Every book has a cover. ‘When Hunter Becomes The Hunted’ is the literary equivalent of an Undercurrent Affairs 007 operating system, which ensures that Undercurrent collars match cuffs, and pages match posts. Not many literary platforms have their own bespoke 007 OS, a non-fiction history genre built around measures with unshakeable, hypocrisy busting foundations like relativity and reciprocity.
EXCERPTS
Crocodile Farm
After 3/4 of a bottle of Red Label, and interpreting Ed’s silence like me, Brian must have come to the conclusion words were becoming about as useless a means of communication between us as they had been between Mugabe, Carrington, Nkomo and Soames during the Lancaster House shenanigans. He switched to an analogy that was…
The Courage Of Ian Smith
In 1982, Smith visited America and Britain, and told reporters that Mugabe was turning to totalitarianism. For some reason, Mugabe later went on to choose the Marxist Leninist flavour preferred by Nkomo’s ZAPU, over ZANU’s Chairman Mao Chinese flavour, perhaps to sideline Nkomo. That was when he sent his Matabeleland Massacre brigade to North Korea…
Motorbike Trip To Matopos Hills
The door to door mishap coincided with the timely return of another good Cargilfield friend, Ed Douglas-Miller, from a stint working on a game farm with the well-known conservationist Clive Walker. Ed was the source of the flawed intel that had landed me in trouble at Jan Smuts; he had arrived in South Africa a…
Rhodes, Slavery And Diamonds
The discovery of diamonds on the border of the Orange Free State opened up the interior to prospectors from abroad, many of them British. The Boers had no alternative, they had neither the skills nor resources to control the new market, and before long were outnumbered by the rapid influx of immigrants, or uitlanders, which…