I cannot resist commenting on a TV news item regarding the `re-introduction of white lions into the wild' by a wild life conservationist in South Africa's Western Cape.
Here is why:
About twenty years ago, I decided that I should try to depart from my serious and wholly unprofitable (in the financial sense) writing about the business of politics in Rhodesian Front- ruled Rhodesia. Peter Joyce, the writer,(he wrote the first published book 'Rhodesian Rebel' about Ian Smith) nobbled me with a proposal for co-authorship of a surprising (to me)genre of writing. I have since lost contact with Peter and our book was stillborn for a reason I will explain further on. He persuaded me that the way to bust out into literary moneymaking was to write a successful Mills and Boon novel! He had got stuck when his own attempt at income generation along this route (the path to a peaceful retirement to an island where the Great Novel could be written)when the first delicate episode of sex reared up in a book intended for the delight of `those bored and frustrated matrons who don't want to read anything dirty'. He warned me that the book had to be well written and would stand only about a 5% chance of publication. His own literary `Blue' from Cambridge was well up to the task. So why ask for my collaboration? "Because I can't write about those silly things you women think about" was his reply. Huffily, I picked up the three slim volumes he threw down for me to read and got through two of them before dawn the next day. "I can do this! Easier than falling off a log. Just let the imagination rip" I said.
Peter had worked out the plot in fine detail. But, to get back to the subject in hand, the story was of a wild life conservationist (heroically handsome) breeding a pride of white lions in a South African game reserve. We had great fun with the daily progress discussions - he left me to do all the first drafting whilst he got on with his "coffee table" books and promised to polish the final version before submitting it for publication. Unhappily for the book's future, its theme at a time when South Africa was threatened at that very moment with `disinvestment'- an anti apartheid project invented by Teddy Kennedy - our story of a rich, white Saxonwold businessman's romantic adventure with a white lady and a lot of white lions would not go down well with publishers. Without Peter, I have never had the courage to review and change the plot. Tawny lions in a Rainbow nation? Impossible.
But my point here is that Peter had researched well and come up with the facts:the white lion was an albino - not, as portrayed today, a lost species to be `re-introduced into the wild'. Certainly not in Africa where the natural tawny coat is a brilliant protective camouflage in the lion's grassland habitat. Snow lions? Well that needs further research.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
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