GREAT AFRICAN TREKS BY THE LADIES

Africana Votes & Views # 18

  Who can actually lay claim to the title of being an ‘explorer’? In the last fifty years or more, the title has increasingly been misused, being applied to individuals who have chosen slightly different routes to an iconic and much-visited goal; those who have used unusual conveyances or unorthodox methods of progress and a few ‘professionals’ who have mustered armies of men and convoys of heavy machinery at great cost to prove that there is no such thing as an impassable route. However, could one really say that a person who undertook to skateboard along the N1 from Cape Town to Johannesburg – a marathon journey certainly – has contributed anything to the sum of knowledge of mankind, geography or the natural sciences? I doubt it; therefore this essay is not going to be entitled ‘Lady Explorers of the Dark Continent’, though a few undoubtedly were just that, while others were adventurous travellers of great courage, entertaining writers, well-off tourists, symbols of growing female emancipation – or even long-suffering wives who were dragged along as ‘camp comforts’ by their unfeeling husbands – presumably.

  So where do we start? Of the latter sort mentioned, there must have been a few unrecorded heroines during early Victorian times and I would not like to put my head on the block as to who was the first. One unfortunate comes to mind – Mary Livingstone, daughter of the Moffats at Kuruman. She had the singular misfortune to marry the great missionary/explorer in 1845. She often accompanied him on his early travels, despite the Moffats’ protests as she was heavily pregnant with the first of their five children in 1847. A mere five years later, the Livingstones were in the wilds on the Zouga River, a tributary of the Zambesi. Mary was extremely ill; she gave birth to her fifth child (her fourth having died shortly after birth at Kolobeng) and her doting husband finally came to realise that dragging a woman and four children through the bushes in a constant state of pregnancy might not be the ideal way of conducting a relationship. He brought her back to Cape Town and shipped her and the children off to Britain. Much relieved, he was able to devote himself to traversing the subcontinent for the next three years. He returned to Britain in 1856 and penned the Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (John Murray, 1857) His wife’s contributions did not merit a single line in the book. It took some serious prompting by John Murray to remedy that state of affairs in the next impression, with a page which tells of their marriage. That he managed this by adding two more pages 8* and 8**, after the original page 8 – rather than resetting/repaginating the entire book – is tribute to the prudence and ingenuity in matters of economy on the part of author and publisher. Their last child was born in 1858 while Mary was with her parents back at Kuruman, after which she returned to Scotland for a short while before being summoned by her lord and master once more to join him on his almost farcical Zambezi Expedition. The reluctant exploratrix died scarcely three months later at Shupanga in Mozambique, of malaria, possibly exacerbated by the alcoholism she had become a victim of. At this stage, the great man could actually bring himself to write:
‘About the middle of the month Mrs. Livingstone was prostrated by this disease; and it was accompanied by obstinate vomiting. Nothing is yet known that can allay this distressing symptom, which of course renders medicine of no avail, as it is instantly rejected. She received whatever medical aid could be rendered from Dr. Kirk, but became unconscious, and her eyes were closed in the sleep of death as the sun set on the evening of the Christian Sabbath, the 27th April, 1862. A coffin was made during the night, a grave was dug next day under the branches of the great baobab-tree, and with sympathising hearts the little band of his countrymen assisted the bereaved husband in burying his dead. At his request, the Rev. James Stewart read the burial-service; and the seamen kindly volunteered to mount guard for some nights at the spot where her body rests in hope. Those who are not aware how this brave, good, English wife made a delightful home at Kolobeng, a thousand miles inland from the Cape, and as the daughter of Moffat and a Christian lady exercised most beneficial influence over the rude tribes of the interior, may wonder that she should have braved the dangers and toils of this down-trodden land. She knew them all, and, in the disinterested and dutiful attempt to renew her labours, was called to her rest instead. Fiat, Domine, voluntas tua!’ That’s right David, pass the buck (though it is writ that the great man never got over his loss and blamed himself – as he should)

  An explorer in her own right, without a doubt, was Florence Barbara Maria Finian von Sass Baker (those names are a bit doubtful – just depends which source you use). She was, of course, the reputed slave girl, rescued by Samuel (later Sir Samuel) White Baker from the clutches of an oriental Pasha in what is now Hungary – a story which may have gained a little romance in the retelling. She became his inseparable companion, aide, lover and wife, and insisted on accompanying him when he started his explorations into the origins of the Nile in 1861. In his own words, 
‘I shuddered at the prospect for her, should she be left alone in savage lands at my death; and gladly would I have left her in the luxuries of home instead of exposing her to the miseries of Africa. It was in vain that I implored her to remain, and that I painted the difficulties and perils still blacker than I supposed they really would be: she was resolved, with woman’s constancy and devotion, to share all dangers and to follow me through each rough footstep of the wild life before me’. That’s what she did, and then some.

  As her adoring companion states:‘Possessing a share of sangfroid admirably adapted for African travel, Mrs. Baker was not a screamer, and never even whispered; in the moment of suspected danger, a touch of my sleeve was considered a sufficient warning’ - and ‘Mrs. Baker was dressed similarly to myself, in a pair of loose trowsers and gaiters, with a blouse and belt--the only difference being that she wore long sleeves, while my arms were bare from a few inches below the shoulder.’ 
  Although she was able to speak a number of languages, which came in handy during their exploits, it is a great pity that she left the writing to Samuel in describing their epic trek to Lake Albert, in his book The Albert N'Yanza Great Basin Of The Nile; And Exploration Of The Nile Sources. (Macmillan And Co., 1866). It may be that she only acquired fluency in English through constant communications with Samuel and later his children from his previous marriage, to whom she became greatly attached. It was only on the later expedition to end the slave trade on the upper reaches of the Nile that she kept an interesting diary and wrote numerous letters, which present her side of the story. These are included in the book Morning Star (Kimber, 1972); a compilation by Anne Baker, wife of a great grandson of Samuel. Not that the latter was sparing in acknowledgement of his wife’s sterling qualities and contribution to overcoming their travails. They were scarcely off the mark when the Bakers faced down an incipient mutiny. Baker writes,‘How the affair would have ended I cannot say; but as the scene lay within ten yards of my boat, my wife, who was ill with fever in the cabin, witnessed the whole affray, and seeing me surrounded, she rushed out, and in a few moments she was in the middle of the crowd, who at that time were endeavoring to rescue my prisoner. Her sudden appearance had a curious effect, and calling upon several of the least mutinous to assist, she very pluckily made her way up to me...’ and by sheer effrontery, the Bakers managed to get the mutineers disarmed. This type of problem kept on dogging them during the northern part of their journey, and they had several more similar experiences of the same kind. Each time Flooey stood by her man; almost at the end of their epic journey, Samuel relates: ‘Parrying with the stick, thrusting in return at the face, and hitting sharp with the left hand, I managed to keep three or four of the party on and off upon their backs, receiving a slight cut with a sword upon my left arm in countering a blow which just grazed me as I knocked down the owner, and disarmed him. My wife picked up the sword, as I had no time to stoop, and she stood well at bay with her newly-acquired weapon that a disarmed Arab wished to wrest from her, but dared not close with the naked blade…’ – certainly no shrinking violet. When Kamrasi, king of the Bunyoro, suggests that Baker might like to swap wives with him, Florence gave him a tongue-lashing in Arabic, which the king understood only too well, though he knew no word of that language. He apologised hurriedly, offering the excuse that it was a customary courtesy in his country.
  Illness and even starvation was a constant worry. At one stage she was felled by sunstroke while battling her way through an almost impenetrable swamp and Samuel, himself fever-stricken, writes: ‘Almost as soon as I perceived her, she fell, as though shot dead. In an instant I was by her side; and with the assistance of eight or ten of my men, who were fortunately close to me, I dragged her like a corpse through the yielding vegetation, and up to our waists we scrambled across to the other side, just keeping her head above the water: to have carried her would have been impossible, as we should all have sunk together through the weeds. I laid her under a tree, and bathed her head and face with water, as for the moment I thought she had fainted; but she lay perfectly insensible, as though dead, with teeth and hands firmly clenched, and her eyes open, but fixed.’
  She only recovered consciousness some days later, and of their final arrival at Lake Albert, Samuel writes: ‘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. A walk of about a mile through flat sandy meadows of fine turf interspersed with trees and bush, brought us to the water’s edge’  - and again later  - ‘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’  Honour given where honour was due, to be sure.
  Their expedition had almost as much trouble with their own men as with the tribespeople among whom they passed. Baker’s perceived racist actions and high-handed manner have deprived him of much of the renown and respect due to the pair’s dogged pursuit of geographical exactitude. In his defence it must be said that they were extraordinarily unfortunate to be in the company of and to meet with some truly horrible people along the route. The Bakers returned from their travels and finally married ‘properly’ back in England, after which the disapproving queen reluctantly knighted the old sportsman, though she could never bring herself to meet with Florence.

  Almost at exactly the same time (in fact they met the Bakers at Gondokoro) another real explorer, Alexandrine Tinne, the daughter of a rich merchant family from the Hague, indulged her fancy for parts unknown, and in company with her mother and aunt, she determined to explore the upper Nile. Alexine, as she was known, was the richest heiress in the Netherlands, which meant she had the resources for the job on hand. First and foremost she accumulated some ₤800 in small coin (banks being in short supply where she intended to go), loaded it alternately on ten camels, or filled one of her flotilla of three boats with cash when travelling by water. After leaving Cairo, they made leisurely progress to Korosko, where they disembarked and prepared to cross the Nubian Desert. Their caravan consisted of 102 camels, four European servants and some forty-odd menials under an Arab chief. Near Berber they rejoined the river as it was less fatiguing. Throughout this journey, Alexine sent letters describing their progress to a relative in England, John Tinne F.R.G.S, who compiled a slim volume entitled Geographical Notes of Expeditions in Central Africa by Three Dutch Ladies (T Brakell, 1864). Without too many problems they managed to reach Khartoum and this is where they encountered the Bakers, who had just returned from Abyssinia. Alexine decided that she wanted to do a little exploring up the Sobat River, the last major tributary of the Nile to enter from the east; so a steamer was chartered to facilitate progress. Besides sampling quantities of fish and game, such as giraffe and elephant meat, no great discoveries were made and they returned to Khartoum in November. 
  At this stage they met up with two German scientists, von Heuglin and Steudner, and a Baron d’Ablaing who were easily persuaded to share in the bounty on their next excursion, which took on serious as well as scientific proportions. They made the mistake of trying to explore the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile, to see how far west they could penetrate, hoping to discover one or more posited lakes in western north-central Africa, which were also sources of the White Nile. This was a mammoth task – a far cry from the previous leisurely excursions with all luxuries and support within easy reach. All the members of the expedition suffered greatly from fever; first Steudner died, then Mrs Tinne, as well as Alexine’s aunt and two maidservants, the latter three even after they managed to get back to Khartoum. While the distraught Alexine stayed in Cairo, von Heuglin published two works dealing with the geographical and zoological results in Die Tinnésche Expedition im westlichen Nilgebiet 1863–1864 (Gotha, 1865) and Reise in das Gebiet des Weissen Nils (Leipzig, 1869) and a number of new plant species were described by various botanists in Vienna under the title of Plantes Tinnaennes.
  In 1869 the inveterate explorer fitted out a caravan to cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad. In Murzuk she met the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal, however the latter wanted to explore the Tibesti mountains first, while she wanted to head further south. It was to prove her undoing. For reasons still unknown, but suspected to be due to factional politics, she and several of her companions were murdered by Tuaregs. Alexine Tinne is not well-known in English circles, since only a little has been written in that language about her and her travels, but she certainly has a huge and well-deserved reputation in the Netherlands. There are a number of romanticised works in English, German and Dutch about her explorations, but only one thesis by Antje Köhlerschmidt does justice to her: Alexandrine Tinne (1835–1869) – Afrikareisende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Magdeburg, 1994).

  Another dutiful wife was Jane Moir, who was married to the co-founder of the African Lakes Company, which was engaged in fulfilling the vision of Livingstone in the then Nyasaland, ie civilising the African by means of missionary endeavour and trade – as well as eliminating the pernicious slave trade that was the scourge of Central Africa at the time. The Moirs set off on an ulendo (safari) from their almost palatial Blantyre home in 1890, and embarked on the little steamer, the Domira, for the fairly pleasant journey up Lake Nyasa, stopping halfway at the mission at Bandawe to embark some porters. Here our traveller encountered the first taste of rough weather and huge waves which threatened to swamp the boat, before they made it safely to Karonga at the northern end of the lake. The party walked the next 240 miles during the three weeks that followed, before embarking once more at Abercorn in an open steel sailing boat captained by A.J. Swann, a colonial official on treaty-business, to complete the voyage to Ujiji, midway up Lake Tanganyika. She describes her experience in a collection of A Lady’s Letters from Central Africa (James Maclehouse, 1891 & Central Africana 1991 repr.) What distinguishes her from other travel companions is the fact that she put a camera to good use, and took a number of the earliest photographs in the region, only two of which appear in her book, though her husband made more extensive use of her photos in his work After Livingstone (Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), and some were published in The Graphic in London.
  While Moir pere discussed matters of economics and diplomacy with the local slaver cum chief (who is described as a rather civil and pleasant person, though a blackguard under the veneer), Jane was languishing in the company of dozens of slaves, handmaidens, concubines and two Muscat wives of the chief – none of whom had any language in common with her. Understandably she was not hugely entertained, but the couple had perforce to wait until a dhow could be repaired sufficiently to load the ivory Moir had obtained and for them to start on the return voyage. As before, all went idyllically for a few days until a storm brewed up and once more the passengers and crew were in mortal danger of foundering. In the dark of night they were forced to run westward across the lake under bare poles until they managed to shelter in a shallow lagoon on the next afternoon. They cautiously bay-hopped south for four days until the storm abated, when they could cross the lake eastwards once more. Now they exchanged the ‘deep sea for the devil’, as it were. Near the mission station of Karema, the winds once again rose and they were blown ashore among a warlike tribe, the Attongwe. While the crew refloated the boat, the Moirs tried to stay on friendly terms by exchanging presents with the Africans, but as dusk fell, an attack was launched and Jane found herself scrambling aboard while her crew tried to push the dhow out into the rough seas. Suddenly she became aware that her husband was still in the water trying to reach them, and she made the crew return in the face of a growing fusillade from the shore. They retrieved Fred in a hail of bullets, during which her helper beside her was hit and her double terai was adorned with two splendid bullet-holes as a memento to this brave act. The rest of the lake journey was painfully slow in the face of adverse winds, but from Abercorn onwards the journey was only marred by occasional fever of which Jane makes light; reaching the northern tip of Lake Nyasa (Malawi), where they were most hospitably received by the Wankonde tribe in their beautiful villages. They had to wait another ten days for the lake steamer, and once more Jane was dreadfully ill ‘having a horrid fever, which left me looking like Gorgonzola cheese’, before reaching home some four months after their departure. Jane Moir’s book is no great literary work, but in parts it is quite interesting and one can but admire her understated account of some five hundred miles afoot as well as some weeks afloat on the two deepest African lakes which have some of the most fickle weather and sailing conditions.

  In chronological order we now come to the greatest of the Victorian lady travellers, whom I can only call la belle dame des Voyages d'Afrique – Mary Kingsley. Although largely self-taught from her father’s considerable library, her lectures and written work became immensely popular, so she is relatively well-known both as a writer and scientist/explorer – also being mislabelled a feminist. Her stance on the Christianisation and colonialisation of the Africans brought her into conflict with the church and the Empire Builders as she found justification for institutions such as polygamy in African society, as well as debunking the concept that the African was the intellectual inferior of the European by virtue of his race. The loss of her parents at the age of thirty provided her with a measure of independence and a modest income, which permitted her to set off on the first of her travels to the Canaries and later Loanda. Here she learnt the basics of survival among native tribes, and decided on a course of action for future exploits.
  The year 1894 saw her back in West Africa, better equipped and supplied to follow her passion for ‘Fish and Fetish’, as she calls her quest. Obviously Mary was an engaging person; people seemed to fall over each other to try to aid and abet her in her efforts; British, Portuguese and German administrators, soldiers, missionaries of all denominations and most especially the traders that put their lives on the line on that fever-afflicted coast and inland, as well as their black staff manning the ‘factories’, as the trading posts along the malarial rivers were called. Her hefty work Travels in West Africa (Macmillan, 1897) launches immediately into a lively description of the scene and especially peoples of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Fernando Po, where her ship’s voyage ended the first stage, though she seems to have visited all the countries fringing the Bights of Benin and Bonny. One of the great shortcomings of her work is the lack of a map to show her routes, as it is extremely difficult to follow her course from her descriptions using the names then current. Her main travels and scientific researches were along the course of the Ogoue River in what she calls the Congo Français (Gabon), she spoke no French and certainly had very little knowledge of the Fan (Fong) indigenous language. Instead she established cordial communication with all and sundry in English, German and an enthusiastically acquired command of Pidgin. She certainly did not explore the geography of the river and its tributaries – that was fairly well-known and often traveled by Europeans – but some of the short-cuts she followed led her through dreadful swamps which could sink her up to her neck in a matter of a few steps, necessitating laborious extrication by her companions. Other great obstacles were the steep ravines that had been filled with storm-felled jungle trees to a depth of six to ten metres. One false step could precipitate a person through this jumble of slippery, rotting wood to the valley floor below. To escape unscathed from these mazes could be enormously complicated and dangerous. In comparison, learning to paddle her own dugout on a rapidly flowing river during her missionary hosts’ siesta-time, is one of the funniest episodes graphically described in the book. Mary also writes in her customary understated way, that she had to beat an enterprising crocodile about the head with her paddle when it tried to join her in the craft. On another instance she was taking a midnight stroll as she could not fall asleep in her village accommodation on an island and suddenly she found herself in the midst of a small herd of grazing hippos. With remarkable sang froid she poked the obstructive beast in front of her behind his ear with the ferrule of her umbrella to shift him out of the way so that she could proceed. She also proved her mettle during a fight between a village dog and a leopard. The leopard stood no chance at all once Mary had ‘fired two native carved stools into the melée’ after which she was forced to break an earthenware water-cooler on the poor beast’s head to get it to change its mind about attacking her. Inevitably there were disagreements with the locals over matters of custom or trade, but Mary not only charmed the Europeans that came her way; she genuinely liked and got on well with the West Africans, especially the Fan, who had a bad name for cannibalism among the whites. She stood firm when it was needed, she reasoned and even wheedled when it was politic to do so – and she yielded only when an impasse was evident. No opponent was shot; neither was she attacked. Her most dangerous moments came from the violence of nature and the occasional man-trap that was set at the entrances of the villages she visited – but there was nothing personal in that.
  Not content with conquering the pestilential swamps, impenetrable jungles and raging rapids, she next sets her sights on conquering the 4000 m high peak of Mount Cameroon. Completely under-equipped she sets off on the six-day hike, and before long her party is suffering from thirst, hunger and freezing temperatures. Mary, though having to leave her last companions huddling together under their blankets in the streaming rain, gropes through the swirling cloud and howling storm to find the cairn at the summit – more by touch than by sight. Thoroughly satisfied, she commences the descent. The only country in the region that receives barely a mention is the Belgian Congo, and she shares my non-existent esteem for the owner as well as his administration. On the other hand the Germans and their colonial efforts in the region get the Kingsley stamp of approval.
  A large proportion of her utterly entertaining and informative work consists of describing ‘Fetish’, which would be classed as ethnographical details of indigenous culture in present-day terms. Even this I found eminently readable (though I do have more than a passing interest in the subject) and other readers of the book I have spoken to, have concurred with me. There is a small section on her zoological discoveries, but this was written by a German scientist and can safely be ignored by all but the most ardent ‘pisciphiles’. A relatively alarming number of deaths among her compatriots and other Europeans are noted, which gives the reader some idea of the health and hygiene along the coast. A whole chapter is devoted to the ills and parasites that afflict the human condition; enough to make one wonder what made any man (and Mary Kingsley) want to disembark on those shores. Nonetheless, her book is my all-time favourite Victorian travelogue and I can heartily recommend it, taken in short doses, to anyone from nine years old to ninety – regardless of sex, race, creed or literary tastes.

  The last, but certainly not least of our assemblage of notable ladies, would be Mary Hall. She wrote an entertaining and informative tome on her experiences: A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo (Methuen, 1907) and she was certainly the very first pioneer tourist to traverse the length of the African continent hard on the heels of Ewart Grogan. Despite her achievement, and possibly because of her common name, I have been unable to find any background on the lady. She seems to have been a termagant of mature years; a seasoned traveler; accustomed to making progress come what may – in addition to being a gifted writer with a fine descriptive turn of phrase, a photographer who developed her own glass plate negatives in transit, so to speak; a discerning observer; a stern disciplinarian, yet a fair judge of men and their frailties. Above all she was a dauntless soul who would tackle an unknown route with some dozens of strangers of a different culture and language than her own, without a single firearm for her protection, relying only on a small terrier-like canine for personal protection. Except for fowls, goats and the odd bovine, no wild animals were injured, nor were there any fatalities caused among the tribespeople along her route. The one exciting episode with enraged warriors she faced with extreme coolness, sitting perched on her trunk under a tree, while she explained politely to the affronted chief and his howling horde that it had not been her intention to offend, and that her guilty askari would be punished. Needless to say, she and the chief parted the best of friends!
  She obviously had the means to tackle the journey while preserving some comforts of civilisation; her folding bathtub, wardrobe, bed, tent and machila (or hammock) are ample proof of that. Every morning she would walk for an hour or two before it got too hot, but she was not a good climber, nor did she ford a stream afoot, while she had willing bearers to hoist her aloft, or a canoe to transport her. She paints a charming portrait of her progress up hills (facing backwards in her hammock, so as not to have to look at the empty skies) and down into the valleys (facing forward to enjoy the view) – seemingly determined to miss nothing of the passing scene. Like Grogan, she did her jaunt in two stages. 1904 saw her touring Southern Africa, and in the following year she set off from where the steamer had dropped her off at Chinde, in Mozambique. She made her way upstream by boat and then took to her hammock for the hike towards Lake Nyasa (Malawi). Here she assembled a volunteer force of porters, as well as two young locals, one of whom could speak English, while his companion knew some Swahili – which was going to facilitate matters linguistic through their east African leg of the journey. Admittedly, being a lone lady traveller did single her out for extraordinary treatment by all missionaries, administrators and military men along the way. Time and again the overwhelmed gentlemen would vacate their quarters for her and try to provide her with as many comforts as were available, so she was never out of touch with Europeans for any great length of time. Neither did she have to carry ten camel loads of small change like Alexine Tinne – since she used the African Lakes Company, the British colonial outposts and even the German administration as bankers along the way. 
  Mary avoided the malarial swamps between Lakes Edward and Albert by cutting cross-country from the top end of Lake Tanganyika across to Lake Victoria, from where she took to the water for a ride to Port Florence. Here she entrained and enjoyed the novelty of a moderately comfortable ride to Nairobi and back, missing a sighting of Kilimanjaro due to the weather. Back at Entebbe, she decided to try a rickshaw to Butiaba, since evidently there was a fledgeling road already in use. From there onward she embarked on one of the sources of the Nile and despite swarms of mosquitoes (which she seems to have kept at bay by sheer willpower, for she suffered not a day’s illness during her entire trip), she concluded her jaunt to Cairo in fine fashion – taking a mere nine months, compared to Grogan’s triple that time. On her arrival at Khartoum she notes that ‘coming from the south after months of privation and spare living, it seemed to me that the hotel was replete with every comfort available’ and that she wished only to have recorded in detail her experiences in the more unknown parts of Africa, therefore she will skip the thousand miles between Gondokoro and Khartoum, as well as the railway journey between the latter town and Cairo – which is within reach of the ‘ordinary tourists’ – among whom she does obviously not include herself. A formidable achievement - and a fitting conclusion to this tribute to six decades of lady travellers, from pioneering explorer to first tourist.

Publish and/or be Damned

Africana Votes & Views #18

So you have written a work of deathless prose, a work of great historical importance, a gripping novel – maybe something a little more whimsical, erudite or arcane. Let’s face it, the chances of finding a publisher who is willing to risk even a moderate portion of his working capital on an unknown author, who is going to need a huge amount of publicity to get his work, however good, to fly, is pretty slim. So the next possibility is to self-publish, a practice often snidely referred to as ‘vanity publishing’. There are any number of concerns out there on the web who will be ecstatically happy to handle your manuscript (hereinafter referred to as MS), thump it into some sort of shape, print the finished product on the first paper that comes to hand, put a lick of glue at the back of the textblock and slip it into a softcover not of your own choosing. For payment, naturally, that is you pay, and they will deliver a product which you can proudly exhibit on your bookshelf and try to persuade friends and others to buy – or not, as the case may be. Alternatively you can do it the hard way, and come away with a book that will, at least for a short period during this time of immense changes that happen in every field you can imagine, make you immortal.
Let’s start with subject matter of your MS. If you have a chunk of change burning a hole in your pocket; you are certain you won’t need it to buy a child a new motorcar, or a Zimmerframe for yourself – why, then you can pretty well do as you please, since the object is not to make money. Ordinary mortals have to keep an eye on the budget – therefore the cardinal rule number one is: find a need for a book, and fill it with your effort. Figure out a marketing strategy. Don’t just ‘think’ Exclusive Books, PNA or any of the other large chains are going to do you that favour. They won’t, ordinarily. Don’t aim too high; a modest print run is wiser in our small local market, and printing a second impression should you be successful, is a better option. We will have to return to this later when considering costs.
So let’s imagine you have you MS about as ready as you think it’s going to be. You have proofread it three times and ironed out all the typos, spelling mistakes and errors of fact. WRONG. Get someone else, preferably a person with professional proofreading skills to repeat the exercise. I’ve never yet heard of anybody being able to pick up all of the mistakes of their own making in print. Be prepared to pay for this invaluable service, it’s worth it. Once that has been done you are ready to actually do a virtual desktop publishing job (DTP) providing you have any of a computer and one of a whole raft of MS-Office lookalike programmes at hand. What you need to do is to pick the size of paper you want (Hint: don’t get too fancy, it costs money to print a book on non-standard sized paper) By this time you will probably have approached some printing firm, you have intimated to them that you want to print en edition of roughly so many books, and generally they are only too happy to help you along on this question. Follow their guidelines, and set up a blank file, having unlimited pages, printed two-up next to each other, as would happen in a book and that is the first step.
Next come margins. There are supposedly certain conventions which expound the dogma that the top margin must be a certain size (relative to the height of the page) while the bottom margin should be that size plus/less a percentage; the inner margin of the left hand page should be another size, and the outer margin on the same page yet another size – which is a mirror image of the right hand page. During the past sixty years I have seen them all, and I can tell you when a layout pleases me, and when it doesn’t. That’s about it. I hate to waste paper with huge margins and tiny blocks of text; the obverse applies. Make sure the text is comfortable to read without needing x-ray eyes to see the end of the line as it disappears into the gutter, as the middle part of the book is named.
Spacing is another point to be considered. Single spacing is hard on the eyes; it makes it difficult to keep your place. Double spacing always makes me think the author ran out of material for his book and wanted to make it look more important than it is. So round about space and a half would be fine; but one can play with the finer points of that on a computer. Closely allied to spacing is the font. Yes, I know there are all sorts of really charming Elizabethan, Gothic, Papyrus etc fonts, but all of these get tiresome to read in a full-length book. Stick to a nice simple font like Times New Roman or Garamond, in a size between 10 and 12 points, preferably something with a serif, so the letters don’t look too naked. While we’re on the subject of fonts, you can adjust the character spacing as well, but since you are hopefully going to justify your text both sides ( as this article is) leave character spacing out of the equation if at all possible. Crowding too much into a space again makes it difficult to read – not the sort of thing you want to do to your customer and best friend. It can be used in things like appendixes or indexes, when you are pushed for space, and if you squeeze your text a little, cut down on font size and line spacing, you can easily save yourself a page or three, which means your book will finish off with roughly the required number of pages divisible by 32 (known as a signature, or gathering). Alternatively you might have to wield the figurative red crayon and cut down on your verbosity to get a snug fit. You are now ready to get your computer to grab your entire MS, copy and paste it into the prepared format. Voila, we have a putative book.
So you’d like to illustrate your book. If your artistic talents are that way inclined, do your drawings, etchings or watercolours, scan them at the finest resolution you can get, shrink them to the size required and cut and paste them into your textblock at required intervals. If you want a talented person to do the artwork for your book, choose someone who will have empathy with you and your work – and choose a person you can afford. If you want a lot of photos with little blocks of text here and there, you are entering dangerous waters. To get a good balance is not that easy, numerous books look like a dog’s breakfast after such efforts. Most publishers pay book designers hefty fees to apply their particular talents to that task. On the other hand, you can always take the easier route and put a batch of ‘plates’ here and there in a book, consisting either of single images or several per page – but it is the old-fashioned way of doing things. Just be 100% certain that the colour photo you are about to adorn your book with is of the highest quality – like with proofreading, get a second opinion. Nothing spoils a good book as easily as a rubbish photo. Full-page illustrations should all face in the same direction if in landscape format, ie on either left or right hand page, the top of the picture is on the left, so you don’t have to turn the book this way and that when reading. There is an alternative format if one wishes to include a lot of illustrations in that aspect, by turning out an ‘oblong’ book, in which the hinge is on the short side. Remember that this format is usually most difficult to store on shelves, though.
Now let us consider the ‘prelims, those free endpapers, half-title, frontispiece, title page, contents, preface, dedication etc. Most modern softcovers, don’t have endpapers; many don’t have half-titles; that is a matter of individual taste. However, many self-published books start off with the title page, which often does not contain much information. You need at least a title; then possible a more explanatory sub-title in slightly smaller font underneath that, and below this the author’s name and possibly the illustrator’s as well, if that person has played a significant part in the book. Somewhere near the bottom of that page, one or both of the following should appear: a date of publication, and the name of the publisher, if there is one. The verso of that page should carry the following information, especially if you have published it yourself: Published by John Citizen, Pofadder, South Africa, (possibly a contact number or e-mail address, and the date should be reiterated and the edition should be stated, eg 2008 1st Edition. Then a few lines further down centred for easy identification you need an ISBN number, which you can obtain by phoning………………… at the State Library in Pretoria. The same person will then send you a sheaf of forms to complete in which you describe your book, and which also tells you that you have to send off copies of your work, free gratis and for nothing to all the holding libraries in the land – that’s about 8-12 copies. On the bottom third of that page you affirm that you are the owner of the intellectual rights of the work, unless you have included quotes or passages from a previously published work, in which case you had better have that author’s permission in writing that you may use the passage, and you acknowledge that they have graciously given you their permission. Most self-publishers have had some help from altruistic friends, authors or publishers – so it is only proper to thank them in print under the heading of ‘Acknowledgements’. Then underneath that you might like to add a dedication to some person for some reason. A page of contents is usual, but avoid anything that lists Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc etc (which I have found in a surprising number of professionally published works), rather, the contents page should be descriptive to give the prospective reader a foretaste of what is to come. You might like to do the same with your illustrations; but while they will assist the bookseller and cataloguer in a hundred years time to decide whether the book is complete, it is mostly not done in modern publications. Your prelims may or may not be included in the pagination of the book, but beware – printers have been known to make a hash of it by starting the numeration of pages from the free endpaper onwards! I know from experience.
Now let’s look at the rear of the text. Your story has come to an end; all the t’s have been crossed and the i’s dotted. Not so fast. If your book is a factual one, which seeks to enlighten the reader in any field whatsoever, then it needs an index. Indexing is a dreadful, repetitive job for people who have special skills; so it is best left to them. You might have used a lot of foreign words – in South Africa, Afrikaans words creep in and if you are going to have foreign tourists reading your work – well, then you’d better explain yourself with a glossary at the end of the book. If you have leaned heavily on the writings of other writers, it is useful to give a full list of the publications you have used. There is a format for this, easily learned by perusing a reputable book which has such a bibliography at the end. These last few items are one place where you can scrimp on the size and spacing of font and lines, as people tend to search for one or two words, they don’t get tired from reading large quantities of tiny font. Just one thing left to do – list the fact that you have appended an index, a glossary and a bibliography at the front of the book on the contents page.
Almost all factual books on historical and other matters have footnotes at the base of the text here and there – mainly to explain something or to give a reference as to where a fact was found. Your computer programme should be able to handle it, but it can get a little tricky. Pre-set the size of the font one or two sizes smaller than your main text, and you can even use another font to make it quite obvious that the reader has strayed out of the main narrative. Footnotes can also be added in a bunch at the end. This means you have to read the book with a finger stuck in the textblock further on to be able to access a footnote when you need it. I find that irksome, but tastes may differ; you can never please all the readers, so you might as well please yourself. Often a book will need a map to enable the reader to follow the action or to place a locality. You can’t just photocopy a map from the nearest atlas, as that image belongs to someone. No, either you have to get stuck in and draw the thing yourself, scan it, put in the required placenames by hand or per computer programme, or once more you have to hunt down some talent and pay them a commensurate amount for doing that small thing for you. It’s your choice.
Right, so now we have a textblock in the rough, so to speak. At this stage you need to make a final decision as to what paper you want to use. Get samples of everything that the printers offer. Decide whether you want a glossy, dead-white, or something a little more organic. Print on a sheet; both sides so that you can check whether the paper is opaque enough to prevent the print on the other side from showing through, check the quality of the printing on the weave with a magnifying glass to see if it has broken up unduly. On the other hand does the printed sheet look grey? Then you almost certainly have a really poor print job on paper that owes more of its existence to a mine than a tree. You need to decide whether the illustrations need a special paper, for instance dead white high-gloss for photos, unless you are going for sepia shades of black and white on a yellow or light beige, or whether your drawings look at home on the same grade of paper as your print. Whatever you do with your colour illustrations, get a proof which also states what paper is going to be used, so that you can check that the innate colour of the paper doesn’t alter your tones in the final appearance of the pictures. Decide on the weight of paper to use – find out if it is available in the correct quantity right now. The paper has been chosen, now the nice person from the printers must tell you exactly how thick your book of xxx pages with yy plates and two maps is going to be, because otherwise you won’t be able to proceed with the next step.
What about a cover? You have a firm idea of what you want your cover to look like. Wonderful! You have taken a stunning photo ten years back, which you would like to use for a dustjacket/cover. Or you are one of those gifted people who can actually do their own artwork. Converting an image into a book-cover is not a job for an amateur. To get the titling correctly spaced, the spine labeled, the blurb aligned properly on the back or on the flaps of the dustjacket – all of these are once more in the preserve of the specialist graphic designer. You’ll pay dearly for the service, but at least you will have a real idea of what your effort is going to look like before you go and throw some real money at it. If there is any chance that the work will be sold at any jacked-up emporium, then you’d better go on-line and buy yourself a bar-code that can be incorporated on the back cover of the book – it makes it look more professional and easier to sell to the big boys, if you should get lucky. Again you have to decide on the weight of paper or board, as it is called, to use on the covers.
Now you speak to your friendly person at the printers. You enquire about the options. Get an idea what it would cost to produce the textblock in different quantities, say 300, 500 or 1000, find out what the difference in cost would be for a ‘perfect-bound’ versus a sewn book. You will be surprised how much cheaper it gets the more you print. Then get a quote for what a softcover binding would add to the cost; alternately explore the cost of having your publication machine-bound in hardcover, with a dustjacket added on, or with a laminated cover. Now the expense starts to climb. Most people bail out at about this stage and decide they can only afford to publish a softcover. Why not? The world is full of softcover books; it won’t hang over you like a criminal record if you go that route. There is one way out of this financial dilemma. Tell the printers that you will not pay for any overruns (you’d be surprised how inaccurate these people can be, 10% more or less is nothing to them), but offer to take a set number of textblocks without covers off them, say 20-50. These you can then hand over to a friendly bookbinder, who can hand-bind them at great expense, and which you may present as priceless heirlooms to family and friends or sell them as de-luxe editions at a hugely inflated price.
Are we ready to go? Not by a long stretch ! You now get a ‘proof’ of the cover, printed exactly on the same sort of board, as they call the thick paper that is used. Tell them you want it laminated, or embossed, or not as your heart desires and your finances will allow – get a couple, just so that you can play with them. Let’s say you are happy with the cover. Now you request a proof of the book. This should arrive in loose sheets, and you apply yourself once more to ‘proof-reading’. It is almost guaranteed that you will find errors. Without any reason that you can fathom, your faithful computer has taken a dislike to the printer’s machine and between them they have decided to alternate fonts on even and odd pages, to kick footnotes into the middle of a page, your pagination numbers appear anywhere and your index doesn’t bear even the faintest resemblance to what you had given them. It happens. Deal with it. Use very bold red markers and point out exactly what is wrong, glue or staple on little scraps of paper bearing instructions and throw it back at your ever-friendly printer with a snarl. He won’t mind, because this happens all the time. He will then make the necessary adjustments and you will get another proof. You will (of course) have kept a photocopy of the previous proof so that you can now track down one and every amendment you have requested. You find that all is well and the printer has done his job – or has he? No, you start from the beginning and proofread once more, because it is equally likely that in fixing the previous batch of errors, he has now committed a few others. You send the results of your researches back to him and request (hopefully) a set of ‘galleys’, which nowadays actually just means a sort of final proof. Yes, you read through that one once more and eradicate that last misplaced comma, full stop or whatever – just look hard enough and you’ll find it.
Most printers will want at least a deposit from you at this stage, and it’s not an unreasonable request; but do hold back 50% of the full payment until after delivery of the finished product to your satisfaction. Read your contract, know what you are letting yourself in for. Ideally it would now be best for you to find out exactly at which small hour of the morning your book will come hot off the press, and you insist that you wish to stand there while they run off your thousand copies at a breathtaking rate. That way you can pick up any major snarl-up as the first few books come off the press and are assembled. It’s not an easy decision to make, since it is heart-attack territory, and it is no guarantee that you will pick up an incipient problem in the dim light of the factory environment between all this lethal-sounding machinery. Hopefully you will be the proud parent of your own literary baby a few days later.

Cape to Cairo

Africana Votes & Views #16

  It was of course Cecil John Rhodes, whose lifelong ambition it was to colour the map of Africa with a broad splash of red from north to south, signifying a string of British colonies, and thus hegemony, stretching from the Cape to the shores of the Mediterranean. It was a goal he pursued by fair means and foul through the latter part of his life – and he all but succeeded. More importantly he inspired generations of would-be Empire-builders.
  Whenever great endeavour, courage and persistence is the subject of talk among travelers, sooner or later the name of Ewart Scott Grogan is almost certain to be mentioned. This epitome of British imperialism was the man who is mostly credited with the phrase From the Cape to Cairo (also the title of his book published by Hurst & Blackett, 1900) – and his epic trek has become the Holy Grail of large numbers of would-be explorers and travelers, who have followed in his footsteps on foot, by boat, by automobile and by aircraft. So let us have a closer look at the gentleman.
  Grogan was born in 1874 into a well-off family with numerous siblings. From tender years onwards he showed much promise and achieved some impressive results in his sporting and scholastic career. During his short stay at Cambridge, his ‘high spirits’, practical jokes and escapades brought him into conflict with this august institution as well as the law and finally caused him to be expelled, after which he spent a short time at Slade Art School – which he left on a whim. At age 22 he arrived in Rhodesia, where he found ‘well-bred Varsity men rubbing shoulders with animal-faced Boers, leavened with Jews, parasites, bummers, nondescripts and every type of civilized savage’ – obviously not people to his delicate taste, but then, he ‘knew that it is good to be an Englishman’. He was just in time to throw himself enthusiastically into the fray of the Matabele Rebellion, which introduced him to the atrocities of war. He survived and before departing back home, he distinguished himself in Beira by knocking down and killing an armed assailant in a dance hall. Feeling in need of a little diversion, he went to visit a friend in New Zealand, where he met his future wife, as well as some stiff opposition from her stepfather, who did not fancy him as son-in-law material. This became the impetus for the great journey. If he made it, he would have proven himself and he would get his girl. Grogan’s biography, The Man from the Cape (Evans Bros, 1959) written by an adoring nephew, Norman Wymer, gives all the background, as well as the subsequent role he played in the colonisation of Kenya and the application of vigilante-justice to errant servants on the steps of the colonial legislature.
  Back to the Great Affair. Funding for the journey was provided in the main by Harry Sharp, a mere acquaintance at the time, but a man who had some means, and who wanted a hunting trip and some adventure. It is a misconception that the pair set off on foot from Cape Town; in fact they took the train to Bulawayo and a coach to Beira. A number of months were spent in pursuit of lions in Mozambique, and the pair managed to bag a dozen or more, and left at least another score wounded cats in the bush before setting off towards Lake Nyasa. This was the real start of the trek, which was to take them over a year to reach the sources of the Nile, mostly on foot, but also by boat and later by machila as both men were brought down by malaria and dysentery. The Central African region had been ravaged by internecine struggles between the tribes, as well as expeditions from the Belgian Congo, who were trying to establish their king’s suzerainty over the uncertain border country of no man’s land. The pair struggled on across and past the Great Lakes, until Sharp had had enough by the time they reached Katwe. He returned to the coast and Grogan carried on alone. One can’t fault his courage in attempting the daunting task he had set himself; so our man muddled through by virtue of sheer effrontery, judicious application of the kiboko (shambok) and boot. His trials did not prevent him from taking out a license to shoot two elephants ( after which in some mysterious fashion he seems to have become entitled to shoot a few dozen, though not all fatally – as would be expected from our marksman). He had a fairly narrow escape from the clutches of the Dinka tribe in the Sudan, but thanks to the judicious application of dum-dum bullets at ranges up to six hundred yards, as he relates with some relish, he survived the journey as far as Sobat, where he once more met up with the British gentry and could continue the trip in the comfort he so appreciated – by boat to Cairo.
  The book is well-written in a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek way, full of sarcastic remarks and opinions, which present the author in a less than favourable light according to present-day standards. He remains a legend, whose trek has been imitated in one way or another by hundreds of adventurers who have taken to the roads, waters and winds on foot, by boat, by automobile, by motorbike, by aeroplane and by seaplane and for all I know even by balloon or dirigible. Certainly there are dozens of books I have either seen or read on the subject.
  Now the behemoths of the steel tracks would tackle the route. The railway, as probably visualised by Rhodes, and certainly advocated by Grogan at great length and with some intensity in his book, also steadily made its way up and down the continent, ever trying to join up. Leo Weinthal’s record of every bit of information, be it geological, geographical, engineering, technical and human, was contained in five volumes entitled The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route from 1887–1922 (Pioneer Publishing Co, 1923) – a rare and precious work, which I have never yet held in my hands in its entirety. Even the few fragments I read in the odd volumes that have crossed my path; the painstaking detail shown in the whole volume of maps that accompanied the work – spoke volumes of the Great Affair, the romance that attaches itself to grandiose works such as the Suez Canal or the Three Gorges Dam.
  A book which sought to follow in Weinthal’s footsteps, and to bring the history of this great line up to the end of the 20th century was George Tabor’s The Cape to Cairo Railway (Genta Publications, 2003). Unfortunately it failed dismally, mostly due to an unpardonable number of errors of fact and sloppy editorship, though it did provide some interesting anecdotes about the grand hotels that were dotted along the route.
  The early flyers also eyed the continent covetously in the years just after the Great War. There were huge obstacles that needed to be overcome; the terrain was virtually uncharted, there were no known landing fields or refuelling depots. However the idea got momentum and the Daily Mail offered a ₤10 000 prize for the first successful flight; even Winston Churchill gave his stamp of approval in the British Parliament. Eventually, in January 1920 the first plane, a Vickers Vimy piloted by Cockerell and Broome, were off, but could not last the distance, and had to abandon the flight at Tabora in East Africa. The South African entry, flown by the pioneers Sir Pierre van Ryneveld and his co-pilot Sir Quintin Brand, sponsored by Smuts’s government, were successful and landed at Cape Town some 45 days after their departure from Brooklands. These early pioneering flights, as well as the number of notable crashes, are ably described by John Godwin in his book Wings to the Cape (Tafelberg, 1971). Another worthwhile book, which deals with the development of civil and military aviation in South Africa is H Klein’s Winged Courier (Timmins, 1955), though it doesn’t deal primarily with Cape to Cairo flight. That notable long distance aviator, Sir Alan Cobham, crowned his flight round Europe by doing the Cairo to Cape in several long-hops using a De Havilland 50 – and for good measure, back again. This resulted in a slim volume entitled My Flight to the Cape and Back (A & C Black, 1926) which was remarkably devoid of incident; but then, all one could say of flight in the early days was that it was noisy, dangerous and gave you a lot of time to say your prayers. A few years later Sir Alan was back again with the largest seaplane in the world, a Short Singapore, in which he flew right around the continent of Africa, only landing in British Colonies for good measure. This little jaunt was described in Twenty Thousand Miles in a Flying-boat (G G Harrap, 1930) and proved to have a little more meat on the bones. Sandwiched between these two books was the effort by Messrs Mittelholzer, Gouzy and Heim, who flew their Dornier-Merkur seaplane from Switzerland down the Nile, thence via the Great Lakes to the Cape and recorded their findings, as well as some fine aerial photography in their book Afrika-Flug (Orell Fuessli, 1927).
  Surprisingly, automobile transport is only third in line. Once motoring became the vogue, there was no stopping the Cape to Cairo crowd. I won’t pretend to know the authors and titles of all the books dealing with the dragging of underpowered and unsuitable four-wheeled conveyances through the swamps of Africa, but a couple do come to mind. The intrepid Stella Court-Treatt relates the epic of one of the early traverses in her book Cape to Cairo: the Record of a Historic Motor Journey (G G Harrap, 1927), in which their party of six Britons boarded a Crossley automobile and with the aid of several dozen spans of draught animals and a number of whole tribes of indigenous peoples, actually made the trek. This historic journey took them all of seventeen months – which though an improvement on the thirty-odd months of Mr Grogan, was not exactly at breathtaking speed, even for cars of the day.
  Just a few years later G Makepeace tells in his book Capetown to Stockholm (General Motors, SA Ltd, 1929) of slogging it out with the aid of a pair of Chevvy's. This was intended to be a publicity stunt worthy of a 21st century advertising agency for General Motors products, but it turned into a real adventure. So it went on through the decades that followed. Every form of the machine you could think of was used; from aged London taxis, to Baby Austins and ancient VW Kombis in later years. I actually met a few of these intrepid people between 1959 and 1980 – but most of them had very little fun along the way, and if they had written books, why, I think they might have been very little fun to read as well. Of course, there were other means of transport, and also some well-told tales.
  One of these was Anthony Smith, who tells us in his book Smith and Son (Hodder & Stoughton, 1983) of buying a Triumph Tiger Cub motorbike in Cape Town in 1955, taking three months to reach Cairo, and then parking the beat-up old crotch-rocket in a damp, downstairs corridor among the household junk, while he married, fathered a son, and generally got on with life. So one day he and his youngster met up with this mechanical marvel and dad is coaxed into telling sonny that he drove the thing all the way through Africa. ‘Past lions and things – at about sixty miles an hour’ – a phrase that obviously would intrigue a child of tender years, who would like to test the bike at that speed there and then. So father stalls a bit and makes a half-promise that maybe someday they could take it out and ride down Africa; past lions and things at sixty miles an hour.
  So when Adam, the son, finishes his schooling in 1983, dad utters that fatal question, ‘OK, so what about Africa?’ To which son replies, ‘Yup, why not’ and the rest, as they say, was history. The book is not just a wearisome enumeration of miles and miles of heat and dust; nor is it about the feeling of freedom of the road that biking and the wind through your hair is supposed to bring, nor the difficulties and the breakdowns; rather it is an exploration of a relationship between a father and his son, with the aid of two elderly machines and several thousand miles of hot, wet, dry, dusty and colourful continent. A thoroughly enjoyable book, even for a person like myself, who has hated the two-wheelers cordially since mounting my first moped at 13, graduating in stages onto a Lambretta at 19 and then having a looong gap until I once more climbed onto a Chinese imitation British 1950’s military sidecar combo with my sister and a chauffeur for a celebratory outing on my sixty-somethingth birthday. My eyes still water and my backside hurts at the memory of our trip round the peninsula – but hey, it was something I had promised myself one day – just like Smith and son.
  One other mighty traveler I cannot omit: some dozen or more years ago a man rang me to enquire whether I had a copy of Livingstone’s great work Missionary Travels – I did have a poor example, but he was quite happy to come and collect it. My tiny shop was invaded by a much larger-than-life Kingsley Holgate, a man who had to turn sideways as well as bend his head to come in through the door. He had just done his first traverse of Africa, and needed to read up a little on the great traveler who had preceded him. I was able to help with a couple of books and we had a lively conversation. In the ensuing years I followed his adventures around the African continent by means of television documentaries, and finally his book appeared, entitled Cape to Cairo, (Struik, 2002), being his whole family’s adventures along the waterways of Africa. While it is not a great feat of literature, nor an epic journey, since they had boats, outboards, 4x4s galore and all the kit that goes along; they did have to battle the demons of bureaucracy, the shadows of war and the zing of malarial mosquitoes. For that I salute the great man and his companions.
  One of the latest offerings in the genre is Sihle Khumalo’s book Dark Continent – my Black A*se (Umuzi, 2007). The irrepressible 30-year old from Durban decides to celebrate his birthday in style. He gives up a well-paid job, perks, and comfortable flat in a secure complex, leaving his girl and 16-month old daughter to brave the public transport system and potholes between the Cape and Cairo. Almost at once his venture runs into trouble when the airline staff went on strike at Durban, necessitating a very lengthy bus-journey to Bellville to catch his pre-booked connection to Namibia. From there on things can only get a*se-numbingly worse. Khumalo describes his travel companions, the differences in culture and infrastructure with insight and good humour. The further he gets away from home, through Zambia, then Malawi, up into Tanzania, the slower his progress, and the more difficult it becomes to communicate.
  Yet there are many unforgettable moments along the way. Victoria Falls and the memories of a prior bungee jump off the steel bridge; sundowners overlooking Lake Malawi after an impromptu barbecue on Lizard Island; the basic honesty of some of the poorest people on earth, and the dawning realization in the hell-holes of the slave dungeons of Zanzibar, that the ‘[Arabs had] screwed Africans in a big way. They took away our dignity and pride and converted our forefathers, including women and children, into goods with a monetary value. Not that the African kings and chiefs were innocent. It is well-documented that local traditional leaders used to barter their own subjects or captive members of other clans with the Arab slave-traders’. I have heard local academics denying that bit of truth quite vehemently a short while back.
  The further north our lad gets, the more difficult it becomes to communicate with first the Swahili speakers, then the Amharic and later Arabic linguists. Until he passes out of Ethiopia, the women also got more beautiful by the mile it would seem – or was that in obverse proportion to his distance from home? His luck holds, and he manages to get his visas for the war-torn Sudan and Egypt and lurches over some abominable tracks in matolas, boksies and buses (one made from an amalgamation of a bus-body and a truck-front) with some astounding bureaucratic hold-ups into the bargain until he can board the train for Khartoum. From there on it was almost plain sailing except for a sandstorm in the two-day desert transit. The antiquities of Egypt fill him with wonder and he reads a book in the Bibliotheca Alexandria to end off his momentous experiences. He looks back on the continent’s starving, sick, dying and naked poor, and he struggles to understand how the so-called liberators have been turned into dictators or heads of one-party states, how they have allowed their countries to deteriorate so much and how they could neglect their people in such a fashion.
  On a much lighter and entertaining note I would like to end this contribution by paying tribute to a distant relative of Grogan – yes, the artist/cartoonist Tony Grogan – who authored and especially illustrated the book Between the Cape and Cairo (Central Africana Ltd, 1995). The artist spent two lengthy holidays in Malawi, and his humorous portrayals of the people and scenes of the ‘Warm Heart of Africa’, are interspersed with cartoon comparisons to some of the scenes he envisaged his illustrious precursor to have encountered, as well as what the modern equivalent situation would look like. A lovely work to page through at the end of an exhausting journey along the length of a continent.

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.