Marieke Faber Clarke
The library has now acquired a copy of ‘Blue Remembered Sky’ by Charlie Comins. Comins is one of several pseudonyms used by Kate MacFarlane. When Kate and I first met several years ago at Oxford Friends Meeting, Kate revealed that she had been brought up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, at a time when the country was under white colonial rule. Her father had been a psychiatrist in the notorious mental hospital called Ingutsheni. Using the pseudonym K.M.R. Smythe, Kate had written but not yet published a first book, called ‘The Secret World of Shlomo Fine’, about her upbringing alongside that dreadful institution. I put Kate in touch with Pathisa Nyathi, a historian and publisher friend in Bulawayo, who subsequently brought out ‘The Secret World of Shlomo Fine’ in 2018.
Kate, who lives near Oxford, has now self-published a second book, ‘Blue Remembered Sky’ (New Generation Publishing 2020), which concentrates more on psychiatry as a means of oppression, particularly of the black majority in Rhodesia. There were of course many other means of oppression in that country, before Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980.
As I was deported by the white Rhodesian rulers while I was teaching at an African secondary school near Bulawayo, I am delighted that Kate has written these two books exposing what it was like for a young white girl to grow up in that country.
‘The Secret World of Shlomo Fine’
(K.M.R. Smythe) is available via The African Books Collective.
‘Blue Remembered Sky’ (Charlie Comins)
is available via The Book Depository and Bookshop.org.
Kate donates a proportion of income from sales of both books to Pathisa Nyathi and the Amagugu International Heritage Centre in Zimbabwe.
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Forty-Three e-Newsletter • Number 503 • March 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
newsletter@oxfordquakers.org