Catalogue - Reprints (Africana General)

Camp Life and Sport in South Africa
by Captain Thomas J. Lucas

Books of Zimbabwe (Africana Book Society)

ISBN 0 949973 10 6

Camp Life and Sport in South Africa is the informative and lively account of a soldier's experiences in the Eighth (1850-1853) and greatest of the wars between White and Black on the Cape eastern frontier. The author, a Cape Mounted Rifleman, served throughout the hostilities, and writes revealingly of the joys, the hardships and the dangers of campaigning in an ever-troubled border region and of the day-to-day life of a colonial officer. The military reminiscences are enhanced, as H. C. Hummel says in his admirable Foreword, 'by the clarity, detail and humour of Lucas's observations as raconteur, hunter, angler and, above all, naturalist . . . Those who know the Eastern Cape and its historic hinterland will recognise familiar landmarks .

CAPTAIN THOMAS J. LUCAS, the author of Camp Life and Sport in South Africa, was a professional soldier who had seen active service on the Cape frontier (and possibly also in New Zealand) as a member of a regular regiment of the British army before he enlisted, in 1848, in the Imperial Cape Mounted Riflemen. He took part in the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53), which he wrote about in evocative and entertaining style in two of his books, and later witnessed another important episode in South African history: the British Government's abandonment of the Orange River Sovereignty. The privations inseparable from military life on the frontier left him in poor health and he was forced to retire, a cripple, in 1862. He died in 1879.

Shortly before Lucas left army service he published his Pen and Pencil Sketches of a Campaign in South Africa a humorously illustrated account of his experiences on the frontier. This was followed by Camp Life and Sport in South Africa, and then, shortly before his death, he completed a work entitled The Zulus and the British Frontiers.

Lucas belongs, with Thomas Baines, Thomas Bowler and Frederick I'ons, to those early artists and 'artist- authors' of the Eastern Cape who, to quote C. J. Meinijies, 'have earned themselves a very special niche in the history of South African painting and literature'.

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