Non-fiction / Personal Memoir
In this Gerald Durrell-meets-Graham Greene account the author examines the accident of his birth to an English father and a South African mother in the booming postwar colony of Southern Rhodesia.
La belle époque Rhodesienne ends abruptly when Prime Minister Ian Smith declares unilateral independence from Britain in 1965, but life in Midvale Road, on the outskirts of the capital, Salisbury, ticks on, and by, as it always has, and it is here, between 1957 and 1968, that the wind of change gusts up the lane, and through the boy.
Against the backdrop of the embryonic bush war, apartheid, Vietnam, the civil rights movement and crushing sanctions, the boy grows up, with purple bauhinia blossom underfoot and the fragrance of unrest in the air.
A Colonial Boy tracks the formative years of a child who is a keen observer of life and takes us on a wonderful journey that is at once innocent and ugly, funny and tragic, but always honest.
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