White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris
A little over 100 years ago, East Africa was terra incognita to most whites: a land largely unmapped, sparsely settled by Europeans, and teeming with wildlife--from elephants to wildebeest, bongos to rhinos, and all manner of scarifying beasts in between. It was the hunter-adventurer's paradise, and by the early 20th century, a small, lionhearted clan of explorers and big-game hunters began leading safaris there for money. They became the legendary White Hunters of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, men who led manifold adventurers--including royalty, film stars, writers, and millionaires--in pursuit of the world's biggest, most dangerous, and most sought-after game.White Huntersis a nostalgic and densely-packed history of these men and their adventures, from the turn of the century until the 1970s when politics, a growing population, civil strife, and concern about species destruction intervened. Brian Herne has written a virtual and anecdotal Who's Who of White Hunters, crammed with the details of hundreds of hunts and the dozens of men who led them.This is no book for the faint-hearted or the politically correct. Despite Herne's insistence that his heroes were the first true conservationists,White Huntersis all about the testosterone-enhanced glory of killing big, beautiful things: "Clary fired, dropping his quarry with a side brain shot. The record-class tusks weighed 159 and 143 pounds each, a gigantic elephant...." On the other hand, a staggering number of hunters died in pursuit of their quarry--mauled, eviscerated, or impaled on the tusks of furious, vengeful beasts.Not so long ago lions wandered the streets of Nairobi. The politics of big-game hunting aside, the White Hunters' East Africa--wild, mysterious, unspoiled--is vanishing, and Herne has painstakingly documented an era that most readers will likely never know.--Svenja Soldovieri