“Your boots carry
fresh red dust. Your foolish English trousers are torn. From the British only
one thing I have learned: always in Africa to wear shorts. All the rest they
have learned from me. In shorts, the thorns do not stop you, and there is less
noise when you stalk. Your skin is not important. It will mend itself.”
Not strictly a Western,
but most definitely a novel of the Frontier, in this case The African Frontier.
The novel is first in
a trilogy set in East Africa spanning from the end of the First World war into
the Second Global conflict.
The reader can not
help but notice the numerous parallels with novels of the American Westward
expansion, the encounters with wildlife, the hazards and blessings of indigenous
people’s interactions, the “good men” and the outlaw.
The novel may have a
stiff-upper lip tone in places but the intimate knowledge of the land and people
as well as the sweep of story, in turns majestic in others outright kinky, the
reader is easily swept along with the epic.
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