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30 Degrees South Authors:
Click on name of Author for Information:
Montague Bentley
Montague Bentley, was born in boksburg North in 1932. Aged two, his parents moved to Bez. He grew up in the Johannesburg of the '30s and '40s before moving to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia in his early twenties. He returned to South Africa in the '80s. He is retired and lives in Johannesburg with his third wife, having divorced his second wife after she was rumoured to be having an affair with Al Capone's nephew in New York. He has never bought a book in his life and Wide Boy is his first book. He denies that Wide Boy is in any way autobiographical ... but then he would, wouldn't he?
Alex Binda
Alexandre Binda was born in Beira, Mozambique in 1945. He joined the Rhodesian Army in 1965. Although he had attested into the Pay Corps, he was to get more operational and combat experience than any of his colleagues. Between 1968 and 1972 he took part in a dozen or so deployments with 1RLI and SAS combat-tracker teams in support of the Portuguese Army in the Tete Province of Mozambique, countering Frelimo and ZANLA guerrilla incursions from the north. He was awarded a Military Forces Commendation. During his 15 years in the Rhodesian Army, he did a four-year tour of duty of with the Selous Scouts and was commissioned in 1979. Alex is a keen student of African military history and has written several articles for Lion & Tusk, the magazine of the Rhodesian Army Association. He is also author of Masodja—A History of the Rhodesian African Rifles to be published in 2007.
Philip Briggs
Philip Briggs is a travel and environmental writer specializing in Africa. Raised in South Africa, where he still lives, Philip first visited East Africa in 1986 and has since spent about half his time exploring the highways and back roads of more than 20 African countries. His first book, South Africa: The Bradt Travel Guide, was published in 1991, and he has subsequently authored Bradt guides to East and southern Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda, several of which are now in their fourth or fifth edition. He has written or contributed to numerous other books published by the likes of Struik, Insight Discovery, AA Travel Guides, Berlitz and Frommers, and he has had more than 100 features and columns published in periodicals such as Africa Geographic, Travel Africa, BBC Wildlife, Mail & Guardian, Saturday Star, Diversions, Wanderlust and Africa Birds & Birding.
Sarah Britten
Sarah Britten has been described by Barry Ronge as “Hitler with tits”. Her first piece of comic reportage, on the wonders of kugels and buying a Matric dance dress in Sandton City, appeared in Style magazine in 1991 when she was 17. She has won Sanlam Prizes for Youth Literature for The Worst Year of My Life—So Far (2000) and The Martin Tudhope Show (2002).
She wrote her Master’s research report on South African humour (with a focus on Madam & Eve) and has a doctorate in Applied English Language Studies, the title of her thesis being ‘One nation, one beer: the mythology of the new South Africa in advertising’. Her area of academic interest relates to national identity and comedy, and the concept of ‘National Intimacy’, as defined by the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld.
The good citizens of Mooinooi once tried to send her death threats after she quoted a man who described them as being like ropes—thick, hairy and twisted—but they couldn’t find her number in the phone book. David Bullard’s fans, who resemble a pack of escaped Labradors gone bad after a week without Bob Martins and Eukanuba, were mightily offended when she pointed out a punctuation error in one of his articles. She already has an active ‘hate club’ of ex-pat whingers in Perth, Australia.
Sarah enjoys birdwatching, wildlife, painting with lipstick (and pastels). She plays the piano, her favourite composer is Bach and she plans to write a fugue in four parts based on the Nokia ring tone. She can also do a mean Australian accent for anyone who asks.
AJ Brooks
AJ Brooks was asked to write an article on the South African involvement in the 1984 Operation Askari. Stan Monick published it as historical non-fiction on the history of the Transvaal Horse Artillery titled “Wherever Destiny Leads”. The article was the catalyst for this, his first work of fiction.
Chris Cocks
Chris Cocks lives in Johannesburg. This is the fourth edition of Fireforce. He is a partner in the newly established South African Publisher, 30° South Publishers.
Licínio de Azevedo
Licínio de Azevedo arrived in Mozambique in 1977 in order to work in the National Film Institute researching stories of the War of Independence, to serve as the basis for feature film scripts. The first piece of research he did for the Film Institute resulted in his first book Relatos de Povo Armado (Tales of the Armed People) which told real stories found in the field during three months in the Moeda Plains in the north of Mozambique; the first region to be liberated in the war. Later he began to make films using the same creative technique of mixing the narrative styles of factual and fictional storytelling. In his documentaries he uses the dramatic structure used for fiction. His fictions are always based on fact. The Train of Salt and Sugar is the result of the same creative process.
P.C. Feller
P.C. Feller is a born-and-bred South African, educated in Johannesburg where he gained a professional qualification. His interest in life and literature led to a degree in philosophy and English in his later years. Although he has written several plays, this is his first novel. Now, at seventy-something he continues to lead an active life. He lives in Johannesburg.
Scott F. Firsing
Scott Thomas Firsing, a U.S. citizen, is a consultant for an international NGO based in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a graduate of Rutgers University with a Bachelor of Science in Administration of Justice, and American Military University with a Master of Arts in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. While pursuing his Masters degree, he was awarded a prestigious internship at UN Headquarters, Department for Disarmament Affairs. Mr. Firsing was elected to membership in the Delta Epsilon Tau International Honor Society for his academic excellence.
David Fleminger
David Fleminger’s passion for wandering the globe, travel writing appears to be evolving as David’s focus in life. His first book, Back Roads of the Cape, was published in 2005. He has also worked in many different aspects of the media industry—as a script writer, director, editor, post-production supervisor, interviewer and producer. (“I am an avid movie watcher with an extensive knowledge of useless movie trivia.”) He has written and directed theatre shows, TV series and educational videos and is studying for an MA in Tourism & Heritage Studies at Wits University. A born-and-bred Jo’burger, he lives in the northern suburbs with sundry pets and housemates. Much to his mother’s mounting despair he is still single but spends his time watching theatre, cricket and walking his dogs in the park.
Adriaan Groenewald
During Adriaan’s extensive career as a leadership trainer and consultant, a radio and television host on business and leadership programmes and regular writer for The Star, the Argus, Business Day and the Sunday Times, he has learned certain principles on leadership that are unshakeable and practiced by the top leaders he has interviewed over the years.
According to Adriaan, great leadership is “the art of moving people and situations profitably”. To this end he has written a book which simply yet profoundly sets out those principles, with clear and current examples of their implementation:
Peter Hewitt
Peter Hewitt was born in Windsor with the Great Depression looming, his adolescent years were passed in Reading, also on the Thames. At age 18, following an MoD engineering apprenticeship, he was conscripted and served for eight years in the Fleet Air Arm. Upon release he entered Colonial Police Service, a career change that took him first to Kenya, followed by tours in Cyprus and Nyasaland. His police career concluded with a nine-year spell in the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. Retuning to England in 1972 he took up an appointment with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where a succession of postings took him to diplomatic missions in Sierra Leone, East Berlin (GDR), Guyana and Lisbon—until a surfeit of ‘foreign parts’ prompted him and his wife to settle in the north London suburb. There was to be, however, one final call of the wild that he felt unable to resist and so took off again for Sierra Leone where he was engaged by a large diamond-mining company in a senior security role. This post-colonial swansong persuaded him that retirement might be the preferred option. Since then he has alternated between Cockfosters and a ‘bolthole’ in north Cyprus.
Graham Jooste
Graham Jooste, born in Greylingstad, lives in Johannesburg and considers himself semi-retired. Graham is passionate about both history and sport and has written four other books: Innocent Blood (2002), So Het Hulle Gesterf (1998), Rugby Trivia (1995) and South African Rugby Teams: 1949–1995 (1995). Graham was awarded the Lewis Memorial Shield for Sportsmanship at the South African Nautical College. He played first-league rugby, cricket and bowls and was president of the Old Selbornians Cricket Club in East London and of the Pirate Rugby Club.
Ron Lock
Ron Lock has spent much of his life in Africa, including 13 years in Kenya and Tanzania (Tanganyika). He served in the Mounted Troops of the Royal Military Police and the Rift valley Troop of the Kenya Police. He is the author of Blood on the Painted Mountain – Hlobane and Kambula, 1879 (Greenhill Books) and numerous articles on military history which have been published in the UK and USA. He is also a registered guide to Anglo-Zulu and Boer War battlefields.
Bror MacDonell
Bror Urme MacDonell was born in 1921 in Elizabethville, the Belgian Congo. For the first twenty years of his life he was known as Bror Örne-Glieman (his father’s Scandinavian surname) but discovered that the Belgian authorities had erroneously registered his surname as MacDonell (his mother’s previous surname). He was educated in France and later at Eton in England. He became fluent in over a dozen languages including French, Swahili, chiShona and several other African languages.
Aged nineteen, he was drafted into service during World War II. He served as Regimental Sergeant-Major with the African Light Infantry in East Africa and India and later transferred to Army Intelligence with the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. After the war he took up a varied career in hunting, locust control, farming, African administration and local government, working in the remotest bush of Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika. He moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the sixties and began writing Mzee Ali in 1963, from his campfire ‘bush notes’ of the forties. (Several UK publishers rejected the manuscript as being “too politically incorrect”—presumably because of the references to the black-on-black slave-trading.)
He retired to the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, where he died in 1998. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, and four children.
Fiona McIntosh
Fiona McIntosh is a photo journalist and the editor of Out There Adventure and Out There Travel. She is the author of various books on hiking and other adventures including the Table Mountain Activity Guide (Struik). She considers herself extremely privileged to live on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town and is proud of its World Heritage status. She is an addicted traveller and adventurer, spending her time canoeing, hiking and visiting strange, out-of-the-way places, such as the North Pole.
Peter Petter-Bowyer
Peter Petter-Bowyer was born in 1936 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. As a boy during World War II he’d watch the Royal Air Force training aircraft whirling in the colonial skies above—so was born his craving to fly. In 1957 he joined the Royal Rhodesian Air Force as an officer cadet. He became a senior operational pilot during the bush war and was instrumental in designing and producing a range of unique aeronautical weapons systems. He retired prematurely as a group captain in 1980 with the advent of Mugabe’s rule and now lives in England.
Peter Quantrill
Peter Quantrill was born in Simla, India, where he spent much of his youth. He was commissioned from Sandhurst into the 1st Battalion 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles (now 2nd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles). He served in India, Nepal, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong and Borneo before settling with his family in South Africa. A keen student of military history, his special interest lies in the Anglo-Zulu War.
Tony Trethowan
Tony Trethowan was born in England in 1955. His parents immigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1958, where he grew up. He served in the BSA Police from 1974 to 1981 but resigned shortly after Zimbabwean independence. He has had three careers—policeman, educator & trainer and health & safety professional. He is presently studying for an MSSc in Occupational Safety and Health at Queens University in Belfast. His home is in Northern Ireland, but he is currently working for a large oil and gas company as an HSE consultant in Yemen. Delta Scout is his first book.
Dr P.J. Viljoen
Dr. P. J. Viljoen has extensive experience in gamebird management and utilisation and has developed gamebird management techniques over the past 14 years. He has a D. Sc. In wildlife management and has written numerous papers and book contributions in the fields of ecology and management. Dr. Viljoen is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Wildlife Management, University of Pretoria and organised the 2nd South African Gamebird Symposium as well as several workshops related to gamebirds. He has won a number of awards and has held many positions as office-bearer or scientific advisor of gamebird-associated organisations. He is a senior field trail judge and trainer of several field trail champion gundogs.
Richard Wood
Dr Richard Wood, born in Bulawayo, is a Commonwealth Scholar, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a graduate of Rhodes and Edinburgh universities. He has enjoyed sole access to the hitherto closed papers of Ian Smith to write this book. So Far and No Further! complements his definitive The Welensky Papers: A History of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: 1953–1963.