Mzee Ali: The Biography of an African Slave-Raider Turned Askari and Scout

About Bror MacDonellKerrin Cocks

Bror Urne MacDonell was born in 1921 in Elizabethville the Belgian Congo. For the first twenty years of his life he was known as Bror OErne-Glieman (his father''''s Scandinavian surname) but discovered that the Belgian authorities had erroneously registered his surname as MacDonell (his mother''''s previous surname). He was educated in France and later at Eton in England. He became fluent in over a dozen languages including French Swahili chiShona and several other African languages. Aged nineteen he was drafted into service during World War II. He served as Regimental Sergeant-Major with the African Light Infantry in East Africa and India and later transferred to Army Intelligence with the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. After the war he took up a varied career in hunting locust control farming African administration and local government working in the remotest bush of Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika. He moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the sixties and began writing Mzee Ali in 1963 from his campfire ''''bush notes'''' of the forties. (Several UK publishers rejected the manuscript as being too politically incorrect -presumably because of the references to the black-on-black slave-trading.) He retired tot he South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal where he died in 1998. He is survived by his wife Majorie and four children. Kerrin Cocks a journalist by profession has worked in the military-history publishing industry for fourteen years. She conceptualized the Africa@War series (co-published by 30 Degrees South and Helion & Co.) In 2009 she scripted directed produced and edited the full-length DVD documentary that accompanied Richard Wood''''s book Counter-Strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All-arms Fireforce in the War in the Bush 1974-1980 which was bought and aired on the New Zealand Documentary Channel. She is the author of Rhodesian Fire Force 1966-1980 (2015) and co-author of I Won''''t be Home Next Summer: Flight Lieutenant R.N. Selley DFC (1917-1941) (2014). She lives in Barberton South Africa.