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Spencer Katsiru's superb scholarship education at an expensive private school coupled with outstanding native intelligence made him something of an oddity among his own tribe. A selfless misinterpreted act isolated him further, but when reluctantly press-ganged into a guerilla army he began to see personal possibilities in the power "that comes from the barrel of a gun."
Set in fertile picturesque Southern Africa during the transition from European to African rule, Taking The Gap tells the personal stories of men and women caught up in larger events, starting at a time when several attacks by "The Crocodile Gang" in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) heralded the second Chimurenga war of independence.
Spanning from the 1960's to the fall of Ian Smith's white minority government, the story follows the fortunes of a colourful cast of characters, in particular Spencer Katsiru and a wild young colonial boy called James Hacking, following them through the dangerous, exciting, and heartbreaking times of an inherited and escalating war.
For fifteen years opposing local factions and tribes battled on the ground, manipulated by China, the Soviet Union and the Western powers in a global struggle for the strategic region's wealth and tactical location. Book one of the trilogy concludes in 1980 as the political dynamics of the entire region change forever, but the for the inhabitants of the new nation of Zimbabwe, euphoria and peace are short lived.
"Taking The Gap " was originally a Rugby term meaning to dart nimbly through a hole in the opposition defence line. In African bush wars it came to mean running away, escaping or fleeing.
There is more about Gordon Orr's books at www.gordonorr.net
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