A pre-Mugabe idyll

All the news coming out of Zimbabwe these days is bad news. What we are never hearing is what a beautiful country it is. I’ve just been reading The House on the Kopje by Mollie Chappell. I was glad to find a cheap copy on eBay as I already had its sequel, The Fortunes of Frick. The House on the Kopje was first published in 1951, when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia and Ian Smith and UDI were yet to come. The political history of Rhodesia since 1890 is quite complicated, as any stamp collector knows, so I’ll just say that at the time the book was written it was ‘a new country – with a big future’, as one of the characters says. ( more about Mollie Chappell )