In 1953 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, accompanied by Princess Margaret, unveiled a memorial to Kingsley Fairbridge outside Umtali (now Mutare), Southern Rhodesia. The statuary group depicted him as a boy, his dog Vic at his side, and crouching behind him with one arm lifted protectively, his African manservant, Jack. It recalled his words from his autobiography: “A lad of thirteen, dressed in knickers and shirt sleeves, I walked on the outskirts of the Empire … “ (K. Fairbridge [1927] 1974, 44). The statue became such an icon of white Southern Rhodesia that it later featured on a Southern Rhodesian postage stamp.

In the first half of the twentieth century, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of colourful pioneers such as Percy FitzPatrick, Leonard Flemming, Matabele Thompson, Murrogh Nesbitt and James Stevenson-Hamilton formed an important part of popular reading in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Kingsley Fairbridge started out a folk hero, and soon became institutionalised as a role model for children. His autobiography, first published in 1927 (1974), is singled out by the Companion to South African English Literature (Adey et al. 1986) as having “an important place in our literature”. It became extremely popular among English-speaking South Africans and Rhodesians, and was often prescribed as a reader in white schools in the two countries: as late as 1960 it reached the pinnacle of approval by being prescribed as an English setwork for matriculation in the Transvaal (Jenkins 1973, 130). By then, after many editions, the title of the autobiography had changed in order to acknowledge its appeal to child readers, from the dry The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge ([1927] 1974) to the romantic The Story of Kingsley Fairbridge by Himself ([1936] 1974). Photographs were added that would appeal to children, and his wife Ruby designed a map of Rhodesia for the endpapers, also apparently aimed at young readers, headed “Part of Rhodesia as Kingsley Fairbridge knew it” and illustrated with vignettes of animals such as “‘Inyamkwarati’ the Sable”.