Who the hell are we?

Boundary Books is a publishing imprint in Harare, Zimbabwe. Angus Shaw is my  name, Andrew Saxon, Joseph Kamau and Andrew Cameron are pen names I have used over the years. Saxon to make it clear I am Anglo Saxon by origin, Kamau is a generic African name – a Kenyan Smith or Jones –  and Cameron shows I am Scottish by origin.  I set up a media consultancy called Saxon, Kamau & Cameron that distributed journalism by white and black contributors. As for Andrew Saxon’s Public Eye, it was a satirical and humourous column in Zimbabwean newspapers and magazines that was billed as insider information provided by an Anglo Saxon writer  from his perspective in now independent Africa. It had to be Saxon for counterbalance, the editors said,  because among columnists writing in the same  local publications at the time were Gono Goto and Zingizi, the pseudonyms of  black writers.

The real Angus Shaw was born in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in 1949. worked for the local Herald and Sunday Mail, Parade, Horizon, the Inter African News Agency, Camerapix in Nairobi, Kenya, the French news agency Agence France in Paris, Time, Newsweek,  the U.S. agency Associated  Press and for British provincial newspapers and Fleet Street tabloids when Fleet Street  was the home of Britain’s national press. He is the author of Lust to Kill: the Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (Corgi Books, Lodon, 1979) and Kandaya, Another Time, Another Place (Baobab Books, Harare, 1993). and Mutoko Madness (Boundary Books, Harare 2014) ,  He lives in Harare.

By the way, that man behind me in the picture top right is the great American conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein; here he is conducting Mahler and from his expression you can see he is transported to another world of both bliss and despair – that’s Mahler for you – by the sheer beauty of the music.