A VIEW FROM A TALL HILL
On a sunny morning in May, 1994, I was riding in a Datsun pickup truck on a dusty road outside the town of Memel, a dot on a map on the high veldt of the Orange Free State. It was election day in South Africa, the first exercise of equal black and white democracy in the former stronghold of apartheid, a day of momentous change, of world-shaking import — all in all, a day of journalistic hyperbole at its most outrageous. To acknowledge the significance of such a day, my Afrikaner friend Willem and I did what we did every other day: We went hunting.
On the road out along the Klip River, where the ducks flighted and the coots scurried, we encountered another pickup coming into town. It was loaded, shoulder to shoulder, with black farm workers and their wives and children. In front was another friend, a South African of established English pedigree and, by Willem’s Afrikaner standards, of suspiciously liberal leanings. William and his wife, Sue, were driving their workers into town so they could line up outside the polling station to cast their votes for, in all probability, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. They were participating in democracy their way, just as Willem and I were participating in ours.
During his time in Africa, Robert Ruark covered many conferences and elections — to say nothing of massacres, hangings, and highway robberies — and he noted that you never really learn anything from covering a conference. What you need to do, he wrote in The Honey Badger, is go to the country that is affected and dig for the reaction there. He also said writing was mostly “exposure to the scene.” Since I received my first grounding in the practical aspects of journalism from that book, I was following his instructions to the letter. The way to get a feel for what would become of South Africa under a new government, I believed, was to head for the vastness of right-wing Afrikanerdom — of which the eastern Free State is a bastion — and see what happened. Which is how I came to be in that truck, on that road, on that day. The one thing William and Sue and Willem and I all had in common was that we were armed to the teeth. Whatever happened, we were not going to go quietly.
As it turned out, Willem and his right-wing cohorts boycotted the election to a great extent, thereby helping to ensure an overwhelming ANC victory, which was the last thing they wanted. They knew what they were doing, but they did it anyway — a contradiction I am at a loss to explain coherently, even years later. William and Sue voted one way, their workers voted another. Then everybody went home, and life continued very much as it had for a century. While the foreign correspondents gathered in the press club in Johannesburg and fed off each other and political handouts, all predicting great and/or ghastly things, the impression I got in Memel was that everyone would take a guarded, but well-armed, attitude of simply waiting to see what would happen, and be ready for it when it did. Meanwhile, the cattle would graze, the sheep would go to market, William and Sue would drive their children to school, and the farm workers would cook their mealy-meal over the fires in their smoke-filled huts. It could have been 1894 as easily as 1994, and that was the real story out of South Africa that day in May.
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The history of Africa since the great rush to independence in the early 1960s, and since Ruark’s death in 1965, has been one of almost unremitting tragedy. So many of his dire predictions came true that it is almost pointless to list them. The continent became, and remains, the economic basket-case of the world. This happened for a combination of reasons, and there is no denying the roots of many of the problems lay in the legacy of colonialism — in the arbitrary borders that divided tribes on the one hand, or threw bitter enemies in together on the other; in the politicians who were ill-prepared to govern and people unable to read, much less vote rationally; in handing machine guns to warriors who still filed their teeth and drank menstrual fluid during tribal ceremonies. But that was just the starting point for Africa’s troubles through the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The overwhelming factor that ensured these countries would stay on the road to ruin was the Cold War and the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to draw third-world countries into their orbits, to attract allies who would vote the right way at the United Nations. To this end, Washington and Moscow fomented trouble, tolerated despots, and threw aid money at governments that were little more than thugs and thieves. The global chess game between the superpowers reduced the newly independent African countries to the role of expendable pawns, and the real losers in the game were the people of countries like Tanzania, Somalia, and the Congo.
Each of the colonial powers pulled out in its own way, and each left behind its own kind of mess. Belgium was by far the worst, judging by what happened in the Congo in the early 1960s, in the months leading up to independence — l’indépendence was the cry in Francophone Africa, as Uhuru was in Kenya — and in the three decades since. Robert Ruark saw the unfolding tragedy firsthand and wrote about it in his newspaper columns, and to a great degree it colored his view of emerging Africa. The Congo was one of Africa’s largest and richest colonies with a treasure trove of minerals in Katanga Province. It was well worth fighting over, and the Union Minière was determined that, independent or not, it would keep its hands on the mineral wealth. The Congo was the setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the definitive literary work on the evils of colonialism, and it provided the graphic images of raped nuns, castrated priests, slaughtered villages, colonial paratroops with their red berets, and ex-Foreign Legion mercenaries. The Congo was the United Nations’ first real attempt at peacekeeping, and it was a disaster that almost destroyed the organization. It cost the life of the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a still-unexplained plane crash. By the time the country lurched to independence, everyone in the civilized world was more than ready to welcome a strong man like Joseph Mobutu, a general who later took the name Mobutu Sese Seko and changed the Congo to Zaire. He then embarked on a systematic looting of the country, eventually salting away an estimated five billion dollars in Swiss bank accounts. Mobutu’s reign in Zaire was one long rape-and-pillage, punctuated by periodic uprisings, civil wars, and massacres, all more or less tolerated by the West, which saw him as an anti-communist ally.
Of the fifty or so independent countries resulting from the scramble out of Africa in the 1960s, only one or two — literally — can be said to have enjoyed anything like a prolonged period of peace and prosperity. The two that spring to mind are Botswana and the Ivory Coast — and the latter is now starting to disintegrate. Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the Sudan have had civil wars that lasted for decades. Uganda and the Central African Republic were taken over by remarkably similar despots, Idi Amin and Jean Bedel Bokassa, who instituted reigns of terror. Ethiopia, Africa’s one stable country of long history, was subjected to a military coup and a period of terror in which Emperor Haile Selassie was murdered, and the country descended into a perverted Marxist hell not unlike Cambodia. In recent years, notable slaughters have occurred in Rwanda and Burundi.
When most Americans think of Africa — if they think of it at all — the dominant images are of herds of animals on the Serengeti Plain, or starving Ethiopians perishing in the latest famine. Yet Africa is far from poor. It has vast oil reserves, not just in the north (Libya and the Sudan) but also in Nigeria and Angola. The Congo and South Africa have some of the richest mineral deposits to be found anywhere. The soil is generally fertile, and provided the rains come, people can feed themselves almost effortlessly. And, if the rains fail in one area, other regions are more than capable of producing food for everyone given the opportunity. South Africa, for example, is in some ways one of the most advanced agricultural countries on earth. During the dark days of the 1970s, the prime minister, John Vorster, argued that his country could become the aid basket for black Africa, given the opportunity and provided those countries backed off on their demands for the dismantling of apartheid. It may have been a blatant attempt at bribery, and it was dismissed without a second thought, but it was a valid observation nonetheless.
In 1971, I was in Uganda at the time Idi Amin first seized power, while he was still popular and the country was still “the garden of Africa,” with a cheerful and well-fed (if somewhat barbarous) population. I met a truck driver who was South African by birth, who had left his homeland for the independent north to experience life in a black-ruled country where he was any man’s equal. He had been in Uganda for nine months when we met, and he was completely disillusioned. There was no work to be had, and his savings were gone. I bought him a beer, and we sat on the terrace of the Speke Hotel, a delightful colonial relic, and talked about Africa. All he wanted to do was go home and find a job. But that avenue was closed to him. He was now independent, whether he liked it or not. Were it not for Idi Amin and various crackpot Marxists, Uganda should be a quite prosperous little country. It is almost oppressively fertile in most areas, and it has coffee, tea, some minerals, and excellent potential for tourism. Yet, almost forty years after independence, it is only now clawing its way to anything approaching prosperity, and it is doing so against the tide of Africa’s newest scourge, Aids.
A better example of a potentially great nation squandered for no good reason is Nigeria, the largest black country by population and one of the wealthiest. With about one hundred million people, a generous mass of productive land, and vast oil reserves, Nigeria was touted in the 1960s as a potential superpower of Africa. It did not turn out that way. The country’s boundaries confined several hostile tribes together, which led to the disastrous Biafran war and an endless succession of military dictatorships. Each new ruler borrowed against future oil production, then either squandered the money or embezzled it. Nigeria became famous for one thing only: baksheesh, or dash. By whatever name, it was life by bribery. Its largest city, Lagos, is an overpopulated, polluted, traffic-congested slum — a true hardship posting for any diplomat. As I write this, the Financial Times reports the current government (a laudable attempt at democracy) has had the Swiss bank accounts of the former ruler, General Abacha, frozen. They contain about 650 million U.S. dollars. Not much compared to Mobutu, I suppose, but then Abacha was only in power for six years. Had a heart attack not snatched him in the bloom of youth, he might have been a contender. Thanks to the legacy of Abacha and his predecessors, Nigeria has gone from being a beacon of hope to a symbol of hopelessness — conclusive evidence that an African country cannot be trusted to prosper even when blessed with substantial, valuable, dollar-producing resources.
Not all colonies rushed to independence in the 1960s. Southern Africa stood apart — the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia, and the two Portuguese colonies, Mozambique and Angola. With South Africa as the anchor, they steadfastly resisted the tide of black rule and watched as one newly independent country after another descended into chaos. Portugal took the position that Mozambique and Angola were not colonies at all, but overseas provinces of Portugal — integral parts of the country. This argument was futile, and Portugal was forced to pull out; since then, both countries have had blood-soaked histories.
Rhodesia (Southern Rhodesia as it was originally) had a substantial white population, estimated at a quarter-million in 1964, with a black population of about six million. This was a substantially higher ratio of white to black than in Kenya, and the economy of the country was quite different. As well, of course, it had close ties with South Africa. The prime minister, Ian Smith, decided black rule was not an option and chose instead a unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. In spite of urgings by its former colonies in Africa, Great Britain refused to use military force to bring down Smith’s government, and Rhodesia embarked on a fifteen-year odyssey of defiance. Several black guerrilla movements sprang up, based mainly in neighboring Zambia and Mozambique. The long bush war that ensued drained the country’s treasury, and international trade sanctions did the rest. In 1980, a black government under Robert Mugabe took power, the name of the capital was changed from Salisbury to Harare, many of the hard-line white colonists fled to South Africa, and Zimbabwe became an independent country. Mugabe was a self-styled Marxist who followed the general line of most African Marxist leaders, which is that Marxism should be imposed on the common people but not on themselves or their friends and colleagues. If George Orwell had been alive to see it, after writing Animal Farm, he would be amazed, gratified, and horrified at the way life imitates art.
Trade sanctions contributed to Rhodesia’s capitulation, but they were not without their benefits. Rhodesia was a naturally rich country, with a prosperous agricultural sector (there were huge white-owned ranches and farms, similar to South Africa) and substantial mineral resources. The tourist trade all but dried up, of course, but the potential was still there. Unable to import most basic consumer items, Rhodesia became self-sufficient in a surprising number of areas. Mugabe inherited a country that should have been largely immune to the problems facing countries like Ghana, for example, which had commodities to export, but were forced to import goods using the hard currency.
In twenty years of Mubage’s rule, however, Zimbabwe has gone steadily downhill. All but about 60,000 white people have left the country, and those who remain are hanging on tenuously. Land reforms have been threatened, implemented, then threatened again. The justification is the age-old African refrain of a few people having too much land, while the majority has none. Farms have been seized, with and without compensation. The Mugabe government has sometimes insisted that compensation should be paid by Great Britain, since it had been a British colony, most of the whites are of British descent, and Britain caused the problem in the first place. That aside, many of the confiscated farms have been handed over, intact and operational, to Mugabe’s friends, cohorts, and relatives. This pattern occurred also in Kenya and Tanzania, and it is one white South African farmers now fear. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zimbabwe is facing bankruptcy, with inflation spiralling, and the government grasping at ever-smaller straws in the hopes of an economic miracle.
In an earlier era, before the Cold War ended, Mugabe & Co. could have counted on Washington or Moscow to ride to the rescue, with loans or guarantees to prop them up, in hopes of acquiring another acolyte at the United Nations. Unfortunately for them, the era of easy aid is over. With Washington’s support, the International Monetary Fund is calling the shots to a great degree, and one by one African countries are being forced into fiscal line. Had this been the case from the moment they became independent, the recent history of Africa would be considerably different.
The United Nations declared that January, 2000, would be the Month of Africa — a period in which the organization and its member states would focus on the problems facing the Dark Continent. Judging by the headlines, the problems today are depressingly like the problems of forty years ago, magnified and multiplied. Once again, the world is viewing events in the Congo (the name having been restored after Mobutu’s demise) with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Mobutu’s successor is a man named Laurent Kabila, who made the usual promises of honesty, fairness, and good government. After three years in power, albeit tenuously, he has come to be regarded as from the same mold as Mobutu. Kabila was barely in office when rebellions sprang up in various parts of the country, with some of his neighbors supporting him, others supporting his opponents, and still others supporting rival groups of rebels battling each other. In the northwest, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi are supplying arms and assistance to rebel groups; elsewhere, Zimbabwe, which does not even border on the Congo, has sent some 11,000 troops to help Kabila, and is maintaining them at its own expense and in defiance of the IMF, as its own economy sinks without a trace.
Journalists’ descriptions of conditions in the Congo are depressingly familiar. A correspondent for London’s Financial Times, a newspaper not given to hyperbole, describes crossing from Zambia into Katanga as “passing through the gates of Dante’s Inferno.” Reports from the northwest list atrocities on both sides — the latest being women buried alive. Exactly what any of the participants is trying to accomplish is not really clear. The only fact acknowledged by all sides, including the IMF, is that none of them can afford the high cost of what they are doing. Uganda has still not recovered from the Idi Amin era and is ravaged by Aids; Rwanda was the human-rights horror story of the 1990s; Zimbabwe is facing economic collapse. Yet still they fight a costly, endless war in the Congo. It has reached a point where no one can even suggest what a solution might be.
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For its part the Republic of South Africa, with its four million whites, its relatively modern economy, its gold and diamond mines and commercial ties to London, and its three hundred years of white history, watched what was happening elsewhere and dug in to resist black rule to the end. To many, the resistance was futile and gained them nothing but increased acrimony, but in retrospect it appears that the time bought by the Vorster government and its Afrikaner-dominated successors may have paid off. And, except for the most radical Old Testament right-wingers, every white South African with whom I have ever spoken, right from my first visit in 1976 at the time of the Soweto riots, admitted black rule was inevitable. What they accomplished by resisting for so long was to allow the object lessons of other countries time to unfold and sink in. By the time the ANC took power in 1994, Nelson Mandela and his colleagues, who were far from stupid, realized they had two choices: descend into hell, like Nigeria, or cooperate to make South Africa work. So far, having chosen the latter, the results have been surprisingly positive.
None of this would have surprised Robert Ruark. Most of it he predicted, publicly and in print, one way or the other. He was not an optimist about black Africa’s prospects after independence, not because he was unduly critical of black Africans, but simply because he knew they were ill-prepared to govern independently in the modern world and were hopelessly out of their depth dealing with the realities of Cold War geopolitics. What would have surprised Ruark, however, was what happened in Kenya, the country he knew and loved best. Against all odds, it has come through the last thirty years as well as any country in Africa, and far better than most. Certainly, far better than anyone expected. Had anyone made a prediction about Kenya’s future at the height of the Mau Mau Emergency in 1953-54, it would likely have envisioned a history not unlike the Congo with its ravished nuns and rivers of blood. That this did not happen is due, in the opinion of many white Kenyans, to the influence of Jomo Kenyatta, the man they had feared as the devil incarnate with his hooded eyes and blood-red ring. Tony Archer, a former professional hunter and one of the anti-Mau Mau “pseudo-gangsters,” attended a meeting shortly after independence at which Kenyatta addressed the crowd, both black and white. He asked them to put the past aside, to forget the bitterness, and not attempt to even old scores. According to Archer, that is generally what happened. The most bitter or fearful white settlers left the colony, many of them emigrating to South Africa and Rhodesia. Those who remained seemed intent on making the best of the situation.
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If Ruark were to walk down Kenyatta Avenue today, he would not recognize his old haunt. The New Stanley is still there, as is the Thorn Tree Grill. And across town the Norfolk Hotel is expanded, renovated, and playing host to a new generation of diplomats, tourists, and aid workers. Now, though, a Hilton dominates the downtown skyline next to the Nairobi conference center with its round, black office tower. Like all cities in Africa, Nairobi has grown beyond all recognition, most of the growth being in slums and pollution. The sparkling, whitewashed colonial town of 1953 has been replaced by a sprawling network of roads clogged with automobiles. Beggars and street hawkers walk up and down the traffic jams, tapping on car windows and offering to sell everything from stereos to framed photographs of the current president, Daniel arap Moi.
Moi was vice-president to Jomo Kenyatta from independence until Kenyatta’s death in 1978. Kenyatta’s rule can be condemned or praised, depending on your point of view. On the positive side, he did not encourage tribal divisions. The Kikuyu were dominant, of course, but the country did not descend into serious tribal conflict or anything like a civil war. There were one or two abortive attempts at military coups, but they were quickly put down with British assistance. Overall, Kenya was a stable political entity by African standards. Unfortunately, it was not immune to the major disease of African politics: corruption. Kenyatta himself became a major landowner. At one point, he reportedly owned twenty-seven large farms around Nairobi. His family also benefited. When the British left, Kenya had a functioning infrastructure that was largely neglected for the next three decades. The telephone system, for example, the finest in Africa in 1963, was treated by a succession of ministers like a cow to be milked, and in 1993 the equipment in place was virtually the same as it had been thirty years earlier. Even a cross-town Nairobi telephone call was all but impossible, with endless delays, and any kind of overseas call or fax was a hit-or-miss proposition. Mostly miss.
Daniel arap Moi succeeded Kenyatta in 1978, and at this writing is still in power. His government has become a byword for corruption and mismanagement in some circles, and he fights a running battle with the IMF over loans and aid money. Unemployment is high, and the Nairobi stock exchange is stagnant.
The real change in Kenya, though, seen through the eyes of a visitor who first went there in 1971 and has been returning on a more or less regular basis ever since, has less to do with conventional measurements of government and prosperity than it does with what is revealed by a casual walk through the center of Nairobi. Each visit saw changes. In 1971, Nairobi still retained the vestiges of colonial rule. The streets were clean and well-kept; the white walls of buildings were still white. Begging was not rife. A tourist could walk at night from the New Stanley to the Norfolk without fear. The available cuisine was the best in Africa — Indian food at the Three Bells, seafood at the Lobster Pot, and cheeseburgers at the Thorn Tree. There was even Africa’s very first Japanese restaurant, newly opened at the Inter-Continental Hotel. On Sundays we would drive up to the Ngong Hills to find a cluster of Mercedes and Peugeots and Asian families out for a walk. Kenyatta Avenue was lined with shops dealing in skins and hides and horns, the products of legitimate hunting and government control work; ivory carving was a big industry, and whole tusks were sculpted into elaborate set-piece displays showing everything from the wildebeest migration to the procession of the Sirdar. Even the smell was different: Every breeze brought a waft of fresh-tanned hide, a hint of the Serengeti, and a whiff of curry. It was exhilarating then just to be alive and in Nairobi.
Joe Cheffings, a professional hunter who arrived in Kenya from England one week before the Mau Mau Emergency was declared, and who has lived there ever since, recalled that during that one period everyone who lived in Kenya, black and white, was proud to be Kenyan. “It seemed that life would always be good,” he said. “There was a real sense that the country was going somewhere. Now....” As it turned out, Kenya was going somewhere, but not where anyone hoped. In 1976, under pressure from international anti-hunting organizations, Kenya banned big-game hunting and ushered in a period of game poaching such as has never been seen. The black rhino was poached to the brink of extinction, and elephant numbers were reduced to a fraction. Kenyatta’s family and high members of the government were implicated in a sophisticated large-scale ivory-smuggling operation. Meanwhile, the country’s population was growing at an alarming pace; for several years, according to U.N. figures, it had the fastest rate of increase in the world. Pressure on available land became ever greater, as well as on land set aside for game preserves and parks. Preservation of wildlife in Kenya became a major concern for everyone, it seemed, except for those in a position to do something about it; for their part, they used the international concern to line their own pockets at the animals’ expense.
Tourism, however, grew to become the dominant industry. Zebrastriped minibuses became the symbol of a new Africa in which people watched animals, rather than shooting them for their horns. A nice symbol in some ways, if you ignore the fact that such encroachment can be far more damaging in the long run than a lone trophy hunter, on foot, taking one or two old bulls out of a herd. Horror stories of rings of minibuses, driving predators off their kills and literally causing them to starve, never seemed to leak out into the mainstream press, which regarded Africa as one big theme park. At the height of the tourist rush in the 1980s, whole plane loads of tourists invaded Kenya on package tours. Many of the former professional hunters, Joe Cheffings included, switched in 1976 from hunting to photographic safaris, with a little wingshooting, which was still allowed by law. The most famous safari firm of all, Ker & Downey Safaris, became a major photographic outfitter.
Oddly enough, one of the factors that took the air out of the tourism balloon was the Gulf War of 1991. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the threat of terrorist strikes against Americans, caused a downturn in the tourist industry, from which it never really recovered. Safari companies set up to service an endless stream of tourists found themselves scrambling for clients. Nairobi in 1990 was noticeably different than it had been twenty years earlier. The white walls were grimy; roads were pockmarked with potholes; you could still walk from the Norfolk to the Thorn Tree for lunch, but if you were returning after dark, you were strongly advised to take a cab and not carry much cash. The Thorn Tree was still there, but the red tablecloths sported cigarette burns and stains, and the waiters’ contemptuous response was merely to turn it over and allow you to enjoy a different set of cigarette burns and stains. For the first time the prostitutes who hung around on the fringes of the New Stanley would march into the Thorn Tree and sit down, unbidden. Ten minutes of desultory and unwelcome conversation later, they would demand money for their time and leave. If you argued, the waiter (who got a cut) sided with the woman. According to reports, the HIV rate among Nairobi prostitutes was ninety-eight per cent. Lunch at the Thorn Tree was not the unalloyed pleasure it once had been. The whole town seemed cynical.
Three years later, more of the same, except the Kenya shilling was going through the floor, the Norfolk was accepting payment in foreign currency only, you were advised not to walk anywhere downtown, and to deposit all but the barest amount of cash in the hotel safe. The city’s buildings were dingier, the potholes bigger. There were bargains to be had for anyone with a few dollars, pounds, or marks. The streets were lined with hawkers, each trying to sell you something. If you paused to be polite, two or three shoeshine boys would jostle to get at your defenseless feet. Now I knew how a wildebeest felt if it slowed down and looked back. It was a mistake you only made once. On the bright side, at least they were selling something, not merely demanding money because they were poor, or deprived, or missing a limb, or, as Robert Ruark once reported an encounter with a prostitute in the Congo, simply “because I am black.”
By 1993, Kenya was a stark contrast to Tanzania, its neighbor to the south where big-game hunting was once again a major industry. Under Julius Nyerere, Tanzania embarked on a thirty-year experiment in crackpot socialism that nearly bankrupted the country and turned it into a professional beggar at every level — from the finance minister pleading with the IMF to the leper clawing at your pant leg with his two remaining fingers. After a week or two in Tanzania, returning to Kenya was like home and mother. In 1993, I got to see Kenya from that point of view twice, once returning from Addis Ababa and once from Tanzania. That, perhaps, is the way anyone who might presume to judge it should see it.
Ethiopia was just then emerging from its period of Marxist military dictatorship, followed by a civil war. Addis Ababa (literally “new garden”) was once again pleasant to visit, at least judging by the view from the Hilton Hotel terrace. You learned to ignore the beggars, some of whom were armed with AK-47s. That is taking begging to levels of sophistication unknown in Nairobi. And the Ethiopian money was worthless, even in Ethiopia. About all you could buy with it was a bag of sugar from a street vendor. The bag looked like it had changed hands many, many times. Getting back to the Norfolk after a stay in Addis Ababa, to a hot shower and a bartender who smiled, to a dining room with crisp tablecloths and a well-prepared steak and a bottle of Burgundy, was better than home and mother, by far. Similarly, getting back to Nairobi from Tanzania was an escape from the extortion kingdom of the world, where the consensus was that you — you, personally — owed them a living. All of them.
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For all of that, however, each successive visit to Nairobi produced more of the same, only worse. Which is not surprising. That is the way most of the world has gone since we were young, and things were all so much better. But the last time was different.
By 1999, Kenya was into serious difficulties with the IMF, and President Moi was doing his best to stall, to make cosmetic changes, to go just far enough to get the next loan instalment or have the lid taken off the aid jar. Not just the IMF, but that gaggle of sugar daddies known as the “donor countries” were insisting on some real changes. Blah, blah, blah. The telephone system seemed marginally better, and Kenya even had internet connections, which operated at a speed slightly greater than the average carrier pigeon.
On a visit to downtown Nairobi, I walked from a parking lot near the courthouse, up past the Hilton, down Kenyatta Avenue, and back through the government section to Haile Selassie Avenue. This was my old haunt thirty years ago. The street vendors were less aggressive, and the beggars were relatively few. The fundamental change from years past, however, was the complete absence of white faces on the streets. It took me a few minutes to realize it. I passed beggars and loiterers, men in business suits, women dressed to the nines in platform shoes, and others wrapped in colorful kangas. There were, presumably, lawyers and bankers and storekeepers and housewives and lady diplomats, and every single one was black. Once I realized this, I began consciously to look for white faces, or brown ones. In the old days, Nairobi was a multiracial town. Now it was a black city in a black country. It was at that moment I fully realized, and maybe acknowledged, that the old Kenya was dead.
A few days later I took a drive with Joe and Antony Cheffings on a duck-hunting expedition up past Nairobi to what is known as the “rice project,” an expanse of flooded paddies where the duck population ravages the crops and a few local hunters like Joe have special permission to hunt as a form of control shooting. A far cry from shooting on control like J.A. Hunter, clearing Cape buffalo and lions from prospective farmland, but it is hunting on control nonetheless. On the entire drive up to the rice project, all day driving around, and then back into Nairobi and on to Langata, I saw not one other white face driving a car. Kenya is truly a black country now, fundamentally different than it was in Ruark’s day. The old “white highlands” area, with Delamere’s Equator Ranch, is mostly black-owned farms and plantations now. The white population, which numbered about 60,000 in 1963, is today no more than 20,000. That is the estimate, at least; no one knows for certain because there is no census breakdown by race.
When I was there in early 1999, the mostly white suburb of Langata had just won a court battle with the city of Nairobi. Langata had, in effect, seceded. Its citizens — people like Joe Cheffings and other former professional hunters, including Tony Archer and, until his death, John Sutton — live in houses set well in from the road, screened by high hedges. The security is not obvious, but it is substantial. They have (and pay for) their own security force, which camps out on a corner of Cheffings’s property. They run their own waterworks. In effect, they operate as an independent town and saw no reason to pay taxes to Nairobi for services they did not receive. The battle went up the judicial chain to the high courts, which ruled in favor of Langata. Karen, the other favorite suburb that includes a large proportion of wealthy black people, is in a similar situation.
In Langata, the residents have a security system of short-wave radios and check in with each other on a nightly basis. Across a valley is a black community. In South Africa it would be called a township. Here it is a suburb. In the evening you can hear the deep throbbing bass of the ghetto blasters that pervade the place, and occasionally night-time intruders rouse Langata’s guard dogs. Doors are routinely chained shut and a late-night alert brings the hired guns running with their dogs. The crime is mostly economic — smash-and-grab robberies as opposed to murders and muggings — but the residents’ precautions and reactions are strangely reminiscent of the Mau Mau Emergency. The sea-change in the life of Kenya Colony that took place in October, 1952, has never really relaxed its grip. Joe Cheffings is one of the few who still own firearms. He was allowed to keep them when the police conducted their sweep after hunting was banned, in which all hunting rifles were confiscated and either destroyed or shipped out of the country. “I told them these were not for hunting, they were for self-defense,” Joe told me. It is a bizarre twist on gun-control arguments in other countries, where some sort of sporting purpose is the one defense of a particular gun. At any rate, while Kenya does not have the routine bloodshed that characterizes crime in South Africa today, it is still a fearful society by European or American standards.
The simple truth is that the Kenya Ruark knew no longer exists. The country has not merely moved along, it has been transformed. Today, tourism is a major industry, but the United Nations is an even bigger industry. Since 1963, Nairobi has become the center for several U.N. agencies, who pour money into the local economy and provide thousands of jobs. Nairobi is no more the hunting capital of old than modern-day Dallas is a cowtown.
***
For most hunters May, 1976, was a turning point in the history of Africa. That is the date when Kenya bowed to the demands of international animal-welfare groups and outlawed big game hunting. At a stroke, the traditional safari industry was crippled; Kenya, “the cradle of safari,” was no longer the hunting capital of Africa.
Since that time, Safari Club International, among others, has worked to persuade Kenya to reverse the decision. While Kenya has periodically seemed to be on the brink of restoring big game hunting, for a variety of reasons it has never happened, and is now less likely than ever, as we shall see. May, 1976, was certainly a turning point, and it can be argued that it was the historical low for hunting in Africa, but in some ways it was actually a blessing for hunters — certainly more so than for the game animals it was intended to protect.
What is sometimes forgotten is that Tanzania had already closed hunting and showed no signs of reopening. Since Tanzania was then, and is now, the greatest storehouse of game on the continent in terms of wild conditions and number of species, its closure in 1974 was a considerably greater blow. And while Kenya was still the spot to hunt certain animals peculiar to the region, such as bongo in the Aberdares, it was not as significant a hunting area as its neighbor to the south. Tanzania closed hunting ostensibly as an anti-poaching measure, although part of the motivation was that hunters and hunting were viewed as colonial relics that had no place in a modern socialist state. Tanzania reopened hunting in 1984 because it found poaching actually increased without regulated hunting and a well-trained, well-funded game department. As well, Tanzania realized its experiment in socialism was failing miserably. The country was counted regularly among the very poorest in the world, and there was a huge pot of hard currency to be made from big game safaris.
Tanzania stands alone in one respect, which is the dedication and imagination it has brought to the art of squeezing every last dollar out of visiting sportsmen. A hunter on a flight out of Kilimanjaro Airport has every right to feel like a well-wrung sponge. From bribes to taxes on firearms and even, at one time, on individual rounds of ammunition, to “conservation surcharges” and trophy fees on any creature that can walk, crawl, slither, or fly, Tanzania has done its best to take much of the fun out of safari, even while providing the greatest hunting on the continent. That hunters continue to flock to Tanzania in spite of this legalized shakedown is testimony to the quality of the hunting and the animals to be found there.
In 1963, when Kenya achieved independence, there was a general exodus of professional hunters, many of whom settled in southern Africa. A group led by Tony Henley and Harry Selby went to Botswana and helped turn the Okavango Delta and the Kalahari Desert into southern Africa’s answer to the Serengeti. In the mid-1970s, with Tanzania and Kenya both closed, there was another movement out of East Africa, as professionals looked for new fields to hunt. With no chance of taking a bongo in Kenya, for example, attention turned first to the Sudan and Central African Republic, and in later years to even more remote areas where the western bongo can be found, such as Congo Brazzaville and Cameroon.
All these developments pale, however, in comparison to what has happened in South Africa since 1965, the year Robert Ruark died and also the period when James Mellon was hunting all over Africa, compiling material for his classic, African Hunter. In game terms, the Republic of South Africa was a wasteland at that time, although this was hardly a recent development. During the fifty years from the time William Cornwallis Harris first hunted there and wrote The Wild Sports of Southern Africa, until the second Boer War in 1899, the game of southern Africa had been systematically exterminated. The vast migrating herds of springbok were virtually wiped out; several animals, including the blaubok and the quagga, became extinct. Elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffes, and lions were unheard of in the provinces of South Africa (Cape Province, Orange Free State, Natal, and Transvaal) after 1900. The Afrikaners are farmers, who traditionally viewed wild animals as predators to be destroyed, or as a source of meat to be killed at will to feed the hands, or as competition for their grazing herds which must be eradicated. The decimation of the game in southern Africa during the last decades of the nineteenth century rivalled the despoiling of the American West, and was the main factor that led to the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa. This international convention was signed in London in 1900 by representatives of Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Congo (which was then ruled by Belgium).
While parks were established in South Africa, notably Kruger National Park, to provide a sanctuary for the remaining game, land that had been given over to agriculture remained largely devoid of game animals right up until 1965. When Mellon hunted there, you could take peculiar species like the black wildebeest or blesbok on some ranches whose owners looked upon them more kindly than most, but that was about the extent of big game hunting in South Africa. Over the next thirty-five years, however, there was a radical change. South Africans discovered game ranching. Kruger became the greatest concentration of animals anywhere on the continent, bursting at the seams with everything from elephants on down. Under South African law, a landowner owns the animals and birds on his property, and there is virtually no public land where you can hunt for free. Farmers discovered that a herd of blesbok could be a valuable source of income, and the game departments took to auctioning breeding stock of many different species from the surplus animals that needed to be culled in the parks. Rather than going in and shooting a few hundred and giving the meat away, they began trapping the animals and auctioning them. Pretty soon, the sight of herds of blesbok on pasture land in the Free State was as common as pronghorns in Wyoming — and for many of the same reasons.
Johannesburg became a gateway to hunting, not only in South Africa but to countries like Botswana, where lions and Cape buffalo were staple game animals, and Zimbabwe, which has a mix of both ranches like South Africa and wild tribal areas like Botswana.
Late in his life, Robert Ruark made the somewhat rueful claim to be the father of the modern safari industry, and there is no doubt his influence was considerable. Partly because of his writings, more and more Americans wanted to hunt in Africa, which meant there was more money to be had, which led to the growth of safari industries in a far wider variety of countries than ever before. Ruark was one of the very first Americans to hunt in Mozambique; although that colony ceased to be a viable destination soon afterward because of post-colonial civil wars and insurrections, it still has great potential. Today, with a surprisingly good government in Maputu (formerly Lourenco Marques), Mozambique is starting to open up to hunters again.
The key to all this change is hard currency. The American dollar is the single most important factor in preserving hunting in Africa. Tourism is one of the greatest global industries, and hunters are really just well-heeled tourists. Unlike the average sight-seer, however, if there is good hunting to be found, hunters will visit countries that otherwise have little to offer in the way of attractions or amenities. Again, Tanzania is a perfect example: While it has a few scenic areas like Kilimanjaro and the Ngorongoro Crater, which draw the zebra-striped minibuses, much of the country is as drab, remote, and unscenic as Africa gets. Yet hunters flock to areas like the Selous Reserve in the south because it is a treasure trove of game.
A second factor is the realization that while foreigners may view game conservation and preservation as laudable goals in themselves, local people who are eking out a living on a meagre plot of land, having their goats killed by leopards or their crops trampled by elephants, view wildlife decidedly differently. While laws against poaching are useful, and an influx of funds from international animal-welfare groups can play a role as well, the key to providing real protection for animals lies in making them an economic asset to the people in their immediate area. Zimbabwe, with its Campfire Program, has been a leader in this. The principle is no different than giving a South African farmer an economic reason to tolerate, or foster, herds of blesbok on land that otherwise might support cattle.
An interesting object lesson occurred in the 1970s when the U.S. Congress decided in its wisdom to do its bit to protect leopards. The importation of leopard skins was prohibited. At the time, leopards may have been threatened in a few specific areas, but they were never an endangered species. They are intelligent animals — wary, and capable of living in close proximity to man without even being detected, much less eradicated. At any rate, thanks to Congress, they became a non-game animal. That meant they had no commercial value in countries like Tanzania and Zambia. Since the locals could not realize anything from leopards as trophies, they were declared vermin in many areas, and the natives embarked on programs of trapping and poisoning them, just to keep the numbers down. A measure that was intended to protect the animals in fact put them in serious danger.
Two animals that became wildlife symbols during the 1980s were the elephant and the black rhinoceros. Both were poached relentlessly, the rhino for its horn, which is made into ceremonial dagger handles in Arab countries and ground up into aphrodisiac powder in the Far East, and the elephant for its ivory tusks. At one point, black rhino numbers dropped to about 2,500 in total. While elephant numbers never declined to anywhere near those levels, and elephants as a species have never been endangered, the commercial trade in ivory became an international cause célèbre. In Kenya, the wife of Jomo Kenyatta and other high-level government people were implicated in an ivory-smuggling ring, in which aircraft of the state airline were used to transport the ivory out of the country. A ban on commercial ivory sales in the 1990s was instrumental in reducing the trade to a fraction of what it had been. Elephant numbers have stabilized in East Africa. Today, you can legally hunt elephant in several different countries. Tanzania is the foremost elephanthunting country, but Botswana reopened elephant hunting in 1996 after more than a decade, because elephant numbers in the Okavango and other areas were outstripping the ability of the land to support them.
The various aspects of elephant conservation are too complex to discuss at length here. The point is, at one time in the 1970s it appeared elephant numbers were irreversibly declining, and that recreational hunting would soon be a thing of the past; yet today elephant hunting is becoming more widespread, not less, even though it is hideously expensive everywhere. The cost is not the point, however; the availability and long-term viability is.
Ironically, while the economic and conservation benefits of big game hunting are being at least recognized (if not actively embraced) elsewhere, one country that is highly unlikely ever to do so is Kenya — but not for the obvious reasons. Kenya was targeted by international animal-welfare groups in the 1970s because it was a very high-profile country internationally. An obscure state like Tanzania could close hunting and few would notice, but if Kenya closed hunting it would give the international anti-hunting movement a burst of publicity and a significant boost. Millions of dollars went into the campaign, and promises were made that if Kenya put an end to hunting, these groups — and some donor countries were included — would move heaven and earth to ensure that the financial shortfall would be made up by so-called non-consumptive tourism. As well, there was outright bribery. So hunting was closed.
Since then, pro-hunting groups have tried to have it reopened. At times, especially when Kenya’s economy has been at its rockiest, they have appeared to be on the verge of succeeding. But it never actually materializes. Partly this is due to Kenya’s fear of offending both the animal welfare groups and donor countries they see as being largely anti-hunting, but there is more to it than simply fear of reprisals. Joe Cheffings, the ex-professional hunter who ran a very successful photo-safari operation after hunting was closed, is not optimistic that hunting ever will return. More surprising, however, is the fact that he is quite sure he does not want it to return.
The reasons for the first view are that Kenya has simply moved past the hunting stage in its development. Hunting is no longer part of its culture. Mention hunting to the average black Kenyan and you receive a blank stare. “We know that the subject has come up in cabinet meetings,” Cheffings told me, “and it is always turned down. Quite frankly, the idea of a bunch of guys running around the country with guns and short-wave radios frightens them.” Economically, he estimates, big game hunting would be worth no more than forty or fifty million dollars a year — about one tenth or less what the country realizes from conventional tourism. Overall, Cheffings sees no economic advantage that could outweigh the possible negative effects. More than that, though, Cheffings is not sure that big game hunting, the way it is done today, is good or right or desirable. And certainly it is nothing he would work toward.
“A few years ago I did one last safari in Tanzania, working on contract,” he told me. “I won’t mention the professional hunter’s name. I arrived in camp and was met by a South African hunter who looked like a young Harry Selby, right out of central casting. We were talking about lion hunting, and he began to tell me how they did it — running the lions down with safari cars, and shooting them from the back of the vehicle. He saw nothing wrong with it. It is sickening to me to see what goes on today. If that is big game hunting, then we are better off without it.”
***
Hunting is one of the oldest of human activities, and one of the most fundamental. It has the power to bring out the very best in a person, and also the very worst. In 1965, in his finest overview piece on hunting, “Far-Out Safari,” Robert Ruark talked about many of the questionable aspects of hunting existing even then, from trophy hunters obsessed with record books who will stop at nothing to get a record head, to cowardly or lazy clients who have their professionals kill their animals for them, to people who just like to kill, to those who become so competitive that they ruin the safari for themselves and everyone around them. None of these is a recent development, however. Questions of ethical behavior in Africa go back to the last century, when recreational hunting in its modern sense first began. There have been game hogs and murderers of animals from the beginning. And almost from the first time airplanes and cars became available, they have been used in hunting and have given rise to debates about where convenience ends and unethical behavior begins.
The advent of the hunting car spelled the end of the old foot safaris with long lines of porters, but cars also opened up country that would never have been accessible otherwise and made safaris affordable for hunters of average means. Even such icons of hunting as Denys Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen used aircraft to locate and evaluate game, often flown by their friend and mutual mistress, Beryl Markham. Rules were eventually formulated, outlawing some of these practices and regulating others. In East Africa, it became an iron law that you could not shoot unless the safari car was several hundred yards away from where you shot. These rules of fair chase found their way into literature: “No one shot from cars,” Robert Wilson tells Margot Macomber coldly in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and the ethical aspects of hunting cars became part of Hemingway’s complex plot. Those of us who grew up reading this and other stories from East Africa’s golden age find it difficult under any circumstances to shoot from a vehicle, although it is now standard practice from Texas to Zimbabwe.
Speaking of Margot Macomber, Ruark wrote at some length about women on safari and the good and bad effects they had — mostly bad. Some involved young wives of rich older men making a play for the handsome young professional hunter. This has been a Hollywood staple for decades. There is also the necessity for the aforementioned older men to go to extraordinary lengths to impress their young wives. Although safaris today are more egalitarian and accessible than they have ever been, there is still a considerable portion of the industry that is geared to very wealthy people, and both safaris and record heads are viewed as status symbols in some circles. When he was shooting editor of Outdoor Life, Jack O’Connor wrote about receiving letters from comely young things offering to provide all sorts of personal services if he would take them on his next safari. A combination of Rock Hudson and big safari moons in the velvety African sky tend to bring out that aspect of womanhood.
There are a few serious female hunters around — women who sincerely like hunting and respect the animals. But there are more, it seems, of the variety that feel they can impress Daddy or their ex-husband or otherwise prove themselves equal to men by hunting and taking bigger heads, or more heads. You combine this with a pair of batting eyelashes and a voice you could use for pie filling, crawling all over total strangers at the Safari Club Convention to get a free hunting trip, and you realize that the more things change in some ways, the more they remain the same in others.
Safari Club International has done more than any other organization to change international hunting. Since its founding in 1969, SCI has become a major force in game conservation around the world, and its annual convention is a highlight of the hunting year. It can be argued equally, however, that its record book and the awards it gives to its members make them focus on a few inches of horn — and forget that, in hunting, what you get is not nearly so important as how you get it. For both men and women, big game hunting is a way of proving something. The problem is, the only person worth proving anything to is yourself.
***
In October, 1971, I walked out of a small house on the outskirts of the Ugandan town of Kasese, crossed through some long grass to the foot of a steep hill, and began to climb. It was a bright, clear morning. The sky was deep blue, the clouds were fluffy and far away, the plain stretched away to the southeast, and the hill was like a wall before my eyes, never changing as I slowly planted one foot in front of the other and the plain fell away behind me.
Every so often I would look back down. At first I could see each house clearly, with its windows and bougainvillea and banana trees. Then the houses became neat white boxes and the lots fell into place, forming a patchwork of gardens. As I got higher, the gardens became a mozaic — an indication of human life without the complications. And of course, the higher I got, the farther out I could see, to where smoke from distant fires gathered in a haze on the horizon, and the breeze carried the faint whiff of burning that, in Africa, is never far away.
I sat down under a small acacia that clung to the hillside and looked out over the plain for a long, long time, enjoying the smell of smoke without the crackling desecration, the neat shambas without the squalor, the beckoning distance that promises secret things, if you could only ever get there. That morning is as close as I will ever get to seeing Africa the way Robert Ruark saw it. But as long as there are tall hills and Ruark’s books, it is a view of Africa that will always exist.