Daniel J Joubert was born in Balfour on 22 September 1954 and completed his schooling in White River and Nelspruit. Daniel began visiting the world renowned Kruger National Park at a very early age with his bush loving parents who moved to the Park when he was 20. His love for the wild took him in his father’s and mother’s footsteps and he and Elma, his wife, began working in Kruger in 1990.
Daniel has also had a great interest in and love for the mystery surrounding African history and the early times when game lived freely with the indigenous people. A favourite saying of his is, ‘I was born a hundred and fifty years to late.’
This is what inspired him to write his first novel, Mandleve’s Gold, which he completed at the age of fifty-three.
The book was published a year later by Raider Publishing International, New York / London.
His second novel, Aliens and Dolphins, is completely different and was inspired by his love for these intelligent mammals roaming Earths oceans and an intense curiosity about the Universe. This novel will be released by the same Publisher during the end of 2009.
His strong feelings towards dolphins have prompted Daniel to donate a percentage of his royalty income from this second book to various dolphin research programs worldwide.
Daniel lives with his wife Elma, the true inspiration behind his writing, in the coastal resort village of Sodwana Bay on the far North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal where he is currently working on his third novel, The Fighter Pilot's Wife.
Extract from Mandleve's Gold.
When Samuel Bartlett levelled the sights of the Westley-Richards hunting rifle on the midpoint of the elephant bull’s head the cicada silenced their high-pitched drone, the alpha male baboon barked his troop into the safety of a marula tree, a brown ground squirrel peak around the stem of a knob thorn and sniffed. The herds of impala, wildebeest and zebra stopped grazing, lifted their heads and flicked their ears. From the top of a yellow fever tree a fish eagle observed the event unfolding.
The bush watched – waited.
The Shangaan tribe called them both Mandleve. Big Ears. White man and African elephant – hunter and hunted – bound together in a way not even the tribal elders understood.
Bartlett had dreamt of this for a decade, and more, from the instant he set eyes on the elephant – an emperor’s ransom in ivory, waiting to be harvested.
The bull lowered its head as if to acknowledge the hunter’s claim upon him. As though to say that if he had to die, it would be with dignity.
No fear, no begging, no struggling against death.
The hunter squinted through the sight, his finger closing around the trigger. Sweat pearled his forehead as the voice hammered his thoughts. End it. End it now.
For the first time ever the hunter’s trigger-finger trembled.
‘So long Mandleve, my old friend,’ he whispered. His finger squeezed against the trigger spring, the rifle tight into his shoulder. ‘The wilderness won’t be the same without you.’ He exhaled a little, caught his breath, and waited for the kick. So hard, for so long. Ten years for just one moment – over in an instant.
Bibliography
- Mandleve's Gold. 2008. New York: Raider Publishing.
- Aliens and Dolphins – set for release 2009.
