Angola’s story is told via a noble beast in a troubled land

A Certain Curve of Horn

The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola

John Frederick Walker

Atlantic Monthly Press: 478 pp., $26

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One of a writer’s hardest tasks is introducing his readers to a distant country few of them have ever seen and to a culture they have scarcely heard of. It is an assignment more often attempted than successfully completed. John Frederick Walker, a freelance writer, succeeds in bringing the southwestern African country of Angola to wretched life in “A Certain Curve of Horn.”

Walker manages this by focusing on a beautiful antelope with majestic horns that inhabits part of Angola and may or may not be a separate species. With this handsome animal as the central point of reference, Walker recounts many things in this book: the place, if any, of the giant sable antelope in the traditional lives of the Angolan natives; the 400-year domination of the Portuguese colonizers over the country; the intrusion over the last century of various Europeans and Americans to hunt for the animal; and the descent of the already miserable colony into vicious civil war since independence in 1975.

The story of Angola is sad. Heedless Portuguese explorers stumbled upon its mixture of linguistic and ethnic groups in the 15th century and quickly set about exploiting its resources for themselves and its people as slaves to be kept for their own use or sold to others. In one form or another slavery in Angola persisted until the 20th century. As imperialists in Africa the Portuguese were not quite as bad, perhaps, as the Belgians, but certainly less thoughtful of their subjects than the British or French.

When it arrived, independence came abruptly, though various groups had struggled for it since the 1960s. The people of Angola were not prepared, and when civil war fell upon them it was with the furies of the distant Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States, each with their surrogates -- the Cubans for the Soviet Union, and the South Africans and the forces of Jonas Savimbi for the United States -- contended with each other for mastery.

In the end, neither prevailed: The Cubans went home, as did the South Africans; Savimbi, abandoned by his American patrons, was hunted down and killed, and Angola, diminished by about 1 million dead in the war, was left to its own devices. Walker tells this story of humans in Angola steadily and well. He sensibly relies on the recognized experts, notably Gerald J. Bender of Caltech, whose “Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality” is a standard account.

The antelope is more elusive than homo sapiens, but it is lovelier. Related to other African antelopes, the giant sable was long thought to be a separate subspecies because of the sable (black) coloring on the face and the unusually long, curved horns on the male bulls. Some of these back-curving horns were more than 5 feet long.

Walker recounts the several expeditions by hunters and collectors for museums who wanted to preserve remains of the great beasts to adorn the walls of their homes or the African exhibits of their favorite institutions. There is, for instance, a fine exhibit of the giant sable, shot by Arthur Vernay in 1925, in a diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In these stories Walker brings to life a time now largely past, when rich hunters roamed the world looking for trophies. He does point out that it was widely believed that the great game of Africa was in danger of extinction, and he is not unsympathetic to the notion that shooting examples of this great game, to be installed in museums, was in the interest of human knowledge.

The end of “A Certain Curve of Horn,” however, is a disappointment. Walker spends too much time on his unavailing efforts to get into Angola’s backcountry to see some giant sables for himself. The frustrations he recounts of traveling in a Third World country are all too familiar to anyone who has tried it. In general, though, Walker’s tale of troubled Angola and its noble beast is worth a look.