A Black South African POW and a German ace: the novel Starlorn
Poet Stephen Symons's debut novel imagines the wartime friendship between a Luftwaffe pilot and a South African prisoner of war in the North African desert.
PANM — South African poet Stephen Symons has written his first novel, Starlorn (Karavan Press), and it starts from an almost forgotten piece of history, he told Daily Maverick's Lucinda Jolly.
The story
The book is loosely based on the friendship between Hans-Joachim Marseille, the young Luftwaffe ace nicknamed the "Star of Africa" during the North African campaign of the Second World War, and Corporal Mathew "Mathias" Letulu, a Black South African prisoner of war in the Native Military Corps. Marseille's life has inspired a film and more than ten books, but none focused on Letulu. Symons calls his book a work of imagination and has renamed the men Hans Muller and Jacob Makwetu. They bond over Cuban rumba, jazz, swing records and chess; about half the novel follows the post-war years.
How it was made
- Symons, an award-winning poet who learnt to fly single-engine aircraft, sat in a Spitfire cockpit at the Imperial War Museum Duxford and read accounts by German and Allied pilots.
- Former South African Air Force pilot Lionel Read was his technical adviser.
- The idea came from an article by the late Peter Dickens.
- Instead of chapters, the book uses numbered sections with factual notes between them, and the desert is treated almost as a character.
Where to find it
Symons launches the book at Booktown Richmond, the Northern Cape book festival, from 29 to 31 October. It is a South African story about conscience and shared humanity, told by a South African writer about a South African soldier whom history had left in the margins.
Source: Daily Maverick, 22 October 2026.
