Beast Is Bureaucracy : For Africa’s Hunters, It’s a New Battle

Bunny Allen raised his tanned forearm in front of him, level with his eyes and parallel to the ground.

“He sank his teeth in right along there,” he said, tracing a hairline scar along his arm. “That leopard’s face was as close to mine as mine is to yours. And all I could think of at that very moment was what beautiful eyes he had--beautiful amber eyes.”

As all such hunters’ yarns must, this one ends with Allen’s gun bearer blowing the animal off him with a burst of gunfire and the hunter eventually mounting the leopard’s incisors on the gold chain that still hangs around his neck.

No Leopard for Aly Khan

Allen, 83, who long ago retired to this steamy oceanfront Muslim town, does not mind luxuriating in the romantic heyday of the East African white hunters, days when he guided the likes of Prince Aly Khan, then married to actress Rita Hayworth. (“Yes, Aly Khan. . . . He failed to get a leopard.”)

But it is not all romance, particularly today, when the remaining Great White Hunters in Kenya and Tanzania are fighting their grimmest battles not with game in the bush, but with bureaucrats, politicians and poachers. At issue is the right to hunt a territory that the spread of agriculture, the fighting of wars and the poaching of game are rapidly shrinking to almost nothing.

“This is a dying profession because there are fewer places to go,” said Robin Hurt, 43, a leading hunter who earned his professional license 25 years ago under apprenticeship rules that required the approval of eight of the 57 professional hunters in the region. “We’ve lived through three hunting bans, in Tanzania, Zaire and Kenya, and we’ve had to leave Sudan because of the civil war there.”

Half of Tourist Income

The fragility of the hunting business today is exemplified by what Hurt and his colleagues have gone through in Tanzania, a nominally socialist country grappling with the paradox of relying on white-run capitalist safari companies for as much as half of its $6 million a year in tourism income.

Within the last month, the Kenya-based hunters preparing for the safari season beginning July 1 in Tanzania were abruptly ordered to recall their crucial advance parties from their bush camps while the Tanzanian authorities “reviewed” their permits. Hurt has since spent 10 fruitless days jawboning officials in Dar es Salaam, the capital.

“Blokes like Robin have to make a hell of a gamble,” said Allan Earnshaw, vice chairman of Ker & Downey, which specializes in much less politically sensitive photo safaris. Ker & Downey is a sister firm of Hurt’s, since both are now owned by a Houston travel company, Safari South.

Nonetheless, hunters like Hurt, Allen and dozens of others still living in the hills around Nairobi consider themselves heirs to Africa’s most romantic tradition.

It is not surprising that to many Americans and Europeans the Great White Hunter largely defines the African bush. For decades the mystique has been burnished on page and screen. Not least among the literature is “Out of Africa,” the Kenya memoirs of writer Karen Blixen, whose nom de plume was Isak Dinesen. She was the wife of one of the most renowned white hunters and the lover of another.

The professional hunters rely on that mystique to bring them business. To a man, they repeat as a credo that they never advertise, but rely for business on worldwide word-of-mouth.

Yet what never changes is the harsh competitiveness of a business in which one’s success has never been dependent chiefly on such romantic qualities as marksmanship and courage.

Marksmanship a ‘Small Matter’

“Marksmanship was necessary but it was a small matter,” said Terry Mathews, a veteran who gave up hunting in favor of sculpting wildlife after a client took out his eye with an errant shot in 1968. A black patch on his left eye, Mathews has spent much of the last 12 weeks lying immobilized in his spacious yard, hoping to speed the mending of a leg devastated in an accident during a television shoot.

“You had to be a damn good mechanic for the vehicles, the refrigerator, the radio-telephones you had with you,” Mathews said. “You had a pretty comprehensive medical kit, with a lot of dangerous drugs. And you had to be a bit of a psychologist, I guess. You never knew whether you were going to be stitching someone’s leg up or consoling him for missing something.”

Most of the hunters describe logistics as the indispensable skill.

Bunny Allen, recalling the combination that made the legendary partnership of his friends Bror Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton (those men from Dinesen’s life) so successful, remarks: “Finch Hatton was a better hunter and tracker than Blixen, but Blixen was a much better organizer. Bror would take care of all the supplies--and in those days it was much more difficult than now.”

Big on Fair Play

Part of the hunters’ mystique was their carefully cultivated image of fair play.

There were and are firm rules. Some were aimed at maintaining the resource: You took only mature male animals, not the young or females.

Some were a combination of sporting manners and efforts to keep hunts from becoming blood baths: “You weren’t allowed to bring a car within 600 yards of an animal and you had to be more than 200 yards from your car,” said Mathews. “That was to stop people driving around the countryside and shooting what they saw.”

Still others appeared to be humanitarian but were just as much aimed at self-preservation. For example, hunters never allow wounded game to get away because, they agree, there is no more dangerous game, ferocious and unpredictable, than a wounded animal.

“Most professional hunters,” said Hurt, “love the animal they’re hunting. The actual kill is not the most important thing. The kind of client we don’t want is the one with a shopping list.”

Clientele Changed

The clients they valued were those who came back season after season, spreading the word in the interim. Before World War II, they say, the clientele was chiefly the crowned heads of Europe. After the war they found a new clientele among the monied monarchy of America, for who else could afford to spend as much as two months living and hunting in the bush?

People around Nairobi still envy the unique relationship the hunters had with this elite. It was Finch Hatton who had the spine to tell the future Duke of Windsor, during a famous safari in 1928, that he could not guarantee him a kill because “Africa does not wear her heart on her sleeve--not even for a king’s son.”

“The hunters were like court jesters to the crowned heads of Europe before the war,” said one former game warden who counts many of them among his friends. “They could say things to them that no one else would think of uttering.”

Because the movies periodically revive an Africa vogue--the latest one is today’s, with “Out of Africa” having been filmed in Kenya and no fewer than three movies shot of the life of African aviator Beryl Markham--most of the hunters also came to know the royalty of Hollywood.

Memories of Hollywood

Allen managed the film set of “Mogambo,” a Clark Gable-Grace Kelly vehicle, and Mathews took out the crew of “Safari,” starring Victor Mature.

“The directors would say, ‘I want this tree moved over there,’ ” recalled Mathews. “The first thing you would do is try to talk them out of it.”

But, again, those were the old days. Today the clientele is drawn from the boards of major corporations, and the longest safari might be three weeks. “They’re directors and they have to get back for their monthly meetings,” explained Mathews.

And there is no doubt that ever since East Africa gained independence in the 1960s, the hunters have occupied an increasingly delicate position.

As individuals, almost all are walking reminders of the white colonial tradition. They are the sons of European settlers or colonial wardens and commissioners who learned to hunt on colonial estates in Kenya, Uganda or Tanganyika (now Tanzania). (The entire area around Nairobi was long known as the “White Highlands” because the British administration barred blacks from owning property there.)

Concern Remains

The idea of allowing the hunters to wander about the bush in armed parties still gives pause to the governments of black Africa.

“By and large, hunting is a white-operated business and your clients are largely rich white people,” said Earnshaw of Ker & Downey. “When you’re up in remote areas, using light aircraft on remote airstrips, if there’s any political instability you could be construed as a security risk.”

Photo safari enterprises like Earnshaw’s are less worrisome because almost all conduct their business within the confines of East Africa’s designated game parks.

For most of the hunters still active today, 1976 marked a watershed. That year, the government of Kenya abruptly banned elephant hunting, taking every professional in Nairobi by surprise. Some were at that very moment busy at a safari convention in San Antonio, Tex., signing up customers.

A Number of Hunters Retired

A number of the older men packed it in right then, including Allen, whose sons had long since taken over his firm anyway. “They were no longer working for me; I was working for them, you know.”

Others moved into tourist businesses like photo safaris. But that is scarcely the same thing as hunting.

“The best hunters were not necessarily the best naturalists,” said Earnshaw, “but they made up for it by being brilliant trackers, students of animal behavior or just bloody-minded persistent. To drive people around and stop and look at animals and photograph them--that just doesn’t provide the same excitement.”

The ban on elephant hunting was emblematic of the permanent tension between conservationists and hunters. The government said it took the action because Kenya’s dwindling elephant population had been so heavily poached--ivory prices had reached a historic high--that its future was in doubt.

Effective Influence

The hunting community is unanimous in arguing that it was the most effective anti-poaching influence on the continent. Each hunting party was assigned a block, or parcel of land, on which it had exclusive hunting rights for a season.

“If we saw something going on--found a carcass, for example--we’d go to the game department and sometimes give them transport,” said Mathews.

Many naturalists agree that licensed hunting had an anti-poaching effect--or at least was not the principal villain.

“Personally, I feel that at no time in Kenya or any place else was the majority of poaching ever done by sport hunters,” said Esmond Bradley Martin, a leading Nairobi naturalist and conservationist. “It wasn’t the overseas guys who were out of control.”

Self-Policing

Yet there is some question about how effective the professional hunters were as an informal police force. The hunters agree that their very presence discouraged poaching within their assigned parcels. But many of their native camp help were poachers themselves, a fact of which the hunters could scarcely be ignorant. And as for the nature of their policing, one veteran game warden remarked: “I always ask them how many poachers they ever brought into court. Because in the eight years I was out there, I never saw them haul in a single one.”

Also, although the hunters note accurately that Kenya’s elephant population has plummeted to 20,000 today from 40,000 to 50,000 in 1977--almost all due to poaching--others point out that the population had started its sharp decline long before organized hunting was banned: In 1973, the population was 165,000.

The governing factor, say some experts, was not the presence or absence of professional hunters but the price of ivory, which rose to about $45 a pound in 1986 from $3.50 a pound in 1970.

In some areas, poachers today are so heavily armed and so well equipped that any hunting party is overmatched anyway. Hurt said that on a recent hunt in the Central African Republic, his camp was approached by a cadre of about 50 poachers armed with machine guns.

“They were shooting up whole herds,” he said. “You could smell the carcasses for miles.”