Echoes of an African War marks a high point in Chas Lotter's 25 year writing career. This soldier poet's craft had humble beginnings - Chas Lotter admits that many of his earlier poems were "written on the back of cigarette boxes". Chas Lotter's writing quickly attracted critical acclaim in poetry journals even before his work appeared in Peter Badcock's volume : Shadows of War. The commercial success of Shadows of War led to another Lotter - Badcock collaboration; Faces of War. Chas joined the Rhodesian Diaspora in 1980 and settled in South Africa. In 1984, he published Rhodesian Soldier - a volume that matched verse with original photographs. Now long out of print, Rhodesian Soldier has become a much sought after collector's item with the scarce copies commanding a premium price.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chas Lotter juggled part-time writing with his business interests and although he achieved occasional success with the select pieces in various journals, he knew that he had not yet told the full story of his service in the Rhodesian War. In the early 1990s, Chas committed himself to the project that would ultimately culminate in the publication of Echoes of an African War. Aware of the appeal of the poetry - photograph format, Chas set out on an ambitious quest to locate as many original unpublished photographs from the Rhodesian war as he could. His task was aided by the explosive expansion of the internet.

Photographs poured in from all corners of the world. Ex-servicemen of all descriptions as well as civilians, reacted generously to Chas Lotter's call for photographs. Within a year or two of beginning his research, Chas had accumulated hundreds of original photos and had become the unwitting custodian of a substantial collection of Rhodesian bush war related photographs. All were carefully scanned and converted into electronic format. Then began the painstaking task of searching out the few score photographs that would form part of the collage in the final book. Chas made use of the internet to generate advance interest in Echoes of an African War. His web site published galleries of photographs and published teasers and samples from the book as the launch date approached.

Echoes of an African War was published in 1999 and quickly disproved a long held belief - namely that poetry does not sell in commercially viable quantities in South Africa. The book was published in two versions - a leather bound collector's edition and a coffee table size hard back volume with a richly illustrated dust-jacket. Echoes of an African War is more than a volume of poetry, however. It forms a remarkable cultural record of the Rhodesian bush war and a unique window into some of the bitterest years in southern Africa history.

From this project grew the Echoes Archive - a repository of several thousand Rhodesian war photographs stored in electronic format. This archive ensures that the history of the war is preserved and is available both to serious scholars and to the people who were there.

The latest project of the Echoes Archive is to scan in and store the entire contents of the official photo albums of the Rhodesian Light Infantry from it's inception to its dissolution - a task that has already taken six months and will probably take another eight months to complete.

Also, from all this grew the Rhodesian Roll of Honour - incomplete because no official Roll was ever assembled but more comprehensive than any other Roll previously attempted and still growing as corrections, additions and extra information continues to be emailed into us from all over the world.

The current Echoes Archive team - all part time, unpaid volunteers - comprises of :

Chas Lotter
Betty Lotter
Jonathan Harvey
Talita Harvey
Mike Hagemann