Bror Urne MacDonell was born in 1921 in Elizabethville, the Belgian Congo. He was educated in France and later at Eton in England. He became fluent in over a dozen languages including French, Swahili, chiShona and several other African languages. Aged nineteen, he was drafted into service during World War II. He served as Regimental Sergeant-Major with the African Light Infantry in East Africa and India and later transferred to Army Intelligence with the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. After the war he took up a varied career in hunting, locust control, farming, African administration and local government, working in the remotest bush of Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika. He moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the sixties and began writing Mzee Ali in 1963, from his campfire ‘bush notes’ of the forties. (Several UK publishers rejected the manuscript as being “too politically incorrect”—presumably because of the references to the black-on-black slave-trading.) He retired to the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, where he died in 1998. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, and four children.
