Here Comes the Pitch!

iAfrika!

A stowaway, anxiously awaiting the ship’s departure from Cape Town, twenty-five year old Adam pens the date: The Ides of March, 1975. As the Bietjanie Zimba, the Little Lion, he intends at last to fulfill his childhood promise to his old mentor. Write!

Chosen to be the word-monger of an old Matabele’s insights, and immersed in the life-blood of Northern Rhodesia and South Africa, Adam’s writing springs from a soul wrestling with his destiny. His single word chapter-headings, throughout, unpack into the searing significance of a tempestuous life. Origins. Betrayal. Hate. Love. Murder. Sacrifice. After his childhood on his guardian parents’ game-farm he hopes for freedom when trying to abscond with his real father in England, but is made to return just before the blistering birth of Zambia. The devastation that follows forces him to go to South Africa. An illicit inter-racial love, abuse in the name of redemption, and drastic choices forge his future. At boarding school he tries to sever the ties to his past. Conscripted as a sniper into the Army, he works on reprieves as a steam-locomotive stoker in Zululand, but after a poetic retribution with an old enemy he determines to escape Africa for good. But it will cost him the love of his life. And now, hidden aboard a Union Castle steamer, at last prepared to write, Adam faces his promise: iAfrika!

In the vein of Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Laurens van der Post, Bryce Courtney, and Wilbur Smith, iAfrika! is a novel not only about the complexity of Africa, but of us all.