Great Lakes and Great Rivers of Africa

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS #14

The reconnaissance of the Great Lakes Region and the sources of the Nile form an engrossing chapter in the exploration of the Dark Continent. The great river, which was the parent of the Egyptian civilization, has intrigued men from ancient times. The Greeks and Romans tried to travel up its length, but were defeated by the papyrus swamps of the Sudd, and during Ptolemy’s rule it was recorded that another probe was turned back by the gorges that cut through the Ethiopian highlands.
It was those redoubtable voyageurs, the Portuguese, who penetrated into the hinterland of Ethiopia in search of the fabled Prester John during the 15th and 16th centuries. One of them, the Jesuit Pedro Paez, correctly identified a stream which flowed north into Lake Tana as the highest source, although there are many more affluents and tributaries that join the lake and the river that issues from it to become the Blue Nile. The Scottish traveller James Bruce of Kinnaird followed in their footsteps and journeyed the length of the Blue Nile to it confluence with the White Nile in 1770. His five-volume work Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773 (J & G Robinson, 1790) describes his experiences, but I have not read anything more than a very short summary of its contents due to its length. His larger-than-life adventures were received with some incredulity by his readers; it is said that they even inspired the Baron Munchausen stories as a satire of his work, but except for ridiculing the Portuguese accounts as phantasy, Bruce made a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the river and the region.
The next was Burton, an explorer and traveller of note, a scholar and fine linguist, as well as a competent writer of dozens of books. On the other hand he often acted in high-handed fashion and thought his opinions and findings as the only ones worthy of consideration – even though he was proven wrong in several of his geographical deductions. He offered a place on his staff to the relatively inexperienced Speke, who had already accompanied him on a disastrous short inland expedition which was described in the book First Footsteps in East Africa, during which their expedition was attacked and both men suffered grievous wounds. 
On their second, more successful journey, during which they headed too far south, they became the first Europeans to see Lake Tanganyika. While Burton was incapacitated by illness, Speke did a little exploring on his own, first roaming across and up Lake Tanganyika, and on a second sally, he chased down reports of another large lake – known as the Nyanza, or Ukerewe. Speke was ecstatic about his find. He interrogated a number of Arab traders and slavers, local chiefs and tribesmen, did a few calculations about the altitude of this immense body of water which stretched to the northern horizon, and came to the not entirely erroneous conclusion that he had found the source of the Nile. After and absence of six weeks, the two explorers got together again and Burton would have none of it. He notes: “.difference of opinion was allowed to alter companionship. After a few days it became evident to me that not a word could be uttered upon the subject of the lake, the Nile and his trouvaille generally without giving offence. By tacit agreement it was therefore, avoided, and I should never have resumed it had my companion not stultified the results of the expedition by putting forth a claim which no geographer can admit, and which is at the same time so weak and flimsy that no geographer has yet taken the trouble to contradict it.” Burton was outraged on their return to read that Speke had pipped him into print with a quite readable account in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Sept/Oct/Nov 1859 issues, entitled variously, Journal of a Cruise on the Lake Tanganyika, and Capt. J H Speke’s Discovery of the Victoria Nyanza Lake – the supposed Source of the Nile in two parts in which he described his momentous find and expounded his theories.
  Stealing Burton’s thunder enraged the latter to incandescence and coloured his entire account of Speke’s contribution to the expedition. In his second work on the sources of the Nile, The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa (Harper Bros, 1860), he continually derides his companion’s weak state, lack of linguistic capability and ability to carry out tasks such as mapping. The latter book is not an easy read. Burton is fond of judgemental pontification on the people he meets with, their customs and character, on even the slightest acquaintance, and even on the evidence of travellers’ tales. His books are laced with obscure classical references, horrendous Victorian verbosity and strange words – thus we read about “horripilatory tale of the dangers” and “ichthyophagous people” and suchlike.
Hard on the heels of the aforementioned book, I worked my way through Speke’s tome, entitled Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (W Blackwood, 1864). Speke was certainly a better raconteur than his companion Grant and he had the added advantage of better health during the two-and-a-half year expedition, which enabled him to get about, hunt and explore the countryside. On the other hand, as leader of the great endeavour, he bore the brunt of the endless negotiations and hold-ups with rapacious warring chieftains, whom he had to placate with endless extorted gifts to make progress. This became so serious that he ended up almost completely impoverished in the three kingdoms of Karague, Uganda and Unyoro, and during their stay the explorers had to rely on masquerading as the ‘Great Queen’s children’ to gain enough status to impress the kings Ruwanika, M’tesa and Kamrasi, to ensure their safety as well as their eventual release to complete their mission down the Nile. Their lengthy enforced stays at each of these three courts describe much interesting detail of the people’s lives, as well as the despotic rule, especially of the homicidal tyrant M’tesa, whose casual killings were reminiscent of the worst excesses of Chaka in the latter part of his rule in Natal. Speke’s findings on this journey, though confirming the egress of a large river at the northern end of the lake, did not manage to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s of the problem, since he did not follow its entire course to confirm that this river became the sole source of the Nile – as it proved not to be in the end Curiously, Speke’s book contains appendixes with data on the geographical fixes, their Zanzibari staff (many of whom deserted), lists of all the animals killed during the journey, as well as the collection of plants made by Grant – which one would have expected in the latter’s book.
His companion, Grant, on the other hand, is a poor writer. The first half of his book, A Walk Across Africa (William Blackwood & Sons, 1864) is a jumble of diary entries, notes on native customs, elementary natural history, bare-bones hunting incident, and above all, difficulties with the native tribes and his porters. All these are seen through a haze of Indian army experiences that the writer compares them to. In one sentence he can jump from elephants via serpents to beeswax – with very little connective tissue. Often his stray sentences seem to have no foundation in what he has been relating, nor does he build further on the subject matter proffered. He is portrayed by some biographers as a loyal companion to Speke; a man with winning ways who used his personal magnetism or charm to smooth their passage through the warring clans of inland East Africa. I could find very little evidence of that – rather that his men deserted repeatedly en masse, he had endless disputes with his bearers as well as the tribespeople. Admittedly he had the misfortune to be seriously ill for many months of the journey in addition to which he and his partner Speke often split the party, so that each lacked the other’s support, and this may have had an unfortunate influence on his writing.
The latter half of the book, once he reaches Ruanda and the kingdoms that make up Uganda, is much better. He develops a reasonable narrative style, his observations are in some semblance of order and actually paint a coherent and informative panorama of these interesting tribes and their customs, as well as depicting the personalities of their tyrannical rulers. Grant’s contribution to botany was apparently very significant on the journey, but very little mention is made of it at first, and it is only in the latter chapters that this becomes somewhat more evident, as do the descriptions of the fauna and the countryside. Grant did not see the egress of the great Nile from lake Victoria via the Ripon Falls himself, but he hastens to explain that this was due to his ill-health, not because Speke did not want to share the glory. The two explorers were fortunate in managing to complete their expedition down the great river with relative speed and good fortune, compared to their painful progress up to Lake Victoria Nyanza. The last part of the long journey down the Nile, mostly by boat, is glossed over in Speke’s book, and is more fully described in Grant’s. They meet up with a number of missionaries, traders, as well as three European ladies, and Samuel Baker (accompanied by his ‘unmentionable’ wife Florence, to whom he was not yet married), who helps them out of their impecunious state and whose party takes up the standard, so to speak, and carries on the exploration of the Great Lakes region.
The Albert N'Yanza Great Basin Of The Nile; And Exploration Of The Nile Sources. (Macmillan And Co., 1866) is one of my favourite books on the subject. Samuel Baker’s descriptions of people, places, hunting experiences, as well as mutinies, tribulations and illnesses are an engaging read. In his preface Baker pays tribute to his companion (later wife) Florence, or ‘Flooey’, as she was affectionately dubbed. He writes ‘Should anything offend the sensitive mind, and suggest the unfitness of the situation for a woman's presence, I must beseech my fair readers to reflect, that the pilgrim’s wife followed him, weary and footsore, through all his difficulties, led, not by choice, but by devotion; and that in times of misery and sickness her tender care saved his life and prospered the expedition.’ – well said. What emerges from the book is that Florence saved her man’s life on several occasions, when she outfaced his attackers, and on occasions even took to arms in his defence. Baker, on the other hand, returns his wife’s devotion and tenderly cares for his gravely ill wife when she lapses into a coma, probably due to a severe attack of malaria when almost at their goal. Of their arrival at the lake he writes movingly: “My wife in extreme weakness tottered down the pass, supporting herself upon my shoulder, and stopping to rest every twenty paces. After a toilsome descent of about two hours, weak with years of fever, but for the moment strengthened by success, we gained the level plain below the cliff…. it was with extreme emotion that I enjoyed this glorious scene. My wife, who had followed me so devotedly, stood by my side pale and exhausted - a wreck upon the shores of the great Albert lake that we had so long striven to reach.”
Their discovery of Lake Albert Nyanza slotted another jigsaw piece into the puzzle of the source of the Nile, as the Bakers took some time to travel around the lake. However, they did overestimate the contribution that this reservoir of water made to the flow of the Nile, and a further piece of the puzzle was only found some years later. This intrepid pair of explorers bore great difficulties and onslaughts on their health and physical safety, before returning to a rather lukewarm reception in Europe. Sam married his Flooey, and he received his knighthood a short time later, but good Queen Victoria could never bring herself to approve wholeheartedly of the Bakers’s ‘irregular liaison’. Some years later he returned to the Nile and led a military expedition to wipe out the slave trade along the upper reaches of the river – a task in which he was partially successful.
Between Lake Albert and Lake Victoria, there was, of course, yet another body of water. The shallow, digitate Lake Kyoga is covered mostly by waterlilies, hyacinths and papyrus – easy to overlook, and quite difficult to find reliable information about. The Britannica can’t make up its mind whether it was discovered in 1875 by one Charles Chaillé-Long, an American, who was the second western explorer of Lake Victoria, or an Italian explorer of the upper Nile River system, one Carlo Piaggia. In any case, a chunk of the Victoria Nile flows through it.
Enter John Rowlands, aka Henry Morton Stanley. Probably my most un-favourite explorer, this American journalist already had one unsuccessful expedition under his belt by the time he was dispatched to find Livingstone – of whom more later. He had the funds to travel in style with all the equipment an explorer could wish for, as well as two hundred porters to carry it all. Stanley made himself a name for brutality and less than exemplary respect for human life – which reputation is being re-examined in later times; I can’t imagine why. After uttering his famous remark, he joined Livingstone in exploring Lake Tanganyika and he did make a contribution in that he decisively proved that Lake Tanganyika had no connection to the Nile. How I Found Livingstone; Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa (Sampson, Low, Marston and Company, 1872) describes this little venture. A couple of years later he took on the mighty Congo River – but that is another story – except that I could mention that he wiped out better than two thirds of his expeditionary force. A few more years on and we see this intrepid voyageur in the Congo once more, this time in the service of that indescribable excuse for a human being, King Leopold, to wrest a private fiefdom for the monarch from the locals.
In 1886 he once more entered the fray when he led an expedition from the Congo to ‘rescue’ Emin Pasha, the governor of Equatoria on the other side of the continent, in the Sudan. With just short of a thousand men our hero tackled the forests, rivers and mountains; rescued the unwilling Pasha and emerged with a vastly curtailed retinue some four years later. Several scandals resulted from this expeditionary tour de force, but there were also two important geographical findings: the existence of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and the presence of yet another lake in the chain, Edward, which empties itself via the Semliki River into Lake Albert. The whole fiasco is ably described in two volumes of In Darkest Africa (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1890), as well as a whole slew of other books by other expeditionaries and later critics. Thankfully he gave up exploration, became a British MP and was knighted for his services to humanity and the British Empire. Wow!
One of the later explorers of note in the Great Lakes region of East Africa was Joseph Thomson. He graduated as a geologist from Edinburgh and found employment as assistant to Keith Johnston who was to lead the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition to explore the region between Lakes Nyassa (Malawi) and Tanganyika which would establish the answers to several outstanding questions of catchment areas and drainage from the lakes. Johnston died of dysentry a few months into the journey, leaving Thomson, then a stripling of some twenty-one years of age, to tackle the journey with his 150-odd porters. With remarkable coolness and tact he led the expedition across some five thousand miles in fourteen months, without the loss of a single further life, nor did his party have to fire a shot in anger. His journey is described in the book To the Central African Lakes and Back (Sampson Low, Marston & Co, London, 1881) in a most readable fashion. His writing paints a vivid picture of a young adventurer on the loose, marvelling at nature, struggling with problems and loneliness, but supported in the main by his African staff, and a generally hospitable population.
He only ran into trouble at the far end of the journey, while investigating the outlet of Lake Tanganyika into the Lukuga River, which drains into the Congo and finally the Atlantic. Here the warlike Warua tribe robbed him and some thirty followers of almost all they possessed and it was only with extreme personal courage that he managed to extricate his party without bloodshed. Thomson’s motto was said to be He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far – and gently he did go. On his return journey he was also the first European to see Lake Rukwa, though from the heights of the precipitous bank he was on, he was not able to do a full survey before returning to the coast at Bagamoyo. 
By the early eighties European traders were clamouring for the exploration of the shortest route from the sea to the headwaters of the Nile. Thomson had acquired a taste for adventure and exploration. In 1882 the Royal Geographical Society asked him to report on the practicability of trekking through the Masai country, which no European had yet been able to penetrate beyond Mt Kilimanjaro. A little earlier a German expedition, led by Gustav Fischer, set off with the same route in mind. By great courage and resourcefulness he succeeded while Fischer failed in his attempt. He describes a half-hearted attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, reaching 9,000 feet, from where he turned back after 7 hours’ climbing, compelled to give up his intention of penetrating above the forest region. Thomson then left. Chaggaland and travelled through what is now Kenya, giving us the first description of the north face of Kilimanjaro. He carried on through Laikipia to Mt Kenya, crossed the Njiri desert and explored the eastern rift-valley, traversing the unknown region lying between Lakes Baringo and Victoria Nyanza, which he reached in1883 The account of this adventurous journey was published as Through Masai Land (Sampson. Low & Marston, 1885)and it is a classic of modern travel. His later career was to take him to West Africa, as well as entering the employ of Rhodes, for whom he explored the region north of the Zambezi, making treaties with the local chiefs on behalf of the British South Africa Company.
Last but by no means least one has to mention that Beau Geste of the Victorian era of exploration, David Livingstone, in the context of the discovery of the great lakes and rivers. After he had already made a very significant trek across the width of Africa from Sesheke to Luanda, and returning from Luanda to Quelimane, described in Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (John Murray, 1857) he led an ill-fated expedition to open up the Zambezi River. He was not the ideal man for the job, being better suited to tackle the wilds on his own with a small band of followers, than being in charge of an unwieldy band of explorers with differing opinions and priorities. In 1859 they were the first Europeans to reach the shores of Lakes Shirwa (Chilwa) and Nyassa (Malawi), the most southerly of the Great Lakes, and though they could not succeed in opening up any river routes, a number of important contributions were made to several branches of science. The book Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries (John Murray, 1865) is more of a defensive work of this failed venture.(brother Charles collaborated allegedly, but he was mpore of a disruptive element)
The exploration bug had bitten Livingstone, and in 1866 he also felt he had to try to put his mark on the origins of the Nile as he believed the source of the great river to be further south than Burton, Speke, Grant and Baker had established as being from Lakes Albert and Victoria. He consequently set out along the Rovuma river and did valuable work in exploring and mapping the region for a number of years, reaching Lakes Mweru, Tanganyika and Bangweulu, near which latter place he died. The posthumously-published volume entitled The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa (John Murray, 1874) concludes the famous explorer’s life work.
This, then, is a summary of a great chapter of African exploration. The full course of the Blue Nile was only explored in the 1960’s by the Brit, Blashford Snell; the first to navigate the entire length of the White Nile was a South African, Hendri Coetzee, in 2004. Satellite images and other modern technology have solved all but the few riddles hidden in the dark depths of two of the world’s deepest lakes, Tanganyika and Malawi, but there is romance in all of these tales.

African Hunting #2

Africana Votes and Views #13

Let us revisit this month, the hunting (or should that be killing?) fields of Africa, as well as a few diversions to other continents around the world. Let us mention, with due respect and reverence, those names which have gone down in the annals of the chase as truly great. Where best to start, but with the slayers of that noble, great beast, the elephant.

As already mentioned in my previous Votes #4, “Karamojo” Bell must be adjudged the man with the largest number of African elephants to his credit, which number amounted to 1011 animals (of which only 28 were cows shot in self defence or for rations). What does make the feat remarkable are two facts: firstly that he walked/ran down each of these animals on foot, averaging some 73 miles per animal and using up 24 pairs of boots per annum, and secondly, that he employed a 7mm or .276 calibre rifle to do the majority of his work. There was skill in his hunting; dogged tenacity and endurance, but in the end it comes down to a ledger of profit and loss, with so many pounds of ivory bagged during the year, and so many expenses on the debit side. His attitude can be gauged from his remark about his most unpleasant experience: “Travelling hot-foot 8½ hours at six miles per hour on an enormous track in wet season to find a tuskless bull. Killed him to prevent a recurrence!” Mais naturellement, what else could a gentleman do? In his spare time he did a little meat-hunting, popping off, on one occasion, 23 buffalo out of a herd of 23 with a pepped-up .22 rifle – “to see how effective the tiny, 80 grain bullet would prove, but also for meat”.

To put Bell’s achievements into proper perspective, one should, of course, mention in the same breath that four military men (Maj. Rogers, Capts. Galway, Skinner & Layard) who were stationed on the tiny island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) managed to mow down the stupendous numbers of 1500, 1300, 1200 and 1000 elephants respectively, using nothing more than smooth-bore sawn-off 16-gauge guns during the early 19th century. I wouldn’t have believed that the island held that many pachyderms in between the teeming millions of people, but hey, I read it in a book (Big Game Shooting Records, E. N. Barclay, Witherby, 1932).

Nor does Bell’s little effort at buffalo hunting make any dent in the all-time slaughter records of American bison – to the tune of Frank Carvers’s year’s total of 5500, Buffalo Bill Cody’s tally of 4280 and A C Myers’s little bag of 4200. These three guys must have been serious competition to the best harpooners of blue whales in the heyday of whaling – even if only in terms of actual biomass exterminated. But wait – my authority has managed to exceed even those numbers for big game – in the personages of the Elector Johann Georg of Saxony, and his son of the same name during the 17th century. These two blue-blooded aristos managed to top 35 491 and 43 649 head of red deer respectively, the weights of some of which went way over 700lbs – so work out that little sum, friends! In the same chapter the reader is regaled also by the fact that one of the Johann Georgs refused the crown of Bohemia –“because the Bohemian stags were inferior both in numbers and size” – Ach, mein Gott, – Johann, you have my sympathies!

So merely as a little diversion from the main theme of great African hunters, let us delve further into the histories of the chase. During the early Middle Ages, men, in this case mostly of noble blood or landed gentry in the case of the Brits, were the only ones permitted to slay any beast (with the exception of people of conflicting interests and opinions, of course, as these could be topped by any common ceorl or villein). These latter low classes took their life in their hands if they developed a taste for venison that rightfully belonged to their lords and masters. Since the pleasure of hunting was only sporadically interrupted by spells of government and wars, it followed that the nobles could expend an uncommon amount of effort in the chase. In addition it gave them something to brag about when they foregathered at the round table of an evening, devouring the best of boar and Burgundy. In early days gone by, the hunter was only armed with a bow, a lance or a knife, with a pack of baying curs as assistants, and hunting was a strenuous and somewhat risky adventure. Enter the crossbow, and later the arquebus (or better variations on the theme). Suddenly it became desirable that the hunter should be stationary, while the quarry was moved towards him. The low classes were given employment to chase all that moved to move towards the line of “guns” waiting in ambush – and hey presto, we have the birth of the Big Bag. If you encircled a few hundred square kilometres of forest with enough peasants (who would camp and make fires at night to keep the game from breaking out), within a couple of days you could push a satisfactory assortment of some tens of thousands of small and large game past a few dozen marksmen, who’d whiled away the time drinking Champers and playing cards until the action started. The nobility of Europe vied with each other to see what they could tally up. There is even an account of a King of Italy chasing hundreds of his peasants into the Alps between 6000 and 12 000 feet high to chase down some chamois and ibex within reach of his artillery.

Naturally the Prince of this, the Archduke of that, the Baron of the other, and assorted Freiherrn, Comtes etc, liked to let those of similar interests know where they stood on the ladder of achievement, and so there was no shortage of hunting literature. The next generation, and the next, and so on, read of their predecessors’ glorious experiences, and within a short time (geologically speaking) you end up with the likes of me or my son, equally hunting mad and slavering at the leash to be let loose on the dwindling wild life of this planet. Small problem – we are not part of a numerically insignificant noble elite, and almost anyone can afford a precision instrument, to wit, a powerful rifle and scope. The rest, as they say, coupled with an inordinately fecund species of primate overrunning the world and ripping up prime habitat, is history. Forgive the diversion, but I was lured off the main subject by this wealth of information which I wanted to share.

Back to the great Nimrods of the Dark Continent: one James Sutherland achieved some 447 elephant bull kills in ten years, which he reckoned to be some sort of world record. He only got bitten by the bug somewhere round about 1902 in Mozambique. His passion led him northwards and until shortly before World War I he made Tanganyika his headquarters. Sutherland wrote quite an interesting book entitled Adventures of an Elephant Hunter (Macmillan, 1912), full of his observations on natural history, as well as hunting experiences and the lives of his native companions. In one respect he differed radically from Bell. He preferred rifles of the heaviest calibres that could be purchased at the time; yet he had a number of narrow squeaks with his prey turning on him in the thick bush in which he hunted. In one instance he got tossed and landed on the wounded beast’s back, while on another occasion he took a well-earned rest on a dead elephant, before hiking back to camp. The elephant was never found, as it obviously woke up from its prolonged bout of anaesthesia and decamped. Proof that Sutherland was not as expert an anatomist of the elephant as was Bell, but the former’s attitude to hunting the great beasts was similar to the latter’s in that each kill represented pounds, shillings and pence in the bank – and that there was no end to the supply of quarries for their guns.

A gigantic, but romantic Scot of great ineptitude is next under the lens. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming found the hunting of the great stag on the highlands was not enough to fire his blood, so he came to South Africa for a five year stint of hard labour, killing the braw and wee beasties i’ the bush. Of his experiences he wrote the widely acclaimed and oft reprinted work Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa (John Murray, 1850 et al), which is quite entertaining for a while, but tends to get wearisome as the great Nimrod struggles manfully to down the gigantic beast “from half-past eleven till the sun was under, when his tough old spirit fled and he fell pierced with fifty-seven balls”. Another time it took a mere thirty-five and thirty balls respectively. No one could say Cumming didna have the balls. I mean, at 4 ounces each, someone must have been carrying the better part of 7 kg of lead in their pouch – or was it in their sporran – on that first occasion mentioned. And then to write about it? I would have been too ashamed to confess to keeping an entire mining sector occupied in my efforts to obtain a little sport, but not our man. To be fair, the seemingly huge numbers of corpses achieved were spread over five years – and then condensed into 756 pages, but he would have presented himself in a far more favourable light as a hunter and sportsman if he had left the rifle in the gunroom and confined himself to sticking a sgian dubh into a royal stag, or something. Needless to say, his bag of elephants did not place him in the hall of fame.

Yet another wee Highlander was the third son of Viscount Strathallan, one William Henry Drummond, who wrote The Large Game and Natural History of South and South-East Africa (Edmonston & Douglas, 1875); a learned-sounding title, but in fact a quite entertaining account of five years’ hair-raising adventures in Zululand and Swaziland, during which he hunted mainly buffalo, as well as a few elephants and smaller game. I read the book quite recently, and must admit that I became quite interested in it. His natural history observations are pretty good, as far as I can judge, and I became utterly amazed at his courage – no, foolhardiness, in rushing in where people a hundred years later, armed with modern magazine rifles, would hesitate to tiptoe in pursuit of wounded buff. It is difficult to gauge how many animals fell to this hunter, as there always seemed a goodly number of (mostly black) hunters in his company, and with everyone blazing away into the bushes, it must have given one the uncomfortable feeling of being in the middle of a swarm of bumble bees. Nonetheless they floored large numbers of buffaloes daily, with not too much loss of life and limb among the humans. Drummond returned to South Africa later and served under Chelmsford, being killed at Ulundi in 1879.

A man who had a great reputation, which far exceeded his actual achievements, was Arthur Neumann. An interesting person, who had a chequered career, from farming, prospecting, trading, later becoming a magistrate, before being lured by the great quarry. He scrimped and saved for years before outfitting his own safari, with which he explored and hunted with the Nderobo tribe near Mount Kenya for three years, and explored north towards Lake Turkana (Rudolph). Neumann at first also hunted with large calibre rifles, but he was introduced to the military Lee-Metford, which he tended to prefer even to his Martini-Henry as a “finishing weapon” from the start. His liking for the light calibre, which he adopted for all his hunting, took a knock though (pardon the pun) when he was seriously injured by an elephant cow after his .303 jammed in the thickets bordering the lake. A lengthy period of recuperation followed, after which he slowly and painfully made his way back towards Mombasa – still managing to bag his three best tuskers with his popgun, even in his half crippled state, on the way home. He lived to write Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa (Rowland Ward, 1897) and the volume was so well-received by the public, that he became an instant Nimrod of Note, though in all likelihood this retiring man’s bag never exceeded a hundred elephants by many. What struck me on reading his book was the sheer number of rhinos that he killed – mostly as rations for the hungry Ndorobo and surrounding tribes. Neumann was different from some of the other hunters I have read about, though, in that he genuinely hated to kill these animals unnecessarily, or for sport alone, when there was no chance of the meat being used. He didn’t rate them as particularly dangerous, nor did he think they were difficult to kill.

William Finaughty, on the other hand, was a man who won little renown during his lifetime, though he richly deserved it. It was only due to the services of an American, who met the old man in 1913 shortly before his death, that his Recollections of William Finaughty – Elephant Hunter (Privately published by G. L. Harrison, 1916) appeared, and that we have learnt about his exploits. He did most of his hunting from the saddle in the more open country of Matabeleland, but he wasted a prodigious amount of horseflesh due to horse-sickness in the process. He hunted primarily with a muzzle-loader firing a four-ounce slug, and managed the feat of slaying six beasts with five bullets, when he noticed the fifth animal had his bullet lodged under the skin on the far side, cut it out and with the recycled lead he got another bull with the next shot. Although the record of his bag is not complete, his tally on record is well over 400 animals.

Talking about cannons on the loose among the herds, the notable Sir Samuel Baker, who wreaked havoc among the fauna of Ceylon, who stalked the noble stags of Scotland and who explored and hunted the length of the White Nile, must take the prize. He persuaded the firm of Holland & Holland to make him a single-barrel rifle, weighing 20 lbs, which fired a half-pound explosive shell at its target. He notes briefly that he only fired this calibre about 20 times in all – each time with satisfactory results. I should b— well think so! On the other hand, my sincere homage does go out to the old warrior for his true grit (I have unbounded admiration for Mrs Baker, who accompanied him) in exploring the source of the Nile, as well as for his hunts for sambar stag and wild boar in Ceylon – armed with a knife and aided by a pack of hounds to bring the quarry to bay, which he would then despatch with one stab to the heart. Wow.

Let us not forget some of the early Boer hunters. Mostly we have to rely on the reports of their fellow-enthusiasts to inform us of their exploits, since they left no written records. In the case of Petrus Jacobs, we only know what F C Selous had to relate with regard to his mode of hunting. He loved to hunt from horseback for the sake of the sport, and was reputed to have shot between 400 and 500 elephants, as well as a hundred-odd lions, one of the latter of which chewed him over considerably, so putting him out of action for two months before he was able to remount to resume his pursuit at the ripe old age of seventy-three. Truly, they were men in those days. In his books Jagkonings (1945) and Veldsmanne (1958) J von Moltke records a number of interviews with surviving descendants and friends of notable hunters of yore. They mostly hunted in Botswana, Damaraland and Angola during the latter half of the 19th century. As ivory hunting was very much the cash cow of the place and period, individual tallies weren’t kept by the hunters, so we read that the van Zyls (father and two sons) killed 130 and 190 elephants in successive years, while their most infamous exploit was to chase a herd of 103-odd elephants into a swamp and finish off the entire lot. Von Moltke ascribes this to mercy-killing, since the jumbos were unable to free themselves, while my British source calls it “the most wanton butchery of elephants in the history of South Africa” – you can make up your own minds about that, but sport it surely was not. Another seemingly great hunter, one Frederick Green, also active in the same region at the time, was most respected by his Boer colleagues, but he left no record, so nobody has any idea whether his reputation is anecdotal or real.

Among the other heavyweights are, of course, the rhinos. Somehow their horns lacked appeal during the great hunting era of the 19th century, and most of the great hunters shot them in staggering numbers, purely, it would seem, because of their nuisance value, or at best for carriers’ rations. The Swedish trader/hunter C J Andersson probably put a sizeable dent into the rhino population of Namibia; he records bags of “scores” of these animals in Lake Ngami (Hurst & Blackett,1856), his best tally being eight beasts killed at a waterhole during one nightly vigil. Not unlike dynamiting fish in a pool – especially since another dozen or so other heads of game bit the dust that night as well. W C Oswell seemed to enjoy hunting rhino, and while no numbers were recorded in the book by his son, William Cotton Oswell, Hunter and Explorer (Heinemann, 1900), it does mention that Oswell and a companion kept a starving tribe of six hundred souls alive for a couple of months on this strong diet. The aforementioned Finaughty, in addition to his sizeable bag of tuskers also managed the odd baker’s dozen of rhinos on at least one day when the elephants stayed away. Towards the end of the 19th century rhino horn suddenly attained popularity – possibly due to a population explosion of Middle Easterners reaching puberty thus needing ornate daggers hafted in this material – or maybe due to a suspected drop in population in India and China, which required some rejuvenation of the male libidos in those parts. Whichever, suddenly traders were arming the tribesmen with blunderbusses and sending them off after the hapless animals, of which there seemed to have been an almost inexhaustible supply until the 1930s, when the game clearances to eradicate Nagana in Zululand almost spelled an end to the genus Diceros in Africa.

The king of beasts, the lion, should certainly be considered when one chronicles the great hunters of yore. However, it is difficult to get to grips with exact numbers, since all too often hunters were canny enough to have a back-up rifle nearby, not to speak of packs of baying curs, trackers and gunbearers armed variously with rifles and spears – because lions are fast and deadly, especially when wounded. So while we read that a certain Paul Rainey killed over two hundred, one Clifford Hill “had been in on the death of 160 lions”; Sir Alfred Pease was a famous hunter with a bag of about 135 lions, Petrus Jacobs killed more than a hundred in his time, and Selous was no slouch himself when it came to hunting the big cats – most of these men had the odd bit of help here and there, making it difficult to apportion exact numbers. What is probably not widely known is that the great conservator, James Stevenson-Hamilton, of Kruger National Park fame, had an individual bag of in excess of two hundred lions that he hunted, sometimes accompanied by a tracker or two, on foot, armed mainly with a .303 rifle (Big Game Shooting Records, Witherby, 1932). All in a good day’s conservation, they might say.

I have left that Beau Geste of the African hunt as last but not least. Frederick Courteney Selous, although not the man with the biggest bag of anything in the annals of the genre, was certainly one of the most fêted of hunter-writers of the late Victorian era. He was the British gentleman, the adventurer, the Nimrod, the naturalist and finally the soldier and fallen hero. His early life was not entirely blameless, as he was prone to trespassing, poaching and brawling in his youth, which almost resulted in his arrest. He was fortunate to be able to leave England at an early age, determined to make his living as an elephant-hunter. His first twenty years were spent in southern and central Africa, hunting, exploring, trading and guiding others. It is said that he also managed to acquire three wives and several children during his illustrious career (in addition to getting married properly to an English bride, and having a few more children).Two books were published during this period: A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881) and Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (1893). Selous’s bag of elephants is tallied at 106 by one writer (E N Barclay, 1932) – a far cry from the stupendous bags mentioned previously, so in all probability his trading ventures had more of an influence on paying his bills. Estimates for his entire bag of larger animals is just over a thousand, and the Selous Collection in the Natural History Museum in London has over 500 of his specimen in their collection. However, it is unlikely that any other hunter managed to amass such a diverse collection in his lifetime. Selous was not just a bloodthirsty noble let loose on the fauna of a continent, but undoubtedly an able writer, a reliable observer, and a skilled hunter who deserved a good measure of that iconic stature and esteem in which he was held. Although I read most of his books (repeatedly) quite a long time ago; I remember them fondly and they would be among the first of the genre that I would advise anyone to read.

Hippos, though reputed to be the most dangerous mammal to man on the continent, do not seem to figure largely in bag totals. The reason is simple – they were considered as food, not a worthy quarry. True, they often presented only a small target to the marksman, as they raised their nostrils and eyes above the surface of the water to breathe, but they were in another element, and the hunter could sit with impunity on the bank of the river/lake and take potshots at whatever rose from the depths. Very few hunters would have had the temerity to take on a grown hippo on land at night, and numerous were the boats upset and people killed in the waters when they trespassed on the territories of the countless “river horses” that populated most African waters. Millions were exterminated between the time van Riebeeck landed at the Cape and the present day – but they were just so much rich flesh – and hides that were ideal for the manufacture of sjamboks, instruments much in favour for disciplining errant servants and local tribespeople.

Leopards, although dangerous and iconic large cats, did not seem to make it into the record books. Although their skins were sought-after trophies for the home and library floor, the relative ease with which they could be killed by a man wielding nothing more deadly than a spear – no, even by some men with bare hands alone – meant that no great kudos accrued to the hunter from a kill. While the same did not apply to the Indian leopards, some of whom became noted maneaters and killers, making them very worthy adversaries, not to be tackled with impunity, the African cats only became deadly to man once wounded. A fair number of Nimrods misjudged these bantamweight killers and paid the price after wounding them and following them into thick bush.

There we must leave the successful and notable hunters of the last two hundred years. There are still many more who made a name for themselves in the deserts, bush and forests of the continent, and possibly we shall revisit some other guise of the same subject at another time.

WAR BORES

Africana Votes & Views #12

  Men have this fascination with war. The noble pursuit of one’s fellow-man with lethal intent must have a similar fascination to driving a thundering behemoth of a machine down the railway or racing track, launching oneself into a melée consisting of thirty grown men and one oval ball with possible fatal consequences, scaling impossibly high pieces of frozen rock while suffering semi-permanent damage to extremities from cold and to the brain from anoxia – or sneaking up to elephants’ backsides in the bush to tweak a hair from their tails and chalk a cross on their haunches (I kid you not – I know such a band of foolhardy knaves). So what is it that so enchants the male persona with dangerous pursuits? The presence of testosterone is popularly blamed for this thraldom to the pursuits of Mars – is it then the presence of periodical quantities of progesterone or estrogen that leads the fair sex to queue up for their dose of Mills and Boone romances?
  For those putative warriors who have either laid down their armoury or have never been fortunate enough to get within smelling distance of burning cordite, there are books on the ‘Art of War’, such as written by one Chinese sage, Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC – and still acclaimed as one of the most influential works on military strategy; in addition to tens of thousands more volumes, offering the vicarious (and safe) enjoyment of the thunder of battle, the niceties of strategies, glorious feats of courage and self sacrifice – all without the attendant stench of death. As the good Horace wrote Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori... – yeah, well tell that to the fatherless children and the widows – not to mention the scarred souls and bodies that survive the turmoil. My one parent had survived the Russian campaign as a mental and physical wreck; the other had squeaked through the relentless bombing of the German cities; I remember living in a cellar in an entirely flattened suburb of Hamburg just after the end of the war. During the next half century or so, I was part of a relatively fortunate generation, most of whom did not have to go to war. Even that grizzled old warrior, Papa Hemingway, conceded that ‘he knew how boring any man’s war is to any other man’ (Across the River and into the Trees, Scribner 1998), and so it was with me. I must confess to having lost my taste for war-books of any kind by the time I was about fifteen, which is not to say that I haven’t read the odd volume touching on the genre every now and again.
  So how about the conflicts that have raged about this continent of ours? One could start at the very beginning of the European presence at the Cape, when the august Viceroy of India, Francisco D’Almeida, conqueror of Kilwa and Mombasa on the east coast, got more than a bloody nose from the local Khoi tribesmen. Despite their armour and superior weapons, his trading/raiding expedition ran into trouble in a village near the estuary of the Salt River when they tried taking stock and hostages. The unsportsmanlike Khoi retaliated using their cattle as living shields, and managed to stone, spear and club the good Viceroy and some fifty to sixty of his men (depending on which source one takes) to death. Apparently the 1510 episode left a bad taste with the Portuguese, and they tended to give the Cape a wide berth, so leaving a vacuum which the Dutch and English were prepared to fill. 
  Fast forward a couple of hundred years during which period the Dutch had established themselves at the Cape (not entirely unopposed by the Khoi tribes), and the wars and alliances between the European powers started to make themselves felt as the French, Dutch, Spanish and English took irritating turns at allying themselves with each other and against each other. Saldanha Bay became the theatre of a number of such confrontations, which are ably chronicled in Jose Burman’s Saldanha Bay Story (Human & Rossouw, 1974), but none of these skirmishes were battles in the true sense – except to those few unfortunate souls that perished in them, and the main loss was ships and cargo. The next battle worthy of the name was in 1806 when the British under Baird and Popham sailed into view to wrest the Cape from the Dutch under the command of Janssens. This was a properly planned, well executed expedition consisting of a whole fleet with some six and a half thousand men, and was focussed on a stretch of sandy coast a few miles north-west of Cape Town. Here the Brits landed at Lospersbaai (nowadays Melkbosstrand) and a short, sharp battle followed, lasting about half the day. The motley aggregation of German, French, Dutch, Javanese, Khoi and burghers, numbering less than two thousand souls, was outgunned and withdrawn by Janssens, little knowing that he actually had the upper hand in that the British were in dire straits from the heavy going in the deep sand and lack of water. According to a number of accounts I haven’t read, like D W Krynauw’s Beslissing by Blouberg (Tafelberg, 1999), which is a very thorough archivist’s take on the event, and M R D Anderson’s Blue Berg – Britain takes the Cape (Privately published, 2008) which comes complete with dialogue; this conflict had all the elements of classic battle, and it certainly was one of the deciding moments in the history of European involvement in the subcontinent.
  Although the first three ‘Frontier Wars’ in the Eastern Cape occurred during Dutch rule between 1779 and 1803, these were relatively minor affairs occasioned by European farmers expanding eastward and being resisted and raided by the various Xhosa-related tribes. The forces deployed were mainly burgher commandos, and their effectiveness was not decisive enough to put an end to tribal excursions for any length of time. The nineteenth century imposed the pax Brittanica on the Cape, as noted above – on the other hand, maybe it didn’t, since the Eastern Frontier continued to be a festering sore on the flank of the colony. The 4th war broke out in 1811, bringing British troops and military science into the fray alongside the commandos, and a number of forts were established. The conduct of these wars, the military manoeuvres, the fine soldierly activities (interspersed with hunting episodes) have been written about in great detail. A few books I have read include some material on these wars, such as J E Alexander’s Voyage Round the West Coast, and a Visit to the Colonies of Africa… in which he includes some of his war experiences on the frontier, before departing up the West Coast through Namaqualand; E E Napier’s Excursions in South Africa (William Shoberl, 1850) which work embodies the author’s experiences as a supernumerary officer in charge of irregulars during the War of the Axe; T J Lucas’s Camp Life and Sport in South Africa (Africana Reprint Library, 1975) in which he relates much ‘exciting work’ which enlivens the lot of a colonial officer in the thick of the fray. On a more serious note, A J Smithers’s work The Kaffir Wars 1779–1877 (Leo Cooper, 1973) tries to put all nine wars into perspective, including the lamentable episode of Nonquause’s prophecy and the cattle killing, which led to untold misery, starvation and the breaking of the power of the Xhosa nations, as well as the last insurgency of Kreli and Sandile, which brought to an end a century of war.
  Also during this period, the Koranna wars raged along the northern frontier of the Cape. Very little glory accrued to any one during these obscure cattle-raiding skirmishes and reprisals, and once more the forces consisted mainly of burgher commandos and policemen, opposed by a bewildering array of tribal and clan alliances. The only work I have seen which endeavours to present the whole history of the eleven years of conflict between 1868–1879 is T Strauss’s War Along the Orange (UCT, 1979) – a fiendishly difficult book to get hold of – and I wrote a chapter on the main outlines of the wars in Life & Travels in the Northwest 1850–1899 (Yoshi, 2008).
A noteworthy war followed hard on the heels of the frontier wars. The Zulu War was no sporting skirmish, nor a cattle-raiding expedition. It was a full-on challenge to the might of the British Empire by a numerous and warlike nation that still had vivid memories of its military genius-founder Chaka as precedent. Some forty thousand trained warriors proceeded to give the Brits a bloody nose at Isandhlwana by overwhelming the garrison. The famous defence of Rorke’s Drift followed – where the redcoats held at bay an overwhelming force of Zulus, winning eleven VCs for gallantry. In another clash at Hlobane Mountain, the Zulus repulsed the British as well as a Boer commando, but at Kambula the fortunes of war went the other way. Finally, the battle of Ulundi, the burning of the royal kraal and the capture of King Cetshwayo signalled the end of this conflict. There are a number of works by military historians who have analysed the war in detail; or if a blow-by-blow account is required, who better to consult than the Illustrated London News of 1879. Of the more modern works, D R Morris’s Washing of the Spears (Jonathan Cape, 1966) gives some background to the rise of the Zulu nation and its fall after the war, and in a similar vein is R B Edgerton in his book Like Lions they Fought (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988). For detailed accounts of the two heroic battles, R Furneaux’s The Zulu War – Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1963) is probably your best bet.
  The next lot to take a swipe at the hapless Brits were the Transvalers. They had been unceremoniously annexed through Shepstone’s machinations, and despite trying to get the decision reversed through diplomatic channels, this was not to be and the burghers decided besiege various British units to prevent them from getting reinforcements from elsewhere. Engagements at Bronkhorstspruit, Laing’s Nek and Ingogo caused heavy losses to the British, and presidents Brand of the OFS and Kruger of the Transvaal, pressed their advantage by diplomatic efforts to gain some concessions with regard to their independence while offering some face-saving clauses in exchange. Unfortunately the correspondence ran into some delays which led to the Battle of Majuba – a decisive loss and blow to the colonial power, which was now forced to back-pedal, un-annex the Transvaal within six months and leave the Boers to plough their own furrows. T F Carter’s work A Narrative of the Boer War (Remington, 1883) is probably one of the best early works, though I found it considerably more indigestible than Oliver Ransford’s Battle of Majuba Hill (John Murray, 1967). 
  Then came the second Anglo-Boer War. No half-hearted regional scrimmage this time, but instead what was to become the first ‘modern’ war, pitting the military might of the most powerful empire of the age against the local knowledge, bushcraft, speed and marksmanship of the burghers of two small republics. The conventional phase of the war was soon over. The republics just couldn’t defend their towns and cities, nor could they consistently defeat the ‘Khakies’ in pitched battle, and their laying siege to a number of towns occupied by British forces just diluted their efforts. The latter phase of the war, the guerilla-war, was to become an epic struggle between will-o’-the-wisp bands of ragged and ill-supplied men, and the ever-growing forces that tried to shut them down. I don’t know just how many books have been written on this war – and are still being penned or revived, or excavated out of old diaries and reports; it could run into the thousands. I have no intention of reading them, so you, good reader, are on your own. There are regimental histories, there are officers’ accounts of their exploits, there are military experts who dissect every tactic and deployment, there are voluminous histories which attempt to cover every phase and every theatre of the conflict, there are technical treatises on munitions and armaments, on communications, or medical advances – and then there are some truly touching personal documents.
  One of these is Deneys Reitz’s Commando (Faber & Faber, 1929). A remarkably well-written personal experience of the entire war from the perspective of a callow youth, scarcely off the schoolbench, straight into the barrage of shells at Talana. From then on the reader follows almost every major event of the war, often under some of the most charismatic and able leaders, like Smuts’s great ride across the Cape, and the war in Namaqualand in the company of berserkers like Maritz. Certainly the work deserves its reputation as one of the best narratives of war and adventure in the English language. A number of young foreigners joined the ranks of the Boers, mainly for the adventure a war promised, one suspects. One of these was the Frenchman Robert de Kersauson de Pennendreff, who was sworn in as a burgher of the ZAR by the old president himself. Though full of enthusiasm to get to grips with the war, he was soon disillusioned as he failed to gain acceptance from his co-belligerents until he managed to learn the taal. He took part in many of the major battles and was even entrusted with a personal mission to inform president Kruger in exile in Holland of the state of the war back home. No great literary work this book, Ek en die Vierkleur (Afrikaanse Pers Boekhandel, ca. 1950) but rather a day by day diary of a young adventurer. A slim volume, Woman’s Endurance by A D L (A D Luckhoff), published by SA News Co, 1904, brought home to me the horrendous conditions in the Bethulie concentration camp for women and children, where the author was chaplain to the inmates. The worthy padre recounts the suffering of mothers and their dying offspring with such empathy that I had a hard time getting through the sixty-odd pages, even with a wad of tissues to hand. No wonder then that the poor man couldn’t last longer than six months in his position. There are several other good books on the same subject, but I haven’t felt an urge to tackle them. Bill Nasson’s work, Abraham Esau’s War (Cambridge, 1991) examines the lot of the ‘coloured’ people in the Western Cape, who tended to be used as auxiliaries by one side – and as traitors by the other. They lost out during the war, and they did not benefit by the peace. I can claim to have read all books that were written about the war in Namaqualand, Bushmanland and the West Coast, but that is because of my general interest in the history of the region.
  Sieges tend to form the subject of some interesting writing – possibly because adversity brings out the best in humanity. The Siege of Kimberley by T Phelan (M H Gill, 1913) is such a title; chronicling the lighter humorous moments and disasters that afflicted mainly the civilian population, while the technicians and engineers of the diamond mines cobbled together the Long Cecil cannon, with which they could reply to the Boers’ artillery. P Burke’s Siege of O’okiep (War Museum, 1995) is more of a military evaluation of the Boers’ siegecraft, though not devoid of its lighter moments, such as Maritz attempting to blow up the whole town with the aid of a train loaded with dynamite (which derailed and burnt instead of exploding), or the boys having a little fun with jam-tins full of dynamite being lobbed onto blockhouses’ and forts’ roofs. The siege of Ladysmith was also the subject of a whole shelf of books, of which I have only read one a while back, by H Watkins-Pitchford, Besieged in Ladysmith (Shuter & Shooter, 1964). The author was a renowned veterinary surgeon, and the book offers a different view in his letters from the besieged city to his wife; an interesting personal document.
  A few novels dealing with aspects of the war have also come to my notice. C L Leipoldt’s Stormwrack (David Philip, 1980) portrays the ramifications the war has on the different elements of the population in the Cederberg village of Clanwilliam, which was only quite peripheral to the main conflict. W C Scully was so enraged at the treatment meted out to townspeople in the Cape by their own government who saw rebellion and collaborators round every corner, that he went on a crusade which bordered on treason. He wrote a thinly disguised novel, The Harrow (Nasionale Pers, 1921), the MS of which he hung on to until almost twenty years after the end of the war – because of his bitterness against his own countrymen and government. But enough of this war – there are plenty to follow.
  1914 was the year the world went mad; and for very confused reasons, not quite evident to my unmilitaristic mind. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to war against his cousin George V of England, because some crazed bloke had shot one of his Austrian archducal buddies in a foreign country, i.e. Serbia. Before you knew what was happening, the entire extended family of both monarchs had joined the fray on one side or another, as well as a gross of other countries who weren’t even related by marriage. So it was on this subcontinent; a portion of the populace supported old Blighty, while the other half harboured grudges from the Boer War and reckoned we should have joined hands with the Germans in South-West. Before you know what, you have the 1914 Rebellion going at full tilt and men are shooting at brother, father or uncle along the northern border. Strangely enough, only the Afrikaans writers seem to feel strongly about this domestic squabble, and I have yet to find a book which gives all the details in English. So I am left at the tender mercies of the doughty Gen. J C G Kemp, who is not exactly an impartial observer in his book Die Pad van die Veroweraar (Nasionale Pers, 1942) to guide me through the sands of the Kalahari towards the German forces. Once the South Africans have been committed to wresting their colony from the Germans, there is much more material available – some of it quite readable if one likes to hear the whine of Mauser bullets and feel the grit of sand between the teeth. Books like E M Ritchie’s With Botha in the Field (Longmans Green, 1915), H F Trew’s Botha Treks (Blackie & Son, 1916) and W S Rayner & W W O’Shaughnessy’s How Botha and Smuts Conquered German South West (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1916) should satisfy the most ardent war historian’s appetite, especially since they cover the southern as well as the northern campaigns.
  Once South-West had fallen, our local generals turned their attention to Tanganyika, where the renowned general P E von Lettow-Vorbeck was showing more talent than was deemed prudent to be on the loose in the East African bush. Although his book My Reminiscences of East Africa (Hurst & Blackett, 1919) consists of mainly the military niceties of his campaign, it is eminently readable, and I suspect that many of his opponents appreciated reading of his exploits as I did. There are a number of semi-arid to dry histories of this part of WWI, and I can only claim to have read two small contributions entitled inaptly On Safari by one F C (F Cooper, Juta, 1917) in which he sketches the discomforts of bush warfare as a gunner under the generalship of Smuts, and C Martin’s Corporal Haussman Goes to War (Privately published, 2000) in which charming little account said corporal betook himself and his Triumph motorcycle to ride in the war against the Germans.
  World War II was an entirely different kettle of submarines. Yes, we do believe some German subs cruised off our shores, and it was rumoured that German seamen came ashore for smokes and a drink now and then, but that was about as close as the action got. Our troops were shipped off in large numbers to East and North Africa, where they fought talented generals like the Duc de Aosta and Rommel, among other redoubtable warriors; got hammered at Tobruk; flew in the Battle of Britain and escaped from various Italian concentration camps. Naturally there is a large body of literature concerning such important events; however, since I had a brother-in-law who had been party to some of the above actions ‘up north’, I was quite happy to listen to his tales of hair-raising escapades and improbable anecdotes, and I have somehow never had the urge to read a single book on the South African involvement in the war. Once again, gentle reader, you must pilot your own way through this literary minefield.
  Lastly we come to what I classify as the ‘Bush Wars’ in my catalogues. They include everything warlike from the beginning of the end of the colonial era in Africa until the present civil wars raging up and down the continent with monotonous regularity. A number of my schoolmates could hardly wait to finish their matrics before they rushed off to join some bunch of ‘dogs of war’ led by one or other psychopath; to make unreal amounts of money in return for unspeakable deeds – or so I had it verbatim from one I met after he returned a haunted and shivering wreck from the Congo. Then, too, I had colleagues at work later on, men who had been sent to the Caprivi, and on into Angola – who would confide in me after a few drinks, some of the inhumanities than men do to other men in the heat of battle or in the cold fever of revenge. None of these encounters awoke any interest or vicarious enjoyment of what they had experienced, so I have read none of the Contacts, nor Mr Stiff’s offerings, nor ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare’s or dozens of other worthy additions to the genre – with one exception – a little book entitled Pionne, by one Bertie Cloete, who happened to be a neighbour of one of my friends. He relates his experiences as a young ‘Troopie’ in training camp and at the front in the north of Namibia; the traumatic Bush War against unseen enemies, and the horrendous things that were witnessed. A gripping read – but quite sufficient for my needs.
  This was a difficult subject for me to write on and I hope any shortcomings will be excused. I have chosen to end this year, the first twelve numbers of Africana Votes and Views, with a subject I do not appreciate, but which will be with us as history and possibly future fact unless mankind undergoes a fundamental change.

MATERIA MEDICA

Africana Votes & Views #11

The ills that afflict the human condition must be an eternal subject of interest to most people. Just listen in when a bunch of ‘mature’ people get together – first up on the agenda are the aches and pains that are experienced, as well as the miracle - or other cures that have been found.
So we’ll have a look at medicine in the Dark Continent, as well as a few related matters. I’ve always thought of the personage who used to be known as the District Surgeon, as a romantic figure who drove a clapped-out Ford or Studebaker sedan over unspeakable tracks in the Bush, with a black orderly/assistant next to him, and a rifle handy on the back seat among the paraphernalia of his profession. This was the Bundu Doctor, and I met a number of these worthy gentlemen in the flesh during the mid 1950’s.
It was with great delight that I actually found a book with just that title only a month or two back, written by a pukka sahib, Colonel (Dr) J Whitby (R Hale, 1961) covering his experiences in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whence he had been posted after extensive duty in the Far East. I immersed myself in the book without further ado, expecting a bizarre array of cases, circumstances and humorous anecdotes. Despite the title, I was a little disappointed. Although the good doctor had a truly sympathetic touch with sufferers from a host of maladies, his writing is infused with racial stereotyping, generalisations ad nauseam, military and colonial attitudes and a fine disregard for the spelling of place-names. His chapter on witchcraft and the results on the affected tribespeople is of interest, and his description of setting a patient’s broken leg via radio instructions to a panicky wife, is an absolute howler, while one or two episodes described smack of being ‘bundu legends’.
The author spent time in his mobile surgery in the ‘doctor’s bogie’, a special wagon hitched onto the train that traversed the country from south to north. It would stop at every small station and the ailing populace would flock in for treatment, often necessitating the bogie’s being left behind in a siding to be hooked up by the next train. Altogether the book is a fair reflection of life in the colonies in the late 1940s, and it paints a good picture of the little settlement of Maun in the Okavango, as well as the Zambian Copperbelt.
Subsequently he was to enter the services of WNLA as the Medical Officer who checked out the avalanche of humanity absorbed by the Witwatersrand gold mines, only to be spat out when their contracts had expired. He devotes more than a whole chapter to the methods used by this organization, as well as the many benefits that the Africans enjoyed due to the system, which operated from a numbers of centres in the Caprivi, Barotseland, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique.
A medico of an entirely different calibre is Alberto Denti di Pirajno, who wrote two books: A Cure for Serpents (Andre Deutsch, 1955) and A Grave for a Dolphin (1956), on his experiences. The good doctor starts his first book with charming reminiscences
among the Berber and Tuareg people of Tripolitania. None of the dour medical details, but intimate cameos of a kaleidoscope of patients, interspersed with snippets of local folklore and flavours from the Arabian Nights. While his treatments might not always have had the full endorsement of the British Medical Association, his cure for impotence, to which the title of the book refers is certainly a novel one which smacks of the time-honoured sleight of hand used by quacks to extract demons or extraneous objects from the patients’ bodies. An endearing quality of Pirajno’s writing is the lack of judgmental pontificating – as he cheerfully treats prostitutes, beggars, villagers or pashas, acknowledging their common humanity.
His next appointment was in Eritrea, this time as Regional Commissioner, but he still had to deputise occasionally for the MO. A hunting trip into the inhospitable desert; a bevy of beautiful women weaving their intrigues; tribal feuds and hashish smuggling all feature in this eventful period at Massawa, before he was transferred to the capital of Asmara for a spell before WWII. The book ends on a sombre note as the good doctor had been posted to Tripoli as the city’s governor and he had to surrender it to Montgomery’s forces.
The second book is a strange tale of a foundling Venus, a love story, of dolphins and of magic – very difficult to classify as to genre – but not really particularly relevant to the author’s medical career. Nonetheless, a most readable offering, which left me with more questions than answers.
A little less colonial, but still a chronicle of pioneer doctoring in the wilds, is Con Weinberg’s Fragments of a Desert Land (Timmins, 1975). He was decanted fresh from Medical School into the small village of Gibeon in 1926, where he was installed as relieving District Surgeon. There was one automobile in town; alternative transport being horseback or on foot. The nearest hospital was in Windhoek, over three hundred kilometers away, and he notes that while there was a telephone in town, one had to shout very loudly into it to make oneself heard in Windhoek!
Weinberg also had his medical caboose, still of pre-war German vintage, which would be hitched onto the passing trains and he would be transported to hold clinics, or to attend to emergencies up and down the line between Keetmanshoop and the capital. While I was reading this, I repeatedly bumped into shadows of my own family history, as my grandfather had been the travelling medic during the construction of the railway line between Luderitz and Keetmanshoop some twenty years earlier – possibly even working in the same caboose, and almost certainly sharing quarters with the author in Keetmanshoop. An entertaining book, full of incident and written with enough skill to let one feel the grit of the sand between one’s teeth.
Medicine in tropical Africa during the 20th century has been overshadowed by the monumental persona of Albert Schweitzer; theologian, musician, philosopher, missionary and doctor. By 1905 he had already achieved great stature as an authority on church organs and music, as well as being a professor of theology. He felt called to become a doctor so that he “might be able to work without having to talk….but (by) this new form of activity I could not represent myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting of it into practice”. He qualified as a surgeon and doctor seven years later and wasted no time in departing, accompanied by his wife Helene, for Lambarene on the Ogowe River, Gabon.
Though he had been promised a mission building, this was not to materialize and his first patients were treated in a disused fowl-house. WWI came and Schweitzer and his wife were briefly interned as German citizens by the French, but his deprived patients caused such a furore that they were soon set at liberty. It was during the war years that Schweitzer had time to philosophise, and he founded the concept of ‘Reverence for Life’ as an embodiment of his faith and work. Nonetheless he returned to Europe for a spell and only resumed his work at Lambarene in 1924. He funded most of his work from his own income as a lecturer and musician and the hospital grew to some seventy buildings in the next forty years of his labours. He received numerous honours including the Nobel Peace Prize, and died in 1965 and was buried at Lambarene.
I have no idea how many books have been written about the man and his work. Two I have worked through are G Seaver’s Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind ( A & C Black, 1948), and C R Joy & M Arnold’s The Africa of Albert Schweitzer ( A & C Black, 1949). The first is somewhat heavy reading, as are Schweitzer’s own books, Civilization and Ethics, My Life and Thought, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, which cover his philosophical work, his biographical writings: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, From My African Notebook, as well as his two most popular and readable works On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, and More from the Primeval Forest. Whether one likes philosophy or religion, or one merely stands in awe of the man, his humanitarianism and towering intellect, one should try to read one or the other of his works.
Just as Schweitzer battled the horrendous tropical scourges that afflict the inhabitants of West Africa, so did Michael Gelfand in South Central Africa. He wrote a goodly number of books dealing with subtropical medicine, as well as traditional healing and witchcraft practices among the tribespeople of Zimbabwe. The Sick African (Stewart, 1943) is too clinical for the lay reader, but Medicine and Custom in Africa (E & S Livingstone, 1964) is an account of the 'medical anthropology' of Africa, in which he examines the history of healing and materia medica, as well as occult practices. In another quite interesting title, Livingstone the Doctor – his Life and Travels (Basil Blackwell, 1957) he gives a critical evaluation of the great missionary/explorer’s medical role during his African sojourn. Another work, Mother Patrick and her Nursing Sisters (Juta, 1964) paints a faithful picture of the first attempts at providing a medical service to the new colony that was Rhodesia; as does the book A Service to the Sick (Mambo Press, 1976) in which he relates the development of medical treatment for Africans between 1890 and 1953. Medicine and Magic of the Mashona (Juta, 1956) delves into more ethnographical fields, as does Witch Doctor (Harvill Press, 1964) for good measure. As far as I’m aware, his last book in this vein to appear was The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe (Mambo Press, 1985), but the indefatigable doctor also collaborated with P W Laidler in writing South Africa, its Medical History (Struik, 1971). Gelfand’s books certainly belong onto the shelves of anybody interested in indigenous medicine and ethnography, while all collectors of Rhodesiana should follow suit, more especially since he also wrote a handful of other historical works.
There are a large number of little memoirs written by and about doctors in private practice in small towns and in the cities of the subcontinent. I can’t claim to have read that many, since a little medicine tends to go a long way with me. The best tales are usually those which are light on technical detail and rich in human tapestry. One of the former is D Gamsu’s Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon (Hugh Keartland, 1967) which is ill-named, since it is more of a whodunit, recalling the most memorable manslaughters, murders attempted and successful as well as fraudulent claims for injuries never suffered. It reads more like Benjamin Bennett than Chris Barnard. Speaking of the latter, one needs to have been born in Beaufort West to enable one to wade through the pages of this flamboyant heart-throb of the female gender (if he is to be believed). Much more charming was the little volume entitled Salt River Doctor by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981), or Dr Dingle’s cheerful memoir And the Doctor Recovered (Timmins, 1959). One of my firm favourites is C Louis Leipoldt’s Bushveld Doctor (Jonathan Cape, 1937) in which he describes his years after the end of the Boer War, ministering to the needs of the poor rural Afrikaner and especially their children in the Northern Transvaal. Many of these waifs were miserably ill-nourished, malaria and bilharzia-ridden, and in some cases scarcely able to assimilate any knowledge during their school hours because of their physical condition. A thoroughly engaging social document of the times.
There is no shortage of historical material on the theme. The Victorian medical men – and women – were not reticent about their activities. Some of the good doctors cured men’s bodies so that they could indulge in scientific adventures with the proceeds, as Emil Holub did. He intermittently dosed, patched and otherwise cured prospectors at the Diamond Fields for years before amassing enough funds to be able to lead three expeditions to the upper reaches of the Zambezi, where he made a name for himself as an explorer and recorder of strange peoples, animals and plants; which he ably describes (at some length) in his two-volume work Seven Years in South Africa (various German and English eds). J W Matthews’s work Incwadi Yami (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 & Africana Book Society, 1976) is in a similar vein, based mainly on the Diamond Fields, but the author prefers at least a modicum of the comforts of civilization, so he did not take to the wilds. Still, a lively and entertaining book on conditions in the ‘Wild West’ of South Africa. Another book dealing with this period and region is Lure of the Stone by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976), which chronicles the career of our own ‘Lady of the Lamp’ Sister Henrietta Stockdale, who was instrumental in bringing some relief to the diggers who were struck down by the major killers of the time, pneumonia, typhoid, typhus fever and dysentery. Sister Henrietta nursed and taught others to nurse for some two decades, right through the siege of Kimberley, and comes across as rather a martinet from this short biography, which reads something like a medical Who’s Who of the times.
Speaking of those times – the Anglo-Boer War was a period of intense medical activity, on both sides of the conflict. While the British potentially had a well-equipped medical service, with staff, equipment and medicines, they had not reckoned with the far-flung nature of the conflict across the subcontinent. The Boers, on the other hand, were short of trained personnel, which was in part supplied by sympathizers from a number of European countries, many of whom left memoirs of their years in the field. A vast amount of this information has been assembled by Kay de Villiers in his monumental work on the history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War, entitled Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, 2 Vols (Protea Book House, 2008). For anybody with an interest in the conflict, these works are an absolute must; the reader interested in medical history will find a feast, and the student and researcher will find much well-researched and documented fact, and even the casual browser will find a wealth of interesting anecdote, to be dipped into time and again – a tour de force in this genre.
There are the stories of the men and women who healed their fellow man. Then there are the stories of the institutions. The South African Institute for Medical Research has a very special place in my heart, because my mother worked there and in the serum laboratories at Rietfontein; so I have spent many hours wandering round the corridors of the august edifice designed by Sir Herbert Baker and built on Hospital Hill, as well as among the animal cages during my youth. M Malan’s book In Quest of Health (Lowry, 1988) traces the history of this world-renowned institution from its earliest beginnings due to fears of infectious diseases among the mineworkers in Johannesburg. During the period between the wars, extensive research was done with plague, relapsing fever, histoplasmosis, sporotrichosis, bilharzia and numerous other diseases, but what brought the institute to world attention was the production of a controversial vaccine against poliomyelitis, that dreaded killer of children in the early fifties. My sibling and I were probably among the first batches of schoolchildren to be inoculated with this virus, so once more it is of personal interest – but more of polio vaccine later. Lately the institute is engaged in research into the immunology of the AIDS pandemic. The book is no easy afternoon’s read, but for the interested layman and medico, a serious contender for their attention.
Certainly there are a number of histories of hospitals and medical schools, but none better to mention here than the definitive work on the history of Groote Schuur At the Heart of Healing (Jacana, 2008) by Anne Digby and Howard Phillips. The authors have written a scholarly yet very human history of this iconic institution and the caring people who staff it from the most menial positions to the top consultants. They trace the rising fortunes of the hospital when money poured in after the blaze of the spotlights had focused on the revolutionary heart transplant successes, and the gradual decline in funding during the latter years, as management struggled to come to terms with the integration of patients and staff in the New South Africa.
Lastly, to return to polio vaccines, and the rumours that it might be an ‘escaped’ plague – an experiment that went wrong. For readers who really love a challenging read, I would suggest you try E Hooper’s medical whodunit entitled The River (Penguin, 2000). The author is a medical sleuth, hot on the trail of the root cause of AIDS - epidemiological detective work; a truly remarkable attempt to trace the possible origins of the world pandemic, as well as its diffusion, from postulated beginnings with a live polio vaccine derived from chimpanzees (who have become acclimatized to their own form of SIV), which was supposedly distributed among Central African villagers. Probably there are huge holes that need to be plugged in the theory, but I have to admit I was hooked from beginning to end, though the medspeak left me bewildered on more than one occasion.

And now I am going off to have a drink to your continued good health!

PAGE RAGE

Africana Votes & Views #10

The time has come to share with you all, readers and writers alike, some of the characteristics, failings and foibles of authors and publishers, that absolutely stick in my craw and refuse to be ingested without a Herculean struggle. 

Some of my pet aversions are purely personal - such as my dislike of dustjackets or dw's as they are often referred to. I love the feel and look of a book attractively bound in cloth, paper or leather-covered boards instead of a slithery plastic-coated concoction in garish colours, frequently bearing advertising, bar codes, pictures of authors, their biographies and forthcoming attractions, over the cheapest possible machine binding job you can get. The dw costs a great deal to produce, I believe; money that could much better be spent on materials and binding of the volume it covers. Once the book has been read a few times - or even just removed from the shelf and replaced again, the dw starts getting first edgeworn, then a few tears appear, making it tatty or scuffed; a few more passages from hand to shelf and extended rips appear, and possibly even a chunk is torn off to scribble a telephone number on or to be used as an instrument of cleansing - making a description of torn & chipped inevitable. Readers have become brainwashed to the necessity of having dw's to such a degree that such deficient pieces of scrap paper are occasionally pasted down onto other sheets so as to reassemble to best ability the jigsaw puzzle they have become; they are lovingly encased in plastic protectors, (as if this confers de facto virginity to them once more), and more disturbingly, crime has raised its ugly head with forgeries starting to appear on the market, courtesy of high quality copying machines. Ag shame!

  Even the fundis of the bookworld differ on this subject. That bible all bibliophiles should possess, John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, (Oak Knoll, 1992 6th Rev ed) has the following to say: Professors Tanselle and Gallup…have spoken up for the recognition of the jacket as, in bibliographical terms, an integral component of the modern book, yet that this insistence sometimes becomes rather hysterical is also true. On the previous page he says: …dustjackets were – and functionally still are – ephemera in the most extreme sense: wrappings intended to be thrown away, before the objects they were designed to accompany were put to use. My pet hate is in good company – I rest my case.
  Let us linger on the exterior of the book. How about size? The first book that leaps to mind is Rourke & Lincoln's tome Mimetes (Tiyan Publishers, 1982). This book weighs in the region of 8 kg, and my colleague who has a copy, informs me that it is about 70 x 50 cm in size. His classic comment was that "All the publisher needed to do is to sell four legs along with the book to make it into a coffee-table". A A Balkema published a few so-called 'elephant folios' in his time - reprints of Angas' The Kafir's Illustrated, and Daniell's African Scenery and Animals; themselves no lightweights and only a few centimetres smaller in each direction. Problem is, you need to have a clean table, big enough to hold the thing, you must have both hands free to turn the page (for fear of tearing it) and preferably you should have someone with good eyesight standing on a chair next to you, who would be able to bend over the book far enough to be able to read the text at the top of the page which is not within range of your bifocals. Then you have the problem of storage. No bookshelf will hold it, as it would protrude far enough to snag every passer-by, leading to eventual damage. You can put it on top of a cupboard to gather dust and fishmoths, but that way you can't enjoy the book, and the same goes for putting it into a drawer for safety. When I have copies of these monstrosities in my shop, they are stood on the floor, leant against this wall and that one; being turned about weekly, so that they don't develop a permanent slouch. Meanwhile I pray that no stray tomcat will come in to mark off the outer limits of his territory in time-honoured fashion against the priceless volume.
  Seriously though, size matters. A book of a thousand pages or more is fine as a reference book, not as a bedside companion. If you would dare to fall asleep while reading one of these lying down, you could end up with facial surgery. The abovementioned dw's are another plague while reading larger books in a prone position. They tend to slither and slide out of their jackets, while the wrappers themselves are not immune to the abrasive qualities of bunched-up bedclothes. Then there are softcover books; at best a necessary evil, which to me will always reek of 1950's shilling dreadfuls like Peter Cheyney's Dark Wanton or Dangerous Curves - but not Wolpoff's six-hundred page quarto tome entitled Preliminary Publication of Paleoanthropology (McGraw Hill, 1994), which is a textbook that is intended to be consulted often and enthusiastically. To add insult to injury, there is that pervasive practice of cheap and nasty bookbinding called 'Perfect Bound'. Anything less perfect is difficult to imagine. The pages of the book are assembled, clamped, ruthlessly guillotined on all four edges if necessary, a lick of sticky, hot gunge is applied to the long side, and a softcover sleeve is applied with some pressure to make it all stick together. Hey presto - you have a book. Or do you? The unsuspecting purchaser doesn't always look at the spine, or the construction, especially if they are bewitched by the resounding title on the cover and the promise of virgin literature on the pages, so they take it home and read it. The monstrosity might survive, one two or even a few more readings, then suddenly a page drops out, the another, then twenty or thirty, as the space-age glue hardens, dries out and loses its tack - rather like space-shuttle glue holding on ceramic heat-shield tiles - you remember the scenario?
  One last peeve concerning the book's exterior: since I read books in a number of languages, I have perforce to browse shelves on which the titles are displayed in various ways. Generally I prefer a label or a horizontally broken-up and printed title and author. That is good if the shelf is in front of me, at eye-height. It is an unfortunate fact that my eyes are fixed in my face and do not run up and down my body on tracks at will - meaning that inevitably, the book I want to look at, is at the height of my knees or lower, and if I bend down, the title is upside down, which at my age, shape and station in life, does not facilitate browsing. If the title is too long or the book is thin, the other convention is to have the wording run from left to right, if one is holding the book front cover upwards in front of one. Not so the Germans; they run the title from right to left - as does Anderson with his book Blue Berg - Britain takes the Cape (Privately published, 2008) as well as a few other authors in various languages that I have run across. This makes for cricking noises of the neck, something that all browsers of boxes of books on the tables at charity and other sales have experienced, as the books' titles are displayed this way, and then face about. Most vendors just don't seem to realise the basic fact that they should try to make the browsing of their stock as painless as possible for their clients - thus achieving maximum sales. Instead it becomes a circus of cerebral contortions until the hapless buyer gives up in considerable discomfort.
  All sorts of sizes are problematical. Why produce an A4 softcover of fifty pages, when you could just as easily fold the text in half and have an A5 which will stand properly (even in softcover), and on the spine of which you can legibly inscribe a title and an author? What does one do with an oblong quarto, or even an oblong folio? You either have to have a special shelf with extra depth to prevent the problem mentioned above with those whoppers, or you have to park the offenders on edge, spine upwards, where you also can't read the title as it is obscured by the shelf above. At the other end of the scale there are tiny books, some no higher than 100 mm, about half the height of a normal octavo. These tend to get lost among their tall companions on the shelves, like toddlers in a crowd of grown-ups. Equally bad are books which pretend to be octavo in height, but their depth is half that of a normal book, making them a bastard-size which is just asking to be squeezed to the back of a shelf, thus making it impossible to find.
  From the exterior, which is after all, only skin-deep, let us delve into the innards of the beasties. A well-designed, considered publication is most desirable; preferably on paper that looks as if it could have had a tree or vegetable fibre as a parent material instead of some of this fashionable shiny junk that owes most of its components to a mine, that won't burn properly, weighs more than a brick, and refuses to take printers' ink without fading to some anaemic grey. Paper should be of sufficient bulk and opacity to prevent the print on the other side from interfering with the text. It should be slightly matt, if at all possible not the dead white which reflects any incident ray of light causing eyestrain to the reader, rather shading into ivory - but avoiding fancy bubblegum colours so beloved for the kiddies' library - or even worse, what I call negative printing, that is white font on a shiny black background as favoured by publications like the National Geographic Magazine and other glitzy productions. Trying to read a nine point font of this type with artificial light is nearly as bad a trying to read the tiny white English subtitles in a Bollywood film production filled with people dressed in white robes, striding through blinding sunshine. Fancy fonts may have their place on greeting cards, advertising signs and directions to the nearest toilet in public places, but they make reading a chore when it should be a pleasure. I don't profess to know much about typography, but an 11pt Garamond, Ariel or Times Roman or suchlike, with a decent spacing between lines, say single or one and a half, means that even those who are not fortunate enough to have 20/20 sight can enjoy the read.
  I have been told by reliable sources that there are conventions in publishing. I attach so little importance to these that I can't actually remember exactly what they are - but here goes. Your top margin is, let's say X mm, then your bottom margin should be bigger, say X+5 mm, on the left hand page your outer margin should be Y mm, while the inside margin should be Y + 3 mm, and the opposite should apply to the facing page. All this is surely based on some deep-seated logic which evolved somewhere in the 15th century, but I fail to see the relevance to anything except individual aesthetics. What I do remember is the completely irrational rage I felt the first time I looked through one of those Scripta Africana reprints. Here is a set of so-called de luxe editions (poorly bound) with a poor facsimile of text lifted from a page 22 x 15 cm (including margins) and plonked down in the same size in the middle of a page the size of a toilet lid, resulting in margins about half as wide as the text, or more, all round. What a waste of paper! Other volumes from the same publisher, like Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War, go to the other extreme, and you have the same large pages with huge blocks of text and very small margins. On the other hand, I must admit to binning books which have ten millimetre margins at the spine, and being bound so tightly that you would need stalk-eyes to be able to read the text to the end of the line, since you can't open the thing wide enough to make out the last word. Talking of which, I have just seen the most awful product that it has ever been my misfortune to view: a combination of three books in one, entitled History of the BSAP 1889-1980 by Gibbs & Phillips (Adcraft Publishing, 2000), which sports 5mm wide margins top and bottom of the page, while the side margins are about ten mm wide. That is taking economy to ridiculous lengths.
  One can understand the amount of physical effort, trial and experimentation that was needed in days of yore and lead slugs for type, to obtain text that was properly justified on both sides. However, I can refer you to numerous books on my shelves, that were published in the 18th century, which are all perfectly set out - so why was it that some indolent slobs of typographers were permitted or encouraged by their bosses the printers and publishers, to foist a bunch of untidy, unfinished-looking prose on the purchasers of their wares? In this regard, our own Guus Balkema was a prime offender, with several shoddy works among a goodly number of workmanlike volumes. I seem to recall trying to read an experimental book once, which was printed like modern poetry - lines of any length, no punctuation, no capitals. Talking of which, I abhor correspondence which I have to read, written without using capitals. Aw, come on, it doesn't take that much effort to press the shift key. Whenever I get a missive like that, I am tempted to reply in full upper case. It's damn nearly as difficult to read - don’t ask me why, but my brain must have become fossilised in 'standard mode'.

  There is a justification for breaking up text on a page into narrow columns, like in a newspaper. I have been told what it is - but I forgot. Whatever it was or is, books are not newspapers, so there is presently no need for this. A very beautifully produced book I have recently looked at (and sold) had this type of configuration. On each landscape small quarto page there were three columns divided by vertical lines - but the text columns aren't justified, making the whole thing look ragged, though in all fairness stretching and squeezing the text alternately to make it fit in between the tramlines would have looked pretty awful too - so why columns? I believe it is easier to place illustrations using this configuration, but here lies another problem for me; imagine an ordinary page, divide it vertically into two, then spread a picture across the middle, with two blobs of text in two columns on top, and again at the bottom. Now how do you read this? Do you read the first blob, top left, then skip the picture and read the blob at bottom left - or do you read the top left, then go across the page to the right hand top blob, read that, and then go back to the bottom left, then the bottom right? See what I mean? You can imagine how lost I can manage to get on pages with multiple columns and multiple pics like in an encyclopaedia.

  Now let us tackle the main course of this discourse: the contents of the book. In these days of computers and instant gratification software, not to mention the Internet, Google, Wikipedia etc, there is really no earthly reason for getting one's facts horribly wrong - repeatedly. To err is human, and I have heard that the completely fault-free book has not yet been produced, and I can believe that. In spite of two proofreaders an editor, a slew of publishing staff and my own very earnest attempts at eradicating every possible typo, erratic spelling of names, punctuation, footnotes and pagination, there are a minimum of three mistakes in something I produced last year. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll whisper them in you ear if you ask me personally. So, I start reading a book with an open mind. To illustrate my gripe, it would run something like this: on page ten I find a misspelling of a Latin botanical name, two pages later there is an omitted letter in a word, three pages later the author tells me that a certain person was born in Austria when he came from Switzerland, and on the next page he finds that the spelling of Bovril is beyond him and he doesn't know the difference between it's and its. Well, you can imagine that my confidence in the author's research is by now shaken, and my ire is stirred. By the time I reach the twentieth mistake without having had to consult a single reference book, I discard the book as 'complete rubbish and paper-waste', CRAP for short. One of my ex-clients springs to mind; after much purchase of books as references, he produced a book on the stirring annals of the building of the railway line between the southern and northern extremities of our continent. I do not remember the exact number of his transgressions, but they were legion. His piece de resistance was the spread of pages on which he portrayed a perfectly clear picture of a Lake steamer, with its name proudly displayed for all to see on its bows, he then spelt it differently in the picture's caption, and to top it all he found another two spellings for the same vessel's name in the next few pages. Elsewhere in the book he would have quaggas running around the jungles of central Africa, and he had a type of pony climbing trees under the misconception that the word meant civet cats or something like that. That sort of sloppiness would be inexcusable in a Victorian novel meant for boys under the age of thirteen, not to speak of a book purporting to be a serious history.
  Especially authors dealing with historical subjects need to check and recheck their facts, and especially spelling. One such author who brought his work for me to sell on his behalf, chronicled the valiant exploits of a distaff military ancestor. Now what I know about matters military is dangerous - but I picked up mistakes in the spelling of an international incident, a renowned engineer, an iconic machine-gun as well as a batch of typos and one glaring factual faux pas - all in the space of half the book. I lost all confidence in any information he presented. To be sure, the author was very grateful to have these problems pointed out to him, but that should have happened before the book got into print. Another beautiful production, a quasi-scientific botanical work on a region that interested me greatly, was sent to me on publication and I started devouring the contents with great enjoyment. Much to my disappointment, lack of proofreading became all too evident within the first fifty pages, with some dozen or two mistakes being spotted and this spoilt the whole, otherwise very worthwhile effort, which represented years of work. When in doubt, get someone to proofread the thing, then get someone else, then ask your worst enemy, then your best friend - then pray that the printer doesn't make a hash of it. When all else fails, put your computer to work and ask MS Word to do a spell-check - trust me, it works wonders, though I must admit to the basic human failing of having the inability to spot my own typos, even if they are underlined in red by the programme.
  As I get older and crankier, I frequently find myself in a quandary as to whether a word should be ending in -ize, or ise, such is the pervasiveness of the American word, both spoken and written, that one begins to wonder who has the etymological right of way in this and many other aberrant versions of common words. After all, what is correct, is merely a matter of opinion in the compilation of dictionaries. However, if spelling should not be an entirely arbitrary matter, open to the whims and vagaries of any who would put pen to paper, then surely a similar courtesy should be afforded to foreign languages. I am in full agreement with writers who insist that English doesn't have adequate words to express the nuances of words like weltschmerz, schadenfreude, zeitgeist, soupçon, raison d'être, cris de coeur, praia and a host of other choice, foreign mouthfuls that one can choose from; but then one should at least take the elementary precaution of checking the spelling. If an author doesn't have a dictionary of say, Amharic, Finno-Ugric, or Bulgarian - help is at hand - Google has an idiot's manual programme which will actually translate in a very rough-hewn way almost anything you enter into the search form, or give you the correct spelling thereof. Which does not mean you can go ahead with that typically British insouciance and permit your literary creation to state emphatically something idiotic like der Sonne scheint und die Mond strahlt, since some languages actually use gender-specific articles, and the sun is feminine while the moon is masculine to all good Germans, although the exact opposite applies in France and Spain, while the English have managed to neuter both heavenly bodies by some Anglo-Saxon alchemy. John Buchan, who happened to be one of my early favourite authors (though his corona has waned a little with the passing of decades), managed to imprint himself indelibly on my youthful brain with a supposedly German injunction uttered by his spy: 'Schnell, schnell, der Boot' in The Thirty-nine Steps.
  Maps are a necessary adjunct to any book which deals with history, exploration, natural sciences, even biographies and a host of other subjects. A book with maps as endpapers is not to be despised, as long as the scale is adequate, and the legend is legible. A map, or multiples thereof loose in a pocket at the rear of the volume, is a risky business, as all too often they/it go AWOL, and the incautious purchaser ends up with a deficient work, of little value. This happens regularly to bookdealers, believe me. On the other hand, a map folded three times horizontally and eight times vertically unfolds into a huge and unwieldy thing requiring a double bed or a large dining-room table to be spread out properly. In addition it needs to be made of the flimsiest material so that all twenty-four thicknesses of it don't exceed the total thickness of the book, so as you unfold his diaphanous creation, you are greeted with the sweet, low sound of tearing paper, as the right angle at the hinge parts under the strain of your amateur ministrations. I've repaired dozens of maps with Japanese tissue on both sides - so I know all about it. On the other extreme, the canny publisher has shrunk his map to a mere fourfold size of the book, but in the process the font labelling the rivers, mountains and dorps has shrunk to about 2pt, which means that even with a microscope you cannot make out the letters between the fibres of the paper. I've tried that as well - promise.
  Lastly, let us consider the crowning glory of the book, the illustrations. Finely crafted colour plates by virtuoso illustrators and artists will always enhance the look as well as the value of a book. From early woodcuts, to coppergravure and steel, on to the different lithographic techniques, many of which resulted in intricate and finely reproduced work (with the inevitable poor examples scattered among them); from simple sketches, cartoons and vignettes to elaborate hand-coloured plates - there was sure to be something that would delight and charm almost any discerning viewer in an illustrated volume - but alas, no longer. The advent of photography has obviously revolutionised printed illustrations. From the poor, grainy, black and white images, to remarkably fine sepia and collotype reproductions and on to the early colour photographs to spectacular modern photography as cameras and chemicals reached their zenith of development, right into the digital age, when computers can embellish, edit and indeed, create scenes for our edification. Why then is it seen fit to produce large, so called coffee-table books, consisting mainly of illustrative material with very little text to flesh out the pages, in which almost every page consists of a photo containing a large expanse of out-of-focus foreground and background, with about half of the actual subject matter (totalling maybe 5% of the surface of the picture) actually properly visible ? If any feature of a book is guaranteed to evoke page rage in me, this is it. This is not arty; this is not clever; this is ineptitude on the part of the photographer; this is sloth or carelessness on the part of the editor and publisher, and it is an abomination in my eyes.
 There, I feel a lot better now that I have got all of that off my chest !