Campfire Stories

[Carbine]

There is a series of books that I found at the library called "campfire stories" if I remember correctly.
There are 3 of them that all have a cover that looks like a big box of lion matches.
I read two of them months ago and should have posted about them at the time.

They contain fascinating short stories from many years ago that include off the top of my head:
- local tribes that spoke to early mariners (may have been Vasco da Gama / Bartolomeu Dias etc) of what must have been a European man in armour that rode on a horse (there were no horses in Southern Africa back then). He came down along the east coast of Africa.
- a Mozambican tribe that carried a white woman back to JHB, fighting off predators and tribes along the way. All the couples oxen were dead and the husband had been on his death bed when he asked them to do so. The agreement was that they can have all the iron from the ox wagons if they get his wife back to her family. The couples kids were lost to malaria before the oxen had died.
- WW2 ends and a Namibian that fought for Germany jumps off a train at night thinking he'll be a POW (which he wouldn't). He digs up a rifle and 50 rnds of ammo that he buried before the war started and lives off the bush for many months, escaping and evading the cops the whole time, who just wanted his help as a "PH" and guide for hunting trips.
- Two miners walk from a early mining site to a town to get supplies - like 200km away. One of them gets sick so the other guy gets him into shade and leaves him with water, food and a rifle. The healthy guy makes it to town where he spends all the money on booze. A week or two later when he is broke and sobers up he goes back for his partner and finds bones, a rifle and well fed hyenas.
- White men that were hired as mercenaries by local tribes to fight rival tribes.

Well worth the read if you enjoy history.

[masoodm]

Sounds interesting