Namibia has just discovered it might be rich beyond imagining. Offshore oil fields in the Orange Basin — billions of barrels beneath the Atlantic seabed. Enough to lift a desert nation into prosperity. Enough to turn it into a target.

President Nadi-Omunongo has spent thirty years watching small nations fracture under the weight of larger ones. She knows that resource wealth and political survival are not the same thing, and that the world has never learned to leave Africa alone. Now Washington is recalibrating, Beijing is positioning, Moscow is watching, and a destabilisation event in the Persian Gulf is spiralling toward nuclear escalation.

At the centre of it all: a female African president who refuses to choose sides, a Ukrainian cyber-analyst tracking a weapons trail, and an intelligence operative who has been running too fast for too long to stop.

Fractured Empires is a taut geopolitical thriller grounded in southern Africa’s actual mineral landscape and great power tensions — a story about what sovereignty costs when everyone wants what is beneath your feet.

The Sperrgebiet. Namibia’s forbidden zone — sealed since 1908, stretching 26,000 square kilometres along the southern Atlantic coast. The fence was built to protect diamonds. What lies beneath the diamond gravels is something else entirely: 2.4 million tonnes of high-grade cobalt. The mineral the world’s most powerful nations are racing to control.

Viktor Volkov, Russian intelligence operative, is in Iran on a personal mission — following a strike that took everything from him. Soraya Nazari knows where the bodies are buried, literally and financially. And Amon, a Namibian geologist, has a core sample that could determine whether his country’s sovereign mineral wealth is protected or stolen.

Three people. Three countries. One resource that will shape the next fifty years of global power. Moving from the interrogation rooms of Bam to the fog-bound Atlantic coast, Forbidden Ground asks whether a small nation can hold what is constitutionally and legally its own against the pressure of those who have always taken what they wanted.

The strikes were precise. That was the point. The AI system had been stripped of its ethical constraints — made more capable, more decisive, more effective. One hundred and sixty-five children in a school in Minab, Iran, were the operational consequence no algorithm had been asked to account for.

Claude is twenty-six years old, Namibian, working at a Silicon Valley AI company when he discovers what the system was used for. The documented evidence is real: authorisation codes, strike logs, signatures, a chain of decisions made by people who had been told that capability without conscience was capability improved.

He presents it in a London lecture theatre. Every camera in the world is watching. All Lawful Purposes is a sharp, prescient thriller about autonomous weapons, AI ethics, and the cost of removing conscience from capability — told partly from the perspective of the AI itself.

On the Skeleton Coast, a forensics specialist finds a military-grade bullet in a poached rhino. A port worker in Cape Town photographs container manifests that don’t add up. A nineteen-year-old soldier in Burkina Faso writes down what he saw at a road junction in the dark, on the back of his mother’s letter.

In Windhoek, a retired Russian intelligence officer has been building a file for fourteen months. It names every node of an criminal network that has been running for sixty years — moving diamonds, weapons hardware, and conflict minerals through the same logistics infrastructure that was built to protect African wildlife. "There is an African road of bones and blood of man and beast, stretching from the southern point of Africa all the way to other continents."

Road of Bones is the story of what happens when the evidence is finally complete, and the weapon of choice is not a gun, but hard documented evidence.

Publication forthcoming. Register your interest below.

A collection of short African stories and poetry and animal paintings drawn from a lifetime of living and working as a Game Ranger, safari guide and explorer across southern Africa. Written under the pen name “Chrigi in Africa,” these are the stories of campfires and wildlife, of the San people and the Namibian wilderness, of conservation and the deep natural beauty of a continent that does not forgive carelessness but rewards those who learn to read it.

For readers of all ages. Available in hardcover.

The second collection of short stories and poetry by Chrigi in Africa — this time rooted entirely in Namibia and his time being raised in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The Skeleton Coast, the Namib Desert, the Kaokoland, the people and animals of one of the least-populated countries on earth. Stories told the way they have always been told in this part of the world: around a fire, teaching a moral or purpose of life, with nothing added that does not belong.