Bembezani: A Novel about Africa

by Mark Brewer

The Macondray family and the vast Bembezani Ranch where they have lived for three generations in southern Africa are torn apart when father Phillip supports the black political movement. Ironically, young Paul Macondray and his black boyhood friend Zachariah Madziba are driven to opposite sides of a bloody civil war. An epic novel of African politics, racial conflict and guerilla warfare.

Hardcover

First published July 1, 2001

About the author

Mark Brewer is an entrepreneur and an adventurer who has traveled extensively, and his novels draw considerably on his own experiences. As a freelance journalist in the 1970s Brewer lived and traveled in South America and Africa. His travels in the West Indies as well as his close observation of the drug trade on Colombia’s fabled Guajira coast provide much of the color and excitement in the smuggling tale, Windward Passage (Crown 1978), which is based on a true story. In Africa, Brewer worked and traveled throughout central and southern Africa reporting on the political turmoil and guerilla warfare of the Rhodesian civil war, which ultimately created the new nation of Zimbabwe, all of which was background for his epic novel Bembezani (Freundlich Books 1984).

Returning to the United States in 1980 Brewer retired from journalism and founded Washita Oil & Gas, a natural gas exploration and development company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Washita has been a notable success and remains Brewer’s primary business interest. Brewer also avidly played rugby football, which he learned in Rhodesia, and he played five seasons with the San Francisco Rugby Club, for which he was a team captain and club president. His most recent novel, Up & Under: Rugby vs Life, an absorbing drama set amidst the hard living milieu of club rugby, draws both on Brewer’s rugby adventures and his journalism career.

Mark Brewer lives on a small ranch in Northern California, where he and his wife have raised two children, now in college, and he tends a vineyard and indulges in a variety of sports.