Bestselling writer of ripping yarns set in Africa
Wilbur Smith 1933-2021
Wilbur Smith, who has died aged 88, used to respond to his critics by saying that he wasn’t setting out to produce great literature: his books were stories. Ripping tales of derring-do, mainly set in Africa, they “featured virile, lantern-jawed hunks, delicate English roses who might be ravished by pirates or find themselves enslaved in Arab harems, and a cast of Johnny Foreigners who generally took a thrashing”, said The Daily Telegraph. They were, in other words, about as “politically correct as Black and White Minstrels”; yet they were translated into 30 languages, and they all sold in their millions. While he claimed his readers were “real men”, his publisher said that his books mainly appealed to women, and “hormonal teenagers”.
Born in 1933, he was raised on a 30,000-acre cattle ranch in what was then the British protectorate of Rhodesia. He was a sickly child, but he loved roaming free in the bush, and when he was eight his father gave him his first .22 rifle. “I shot my first animal shortly afterwards, and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he recalled in a memoir. But his mother had also fostered in him a love of reading, and when he was sent unhappily to boarding school in South Africa, he took refuge in writing. Later, at his father’s insistence, he trained as an accountant, but following the collapse of his first marriage, he started selling stories to pay alimony bills. His first novel, inspired by his childhood, and his grandfather’s tales of fighting in the Zulu wars, came out in 1964. He would write 48 more, eventually churning out two a year with the help of “co-writers”: he would come up with the ideas, which they would set on the page.
In his spare time, Smith lived the kind of macho life he wrote about: “I travel and hunt and scuba dive and climb mountains.” His personal life, however, was stormy: his second marriage also ended in divorce; and he fell out bitterly and publicly with the children of his first marriage, and with his stepson from his second. His third wife, Danielle Thomas, who – to his apparent chagrin – became a novelist in her own right, died of brain cancer in 1999. The following year, he met and married Mokhiniso “Niso” Rakhimova, a law student 39 years his junior, who, he said approvingly, was “quiet and extremely well-behaved” at dinner parties. She survives him, along with his children.