Following two and a half years of misadventure in rich, white-dominated Southern Rhodesia (now impoverished, African-controlled Zimbabwe).
At the age of nineteen, having travelled 8,000 miles by liner and train from Britain, the author became a technician in the Rhodesian Roads Department but after six months he escaped his impending confinement in a road construction gang caravan containing a bedsit-cum-laboratory!
Transferring to a remote research farm in the hot, dry Lowveld; he lived in a bungalow for two years, shared with three other technicians and pampered by African servants.
His scientific work was interrupted by elephants, deadly snakes and sexual entanglements!
The author's work, like the duties of the rest of the Rhodesian Whites involved the help of Africans. Their co-operation was needed in the home, on the farm and in the laboratory and other workplaces.
Without it, Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s would have been unable to function. The replacement of Rhodesia by Zimbabwe resulted in the exodus of the Whites. Denied their know-how Zimbabwe descended into chaos.
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Verlagsort
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Maße
Höhe: 216 mm
Breite: 140 mm
Dicke: 20 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-78623-672-2 (9781786236722)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
I was born in Central London. My family moved to a West London Suburb just before the Second World War. We moved to the countryside to avoid the blitz. At the end of hostilities, we returned home where I attended a small Private School. I was taught English language and Literature by Vernon Scannell, a famous British author and poet. At sixteen I worked as a laboratory technician in a London chemical company. A post in a laboratory in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, followed. Motor cycling to the capital three hundred miles away enabled me to get a girlfriend. The loneliness of my Lowveld situation together with pursuit by the Rhodesian army encouraged me to obtain a student place at Cape Town University. Short of money a laboratory post followed in a dynamite factory in Johannesburg. The sexual overtures of my female inductor distracted me, resulting in a visit to the chief chemist. I returned to my London parental home by hitchhiking across Africa and Europe in 1960 with a Jewish tailor. I failed my British medical for compulsory military service. A London post in Overseas Surveys enabled me to write about overpopulation in Africa. This helped me to win an interview at Cambridge University. I finally got a degree from London University while working in the laboratories there, followed by two more degrees and teaching certificates. As a result, I taught and lectured. I later became a local government ecologist.
