one-party state, complete with a president-for-life. Whatever happened in the next few years was going to be vital for the longevity of this firebrand of a nation.
By the time Golden Fox, the sequel to Rage, was published in 1990, it would only be another year before Nelson Mandela was released and the first steps were being taken toward reconciliation, and healing the nation’s wounds. Nelson Mandela showed his true worth and justified his international acclaim when, in an unprecedented act of African statesmanship, he stepped down from the Presidency after only a single term.
Rage reflected the real-life dramas being played out in modern Africa, and the sequel Golden Fox continued the trend. Shorter than the others, it was more of a spy thriller, with one of the minor characters from Rage, Shasa’s daughter Bella, as the heroine. I was fond of Bella in Rage, but had no idea what she was going to get up to. Then in Golden Fox she came into her own as a spy who infiltrates the government. It often happened: I would create someone with no apparent future then suddenly, later, I realized what they could do. I didn’t have conversations with my characters as I had heard some authors do. My characters just lived in my mind and my writing for me to watch and record. I would often be asked if a character was me. Was I the devil-may-care big game hunter, adventurer and ladies’ man, Sean (in either Rage or When the Lion Feeds), or his brother Garrick, the runt of the litter in Rage and the cripple in When the Lion Feeds? I suppose, in truth, I identified more with Garrick. Like me, he was a loner fueled by a determination to succeed, often surprising those around him.
It wasn’t Bella, however, who stood out and grabbed all the attention, but a minor character, Vicky Gama, the wife of the novel’s jailed leader Moses Gama. Vicky had been introduced in Rage, but now in Golden Fox, with her husband still incarcerated on Robben Island, I had written a scene in which I depicted Vicky, the “black Evita” and “mother of the nation,” as a topless gin-swilling sjambok-wielding sadist, beating up a young member of her athletic club, who she suspects of being a police informer. It all took place in a mansion in Soweto, which Vicky had built from overseas donations to the struggle against apartheid.
My books are pure fiction, there are no hidden messages, no matter what people want to think. My characters are totally fictitious—I’m a storyteller—but some people drew parallels between Vicky and Winnie Madikizela—or Madikizela-Mandela, as she is known today. In the week Golden Fox was released, Madikizela-Mandela was being named in court during the trial of her bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, who was accused of murdering a young activist by the name of Stompie Seipei. Stompie, a fourteen-year-old member of the ANC Youth League, had been kidnapped with three others on December 1988 by Madikizela-Mandela’s bodyguards, who called themselves the Mandela United Football Club. Stompie was killed on New Year’s Day 1989 and his body dumped near Madikizela-Mandela’s house. He was found five days later in the veld. His throat had been cut. Richardson, the Mandela United “coach,” was convicted of the murder even though he claimed in court he had only been doing Madikizela-Mandela’s bidding; and, a year later, Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of Stompie’s kidnapping and being an accessory to his assault. Madikizela-Mandela was sentenced to six years in jail, reduced to a fine and a two-year suspended sentence on appeal. Richardson got life.
The reality was that Golden Fox was written some time before Madikizela-Mandela was named in court, but, whatever I wrote, I couldn’t please everyone all of the time. Some people would be delighted by passages that might offend others. In the novel, the scene in which Vicky Gama attacks the suspected informant did not refer to any particular person. I was writing stories, not political allegories. It depicted a type of person who could have existed in the period in which the novel was set.
It was not the only moment the novel came close to the realities of modern South African life. Golden Fox had the daughter of a fictitious South African ambassador to London wheedle her way into the Cabinet to get her hands on top secret information—including a poison gas being manufactured in South Africa by an Armscor-like entity—to give to the Russians and Cubans. As much as it was the work of my imagination, recent newspaper headlines had claimed that the assassinated white Swapo leader Anton Lubowski had been a spy for South African military intelligence—and it had been proved that Commodore Dieter Gerhard, the commander of the all-important Simonstown naval base outside Cape Town, had been a spy for the Soviets all along. Like Rage, Golden Fox showed just how the realms of fiction and fact intertwined. Golden Fox, though, would be the last time I sailed that close to contemporary political history. The reason was simple: I was a professional storyteller, not a political pundit.
As it was, the books were almost writing themselves. Anyone outside the country wouldn’t believe what we were living through daily, and as always in Africa, tragedy lurked around the corner. We had a bad experience in July 1989 when a hit-and-run driver knocked down and killed our domestic servant Gladys Siqele. She was outside our Bishopscourt home in Cape Town walking with a friend back to her house when a car mounted the pavement and mowed her down. I was out of the country on a book tour at the time. My wife thought she might have been targeted because of my books, by another “Wit Wolf.” The original “Wit Wolf” (white wolf), a disaffected and disgraced twenty-three-year-old South African Police constable named Barend Strydom, was sitting on death row in Pretoria for a shooting spree he conducted in full uniform with his service sidearm that claimed seven African lives and wounded fifteen more on November 15, the previous year. He claimed to be the leader of the White Wolves, but that turned out to be a figment of his imagination. He was sentenced to death but escaped the noose as the National Party Government under F. W. de Klerk had suspended all executions. He was released in 1992 as one of 150 political prisoners and granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the democratic elections in 1994.
We posted a R10,000 reward for information about Gladys’ death. The police asked us if we or Gladys had any enemies. We didn’t, at least none that we knew of, but we told the police of an incident a couple of weeks before when a car swerved toward a black pedestrian and then drove away at high speed.
The tire tracks swerving toward Gladys, who had been on the opposite side of the road, were as clear as daylight. The car had to have been traveling at high speed because Gladys was killed instantly.
Gladys had been with us for twenty-one years and was the mother of four children. We went to her funeral and it was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Under the hot sun, in the gentle red dust, the deep, pungent home-smell of Africa all around us, there were 300 to 400 mourners singing of their love for Gladys and for mankind as if it was the total spirit of Africa given voice. That day, as the tears ran freely down my face, I celebrated that I too was an African, that only here amid tragedy, could I feel such a powerful, unbreakable bond.
Four days later a 32-year-old police sergeant approached his station commander and confessed he had been driving the car. Almost a year later Jacobus Michael Charles Andrews appeared in the Wynberg Court on a charge of culpable homicide, alternatively reckless driving. In October, he was convicted of culpable homicide and fined R1,000 or twelve months’ jail. Nothing would bring Gladys back; we did what we could for her children who were all adults, but his sentence was only a slap on the wrist.
We were very sad and very angry.
•••
After the euphoria of the general elections on April 27, 1994, that swept the African National Congress into power, it was as if the genie had been let out of the bottle. There were rampant expectations, an economy in decline and freebooters on the side turning a profit at every corner through state tenders and the abuse of state resources. The most frightening thing though was the criminal violence—fed by the flames of disillusion, especially among African youth. At one stage, there was a real fear that South Africa could become like Lebanon and those who were able to would simply leave the country and settle elsewhere. It was made worse, paradoxically, by the new adherence to the doctrine of human rights. The police were virtually powerless, and the courts had been rendered impotent to hand down sentences of any meaningful deterrence. I have always believed that to survive we must have laws and morality. I’m not a great practicing Christian, but religion has a very strong place in the formation of our society because it teaches people ethics. We are spoiling whole generations of people now. You don’t have to work, you can claim benefits; if you want to write obscenities on the walls and go on the soccer field and swear your head off, you’re a hero. Human rights, while in principle absolutely essential and admirable—and I’m an unwavering supporter—can be abused and criminals can go free if you have a good lawyer, enough money and know the right people.
The situation though wasn’t bad enough for us to leave South Africa forever; that would only happen if the country became ungovernable, ruled by a crazy racist in an environment where I felt physically threatened—in other words in a situation like that in countries to the north of us, in particular Zimbabwe under the despot Robert Mugabe. I have witnessed inhumanity which changed my attitude when in Rhodesia during UDI, specifically that those systems which had been fine in Victorian times were now long past their sell-by date.
I knew that apartheid was such an iniquitous doctrine and 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. I was walking down Muizenberg beach in Cape Town after apartheid ended and a fellow came up to me and said, in an Afrikaans accent: “I know you.” I replied, “Have we met?” and he said, “Ach, no, we haven’t met, but I worked for BOSS and for a year I had to sit and listen to you on the telephone. Old Wilbur, you boring!”
I said to him, “Well whatever you do, please don’t tell my readers!”
Whenever I returned to South Africa from my long researches, it was always with excitement mixed with trepidation because of the violence and the crime. After the ANC came to power, we had forty-eight years to catch up with in six months and a lot of people had been left behind. It was OK to be free, but freedom meant respecting others and their property. I had a man who walked around my Cape Town house with a dog, and I had security fencing, but I was most concerned for the lives of the people who worked for me. They were the ones at risk. I could protect myself but they were vulnerable.
There were two very positive changes for me when apartheid ended, and they both involved Nelson Mandela. South Africa’s acceptance into the global community thanks to the international reputation of Madiba meant that my books were now selling well in the US, for the first time ever exceeding the sales in the UK, which had always been the benchmark. In fact, US tourists visiting in huge numbers to Cape Town would often ask where I lived and the tour guide would drive them up to Bishopscourt. One day, I was in my oldest clothes with a hat over my eyes when a luxury bus pulled up.
“Do you know where Wilbur Smith lives?” one of the riders asked.
I said, “No, but Dr. Chris Barnard, the world-famous heart transplant surgeon, lives just down the road,” and off they went. I valued my own privacy a lot more than I valued Chris’s.
The second was the holding of the rugby world cup in South Africa in 1995. The South African Rugby Board had won the rights to host what would only be the third ever world cup, although it was the first for our national team, the Springboks, because they had been excluded from the first two because of apartheid. It was Mandela who won the game—and the country—for us, in one of the most incredible acts of reconciliation ever witnessed. It was so great that a book was written about him and the rugby world cup by journalist John Carlin, called Playing the Enemy. Clint Eastwood subsequently made a film Invictus, with Matt Damon as Bok captain Francois Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as Mandela.
Nelson Mandela remains my hero to this day. I had the privilege of shaking his hand and, having grown up and lived my entire life in Africa, understand the true greatness of his achievement. I am one of those South Africans who worried what the shape and face of my own country and indeed the continent would become when he died. Sometimes, I thought, self-styled philanthropists like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and pop stars Bono and Bob Geldof were doing more harm than good by wanting to treat the symptoms and not the causes of the problems in the continent. One of these was their insistence on writing off international loans, which to my mind was like rewarding bad governance and unaccountability. It wasn’t about them not understanding the African mind, but rather that they ignored the reality of the African concept of government. The whole structure was predicated on tyranny, controlled by one person, from Shaka in KwaZulu Natal to Mzilikazi in what became Zimbabwe. They committed terrible atrocities to consolidate and stay in power—a pattern that had continued with terrible consequences in modern Africa, such as when Mugabe put down the Matabele dissent using his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade. Even Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had resorted to force when his people were starving. And then there were the kleptocracies of the Central African Republic and Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) where money that was supposed to help the people was shamelessly looted and deposited off shore, gratefully received by unscrupulous Swiss bankers.
The dictators don’t accept the idea of using money to generate more wealth for the country. They either spend it, or steal it—and then when the country can’t repay the billions they have been loaned, the West will be asked to write off the debt and advance another tranche.
The dictators then think, “Oh boy, we’re on a good wicket here! We’ll never have to pay anything back. When is our next gift coming?” This isn’t about black or white. It’s human nature.
South Africa’s own problems were similar yet nuanced: the apartheid government had impoverished all black South Africans, and so they had nothing to lose. It didn’t take long, much like post-perestroika Russia, for some of the better-known erstwhile Marxist freedom fighters to metamorphose almost overnight into big time capitalists and tycoons. We even had a phrase for it in South Africa, the “gravy train,” or the propensity of activists to lose their principles for the allure of directorships, a practice only exceeded by another phenomenon—not exclusive to South Africa either—of tenderpreneurs: people who have become obscenely wealthy by using their political connections to wangle state jobs and contracts.
Which is just another reason why Nelson Mandela was so special. We had all watched with trepidation and more than a little sadness as he began his slow, inexorable decline. The attention to his series of health scares was nothing less than ghoulish, but that was what happens when you see a great man going. When he died on December 5, 2013, I wrote: “An African giant has fallen, but the legend that was Madiba will echo down the centuries.” I don’t believe I will be proved wrong on that. The entire country went into mourning, with scenes that hadn’t been witnessed since the country first went to the polls as one on April 27, 1994. I don’t believe we will ever see that kind of national kinship again, especially not in my lifetime. It’s a pity, but an incredible gift to have lived through a period which traversed Nelson Mandela standing in the dock under a possible death sentence on terrorism charges, being banished for the better part of his adult life to a rocky island in the middle of Table Bay, and then emerging twenty-seven years later to pull a fractured country together—and then stand down as he had promised after only a single term in office.
It was unprecedented in the ways of Africa, and nigh-on unheard of internationally. We were poorer for his passing, but far richer for having had the privilege of knowing him.
•••
Perhaps because of its subject matter, and how closely it hewed to the world falling to pieces around me, Rage had been my most difficult novel to write. Yet, somehow, it had worked—and readers fell in love. The novel sold almost a million copies in 1988, and was an international bestseller. It also broke the world record for the longest ever South African novel, with the paperback weighing in at 626 pages, breaking the previous record holder—Madge Swindell’s 1983 novel Summer Harvest—by 26 pages.
The stigma of South Africa’s apartheid regime had dogged me my entire career. As Charles Pick used to say, it was one of the reasons my novels had not taken off in the United States as quickly as they had in the rest of the world. For Americans, everything that came out of South Africa was damaged by association with the political regime. It was a similar story in other parts of the world. On a publicity tour in New Zealand, I was accosted by fourteen scruffy men from HART—the “Halt All Racist Tours” movement. They were the same mob who had successfully disrupted the South African Springbok rugby tour in 1981, flour bombing a rugby ground and almost inciting an all-out civil war between All Black rugby fans there to see a contest between the two greatest rugby playing countries in the world, and protestors who wanted to see the end of apartheid. They wanted to present me with their “Racist of the Year” award, which I declined with thanks. Clearly, they hadn’t read anything I had ever written. The fact that I was white and South African was enough for them to denounce me. Later, when I was questioned on New Zealand television’s News Hour, I counterattacked by accusing HART itself of blatant racism—the labeling of me, just because I was white. It seemed they thrived on racial conflict—without it, they wouldn’t exist. My books, I said, had always been anti-racist—in fact, my early books had been banned because of friendships and sexual relationships that crossed the color bar. One thing is certain: I abhor racism, and I always will.
Stories moved me and inspired me—since my childhood—and the idea that they should aspire to do more than that had never really occurred to me, or, if it had, I never truly entertained it. Rage and Golden Fox, however, became the focus of the perennial debate between popular and literary writing in the most unexpected way.
In 1991, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was involved in the periphery of the award after a fan, Andrew Kenny, wrote to a Johannesburg newspaper, the Star, asking why I hadn’t been considered by the Swedish committee. I had never met Kenny before, but his opinion seemed to strike a chord with a great many readers, and soon letters to the editor flooded in, reflecting both sides of the debate. Kenny’s argument was that, compared to the number of people who read Nobel laureates like Gordimer, my novels—and others like them—had an immense reach, one that could influence many more people and contribute to their understanding of the modern world. Far from being pure escapist fun, Kenny argued, books like mine were the only ones that could hope to affect the way we lived our lives. Like many critics before, Kenny didn’t hold back on what he thought were my shortcomings—my books, he said, were unsubtle, my dialogue stilted, my people caricatures; my stories were filled with unbelievable sex and far-too-believable violence. Yet, if he had to choose one book to explain South African politics to a foreigner, he would unhesitatingly choose Rage.
Other letter writers added their voices to the chorus, with one even suggesting a special South African prize for popular fiction to recognize me and pacify Kenny. It was an unusual and unsolicited affirmation. I had never set out to write high literature—not since The Gods First Make Mad had I made that mistake—but I enjoyed the idea that my characters and stories could make a difference to people’s lives. It was all much ado about nothing, and I found it amusing, and gratifying for showing me what incredible fans I have. I have always tried to ignore critics. In the early days, it had been terrible when they hated my novels—and the idea that they were the arbiters of good taste was always galling to me—but now it didn’t matter. I was no longer a new writer. Whatever the critics thought, my readers were not going away. They are the people who buy my books, read them, and tell their friends all about them. They are the only ones I think of whenever I pick up my pen.
Sometimes fellow authors, especially the literary types, turn puce at the thought of my popularity. I have always thought that we should be standing together—the literary writers and all the other authors—but instead they deride us for being “airport writers,” and sneer at our commercial success.
Yet, William Shakespeare was a popular writer in his day. Perhaps he would be surprised to know about the lasting place he has in English literature. His audiences at the Globe were made up of the working masses; this was a place that Londoners could come to laugh at the ribald Falstaff, and not necessarily gape in awe at the beauty and imagery of the language. Shakespeare’s crowds wanted to see the story at the beating heart of the play. Centuries later, the same was true of Charles Dickens, one of the greatest storytellers in the English language. As Andrew Kenny had said, it is the popular author who has the chance to really touch hearts and minds.
I had a fan in the highest office of the land: former president F. W. de Klerk, the man who eventually freed Nelson Mandela, unbanned the ANC and set South Africa on the path to democracy. I first met him in 1995, after he had stepped down as deputy president in the new government of national unity, and we chatted for some time. He took me to task for Rage and my portrayal of Manfred De La Rey, who he recognized as being inspired by B. J. Vorster, the prime minister interned during the Second World War for his membership of the Ossewa Brandwag, the right wing pro-Nazi militia. Many years later, when I met F. W. again at Alfred Mosimann’s private dining club in London, I greeted him heartily. “Hello, F. W.!” I exclaimed, and he looked up and said, “Hello, old Wilbur, it’s good to see you again.” I was flattered that he’d remembered me.
On one occasion, I went up to the north of England to visit an independent bookshop which, although small, had been selling a lot of my books. Halfway through the afternoon, the owner, a lady, came up to me and said, “There’s a retired colonel who lives in the village and he relies on me to pick him four books a month to send to him. I think it would be a lovely touch if you could inscribe a copy for him and I’ll send him one of yours. His name’s Colonel Bailey . . .”
“Sure,” I said.
I duly inscribed the flyleaf, “To Colonel Bailey, with best wishes, Wilbur Smith.” And that was the end of the story—or so I thought. A year later, I popped into the same shop for a cup of tea and a chat with the owner. “You’ll never believe what happened with that book you signed for Colonel Bailey,” she said.
“Oh yes, what was that?”
“It came back the next day, with a note from him, saying, ‘Dear Mrs. Smith, I’ve been dealing with you for fifteen years and this is the first time you have ever sent me a spoiled copy. Please take this book back and send me a clean copy.’”
I collapsed in laughter. So much for the allure of my signature.
Sometime later, I had the opposite experience while on a flight from New York to London, after a fishing trip in Alaska. I had a proof copy of my latest book and was going through it, correcting typos, when the fellow sitting next to me leaned over.
“I see you’re reading Wilbur Smith,” he said.
I nodded.
“Tell me honestly, what do you think of him as a writer?”
I feigned deep thought for a moment and then said, “Well, I think he’s a fine writer. I’d place him alongside Hemingway and John Steinbeck.”
My neighbor warmed visibly and leaned in closer. “I know him,” he beamed. “I know Wilbur Smith . . . he’s a close friend of mine.”
“No, really!” I said, never having met this gentleman before.
“Yes,” he went on. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know the character of Sean Courtney, the hero of When the Lion Feeds?”
I played along. “Do I know him? Of course, he’s one of my favorites.”
“Well,” said my newfound friend. “Wilbur based him on my life!”
“No!” I said, with just the right amount of incredulity.
“Yes,” said the man. “I’ll tell you what, if you give me your card, I’ll go to Wilbur and get him to send you a signed photograph of himself. We’re so close, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”
So I gave him my business card, which he pocketed without a glance. I haven’t heard from him since.
•••
Leopard Rock: even now, these two words return me to the perfection of a night obliterated by stars.
In our old Rhodesian-style farmhouse, reminiscent of my childhood home, I lay awake, listening to the animal sounds. Intermittently, I slept, only to be woken by the bark of a kudu, or roused, in the morning, by the beauty of birdsong around the ranch house windows. At Leopard Rock, I was in practice a game farmer—doing game counts, checking populations and, if necessary, arranging for the extra numbers to be sold at auction for transfer to other farms. But the recompense was huge. In the morning, the blare of city life long forgotten in the stillness of the wild, I would go out into the veld. Sometimes I would spot the occasional leopard, or sit quietly and watch the herds interact. I particularly enjoyed observing them after the ewes had lambed, and the cows calved, to see how the little ones adapted to their new environment. There is no better feeling in the world than seeing a young animal take its first steps and knowing that the land around them, the only world they will ever know, is safe and free because you have made it that way.
The sole purpose of Leopard Rock was to preserve the game I had been systematically introducing: the springbok, kudu, eland and impala, all of them imported from game farmers and released to live wild and give rise to greater herds. Our staff lived on the farm, maintained the land, and, wherever possible, protected the game from poachers, as well as from the leopards who sometimes wandered through. When we first founded the farm, some of the locals were living in very poor conditions, almost in cattle stalls, and our immediate order of business was to build proper houses, install hot and cold running water, electricity and television. We made sure everyone had access to medical checkups each year, enlisted the staff in pension schemes and helped their children enroll in school. Every Christmas, the staff and their families would gather at the farm house to share gifts and party together, long into the night.
I’d discovered that Leopard Rock was not only a place where I would conserve animals, it was a way of helping the local African people as well. It gave me great pleasure to be the laird of the estate—or, as they would say in central and East Africa, “Bwana”—but being laird came with responsibilities. Once, I was in the middle of an interview when the phone rang. The farm manager was frantic on the other end of the line. One of our laborers had driven his tractor through the electric cables and severed power to the whole of Leopard Rock. Calamities like these would often pluck me out of the isolated world of writing, but what Leopard Rock took from me, it gave back in abundance.