The Angus Shaw

“I often wondered how Kandaya felt as we closed in on him. We had the helicopters, the radios, the firepower. But he had stealth on his side.”

Angus Shaw was there when Rhodesia slid into war.

Born in the country he would later fight for, Shaw records, first as a civilian newspaper correspondent and later as a conscripted soldier, the brutal descent into a bitter bush conflict that would reshape southern Africa forever.

He meets revolutionary agitators plotting the end of white rule. He comes face to face with Robert Mugabe and exiled nationalist leaders directing the war from beyond Rhodesia’s borders. And he hunts Kandaya, a disciplined, elusive guerrilla commander who wages war by stealth, patience and terror.

At first, Kandaya follows the ancient rules of guerrilla warfare. Strike where least expected. Withdraw when pursued. Fight only when victory is certain.

But as the war intensifies and Kandaya rises to sector commander, he grows bolder and more ruthless.

In the northeast of Rhodesia, Shaw’s unit is ordered to find him. A bounty is placed on Kandaya’s head. The hunt becomes personal.

As independence approaches in 1980, the conflict hurtles toward its violent conclusion, culminating in a final reckoning between two men shaped by the same land, now divided by war.

This is not an armchair history.

It is a firsthand account of combat, fear, ideology and collision, on the battlefield and at a doomed peace summit in neighbouring Zambia.

A rare, unfiltered chronicle of the Rhodesian Bush War, told by a man who reported it, fought it, and survived it.

Read it now.