JOHANNESBURG – A new crime cop is emerging in Southern Africa, one so different from Botswana’s Mma Precious Ramotswe that it’s unlikely there will be rivalry between them.
Except, perhaps, in readers’ affections.
Detective Inspector Jabulani Sibanda, who studied in the United Kingdom, is tall and elegant, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the bush, birds and wildlife.
He’s stationed in a large village on the borders of a national park in Zimbabwe’s rural Matabeleland.
It’s clear there’s a marked difference between him and homely, plump Precious Ramotswe. After all, Alexander McCall Smith’s Ramotswe runs the No One Ladies’ Detective Agency in a city, the Botswana capital of Gaborone.
“Sibanda’s a really hot-looking guy in his early 30s who has managed to escape marriage because crime has played such a huge role in his life,” his creator, Zimbabwean CM Elliott said.
Known to most as Scotty — her maiden name was Arscott — she has spent much of the past 35 years living in tents and tree houses deep in the bush. It’s where she met her husband, Alan Elliott, in 1977 on a stopover flight back to England.
“I could feel the magnetic force of the country as my foot touched the ground at Salisbury (now Harare) airport. There was such a sense of excitement and adventure in the air,” recalls the author, whose thriller has attracted attention at two South African book festivals this year.
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Sibanda’s foil is Sergeant Ncube, who is comic and fat. “I had Shakespeare’s Falstaff in mind,” Elliott said.
He has three wives, is town-bred, terrified of the bush and suffers from dietary challenges.
The story starts with the discovery of a barely recognisable human corpse by tourists on a game drive. They had expected a kill of a different kind. The vultures have eaten much of the body.
By the time Sibanda and Ncube arrive in Miss Daisy, an ancient Land Rover, the tourists are receiving trauma counselling back at their lodge.
As Sibanda bends over the body, francolins burst out of the undergrowth with their characteristic cackling and an already quivering Ncube leaps with fear. He’s convinced killer lions will finish them off too.
But bush-wise Sibanda has already noted that the internal organs have not been buried, as is the wont of lions at a kill. Furthermore, the ears have been cleanly sliced off.
It’s clear to him that this is not the work of a wild animal. There’s a human hand involved, probably with the aim of harvesting body parts for muti.
It’s a grisly scene in a detective thriller remarkably low on bodies, guns and gore. Instead, it’s a comedic, gentle tale that touches, but does not linger, on Zimbabwe’s history and politics, and the brutality of its independence war.
Elliott also ventures into Zimbabwean village life and its culture. Her Ndebele-speaking husband, Alan, was once the Member of Parliament for Hwange, “so we were in villages, assisting with projects such as schooling for some time, during which I was observing and absorbing the culture”.
Elliott, unlike many crime authors, has never spent any time on the beat with the police. Indeed, she’s never been into a police station.
“My stories are not police procedural ones, they come from the bush,” she says, “because that’s where I come from, and so naturally that’s where I’ve placed my crime adventures.”
Elliot was born in Nottinghamshire, UK, and was 17 when her parents emigrated to Perth, Australia. She obtained her honours degree in French there before teaching for several years.
“I decided when I turned 27 that I needed a bit of adventure and booked my air ticket with flights up Africa,” the softly spoken author, who has retained her English accent says.
She met Alan at Hwange National Park’s safari lodge. He was the wildlife manager and she was struck “by his extraordinary knowledge of the bush and his tracking skills. I found the wilderness and its remoteness hugely appealing.”
Elliott continued her trip across Africa to the UK and Europe, but returned to Alan. When she ran into visa problems, they decided to marry on a visit to Bulawayo to get their vehicle fixed. “So, covered in dirt, we went to the district commissioner’s office, were married, went back to Hwange and carried on as normal.”
When dissidents blew up their house, they moved into the lodge. Before their son was born, she spent a couple of years, “like a mating ant”, following Alan around as he tracked wild animals.
It was then she learnt much of her own bush lore, though on several occasions she’s found the bush too close for comfort. Like the time she was breastfeeding her son, now 30, when a movement made her turn. She was gazing into the eyes of a spitting cobra.
Many of her experiences have been adapted to appear in this book or will feature in its sequel, Sibanda and the Death’s-head Hawkmoth, due out early next year.
Lodges also feature, “one of ours was ambushed — though not with gunfire”, as do safari companies. Elliott and her husband opened their own business, Touch the Wild, in the 1970s, building lodges initially in Hwange National Park before expanding to the Matobo Hills National Park, Great Zimbabwe, and briefly into Zambia.
“I ran the marketing, the bookings and some game drives, whilst Alan managed the wildlife and operations side.”
At one stage their company was huge, she says, with more than 300 staff, “and we had to move into Bulawayo, where we now live, for logistical reasons”.
When they sold their company shares in 1997, she turned to writing to alleviate boredom and set herself the task of penning short stories in every genré.
She wrote just one, fell in love with Detective Inspector Jabulani Sibanda, “and knew that he and I had places to go. He’s a complete figment of my imagination. I just understood that I wanted a bush detective”.
Publisher Jacana asked for a sequel almost immediately.
Unlike the truculent and eccentric Miss Daisy, with her pink-striped seats, it is likely this series is going to motor.
– BDLIVE
