LONDON – He left as a character in his novels: suddenly, unexpectedly, after a day spent reading, writing and enjoying the company of his fourth wife, the Tajik Niso, the one to whom he had just dedicated his last book, just released in Italy. “You healed my heart and gave me the strength of an army”, reads the message to his beloved wife on the first pages of the volume, “thank you for pushing me to become the best writer possible”.
Perhaps these will remain the last words of Wilbur Smith, the king of adventure, who died at 88 in South Africa, on the continent where he was born, where he had almost always lived and where he had staged the epic stories that made him, if not the “best writer possible,” certainly one of the most popular and wealthiest authors in the world. Forty titles, divided between the saga on ancient Egypt, of which The new reignor constitutes the last chapter, preceded by The river god, The seventh papyrus and several others, and those about dynasties of white families like him, who grew up in apartheid Rhodesia (now Zambia), a regime he strongly condemned, then went through the end of colonialism and the beginning of a new era of racial equality, like the Courtney and Ballantyne cycle, which began with The fate of the lion, the lucky debut that made him discover and made him a best-seller sample. One hundred and twenty million copies sold, one sixth of which in Italy, one of the countries where it had more readers.
The book
Wilbur Smith. Adventures on the Nile
by Enrico Franceschini
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The real adventurer was his father, a metalworker who became the owner of the factory where he worked, an ex-boxer “with such big arms”, a hunter who bought a farm in Rhodesia and retired there to cultivate the land. But also an old-fashioned white man, a colonialist: “I listened to him until I turned twenty and then I started thinking for myself,” Wilbur recalled. “I didn’t want to perpetuate the injustice, so I left Rhodesia and tried to find my way alone.”
As a boy he wants to be a journalist, his father forces him to study as an accountant, but at that point Wilbur also has his share of adventures: “I killed my first lion at 12, in self-defense, I was almost killed by a buffalo , I saw men killed by elephants and I swam among sharks ”, as he told Claudia Morgoglione in an interview with Repubblica just a few months ago. As a young man he worked in a mine in South Africa and then embarked on a whaling ship, even if he descended from it after a month, having realized that it was not his job. For a while he worked for the South African tax office. Then he goes back to his youthful passion, to write: not for newspapers, however. Stories of fantasies, inspired by Africa and its myths. Whether it’s the magician and scientist Taita, protagonist of the Egyptian saga, or the forefathers of the Courtney and the Ballantyne, the characters in his novels are his alter ego, as he first admits: the romantic heroes he would have liked to embody in reality.
Wilbur Smith: Heads High Beyond Hell
by Claudia Morgoglione
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The first manuscript was rejected by twenty publishers. But when it is released, the success is overwhelming and hasn’t stopped since. “Write about what you know,” encourages the publisher. “So I wrote about my father and mother,” Smith will say, “about the history of Africa, of blacks and whites, of big game hunting and mining, of adventurers and women.” In the center of The fate of the lion there is a man who remembers his grandfather, “elephant hunter, gold digger and commander during the war against the Zulus”: his fantasy does the rest.
In the last decade he wrote together with selected collaborators together with the new publisher HarperCollins, who now publishes all his books also in Italy: Wilbur thought about the plot and drafted the text, a younger writer did the research and rewriting. It was now a trademark and as a company it published one or more novels a year. Not literature, not even avant-garde fiction, but high quality entertainment, as evidenced by tens of millions of fans.
His private life was also an adventure: four wives and only with the last one conjugal happiness, “I got along only with the first in bed, the second despised me, the third always tried to manipulate me”. Then the meeting with Mokhiniso Rakhimova, a Tajik student of the Moscow University, almost 40 years younger, which makes him reborn. The three children are against marriage, Wilbur marries her anyway and breaks up with the children: “I’m a generous person”, he said, “but if someone turns against me, I cut off all relationships and it’s over for me.”
Among the writers he most admired and considered his masters were Hemingway and Steinbeck. “I consider myself a 17th century man,” Wilbur Smith said. “Technology doesn’t interest me. I need to smell the roses and the buffalo manure ”. His Africa, where he will now be buried by his beloved Niso.
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