The Diary of Edwin Clarke

The journal of a young British colonial-era police officer in remote southern Africa. Edwin Clarke left behind his comfortable, English middle-class life as the son of a bank manager to become a mounted trooper in the British South Africa Police in Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – in 1901.

When he died in 1955, Clarke bequeathed a unique handwritten diary of his service, which is published here over 110 years later. For the first time, read his account of horseback safari across miles of unspoiled African landscape in rural Matabeleland, stalking and hunting big game.

Vivid diary entries bring to life a cast of characters: gold prospectors, legendary farmers and settlers telling yarns around a camp fire at night, friendly African chiefs, and Clarke’s fellow police officers. There is tragedy too – sickness, brutality and violent death, set against a fascinating account of the daily life of a colonial police officer in a remote African district in 1906.