Wilbur Smith
I’m currently reading my second Wilbur Smith novel, called Rage. It’s the third book in the “Courtneys in Africa” series and follows Power of the Sword, which I finished a few weeks ago.
Smith tells a great yarn from the perspective of several contrasting characters. The lives of these characters intersect, but they are vastly different in many ways.
He conveys the fascinating modern history of Southern Africa through the eyes of people representing key elements in that complicated society.
Power of the Sword traces the period from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second.
South Africa during that time came to grips with its union of the two British colonies (Cape and Natal) with the old Boer republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State).
There was deep mistrust between the English and Afrikaners following the Anglo South African War and Prime Minister Jan Smuts was considered to have betrayed his Afrikaner people by forging a strong alliance with Britain.
There was a failed attempt by militant Afrikaners to support the Kaiser in the First World War and one of Smith’s characters, Lothar De La Ray, fights against Smuts’ Army in the German cause.
His life entwines with Centaine Courtney when he rescues her in the Kalahari Desert and fathers her second child, who she abandons and Lothar raises (Manfred).
That meeting was the subject of the first book in the series, which I haven’t yet read.
Lothar and Centaine go their separate ways. She founds a diamond mine and becomes one of the richest people in Africa, surviving the Great Depression with her wealth intact.
Lothar borrows from her to open a fish factory at Walvis Bay, but the Depression sends him under, so to speak, and Centaine calls in the loan.
With smouldering resentment, Lothar and Manfred survive in shanty towns with an Ovambo native friend, Hendrik. They escape a typhoid outbreak, taking with them an orphan Afrikaner girl, Sarie.
Lothar plots revenge on Centaine and plans a diamond robbery with his old Commando colleagues. It’s bungled and he’s apprehended after a shoot-out on a kopje in the desert, but only after Manfred and Hendrik get away with some of the loot.
Lothar was arrested by the Administrator of South West Africa (Namibia), Blaine Malcolmess, who becomes Centaine’s lover. They later marry after Blaine’s wife dies.
Meanwhile, Centaine’s first son Sharsa Courtney follows her ruthless example and becomes a successful politician and businessman.
The son that Centaine abandoned to Lothar, Manfred De La Ray, grows in his father’s image as a bastion of hardline Afrikaner society, raised by a preacher while his father rots in jail.
In Rage, these two men come together in the National Party Cabinet as Government Ministers. Ironically, Sharsa foiled an attempt by Manfred to assassinate Jan Smuts during the Second World War, without knowing his identity.
The character of Hendrik’s brother Moses Gama, who Sharsa met working on the family diamond mine in Power of the Sword, develops in Rage as he becomes a radical leader in the black nationalist movement.
Rage has a greater emphasis on black characters, tracing the history of South Africa through the 1950s and 60s as apartheid was formally established.
There’s a coming together of the Afrikaner and English elements of white society, especially after Britain was seen to have abandoned her former colony and dominion through Harold McMillan’s “winds of change” speech to the South African Parliament.
That’s where I’m up to now, seeing the half-brothers Manfred and Sharsa come closer through mutual necessity. Manfred knows about the fraternal relationship, but Sharsa doesn’t.
Their own sons are developing as characters in the novel and, I assume, are featured in the next instalment.
I like the fact that Smith doesn’t moralise or lecture. He simply tells the story and lets readers draw their own conclusions.
He understands that each character, representing elements of society, believes they are right. The Afrikaners thought apartheid was a reasonable policy. The English came to accept it and, of course, the blacks resented it.
Smith was born in Central Africa and has a deep empathy with the continent. He tells a great story and I’m thoroughly enjoying his work.
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