WILD CONQUEST

Not since Closte's The Turning Wheels have I read as vigorous a story of the great Bear trek as this one. And here there is a wholly new method of presenting that grim saga -- in two stories, the story of one Boer family, forced out of the home they had built, the lands they had cultivated, by fear of reprisals from the newly freed blacks, who had been their slaves; and the story of the Zulu tribe that dared not take the advice of a wise chief but determined to fight for the right to keep the land that was theirs. Abrahams has been singularly successful in creating really deep sympathy for both sides- though the reader feels the tragedy of failure to take wise counsel, the failure to recognize that two peoples had much to give each other, the failure which planted the seeds of hate and fear of which the harvest is still reaped today. Abrahams wrote in 1947 a story that had some of the qualities of Cry The Beloved Country. In that story he has told one side of today's problem in South Africa. Now in Wild Conquest he turns back the pages of history in a very human double story of the conquest of the Zulus by the dispossessed Boers, a story of dramatic and tragic intensity. What he loses in emotional involvement by this paralleling he gains in objectivity and wholeness.