Amai Shumba, Mother of the Lion

By Ray Krebs

Amai Shumba, Mother of the Lion a book of Africa which delves deep into the roots of historical fact, tribal culture, mysticism and adventure. The reader will be transported through the turmoil of anti communistic rebellion and the horrific fate of the innocent who are caught in the middle of modern warfare verses ancient tribal culture. Through the adventures and often violent life of Alistair Rivers, a young ex-soldier now Professional Hunter, "Jealous" his mysterious Shona warrior companion and of the strongly independent South African woman, Michelle whom he learns to love and trust. Their trials of survival in the wilderness under the bureaucratic corruption and indifference of an emerging democracy culminate in the realization of the importance of compassion for cultural preservation and conservation in post-civil war Mozambique.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ray Krebs
• Release date: Sep 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310565335

Ray Krebs

Ray Krebs is a retired Federal Security Director formally with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington D.C. Prior to his career with the federal government Krebs spent most of four years in southern Africa. This novel was meticulously researched during his travels in Mozambique and Zimbabwe and his first hand experiences during the transition from the apartheid government of the Republic of South Africa to the ANC led present regime.

Book preview

Chapter One

Mozambique Trek

Trekking through the verdant foliage in the bush of northern Mozambique is treacherous at the best of times but during the back side of a three year drought, in the aftermath of a sixteen year long civil war it can become a dangerously suicidal game of Russian Roulette. Yet the lure of adventure coupled with the prospect of monetary reward burns in the soul of man like the white hot fires of Nero's Rome.

The dense mopane forest that flanked the barely discernible track snaking through this once game rich forest, suddenly opened into a veldt of lush elephant grass sparsely populated by umbrella acacia and mbasa trees. The stillness of the seemingly endless brown sea of four foot high brown grass had the eerie calm of a grave yard in the short African sunset for no other place on the planet could the orange orb of the sun disappear as swiftly as it does this close to and south of the equator.

Mozambique had once harbored one of the largest elephant populations in all of Africa. Ivory hunters from the Arabian Peninsula had hunted here a hundred years before the Portuguese colonist opened the Atlantic slave trade. Sailing around the cape into the Indian ocean and north through the Mozambique Channel the Portuguese established the slave and ivory trade center Lorenco Marque on Delagoa Bay, at the southern tip of this coastal country. The Portuguese were soon followed by other traders in white and black gold from England, Holland, Spain and the United States. Commercial adventurers and poachers harried the great beasts relentlessly. After independence from Portugal was declared on 25 June, 1975 the final blow to the great herds was struck as the revolution against the communist government escalated and the elephant herds were decimated by Frelimo and Renamo militaries poaching from Russian supplied Hind helicopters and platoons of soldiers armed with automatic weapons.

The Marxist Frelimo government for years relied upon game poaching to feed their Army. The ivory from thousands of illegally killed elephant, the horns from black and white rhinoceros and the teeth of the even larger numbers of slaughtered hippos, always seemed to disappear to later resurface in the hands of high ranking cabinet members in the capital cities Maputo and Beira with exclusive export authority and lucrative connections in the thriving black market.

Elephant, rhino, hippopotamus, crocodiles, cape buffalo and the many varied plains game species of antelope were almost entirely wiped out in the coastal and central regions of Mozambique and from all but the most remote, rugged and densely forested regions in the central tribal lands and along Lake Cahora Bassa and the northeastern swamp lands that border the Niassa Preserve.

Alistair Rivers’ borrowed, solidly built, four wheel drive truck slowly bounced and weaved north through the dense growth of this Mozambique bush veldt. On the left and parallel to the rutted two track and overgrown road ran a donga, the dry creek bed of Africa. A dark figure appeared in the dappled shadows cast by the overhanging trees at the edge of the donga as if a lone, misplaced, ebony barked mahogany tree had sprouted from the red clay bank. Tall and broad shouldered with the defined, handsome features and high cheek bones of the Entebele tribe, the man was naked to the waste with one frightening exception, the crossed bandoliers of 7.62 mm, U.S. supplied, M60 light machine gun ammunition across his bare chest. Held at high port he carried the ambiguous AK-47 assault rifle. Mazunde stomped on the brake not bothering to gently apply pressure to slow the borrowed Toyota with its World Wildlife Trust, black, white and green door placards to a stop.

Chapter Two

Alistair

The armed insurrection of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) intensified into what was to become known as the Chimuringa War in 1966. Alistair Rivers, the son of Randall and Jane Karnes Rivers was three years old when their farm was attacked. Guerilla fighters led by ZAPU trained agitators bent on making an example of the village. Fear and intimidation. Support the white capitalist white capitalist at your own peril. The guerillas set fire to the tobacco plantation destroying years of carefully cultivated plants before storming into the farm village where Alistair was playing with Yati a Matabele boy who at seven was four years his senior. A sturdy young lad whom Alistair looked up to, holding him in the same regard as a child of ancient Greece held the Olympian athletes, mainly due to his skill at catching lizards and the ability to throw his toy spear farther than any other child in the village and stick it in the rotten tree truck almost every time, a feat that never ceased to amaze the impressionable, little Alistair. He followed Yati everywhere but always under the close supervision of his nanny Margaret Mhuru. Only the ever present, watchful eye of his nanny saved Alistair from becoming one of the examples as the guerilla forces swarmed into the village clubbing to death eleven Matabele farm workers, women and children, including the young Olympian Yati.

Randall loaded his frail, sickly, young wife, son, three house servants the dedicated nanny Margaret among them, a few personal items in the ranch lorry and fled to the relative safety of a more heavily fortified neighboring farm. A year of tedious negotiation, several bribes paid to high ranking revolutionary leaders and a commitment to supply the ZIPRA with maize and tobacco between the Farmers Consortium and ZIPRA representatives was agreed upon before the farm was permitted to reopen. During which time Jane Rivers succumbed to the reoccurring bouts of malaria that had plagued her for years. Leaving Alistair to be raised by a single minded totalitarian father. The only parental nurturing he would receive would come from the aging Margaret, his father being a man that could not or would not offer any display of affection, in his hard line way of thinking an outward display of affection was to show weakness, never let them see your under belly, boy a comment he made more than once which accurately described his normal, daily demeanor. Randall was one of the few Europeans, as the white Rhodesian farmers referred to themselves, that refused to join the Rhodesian Defense Force and instead chose to honor the agreement and demands of the militant nationalist until independence was formally established in 1980 and the Defense Force was disbanded. A decision that labeled him as a traitor among many of his neighbors. The survival of the farm is all that matters. It don’t matter more than a hill of horse shit if it’s the Shona or the Matabele who are running things in Harare, this tide will turn because these kafirs, he pronounced the derogatory term kay-fers, don’t have the brains to run a country. When it all falls down around their arses we will get things back to the way it was. He angrily told the resistance council of consortium farmers.

Returning to the farm Randall continued his rant to the disinterested young Alistair. Why the hell should we be afraid of the blacks! Are they rich? No, they‘re poor, they have always been poor.

Alistair removed his head from under the bonnet of the lorry he had been working on and dropped to the garage floor before answering his father’s rhetorical question. You are right about that patter, they are poor.

Right. Money rules the world, the whites have it the blacks don’t, so why should WE live in fear of the ignorant bastards?

Because they are tired of being poor.

Alistair’s logic being to much for the stubborn Randall Rivers to absorb, he turned and angrily left the garage.

In spite of his father Alistair managed to thrive in the bush environment of the Low Veldt during his adolescent and teenage years and completed high school with a high enough average to be accepted as one of the token European applicants at the newly re-established Zimbabwe University in Harare.

After graduation from the University, prior to completing his formal education at Kings College, London, Rivers again relocated or ran away as his father told anyone who would listen to his rant, to Pretoria, South Africa. Intrigued with the prospect of adventure Alistair enlisted in the South Africa Defense Force, and was seconded to the Special Forces Brigade. Where he underwent the rigorous training of the Reconnaissance Commando. He studied every news release and read every book he could find on the volatile history of the region which had evolved into the twelve year long border war in South West Africa, later to become the nation of Namibia.

Following the Second World War, the United Nations (UN) invited its members to place their mandates for new territories under the UN Trusteeship Council System. All did so except the newly formed government of the Republic of South Africa, commonly referred to as the RSA. The RSA, instead organized a referendum among the chiefs of its mandated territory in South West Africa. The referendum was drafted on the strength of the benefits to South West Africa becoming a protectorate of the RSA and at a later date, the territory would be incorporated into the union of the Republic. In 1949 South Africa virtually annexed South West Africa into the Union; most of its wealth was diverted to the Cape Colony and the apartheid system was forcefully exported to the newly annexed territory.

As the Cold War began in Europe and the United States the fight was on between Communism and Capitalism, initially starting with Russia and America, the cold war rapidly spread to the rest of the world and it was the paranoid obsession, by the anti Communist states, that they needed to contain the cancer of Communism before it spread further into the developing countries around the globe.

The year 1966 marked the beginning of the armed struggle against the government of South Africa and it was the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) who spearheaded the liberation movement. The movement was formed previously in 1960, by Sam Nujoma and Andimba Toivo under a different name with the soon to be abandoned intent to seek change by peaceful means. Although the RSA was militarily superior, the South West Peoples Organization through its military wing the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) persisted with its guerrilla warfare until 1988.

Following Angola's 1975 independence from Portugal the SWAPO was able to establish bases in southern Angola, which led to the fact that the Namibian conflict became inextricably linked to the civil war in Angola. The Angolan government supported the SWAPO. South Africa, in retaliation, supported the Angolan rebel group UNITA, the Uniao para a Independencia total de Angola, byname National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. An Angolan political party that was originally formed to free the nation from Portuguese colonial rule.

In order to keep things under control, the South African government saw the need to deploy regular army soldiers to the Namibian and Angolan borders to prevent the Cuban backed regimes of Communism, namely the ANC and SWAPO from entering the annexed country of South West Africa which would become a stepping stone to the RSA. The South African government and the South African Defense Force (SADF) fought against the guerrilla warfare tactics used by SWAPO, both politically and militarily.

Conscription had been the answer to low regular army recruitment for years. The only way the government could keep insurgents out was by increased conscription and allowing white men from Zambia, Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa to enlist in their ranks. In part this is how the South African government dealt with the enemy threat of encroachment.

All white males aged 17, 18 and 19 had to enlist for military service after they had completed high school level education. It was compulsory and was expected of the boys as they grew up with the war. Enlistment in military service was for a minimum of 2 years after which you could go on and begin your studies at university. The only way you could get out of doing your military service was if you failed to pass a medical examination, had permission to continue on to a university education before your service with a commitment to serve a minimum of four years upon completion, or by filing for conscientious objection status, in which case you would be thrown into jail. Each boy had to fill out forms at school and submit to a physical examination. Their families were sent a telegraph or a formal military letter welcoming their sons to the SADF. It was a fact they grew up with and almost everyone excepted it without question. After 2 years of military service, the young soldiers could leave the SADF and return to civilian life with a small government pension if they enrolled directly in university. While the feelings of some of the young recruits after receiving the Union draft letter was It was the worst day of my life.. To the volunteers Alistair and Marshall it was viewed as the beginning of a great adventure.

The government propaganda office in Pretoria posted ads in the national press that young men who meet the proper qualifications and back ground, race being the foremost background qualification, from neighboring countries would be considered for recruitment in the SADF with equal status to native born white South Africans, if certain mandatory requirements were met. Paramount in the requirements category was citizenship. Apply for and be granted citizenship in the Republic or be granted duel citizenship with their respective country.

The seed was planted for Alistair when he read the news release in a two week old copy of the Pretoria Standard at the feed and farm implement cooperative in Bulawayo. The artical went on to briefly describe the reasons for such a liberal recruitment policy as being the unrest in South West Africa. Enough of a description to ignite the adventurous spirit of the restless, young Zimbabwean. While attending Zim-U Alistair had paid close attention to any news from the progressive Republic of South Africa and spent many a night listening to the BBC reports on the schools side band radio. It was astonishing to see how world events directly impacted the economies and politics of the countries of Africa.

As the near end of the Cold War was in sight the SWAPO-South Africa