Hong Kong photographer Peter Wood on his wild Rhodesian days
He went on a leopard hunt at 3, grew up gay and confused until, at 15, an Australian sailor taught him 'about the birds and bees' on a Seychelles holiday, and saw the family farm seized in what by then was Zimbabwe - recollections Wood has shared in a memoir about his roots in Africa, as he tells Kylie Knott
I'm a white, gay Afro-Chinese - so yes, it's confusing! Anyway, let's rewind … my wicked past in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia. Between 1975 and 1979 I kept a diary and the entries form the basis of my memoir, Mud Between Your Toes. When a friend returned the diaries to me in 2005, after safekeeping them for years, I was fascinated by how interesting life on the farm was: a mix of politics and sex. As a teenager the most important things are getting laid and getting drunk, but the skin that wrapped around these stories was quite dramatic.
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I was born in Harare in 1962, in a hospital called the Lady Chancellor. It was terribly posh and only for white women. My father, John - he never let us kids (brother Duncan and sister Mandy) call him "dad" - had an amazing wit and was a great farmer, hunter and entertainer but he was not so great a husband, or father. He turned up to my birth late and drunk. During the birth, my mum, Libby, my hero, had an out-of-body, near-death experience called a silver cord. She was looking down over us and could see everything and hear the doctors discussing whether to save the mother or the child. Needless to say, a strong bond was formed.
We had a 13,000-acre tobacco and cattle farm, M'sitwe, about 125 miles north of Harare. My father built the house from scratch; he even made the bricks. We lived among leopards, antelope, kudu and a stunning landscape. My father took me on my first leopard hunt when I was three. A female leopard had gone rogue and was killing our cattle. She had to go. We found her lair and could hear her grunting. She knew we were there. Anyway, I peed my pants. I mean, who takes a three-year-old on a leopard hunt?
We'd go on hunting holidays to the Zambezi River. While school friends went to Cape Town and Durban (in South Africa) to shop and sit on a beach eating candy floss, I'd be watching a buffalo get skinned. There were a lot of hyenas - back then we didn't have David Attenborough telling us how dangerous they were. After the hunts we'd skin the animal and use every bit of the beast. We made biltong (dried meat) by putting the meat in a vat with brine and spices and hanging it out to dry. On one trip, the adults stuck the kids' camp dangerously close to the biltong and bone pit. One night we could hear the hyenas giggling and squabbling over the meat and bones. The next morning all that was left was a pile of hooks used to hang up the meat just yards from our tent.
