OUT OF AFRICA

Not long ago, many years after having first watched it on the big screen, I began watching that iconic movie “Out of Africa” on DVD at home. (The movie, released in 1986, was directed by Sydney Pollack, and starred Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). However, I could not watch more than the first few minutes. As the camera pans across the Kenya savannah, the smoke from the distant steam train just a tiny smudge against the vastness of the landscape, I was surprised to find a few tears trickling down my cheeks. When I consider the overwhelming assault on the planet Earth by humanity, an assault felt particularly in Africa, I must either get angry, or weep.

I am old enough to remember a Kenya not yet so hugely removed in ethos from the period in which that movie was set. When I was a boy, Kenya’s human population stood at only eight million. There were then, in addition to the game reserves, vast tracts of semi-wilderness: tribal lands where man and wild-life co-existed. Today, those regions have become a great deal more crowded with people, under constant pressure from an ever-rising human population, which now stands at forty-five million people. Kenya’s human population has multiplied by over five times during my lifetime. 

In the late 1950s, when I was a boy, there were hundreds of thousands of elephants alive in Kenya. Today there are not much above thirty thousand. As a boy I lived in a country which was home to tens of thousands of rhinos. Today there are not many more than five hundred black rhino left in Kenya, and of the Northern white rhino species, the very last of its representatives died in captivity a few years ago. White rhino are being successfully relocated to Kenya from southern Africa - but the original native (Northern) white rhino species is now extinct.

When I was five or six years old, my uncle, who operated safaris in central and East Africa, took us on safari, in four Land Rovers, to Maasai Mara. We camped in a row of big khaki-coloured army-surplus tents near the Mara River. In one of the tents was a canvas bathtub supported by a tubular steel frame. A camp servant would bring the bather dhebbis (buckets) of water heated in an iron cauldron over a khuni (wood) fire. Another tent served as our dining place: we dined at table and sat in chairs. The camp was lighted by oil lanterns after sundown. There were camp servants to attend to our needs, and to the domestic necessities of the camp. I saw my first Maasai moran (warrior) on that safari. It was during that safari, I think, that the seed was planted in me of a passion for Africa’s wilderness: the seed lay dormant for many years, with only occasional family holidays to the Kruger National Park, or to other national or provincial parks over the years, to keep it alive. However, when I grew up, I was to work in a number of southern Africa’s game reserves and wilderness regions, and to learn much about the regional fauna and flora, and the various regional ecologies, along with acquiring a range of very useful bush-craft skills.

Throughout my childhood, and well into my thirties, Africa still had huge tracts of wilderness left. Those that remain today are under great pressure from human encroachment; their fauna and flora - their very ecologies - threatened as never before in history, by deforestation, by pastoral and agricultural farming, and by poaching on an industrial scale (this latter, largely to meet the wants of the far eastern market).

I have lived long enough to remember an East Africa and South Africa where the combined human population of the two regions was 60 million fewer than it is today, and the wild animal population was literally millions greater than it is today. I can remember viewing game from the car as we drove along the main road between Nairobi and Mombasa - game that included elephants.

I have walked in the bushveld - more often alone, sometimes in company - and seen great herds of buffalo, elephants, and zebra and antelope. (Once, just for joy, I ran as fast as I could towards a group of giraffes, and I laughed to see them loping effortlessly away from me, soon leaving me far behind).

I once sat motionless beneath a jackalberry tree growing atop a giant termite mound, and counted, strung out in a long column (the mature bulls acting as outriders), more than three hundred elephants passing me by, as they made their way on their bi-annual migration between Zambia and Botswana, via the Caprivi Strip.

On foot, unarmed, I have followed family groups of feeding elephants as they browsed the acacias in the scattered woodland, staying as close as I could get without spooking them (or myself). I have set off on foot after a trio of buffalo I knew were in the district: an old fellow (the old, often solitary buffalo bulls were called “mzee” - “old man” - in Kenya), and his two younger askaris (soldiers) who were keeping him company, and when I had tracked them down I crawled to the crest of a large termite mound until I was close enough as I looked down on them to see the fat grey ticks lodged in the creases and folds around the buffalos’ heads and necks. The huge animals never knew I was there.

In an open motor launch on the Shire River (pronounced “Sheereh”) in southern Malawi, I remember the horrified awe I felt as, following our progress upstream, scores of huge crocodiles sunning themselves on the riverbanks slipped quietly into the water, and began swimming silently towards us, each leaving barely a ripple on the calm surface.

I have been walking a narrow game trail in the bush, bare-legged, wearing open sandals on my feet, and only the sudden “ssssss-shss!” of the snake’s hissing has made me spring backwards off my back foot, as I was about to put my right foot down atop a highly venomous puff-adder basking on the warm sandy track.

That is the Africa I loved; that is the Africa I wish to recall when I return there in my memories. For I would gain no joy from returning to Africa in actuality; not today. An Africa groaning beneath a vast, rapidly expanding human population; an Africa where every year sees the further advance of de-forestation; every year sees further encroachments upon once wilderness regions; each year witnesses scores fewer elephants left alive to roam free; where even the animal sanctuaries are not safe from dreadful attacks by those who pass for human beings (as was reported some years ago in South Africa, where several rhinos were killed while being cared for in a rhino sanctuary).  

I do not wish to return to an Africa where the true wilderness has shrunk almost to nothing, and where the nearest you can get to it are the game reserves, which are increasingly overburdened by roads, tourists and vehicles. In both Kenya and South Africa, the slums and squatter camps on the peripheries of the big cities and towns mushroom, swallowing up more and more land, drawing in thousands more people, every year.

And in Kenya, the Maasai morani all carry cell phones.

I am an old man. I would rather keep alive my memories now, unspoiled, than ever return to see them snuffed out by the contemporary realities of either Kenya or southern Africa. When I am gone, there will be almost no one left alive in my extended family who can say they knew an Africa that my parents’ and grandparents’ generations would have recognized. I knew a Kenya that still held echoes of the country that Karen Blixen wrote about in “Out of Africa” (Karen Blixen; 1937), the memoir on which the Redford/Streep movie was based.

My Africa is indeed lost. I grew up during the last years of an Africa that Karen Blixen wrote about, and which the movie with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep portrayed. The conditions in which such an Africa could exist, are now altered beyond recovery. But perhaps it is not too late to ensure that when we drive our present consumer-based civilization into extinction (along with the thousands of animal species we have already driven to extinction), Africa, that continent I loved, may recover the sooner.