The Rock of the Wind: A Return to Africa

Denis Cecil Hills (1913 - 2004) was a British author, teacher, traveler and adventurer. He came to international prominence in 1975 while he was living in Uganda and was sentenced to death for espionage and sedition following comments about President Idi Amin in a book which Hills wrote called "The White Pumpkin". Following the intervention of the Queen, Hills was released and allowed to return to the UK. In 1945 Denis Hills served as an officer of the British Eighth Army in Italy. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago recognized Hills's part in thwarting the return of Russians to Stalin according to the Yalta Repatriation agreements as they were being condemned to death. Hills took a similarly humane and independent line over the question of the SS Fede, a decrepit hulk anchored off Israel and crammed with 1,200 Polish Jews, survivors of the Holocaust who were determined to make their way to Palestine in the face of a British blockade and quota restrictions on Jewish immigration. Hills persuaded the authorities to look the other way as the Fede raised anchor, an episode immortalized by Leon Uris in his novel Exodus. He returned to Africa in 1976, travelling through Southern Rhodesia. He also climbed mountains, biked the length of Europe from the Arctic Circle to Salonika, Greece, and wrote books about his adventures. Hills returns here to an Africa that both mesmerizes and repels him. The Africans' destruction of the Eden-like physical environment - through slash-and-burn cultivation and felling trees for firewood - distresses him particularly. He also broods upon the Ugandans' penchant for violence and their acceptance, even envy, of the marauding soldiery that has laid waste to the country since the days of Amin. Subjective and rambling, Hills' is still an unparalled first-hand account of land and people in rural Uganda today.