Any South African 'westerns'?

Only a few that would be exactly classed that way. Rider Haggard is better known for Lost Race fantasy, but he could write a pretty straight-forward tale of life on the frontier among trekboers, elephant hunters, & Zulus. Given that he knew that era of S African history first-hand, he really deserves more credit in that line. Haggard is one of my favorite writers.

Stuart Cloete wrote a certain amount of frontier tales. Wilbur Smith too (I'm thinking of When the Lion feeds, eg), though he's all over the African map when it comes to settings. They are both very good, though Cloete is more serious where Smith is all pulp-paperback sex-n-shootin'.

Films tend to get more recognition for the underlying similarities, Zulu for instance. Caine and Baker are like the cavalry officers in a John Ford movie, the Zulus are similar to the Indians... The Hellions is a pretty straight up Western, with Richard Todd as the "sheriff" albeit in a Natal Mounted Police uniform. Jamie Uys (The Gods Must be Crazy) plays a hapless shopkeeper who has to man up for a show-down. The Jackals is a re-make of Yellow Sky, but changing the setting from Arizona to the Transvaal. The original story was by WR Burnett (High Sierra, Asphalt Jungle). Vincent Price plays the old prospector. Definitely a bushveldt Western.

I've got an unpublished S African Western. I was never too satisfied with the final result and when I submitted it, I think editors just went "huh?". I'm working (in a lazy way) on a "Western" in German East Africa. African frontier tales is a subject I'd like to explore more (I'm up for writing them!), though I wonder what sort of market I could find.

Arislan said:

Here's a screengrab I found. http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/8273/scrooge.jpg

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That's pretty wild. There's something that is just perfect about a cowboy-duck riding a lion into an African boomtown.

BTW, have you checked out these guys: Jungle Jim. They bill themselves as African pulp, so I guess anything goes so long as it's African. Obviously they are not a market for Westerns in the traditional form, but they might be a good fit for the kind of thing you are talking about.

If you don't mind my asking, what gave you the idea about S Africa as a parallel to the American Western?

Arislan said:

Hi again, Dave! The graphics on that Jungle Jim site are fairly brain-frying. ;-)

What gave me the idea....well...I don't think it was my idea, I think that whenever you look at photos of little boomtowns in the African 1800's there's plenty of similarities to American western towns, also the way people dressed was similar. Being from Rhodesia, whenever I look up images of old Salisbury I feel like I'm looking at a Sergio Leone set.

This I noticed to be true in a few places. Australia, Africa and Southern Brazil (they had their own small Civil War in 1835, the Guerra dos Farrapos).

My WIP features a white African coming to Texas in 1850. It's a Weird West tale involving the supernatural. I posted the first chapter on the SYW horror forum.

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That's interesting. I got interested in S Africa when I was a kid since it was all over the news. I sort of got the idea that the Boers passed through a lot of the same stages as American settlers, but with a very different outcome.

I have a similar idea about Brazil, Australia, and other frontier lands. Brazil is pretty rich with characters like Lampiao, the bandit king. There have been Brazilian filmmakers that were inspired by the Spaghetti Westerns. The gauchos of the pampas get compared to cowboys (Richard Slatta has done a lot of writing on that). Australia has the bushrangers & a history of gold rushes. You could even compare the 19th century Siberian gold rushes to America, maybe instead of cowboys you have cossacks, and the outlaws are criminal exiles.

I suppose some folks might feel this is all too far away from the American Western, but I figure this is an international board. I want to encourage fresh takes on Western themes. Maybe some of that will help draw in new readers, and make some space for the traditional Western as well.

I'll take a look at your stuff on SYW. We used to do a lot of monthly writing prompts but that fell away. I got too busy to do much outside of my main projects, unfortunately. They were good exercise though.

When you write an African-Western, I'd like to see it.

Quickly jumping in here. Most books set during the great trek or having anything to do with the gold rush in SA could be considered 'westerns' (even if they were moving in an easterly direction, but go with it). My family is also originally from Rhodesia and, again, anything set at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th could be considered frontier books as they tend to focus on men/women pushing into the interior. For my money's worth I would go with Wilbur Smith on these - I read them yonks ago, but they were all mainly set during that era.
Another author is James A Mitchener, he wrote the Covenant, amongst others, that was set in SA around those times.

Returning to this topic, I just read Masked Raiders by Charles van Onselen. It's about robbers, safe crackers and hell-raisers of Irish origin in the Transvaal during the gold rush years on the Rand. Van Onselen is a social historian, which sounds very dry, but he has a penchant for relating the history of people like Nongoloza (who founded the Numbers Gang as well as S Africa's first street gangs in circumstances not far removed from the Wild West) and Joseph Silver, a pimp from the Lower East Side of New York who was point-man for a syndicate of pimps and gamblers in Johannesburg's gold-rush days before the Boer War.

Lot's of material here for aspiring writers of S African blood-n-thunder tales.