Of Land and Spirits ~ Alan Thrush

Of Land and Spirits ~ Alan Thrush

Large hard cover with dust jacket 
408 pages
Excellent condition 

Battle action from Britain's last colony in Africa.  

A uniquely sour taste filling his mouth: strain and fear. In peripheral vision, Corporal Sibanda's wiry form moving parallel with him, rifle traversing slowly from side to side like the head of a cobra, covering every twist and turn of the bank ahead. Andrews gunner on the other bank and, overhead in the rain, the roaring whine of the gunship and the incoming second wave, drowning out all other sound except the snapping rifle fire and the occasional snatch of radio conversation coming over the handset dangling from his yoke.
The best piece of writing, novels or otherwise, on the fighting in the Rhodesian bush. Thrush writes skillfully from personal experience that lends strong credibility to a work that he protests is pure fiction. The historical background is accurate and, in some instances, revealing. Professor Richard Wood History Department, University of Durban-Westville 
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia March 1980 
It is a time of turmoil and suffering as white rule gives way to black nationalism in a part of British colonial Africa riven by a war that has cost 35 000 dead and untold wounded. 
In the humid, pre-dawn gloom, Rhodesian Army units are poised to re-group and attack assembled guerrilla forces. Results of the internationally supervised elections are seeping through: an overwhelming vote for Robert Mugabe. In camps across the country, twenty thousand guerrillas stand to their weapons, waiting for the fantan to come crashing and burning into hut, trench and bunker. Waiting for the soldiers, pouring down from the sky. 
The fight is to the death the climax of eight years of war between two allied guerrilla armies and an established government which has dared to unilaterally declare its independence from England; and which is willing to fight to defend it. 
It is the end of Empire in Africa: Rhodesian history, and Zimbabwean history, too. 
This is the best-selling classic of the five years of civil war leading to the birth of Zimbabwe the story of Scott, Bruton, Sibanda, Kuretu, Mpehla and many others of the Rhodesian Army as they fight with great skill a war they cannot win. For even as the kills mount, so the numbers of the enemy inside the country grow ever larger.

It is also the story of a rural population and its swikiros the spirit mediums who lead and guard won over to the revolutionary side by Mavunha, Chimombe and other guerrillas of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army who have dared to fight for the ancestral land. 

This is political fiction and war fiction at its finest the story of a white community wanting to hold on to standards and tradition despite the cost in human life, without realising the effect this is having on their sons who must carry on the fight. Of a black community whose sons serve on both sides, and which suffers reprisal and atrocity. 

Nowhere has the sheer weariness of war been better portrayed, with its numbing boredom interspersed with gut-wrenching excitement. There is bravery, cowardice, comradeship and, above all, the loss that comes from civil war.