Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  The next day, my finesse and patience improved overnight, I did manage to land some decent ones, seven-, eight- and nine-pounders. Kelly hooked one on his center pin, and amid the sound of the reel handle cracking against his knuckles brought aboard a 15-pound slab of tiger. The spell of the fly rod soon fell upon Kelly, and by noon he was asking Jonathan to show him the way. There seemed no alternative but for me to join the party, too.

  I could see the sport in it, to be sure. Choking a tiger on the flesh of its own kind is effective and even somewhat restful, but there is something to be said for convincing one to hook itself on a fly. The work part was clear: all that casting. The risk part came from the 70-some hippos per kilometer in that stretch of the Zambezi, often swirling below the boat; then there were the elephant, which sometimes were in the river, though not usually in sufficient number to pose a hazard; and there were always crocs, Kelly advising me as I waded barefoot not to stay in any one place for any extended period, which gave them time to triangulate one’s position.

  The main problem with fly fishing, though, was the intense, blinkered concentration it demanded, something Africa kept getting in the way of. Trying to think about my back cast, I would be distracted by a colony of carmine bee-eaters nesting in tiny burrows in the high bank like a curtain of red Christmas lights; a flock of black-crowned night herons perched dazedly in a thorn bush during the day; a herd of buffalo bulls with horn spreads beyond reason grazing on a grassy flat; a six-foot monitor running along the river’s edge, its tail waving like a strap of gunmetal-colored leather. I wanted to stop and look, but realized that going after tigers with flies meant being as single-minded as Jonathan, every inch the New African.

  Late on the last afternoon, in another country on the other side of the Zambezi, I stood in the tethered boat, wondering if crocs might be venturesome enough to muster a boarding party and tossing out my fly. Kelly and Jonathan were a little downstream, flogging the river relentlessly. By now my casting was looking good, except for this one time when I piled the line and the fly off the side of the boat, not really fishing it. And had a boil right where the fly landed. I jerked the fly back and wondered out loud, “Wuzzat?”

  “Flip it in again,” voices cried. I did, and nothing happened; so I returned to the long, mighty Interflora-man casts I had come, every once in a while, to perfect. Then I fumbled a cast and piled the line up beside the boat again, and I had a take. I tightened the line, and a three-pound tiger cartwheeled out of the river.

  “Inside!” I yelled, for Jonathan’s benefit.

  I fought the tiger fast to keep it from beating itself to death, beached it, slipped a finger carefully under its gill cover to lift it and had my finger slide through to its jaws, which it promptly clamped down. I had my tiger on a fly, though, and once its teeth were out of my flesh and it was back in the water I could enjoy the view as the river turned from mercury to rose to black with the sunset.

  That night, gin and tonic in hand, shredded index finger throbbing, I sat in a folding chair beside the campfire talking with the 30-ish woman who, with her husband, managed the camp. Hearing the hippos making their throat-clearing sound and the roar of lions from across the water, I thought how this was a good part of the Africa I remembered, the old, slow Africa, where what mattered was the quality of the adventures you had, not the new, vulgar, accelerated Africa where what counted was how many leopards you saw, rivers you ran, or miles you trekked, all crammed into seven-, five-, or even three-day “safari excursions.” There were times when the best part of Africa was the one without any adventures at all, and that was the part that seemed to be getting lost, turning the Dark Continent into every other place on earth where tourists went for cheap thrills.

  That’s what I was thinking as I sat adventure-free, when the woman standing in front of me at the campfire took a drag from her cigarette, exhaled, and in the mildest of voices suggested, “Don’t move.”

  There are places in the world where those words might mean little or nothing, but Africa is so seldom one of them.

  “Wuzzit?” I croaked.

  She tilted her head slightly, as if to get a better view, then with a hint of a sigh said. “Buffalo.”

  I heard the crunching noise behind me. I turned my head oh so very slowly to the right and looked over my shoulder at the shape black as the suit of spades, looming 15 feet away. The bull was munching down the seed pods fallen to the ground from the winter thorns as if they were cocktail peanuts, working his way into the firelight. The woman went on smoking; and I cursed myself for being sunk into a low-slung canvas chair, as prepared for a fast escape as a tortoise flipped onto its back.

  When the bull came fully into the light, he lifted his head and fixed us with one of his huge round baleful eyes, and the planet ground to a standstill on its axis. Then he dropped his head and went on feeding until the darkness surrounded him and the earth began rotating again.

  “That was interesting,” I said, letting out my breath.

  “Funny thing about them at night,” the camp manager said placidly. “If this had been day, we’d be quite dead right now.”

  I manipulated myself out of the canvas chair, drank down the G&T, and set the empty glass on the camp table. I walked calmly to my tent without a flashlight, having to circle around to the back to avoid the herd of buffalo bulls lying on the river bank right in front of it. In bed in the tent, the lantern extinguished, I listened to the sounds of the insects and amphibians, the contented grunts of the buffalo, the manic noises of hyena, and lions roaring in Zimbabwe. Down the Zambezi lightning flashed, too far for thunder. And then I slept in Africa, neither old nor new, but something that in its heart could never change. And where the laughs just never seem to stop.

  Seeing the Elephant

  Before …

  EVEN THOUGH THEY weren’t, call them Ahab.

  “Ahab” does not fully explain the why of all the men who set off during the 19th century, and startlingly far into the 20th, to follow the elephant’s track. Few if any were as existentially obsessed as the good captain with the “whiteness” of the elephant they chose to pursue for their ivory, but they were every bit as interested in those tusks’ commercial potential as the old New Bedford whalers were in their particular quarry’s oil and baleen. Rare among these men was one who was in it purely for the “sport,” however imposing. There was undoubtedly as much exhilaration and awe and, frankly, joy in stalking the largest animal who walks upon the earth’s face, while armed with a smooth-bore gun of dubious merit, as there was to be found in bracing yourself in the front of a twin-bowed whaleboat driven by a handful of other men straining at long oars, waiting for a barnacled back to rise like a reef to the surface of the sea so you could set the iron of your harpoon and commence a Nantucket sleigh ride over the green swells. That would be all mere sidelight, though, to the commerce at hand. Because commerce it very much had to be, and the elephant hunters of the past were as much whalers of the green hills of Africa as Ahab was of the blue water. And something more.

  Ivory tusks were the obvious desideratum of the sometimes cruel, sometimes scoundrelly, sometimes maudlin, sometimes romantic, sometimes clever, sometimes imprudent, sometimes timorous, sometimes undaunted men who trekked after Loxidonta africana and Loxidonta cyclotis. Yet those tusks are no more than the elephant’s exaggerated upper incisors, carried by both the male and female of the African species and by most of the males of the Asian, and were known in the ivory trade simply as “teeth.” Covered by a compact outer layer of cementum, the inner dentine that is the actual ivory derives its beauty and worth from the ease with which it can be carved and by the bright rich polish it will accept. There is also the “touch” of it, the smooth coolness it has without ever growing chill.

  Prized beside gold, ivory was fashioned into the thrones of the kings of Etruria and King Solomon. Elephant tusks were delivered as tribute to the Persian kings by the Egyptians. The galleys of ancient Tyre were outfitted with ivory benches, as
was the Roman Senate, while the bon vivant Emperor Caligula presented that special horse of his with an ivory manger. The Renaissance saw the wide use of ivory in religious carvings, and the Japanese have long used it for their netsuke and seals. As time passed, more and more domestic applications for ivory were found, from combs to knife handles to toilet seats to billiard balls to those ivories on the piano that just cried out to be tickled. (Among the largest purchasers of tusks during the 1800s and early 1900s were the ivory-cutting companies along the lower Connecticut River, producing piano-key veneers, hair combs, and billiard balls.)

  The earliest humans to hunt elephant were little concerned with the ivory of their prey, except perhaps for such utilitarian odds and ends as fish hooks, arrow straighteners, or harpoon heads. They wanted meat in tribe-sized portions. From the Pleistocene on they collected it by digging pitfalls or ringing an elephant herd with fire in the tall grass and spearing to death the smoke-damaged animals as they tried blindly to exit the flames.

  They might rig a heavily weighted, broad-bladed lance between two trees across an “elephant road”: When an elephant passed beneath the dangling lance he would trip a cord, releasing the lance to fall between his shoulder blades. Bows with a draw-weight of 100 pounds or more were, and still are, used to propel poisoned arrows into elephant; and Pygmies (a term said to have been reclaimed by many tribal peoples of Central Africa, despite its racial-sounding origins) to this day creep to within feet of an elephant in the thick cover to spear him in the belly, decamping from the vicinity to return to take up the blood spoor and usually in a few hours discover the elephant’s dead body. In the least complicated of ploys, an army of spearmen would manage to encircle a lone animal separated from the herd and do him in by a frantic rush. (One visualizes ants attacking a grasshopper, or honeybees swarming a bear.)

  The 19th-century Bagheera people of Abyssinia brought unmistakable panache to their elephant hunting. Stripping naked so their garments could not be caught on thorn trees or wait-a-bit bushes in the event they had to beat a hasty retreat from the field of honor, two men would mount double on a horse, a broadsword in the hand of the rear rider. Then they trotted out across the rough, broken ground until encountering an elephant. Running head on at him, they issued boisterous challenges (“I killed your father … and your grandfather … and I am now come to kill you …!”), that were essential if the proper form was to be maintained, until the elephant could be provoked into charging this pestering horse and its cargo of yammering humans, who had to be nimble enough to avoid the grasp of its trunk if the contest was to continue. After a charge or two had been gotten out of the elephant, the horse was galloped up from the rear and the armed rider dropped off; and while the elephant’s by-now infuriated attention was fixed upon the horse, this beau sabreur deftly hamstrung the bull. Then the horseman circled back to retrieve his accomplice, and they would ride after any more elephant there were to be had, returning to the hobbled elephant later to conclude the spectacle with javelins. That was how, from the Bagheera perspective, events were supposed to transpire, though more than one speedy elephant managed to catch ahold of the horse and cast it and its riders to earth, rendering them all into hyena kibble on the Abyssinian highlands.

  While the finest ivory comes from Equatorial Africa—the tusks usually blackened on the outside by the long use to which their original owners had put them—even there the material meant virtually nothing to Africans before Arabs and Europeans came and got around to suggesting that it might be something of value. After all, tusks could no more be eaten than the elephant’s bones, though as with the marrow in bone, the large nerve in the tusk could be extracted and consumed. The most sensible course, after perhaps removing the nerves at their roots, was simply to leave the tusks behind with the rest of the bones for rodents to gnaw on. When they were brought in from the field, tusks might be made into bracelets or armlets or necklaces, but were as likely to become fenceposts or chopping blocks or stools. There might be so many tusks in a village, collected over who knew how many years of hunting, they would initially be set on end (perhaps just to see how that looked), then laid flat, then heaped around some wooden idol or over a chieftain’s grave, then perhaps scattered idly about like so many tons of giant Lincoln logs or even used as pilings to set huts upon. As a trade good among Africans themselves, ivory could seemingly demand a price no higher than firewood’s. (Two tusks totaling 141 pounds were once exchanged with Europeans for the munificent sum of eight pounds of beads and two bullets.)

  The ivory trade among non-Africans had been carried out since Roman times and probably well before. Twenty centuries ago Chinese merchants traded with Siberians for the ivory the Siberians dug out of the ground, it being the product, it was believed, of a giant subterranean rat, fen-shü in Chinese, who was said to die instantaneously upon contact with air or sunlight. To the Mongol tribesman of Siberia, where ivory continues to be unearthed, fen-shü was known as mammut, and we know him today as the vanished “mammoth,” though with today’s reproductive science who can say what might someday be resurrected from the DNA of this creature.

  The Arabs who sailed in their dhows to Zanzibar 10 centuries ago also traded with the mainland for the tusks of elephant, and the Portuguese fairly exhausted the accumulated stockpiles of ivory to be found in Angola and Mozambique soon after they took up residence there. Then the Dutch landed on the Cape in the 1600s and once again a new supply of ivory was brought to market.

  All of this was ivory collected from around the barest rim of Africa, but it was enough to spur such an intensified demand that between the years 1788 and 1798 approximately 192,579 pounds of ivory was imported into Great Britain each year (in another 60 years this yearly figure grew to 1,000,000 pounds). When imports dipped 118,000 pounds by 1827, it was time to venture into the interior of Africa in search of new lodes.

  The first non-Africans to explore and “discover” in the heart of the Dark Continent were not, as the view made popular in 19th-century England would have it, resolute, staunch, indefatigable Britons like Speke or Burton or Grant or Livingstone or Baker or Stanley—whose declared goals were to settle age-old questions of geography or bear the word of the Lord or “rescue” the seemingly lost bearers of that word or nobly inflict education, law, and “humanity” upon “savages”—rather they were Arab ivory traders.

  Almost anywhere in Central Africa that the great British explorers went (and despite the inflationary spiral their achievements experienced back home, most were in the end genuinely great in a quixotic, somewhat addled fashion in conjunction with which we would scarcely dare to use the word “great” today), they found Arab merchant princes already firmly established with their settlements, business organizations, and harems.

  At first the Zanzabari Arab ivory sultans, reacting to the clamor raised by British, German, and Yankee traders for more ivory, chose to deal utterly scrupulously with the native chieftains of the interior from whom they collected it. They readily paid the agreed-upon hongo, or ivory tax (often some ludicrously small amount), and hired the necessary porters to transport the tusks to the sea. Many Arabs borrowed money at 100 percent interest to finance their expeditions; but ivory was then the only product in Central Africa that could “pay the cost of its transport,” according to one author; and a tidy profit was more than likely realized. Matters progressed agreeably enough for all concerned so that as late as the 1840s it could be said of any Arab that he could “walk through Africa armed only with a cane.” Then the African chieftains wised up to the genuine worth of ivory, and the Arabs got guns.

  Hongo now came payable in black powder. At dawn the Arab ivory raiders and their armed band of Africans mercenaries descended upon a village whose ivory they desired and torched the huts. As the villagers fled their burning homes they were shot, clubbed, knouted, and lashed with hippopotamus-hide whips until the survivors could be strung together in a coffle, each handed a tusk and marched to the Indian Ocean or the Nile River at Khartoum. On
e in five made it. At journey’s end, instead of having to provide severance pay and letters of recommendation, the Arabs merely had the porters lay down their burdens at the ivory warehouses and then deliver themselves directly to the slave markets: a business proposition as eminently neat as could be.

  One of the premier big-game hunters of his time, Sir Samuel White Baker, born in 1821, was also an ardent foe of such slaving, even though a discernible racist. His convictions even led him in 1870 to accept, along with a salary of £10,000, the command of a force of 1,400 men sent into the Nile basin ostensibly to stamp out the practice—as well as, if at all possible, to annex the entire territory for Ismail Pasha, the profligate Turkish viceroy, or khedive, of Egypt whose wretched excesses (£5,000,000 lavished on his harem alone) would in due time resoundingly bankrupt the entire nation he was supposed to oversee. Baker’s distaste for slavery, aside from being the “correct politics” of the day, was no doubt abetted by the fact that a decade earlier he had purchased his Hungarian mistress, and eventual second wife, Florence, at a slave auction in the Balkans, rescuing the then teenaged girl from that fate worse than death—if it did not, of course, involve an Englishman.

  No conventional Victorian, Baker was the eldest son of a prosperous banker-shipowner-colonial planter, but was himself a rover and, though in later years a linguist and author, no fan of schooling or discipline. His only love was for the hunting, and the polite society of England constricted him fearfully. Marrying his first wife when just out of his teens, he had soon taken her off to Ceylon where he spent eight years hunting the tuskless rogue elephant who pitilessly trampled the crops and broke down the dams and irrigation tanks of that island.