From colonial northern Zululand to guerrilla warfare in the Gona re Zhou of Rhodesia—a vast panorama of southern Africa

West of the Moon - A Game Ranger at War is a sweeping canvas that evokes a bygone era of the 1940s’ colonial Natal through to the cruel intensity of the ‘Bush War’ that ravaged Rhodesia in the 1970s. The book is in two distinct parts - Part 1 chronicles the author’s earlier years - an idyllic childhood spent roaming and hunting among the empty, rolling hills of northern Zululand; of the inaccessible St Lucia waterway; the nostalgia of yellow fever trees; of building railway bridges into the wild interior; of colonial scallywags and native witchcraft; of sugar estates and poaching; of shipwrecks and the sweaty cantinas and backstreets of Lourenço Marques - a time that slipped away.

Part 2 recounts the author’s move north across the Limpopo where his love of adventure, hunting and the bushveld lead him to Rhodesia. He becomes a game ranger, dealing with ‘problem animals’ in the farming areas and the escalating terrorist war in the Gona re Zhou National Park in the beleaguered south-eastern Lowveld of the country. Trying to care for an environment and the animals that depend upon it, while the people around commit barbaric acts in the name of political ideology, brutally awakens the author to the reality of the disintegration of an organized colonial subcontinent.

§ Back to list