… admirably well-researched
… first-rate, well-written adventure story
… historical epic
… sublime regional dialogue
Smoke And Dust is the story of a feckless farm boy whose passion for his half-sister causes him to be banished from the rural familiarity of the South of England to the brutalities of early colonial Africa. Conscripted – tricked – into the army, comes to fight in the Matabele Wars, farms in what is now Zimbabwe, becomes an ivory hunter in what is now Zambia and trades up and down the beautiful and dangerous Zambezi River. The bigoted, ignorant and fearful teenager develops into a singular man who grows to understand and love Africa. From being an English boy, he becomes an African man. Two African women are instrumental in this dramatic and uplifting transformation: Esnati, who is torn from his arms during the Matabele Rebellion but returns first in his dreams and then in an extraordinary reality; and Helena, half Chokwe and half Portuguese, whose appearance in Ben’s life seems to fulfill the clairvoyance of the young Gypsy girl who seduced Ben, stole his father’s plow horse and triggered his life’s adventure.
I wrote this book based on a story originally written by my father when we returned from Africa. He researched the historical details meticulously and presented the inarguable facts through an idiosyncratic eye. Africa is still in many respects an ignored continent yet its people and resources are essential to the evolution of our 21st world. We continue to ignore the continent at our peril. I hope I’ve done justice to my father’s original work.
“If men like you return from where you came, there is no hope for this land or for our people because, if men like you return, only the thieves, the whores and the murderers will be left. Only those who think that my people are as monkeys, to be laughed at; as crocodiles to be exterminated; as slaves, to be beaten and abused. But if men like you remain, perhaps our two people can learn to live together and the warriors who died, yours and mine, will not have died uselessly. Their spirits will rest easy.”
Amazon reviews
Smoke and Dust is an historical epic that follows the journey of a young man, Ben Johnson, from rural farm-hand in nineteenth century Hampshire to a British Army posting in Southern Africa at the turn of the century… paints a vivid world that the reader will likely have very little familiarity with… Smoke and Dust is a character-led novel and, in common with his television and film work, Peter’s characters are well painted… tastefully shows proficiency for the semi-erotic, treading the fine line between the embarrassing and the vanilla. A trait equally echoed when the book becomes ever more violent as the story moves to Africa; on both occasions the passages exist for the benefit of realism, less than shock value… (the book’s) mandate seems as much to inform the reader of the worlds at play in the novel as to tell the story itself… reminds the reader of a science fiction novel where distant worlds need to be explained… his proficiency in painting filmic scenes in the minds’ eye is, however, all too evident and the backdrops of Zimbabwe are realised in magnificent detail through words alone.
In this admirably well-researched historical… the central character, ashamed and ostracized runaway Hampshire farmer’s boy, Ben Jonson, finds himself unwittingly part of a small British army unit bound for South Africa to join pioneer Cecil Rhodes in his venture to exploit and colonize the land and indigenous peoples of South and Central Africa during the so-called ‘gold rush’ at the close of the 19th century… dynamic and frequently action-packed narrative setting the fictional character’s adventurous life neatly within the veracity of the historical facts… I would not hesitate in recommending ‘Smoke and Dust’ to those who enjoy a first-rate, well-written adventure story