CURSE OF MAGIRA

by David Bee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 1965

Time is foreshortened in this multilinear story of German East Africa and Tanganyika which returns to the first World War campaigns with their military and political concerns and to the forty year old murder of an Old Boer miner. This is correlated and concentrated through Peter Disley, a Police Inspector in Tanganyika during the last years of British rule, who revives and reviews the case and the work done on it by Manfred von Thielemann, his German counterpart. Time telescopes; ruins of old buildings become whole again; and von Thielemann, stoic and heroic, is frustrated by official blunders as well as the difficulties of a terrain humming with myth, ancient tribal secrets and enmities. Disley will be defeated much in the same manner as his predecessor was, but through the dual account the author has managed to convey much of the forgotten history which took place there when a senseless European war was imposed and incongruously fought on African soil. The action and the country itself, with its overhang of evil, myth and legend, come through with greater strength than the personal protagonists.

Pub Date: July 28, 1965

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1965

Categories: FICTION