Prologue

Prologue

I’m often asked, by people whom have never seen Africa, why I have such a fascination with the place. The answer to that question is complicated and not at all clear, even to me.

I was born into a hunting family in southern Michigan, and some of my earliest reading was the hunting magazines to which my grandfather subscribed. Field and Stream, True, Sports Afield, to name a few, and always I was drawn to the articles on Africa. Later in life I would be greatly influenced by the writing of Peter Capstick, and to this day I own several copies of every book he wrote.

Growing up, my home church supported numerous missionaries around the world, and on occasion the church would sponsor a conference of sorts, where all the missionaries who were home at the time would set up booths regarding the country in which they spread the Word. Again, I was drawn to the African displays. I can still remember a small hut built in the church gym, complete with thatch roof and a zebra skin rug on the floor, and I distinctly remember dreaming of living in such a place, pursuing all the dangerous game of the Dark Continent. It was a spectacular fantasy for a lad of 7 or 8.

Then too, Africa is the Cradle of Man, and I have considered that the affinity I feel for All Things African is simply my home, my past, calling to me.

I first laid eyes on her in 1994. Circumstances were such that I was able to book a two week hunt in South Africa during late spring. The 747 left JFK airport on a Thursday evening, and at some point during the flight, I had closed the window shade, wrapped up in the pitifully thin blanket supplied to airlines the world over, and settled into a restless sleep. As I dozed, the great jumbo jet headed east southeast across the Atlantic to the westernmost tip of Africa, made a right turn, and followed along the coastline headed south for Johannesburg. When I awoke the following morning, brilliant sunlight was leaking through the edges of the window shade. I opened the shade slightly and allowed my eyes to adjust to the incredible brightness of the mid-morning sun, and when I could finally focus, I was gazing down at the Great Namib Desert. Africa. Finally. And I had the feeling you get after a long difficult journey, when you walk into the familiar surroundings of your own home, and know that all is again right with the world. I was home. Since that moment I’ve never again questioned my feelings about Africa. I love it, and there is no reason for me to explore why. She affects some people that way, and those who feel as I do need no explanation. Anyone else will most likely not understand it, except if they examine their own lives for the one inexplicable passion they feel that has no logical reason for existing.

I returned in 1995, and after meeting friends at the airport in Johannesburg, spent three days driving north, through South Africa and Zimbabwe, into Zambia, where we chartered a flight from Lusaka into the Luangwa Valley. We spent a week hunting buffalo and puku, and also being hunted by lion, but that’s a story for another day. When the hunt ended, we drove from the Valley back to Lusaka, then south to Harare, west to Victoria Falls, and then back south again, crossing into South Africa at Beitbridge.

I was impressed with Zimbabwe. Mostly what I saw was a deeply green country with high rocky protrusions that weren’t quite mountains, but they weren’t hills either. The roads were well maintained, the travel was easy and the people were friendly. One of my travel companions had been a sales rep for a mining equipment company and had traveled throughout Rhodesia during the long bush war. There had been a curfew during those dark years, and people had to be off the roads by 4:30 in the afternoon, or risk being mistaken for a terrorist. As a consequence, he knew every watering hole, pub, motel, and guest house throughout the length and breadth of Zimbabwe. He educated me with non-stop banter along the way, and I decided I needed to know more about this place.

I returned to Zimbabwe in 1998 for a three week hunt that included elephant, buffalo, leopard, and a variety of plains game. I had hoped to do some sight seeing while there, but the hunting was hard and there wasn’t time available to leave the bush. By then I had succumbed to the urge to own a double rifle, and the trip was partly designed to properly initiate my William Douglass .470 nitro express. The hunt was a resounding success, and by the time I left, Zimbabwe was in my veins. I didn’t know at the time that it would be three more years before I returned, but when I did, it was truly going to be a season of discovery.

In January of 2001 my 23 year police career ended and for the first time in my adult life, my horizons seemed limitless. My children were mostly raised, I had no one to answer to, and could come and go as I pleased. I had no idea what to do with myself.

In February me and a buddy loaded our motorcycles into my truck and headed south, out of the long gray Indiana winter, into the bright sunshine of southern Florida. We spent most of the month touring around the state, eventually riding through the everglades and down to Key West. I wanted to see Hemmingway’s place while we were there, but it was too crowded to get into, so we headed to the beach instead.

There, standing on the Atlantic side, my bare toes in the warm sand, I started to think about Africa. I suppose it was partly the Hemmingway connection, and partly because my friend Dave and I had spent the better part of the past two weeks discussing what on earth two middle aged men could do with the rest of their lives. I knew that the owner of my 1998 safari company was in the States booking hunts for the coming season, and standing there on the beach with my cell phone I began the process of tracking him down. It didn’t take long to find him staying with friends in North Carolina, and with my heart pumping louder than the surf, I asked him if I could come over and work the safari season for room and board. He hesitated briefly, and then said yes. He then asked if I could be there in two weeks. I panicked, knowing that it would take me a little longer than that to close down my life in the States, and I was afraid that he might change his mind if I said no. I told him (rather optimistically) it would be more likely 4 weeks before I could get there. He told me that would be OK, and to stay in contact with the Company Office so we could coordinate arrangements.

It would end up taking me two months to disentangle myself from all the accoutrements and impediments of modern life. My buddy and I spent another three days in Florida, and then loaded up and drove back to Indiana so I could begin the process.

Over the next 8 weeks I ended my apartment lease, cancelled phone and internet and TV services, along with all my basic utilities, put my property into storage, and began to plan what items I needed for an extended stay in the bush.

I agonized over the choice of firearms, which is a consequence of owning too many, I suppose. I eventually settled on my .470 for heavy work, as Dudley, the Company owner, had indicated he would be using me for PAC, or Problem Animal Control work, which usually meant elephants.

For a general purpose rifle I selected a model 70 Winchester super grade in .416 Remington. I judged it a better all around caliber than the .375 H&H, and I wanted to test the theory. It was fitted with a Leupold 2.5X in Leupold detachable rings, and I had an identical scope already fitted in the same rings as a back-up. I had owned the rifle about 6 months, and had shot it enough to know it was extremely accurate, but I had noticed a nagging extraction problem which I didn’t have time to address before leaving. Keeping this rifle in shooting condition would turn out to be a major challenge for me throughout the coming season.

For a scattergun I chose a Stoeger coach gun in 12 ga. Magnum. The gun had dual triggers, 20 inch barrels and patterned full and modified at 25 paces. I had actually carried the gun in my last year as a cop. Strictly unauthorized, of course, but as an old-timer I didn’t really care, and no one else seemed to either. It would be excellent medicine for leopards, and shot fine for the little bit of bird shooting I anticipated. That turned out to be a miscalculation as well, and those short barrels cost me most of the hearing in my left ear. We’ll get to that story a little further down the road.

I owned a couple pair of good binoculars, and enough bush clothes and accessories to equip a medium sized raiding party. I obtained a solar battery charger for my camera and tape recorder batteries, and then began packing it all into a hard gun case and a single duffle bag. I’m quite certain I was over the airline weight limit by a considerable margin, but I actually got through the check-in process without getting the luggage weighed, so I was home free.

I shared one last evening with good friends, had a tearful goodbye with my daughters Angela and Katie, and headed to Africa.

It was a season straight out of a Capstick book. There is an old saying, “Africa wins again”, that is frequently used in exasperation when things aren’t going well. It conveys the feeling, or belief, that we are all barely hanging on to what has been built or is being earned from the land of Africa, and that anytime she pleases Africa will thwart our best efforts just because she can. In Zimbabwe the saying has been modified somewhat to “its Africa, baby”. I was to see it in action more times than I can count. Eventually all Africa hands learn to factor “It” into plans and timetables and even hopes and dreams. You might win, but then again Africa might win instead. It began on my first day in country and continued until the moment my plane left at the end. At first when “It” happens you’ll laugh it off, and then you’ll become irritated to no end, and then angry at your loss of control over events, but eventually, if you love Africa enough to stay, you’ll make peace with it, simply accepting it as part of the cost of being there.

I was to meet some excellent people in those 7 months, both white and black Africans, as well as a few clients who were marvelous bush companions. There were also a few that I wouldn’t care to see, ever again.

I was to become intimately familiar with the problems of running a business in a third world country with an ongoing political crisis that cruelly victimized the very population it claimed to represent. Inflation was beyond control, interest rates for business loans were at 70% per year, and basic food supplies cost most people more than they could earn in a month. One could drive the length or breadth of the country and not find a single petrol station with gas or diesel. Small amounts were getting into the country, but seemed to get channeled directly into the thriving black market. Sitting in queue at what would always turn out to be another empty petrol station, someone would inevitably walk up to your window and offer 5 or 10 liters at 8 or 10 times the legitimate price.

Poaching was rampant. Most of what I was to see appeared to be subsistence poaching, people killing animals simply to survive, but the methods used were brutal, wasteful, and killed many more times the animals than were necessary for survival. During the entire season, without a single exception, every buffalo taken out of our camp had been shot or snared before. The same was true of many of the elephants we took also, and I have a small collection of bullets recovered from these trophies. And there were the commercial poachers, as well, brazen, politically connected, and untouchable. When I first hunted Africa in 1994 I was told in no uncertain terms that poachers were shot on sight. That was a different country, of course, but the attitude seemed prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In just a few short years the situation had changed a complete 180 degrees, and at least where commercial poachers were concerned, none dared interfere.

Elephants were to become almost a daily part of our lives. Scouting them, hunting them, running from them, protecting them from angry, hungry villagers, protecting villagers from angry, hungry elephants. There seemed no end to them. Throw in a couple snakes now and then, a few wounded buffalo, one wounded lion, the occasional brush with what passes for the law in Zimbabwe, and it was quite an adventure, in a place that might not exist much longer.

As I write these words, Zimbabwe may be well in its death throes. The Zanu PF party maintains its brutal grip on the country through any means necessary, with nothing but negative results. AIDS is a crisis that’s beyond control. Called “slow puncture” locally, it killed every single black African I hunted with in 1998, save one skinner, who contracted it while I lived there in 2001. Employed Zimbabwe citizens actually pay a withholding tax on their wages for AIDS, but the money never seems to produce anything for the victims of the disease.

Another result of the current political crisis is mass starvation. Hunger was a problem in 2001, but international relief agencies were still allowed to contribute food in Zimbabwe. No longer. I’m certain that friends I made are starving, or dead, victims of their own government.

Mugabe’s “land reform”, which allegedly rewards black veterans of the bush war which he won, has dismantled generations of commercial farming, ranching and game management that were once some of the finest in the world. Declared by Mugabe to be enemies of the state, their white owners have become the forgotten Africans. They built their businesses and their farms and cattle ranches, they fed and employed the nation, and when the bush war that created Zimbabwe ended they elected to stay and contribute as they always had. It was risky, to be sure, but they had the right to call themselves citizens as much as anyone did. They accepted changes that very few peoples have ever had to endure, and now it seems that it earned them nothing.

Oddly, very few of the so called “war veterans” who occupied white owned farms or game management areas even wanted to be there. I heard from them on numerous occasions that they were ordered to “settle” farms or risk losing their government pensions. Sometimes the threat was directed towards family members. Many of the locations stolen by the government were several kilometers from water, forcing an even harsher existence on these people.

And, many of them were not veterans in any sense. The running joke was that most of them must have been in the Zimbabwe Navy, because they were semen during the bush war.

I fear that Zimbabwe may never recover. The game is being eliminated at a breakneck pace, and decades of careful re-generation of endangered species such as black rhino are being undone in brutal, greedy haste. I’m afraid of what I’m going to see when I go back.

But, it was home for a time, and it was a place where a middle aged man became an 8 year old boy once again, living a dream.

So, gentle reader, sit back, relax, and let me tell you the story. It was a grand time, had in a grand place.

Bruce VanBuskirk

Tucson, AZ

2004