Zulu Wilderness - Shadow and Soul

Reviewed by Robert K. Olson

Ian Player. 1998. Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, CO, 320pp., $21.95.

"Africa had a soul and my own soul was linked to it."

Why are we reviewing a book about wilderness in the Republic of South Africa? What has this to do with Listening Point, with the Upper Midwest, with North America? Read on; there are good reasons.

Because this is a wonderful story in many ways. Ian Player may be a stranger to 99 percent of our readers but not to Sigurd Olson and not to the wilderness movement in the United States and worldwide. Indeed, the book was actually written in Idaho while Player was a visiting professor at the University of Idaho. He built the South African Wilderness movement on the American wilderness campaign:

The most important document I ever received was from the United States. It was Senate Bill S1176 of 1957, the Senate hearings on wilderness. It was the best secret weapon in our armoury. It contained every argument for and against wilderness.

Player, now a member of the International Board of Senior Advisors of the Listening Point Foundation, in turn launched the wilderness movement in South America and the series of World Wilderness Congresses held every few years in different parts of the world. And, because Player is one of those rare men who is at once a dreamer and a man of action. Sound familiar?

Player writes about his own life, a spiritual journey of discovery, of Africa and of himself. But the story is also a tribute to his Zulu friend and mentor Park Warden Maggubu Ntombela who taught him to see and appreciate the wilderness and who inspired him to call a big "indaba" or gathering to inspire the rest of the world. It is a tender, moving story with multiple overtones of love, comradeship, and racial respect.

Because Ian Player is a gifted writer who reminds your reviewer of Sigurd Olson, himself. Like Sig, he blends the outer world of the wilderness with the inner world of the heart and soul and mind. "How could I explain to them," he writes, "that I had gone on a journey in the inner and outer wilderness?" We are also reminded of David Backes' Sigurd Olson biography The Wilderness Within. Here are some examples:

In the national parks and game reserves of Africa that ancient spirit, described by General Jannie Smuts as "older than the spirit of man," still survives in the brooding lowveld, in our remote mountain areas and wild coastlines. What we have in those places is the most precious of worldly gifts, a sense of the spiritual connection between human beings and the land.

Speaking of ancient man in South Africa, "Were they not, like me, caught up for the moment in the sheer music, the symphony of land, sky, water, and other life?"

Here is the Singing Wilderness of South Africa. It's a classic and a joy to read.

For more information on Ian Player, see the profile of him in the Spring/Summer 2000 newsletter.