BOOK REVIEWS .121Rolin's Rhodesia By H. Rolin translated by D. Kirkwood. Bulawayo, Booksof Rhodesia, 1978, 304pp., illustrated, ZR$17,00.A Right to Be Proud By A. P. Di Perna. Bulawayo, Books of Rhodesia, 1979,245pp., illustrated, ZR$13,90.These two works are part of a well known series of reprints but they bothrepresent new departures for the publisher. The former of the two books isthe first translation in the series and the latter is a reprint only in the sensethat it is an updated and extended version of a Ph.D. thesis only a few yearsold.Specialists in the early history of European rule in Southern Rhodesiahave long known, and profited from, Rolin's Les Lois et Vadministration dela Rhodesie (Brussels, E. Bruylant, 1913); this translation into English willnow make this work available to a wider reading public. The book is largelya factual description of the way in which the British South Africa Companygoverned its territory south of the Zambezi, but it also has useful materialon the organization of land settlement and mining. It is in effect, the nearestwe have to a constitutional history of the B.S.A. Company, and it is a pity thatan analytical introduction was not provided.Di Perna's book is essentially an explanation of the reasons why SouthernRhodesia opted to end Company rule and become self-governing rather thana part of the Union of South Africa. The short answer of the author is thata Rhodesian nationalism had developedŠand that it is only ignorance of thatfactor that has made Britain and the world underestimate Rhodesian deter-mination since 1962. While there is some truth in this line of argument, itgreatly oversimplifies the complexities of the 1922 Referendum and noaccount has been taken of considerable research, notably by Mrs Elaine Lee,a doctoral student of this University, much of which has been published.Whatever criticisms may be made of these two books, however, it isimportant to welcome these new ventures by the publisher in making suchworks accessible to the reading public and students of Zimbabwe Rhodesia.R.S.R.The Yellow Mountain By L. Burton. Salisbury, Regal Publishers, 1976,293pp., ZR$7,50.Spotted Soldiers By C. E. Dibb. Salisbury, Leo Publications, 1978, 160pp.,ZR$4,80.Operation Zambezi : The Raid into Zambia By P. Armstrong. Salisbury,Welston Press, 1979, 256 pp., ZR$2,75.Ten years ago after ZAPU guerillas had clashed with security forces in theWankie district several authors used the incident as a basis for novels aboutan imaginary war in Rhodesia. Wilbur Smith's The Sunbird, David Chap-man's The Infiltrators and Lawrence van der Post's two novels A Far-offPlace and A Story like the Wind all give a fictional rendering to that earlyincursion and all managed to invest it with a curious quality of fantasy.That is nothing new. Long after the armed resistence to the occupation ofT122 BOOK REVIEWSRhodesia had faded into history, Rhodesian novelists had continued to titil-late their readers with stirrings in the Reserves. What is remarkable was thatafter the incident in which members of the security forces were killed and Ithe organization and tenacity of the newly militant nationalist groups had jbecome obvious, novelists seemed incapable of throwing off the habit of Iseventy years: African objections to White rule could still be stylized as the {eccentricities of the primitive man or be used to add additional colour to the ]novelists' depiction of the mystery and romance of Africa.Ten years later that comfortable distancing of the significace of such ;events is no longer possible. No one, Black or White, is unaffected by thewar. Refugees in their hundreds of thousands have flocked to the towns and [cities. The dreary toll of human life has become a part of our consciousness.We live, as the Catholic bishops recently said, in a 'tormented land'. 'It is not surprising then that the latest novels show an immediacy intheir treatment of the war that was absent in novels published even threeor four years ago. The daily tensions of farm life in Chipinga are described ?with a precision in C. E. Dibb's Spotted Soldiers that has not been managed ,,in any previous novel and she does not attempt to make the war a passing ,albeit rather unpleasant phase in the life of the country. Peter Armstrong's \Operation Zambezi conveys something of the way in which the war has come Ito dominate our lives if only by permeating even the sub-plots that clutter ihis narrative with aspects of the war not dealt with in the reconstruction ofthe October 1978 raids into Zambia which are the novel's principal concern. )Even Lloyd Burton's The Yellow Mountain, a celebration of White Rhode- Ł>sian superiorly against all comers, manages to become more sombrely realis- 1tic in the chapters actually set in Rhodesia.But having made that point one still notes with surprise how shallowis the insight of all three novels into what the war is all about. In Spotted >Soldiers this is perhaps defensible. The novel had its genesis as a serial inthe South African magazine Fair Lady and is at least as unpretentious as that 'origin suggests. Felicity Maclntyre, its widowed heroine, who is determined ,to continue to run her coffee plantation despite the hostility of her neigh-bours and the scepticism of the army, is characterized with some skill and Vshe manages to achieve an individuality not normally associated with women's Imagazine serials. Her love of the farm is justified by the occasionally adeptdescription of Gazaland scenery, although these are sometimes damaged byDibb's adjective-laden prose. The plot is similar to Jeffery Farnol's TheMoney Moon, a popular Edwardian romance and no doubt hundreds of others >like it, only here the neighbour who wants both Felicity and her land is arather simple-minded AfrikanerŠ he says 'No, my proud beauty ... Don't "r*try to fight me' but the book is not generally written as badly as thatŠand ithe stranger coming fortuitously into her life is Rod Napier, an attorney and [Captain with the Territorial Army. In short, it is the stuff that women'smagazines serials are made of except Gazaland today does enforce a realismof detail on that hackneyed plot. It is hard to be completely fatuous whenthe machinery of your novel includes F.N.S, Agric-Alerts, ambushes, home-stead attacks and the tired faces of men fighting an apparently endless war. ''"Only when Dibbs describes a recruiting incident does she fall back on thatcurious propaganda cliche that children can be lured from schools only with \promises of scholarships. It is inconceivable that a sixteen-year old lad inGazaland would be unaware of why he was being invited by an armed manto cross the border into Mozambique. But that and a nganga smelling outdissidents in a camp at Espungabera can be balanced against a compassionateBOOK REVIEWS 123account of one of the boys, Luka, returning to see his mother where a finetenderness of detail allows some humanity to the boy even while acknow-ledging that he has been involved in acts of brutality in the border area. InLuka's sudden doubts about the justness of his cause and Sonny vanNiekerk's dealing with the guerillas in order to drive Felicity into his clutchesDibbs is attempting to describe a situation worthy of her title. Shakespeareunderstood that in war the most spotless cause cannot rely solely on 'unspottedsoldiers'. Bombarded as we have been for so many years by propaganda thatmakes one side wholly good, the other wholly evil, one can only be gratefulfor the implications of the novel's epigraph.Altogether a different sort of novel is The Yellow Mountain. LloydBurton came to Rhodesia only in 1972Šthe year the war started in earnestŠand the love his Rhodesian characters feel for the land is asserted ratherthan demonstrated. Whereas one has no doubt why Felicity Maclntyre isfighting to retain her land, the Cochrane family of Burton's novel are offeredas typesŠthey have already fled Kenya because of Mau Mau and are nowfaced with another insurgency threat in their adopted land. They are Whites atthe mercy of a turbulent continent. In their determination, however, that theflight from Kenya will not be repeated they are given a stature that makesthem at once incredible as characters and at the same time worthy participantsin a more or less incredible series of events.A German officer, Krans, discovered oil while drilling for water in theSahara during the Second World War; he also captured a huge consignmentof gold sent by British Intelligence to win the allegiance of desert nomads.The British Treasury is after the gold; an American oil company after the oil;the local corrupt police officer also wants the gold and the situation is furthercomplicated by the intelligence officers of an Eastern-block country becominginvolved. An even greater complication is that both gold and the maps of thearea where the oil strike was made are hidden in a booby-trapped fort, JebalSafraa, the yellow mountain of the title, which is used as a training centrefor a Zimbabwean guerrilla group.With that sort of opposition any sensible Rhodesian might be expectedto call it a day but the Rhodesians of The Yellow Mountain are not so pusil-lanimous. Cochrane, his daughter and a young patrol officer from Beit Bridgehelped by Krans manage to obtain and escape with both gold and maps.What emerges from the plot then is that Rhodesians can take on representa-tives of most of the world and by sheer force of will and cunning emergevictorious. It is for some White Rhodesians a comforting fantasyŠ theBritish are shown to be peculiarly incompetent and spitefulŠbut the triump-hant activities at Jebal Safraa necessarily contrast with the beleaguredhomestead of Cochrane's adopted son and the likelihood that his farm willbe abandoned after he has been paralysed during an attack on the house.The object of getting the gold and selling the oil maps to the Americansis to provide a laser beam defence system along the Mocambique borderŠCochrane's brain-child. There is a sad inconsistency between this desperateattempt to keep track of incursionsŠwithout the gold from Jebal Safraathere would not be enough money to pay for these installationsŠand theeasy heroic role of Rhodesians in the Saharan town. Whereas in earlier novelsthe war was a fantasy and White Rhodesia's victory a certainty, in theselater novels ways of ending the war become increasingly far-fetched.This is confirmed by the latest novel about the war, Peter Armstrong'sOperation Zambezi. Here, a temporary respite to Rhodesia's problems is124 BOOK REVIEWSprovided by the capture of the Soviet Ambassador to Zambia. He is brain-washed into supporting ZANLA and withdrawing support from ZPRA. Quitewhy the Rhodesian war effort should benefit from Cuban soldiers beingshipped to Mocambique and a cargo of arms being sent directly to RobertMugabe is not made clear except in the rather unconvincing observation:' "Any confusion in the unholy alliance which is working against us can onlybe of benefit, even if it only lasts for a few days" '. It is indicative of thedesperateness with which the novelists are forced to view the situation thathope of winning the war should be made to hang on such slender threads.Another sub-plot charts an attempt to assassinate Joshua Nkomo by a manwhose girl-friend had been murdered in the Viscount disaster of September1978, although there is no suggestion that anything would have been achievedhad such an attempt succeeded. In the descriptions of Spark's obsessionalhatred of Nkomo and his determination to avenge his girl-friend's murderArmstrong seems to be working out a fantasy with which many WhiteRhodesians would be able to identify.The main concern of the book is with the Rhodesian raids into Zambiawhich are described with competent reportage, although how accurate theyare in fact it is impossible to know. What is interesting is to speculate whyArmstrong felt it necessary to pad out these accounts with his improbablesub-plots.The raids were, in terms of what they set out to do, successful and musthave demanded courage and dedication from those who took part. Despitethis even when the book was being written the war continued to escalate.Nothing had changed. Is that not the reason why novelists like Armstrongcannot rest with realistic accounts of the conduct of the war? To the novel-ists ten years ago the idea that a large-scale war could develop seemedfantastic; to the contemporary novelist the war is only too real. They haveto allow their fictions to lapse into fantasy for only in fantasy is there anysort of comfort.University of Rhodesia A. J. CHENNEIXSProminent Rhodesian Personalities 1978 Edited by L. Hewitt. Salisbury,Cover Publicity Services, 1978, 238pp., illustrated, no price indicated.This work is a new version of Prominent African Personalities of Rhodesia(reviewed, ante (1978), VI, 221), expanded by the inclusion of some 60more Africans and about 140 Europeans. Although of some use in respectof the personalities included, the coverage is too inconsistent and scrappyto make it a valuable work of reference.R.S.R.