THE EMPIRE and AFRICAN WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

I was very, very fortunate, both in being born into an age before much of the harm done to Britain and the world had yet become apparent, and in being born into the British Empire in Africa.

I grew up amidst wondrous natural beauty, in a society secure within itself, full of dynamism and energy, and immensely proud of its British heritage. Many of us were conscious that we had a mission in Africa, a mission that we were amply fulfilling: a mission to maintain peace and stability and security for the native peoples, so that their lives could be materially improved. A mission also to sustain and maintain the great wilderness regions that were within reach even of the city dwellers of Nairobi, or Salisbury, or Johannesburg, or Durban, and so across Africa, wherever the British ruled. These superb wilderness regions, we believed, were held by us in trust for future generations. It was a trust we took very seriously.

Kenya’s national parks, unlike those of South Africa, embraced the native tribes who were resident within them. The Maasai were not cleared from Maasai Mara national park. They continued to herd their cattle within the confines of the national park. We recognized that Mankind had lived here for millennia, and he too had a right to this territory. But we protected the flora and fauna from wanton pillage, from poaching, from the attentions of ivory and rhino horn poachers, eager to sell on the product to middlemen who passed it up the line, and so on, until the ivory and rhino horn eventually found its way to its ultimate destination, China. There was, there is, also a market for rhino horn in Arabia, where daggers with rhino horn hilts are much prized as status symbols.

When Britain ruled much of Africa, the wilderness regions flourished, and all that lived and grew therein. 

When I was about five and half years old, one July, my Uncle Jack, a farmer and professional white hunter, organized a safari to Maasai Mara for our two families. White hunters shot only within the limitations imposed by local officials who knew their districts, by District Officers who knew whether the region could sustain a lion shoot, or an elephant shoot. If they thought not, they would not grant the hunter a license to shoot.

Uncle Jack has led safaris for European royalty and American film stars. Ava Gardner had been one of his clients. We left Nairobi in a convoy of three or four Land Rovers: my Mum and Dad, my tiny brother, Uncle Jack and my Aunt Wendy, their two tiny boys, and almost a dozen black servants. We camped about 100 yards from the banks of the Mara River. A total of seven tents, great khaki canvas tents, were raised: one each for the two adult couples, one for the four little boys, a mess tent, a kitchen tent also, and a tent for the staff, and - for this was the British Empire, and though we were now far from civilization, we had brought civilized amenities along with us - a bathroom tent. A canvas bathtub on a tubular steel frame was set up within a tent. When one of us wished to take a bath, we first alerted the bathboy, who heated the water over a khuni (wood) fire, and brought it to the tent in dhebbis (buckets). He then stood to one side while you took your bath - women and men both - and periodically, his gaze averted if you were a lady, he would pour more hot water into the bath for you. When you stepped from the tub, he held out a great white fluffy cotton towel, once again, if you were a lady, his eyes averted. 

Lavatories were a series of three or four shallow pits dug in the rocky ground, then screened by grass and reed matting, gathered from the banks of the Mara River, and woven on the spot by the black staff. There were portable commodes set up with wooden seats atop these pits.

We spent a week or so in Maasai Mara national park, which straddled the border between Kenya and the then Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania).  Hugely rich in fauna, and best known for the annual wildebeest migrations of July, there are about a dozen other antelope species, along with zebra, several hundred bird species, and the Big Five were then plentiful: lions, elephants, rhinos (including many black rhinos), great herds of buffalo, and leopards. We were forbidden, we little boys, from venturing unaccompanied to the riverbanks, for there were hippopotami, and Nile crocodiles in the river. 

Many times I was to visit family farms and ranches in the colony, along with my Grandfather’s holding near Nakuru, and even as a child I knew how beautiful this land was, how precious its wildlife. But the settler-farmers could be pragmatic about the wildlife when necessary: I remember accompanying my uncle, with my father, to the high fields on Uncle Jack’s farm (the farm was situated 9 000 feet above sea level), to shoot a few buffalo, who were eating the new barley. My uncle shot only one or two beasts, enough to discourage the herd from the barley fields, and the meat went to the family and to the black farm workers. 

I had seen elephants already either side of - and even walking along - the murram main road (laterite earth and gravel) between Nairobi and Mombassa, on our way to our holiday cottage on the coast. 

But this safari was a magic experience: it stands out still in my memory. And it was during this trip that I first saw a Maasai moran (warrior), draped in a short red cotton toga, his body rubbed with red organic dye, his hair woven and plaited and fixed with red clay, so that he was an entirely red man: tall, slim, still as a statue, standing on one leg, one leg crooked across the other at the knee, and supporting himself with a long spear. He was guarding his cattle from lions.

I became familiar as a child with the small wild creatures that could be found not far from the house: monkeys, bushbuck, servals, occasionally a civet cat, and dik-dik (tiny antelopes), along with fantastical insects and enormous millipedes. There were leopards still in the forest, and we little boys did not venture too far beyond the forest fringe. 

My family spent many holidays based at permanent hutted camps in national parks as I was growing up, and when I was a teenager, I began hiking in the mountains that form a spine along the Cape Peninsula, running to the south from Table Mountain. I grew to know and love the huge variety of flora; aromatic scented herbaceous plants, many with small, brightly coloured flowers; and I delighted in the sunbirds, tiny birds like costume jewelry, with long, delicate, curved bills, which flitted from protea bush to protea bush in small flocks, to sip the nectar from the flowers, their iridescent colours gleaming like polished enamel under the hot Cape sun. I laughed at the antics of the troops of baboons I came across, but it was a respectful laughter, for these animals, if treated with too much casual disdain, could be dangerous. 

I grew to know that chain of mountains as well as my own back yard, and I spent much of my free time for many years in those mountains, often alone, but never lonely - for how can a man who loves God and His wondrous Creation, be lonely amidst the splendor and beauty of that creation?

On the Cape Peninsula I spotted whales off the coastline, and seals, and penguin colonies on the shore - Jackass penguins, so called for their braying, jackass racket. I was struck silent by the masses of ‘veygies,’ brilliant flowering succulents in every colour imaginable, close bunched and thickly carpeting the sandy soil near the edge of the beaches.

In later years, I lived and worked in wilderness regions in southern and central Africa, where I would walk out alone when there were no other pressing duties to occupy my time, and spend the day walking in the bush, unarmed but for a short stabbing spear and a bush knife; a floppy bush-hat on my head, shorts, a short sleeved shirt, and open sandals on my bare feet. I learned how to gauge the comings and goings of animals, to know when to give them a wide berth, and when they wouldn’t mind my coming close. Sitting beneath a jackalberry tree on top of a giant termite mound, I once watched a column - many herds combined - of elephants on their bi-annual trek as they crossed the Caprivi Strip, passing by me about 30 yards away. I tried to keep tally of their numbers, but I lost count after three-hundred animals. Mothers, aunties, babies, with the mature bulls as outriders, keeping watch for danger.

Out walking one morning, I spotted in the dry, sandy soil evidence of a dog-like spoor I could not recognize. Following the spoor, I came upon a pack of Cape hunting dogs on the far side of a shallow vlei, the first pack of Cape hunting dogs sighted in that district since the end of the civil war. I gazed with huge pleasure, warmed and humbled by a sense of great privilege, at these dog-like creatures, piebald as ponies from a western movie (thus their name in Latin ‘Lycaon Pictus,’ Painted Wolves).   

To know God is to love the wilderness; to love the wilderness is to love God. 

I am an unapologetic ethno-nationalist (but a wildlife and environmental conservationist also); immensely proud of my British heritage, and grateful to be old enough to have known it before it - and the empire - finally disappeared. We were once masters of a global empire that embraced millions of square miles of wondrous wilderness regions, and districts of immense natural beauty, and we took seriously our duty towards husbanding and safeguarding God’s creation, which we believed we held in trust for generations yet to be born.