African Stories

by Al J. Venter

Al Venter regards himself an African – a ‘white’ African, but as much a part of the fascinating and often troubled continent on which he was born as his Zulu and Swahili speaking contemporaries. There is no country in Africa that he has not visited. During his half-century career as a foreign correspondent, working for media outlets on four continents, he has given his version of unfolding events from many of them, for, inter alia, Britain’s Jane’s Information Group, the Daily Express and Daily Mail of London, United Press International, Geneva’s Interavia, the BBC, SABC, NBC (radio), as well as scores of magazines. His love for Africa stems in part from his childhood. At the age of 14 - while on vacation in what was then still Northern Rhodesia - he hitched-hiked back to boarding school in Johannesburg in a race with his schoolmates who travelled by train. And he won. Seven years later, after completing three-years in the navy, he explored East Africa and ended up in Mombasa in Kenya and cadged a lift on a freighter to Canada. Then, after qualifying professionally in London, he travelled overland through West Africa all the way to London. Along the way he met many notables – including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the man who hosted Graham Greene at his derelict hotel in Liberia – then all but an American colony, where the ‘greenback’ was the official currency – as well as the great Dr Albert Schweitzer. The author spent a week at his jungle clinic at Lambarane in Gabon.Venter includes many of these adventures in this new book. He also delves into some of his military adventures and has invited several of his old colleagues to add some of their thoughts to this bundle of travel, adventure and excitement to create a remarkable insight to a continent that that, though briefly ‘tamed’ by Europe, was never really subjugated. In that anomaly too, there lies many a stirring yarn.

324 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

About the author

Albertus Johannes Venter is a South African journalist and historian who is arguably the world's foremost expert on the modern military history of Africa. He has been a war correspondent/military affairs reporter for many publications, notably serving as African and Middle East correspondent for Jane's International Defence Review. He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker, and has authored more than forty books.

He has reported on a number of Africa’s bloodiest wars, starting with the Nigerian Civil War in 1965, where he spent time covering the conflict with colleague Frederick Forsyth, who was working in Biafra for the BBC at the time.

In the 1980’s, Al J Venter also reported in Uganda while under the reign of Idi Amin. The most notable consequence of this assignment was an hour-long documentary titled Africa’s Killing Fields, ultimately broadcast nationwide in the United States by Public Broadcasting Service.

In-between, he cumulatively spent several years reporting on events in the Middle East, fluctuating between Israel and a beleaguered Lebanon torn by factional Islamic/Christian violence. He was with the Israeli invasion force when they entered Beirut in 1982. From there he covered hostilities in Rhodesia, the Sudan, Angola, the South African Border War, the Congo as well as Portuguese Guinea, which resulted in a book on that colonial struggle published by the Munger Africana Library of the California Institute of Technology.

In 1985 he made a one-hour documentary that commemorated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He also spent time in Somalia with the US Army helicopter air wing in the early 1990s, three military assignments with the mercenary group Executive Outcomes (Angola and Sierra Leone) and a Joint-STAR mission with the United States Air Force over Kosovo.

More recently, Al Venter was active in Sierra Leone with South African mercenary pilot Neall Ellis flying combat in a Russian helicopter gunship (that leaked when it rained.) That experience formed the basis of the book on mercenaries published recently and titled War Dog: Fighting Other People's Wars.

He has been twice wounded in combat, once by a Soviet anti-tank mine in Angola, an event that left him partially deaf.

Al Venter originally qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers at the Baltic Exchange in London.

(from wikipedia)