Chapter One

Circa 1888, a young ambitious unknown British entrepreneur, Cecil John Rhodes obtained the mineral rights for gold, copper and other valuable deposits in Zambezia. He obtained these surreptitiously from the African Chiefs ruling that vast land. Twenty-two years later, as a consequence of now being under British control, in 1910 Zambezia was then divided into Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia. The two Rhodesias were separated by one of Africa's mainline arteries, the magnificent but treacherous Zambezi River. (Now independent, these countries stand as Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia.)

In the same year of 1910, some 3000 miles south in Cape Town, on a freezing cold night in June, Margot Kennedy slipped out from the maternity wing of Belville Hospital into the bitter cold, forsaking her infant daughter. It happened when the serious clinical conditions of post-natal depression and puerperal psychosis were unknown entities.

The next morning, excited to have hired a horse and cart in which to take home his young wife and infant from the hospital, Margot's husband instead found himself confronting a timid nurse who handed the new father a slip of paper. In his wife's familiar handwriting Martin Kennedy read the chilling words, "If this is married life, you can have it ... au revoir ..." With those final words "Au revoir!" underlining the fact that his wife was of French Huguenot descent, the confused young Irishman from Cork, stared at his red-faced infant screaming in protest from the depths of her crib.

Eventually, when he reached out and lifted her u