Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

The elephant isn’t reactive like the buffalo—he’s very shortsighted—but he can think, fast. In the thick bush where he usually hides, his color is the most deceiving camouflage in the wild. The trick after you’ve spotted him is to move in close; he’s so heavily armored that the hunter needs a heavy bullet, a really heavy bullet, which has accuracy only at a very short distance.

  “When we stalk one,” Lynn says, “he’s likely to sniff the wind. We have to get that bit exactly right. If an elephant lifts its trunk and detects you, you’ll hear a trumpeting that will downright chill your spine. Then you’ll be stampeded, and it will be all over.”

  He’s not referring to my first-ever big game safari. He’s referring to my life.

  “The most promising shot is the brain shot,” Lynn says. “Just see whether you can nail the thing head-on.”

  After hours of stalking in the scorching July sun, Lynn’s trackers spot an elephant through the tall grass drinking from a river. “Those tusks have to weigh about seventy pounds each,” Lynn whispers. He crouches down and moves in, and I edge in front of him to do the same. “Remember what I’ve told you, Geoff. If he sees you and you have to get down, just sit. Do not lie on the ground: that gun will recoil against you so hard you’ll never shoot again.”

  A breeze rises up and sways against us. I take the lead and watch the trunk rise like a snorkel.

  Our scent has carried across the wind.

  “Closer,” Lynn says.

  We inch forward. I know that at this distance, there will never be time for a second shot. “That’s it,” I whisper, subtly pointing toward the elephant’s left shoulder. “That’s my shot.” Lynn nods, his eyes fixed on the elephant. I bite down and steady the gun against the crook of my armpit, aiming not for the center of the forehead but for the gutsier shot: a heart shot, from the side.

  I fire.

  “Yes!” Lynn hisses.

  No, I think. No . . . no.

  I pulled the trigger too fast. I’ve hit him before I wanted to.

  I watch, my fingers still choked around the trigger. The elephant absorbs the bullet above his shoulder and stumbles. He gains a second of footing and takes off toward us, just past the left of me, so close that he nearly knocks me down. He loses all of his tracks—and then, suddenly, crashes down like a boulder.

  I’m in horror—not because a few yards more and I’d have been trampled, but because I’ve just killed the most beauteous and magnificent beast I’ve ever seen.

  I lower the gun, heartsick.

  Lynn takes off toward the kill and calls over his shoulder, “Well done, Geoff!” Right then I make a vow to myself and to Africa:

  If I ever shoot an elephant again, it will be with a camera—not a gun.

  Despite the heat and fatigue, Lynn and his staff are in high spirits when we return to camp. To celebrate my official passage into manhood, they craft for me a ritual gift: a bracelet made of the bristly hairs from the elephant’s tail. My attention to the bracelet softens the emotion that’s sitting in the pit of my stomach like a rock. “You like it?” says one of the trackers.

  “Very much.” I turn it in my fingers, studying the assembly.

  “Is a charm for good fortune. I teach you to make one, is not so difficult.”

  As Lynn prepares dinner, I follow the men’s instructions, making a fine bracelet out of two long hairs . . . and in the tent before bed, I make twenty more. Not difficult indeed, and the best souvenir I’ve ever seen.

  When I return to Nairobi, I walk into the curio shop owned by Mr. Kanji, a cheerful but discerning Indian trader who often sells his wares to my mother as hostess gifts for her friends. “Look at all those bracelets you’re wearing,” says Mr. Kanji. “Where did you get those?”

  {Fabian Teschner}

  Africans have an old proverb, “When two bull elephants fight, the only thing that gets damaged is the grass.”

  {Jorie Butler Kent}

  Guiding actor James Brolin on a camel safari for the television show To the Ends of the Earth.

  “They were a birthday gift, in a way,” I explain. “I got them as a souvenir after I got my first elephant. Would you like to have a look?”

  “Indeed,” he says. “You make these?”

  I nod.

  He studies one in his palm and asks me, “How much would you charge me for these?”

  “Seven shillings each,” I tell him, rounding it out to the equivalent of a dollar. “More if I use more hairs. I only used two for this one, but I can put in as many as eight.”

  Mr. Kanji holds his hand out for a handshake. “We’re in business, my friend,” he says. “I’ll take as many as you’ll sell to me.”

  I shake his hand firmly and dash out, his doorbell jingling behind me. I race straight to the Kenya National Parks headquarters, where I seek out Lynn Temple-Boreham’s office. “Lynn,” I say, breathless. “Could I possibly have all your elephant tails?”

  “What would you want with dead elephant tails?”

  “I’m starting a project.”

  He dips his chin, doubt in his eyes. “All right . . . you want them all?”

  “Yes please. The ones from this year that died from natural causes, and the ones the game department killed in the annual culling.”

  Again, the look.

  “No sense in letting them go to waste,” I say with a shrug.

  “How much were you thinking to pay?”

  “Well, I’ve heard they’re quite wretched actually, crawling with maggots and rather unpleasant in general. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in paying me to take them off your hands.”

  He studies me. “How much?”

  “Five shillings a sack.”

  “Ha!” he says, rising from his seat. “I ought to pay you ten.”

  I run out for my father’s truck, and Lynn helps me load up a few dozen sacks.

  Back at the farm, Mummie’s eyes raise from her newspaper when I run past her in the lounge. “What have you got there?”

  “Elephant tails!”

  “And where do you think you’ll store those?” She’s risen and is sailing on my heels.

  “Outside, in the old workshop next to the truck!”

  {Harold Lassers}

  Waterhole in the Masai Mara.

  “Geoff!” my father calls.

  “What?” I reverse and follow Mummie toward where Dad is seated in the drawing room.

  “It’s the rainy season,” my father says, his eyes down on the newspaper.

  “They’ll be all right,” I tell him. “They’re waterproof!”

  As the final weeks pass before school resumes, I sit in the shade under Mummie’s kitchen window making bracelets. Then, at one of Mummie’s Sunday curry luncheons, the chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines makes an appearance. Mummie’s friends take the bait, asking me to show them the bracelets I’m wearing. “You know what you should do?” I direct the question to the head of the airline.

  My mother’s friends go dead silent.

  “Why don’t you give one of these bracelets each to your first-class passengers?”

  Gently, Mummie sets down her fork.

  “Is that what you think I should do?” he says.

  Silence—then after a moment: “It would be a lovely souvenir,” says his wife.

  “I sell them in town for a dollar or two each, but I’ll cut you a deal,” I told him.

  “You know,” he says, “that is actually a great idea.” He puts in an order so big that the Kenyan women who work on our farm join me to turn out the product. They’re delighted for the additional income: I pay them each twenty-five cents per bracelet.

  After a couple of months, my business is growing rapidly, and it only improves when I discern that my bracelets made from white elephant hairs—which are considerably rarer to find—should be priced higher than the typical black bracelets. Wares and money trade hands so often between Mr. Kanji and me that by the time school has begun in September, I’ve saved enough to purchase a mot
orbike so gorgeous and shiny, it practically sings. “Mind yourself,” Dad says. “You go to the best boarding school in Kenya, and the headmaster won’t be pleased with all that flash.”

  In fact, to have a motorcycle is completely against the rules at the Duke of York School, so I keep mine hidden in the bundu—Swahili for “bush”—just outside the perimeter of the school grounds. “You and Leakey must be in love with wildlife!” my schoolmates tease, referring to our chum Richard Leakey—but in fact it’s another form of life that I’m interested in. About twenty miles from Nairobi is the girls’ school that my sister, Anne, attends, and I visit it often to see a particularly attractive young lady whose company I quite fancy.

  One afternoon, while my girlfriend and I are rendezvousing in one of the nearby coffee fields, I hear a car approaching slowly along the adjacent road. I dash off on my bike, recognizing the woman inside the vehicle: the headmistress of the girls’ school. I lose her only by veering off the road and disappearing into a thick area of the bundu.

  Unfortunately, she’d already noted the contents of my license plate. At school the next morning, the headmaster of the Duke of York School, Mr. R. H. James, sends a messenger to my early class to request that I report to the administrator’s office immediately. “Your parents are friends of mine, Geoffrey,” Mr. James says, “and as such, out of consideration for their feelings, we shall not be expelling you immediately.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “However, you will be leaving the school at the end of the term—and you will not be invited back. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I’ll leave it to you to share the news with them.”

  When school ends for the holidays I know I can’t keep it from my parents for long. My father goes out of his mind. “Your mother and I work hard on our farm and in our community to ensure the best education for you, Geoff!” he says. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  {Jorie Butler Kent}

  On a game drive surrounded by a herd of wildebeest.

  I lean back in my chair, silent.

  “You’re among the top three in your class, and you are just two A-level exams away from a scholarship to Brasenose College at Oxford University!”

  “You’re the one who says my tastes are too lofty,” I tell him, “and you want to send me to Oxford University?”

  “I know several of the top management at the Royal Dutch Shell—do you know how many young boys in Africa can only dream of a career in oil?”

  “My working in oil is your dream! I’m through with studying Arabic—”

  “Clearly!” he shouts.

  “I can’t discuss this with you any further.” I push out from the table and thunder to my bedroom. The next morning after breakfast, I start up my bike and take the dirt roads toward town, straight to the dealer who sold the motorbike to me. I look at bigger ones, louder ones, and I quickly settle on a sleek Austrian-German model: a brand-new 250cc two-stroke, split-twin Steyr-Daimler-Puch. It costs me three hundred pounds, but it can do one hundred miles per hour.

  My father is waiting for me at the entrance to our farm when I return home. “Where the devil do you think you’ll go on that thing?”

  “I know exactly where I’ll go,” I tell him, brushing past him and into the house. “To Cape Town.”

  “You think you’ll be the first to make the trip from Nairobi to Cape Town on a motorbike?” he shouts behind me. “It’s over three thousand miles—you really think you’ve got what it takes?”

  I turn on my heels and defy him with my stare.

  “Rubbish,” he says. “You’ll never make it.”

  {Kent family archives}

  The motorbike I rode from Nairobi to Cape Town, a Daimler Puch 250cc, on Nairobi’s Delamere Avenue.

  Chapter 2

  Nairobi to Cape Town

  1958

  Knowing there’s no talking me out of my motorcycle ride to Cape Town, my mother steps in to lend support. “It’s the beginning of the rainy season, GJ,” she says. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Right then, love,” she says, sighing. “We’ll try and make the best of it.” She gives me two hundred pounds sterling and a brown paper bag filled to the brim. “Raisins and your biltong,” she says, referring to my homemade dried meat made from the fillet steak of buffalo or eland, which is seasoned with crushed pepper and salt. “You have some hard days ahead,” she says. “The sugar in the raisins and the protein in the biltong will keep you feeling strong.”

  “Thanks, Mummie.”

  “It’s all right, darling. Listen, I’ve mailed letters to my friends along the way. Hang on to the list of addresses I tucked in the side pocket of your bag, and look up those contacts as you go. It could save your life.”

  “I will do that.”

  I head into the center of Nairobi, where I buy a Shell Oil road map, and then I stop at the Salvation Army to get a poncho and a tarpaulin sheet. Then I visit the motorbike shop to have containers for spare water and fuel fitted onto my bike. Then, on the back of it, I fasten a hand-painted sign:

  NAIROBI TO CAPE TOWN

  3,000 MILES

  I stuff as many elephant hair bracelets into my bags as I can—my equivalent of trading beads—and sling my saddlebags across the bike. The gear that I fasten to either side of the bike contains my food and supplies; I’ve fixed the bags to bear equal weight and to protect my food from the beating sun. Then I rev up and roar off, speeding straight down the Mombasa Road before turning south at Athi River to take me via Kajiado into Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

  The acacia bushland is primitive and wild, the acacia trees rooted sparsely—romantically—across the savanna. Elephants eat the baby acacias and keep the land clear for the antelope; the trees that remain standing on the savanna are the often-solitary survivors.

  I take note of leopard tracks on my trail, the harems of zebras that fix their strange striped stares on me, the giraffes nodding among the bush. Day by day, as I continue on the road, the giraffes I see have smaller and smaller spots—Mummie once told me that the more intense the sun is in a given location, the larger the giraffe’s spots will be as they absorb the heat of the sun to release it away from the giraffe’s body. The animals seem to whisper the promise of thrills to come—should I make it.

  Yes, I resolve. I’ll make it.

  Later, in the distance on my left, comes Mount Kilimanjaro—nearly four miles high and capped with gleaming white snow. You’re my next challenge, I pledge silently, just as soon as I return to Kenya. Something about the long road opens my mind to a much wider vision for my life. Suddenly I’m realizing that possibilities exist far beyond producing the next bunch of elephant hair bracelets. In this whole great world, who is Geoffrey Kent? What do I think is worthwhile? The only way I can sum up the answer is what I’m living, right here, right now. Being one with the wild. The wide, open road.

  As I near the Tanganyika border, the wind flies harder against me as I twist the accelerator a little harder and cruise. The freedom is magical; the scenery, stunning. My father travelled every nook and cranny of Africa during his time in the army, and even he shied away from this journey—maybe I’ve got more nerve than he does after all. (Of course, I admit, he never rode a motorcycle.)

  Then, within minutes of crossing into Tanganyika, the road surface changes instantly from hard clay to soft sand. I skid across the road and come off ass over end, pinned under my bike, half stunned, the hot exhaust pipe sizzling my arm. For a moment I look around, trying to place what’s just happened. When I extricate myself and get to my feet, only one thought keeps me from turning tail and heading back home: my father’s words. You’ll never make it.

  I could never let that happen. I get back on my bike—with my burnt and wounded right hand—and limp toward Arusha, still several miles away.

  Within a few miles, I see a coffee plantation on my right. I drive in and knock on the door
of the large house out front, and a kindly woman answers. “I’m riding from Nairobi to Cape Town and I’ve just wrecked my bike,” I tell her, exposing my injured arm.

  “Oh dear,” she says. “That’s quite a burn.”

  “Could you possibly use some help on your farm for a few weeks?”

  “Please, come inside.”

  For the month it takes my burn to heal, I drive a tractor and help this woman and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Knieb, in the coffee crops in return for room and board.

  Then I start out again.

  My route takes me down across the Masai Steppe, to Dodoma, then to Iringa, where I bear to the southwest alongside the Iringa mountains covered in lush greenery. I ride along the northern tip of Lake Nyasa into Nyasaland (changed to Malawi in 1964).

  The roads outside the towns are pitted and rough. Each day I rise with the sun and ride all morning, then stop at midday to catch shade from the broiling heat. I spend these hours resting and reading at the base of baobab trees’ mammoth trunks. I relish living on my own schedule, doing everything I want. Each time I get back on the bike, my destination—and my destiny—are in my hands exclusively.

  The savanna is a field of gold in the afternoon light. On the bike I can smell the clean African soil; I can feel the thud of rain pounding into the ground. Around dinnertime, I find a sidetrack off the main road and seek out an acacia tree, under which I lay out my tarpaulin sheet and my sleeping bag. The nightjar birds have started their call to signal the end of the day as I begin to pray for a night of no rain.

  When morning comes, I locate the marketplace—the center of any African village or town—to try to sell a bracelet or two to raise a little cash. I might spend my money on supplies, food, or a clean, dry map to show me the way to my next stop. Traversing nearly the whole length of Nyasaland north to south, about seven hundred miles, I arrive at the capital, Zomba. This is my first planned stopping point.

  {Jennifer Leska}

  Cape Point, the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet.