West of the Moon
Early Zululand and a game ranger at war in Rhodesia
RON SELLEY
ISBN: 9781920143329
SA release: April 2009
US / UK release: June 2009
Paperback 284 pages 234 x 153mm 6 x 9
200 b/w photos, 4 maps
£16.95 + P&P
From colonial northern Zululand to guerrilla warfare in the Gona re Zhou of Rhodesia—a vast panorama of southern Africa
West of the Moon—A Game Ranger at War is a sweeping canvas that evokes a bygone era of the 1940s’ colonial Natal through to the cruel intensity of the ‘Bush War’ that ravaged Rhodesia in the 1970s. The book is in two distinct parts—Part 1 chronicles the author’s earlier years—an idyllic childhood spent roaming and hunting among the empty, rolling hills of northern Zululand; of the inaccessible St Lucia waterway; the nostalgia of yellow fever trees; of building railway bridges into the wild interior; of colonial scallywags and native witchcraft; of sugar estates and poaching; of shipwrecks and the sweaty cantinas and backstreets of Lourenço Marques—a time that slipped away.
Part 2 recounts the author’s move north across the Limpopo where his love of adventure, hunting and the bushveld lead him to Rhodesia. He becomes a game ranger, dealing with ‘problem animals’ in the farming areas and the escalating terrorist war in the Gona re Zhou National Park in the beleaguered south-eastern Lowveld of the country. Trying to care for an environment and the animals that depend upon it, while the people around commit barbaric acts in the name of political ideology, brutally awakens the author to the reality of the disintegration of an organized colonial subcontinent.
Ron Selley was born in 1947 and grew up in Zululand. In the wilds of northern Natal, he started hunting at the age of eight and operated a boat on Lake St Lucia, his ‘home turf’, at the age of ten. He became fluent in Zulu, Afrikaans and French. In 1975, with his thirst for adventure and an overriding love of the bush, he moved to Rhodesia, where he joined the Department of National Parks & Wildlife as a game ranger, operating in the Lomagundi, the Zambezi Valley and the Gona re Zhou during the height of the Rhodesian Bush War. He returned to South Africa in 1979, hunted professionally for a period and joined KwaZulu Nature Conservation, in charge of the Kosi Lake system and Northern Beach areas. He now lives Lambert’s Bay on the west coast of South Africa, running a variety of businesses—boat-charter, ship painting and cleaning services. He enjoys black-powder hunting, is an avid collector of World War II trucks and tanks, owns two Rolls Royces, which are in daily use, and is the station commander of National Sea Rescue Station 24A.