Elizabeth Balneaves (1911 – 2006) was a Scottish author, painter and filmmaker. Ms. Balneaves went to Northern Rhodesia when the Kariba Lake began to fill, dispossessing the Tonga people, who had been warned, and innumerable animals great and small, which had not. Commissioned to bring back pictures of animal rescue, by great good fortune she made the acquaintance of Joe McGregor Brooks, an enterprising young Scotsman who was Game and Tsetse Supervisor over 4,000 square miles on the northern shore of Lake Kariba, and who spent his spare time in running a private animal-rescue service in a homemade raft.
Mr. Brooks and his charming Siamese wife invited Miss Balneaves to stay with them for a couple of nights, but her stay lengthened into weeks – accompanying game control or fly survey parties or helping with animal rescue by day, and in the evenings listening to Joe Brooks talking about his work, or telling stories of his many adventures with African wild life; his experience with elephants had first drawn him to the Valley. So impressed was she that, within a year, she was back. What she saw and heard during her two visits forms the basis of this book.
It treats with great sympathy the plight of the Tonga people, flooded out of their old villages by the Kariba Dam, and threatened in their new ones by elephant, hippo, lion, buffalo and crocodile. To protect the new settlements was an important part of Joe Brooks’ work, and his exploits provide many exciting chapters. Of the work accomplished and the hazards endured by him and his fellow Tsetse officers a are statement of facts gives little idea. Theirs must be one of the world’ epic fights against disease; but the facts are here. It’s a most interesting, varied, and human book. This is a rare book published in Great Britain.
