African Star is the author's memoir of his first voyage as a teenaged cadet on the ship of that name in 1961. It relates his experiences among grizzled seamen aboard ship and ashore in the ports of South and East Africa. It is a humorous re-telling of his coming of age, but it also relates his experiences with and reactions to the injustice of the apartheid system then in full force in South Africa.
It is also the story of a bygone era when thousands of American men went to sea in American merchant ships that plied the oceans far and wide. Sadly, that is no longer the reality in 2021, and is now but a distant memory. This book serves as a time capsule for the practices and people in the US maritime industry prior to the revolutionary changes wrought by technology, economics and politics that have brought it to the brink of extinction today.
