The White Hecatomb, and Other Stories

The White Hecatomb is a collection that transports readers to the drought-stricken veldt of late 19th-century Southern Africa, where tribes face annihilation not from a single enemy but from the twin scourges of nature and war. The title story unfolds through the voice of an elderly woman, one of the last of the Amangwane, who recounts her life from childhood amid clan warfare to the present day, when she alone remains to tell of the locust plague that devoured every crop and the raid that took everyone she loved. Scully renders this landscape with unflinching clarity: the sky black with insects, the earth left bare and howling, the terrible choices that divide survivor from victim. These are stories of displacement and endurance, of communities fractured by conflict and rebuilt from ruins. The opening tale follows a young girl through similar terrors, her youth swallowed by violence she cannot yet name. What emerges is a portrait of resilience that feels less like heroism and more like stubborn, aching persistence. This is historical fiction that refuses to soften its era, rendering indigenous African experience with a complexity that 1890s colonial literature rarely attempted.