Romola Valmai Sherwell

The Guinea Fowl Girl: a Colonial Childhood Southern Rhodesia 1939-1958 Romola Valmai Sherwell

This memoir is set during a time long before the independence of Zimbabwe from Britain. My father and mother (he being a magistrate and local governor) lived in Southern Rhodesia throughout the '40s and '50s, and this is a story of what life was like in those days. Mother and her family were from South Africa and my father was born in Cornwall. I have tried to capture time and place as seen through my eyes, the eyes of a child. I wanted to get all of this down; the society, cultural norms, our family history etc., before everything about that time disappears for ever. It is no a political treatise, but an account of a life as seen through the eyes of a child. The names of the towns have all changed since African independence. I have kept to the names we whites used during that time for authentication.