African Indaba
A Story of Adventure and Conflict
by
Angus Robb
Himself born in South Africa between world wars, Angus Robb loves the land, the people and great elephants that dominate that world. In his teens Angus was sent to a scottish boarding school and went on to earn multiple degrees in Mining engineering. His career took him into mines across the globe, but even now, 88 years after his birth, the sights and smells of Africa live in his heart.
Story Synopsis
RORY MACKENZIE, son of a Scots refugee and a Boer mother, achieves manhood during political and cultural upheaval on the Dark Continent, all the while under the threat of CHOLA, a deadly bull elephant. As a child, he watches the beast slay his grandfather, and as a youth sees his father meet the same fate, but both times Chola mysteriously spares Rory’s life. Perhaps the natives are right: The monster has mtagate, magical powers enabling him to tell the difference between friend and foe.
At age eleven, Rory is packed off to a grim Scottish boarding school to toughen him up. Will his formative years there, besieged by bullies and suffering harsh punishment, prepare him to face the killer elephant? Or turn him into something monstrous himself?
Spanning decades before, during, and after World War II, the tale unfolds during the dying years of colonial domination in Africa. At its core is the story of a boy and a rogue beast, each fighting for his place in a vicious world, but neither craving to kill the other for it.
Mistreated throughout his boyhood, Rory burns with a cruel desire to settle scores. He seizes the opportunity when he later commands a crack anti-terrorist assassination unit of the colonial military. He clashes with the Bloody Assegai Freedom Party and its local leader Inkosana, an African prince who once served honorably with British troops but later rebelled against his colonial masters.
Brought together by their common love of Africa, Rory establishes a friendship with Inkosana who becomes a senior official in the newly proclaimed nation of Zambia. Inkosana not only agrees to help Rory track down his nemesis, the rogue elephant Chola, but also introduces the younger man to Sascha, a young woman of mixed African and Russian blood.
With Inkosana as his backup gun, Rory embarks on the hunt for Chola in the Luangwa Valley, where intuition and fate lead them both to a final confrontation. But Rory is not sure whether his mission is revenge for the deaths of his elders or compassion for the behemoth, now rendered lame by age and tormented by lingering wounds.
True to form, the massive animal ambushes Rory’s team. Rory gets Chola in his gunsights for the first time. He freezes. The elephant does not. Chola savages Rory pitilessly before Inkosana shoots the giant.
Recovering from near-death injuries, Rory awakens from a coma to find Sascha and Inkosana at his bedside. They have spent weeks there, coaxing him back to life. Rory’s only words to Inkosana…
“Does Chola live?”
Born and raised in various towns in the guts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Angus Robb grew up during the second world war tough, self-sufficient and crammed full of African bush skills. His knowledge of Africa and this turbulent era in history gives Scots Boy Africa the impact and credibility of personal experience and insight.
