If You Get Yourself Killed, You're Fired!

Résumé du livre

This is the story of a most unusual life from beginnings in the South African wilderness to a career reporting on the watershed second half of the last century in Africa. It is a saga of exotic places, people and events from which the new and turbulent Africa has emerged. The only son of a military family, Wilfred Hatrton 'Wilf' Nussey was raised, when not in boarding school, largely in the Lowveld where his relatives carved ranches from raw wilderness. As a reporter he was in the front line of hectic South African politics, then the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, worked in Britain and Canada for some years, then spent more than twenty years covering black Africa, thirteen of them as editor of a premier news service in the continent. His story is a long gallery of vivid word-pictures of predators and presidents, bush wars and urban upheaval, places of stunning beauty, events that made history and shaped our future, characters larger than life, misery and joy and laughter, and captivating wildlife adventures, all painted with passion.

It covers many major news stories such as the international furor over South West Africa (Namibia), the Rhodesian UDI, the wars there and in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and the Congo, the Madagascar revolution, the uproar over the killing of Canadian girls at Victoria Falls, hurricanes in Mozambique, and the hijacking of a South African Airways Boeing. Several African independences are among them, good and bad. Famous and infamous figures lard the story, among them Verwoerd, Vorster, P.W. Botha, Welensky, Ian Smith, Kaunda, Seretse Khama, Leabua Jonathan, kings Sobhuza and Moshoeshoe, Waldheim, Robey Leibrandt, Joaquim Chissano and various revolutionary leaders.

It is a personal story which eloquently captures the events and strains of the latter half of the past century in much of Africa. Perhaps, most of all, it is an accurate, firsthand account of the violent, progressive collapse of white rule in southern Africa up to the borders of South Africa, accelerated by UDI and the demise of the Portuguese dictatorship, which led to the end of apartheid.