Africa's Child

Author/poet Chas Lotter has sent this airbrush painting entitled  "Africa's Child" commissioned as the dust jacket for his next book Echoes of an African War.

The painting is by Corrie Maritz (email: [email protected])

Chas says the inspiration for the painting was a L/Cpl Marais of the RLI, who posed in this fashion for a Rhodesian Army recruiting poster entitled "You need more than beads and long hair to win a war".

Says Chas: "Perhaps I am prejudiced, but I think it is an effective rendition of a Rhodesian troopie. Besides being the dust jacket, it will be used in the body of the book with the following poem" :-

AFRICA'S CHILD

It is two hundred eighty years now

Since Europe shook its fist

At my ancestor

And forced him to leave.

Since then

Generations of my clan have sunk their roots

Into the African soil

And proliferated.

My tribe woke a continent

And thrust it into tomorrow.

My Afrikaans forbears fought their wars

To buy their land with their blood.

As I have fought my war.

I belong

This is my land, my home.

I yearn not

For that strange, unfamiliar place called Europe.

I am an African

A white African.

Chas Lotter's Echoes of an African War

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