Down one of Africa’s great rivers

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33929, 23 August 1975, Page 10

Down one of Africa’s great rivers

Coming Down the Zambesi. By Bernard Venables. Constable. 231 pp. N.Z. price $9.55. Rivers play a great part in the lives of African peoples. One of the greatest is the Zambesi, the fourth largest on In open country Early Muster. Selected Poems by Allister Evans. Pegasus. 72 pp. N.Z. price $4.50 (doth), $2.95 (soft cover). Mr Evan’s poetry is perhaps unusual in this day and age, concerned as it is to record and to celebrate the joys of nature in regular metre and rhyme. However, Mr Evans writes from a practical experience of open country, descriptions of sheepdogs, storms, axemen, and musters are obviously derived from an unsentimental appreciation of the hard facts of outdoor life. The best poem here is probably the ballad “The Whisky Still”, an entertaining tale of four Scotsmen on Craigmore Station.

the continent, and the principal river of the southern part. The Zambesi runs for some 2000 miles, and its upper reaches begin where Rhodesia, Angola, and Zaire adjoin. It drains 573,000 square miles, and has a delta of 2500 square miles After many miles of navigable water, and fierce rapids, the great river debouches in the Indian Ocean near Chinde, a port in its northern arm in Mozambique. “Coming down the Zambesi” is the story of the circumstances and encounters of a 1200-mile journey down the river from the very source. Mr Venables makes the journey come alive because of his concern for nature and the environment. The stay is not only about a river journey. Mr Venables writes of his encounters with wild animals, the life and attitudes of the peoples of the . river — in Zaire, Zambia, Botswana, Rhodesia, and Mozambique — and the physical phenomena of the mighty Zambesi, including the Victoria Falls, which had to be negotiated on the journey to an ocean.