Man of Bees: A window into white man’s perspective of Rhodesia’s war
WHEN Alex Morris-Eyton (75) sauntered into the newsroom holding a tome of a book titled “Man of Bees”, I was forced to pay attention. Although visibly aged, Morris-Eyton looked physically fit for his age.
Tall and gangling, the 75-year-old white former commercial farmer exuded an aura of a battle hardened veteran.
He introduced himself as a friend of Oliver Stuart York, the author of “Man of Bees” — a somewhat autobiographical narrative about Zimbabwe’s liberation war.
A casual glance at the 479-page book renders it more like a Cinderella story with a feel good ending.
The picture of a smiling little white girl in a pink dress overly watched by a dominant figure of a handsome grey-haired black old man is deceiving. This is not a Cinderella story. The book is about Zimbabwe’s liberation war and the immediate post-independence period characterised by uneasy relations between blacks and whites.
Morris-Eyton must have noticed my rather squeamish reaction and immediately assured me of an illuminating experience.
His summation was that the book is a candid depiction of the war from an active participant. He left a note with his contact details leaving me wonders-truck.
Why had this old man made so much effort to personally deliver his “friend’s book”.
The book’s blurb reads; “In 1985, Oliver York, home from a self-imposed exile in Scotland, opens a business in Harare. Rosemary, his neighbour, approaches him with a plea.”
It took me an unusually long to finish the book but at the end of it all, I felt enriched not so much as a convert to a white man’s discourse on war but that the narrative became a window into a white man’s sensibilities and insecurities.
One lingering question: Would a reader regard the narrative as purely autobiographical or partly fictional?
The story has all the petal of a historical fiction but the author insisted that this was a true account.
It is a gripping story of war; of the hunter becoming the hunted and eventually falls into the same white prejudices of seeing every black man as nothing but a sex predator.
The black colonel Kufa is a heartless sex predator keeping a young white girl as a future woman ostensibly to revenge the ills perpetrated by whites on blacks.
Equally telling is the depiction of Dina, the heart-warming character who plays a critical role in rescuing the protagonist and the young little white girl.
At the end of the book Dina does not transcend stereotypical depiction attached to a black man by most whites.
He is given a large sum of money and is reported to have gone back to his native Mozambique and married a wife. That is all Dina could do with his money.
The author still refers to the war as the bush war and despite attempting to offer a balanced account is unable to overcome inherent prejudices especially when describing black people.
It is also not clear where the author got the narrative account of First One and his group who are on the opposite side including their encounter with German trainers in Mozambique. Who told the author of these encounters? Was it First One or the old man Dina? That part is left hanging, leaving doubts in the mind of a reader. Surely, Oliver Stuart York is not an omnipresent being.
The depiction of a post-war black government is disconcerting. Officials are depicted as power hungry individuals ready to kill in order to preserve a sense of order.
It is bewildering how a colonel in the army would kidnap a white man and a little girl, imprison them at an abandoned makeshift prison in Mutoko without any other government official being aware of it.
In short, the picture painted of the new government is that of greedy and incompetence.
But despite these apparent loose ends and unconnected dots, this is a book anyone interested in understanding the war from the other side should read. It attempts to be a balanced account especially as it relates to the experiences of young white recruits conscripted to fight a war whose end was hazy. There is also rare attribution of triumphs to black freedom fighters described as terrorists or rebels.
Despite Rhodesia’s military might, black freedom fighters through their own ingenuity and an intricate understanding of the terrain and environment outwit their enemy, throwing doubts in the minds of young white soldiers of the possibility of winning the war.
This is a book fit for a gripping movie particularly the adversities encountered by the protagonist as he rescued a vulnerable white girl from the hands of a sex predator in the mould of Colonel Kufa. It is an incredible story of fate and courage.
The story has aspects of realism. It is a believable story from the perspective of it having actual places, with actual names of people — Margaret Thatcher, Robert Mugabe and Ian Smith. I particularly liked the page in the last chapter where the protagonist and Jennifer, the mother of the little girl, converse about a secret letter written to Margaret Thatcher, the then British Prime Minister.
As an afterthought, Stuart York says to Jennifer: “Maybe his (Ian Smith) confidential letter to the British Prime Minister enabled Lord Carrington to convene the Lancaster House Conference in London with some hope of success.”
Most Rhodesian whites believe Smith struck a secret deal with Prime Minister Thatcher.
Very few people except Thatcher herself knew the contents of the letter and it was probably because of the contents in that letter that led the British Prime Minister to break every rule in order to rescue a little white girl named Tsitsi but later renamed Lucy.
It is probably that letter that spurred Stuart York to write “Man of Bees.”