Kevin Ritchie
Wilbur Smith is content. “I don’t want to sound smug, but dammit, I am, my life’s been great.”
The 78-year-old author is on an unprecedented global publicity tour for his latest book Those in Peril, his 33rd book which launches internationally on Tuesday.
He’s sold 120 million copies in 26 languages since When the Lion Feeds was first published in 1964 – and then promptly banned by the National Party government – but there’s no stopping him.
“I feel great, I’ve got the inclination and I’ve got the energy,” he says.
His appearance certainly belies his age. Sitting behind the antique partner’s desk in his study, an annex to the sprawling bungalow in Bishopscourt, in the lee of Table Mountain, Smith could easily pass for a man of 65.
There’s not an ounce of spare fat on him and what’s left of his hair is shaved close to the skull. His handshake is firm, all that suggests otherwise is a stiffness and a pronounced limp when he walks.
When his wife Mokhiniso walks into his study, the years fall away. Smith’s positively skittish around her.
There’s a gulf of 39 years in their ages, but when they’re together, the age difference seems to shrink to 10 or 15.
Smith married her within months of his third wife Danielle finally losing her six-year battle with brain cancer.
Mokhiniso, or Niso as everyone refers to her, seems to play the same critical role in Smith’s life that Danielle did for the 30 years she was married to the writer.
She’s charming and elegant, with a core of steel and a prodigious memory for detail.
Smith is delighted to hear Boris Johnson, today the Lord Mayor of London, actually interviewed him almost 20 years ago, but can’t remember the article. Mokhiniso does: “Yes, darling, it was Birds of Prey(one of Smith’s blockbusters) and he was on the Daily Telegraph.”
It was in that interview that Johnson identified one of Smith’s enduring traits – the often breathtaking violence in his tales and the lust, “venerated among schoolboys for his dog-eared sex scenes”.
There are plenty of those in Smith’s latest adventure, set in present day Africa among the Somali pirates. It’s a rollicking yarn that starts with a bang and never lets up until the final terrible denouement, after the indulged daughter of a Cape Town-born oil tycoon is captured in her yacht and then brutally sexually enslaved by the ringleader.
There’s lashings of derring do, bodice ripping and stomach swooping danger as her mother, helped by a former SAS major, plots her safe return. This time, the setting of the book is totally up to date.
It’s a contemporaneity that Smith has shied away from in his other books, choosing instead to range between the Egypt of the pharaohs 4 000 years ago and African colonial sagas, battling the elements, shooting elephants and siring feuding dynasties, that run from the 1600s to the 1980s, but never beyond.
His critics call him one-dimension and formulaic.
His fans liken him to Charles Dickens for his ability to explain Africa. One of them, Andrew Kenny, once memorably wrote to newspapers to demand that Smith should have got the Nobel Prize for literature instead of Nadine Gordimer. Another fan was buried with all Smith’s novels in his coffin.
None of Smith’s books have ever gone out of print. He’s Pan Macmillan’s most successful author of all time, collecting 22 of the publishing house’s coveted Golden Pan statues, awarded to authors whose books exceed one million sales. His nearest rival could only manage seven – and that was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.
It’s a long way for the little boy who grew up on the Zambian copperbelt before being sent to do his high school at Michaelhouse in KwaZulu-Natal, long before John van de Ruit immortalised it in Spud.
Smith isn’t particularly enamoured of his time at the little Eton on the Veld: “I wasn’t good with ball and bat, I read books, I spoke out, I was a bit of a rebel.”
As for Spud, “ yes, I’ve read it. It’s enjoyable, it reminds me of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books. It’s amusing”.
Rhodes University would prove a happier time. Smith qualified as a chartered accountant and only began writing after the collapse of his first marriage. He cashed in his leave, resigned from the Receiver of Revenue in the then Rhodesia and took off to the hills of Inyanga to write When the Lion Feeds.
The rest is history.
Now, at a time when most people have already retired and many are contemplating life in frail care, Smith wants to woo a brand-new market of younger readers between the ages of 25 and 35.
It’s a novel approach from the man one reviewer described as being like Coca-Cola and Baywatch“because his fame is so widespread he needs no introduction”.
Smith has three children from his first two marriages; Shaun, a daughter Christian, and their half-brother Lawrence.
He adopted Danielle’s son Dieter, and ultimately made him his sole heir.
Today he is reportedly reconciled with Shaun, who is a successful businessman in Plettenberg Bay.
Of Christian, who launched a public attack in 1993 on her father accusing him of abandoning her and her brother, there is no word, as there is none of Lawrence.
Shaun’s son, a tik addict at a halfway house in Cape Town, wants to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and write a book of the underbelly of the Mother City.
Smith explains it thus: “They lead their lives, and I lead mine. I’m not the clingy type.”
Of Dieter, the doctor who unsuccessfully sued Smith, airing the family’s dirty linen in the process after his mother’s death, Smith is unequivocal: “He’s gone. Forever. To America. It’s not far enough.
“Have you heard the story about the old man dying?” he asks. “The old man is lying on his deathbed in his farmhouse, when his four sons arrive. They enter his room and ask him where he’s put his money.
“The old man wheezes and gurgles, his withered hand comes out from beneath the sheets like a claw. Two fingers point downwards.
“Unceremoniously, his sons dump him off the bed and turn the mattress over, but there’s no money. They ask him again as he lies on the floor. His two fingers point down again. They race out of the room and into the cellar, but there’s no money.
“A year later, the old man’s fully recovered, he’s sitting on his stoep with his gorgeous 26-year-old bride about to enjoy a glass of red wine, when a bakkie screeches to a halt outside the house and his four boys pile out. ‘Dad,’ they say, ‘we’re so glad to see you fully recovered, but we just wanted to find out about our inheritance, you know, because even though you’ve recovered, it’ll happen again, so where were you pointing to?’
“‘Of course it’ll happen again,’ says the old man, ‘the only problem was that the last time I didn’t have the strength to turn my wrist and lift up my two fingers to all of you’.”
Smith chortles. As far as he is concerned, he’s in the prime of his life. “I’m 78, I reckon 88’s a good time to go, before you start drooling into your food or peeing yourself, so that’s 10 years.”
He’s looking forward to meeting his fans on the road. “It’s a privilege to meet anyone who pays money for a book I’ve written,” he says, but he warns the PR tour will be relentless; afterwards though will be time for fun.
“It’s off to Argentina, the place I love most in the world after Africa, for steak and bird shooting and then Russia for Niso and I to catch salmon.” Their next stop will be New York, where he will be staying for seven months.
After that it’ s back to Cape Town, there the couple spend five months of every year – a far cry from when Smith was publicly threatening to leave the country if Winnie Madikizela-Mandela ever became president.
For her former husband though, Smith has nothing but the greatest respect.
“The attention with his recent health scare was a bit ghoulish, but I think that’s what happens with a great man. It’s sad, terribly sad when you see an old bull going back. He’s so revered everywhere; his absence will be sorely missed, even in his advanced old age.”
As for himself, though, he might not be able to walk for five days after elephants, but Smith believes he’s in fine shape.
“This morning, I looked at myself in the mirror… and said ‘you’re looking okay, you’ve had a great innings’. I’ve lived a life that few can emulate, things that didn’t end well at the time, have turned out to be blessings in disguise. My life’s been great. Now I’m going to start living even faster and doing even more than I’ve ever done before.”