It’s been fifty one years since I dropped out of university in Durban on the east coast of South Africa, to go and find out about life. Dropped out is probably egging it a bit. I didn’t get much past freshers’ week. Adventure, experience, that’s what I needed, I decided, to qualify me for my intended career as a journalist.
This isn’t going the way I intended. When I sat down to write this blog, I had recited Dylan Thomas’ opening to “Under Milk Wood”; ‘To begin at the beginning’, over and over, intent on starting there. But it was the beginning of what (?), the beginning of where (?) that made me step off the path I had drawn in my mind, and look in both directions, and then to face back, looking into the spaces, the places I went through to get here.
There are too many beginnings, you see? It’s been snakes and ladders; climb up a ladder, fall down a snake and start again. So let’s find a point that we can call a beginning and start from there.
I’ll take November 1974, and I’ve just turned nineteen. It’s hot and humid and my not yet broken in boots are chafing the hell out of my feet. Inspector Pearce, his voice like gravel and Scotch points to an African Gothic building and rasps out, ‘That’s the Regimental Chapel. If you drop in the sh*t it’s where we marry you – If you drop deeper in the sh*t, it’s where we bury you. I think, ‘Oh My God, what have I done?’ I’m a week into training in the British South Africa Police, which is neither British nor South African. I’m in what was then called Rhodesia in the first week of training in this paramilitary police force. For the first six weeks I was sure I was going to desert, but, and this is one of the first lessons they taught me; normalcy shifts. Later it dawned upon me that the same is true of identity, shifting as you move through space and circumstance. I should have known this from my teens in South Africa during the years of apartheid, when I read Doris Lessing and Alan Paton but didn’t register that for the black people I met on a daily basis, a normal day was not a nice day, that their normal was not my normal.
But that’s an issue for another blog. I’m trying to give you the foundation for the book I’ve just written, and the one written twenty three years ago, “Landsong” for which “Beyond The Fever Trees”, its original working title quite different, was meant to be a sequel.
Readers have described “Beyond The Fever Trees” as raw, gritty and compelling. I’ve tried to write about war as it is, and about how people caught up in conflict, whether as combatants, onlookers or victims, try to respond and survive. I’ve tried to resist the temptation to moralise, philosophise and pontificate. I’ll let you be the judge.
My next projects will also be set in Africa, drawing on experiences in diplomatic security. I worked in Africa for about ten years from twenty fifteen to twenty four, starting with Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic, and ending with the aftermath of the military coup in Niger. Hopefully the picture I have attached will convey something of the human condition in that fragile continent.
You can order it from O’Mahony’s booksellers here: https://www.omahonys.ie/beyond-the-fever-trees-p-10657730.html
