A Taste for Adventure - Wilbur Smith

Issue 36

Best-selling novelist Wilbur Smith grew up in southern Africa, and his books are full of the flavour of the continent’s chequered history. He chats to Ron Toft about how it all began. Born and raised on a 25,000-acre cattle ranch in what used to be Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, Wilbur Smith was blessed with an idyllic childhood. Accompanied by a pack of mongrels, Smith and his slingshot-carrying chums roamed far and wide over hills, through forests and across savannah grassland. The lads hunted and trapped birds and small mammals which they cooked over an open fire and devoured with great relish. His memories of these early Boys’ Own-type adventures were to prove invaluable later in life when Smith began writing about the Africa he loves. Smith was introduced to “the wonders of the written word” by his mother. After cutting his teeth on Biggles and Just William books, he moved on to the works of C S Forester, Ryder Haggard and John Buchan. But because his father considered Smith’s preoccupation with books to be “unnatural and unhealthy,” he was forced to read in secret.  “I spent so much time in the outhouse long-drop latrine, where I kept a cache of my favourite books, that my father ordered my mother to administer regular and copious doses of castor oil!” At boarding school, reading was Smith’s solace when homesick. “I used to read by torchlight under the blanket. I half suffocated! By the time I left, I think I’d read most of the 1000-plus books in the school library.” While at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, Smith told his father he wanted to be a journalist or professional hunter. “His blunt reply was that I was a bloody fool and that I would starve. He told me to get what he described as a ‘real’ job.” Smith reluctantly became a chartered accountant. To preserve his sanity, he started writing as a hobby and soon found that people were prepared to pay for his literary efforts. He sold his first story to Argosy magazine for £70 – twice his monthly salary. Buoyed by this unexpected success, Smith wrote a novel called The Gods First Make Mad which earned nothing but rejection slips. Undeterred, he wrote a second book, When The Lion Feeds, tapping into his childhood experiences of life on a ranch. He named the main character Sean Courtney after his grandfather, Courtney James Smith, who was a machine gunner in the Zulu Wars. The novel was accepted by the first publisher his agent contacted. “That was a great stroke of fortune. I earned enough to become unemployed for the rest of my life!” Smith resigned from the Inland Revenue Service, towed his father’s caravan into the mountains near his home, parked alongside a trout stream and wrote his next novel, The Sound of Thunder. The rest is publishing history. During the past 42 years, Smith has sold hundreds of millions of copies of his 30 adventure novels in languages as varied as Icelandic and Hindi. Many of this master storyteller’s books follow the fortunes of successive generations of the Courtney and Ballantyne families, while others are unconnected but equally absorbing tales. His latest novel, The Quest, is the fourth book in his Taita of Ancient Egypt series. It will be published in March or April of next year. All of Smith’s stories are set in his beloved Africa and draw heavily upon his own experiences and his studies of past and present Africa. “Some of my books were about the Rhodesian struggle, which I was very close to. I’ve also written extensively about Mozambique, which I’ll be revisiting soon – the infrastructure has been restored and tourism is building up again. I’ve also written a lot about Namibia and Egypt, the latter being the subject of my latest novel.” Smith has long been interested in Ancient Egypt, partly because he grew up in the years following the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. “It’s a fascinating part of the world and has served me very well as a backdrop for my Taita books. I went to Egypt at the earliest possible opportunity, travelling by caravan from Karnak to the Red Sea. I revisited it for The Quest, cruising down the Nile from Aswan to Karnak. I wanted to get the feel of the country again.” He enjoys delving into the origins of conflicts, of national boundaries, of national perceptions and of feelings of patriotism and self-awareness. “I am also fascinated about mysticism and religion, from Islam to Christianity. Everything is here in Africa.” Smith describes himself as a camera, not a prophet. “I just put down what I see and try to pepper my stories with colourful people and relationships at interesting periods in time.” He works and plays hard. Smith started The Quest on 4 January 2006 and delivered it to his publishers, Pan Macmillan, in early August. “Once I’ve started a new novel, my wife complains she has lost me to paper. I find the only way to get it done is to go hard, go long and work until its finished. Now that I’ve stopped pounding the keyboard for The Quest, the good times have returned.” Smith never stops creating plots and characters for possible future novels. “It’s what I’ve done all my life. It’s automatic. Recently, after I had finished The Quest, my wife and I went out to dinner. Halfway through the meal, when I went quiet, she remarked, ‘now what are you thinking about?’ I told her I was thinking about my next book. It never ends and I find it terribly exciting. Africa is a treasure-house of stories and very much my turf, and story-telling is my game.” Smith won’t start writing his next novel until January 2008. “I’ve got some ideas, but as yet they are not totally formed. You could say that I am lightly pregnant!” When he is not writing, attending editorial conferences and promotional functions, giving interviews or signing copies of his books, Smith enjoys hunting, fishing, fell walking and travelling. He is also a keen conservationist and patron of Back to Africa, a charity which breeds animals for release into the wild. “Hunting and conservation are in partnership. I recently paid around $35,000 for two weeks’ hunting in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park and fired only a single shot. That money goes towards the park’s upkeep. “In areas where there are hunting concessions around national parks, hunters are effectively an unpaid anti-poaching force because they are on the ground all the time and have a proprietary interest in preventing any infiltration and in alerting the authorities to the outbreak of any disease or other emergency. “Animal rights activists try to portray safari hunters as people who shoot everything in sight. That may have happened 100 years ago, but it certainly doesn’t happen today. Hunting companies are every bit as dedicated to conservation as game departments and national park boards.” Smith says although he loves travelling further afield, Africa is where his heart is. “If, like me, you are weaned from your mother’s milk onto Zambezi water, you can never leave Africa.”

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