Ivan Smith

This is the story of one man's service in the British South Africa Police of Rhodesia during his service of nearly fifteen years, between the years 1965 and 1979, and in many ways forms a sequel to the author's book Mad Dog Killers. The struggle to keep Rhodesia out of black nationalist hands started in late 1964 and ended with the Mugabe regime in 1982. It is also a story of a policeman engaged in that war as a member of the paramilitary BSAP Support unit, the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit and as an ordinary member of the force that had always been designated the country's first line of defence. Most of the service was on remote rural district stations, often in the middle of the"front line". The account tells of one man's learning to be a policeman and a police public prosecutor and about the eccentricities of some of the circuit magistrates. A policeman has a lot to learn about life, and in the BSA Police he was expected to jump in at the deep end from the start. It is also the story of the strange struggle by Rhodesian-born policemen in a force where the majority were English-born, at a time when Rhodesia was in rebellion against Britain. The author's senior officers, though fiercely loyal to the force, were British and required to join the rebellion. It tells of his resentment at the lack of drive by senior officers in the fight against terrorist atrocities. There is additional insight into the Utopian life in Rhodesia, especially in rural areas, when it was still possible to hunt buck for the police mess rations, where there was no electricity or other modern amenities and where the single quarters were in ancient buildings enclosed by a wraparound gauzed-in veranda - a life gone now forever. It is also a story of a young man who grew up in Salisbury, his sexual excesses and sadness. The British Queen Mother was patron of the force all her life and was very proud of her association with it.

During that long, hot summer of 1964, Ivan Smith, a mercenary volunteer in the Armée Nationale Congolais, came to witness and understand fear, the law of the jungle and the lust for killing that permeates Africa. A member of 'Mad Mike' Hoare's 5 Commando Group, he and his companions were nominally soldiers but there was little in the way of campaigns, tactics and discipline. Of conventional warfare there was none. Loyalty to country or unit did not exist and the fear of death was the only commander. Many more mercenaries died from an accidental discharge, in a drunken shoot-out or from a bullet in the back than were ever killed in action by Simba rebels. Nearly half a century later, Ivan Smith re-lives the nightmare that was the Congo. About the Author Ivan Smith was born 1941 in Fort Victoria, Rhodesia. He grew up on a farm before doing his national service after leaving school in 1958. After some cowboy and mining work he spent two years in London and Copenhagen. In 1964 he signed up for a six-month contract as a mercenary in the Congo. He joined the British South Africa Police in 1965 and served fourteen years in the paramilitary Support Unit and the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit during the protracted Rhodesian 'bush war'. He emigrated to South Africa in 1984 where he worked in the security department at the University of Cape for 16 years. A lover of hunting and fishing, he has written for various outdoor magazines for over 40 years. He lives in the small village of Joubertina in the Western Cape of South Africa.

Modern approaches to the study of symplectic 4-manifolds and algebraic surfaces combine a wide range of techniques and sources of inspiration. Gauge theory, symplectic geometry, pseudoholomorphic curves, singularity theory, moduli spaces, braid groups, monodromy, in addition to classical topology and algebraic geometry, combine to make this one of the most vibrant and active areas of research in mathematics. It is our hope that the five lectures of the present volume given at the C. I. M. E. Summer School held in Cetraro, Italy, September 2-10, 2003 will be useful to people working in related areas of mathematics and will become standard references on these topics. The volume is a coherent exposition of an active field of current research focusing on the introduction of new methods for the study of moduli spaces of complex structures on algebraic surfaces, and for the investigation of symplectic topology in dimension 4 and higher.