An excellent account of the solitary life, the responsibilities and routines of a Native Commissioner stationed in the remote vastness of Rhodesia in the years before World War I. As the principal representative of government in the rural areas, the Native Commissioner was charged with a huge variety of responsibilities: from collection of taxes to the administration of justice; from the control of smallpox and locust swarms to the allocation of land. He had to be administrator, manager, agriculturalist, civil engineer judge, psychologist, architect, builder, doctor and vet, and from him was required absolute integrity, and dedication to the task of bringing a better life to the indigenous peoples while, at the same time, respecting their traditional institutions. Such a man was Herbert Nassau Hemans, who was posted to the Sebungwe area, a semi-arid, inhospitable and tsetse fly infested region south of the Zambesi river. Sebungwe's untamed wildness had a special appeal for him, not least because of the opportunities it gave for hunting, exploration and study of its primitive peoples. In this book he describes his lonely but incident- and intarest-filled life in modest, straightforward style. Highlights of the story, perhaps, are his encounters with wild animals and a 200-mile boat trip down the Zambesi to the Kariba Gorge. Hemans' ethnological notes on the Batonka and Bashankwe tribes are of special interest..

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