Friday, December 6, 2013

David Bloom, Editoral Committee Chairman, www.telfed,org.il, Israel

                                                                                                               

BOOK REVIEW:  After reading Patricia Friedberg's memoir Letters from Wankie: a place in colonial Africa, Rainbow Books, Inc., USA. 2013. I could not help but smile reflecting on my own childhood in Rhodesia of the 1950s. Although the author and I lived in the same country – in truth, we lived worlds apart. Her accounts of her primitive lifestyle were far-removed from the "townies" of Salisbury (my family), and Bulawayo with their manicured gardens and multitude of servants.

Through her letters to her parents in England, the author weaves a fascinating and colourful story as a young Jewish wife in the dusty "one-horse" town of Wankie, the site of a large Anglo American coal mining operation where her husband accepted a position as company doctor. Friedberg had met her South African husband-to-be while he was studying medicine in the UK who persuaded her to try their first years of marriage in Africa.

Soon after arriving at the sizzling hot coalmining town, they were given their first lodgings - a thatch-roofed ‘rondavel’ with no lock on the front door and where she ‘enjoyed’ her first encounters with lizards, spiders, flies, mosquitoes, snakes and other endearing African wildlife. The advice she received on her first day was instructive: “Shake out your shoes before you put them on. Tarantulas and scorpions love shoes.”

Worlds Apart
Most illuminating was the author’s detailed recollections of her work for the Native Commissioner - the “white” government's arm in charge of birth-to-death issues in black African society. Through her experiences as the Clerk of the Court in Wankie, she was exposed to the local Ndebele people and describes with much humour and enthralling insight into their culture.

She describes cases involving lobola (bride price) to murder and white managers mercilessly beating their black employees. While most white Rhodesians would rarely encounter blacks beyond ‘a master-servant relationship’ and thus had little knowledge or understanding of their culture, Friedberg and her colleagues - mostly UK educated - showed a surprising level of empathy and a desire to ensure justice prevailed.

 “Different” and non-conformist, many of the letters from Wankie evince an uncommon perception for that time of the issues and schisms of a racially divided society. A riveting read, ‘Letters from Wankie’ provides a 1950s snapshot of ‘cultural encounters’ in a remote district of rural Rhodesia.



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