LBF 2017: Ranger extraordinaire’s scribbles turn into third book

MBOMBELA – He has since penned three successful books and says he is still scribbling away, although another book is still a couple of years to come.

“The late Dr Ian Player addressed the Game Rangers Association of Africa one day and said, ‘Game rangers need to document their experiences; we need to write, write, write.’ Essentially I began making notes, purely an observer’s anecdotal recollections of the environment I lived and worked in every day.

They were written from my perspective, as descriptive as possible without delving into too much technical detail,” explains Cesare, who has been a reserve manager at Olifants River Game Reserve for 24 years.

The author has been invited to the Lowveld Book Festival from August 18 to 20, where he will form part of a panel discussion titled Wildlife Wars, along with other well-known writers such as Tony Park and Nikki Meyer. His writing found encouragement from the positive response his newsletters received every few months.

“They loved being transported out of their corporate boardrooms and stuffy offices. To get them to smell the dust kicked up by a herd of buffalo and to make them feel the sun on their faces, to allow them to forget they were in a concrete jungle and in the bushveld was my aim with the pen, and apparently my newsletters helped to do just that,” Cesare says.

He admits he did not excel in English at school. “Everything I write comes from the heart. It certainly wasn’t through formal study that I was able to string sentences together to resemble prose, and not by virtue of the E grade I received in matric.

After 45 years I tracked down my English teacher, who now lives in the USA, to let her know her efforts had finally paid off. She was in tears on the phone.”

The favourite of his three books is Heart of a Game Ranger, in which he recounts some of his most shocking, devastating and heart-warming experiences in the wild, while paying homage to the brave and dedicated people fighting for the benefit of Africa’s natural world.

Cesare is incredibly excited for the Lowveld Book Festival.

“Being a shy person by nature, I can honestly say rubbing shoulders with fellow authors, and the genuine interest shown by the audience in hearing what makes a writer tick, made it easier. Until then, I had never considered myself an ‘author’ as such.

“Being invited to (this) festival will be the cherry on the top for me. Also I suspect being so close to home, the ‘real’ bushveld and the town where my children went to school, promises to make it all the more special,” he says.

In his first book, Man-Eaters, Mambas and Marula Madness, Cesare devoted a chapter, “Back to my Roots” to his trip to Italy to find his famiglia. One reviewer of his manuscript of The Man with the Black Dog said it was “the best such story since Percy Fitzpatrick wrote Jock of the Bushveld”.
Cesare married a fellow Johannesburger, Meagan. Both their children matriculated at Uplands College, but live in Cape Town.

“Though both my children grew up in the Lowveld and love the bush, neither wanted to make a career out of conservation.

Although I will always love the Lowveld for a myriad of reasons, not the least being it has given my life a purpose and has allowed me to leave a small part of the world a little better than when I found it, I will retire one day to the Western Cape, to where my children are,” Cesare says.