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On The Bridge of Goodbye
David Robbins
Publisher: Jonathan Ball (2007) South Africa
Paperback - 246 pages
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'Everyone wants to give some history to his children. This gives him a reality. But what is this history unless it is in his parents and in the land.’
Set against the southern African canvas of war and upheaval is the story of the famous San soldiers who fought first for the Portuguese in Angola, then for South Africa from bases in northern Namibia. When South Africa withdrew to make way for Namibian independence, many of these soldiers and their dependents came to South Africa where, after 13 years in tents, they moved into small houses on the outskirts of Kimberley.
Beyond the bare bones of this story, remarkable in itself, lies a process of devastating displacement that has never fully been explored. Angolan and Caprivian communities had been wrenched apart by war, and for many neither reunification nor closure had been possible since the sudden Portuguese evacuation of Africa in the mid-1970s.
Author David Robbins travelled with a small group of these discarded San soldiers on a journey into their respective pasts so that he could tell their stories. The result is On the Bridge of Goodbye, a book rich in insight and emotion that culminates deep in the Angolan bush, and also in the very marrow of human loss and endurance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Robbins has spent the past 20 years writing about southern Africa in his distinctive travel-genre style. He recently completed his trilogy of South African travel books that began with the award-winning The 29th Parallel and ended with After the Dance (Jonathan Ball, 2004). Robbins, who was born in the Eastern Cape and now lives in Johannesburg, has travelled widely in Africa. On the Bridge of Goodbye is is sixth major nonfiction work dealing with southern African themes.
