Bring together a French explorer, a Scottish engineer, a New Zealand-born TV presenter, a murderer, a medical writer, an international tennis star, a professor, a judge, an Australian-born farmer, an Afrikaans playwright, a Jewish diamond prospector, a frantic mother, two famous African writers, a variety of white and black novelists, editors and journalists, not forgetting a San/Bushman mother - and something amusing should result. These men and women of different races, different centuries, different cultures (ranging from American-Irish to Zulu), have one distinction in common - each has been identified as among the most entertaining writers of English-language humour in South Africa in the last 200 years.