Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  Copyright © 2016 by Thomas McIntyre

  Foreword copyright © 2016 by Craig Boddington

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Andrew Warrington

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Chuck Cole

  Cover photo by Thomas McIntyre

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1397-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1401-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  “Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”

  “No, I wouldn’t like that.”

  “I’d go there with you.”

  “No; that doesn’t interest me.”

  “That’s because you never read a book about it.”

  —The Sun Also Rises

  My opinion of traveling is brief: When traveling, do not go too far, or you will see something that later on will be impossible to forget.

  —Daniil Kharms

  Contents

  Foreword by Craig Boddington

  Prologue

  Africa Passing Relentlessly Beneath the Sun

  Running Scared

  Buff!

  August in Africa

  The President and the Pleistocene

  “A Suggestion of Grace and Poise …”

  Arab Winter

  De Rebus Africanis

  Tiger, Tiger

  Seeing the Elephant

  The One

  Something Borrowed

  Big Running Mean

  The Great Koodoo

  Perfect Game

  Iodine

  Sitting Around Campfires with PHs

  Dagga Boys & Monkey Oranges

  Not Far to Africa

  Blue Train

  Confluence of Memories

  The Most Expensive Safari in the World

  Old No. 7

  Dreaming the Lion

  In Burnt Lands

  Afterword: The Trend of the Game

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Illustrator’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  I suppose a great writer might approach every piece with the thought that it’s the most important thing he or she has ever written. I suspect that’s the way Thomas McIntyre approached this book, but I cannot know for sure, because I am not and have never been a great writer and thus, now 60-something, am somewhat unlikely to become one. One might describe me kindly as a decent reporter and perhaps not a bad storyteller, but a gifted writer I am not. So I tend to approach writing assignments pragmatically, somewhat like planning and conducting a military operation, something I was once considered fairly adept at. The steps are simple: assess, plan, proceed, with the first, at least theoretically, ongoing.

  My assessment: This is an important book by a gifted writer. My plan: To relate why, and, along the way, explain why I am significantly honored to pen this foreword for my old friend, colleague, and occasional competitor, Tom McIntyre. So let’s proceed.

  The body of literature we call Africana has yielded the richest treasure trove in the entire world of sporting literature. At one time it was rivaled by the wonderful stuff written about the great game of the Indian subcontinent, but the days of the Raj are long over. Partition of India and Pakistan separated the mountains and deserts from the forests and jungles, and modern India’s burgeoning human population has left little room for wildlife and none for hunting. Pursuit of India’s great game—tiger, leopard, gaur, sloth bear, sambar, and so much more—has faded into dimming memory. A full generation has passed since a significant sporting book has come from that region, and there will be no more.

  One might argue that, today, Africa’s wildlife is similarly slipping away. In one sense this is true: Overpopulation, meaning encroachment by agriculture and livestock and resultant habitat loss, is pushing Africa’s wildlife into ever-shrinking protected enclaves. Sadly, today there are huge expanses of Africa holding virtually no wildlife, and the concept of “wild Africa” is increasingly elusive. That said, Africa is a very big place. Much wild game remains, in some cases more than what Tom and I first saw more than 40 years ago.

  You see, “protection” can and does take at least two distinct forms in Africa. Let’s understand that in Africa’s developing economies there is little room and no money for altruism. Wildlife must somehow pay its own way, or must give way to villages, herdsmen, and plows. Some of those protected enclaves are national parks, the most famous and scenic of which are well-funded by an active photo safari (“ecotourism”) industry. Regrettably, the total acreage of Africa’s parks reflects just a tiny percentage of a mighty land mass. Most of the rest of Africa that actually retains viable wildlife, though larger, is also not a major percentage of the whole. However, surprising though it might be to non-hunters and infuriating to anti-hunters, outside of the national parks, most areas that still hold significant wildlife reserves are protected by hunting and hunters.

  This takes at least two paths in modern Africa. On the southern tip of the continent much wildlife is privatized, brought to market as a cash crop monetized in breeding stock, venison, and harvesting by (mostly foreign) sport hunters. The success of the game ranching industry is such that wildlife in South Africa alone has burgeoned from a few hundred thousand head in 1970 to an estimated 17 million today. Namibia is a similar success story.

  Elsewhere on the continent the road is bumpier, but large areas ranging from designated game reserves to government and tribal concessions are purely looked after by hunters’ dollars. Let’s accept that much of this is marginal land, lacking the beauty and species diversity of Africa’s great parks. As such, ecotourism in significant volume is not viable—but hunting is, because we crazy hunters willingly place ourselves in marginal lands, working hard, sweating much, and paying dearly for the possibility—never the certainty—of harvesting a handful of Africa’s legendary beasts. Our currency funds the game departments, such as they are, but, more importantly, at the local level, creates employment, distributes legally taken meat, sinks wells, builds clinics and schools, and funds anti-poaching efforts, much of which today are conducted not by governments, but by safari operators who probably have the most to lose.

  There is much to be optimistic about regarding African wildlife and African hunting. The hunting safari industry is bigger than ever. At this writing, fully 20 African nations use some form of regulated sport hunting both as a management tool and to generate revenue—placing value on wildlife. This is many more potential destinations than when Tom and I first hunted Africa in the 1970s. The African continent hosts nearly 20,000 hunting safaris annually, a far greater number than ever before. A majority of these are the modern short-duration “plains game safari,” an option that didn’t even exist when Tom and I were young. These affordable safaris have opened African hunting to people from all walks of li
fe. Thousands of new hunters realize their dreams of Africa every year. Since planning an African safari is a bit more complex than applying for an elk tag, it means that many thousands more are dreaming of that life-changing first safari. And, I can assure you, any hunter who has visited Africa once is ruined forever, and will spend the rest of his or her life dreaming, planning, and hoping to return.

  Most do. When Tom and I first hunted Africa, I think our motivation was similar. Having read about it and dreamed about it since grade school, we went once so as to get it out of our systems once and for all. This plan didn’t work particularly well for either of us!

  All these facts combine to make good writing about Africa a most viable business, even in our 21st century. Even so, I must concede that Africa has changed, and continues to change. The Africa that Tom and I saw in the 1970s is not gone, but is no longer the same. Although there are many more countries available and many more safari operators, today’s game country is smaller, the safaris shorter and more “packaged.” This is not exactly the same as “canned,” although, regrettably, that option is also out there.

  Even in these days of internet and outdoor TV there remains a hungry market for good reading about Africa, so I am sure many more books will be added to the body of Africana. But this may be the last truly important hunting book in this genre.

  The reason for this is twofold. First, Thomas McIntyre and I began our African careers in Kenya. This was purely an accident of timing, and I would never suggest that Kenya was, even in its halcyon days, the “best” safari country. But it was the birthplace of African hunting as we know it, the genesis of our safari traditions, and the inspiration for so much of the great writing in the English language that has come out of Africa. Tom and I were fortunate (perhaps “driven” is a better term) to start at very early ages. Kenya closed big-game hunting now 40 years ago, so Tom and I are among the few left standing who had that experience, and we are the last journalist-hunters who shared the Kenya experience. We met some of the great old hunters and heard first-hand accounts. It gives us a different perspective, certainly not “better,” but more completely balanced. Since then we have continued our African odysseys, journeying widely across the continent … but always with first-hand knowledge of where it all came from.

  My own African obsession has been at least as strong as Tom’s. After that first safari to get it out of my system once and for all I have spent too much of my adult life scheming and planning and returning, now well over 100 African ventures in 18 different countries, a collective of many years of tramping Africa. So, one might reasonably ask, why is this book from Thomas McIntyre more important to the body of Africana than one I might write myself? The answer is both simple and complex.

  The simple: I have squandered my African experience in a series of “ten-year books,” each a decade-long snapshot in time. The fourth and perhaps final is in the works, and I don’t see myself going back to the beginning in a single volume. The complex: Thomas McIntyre is a far better writer! This is a fact I acknowledged before we were out of our twenties, so I have long since managed to accept it and deal with it. As all good writers must be, Tom is a keen observer and voracious reader. He brings to this volume the full weight of more than 40 years of not just hunting in Africa, but dreaming about Africa, reading about Africa, and studying Africa.

  It would be a stretch to say that Tom and I are close friends, but we go back a long, long way, with careers that have been sometimes parallel, sometimes diverging, and occasionally colliding. Tom and I are pretty much the same age, and we started our writing careers at about the same time. Not in desire but in actual timeline, Tom beat me to Africa by a couple of years. I was off with the Marines, still dreaming and saving my pennies, when Tom “got ’er done.” We probably sold our first stories at about the same time; his was about Africa (mine was not), and, appropriately, you’ll find his first story as part of this volume, and be bemused, as I was, at the potential shown by a then twentysomething writer.

  Tom and I met in the early 1980s at the old and long-defunct Southern California Safari Club. Although in the company of many older and more experienced safari hands, we were looked upon as oddities, two very young men who had used our own money to mount our own safaris. By then, I was working as an editor for Petersen Publishing Company, and most of those safari club meetings were held at Scandia, Bob Petersen’s restaurant, just down Sunset Boulevard from corporate headquarters. Tom was writing successfully in what, I suppose, is a classic example of something my friend and mentor, and at that time our star gunwriter, John Wootters used to love to tell me: “Them’s as can writes; them’s as can’t edits.”

  I stayed in the office for 15 years, hunting and writing a bit and editing a lot, and then, finally, I made good my escape to the writing side. Today I consider myself first and foremost a journalist, but I’ve diverged into related activities: outdoor television, internet, public speaking. Tom is as he was, and as he should be, an amazingly talented writer, constantly striving to improve his craft. I have always enjoyed his work!

  A couple of times we’ve crossed swords, once childish, another more philosophical. Those two years that Tom beat me to Kenya were in fact critical. Although none of us recognized it at the time, and certainly didn’t predict the abrupt closure in May 1977, Kenya was on its last legs as a hunting country, with government-sponsored poaching gangs roaming the countryside. My Kenyan safari wasn’t nearly as successful as Tom’s. Did I feel a bit of jealousy? You bet!

  Tom and I share our addiction to buffalo from our initial African hunts, but it would take more safaris before I took my first lion, in 1983; and my first elephant and leopard, in 1985. In 1986, in for a penny, in for a pound, I choked it up and took a southern white rhino, a major stretch for me then, but a small pittance compared to what such a hunt costs today. It was a delightful hunt, conducted by my Kenya PH, Willem van Dyk, returned to the South Africa of his ancestry. Hunting a free-range area, still possible then, it took us most of two weeks to find the correct bull that was causing mayhem. Tom declared emphatically that it didn’t count for the “Big Five” because it was a white rhino, not a black, a position I note he maintains in this volume! From a historical perspective, he is correct—but I’m sure the rhino don’t care one way or the other, and today’s primary arbiter in such things, SCI, doesn’t make the distinction. As I said, childish, with no winner and no loser.

  The other time we butted heads was a subject of more substance, with geopolitical implications. Tom took a position that, in hunting Zimbabwe, we were supporting and prolonging Robert Mugabe’s despotic regime. Once again, honestly, he may be correct. However, over the years, I’ve hunted that country both as Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, some 20 times and many months in total. My ties are too close, and I took the position that by going on safari there we are supporting Zimbabwe’s wildlife and honest people trying to survive in a ridiculously crumbling economy. It’s impossible to say who was right and who was wrong, and, more than a decade after that collision, improbable as it seems, that regime remains in power and continues to dismantle what once was a great little country.

  Hey, two writers of the same age and similar experience in a very specialized field, just two disagreements over the course of 40 years? That’s not too bad a record! Especially since I have long stated, both publicly and to Tom personally, that I consider him the better writer. To his credit, he has never acknowledged this one way or the other, but I trust that, in his heart of hearts, he knows it’s true, and I think you will see the difference in this volume.

  Although often alluded to herein, I do not believe this will be Thomas McIntyre’s final word on Africa. The saying that “he who has drunk from the waters of the Nile will always return” is only partially true. It applies equally to the waters of the Limpopo, the Zambezi, the Luangwa, the Rufiji, the Congo, the Aouk, and all of Africa’s watercourses great and small. Tom and I are not just “no longer young”; at our years it’s an overstatement to c
all ourselves “middle-aged.” But Lord willing and health allowing, we will return to Africa, not just because we are compelled to, but because we love it so much.

  So I don’t believe this to be Tom’s last writing on Africa (and I hope it is not), but it may well be his last African book; and it is his one and only compilation of the totality of his African experience, written in keeping with the greatest traditions of Africana. As a writer, albeit not as good a one as Tom, let me state that this business of doing forewords is tricky. In the long term, far beyond my lifetime and that of the author, a foreword joins our names; in the short term, a foreword for a competitive book may well do me out of sales and royalties! It isn’t an assignment to be entered into lightly, so I have accepted some requests and demurred on others. In this case I am honored, in part because of my deep respect for the author’s talents, in part because of our long (but occasionally stormy) history, and certainly in part because of the deep and abiding love we share for Africa and African hunting.

  Herein, from a master’s hands, you will find a healthy and eclectic mix of a bit of fiction, some well-researched history, and a whole lot of personal experience spanning a wide swath of Africa. As I said, Tom’s experience and mine have sometimes paralleled and sometimes diverged. We start here in Kenya, and continue to other countries we have shared: Cameroon, C. A. R., South Africa, Zimbabwe. I especially enjoyed his chapter on driven boar in Tunisia, an off-beat and excellent destination we’ve shared—but few Americans have visited. (Tom, hunting farther south, saw a lot more pigs than I did!) And I enjoyed his account of Senegal, not just off the beaten track—I suspect more Americans have walked on the moon than have hunted in Senegal!

  There are other great hunting countries that Tom has not visited, but Africa is a very big place and no one can see it all. We who love Africa are compelled to see as much of it as we can, so I hope this is not Thomas McIntyre’s final writing on Africa. But it is, far more than a snapshot in time, a master work from a great writer on a much beloved subject, taking us not just across the miles and miles of bloody Africa, but across the centuries, to the beginning of African hunting, to the present, and on to the future, whatever it might hold. Take time with this book, and savor every morsel.