Vic, the volunteer worker in Vinnies who looks after their second-hand book section, always keeps some books that he thinks may interest me. Yesterday he surprised me with a whole box full of Wilbur Smith's. "I thought you may be interested since you lived in Africa", he said.
Wilbur Smith may be a good writer, and I have read two or three of his earlier oeuvre, but my Wilbur-Smith days were over when I realised that he took those two or three early bestsellers and threw them into a meat grinder hoping more magical sausages would emerge. Of course, more sausages did come out but they were neither magical nor digestible.
If I want to read about Africa, and about the South African apartheid, but in particular about the Kalahari and its bushmen, I go to Laurens van der Post, a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist, who wrote well over a dozen books on Southern Africa, including "The Lost World of the Kalahari" which was also made into a six-part TV series.
The also well-known movie "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence" is based on his book "The Seed and the Sower" which describes his army service when, as Japanese forces invaded South East Asia, he was transferred to Allied forces in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) because of his Dutch language skills. On 20 April 1942, he surrendered to the Japanese and was taken to prison camps, first at Sukabumi and then to Bandung.
He died on 15 December 1996, aged 90, in London, England, and is buried in Philippolis in the Free State province of South Africa.
