00:00History, according to Wilbur Smith.
00:25The sun rose over the African continent like a slow tide of fire,
00:29spilling across the Kalahari sands and the scrubless plains
00:32where the mirage lay so thick you could almost drink it.
00:36Behind the hills the sky paled to ash, then to a pale blue canvas,
00:41streaked with the first eagles turning on the thermals.
00:44The land stretched away in every direction, baked and glittering,
00:48where the tracks of the early hunters had long since been erased by the wind,
00:52and the bones of dead oxen bleached beside the wagon trails.
00:57Time seemed to hang here, suspended between the raw brutality of the present
01:02and the legends of the past,
01:04the men who had crossed this emptiness with pistols and horses,
01:08trusting faith and luck to carry them to the goldfields
01:11and the rivers whose names had become myth.
01:14As the caravan moved forward, dust rising like the breath of the earth itself,
01:19the emptiness pressed in, immense and indifferent,
01:21a stage on which empires and men would rise and fall without witness,
01:26save the sky and the vultures circling high above.
01:30From Birds of Prey, 1976.
01:36Birds of Prey
01:36Birds of Prey
02:03Wilbur Smit's historical fiction was dug by controversies over racism, colonialism, and historical revisionism.
02:10He is remembered as the modern incarnation of H. Ryder Haggard, and like him, he romanticized the many foreign intrusions
02:17into a dark continent.
02:19Smit spent his early years in the wild, untamed landscapes of northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,
02:25born in Endola and raised on his family's vast 25,000-acre cattle ranch along the Cafu River near Mazabuka,
02:33where endless forests, hills, and savannah stretched in every direction.
02:39Accompanied by the young black sons of the ranch workers, he ranged freely through the bush,
02:44hiking, hunting birds and small mammals, and living a boyhood steeped in raw physicality and frontier life.
02:51It was an unmistakably colonial and hyper-masculine world.
02:56His father, a metalwork and boxer-turned-rancher, was an unyielding man's man who scorned books,
03:02including his son's later novels.
03:05From him Wilbur inherited toughness and self-reliance,
03:09as well as notions of imperial entitlement and colonial supremacy.
03:13His father saw writing as a sentimental waste of time,
03:17but his quiet mother reared him on nightly tales of escape and adventure,
03:21and nurtured his imagination.
03:23But it was ranch life that shaped his later career,
03:27rugged action over intellect and wide mastery of the African bush.
03:32Wilbur Schmid shot his first lion at the age of 14.
03:36He eventually became an adventurer himself,
03:37not too different from his fictional mercenaries,
03:40flying his own plane to remote destinations and running his own wild game reserve.
03:45He remained slim and fit even into his 70s,
03:48with a fine face and a mischievous smile rarely captured in photographs.
03:53His debut novel, When the Lion Feeds, from 1964,
03:58launched both his career on the first major backlash.
04:01The story of twins Sean and Gary Courtney romanticized the Anglo-Sulu war and white settler life,
04:08but South Africa's publication control board banned it for 11 years on grounds of dealing in an improper manner,
04:14with promiscuity, passionate love, sin, sexual intercourse, obscene language,
04:19blasphemous language, sadism and cruelty.
04:22Court hearing during appeals descended into literary criticism,
04:26describing passages as in poor literary taste,
04:29and calculated to incite lustful thoughts and sexual desire.
04:35Schmid followed with The Sound of Thunder in 1966,
04:38advancing the court knitwends through the Second Boer Wall.
04:42Both early courtly novels were repeatedly attacked for glorifying European settlers
04:47and downplaying atrocities against indigenous populations.
04:50The Dark of the Sun from 1965 and Shout at the Devil from 1968
04:56drew similar fire for reducing Africans to stereotypes and secondary characters
05:01and celebrating mercenary violence.
05:03The 1976 film adaptation of the latter, starring Roger Moore and Lee Marvin,
05:09fanned the flames considerably.
05:11Goldmine from 1970 and its 1974 film Gold
05:15faced condemnation for focusing on white protagonists
05:18in the apartheid-era mining industry, while ignoring black labour exploitation.
05:24By the 1980s, Schmid had launched at the Ballantyne series
05:28A Fountain Flies from 1980, Men of Men from 1981,
05:33The Angels Weep from 1982,
05:35which chronicled the white colonization of Rhodesia and the Matabella Wars.
05:40Critics accused these books of sanitizing violence and displacement of indigenous peoples,
05:45while presenting its sympathetic portraits of white Rhodesian settlers during the Bush Wars.
05:51The Egyptian novels, River Gods from 1993 and Seven Scrolls from 1995,
05:58were faulted for an Orientalist exotism that reduced Egyptian cultures to mysticism and historical inaccuracy.
06:05The faceless condemnation, however, centered on rage from 1987,
06:09the courtly novel set against late apartheid turmoil and the Sharpeville massacre.
06:14One academic described the entire Courtney saga as an obvious example of the application of biology
06:20to support the separate development of blacks under apartheid,
06:23arguing that the black characters in Schmid's books were essentially and naturally debased.
06:29Contemporary reviewers singled outrage as the worst offenders in the series,
06:33with one stating that he had read it to see if it was as bad as he had heard.
06:37I discovered, no, it was worse.
06:39Another scholar, writing in the journal South African Studies,
06:43accused the novel of presenting biased, illiberal views against African nationalism.
06:48Post-colonial theory traced a red line of objectionable politics throughout Schmid's whole body of work.
06:55A prominent South African journalist labeled Schmid a racist and a sexist child of the British Empire
07:00in a 2021 obituary, arguing that Schmid's fiction brimmed with the nostalgia of empire.
07:07Schmid himself would have disagreed.
07:09In a 2011 interview, he insisted,
07:12I would say that is the way the world works.
07:15If you see that in my book, then you see something that is not there.
07:20Schmid once confessed that he had hated the loneliness and doubt that told his early mid-book crisis.
07:26He did not see himself as an easy man.
07:29His divorces were bitter, and he was estranged from several of his children.
07:32He left Radicia during Ian Smith's era, allegedly because he did not want to perpetuate injustices.
07:39Even so, his next books continued to romanticize the colonial conflict.
07:44Later in life, he changed publishers several times.
07:47He went from Heinemann to Panma Macmillan, then to HarperCollins, then to Bonnier Zafra,
07:52partly to accelerate output with co-authors after fans demanded more Courtney and Ballantyne stories.
07:59In his 2018 autobiography, On Leopard Rock, he acknowledged shifting social attitudes and the need for more inclusive storytelling.
08:08His early books, however, continued to attract attention for their uncritical portrayals of colonialism and race.
08:15Will Smith died in Cape Town in 2021, obituary centered on his divided legacy.
08:21He sold millions of books worldwide, but was somehow entrenched in racial and colonial stereotypes.
08:26He became a larger-than-life icon, celebrated for an inexhaustible creative energy and passion for storytelling.
08:35But memories of his most contentious titles, when the Lion Feeds, Rage, and the broader Courtney and Ballantyne cycles,
08:42often resurface in literary reviews.
08:45Many readers, including former British Prime Minister John Major, loved Webber Smith's books for their unapologetic escapism,
08:53their high-staked dramas, and their vivid and immersive setties.
08:57Millions were transported into an Africa red in tooth and claw,
09:00into vast savannas, gold rush, into colonial frontiers, or ancient Egyptian courts, or big game hunts.
09:08They scented open grassland, heard roaring lions, and felt the thrill of impending battle.
09:15And this fast-paced action could assume an almost epic quality, a saga of generation,
09:21interspersed with meticulous, if controversial, historical detail.
09:25They were African-Western novels, with a cinematic quality, and they hooked readers from the very start.
09:31Smith created protagonists that resonated with many, and he invoked a sense of wonder about Africa,
09:37its wild life, its politics, and its untamed past.
09:42Smith's transcendent controversy, and his books became the guilty pleasure of young and old,
09:48with total sales surpassing 140 million.
09:52In the summer of 2006, Stephen King nominated his Best Historical Novelist,
09:57I would say Wilbur Smith, with his swashbuckling novels of Africa, he declared.
10:02You can get lost in Wilbur Smith, and misplays all of August.
10:09Is it true you mercenaries will do anything for money?
10:12What are you talking about?
10:12That we're going to pick up 50 million dollars worth of diamonds.
10:16Hey, you want to come?
10:19I'll be there.
10:20Right!
10:2450 million dollars in diamonds is their mission.
10:29A deal, Captain.
10:32Three days.
10:34To keep the Congo alive.
10:37Danger is their 9-to-5 job.
10:51This is HistoryRadio.org, a free radio stream.
10:56Promoting knowledge of literature and history.
10:59One.
11:13But it's true you've got a 13-day radio stream.
11:13One.
11:13But it's history.
11:14One.
11:14Two.
11:14Many.
11:14Three.
11:15One.
11:15Three.
11:15Nine.
11:20Three.
11:20Three.
11:20Three.
11:21Ten.
11:22Three.
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