The Changing Face of the African Safari

– by sports afield, over the course of sixty years, safaris have undergone a radical transformation..

Story and photos by Harry Selby Over many years, the word “safari”–that magical word which brings to mind high adventure in the wilds of Africa, immortalized by Theodore Roosevelt, Martin and Osa Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Ruark–has become synonymous with a hunting/photographic expedition involving sportsmen and women from across the world.

A safari in the earliest days of East Africa, prior to the outbreak of World War I, was known as a “foot safari.” It would consist of a group of a hundred or more people, including a number of visiting hunters, one or more professional hunters, local gunbearers, cooks, and skinners, but the majority would be porters who carried loads made up of tents, camping equipment, and food for the entire group. Everyone walked, as horses and donkeys would not survive due to the dreaded disease-carrying tsetse fly infesting most of the hunting areas.

The origin of the safaris I will discuss in this article, however, coincided with the use of motor vehicles on safari sometime in the 1920s. These safaris typically numbered from twelve to twenty people, and they were completely self-sufficient, willing and able to cope with whatever situation might crop up. The professional hunter and his clients rode in a hunting car and a baggage truck followed, carrying everything required to set up camp wherever one chose–staff, fuel, foodstuffs, tentage, medical chest, camping furniture, cooking utensils, and china tableware; later, even refrigerators were provided.

1940s safari

Safari vehicles on the move in Masailand in the 1940s.

The professional hunter was truly the “captain of the ship” and the success of the entire safari, its well-being, and even the lives of the group depended on his decisions. A competent professional hunter was of necessity knowledgeable and a pleasant companion, at times a diplomat, a doctor, and a mechanic; hunting was second nature to him. Furthermore, he required a sound knowledge of the country and the local people, leadership qualities, self-reliance, and the ability to handle a difficult situation, especially when the clients were often men controlling huge business empires and who were used to giving the orders, not taking them.

When a safari left Nairobi for perhaps one or two months in the field, there was no easy way to contact the Nairobi office even in an emergency. If an accident should occur, or a member of the party became ill, recovery would follow in time. If the situation was very serious, one of the small single-engine aircraft stationed in Nairobi would need to be summoned, and even that in itself was no simple matter as in the remote centers where there might be a phone, which sometimes worked, long delays of many hours could be expected. In many cases, a makeshift landing strip would have to be cleared, and then dragged with a large bush attached to the hunting vehicle in order to smooth it sufficiently for an aircraft to land.

For urgent incoming messages, safaris relied on an arrangement with the local Nairobi broadcasting station that after the nine o’clock evening news an urgent message could be transmitted to a safari in the field. An announcement prior to the news broadcast advised that there would be a message for a certain group or individual, resulting in a very tense twenty minutes of news while the group waited for the message, which usually was not good, and then the frustration of being unable to reply to it.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, two-way HF radios became available and made a tremendous difference to the isolated safari in the field; in fact, their arrival on the scene could be considered one of the two fundamental landmarks in the history of safari, together with the advent of the four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Mobile Safari

As all traveling was by vehicle, it could take three days of hard driving to reach the intended hunting grounds in southern Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Western Uganda, or the Southern Sudan from Nairobi, but it would be interesting, seeing colorful people from various tribes such as the Masai, Samburu, and the Dinka; extinct volcanoes; snow-capped mountains; beautiful lakes; forests of huge baobabs; and historical sites such as the compound shared by Livingstone and Stanley near Tabora. If the route should cross the Serengeti after skirting the rim of wildlife-rich Ngorongoro Crater, one would see, if the annual migration was in full swing, unbelievable numbers of wildebeest, zebra, antelopes of various species, and gazelles on the move, followed by prides of lions and other predators.

On long trips, the hunting party would bivouac beside the road in order to get going again early the next morning, and, amazingly, a very acceptable meal would be forthcoming from the cook within a couple of hours of having halted for the night. There would be a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee the following morning, before the safari got under way again.

The safari staff usually rode atop the loaded baggage truck.

Eventually, on reaching the hunting area, the camp would be erected by experienced hands and made habitable in a matter of hours. In this way, it was possible to move very freely and rapidly from area to area, especially as there were no concessions in existence, or blocks to be booked, and quotas were unheard of. Hunting was lawful anywhere so long as the area was not a game reserve, national park, or private land. If the safari moved into an area and found it was disappointing, it pulled up stakes and moved on.

The number of animals allowed on each hunter’s license was overly generous, having been formulated at a time when the early foot safari would require meat for eighty to 100 people over several months. For example: twelve buffalo, twenty zebra, twenty wildebeest, twenty kongoni, four lions, unlimited leopards, and equally generous numbers of all other species. Elephant and rhino required a special license even then, as the elephant ivory and rhino horn could be sold.

The complacent colonial government controlled from London took a long time to initiate a reappraisal of the entire licensing system, and that didn’t happen until some years after World War II. It often required tact and a firm hand on the part of the professional hunter to prevent abuse by trigger-happy individuals.

In those early days, the time factor was not as important as it is today. Safaris often lasted for two months or possibly three. I would estimate that a third of the entire safari would be spent traveling from one hunting area to another, and many hours would be spent getting the heavily laden vehicles freed from the clutches of either tenacious mud or heavy sand.

Remember, too, that safaris did not have four-wheel-drive vehicles, so a lot of hunting was done on foot, which took time and was hard work. It was generally agreed that 100 miles, plus or minus, would be walked for every elephant taken with tusks of 90 pounds or more. I remember spending a whole week at Kondoa Irangi in Tanganyika clambering up and down steep, rocky hills until a kudu was finally bagged.

In those days, more emphasis was placed on the entire safari experience–photography and bird shooting, for instance–rather than just the collecting of trophies. Naturally, clients expected to get good trophies. It was the collecting of them that provided the thrill, and a fine trophy was the reward for a memorable hunt. Today, the burning question as soon as a trophy is bagged often is: “Will it qualify for the record book?”—sadly, sometimes, irrespective of how it was hunted.

As hunting pressure increased in the most accessible areas, some pioneering and resourceful professional hunters cut tracks or built makeshift bridges to get into virgin country and escape the ever-increasing number of safaris entering the field. There were occasions when an entire day might be spent manhandling the two-wheel-drive safari vehicles over a soft sand riverbed. Several days might be spent erecting a makeshift bridge.

If a previously used river crossing had become too deep to ford with a hunting vehicle, and you needed to hunt the opposite side, you simply removed everything from the vehicle, including tools and spares, disconnected the battery, drained all oil and fuel, and then, using the heavy rope every safari carried, your crew, possibly assisted by locals, pulled the vehicle through the river, sometimes completely submerged.

After a night to dry out with the drain plugs removed, the oil and fuel were refilled, the battery reconnected, and the hunt continued. The hunters would cross the river morning and evening between camp and hunting car by dugout canoe or wading; the hunting car stayed on the other side of the river until the safari was ready to leave that area, at which time it was pulled it back through the river again.

Miracle Workers

The professional hunter was, at times, called upon to perform near-miracles mechanically and medically, as a few incidents that took place on my safaris will illustrate. I remember one cold, windy night on the Serengeti at one o’clock in the morning, soldering the leaking radiator of the baggage truck carrying the camp equipment. I heated the soldering iron in a fire made of wildebeest dung, as there was no wood. Our supper had been prepared the same way.

One evening at Ikoma, after traveling for three days from Nairobi, one of the skinners was bitten by a snake as he opened up his bedroll. He became hysterical, so I had him rushed to the mess tent, where the only bright light on the safari was kept, to examine the bite. I found two fang punctures, indicating a bite from a venomous snake. I proceeded to administer the antivenin shots to the protesting man, oblivious to the fact that four wide-eyed clients were watching the whole performance. Next morning he was sore, but OK; either the antivenin had done its job or he had received a “dry” bite, as I understand sometimes happens.

On one safari, we were camped south of Ngorongoro in the vicinity of Lake Eyasi in Tanganyika. Our camp was situated a couple of hundred yards from a steep-sided donga (ditch), at the bottom of which flowed a small stream. When we drove into camp about midday after one morning’s hunt, Juma, my headman, informed me that the truck was in trouble at the river.

It transpired that the truck had been driven there with two of the staff in order to fill the water drums on the back. The driver walked back to camp. When the drums were filled, the men called to the driver to retrieve the truck. He was a bit slow, and a young lad, the cook’s helper, climbed into the cab and while fiddling with the controls, pressed the starter button.

The truck was parked in reverse gear, and unfortunately the engine fired instantly and the truck rolled backward over the bank into the stream, winding up with all wheels in the air. That was what met my horrified gaze when I walked to the spot. We were miles from nowhere, and there was no radio in camp in those days.

The safari truck overturned in the riverbed, miles from nowhere.

We had to fend for ourselves, so for the next day or two while we were hunting, the camp staff busied themselves digging one bank down sufficiently to allow the truck to be hauled up.

When this was completed, we attached the big rope to the far side of the truck and to the rear of my hunting car on the opposite bank. When all was ready the hunting car, assisted by our crew and a number of friendly locals to whom we had given meat, hauled on the rope and, fortunately, we were able to turn the truck back on its wheels, and finally pull it up the bank.

I will never forget one unfortunate safari: Shortly after we had crossed into Tanganyika from Kenya, the baggage truck did not arrive when I stopped for it to catch up. I had a foreboding that all was not well, and a couple of miles back I found it lying on its side, having rolled over after having gone into a skid aggravated by the shifting weight of the men perched on top of the load.

As I drove up, Juma came forward, and in reply to my question, “Is anyone dead?” he replied, “Only one.”

Two other men were badly injured, and after getting the truck back on its wheels I instructed Juma to pitch a tent beside the road for the clients. I then took the two injured men and the corpse back into Kenya in the hunting car. The injured men I left at the reasonably sophisticated hospital in Narok, in Masailand, as traveling was very painful for them. I phoned Nairobi telling them what had happened and asked that replacements be on hand. I then carried on to Nairobi with the body of the unfortunate skinner.

When I returned to the safari, we hastily packed up and carried on across the Serengeti to Banagi, where we bivouacked. I had been without sleep for sixty hours.

Changing Times

During the 1950s, hunting areas in Kenya came under increasing pressure as more clients decided to hunt in Africa and more “occasional” hunters took up professional hunting, some with limited experience. The Game Department tried to lessen the pressure on the game populations, especially the Big Five, by allowing the taking of only one of the Big Five per week of safari. Should a hunter want licenses to hunt all five, the safari must last at least five weeks. This measure helped to some extent, as with the advent of the four-wheel-drive vehicle, hunting became easier as remote areas became more accessible and some clients tried to collect huge bags in the shortest possible time.

During the late 1950s, the “block” system was introduced in Kenya: the country was divided into numbered blocks. It was necessary to reserve the chosen block sometimes months in advance, with no idea of what would be found there when the safari finally arrived. If the game situation was really disappointing, the safari had to wait until its next block booking became available before moving on.

Other changes were making themselves felt as well. East Africa was in a state of political flux; Kenya had experienced six or seven years of the Mau Mau insurrection, and independence from Britain was the goal of all three East African territories–Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, and independence was being actively negotiated by their representatives with the British government. No one had any idea what a post-independence East Africa would be like, especially after the Congo debacle.

In the early 1960s, I moved with my family to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and opened a branch of Ker, Downey & Selby Safaris there. Our company was granted two very large tracts of land known as “concessions” in which to conduct hunting safaris. One was adjacent to the Okavango Delta, and the other was in the northern Kalahari.

The distances between camps in these concessions was not great, and I soon realized that a more efficient method of operation would be to have static camps, fully staffed, at strategic locations. The clients, together with the hunter and hunting vehicle, would move from one camp to another, thus reducing overhead by literally halving the staff that had been required to pitch and break camps during the days of the mobile safari.

One supply vehicle would do the supply rounds periodically, thus eliminating the situation where a truck remained idle for long periods in each camp. This arrangement worked very well, and in fact it had been in operation in Mozambique and Angola for some time, before politically motivated insurgencies erupted there.

Due to a number of factors, the traditional mobile safari was gradually on its way out in the East African countries where it had originated. Border controls on individuals, vehicles, equipment, and firearms, and the transfer of funds between newly independent states became a problem. Safaris did continue to flourish in Kenya for some years after independence in 1963, often ranging as far north as the Sudan, until, unexpectedly, the Kenya government closed all hunting in 1977. Safaris already in the field were summoned back to Nairobi, and hunting has remained closed there ever since, effectively putting an end to the “classic East African safari.”

Harry Selby with his safari crew and several clients in Kenya in 1950.

After independence in 1961, Tanzania, previously Tanganyika, created a state-owned and controlled safari organization which prohibited private safari companies from conducting safaris. The venture was not a success.

For some years, Botswana was one of the very few countries in Africa where no independence struggle was taking place. Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, and South-West Africa were all coping with bush wars. Eventually, as the political and security situation improved in those countries, and South Africa joined the ranks of countries offering hunting safaris, the “static camp” became the only way to go When privately owned safari companies were allowed to resume operations in Tanzania after the disastrous attempt to establish a state-controlled organization, a similar system of static camps was employed there, except that a hunting car remained in each camp and aircraft were used to transfer clients and their hunter from one camp to another.

To establish a static camp, it was necessary to have an exclusive lease on the area, so concessions or some form of lease on specific blocks became the norm in most countries where the land was government-owned. In some countries, large privately owned ranches became “game farms” where the emphasis was on breeding game animals rather than domestic stock. Static hunting camps were established on these ranches to accommodate visiting hunters.

Initially, these static camps consisted of the standard safari tents with a flush toilet and shower enclosure attached to the rear. Semi-permanent structures were provided for the mess and the kitchen, which was equipped with the necessary furniture and a gas stove.

As time progressed, the camps in some countries became more sophisticated being erected on wooden decks, with regular furniture and in many cases electric power for lighting, ice making, and refrigeration. VHF radio contact with base became standard in all camps and in many of them a satellite phone is provided. Today, some clients bring their own satellite phones, and many camps are within easy reach of airfields and helicopters are available on call should an emergency occur.

Moving clients over short distances is usually accomplished by vehicle, but where long distances are involved, aircraft are used. This cuts traveling time considerably, resulting in significant savings to the client and allows for more time to be spent hunting, making it possible for hunters who previously had been unable to spare both the time and the money to undertake an African safari to do so. Now most safaris are between ten and twenty days long.

Air travel today is so available and quick that within a couple of days of leaving home, the clients are in the hunting camp, and as they have possibly read all about safaris or been to one or more conventions, they arrive with their wish list in one hand and, possibly, the record book in the other, ready to begin hunting.

The hunting will be intensive because of the short time available, and any mishap such as the hunting vehicle getting badly bogged down or malfunctioning might be regarded by the clients as time wasted. In some cases they might even expect a refund.

The professional hunter will be under considerable pressure to “produce”—and, greatly to the credit of the present-day PHs, successful hunts and very fine trophies are being brought in.

The clients, unless camped in tribal areas, will see very little of Africa or its people, other than a few hanging around the airport where they landed before leaving by vehicle or aircraft on the way to the camp.

I realize that the only way game will survive in Africa is to pay very handsomely for its existence, and the only way that can be achieved is by bringing in more hunters, photographers, and general tourists, all attracted by Africa’s magnificent wildlife, all bringing money into the country, thus demonstrating to the local people that the wildlife is more valuable on the hoof than in their bellies. To achieve that situation, permanent camps and air transport are essential to make it affordable, both in time and cost.

It was inevitable that “safari” had to change, and it will continue to change in order to exist. Africa itself has changed out of all recognition both physically and politically, and the old-time self-contained safari would have no place to go in today’s Africa. There are hunters today who would prefer to have experienced the sense of freedom of an old-time safari, as I am sure there were those who went on safari many years ago who would have preferred something along the lines of what is offered today. The two experiences are as different as night is from day; the only feature common to both is the name. . . that magical word, “safari.”

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The Most Iconic Rifles and Cartridges from African Safaris

By: Ron Spomer

Updated on Apr 20, 2021 2:33 AM EDT

8 minute read

The .30-06 has been an Africa classic since president Teddy Roosevelt’s infamous 1909 safari. Ron Spomer

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Just as the lever-action .30/30 is iconic in the North American whitetail woods, certain rifles and cartridges are African safari icons. But which are they? Which define the long, rich tapestry of safari hunting on our greatest big-game continent?

A surprising many.

The surprise is as much the variety of calibers and cartridges as the makes and models of rifles. Seen through the lens of the modern safari hunter, classic Africa rifles would all seem a tight knit family of side-by-side doubles and beefy bolt-actions with oversized holes at their muzzles. That is only partially true.

The double-barrel big bores evolved from double-barrel muzzleloading shotguns first used to slow down large and cantankerous animals. A .50-caliber Hawken might have sufficed for a Rocky Mountain fur trapper and even a bison market hunter. But not an ivory hunter. Or even a voortrekker in pursuit of Cape buffalo or cameleopard (giraffe) skins. Even when firing 1/4-pound balls from 4-gauge guns, hunters usually needed multiple hits to bring prey to the ground. The process of reloading a muzzle loader, of course, meant one hired a gun bearer or two to stay at heel with backup guns loaded and ready. The second barrel of a side-by-side double was often the last line of defense.

Hardened and elongated bullets (Maxi balls) improved terminal performance in the mid-1800s, but the real leap forward came in the 1890s with the advent of smokeless powder. The concentrated energy of nitroglycerine boosted velocities significantly. Doubling bullet mass doubles energy. Doubling velocity quadruples energy. This made lighter bullets more effective. Nevertheless, tradition dies hard. So do buffalo. Bore diameters certainly shrank during the 1890s and 1900s, but they seemed to settle between .40 inches and .577 inches.

Oddly and simultaneously, a few hunters, tired of massive recoil and heavy guns, began experimenting with lighter military rifles and cartridges. The most famous and influential was W.D.M. “Karamojo” Bell. This Scottish ivory hunter proved a puny .275 Rigby Mauser moving round nose, 173-grain FMJ military bullets 2,300 fps (feet per second) killed mature elephants and buffalo as effectively as bigger bores when bullets from both were applied to the same vital places (brain and heart.) The .275 Rigby is the 7×57 Mauser with a different name.

Heavy Calibers for Dangerous Game

Despite Bell’s success, African dangerous game cartridges settled firmly in the larger bore sizes starting with the minimum .375 H&H Magnum and running through such famous numbers as .416 Rigby, .425 Westley Richards, .404 Jefferey, .450 Nitro Express, .470 Nitro Express, .500 Nitro Express, and .577 Nitro Express, among others. The rimmed cartridges were engineered for best function in double rifles, which still cling to their romantic position because of their second shot speed and reliability. All spit bullets weighing anywhere from 300 grains to 570 grains at muzzle velocities from 1,900 fps to 2,600 fps with most settling in at about 2,100 fps. This is a sufficient speed and mass to generate anywhere from 4,000 to 5,800 foot pounds (ft-lbs) of kinetic energy.

For perspective, the .30-06 with a 180-grain slug might hit 3,000 ft-lbs. Only one .60-caliber was ever marketed, the .600 Nitro Express, throwing 900-grain bullets about 1,900 fps to generate an unbelievable 7,000 ft-lbs muzzle energy. Even burly, beefy professional hunters considered this a bit excessive, best employed in the most dire emergencies only. The 16-pound rifles also limited how far PHs and hunters were willing to carry it.

The Move to Double Rifles

Strong, fast, naturally pointing doubles from Holland & Holland, Rigby, Westley Richards, Boss, Purdey, William Evans, Boswell, and other boutique English gunmakers gave and continue to give professional hunters and wealthy clients the tools and assurance they need in the face of a 1,500-pound buffalo at terminal velocity.

But there is a fly in the double rifle ointment. Expense. Many, if not most doubles, with articulating triggers and intercepter sears cost five to ten times more than a bolt-action of similar quality. This focuses the attentions of average hunters, even professional guides and PHs, on controlled-round-feed bolt actions like Bell’s Rigby Mauser M98. This controlled-round-feed magazine rifle provides four or five quick shots with remarkably reliable function. It wormed its way into the batteries of professional hunters when magnum versions came chambered in .416 Rigby, .404 Jeffery, .425 Westley Richards, .450 Rigby, and .505 Gibbs.

The Rigby Mauser was the standard bolt-action big bore in Africa until Teddy Roosevelt and Stewart Edward White carried Griffin & Howe modified 1903 Springfields on safari prior to WWI. They and others proved that the .30-06 could handle leopards, lions, even buffalo and rhino. Then, in 1956, the affordable Winchester M70 CRF bolt-action came along in .458 Win. Mag. This round throws 500-grain bullets to within 250 ft-lbs of the .470 Nitro Express’ energy levels. Dozens of PHs adopted it. The CZ 550 bolt-action is another rugged, dependable CRF, as is the superb, high-end Dakota M76.

The .375 H&H is Just Right

The most common chambering among African bolt-actions is the .375 H&H, one of our first belted magnum cartridges. Ever since its introduction by Holland & Holland in 1912, the old .375 H&H has clung to its well-earned fame because it’s a Goldilocks round. Not too big, not too light. Just right for the sport hunter with insufficient time to become proficient with heavier recoiling rounds. It may not be the equal of the .458 Lott (a stretched .458 Win. Mag.) or .505 Gibbs for stopping a charge, but the sport hunting client is always backed up by a professional PH. Loaded with 235-grain bullets going 2,800 fps gives the .375 H&H 300-yard reach for smaller antelope while 270-grain spire points make it a trajectory match for a .30-06 shooting 180-grain spire points. Step up to full-house 300-grain loads and with 4,100 ft-lbs muzzle energy you enjoy sufficient energy for not just eland, lion, and leopard, but rhino, buffalo, elephant, and hippo on land.

Read Next: How to Plan a Hunting Trip to Africa

Bolt Guns vs. Double Barrels vs. Single-Shot

The most significant feature of the Mauser 98 and its near copies that cement them as safari ideals is their massive, leaf-spring, claw extractor that grabs rounds from the magazine, holds them firmly against the bolt face for a straight, unencumbered ride into the chamber, and yanks them out with a wide, firm grip. Additionally, bolt-actions are much more precise for long shots and can be easily fitted with quick-release scopes for additional precision, something needed for many plains antelope. In contrast, double rifles are at their best inside 50 yards, the distance at which most are regulated to print near the same point. You can’t free-float a double’s barrels, and getting both the throw bullets to the same spot is a slow, expensive process.

One surprise safari classic is the falling block single-shot. More than a few African hunters worked with the old Winchester M85 single-shot with its external hammer, but the most famous falling block is the Farquharson as built by Gibbs. Few were actually made, but Frederick Selous used one, and that accrued to its fame. Today, the Ruger No. 1 is the go-to falling block for Africa. More elegant and expensive is the superb Dakota Model 10. Of course, a single-shot is not ideal for dangerous game, but, again, the PH is at hand to stop a charge. Knowing you have but one shot tends to focus your attention on making it a good one.

Despite more than a century of these doubles, CRF bolt-actions, and single-shots, modern safari hunters are broadening the category to include push-feed bolt-actions and even lever-actions. The same rifles hired for elk, moose, and mule deer in the U.S. are proving just as effective for kudu, oryx, and even buffalo in Africa. I’ve personally used multiple CRF and push-feed bolt actions chambered for everything from .223 Rem. to .450 Lott during some 15 African safaris and suffered no ill effects but a poor trigger and a dropped magazine from any. Lever-actions in traditional chamberings like .45-70 Govt., .405 Win. and newer magnums like the .475 Turnbull are turning heads in African safari camps these days. This hardly makes lever-actions or push-feed bolt-actions safari classics, but they can certainly do the job.

Shooting Small Ammo

Finally, we’d be remiss if we ignored the long history of small caliber rounds in Africa. While some consider Bell’s .275 Rigby an exception to the big bore rule, in reality most African game has probably been taken by such small bores. Since the early 1800s local farmers, ranchers, meat and hide hunters have made do and done well with a wide variety of affordable, often military surplus rifles and ammo. In addition to the 7×57 and .30-06, the .303 British, 6.5×55 Swede, 6.5 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, 8mm Mauser, and 9.3×64 Brenneke were quite common across Africa. Many are still collecting biltong, increasingly joined by 7mm and .300 magnums, .308 Win., 7mm-08 Rem., .270 Win., and even the loved/hated 6.5 Creedmoor.

Read Next: 10 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From My First Africa Safari

The point is, any good shot with a good bullet can use virtually any rifle/cartridge effectively on appropriate African game. But when campfires glow against dark African nights, the appeal of the classics dominates hunters’ dreams and conversations. And the most recognized and venerated of all is the controlled-round-feed bolt-action chambered .375 H&H Magnum.

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50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

Top 50 movies set in africa you have to see.

If you cant travel to Africa, Africa comes to you.  We all know movies like Last King of Scotland with Leonardo di Caprio, Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, The English Patient, The Constant Gardener,  Goodbye Bafana, and evergreen classics Out of Africa and Gorillas in The Mist.

But there is more! 50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa is list of less known films shot in Africa with great stories and insights into African continent.

Unfortunately  many  movies filmed in Africa  get overlooked due to lack  of the publicity. Below is the list of less known  50 movies set in Africa. Many movies from the list are  award winners or nominees  on international festivals like Cannes, Toronto, Tribeca, Sundance…

On top list of movies set in Africa you will find everything: from shocking and eye opening documentaries revealing problematic issues in Africa, stories inspired by real life events, to drama action and love. We have gathered and seen many from the list of 50 movies where the action happens in Africa. How many movies have you seen?

Movies set in Africa With Child Soldiers and Rebel Topic

50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

Set in Northern Uganda, a country ravaged by more than two decades of civil war, WAR/DANCE tells the story of Dominic, Rose, and Nancy, three children whose families have been torn apart, their homes destroyed, and who currently reside in a displaced persons camp in Patongo.

When they are invited to compete in an annual music and dance competition, their historic journey to their nation’s capital is also an opportunity to regain a part of their childhood and to taste victory for the first time in their lives.

The Silent Army

Child soldiers in Africa are at the fore in this tale of a white restaurant owner in an African town bordering a conflict zone. When his son’s African friend Abu is abducted, he sets out to find the boy, and walks right into a training camp exploiting children like Abu.

movies africa top 50 silent army

War Witch paints a poignant and harrowing portrait of Komona, a 14-year-old girl (wonderfully played by nonprofessional actress Rachel Mwanza) who has been kidnapped from her African village by rebels to become a child soldier.

She escapes from the camp with an older albino soldier and experiences for the very first time the joys of a peaceful and loving life, but a fresh tragedy will force her to confront and fight the ghosts haunting her mind.

Movies Set in Rwanda Based on True Events from Genocide War

Sometimes in april.

movies set in africa rwandan genocide

If you really want to find out a bit more about the genocide in Rwanda of 1994, this is THE movie to go! It’s a wonderful, yet uncompromisingly sad and bitter movie. Whereas “Hotel Rwanda” was more like Schindlers List in Africa.

More focusing on a Hollywood-like hero & love story, “Sometimes in April” leads you right into the very depths of hell. The characters are well pointed out, the acting is always impressive and the film-making is very subtle and pleasantly calm.

Beyond the Gates  aka Shooting Dogs

Based on a true story. An exhausted Catholic priest (Hurt) and a young idealistic English teacher (Dancy) finds themselves caught in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. They must now choose whether to stay with the thousands of Tutsis about to be massacred or to flee for safety.

A Sunday in Kigali

In April 1994, the middle-aged Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt is making a documentary in Kigali about AIDS. He secretly falls in love for the Tutsi waitress of his hotel Gentille, who is younger than him, in a period of violent racial conflicts.

When the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda begins, Bernard does not succeed in escaping with Gentille to Canada. When the genocide finishes in July 1994, Bernard returns to the chaotic Kigali seeking out Gentille in the middle of destruction and dead bodies.

Kinyarwanda

A young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man fall in love amidst chaos; a soldier struggles to foster a greater good while absent from her family; and a priest grapples with his faith in the face of unspeakable horror.

A local Hutu official is persuaded to implement the government’s policy against the Tutsi: To completely wipe them out. Josette, a beautiful young Tutsi girl struggles to survive the killing by taking refuge in a church, supposedly protected by the UNO forces.

Meanwhile, Josette’s brother is hunted down and murdered and her boyfriend rescued by the rebels. But the Hutu Catholic priest betrays Josette’s family and only agrees to spare her life is to submit to the nightly violations.

By the time she is reunited with her boyfriend, neither of them can face the brutal reality of their situation: she is pregnant and bears the priest’s child, which she immediately abandons. 100 Days was shot in Kibuye, the beautiful landscape had been the back drop to some of the worst atrocities in 1994.

In Kibuye Church, the site of an actual massacre, Rwanda actors played killers and victims that were only too familiar to them.

Hotel Rwanda

The true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsi refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda.

Movies Set in South Africa

In Johannesburg, a small time criminal, Tsotsi, is a teenager without feelings, hardened by his tough life. After a series of violent gang hits, Tsotsi hijacks a car. However, whilst driving, Tsotsi finds that there is a baby on the back seat. He brings the baby to his house in the slum. The next six days bring about a change in him that couldn’t be foreseen

The Bang Bang Club

best movies Africa

A must see movie for photojournalism lovers! A drama based on the true-life experiences of four combat photographers capturing the final days of apartheid in South Africa. The “Bang-Bang Club” was a moniker given to a group of primarily four South African photographers who gained notoriety for consistently putting themselves in harm’s way to obtain photographs of the “silent war” between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha.

Inkhata raged from 1990 to 1994, leading up to the first free elections in South Africa that resulted in Nelson Mandela becoming President. The Bang Bang Club is a film version of those years, focusing on the primary members of this group, Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva.

 Gangsters Paradise: Jerusalema

Inspired by a true story, GANGSTERS PARADISE: JERUSALEMA is an unflinching look into the crime, corruption and the transgressions of those looking to survive in the most crime—infested district of Johannesburg. Starting off with simple smash and grabs, and petty crime, Lucky Kunene quickly graduates to more aggressive heists such as armed robbery and carjacking.

Soon, Lucky realizes he needs a bigger score to fulfill his goals of making it big, and escaping from the slums, to a dream house by the sea. Lucky hatches an elaborate and violent plan to make his fortune hijacking building from landlords of Johannesburg tenements by winning the favor of the tenants and then holding their rent hostage from the landowners.

His high—profile real estate acquisitions attract the attention of the local police force who have no qualms about using unprovoked brutality to bring him down. His trouble with the law, coupled with an escalating war between a local drug lord, creates a tense standoff: both sides are closing in, and Lucky must stay one step ahead, or his empire, and his life, will come crashing down.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela is a South African lawyer who joins the African National Congress in the 1940s when the law under the Apartheid system’s brutal tyranny proves useless for his people.

Forced to abandon peaceful protest for armed resistance after the Sharpeville Massacre, Mandela pays the price when he and his comrades are sentenced to life imprisonment for treason while his wife, Winnie, is abused by the authorities herself.

Over the decades in chains, Mandela’s spirit is unbowed as his struggle goes on in and beyond his captivity to become an international cause. However, as Winnie’s determination hardens over the years into a violent ruthlessness, Nelson’s own stature rises until he becomes the renowned leader of his movement.

Life, Above All

In the dusty small town of Elandsdoorn, a South African township not far from Johannesburg, life is simple and serene. A prevailing sense of deep pride tightly bonds together the entire community – but beware to those who step out of line … 12-year-old Chanda is a hardworking promising young student with a bright future, but her life changes dramatically when her baby sister unexpectedly dies.

Heartbroken, Chanda’s mother, Lillian, in turn becomes severely ill. Her stepfather drowns himself in alcohol, leaving the young girl to take care of her two smaller siblings. Meanwhile, the formerly friendly neighbors become increasingly distant and gossip spreads. “Auntie” Tafa does what she can to help by getting Lillian to leave town, but not even “Auntie” is immune to the cloud of fear filtering across Elandsdoor.

7 Days in Entebbe (2018)

In July 1976, an Air France flight from Tel-Aviv to Paris via Athens was hijacked and forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda. The Jewish passengers were separated and held hostage in demand to release many terrorists held in Israeli prisons. After much debate, the Israeli government sent an elite commando unit to raid the airfield and release the hostages.

Top Movies set in Africa - 7 Days in Entebbe

Beat the Drum

Young Musa is orphaned after a mysterious illness strikes his village in KwaZulu Natal. To help his grandmother, Musa sets out for Johannesburg with his father’s last gift, a tribal drum, in search of work and his uncle. The journey confronts him with the stark realities of urban life, but his indomitable spirit never wavers; he returns with a truth and understanding his elders have failed to grasp.

Inspired by true story. A dark skinned girl born to white South African parents attempts to explore her identity in the era of apartheid as her government, her parents, and society as a whole struggle with what it means to be a black child of Caucasian descent in a nation deeply divided by race. The year is 1955.

Sandra Laing, Sophie Okonedo, has just been born to a pair of white Afrikaner parents, her brown skin and curly hair the surprising result of genetic throwback. As the government’s rigid apartheid system struggles with whether to classify Sandra as white or black, the young girl and her parents gradually realize that the complications they face due to her appearance run deep and wide.

The Colour of Freedom aka Goodbye Bafana

GOODBYE BAFANA is the true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner’s name was Nelson Mandela.

Movies Set in Kenya

Paradise: love.

On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as “Sugar Mamas” — European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a fifty-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise. She goes from one beach boy to the next, from one disappointment to the next and finally she must recognise: On the beaches of Kenya, love is a business.

top movies Africa Paradis Love set in Kenya

The White Massai

The Swiss Carola Lehmann develops a crush on the Samburu warrior Lemalian Mamutelil during a ferry trip on the last day of her two week vacation in Kenya, although traveling with her boyfriend, Stefan. She strikes up a conversation with Lemalian and, the next morning, instead of returning to Biel (Switzerland), Carola decides to leave Stefan and seek out Lemalian.

top Movies set in Africa Whie Massai set in Kenya

She travels to Nairobi by bus. From there to Maralal, where she befriends Elizabeth Muzungu, a Caucasian married to a Kikuyu. She explains some important details of the Samburu culture to Carola. Wwhen Lemalian meets with her, they walk together to his isolated tribe in Barsaloi.

Carola is welcomed by his people, she sells her shop in Switzerland and marries Lemalian, having a daughter with him. She also opens up a store. However, their differences of cultures force Carola to make an ultimate decision.

Nowhere in Africa

A love story spanning two continents, “Nowhere In Africa” is the true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya.A Jewish family in Germany emigrate short before the Second World War.

They move to Kenya to start running a farm, but not all members of the family come to an arrangement with their new life. Shortly after their departure, things are changing in Germany very quickly, and a turning back seems impossible. So everyone has to arrange himself with the new life in a new continent.

 Nairobi Half Life

A movie made by Kenyans for Kenyans. A young, aspiring actor from upcountry Kenya dreams of becoming a success in the big city. In pursuit of this and to the chagrin of his brother and parents, he makes his way to Nairobi:the city of opportunity.

The First Grader

Set in a mountain village in Kenya the film tells the remarkable true and uplifting story of a proud old Mau Mau veteran who is determined to seize his last chance to learn to read and write – and so ends up joining a class alongside six year-olds. Together he and his young teacher face fierce resistance, but ultimately they win through – and also find a new way of overcoming the burdens of the colonial past.

Out of Africa

This is one of those rare movies that has something for everybody and is nearly perfect in many respects.OUT OF AFRICA is based on the memoirs of Danish writer Karen Blixen (pen name, Isak Dinesen) in a coffee plantation in present day Kenya.

It explains how this brave woman overcomes the stereotype of a dainty, colonial British lady by running the coffee farm while her husband Bror Blixen (Brandauer) led a life of hunting and infidelities.

Meryl Streep is great as Karen Blixen. She manages to maintain the realistic Danish accent through the whole film. Redford is great as Denys Finch-Hatton, the Etonian hunter who keeps companion in her loneliest and hardest. But the real attraction of the film is he outstanding photography of the African landscape.

out-of-africa---top-Movies-from-Africa

The Constant Gardener

In a remote area of Northern Kenya, activist Tessa Quayle is found brutally murdered. Tessa’s companion, a doctor, appears to have fled the scene, and the evidence points to a crime of passion. Members of the British High Commission in Nairobi assume that Tessa’s widower, their mild-mannered and unambitious colleague Justin Quayle, will leave the matter to them.

They could not be more wrong. Haunted by remorse and jarred by rumors of his late wife’s infidelities, Quayle surprises everyone by embarking on a personal odyssey that will take him across three continents.

Using his privileged access to diplomatic secrets, he will risk his own life, stopping at nothing to uncover and expose the truth – a conspiracy more far-reaching and deadly than Quayle could ever have imagined.

Social Documentaries Set in Africa

Darwin’s nightmare.

A documentary on the effect of fishing the Nile perch in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria. The predatory fish, which has wiped out the native species, is sold in European supermarkets, while starving Tanzanian families have to make do with the leftovers.

The larger scope of the story explores the gun trade to Africa that takes place under the covers — Russian pilots fly guns into Africa, then fly fish back out to Europe. The hazards and consequences of this trade are explored, including the pan-African violence propagated by constant flow of weapons into the continent.

If it is a “survival of the fittest” world, as Darwin concluded, then the capitalist interests that fund the gun runners are climbing the evolutionary ladder on the backs of the Africans in this stark Darwinian example.

Much like the foreseeable extinction of the Lake Victoria perch, and death of Lake Victoria itself, the Africans are in grave jeopardy, even as they survive in the only ways they know how.

God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan

In 1987, Sudan’s Muslim government pronounced death to all males in the Christian south: 27,000 boys fled to Ethiopia on foot. In 1991, they were forced to flee to Kenya; 12,000 survived to live in a U.N. camp in Kakuma. Archival footage documents the 1,000 mile flight; we see life in the camp.

We follow three young men who repatriate to the U.S. John Bul Dau goes to Syracuse, and by the film’s end, becomes a spokesperson for the Lost Boys and Lost Girls of Sudan; Daniel Abol Pach and Panther Bior go to Pittsburgh. All work several jobs, send money back to the camp, search for relatives lost in the civil war, acclimatize to the U.S., seek an education, and miss their homeland

The New Sudan

After 20 years of terror-filled nights, there is dawn in Southern Sudan. The people of the land peek out from the doorways of their huts. They ask each other, “Will the sun stay? Will there be morning tomorrow and the next day?” The long war is over. Southern Sudan becomes New Sudan.

Peace treaties are inked and enemies shake hands. But other wars still rage. The war of awakening hope against the habit of despair. The war of new alliances against decades of mistrust. The war of joyful homecoming against the lack of homes remaining. Above all, it is a war for the human heart against the heart of darkness.

We Come as Friends

WE COME AS FRIENDS is a modern odyssey, a dizzying, science fiction-like journey into the heart of Africa. At the moment when the Sudan, the continent’s biggest country, is being divided into two nations, an old “civilizing” pathology re-emerges – that of colonialism, the clash of empires, and new episodes of bloody (and holy) wars over land and resources.

The director of DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE takes us on this voyage in his tiny, self-made, tin and canvas flying machine. He leads us into most improbable locations and into people’s thoughts and dreams, in both stunning and heartbreaking ways.

Chinese oil workers, UN peacekeepers, Sudanese warlords, and American evangelists ironically weave common ground in this documentary, a complex, profound and humorous cinematic endeavor – a tale of very old and rather sinister verses.

In the forested depths of eastern Congo lies Virunga National Park, one of the most bio-diverse places in the world and home to the last of the mountain gorillas. In this wild, but enchanted environment, a small and embattled team of park rangers – including an ex-child soldier turned ranger, a carer of orphan gorillas and a Belgian conservationist – protect this UNESCO world heritage site from armed militia, poachers and the dark forces struggling to control Congo’s rich natural resources.

When the newly formed M23 rebel group declares war in May 2012, a new conflict threatens the lives and stability of everyone and everything they’ve worked so hard to protect.

best movies Africa virunga movie dr congo

‘The Square’ is an intimate observational documentary that tells the real story of the ongoing struggle of the Egyptian Revolution through the eyes of six very different protesters.

Starting in the tents of Tahrir in the days leading up to the fall of Mubarak, we follow our characters on a life-changing journey through the euphoria of victory into the uncertainties and dangers of the current ‘transitional period’ under military rule, where everything they fought for is now under threat or in balance

Half The Sky

Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, two sequences are shot in Africa, one in Kibera and the other in Somalia. 

In August 2009, Shining Hope for Communities founded The Kibera School for Girls, the first tuition-free school for girls in Kibera. By providing a superior education, daily nourishment, uniforms, and schools supplies all free of charge, they were able to give the brightest and most at-risk girls the power of hope and education.

Ross Kemp Extreme World and Piracy Series

Lagos, Nigeria – Ross kemp looks at the link between poverty and piracy in Lagos’s biggest slum Ajegunle:

Ross Kemp Extreme World: DR Congo

Ross Kemp flies to RWANDA to find out more about The Congo war, which has been fought for over a decade, and is the bloodiest conflict that has been fought since the 2nd world war.

Ross Kemp on Gangs: Kenya Special

In this 90-minute special, Ross Kemp travels to Kenya to investigate the Mungiki, an outfit labelled as the most dangerous “gang” in Africa.

Movies Set in West Africa

Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, proud cattle herder Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed aka Pino) lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), his daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and Issan (Mehdi Ag Mohamed), their twelve-year-old shepherd.

In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. The women have become shadows but resist with dignity.

Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences. Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes abruptly

Caught in the middle of a brutal civil war, six Liberian missionaries in Monrovia flee the widespread violence of their native country. Their destination: Freetown, Sierra Leone. With the help of local church leader Phillip Abubakar (Henry Adofo), the missionaries make the difficult journey, only to have their troubles compounded by a rebel fighter bent on killing one of their own.

Based on true events, FREETOWN is a thrilling and inspiring story of hope and survival.

Tall as Baobab Tree

Coumba and her little sister Debo are the first to leave their family’s remote African village, where meals are prepared over open fires and water is drawn from wells, to attend school in the bustling city. But when an accident suddenly threatens their family’s survival, their father decides to sell 11-year-old Debo into an arranged marriage.

Torn between loyalty to her elders and her dreams for the future, Coumba hatches a secret plan to rescue her young sister from a fate she did not choose. A powerful voice from Africa’s young generation, Grand comme le Baobab (Tall as the Baobab Tree) poignantly depicts a family struggling to find its footing at the outer edge of the modern world… where questions of right and wrong are not always black and white.

Blood Diamond

The film opens in Sierra Leone, 1999 when Civil war rages for control of the diamond fields…According to devastating reports, these stones are being used with both rebels and government forces to purchase more weapons and finance civil war…A story following Archer, a man tortured by his roots.

With a strong survival instinct, he has made himself a key player in the business of conflict diamonds. Political unrest is rampant in Sierra Leone as people fight tooth for tooth. Upon meeting Solomon, and the beautiful Maddy, Archer’s life changes forever as he is given a chance to make peace with the war around him.

Dreams of Dust

A Nigerian peasant comes looking for work in Essakane, a dusty gold mine in Northeast Burkina Faso, where he hopes to forget the past that haunts him.

Other Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

Where are you taking me.

Employing an observational style, this contemplative documentary reveals multifaceted portraits of Ugandans in both public and private spaces. The film travels through Uganda, roaming the vibrant streets of Kampala and the rural quiet of the North, to reveal a diverse society where global popular culture finds expression alongside enduring Ugandan traditions.

White Material

Denis revisits Africa, this time exploring a place rife with civil and racial conflict. A white French family outlawed in its home and attempting to save its coffee plantation connects with a black hero also embroiled in the tumult. All try to survive as their world rapidly crumbles around them

Desert Flower

The autobiography of a Somalian nomad circumcised at 3, sold in marriage at 13, fled from Africa a while later to become finally an American supermodel and is now at the age of 38, the UN spokeswoman against female genital mutilation.

African Proverbs Wildebeest Migration in Tazania  

The Good Lie

Four Sudanese children are orphaned after their village is massacred in the Second Sudanese Civil War. Consequently, they make an arduous and dangerous trek through the plains, enduring hardship, death and sacrifice all the way until they reach safety in a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

Years later, these youths are among 3600 selected for resettlement in America, only to have the one girl among them sent to Boston, while the three boys must to make a new life in Kansas City.

Together, these young men must adjust to an alien culture even as the emotional baggage of their past haunts them. However, these newcomers, and their new friends like employment counselor Carrie Davis, strive to understand each other in this new home, as they make peace with their histories in a challenge that will change all their lives.

Unfolds the poignant story of three women and their search for justice from the daily plight of sexual harassment in Egypt.

The Lost Number

An international action drama, The lost Number is the story of a redemption-seeking English woman going against all odds to save a remote slum in Africa.After going renegade on a Foray, Kathleen an English woman goes down south to Ngara Town.

Seeking redemption, Kathleen saves Ngara Town and becomes her new hero. But when Diwani (point man of the Foray) comes to Ngara to retrieve from Kathleen what belongs to the Foray, Kathleen must go against the odds to save Ngara from Diwani and a Foray striking for the very soul of Ngara Town.

Long Way Down

Actors and best friends Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman travel from John O’Groats, Scotland down to Cape Town, South Africa on motorcycles. They travel down through Europe and Africa, getting an up-close view of the local cultures. They also stop at various UNICEF projects to offer support and assistance to the children there.

Long Way Down is the feature cut of the second season of the road trip documentary featuring Ewan McGregor and his buddy Charlie Boorman on their motorcycle adventure from the Northern tip of Scotland, to the southern tip of Africa. Brushing up on the past adventure is not a requirement for getting your visa for this trip.

The film suffers mildly from the lack of build-up and planning for the trip, which would have added more of an introduction to the traveling company, but the ramping right into the adventure helps the pace of the 2+hr film.

As a whole the film works as an African postcard, a buddy road trip, and the greatest advertisement for adventure tourism ever made. It is impossible to watch this film and not have an immediate desire to skip the beaches of Hawaii for the far-reaches of the African wilderness.

The Last King of Scotland

In the early 1970s, Nicholas Garrigan, a young semi-idealistic Scottish doctor, comes to Uganda to assist in a rural hospital. Once there, he soon meets up with the new President, Idi Amin, who promises a golden age for the African nation.

Garrigan hits it off immediately with the rabid Scotland fan, who soon offers him a senior position in the national health department and becomes one of Amin’s closest advisers. However as the years pass, Garrigan cannot help but notice Amin’s increasingly erratic behaviour that grows beyond a legitimate fear of assassination into a murderous insanity that is driving Uganda into bloody ruin.

Realizing his dire situation with the lunatic leader unwilling to let him go home, Garrigan must make some crucial decisions that could mean his death if the despot finds out.

top-Movies-Africa---Last-King-of-Scotland

Gorillas in The Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey

The story of Dian Fossey, a scientist who came to Africa to study the vanishing mountain gorillas, and later fought to protect them. Based on Dian Fossey’s own autobiography, this true life story is inspiring and has helped these amazing animals in many ways by waking us up to their plight.

Originally Dian herself was helping to make the film, until she was murdered and the production team had to go back and start it all over again several years later in 1988.

Based on the real-life experiences of Mende Nazer,the story unfolds as twelve-year-old Malia,daughter of champion wrestler Bah,is abducted from her Sudanese village in the Nubar Mountains by pro-government Arab militia and sold into slavery to a woman in Khartoum,who beats her for touching her daughter.

After six years she is sent to London, where her name is changed, but her miserable life of servitude continues.

Her passport is taken and she is told that her father will die if she goes to the authorities. Fortunately she meets a sympathetic person who seems to offer her the hope of escape and reunion with Bah,back in Sudan. For all the film’s optimism an end title states that there are around 5,000 ‘slave’ workers currently in Britain.

The Last Lions

Fifty years ago there were close to half-a-million lions in Africa. Today there are around 20,000. To make matters worse, lions, unlike elephants, which are far more numerous, have virtually no protection under government mandate or through international accords.

This is the jumping-off point for a disturbing, well-researched and beautifully made cri de coeur from husband and wife team Dereck and Beverly Joubert, award-winning filmmakers from Botswana who have been Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic for more than four years.

Pointing to poaching as a primary threat while noting the lion’s pride of place on the list for eco-tourists-an industry that brings in 200 billion dollars per year worldwide-the Jouberts build a solid case for both the moral duty we have to protect lions (as well as other threatened “big cats,” tigers among them) and the economic sense such protection would make.

And when one takes into account the fact that big cats are at the very top of the food chain-and that their elimination would wreak havoc on all species below them, causing a complete ecosystem collapse-the need takes on a supreme urgency.

Movie synopsis taken from imdb.com

50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

About the Author: Nina Zara

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Fantastic list ! Thanks for sharing..

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You are welcome, will be updating this list!

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Lookong for a movie about an african stock fighter looking for revenge for the death of his daughter. Great movie woth all afrocan cast. 1970s I think

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Super seznam. Hvala. Dodajam pa jih še nekaj: Capitan Phillips Tears of the sun Invictus Black Hawk Down Lion des Hommes The constant gardner Lord of the war Invictus Goodbye bfana

Hvala Matjaz, za dodatke, Bafana in gardener sta na listi, ampak se hitro kaj spregleda ob tako dolgi listi:) Lp, Nina Zara

Im looking for a movie from the 60s or 70s black and white about a man looking for a stick fighter who killed his daughter to gain power. English speaking i think. Title is a single african word

Comments are closed.

Safari (1940) with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

It’s a Safari of Love! Burning sands . . . burning lips! It’s night-time on the glamorous Nile!

L et’s back the truck up for a moment before looking at this week’s picture, 1940’s Safari with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Madeleine Carroll.  It’s again a good exercise to compare some of the marketing pitches against the actual film they are tied to.

Safari is a pretty good if formulaic jungle film, but there is nothing torrid about it at all.  If memory serves, there isn’t a single kiss in the entire film until the final, making the ‘burning lips’ tag a bit irrelevant.  We are set on a river on a game hunt for most of the picture, far away from the vast seas of sand implied above.  And there’s no need for a discussion on the glamorous life on the Nile, as little could be further from the truth.

With our rant on misleading advertising over, let’s look at the picture itself.  To say it isn’t very popular is an overstatement as even an internet search reveals insanely little.  Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is Logan, a tour guide who organizes safaris and hunts.  But though he’s known as the best around he’s looking for a bit of a break, at least for a bit- though retirement doesn’t seem too far out of the question.

The Baron is hoping to finally convince Linda to marry him and hopes that in sharing the thrills of the hunt and his prowess in the jungle with her she will finally succumb to his desires.  Linda’s a bit of an odd duck at first glance.  She flirts outrageously with Logan and we can feel the tension build between them, but it doesn’t seem to lead to anything.

Once on the river on the way to the jungle, the Baron becomes more forceful and condescending in his demands of Logan, which Logan accepts as best he can. Linda continues her flirtations with Logan, who reciprocates to a certain extent.  What we start to see is that Linda is playing with Logan only to make the Baron jealous.  With each flirtation comes a further agitated order from him to their guide.

While they’ve been away the Baron’s gone off on his own in a bit of a jealous rage and shot a leopard.  Only injuring the animal, he leaves it to one of the manservants (named “Happy”) to finish off the beast.  Only Happy never returns and Logan finds his body coiled with the now dead leopard.  We can see that Logan’s dander is now up but he continues the hunt.

Once out of sight we hear the lion roar and struggle.  With each roar we cut to a shot of Linda’s face, and it is now that we see that in spite of what she’s said in the past that she’s fallen in love with Logan.  With a gunshot we hear the struggle cease and Logan finally emerges, badly bleeding from his arm.  Linda wants to run to him but restrains herself.

After lecturing the Baron on intentionally botching the shot, Logan cancels the hunt as he needs medical attention that’s only available back in town.  One the way back Linda calls things off with the Baron for good, knowing that it is Logan she desires.  After a brief disappearance to convalesce Linda finally finds him and all ends well.

What you won’t find is a tremendous amount of action in Safari.   Though the premise is entirely about hunting, there animals appear insanely rarely on film here and what little actual hunting takes place happens with the animals off camera.  Mogambo this isn’t.  Look at Safari as a drama with a bit of hunting in it as opposed to looking at it as a safari picture with a plot and you’ll have a good time with it.

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Safari

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Produced by, released by, safari (1940), directed by edward h. griffith.

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A Brief History of Safari Style

By Michela Wrong

Image may contain Human Person Helmet Clothing Apparel Animal Wildlife and Mammal

The quintessential safari look that started 150 years ago in colonial Kenya still prevails.

Image may contain Clothing Apparel Sweater Hoodie Sweatshirt and Coat

  • First seen in the late nineteenth century, the jacket—crisp drill cotton with pockets, buttons, epaulets, belt—is part of the British military uniform in the tropics.
  • Adopted as de rigueur by men of privilege like Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Baden-Powell, and Denys Finch Hatton, who endorse the cult of the heroic outdoorsman and set off to explore and to hunt big game in the colonies.
  • Ernest Hemingway, the ur–adventurous manly man, embraces the safari jacket, as does Hollywood, which puts it on movie stars from Clark Gable to Grace Kelly to Johnny Weissmuller.
  • Yves Saint Laurent designs safari jackets for his collection. Veruschka wears one in Vogue: a _succès fou. _

1990—present

  • The safari jacket is ubiquitous high and low and around the world.

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  • The pith helmet, which became popular with European militaries in the tropics, is adopted by civilians at the end of the nineteenth century.

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  • Among hunters on safari, a rakish felt Borsalino becomes the go-to topper.

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  • The Tilley hat—floppy and lame looking but crushable—fends off bugs, protects against sun, and is vented to release heat.

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  • Big game hunters in Kenya from Teddy Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway prefer English double-barreled rifles such as those manufactured by Holland & Holland and Westley Richards.

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  • Avid wildlife photographers arm themselves with 300mm to 500mm lenses to capture the yawn of a cheetah or flight of a bird.

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  • Shutterbugs pack a point-and-shoot with a 10x zoom that connects wirelessly to their smartphone.

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A Brief History of the Bourgeois Safari

Safari is a popular form of ecotourism often billed as a benefit for conservation. But this colonial practice cannot make up for centuries of exploitation of Africa’s people, wildlife, and lands.

  • Lily Sánchez
“African development is possible only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system, which has been the principal agency of underdevelopment of Africa over the last five centuries.” Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , 1972
“ The only positive development in colonialism was when it ended. ” Walter Rodney
“Natives live in harmony with nature but outsiders destroy it.” Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa , 1935

In April 1991, a few years before he would be elected President of South Africa in the country’s first election based on universal suffrage, Nelson Mandela appeared on the cover of the newspaper Weekly Mail , kneeling in grass at the Mthethomusha Game Reserve . In one hand, he held a hunting rifle; in the other, the horn of a blesbok, a species of antelope that he had killed moments before while on safari. The headline declared, “Mandela goes Green. A hunting trip converts ANC [African National Congress] leader to conservation.” Mandela had gone on a two-week safari to hunt and learn about ecology—“at a time when most blacks could still not hunt legally, let alone own guns” and when “conservation [had been] long identified with the marginalization of blacks in South Africa,” writes Jacob S.T. Dlamini, author of Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park , the cover of which features the newspaper image of Mandela. Mandela also went to visit Kruger National Park, one of the most popular national parks in the world . His trip would mark the beginning of the ANC’s commitment to conservation in postapartheid South Africa, as well as to reforming the national parks system into one accessible for all people and one which considered the needs of locals. Kruger in particular had represented, from colonial times, the government’s efforts to “promote a ‘national feeling’ among whites” and to “promote a sense of nationhood built on the exclusion of indigenous peoples,” writes Dlamini. (Dlamini notes that there was a similar attitude in the U.S. around the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872; South African parks documents at the time of the creation of Kruger show numerous references to Yellowstone. Indigenous Americans were forcibly relocated for the creation of that park. Jessica Hernández, cited later in this article, notes that the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gave the president the authority to “protect prehistoric Native American ruins and artifacts,” did not do anything to protect Indigenous people, who were denied access to the park around that time.)

The Mandela article highlights some familiar themes in modern conservation. The land for the reserve was said to have been “donated” by the leader of the “local Mpakeni clan,” a more “sensitive approach” than that which usually happened when parks and reserves (including Kruger National Park) had been created in Africa, whether under colonial or postcolonial governments: displacement of area natives. Mandela said in the article that conservation ought to aid local development and be done in consideration of the needs of local people. The tourist proceeds from this particular reserve, including those from hunting, were split more or less between the parks authority and the Mpakeni clan, which used the money for “schools, clinics, and other social services.” The reserve only allowed the hunting of “overpopulated species,” which was noted to be beneficial to the ecosystem as well as a deterrent to poaching. “As a result local people develop a deep respect for animals and other species to be protected.”

Put another way, the article promoted the following ideas: the idea of enclosing land to make parks or reserves, often separating land and wildlife from people; the idea of partnering with local people on conservation projects, as opposed to displacing them or evicting them outright; the idea that conservation projects, especially safari hunting tourism, could be used to promote human development (and/or poverty alleviation) along with wildlife conservation; the idea that killing animals via hunting is preferable to killing them via poaching; and also an assumption that the local people need to be taught “respect” for nature. For the latter, depending on the historical time frame under consideration, local people may have been living on the land in question for decades or longer, in which case their connection to the landscape (and their knowledge) would be much deeper than that of outside conservationists. In other cases, if people in a natural area migrated from urban areas and did not know about or practice the traditional lifestyles of the area, they may not know as much about the natural environment (a key legacy of colonial “education” was that Africans were left largely uneducated about their own culture, history, and landscape and educated instead about European culture, history, and landscape). If one takes the idea of teaching local people how to respect nature to its logical conclusion, we get to an assumption that tends to underlie conservation projects on the continent. That assumption, as Benjamin Gardner writes in Selling the Serengeti: The Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism , is that “African nature is too valuable to be managed by Africans.”

Dlamini notes that “Mandela’s hunt actually took place … at the Songimvelo Game Reserve.” In any case, both that reserve and the Mthethomusha Reserve were under the domain of the KaNgwane Parks Board. KaNgwane was a Swazi-speaking non independent Bantustan. Bantustans, also called homelands , were areas to where native black people were forcibly relocated under apartheid. Dlamini said in an online discussion that the purpose of these homelands was to “dilute and neutralize” black claims to political power. Even though the scenario in the Mandela article appears to involve Africans managing an African landscape, it will become more apparent in other scenarios who the outside Westerners or conservationists are and why some African groups choose to cooperate with conservation projects, and their reasons for doing so. It should also be noted that the National Parks Board of South Africa was a thoroughly white institution, seating its first black member in 1991. KaNgwane would ultimately be reincorporated into South Africa in 1994 at the end of apartheid.

Modern conservation as applied to African wildlife and landscape is rooted in Western colonial attitudes and practices that have, in the past and modern times, been carried out to the detriment of Indigenous people and land, causing disruptions to communities that can lead to “ famine, disease, and death .” Indigenous scientist Jessica Hernández, author of Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science , writes about Western conservation from the perspective of an Indigenous person of the Americas. In the book, she explains:

Conservation is a Western construct that was created as a result of settlers overexploiting Indigenous lands, natural resources, and depleting entire ecosystems. According to National Geographic , conservation is defined as “the care and protection of … resources so that they can persist for future generations. It includes maintaining diversity of species, genes, and ecosystems, as well as functions of the environment, such as nutrient cycling. “

Furthermore, Indigenous people were already “conserving” their land prior to colonization. And as Hernández explains: “Conservation did not exist precolonization because Indigenous peoples viewed land as communal, meaning no one person owned it.” Western and capitalist notions of private ownership were exported by Europeans onto the African continent as well.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel (who is from Eswatini) has written about the roots of European enclosure , or the privatization of land in order to create resource scarcity. This was employed by Europeans during colonization:

The same process unfolded around the world during European colonization. In South Africa, colonizers faced what they called “The Labour Question”: How do we get Africans to work in our mines and on our plantations for paltry wages? At the time, Africans were quite content with their subsistence lifestyles, where they had all the land and the water and the livestock they needed to thrive, and showed no inclination to do back-breaking work in European mines. The solution? Force them off their land, or make them pay taxes in European currency, which can only be acquired in exchange for labour. And if they don’t pay, punish them.

In his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , the Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney argued that African nations, having been formally colonized by Europe for just over 70 years, had ended up underdeveloped (socially, politically, culturally, and economically) to the degree that Europe had become developed in that same time period. Colonization was a large part of the reason that, upon independence, African nations emerged stunted. Rodney wrote that, prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century, the African continent was unevenly developed. Some societies existed closer to a state of feudalism, as Europe had been on the eve of its transition to capitalism. But many African societies resided in a state of communalism, which, unlike feudalism, was non exploitative and was governed by customary land rights . This meant that the land was communally owned on the basis of ethnic or tribal ties and history of occupancy to the land. “Customary and collective land rights … were dismissed under colonial rule,” writes Gardner . Land was thus used to serve colonial economic interests, whether for natural resource extraction (such as mining), to build transit, or to build reserves, especially for big game hunting, a favorite sport of gentlemanly European elites that peaked in British East Africa (which approximates modern-day Kenya) in the early 20th century prior to the outbreak of World War I.

Furthermore, the idea of separating people from land and wildlife forms an important underlying assumption in modern Western conservation. This is the idea of “ fortress ” conservation, an idea

based on the belief that biodiversity protection is best achieved by creating protected areas where ecosystems can function in isolation from human disturbance. Fortress, or protectionist, conservation assumes that local people use natural resources in irrational and destructive ways, and as a result cause biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Protected areas following the fortress model can be characterized by three principles: local people dependent on the natural resource base are excluded; enforcement is implemented by park rangers patrolling the boundaries, using a ‘fines and fences’ approach to ensure compliance; and only tourism, safari hunting, and scientific research are considered as appropriate uses within protected areas. Because local people are labeled as criminals, poachers, and squatters on lands they have occupied for decades or centuries, they tend to be antagonistic toward fortress-style conservation initiatives and less likely to support the conservation goals.

Separating people and land under the “fortress” conservation model “denies the possibility of people sharing the land with wildlife as a viable practice,” writes Gardner. This is a problem for Indigenous people all over the world whose livelihoods depend on their access to and relationship to the land and its flora and fauna. The roots of this modern trend in land enclosure can be seen in the colonial practices around hunting. Colonial administrators needed tracts of land which could ensure that elites, mostly from Europe, had undisturbed access to ample big game. In fact, the Europeans were so fond of hunting that they “shot out” the big game and had to impose regulations. In one review of books in the white-man-goes-trophy-hunting genre, there’s a quote from John Tinney McCutcheon’s 1910 memoir In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country : “The Belgians place no limit upon the number of elephants one may shoot. … In British territory, however, sportsmen are limited to only two elephants a year to those holding licenses to shoot.”

The Germans gained control of Tanganyika (which, along with Zanzibar, became modern day Tanzania) in 1885, and they preferred ivory . Writes Gardner, “Soon after colonizing the country the Germans created regulations to protect the remaining wildlife and regulate its use for hunting. Colonial laws effectively banned customary hunting,” although locals could “apply for a license to hunt” or else had “severely limited” access to what eventually became formal game reserves. Thus, wildlife went from being a communal natural resource to being mostly for European use and profit. The British would gain control of Tanganyika after World War I, at which point they enacted game ordinances which kept locals out. Gardner writes that in Tanzania, whether under colonial or postcolonial governments, “controlling wildlife” would remain “central to accumulating state wealth and maintaining authority.” In neighboring East Africa (Kenya), by the 1930s, the British realized they would need to conserve wildlife if hunting was to remain a viable industry; that was thus one impetus for the creation of national parks around that time.

In Selling the Serengeti , Gardner gets to know Maasai activist and former Tanzanian MP (Member of Parliament) Lazaro Parkipuny, who had this to say about the settlers’ appetite for the hunt:

Indeed the excitement of the whites, colonial civil servants, missionaries and settlers alike was not climaxed in watching, photographing and describing the scenery and wealth of wildlife they found here. Their pleasure was only recorded and hearts fulfilled at sights such as the heaviest ivory from the biggest horn of a ferocious rhino that took a bullet in his brain, the display of the biggest horns of a sable antelope shot; the distance at which an eland was killed with a small caliber rifle, etc. … The main attraction of the Serengeti to Europeans at the time, up until the 1930s, was shooting lions [that were] helpless in the extended [plains] . 1

The colonial attitudes and practices that lie at the origin of Western conservation show up conspicuously in the modern safari, whether for sightseeing, photography, or trophy hunting. Essentially, safaris glorify the European colonialism from which they originate. Note the following aspects of safaris:

  • The iconic Hemingway-style tents and “ colonial style safaris . ”
  • The practice of having “ sundowners ,” also referred to as “ happy hour in the bush.” (Referring to the G&T or gin and tonic, the author writes of a sundowner: “It’s quite tasty. And it’s historical. Yes. Historical.” By this she means that the quinine in the tonic water had antimalarial properties that came in handy as the Brits “trundled on into more and more malaria-infested lands” in Africa.)
  • The focus on the Big 5 , a term referring to big game species that were considered the most difficult to hunt by foot: the African buffalo, African bush elephant, leopard, black rhinoceros, and lion.
  • The practice of posing with one’s kill . (See photos of Theodore Roosevelt’s safari, to be discussed, here ).

Safaris purchased today descend conceptually from safaris that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as European powers were “carving up” Africa into various regions under their rule and bringing in white settlers. “Safari emerged as a form of tourism at the precise moment that imperial expansion in Africa was reaching its peak,” writes Trevor Mark Simmons in Selling the African Wilds: A History of the Safari Tourism Industry in East Africa 1900-1939 , from which most of the details in this sketch of the colonial origins of safari have been drawn. As Simmons quotes Elspeth Huxley’s 1948 Settlers of Kenya , he notes that Sir Charles Eliot, the Governor of the British East Africa Protectorate, said in 1903 that “the main object of our policy and legislation must be to found a white colony.” Indeed, these former “white colonies” are now some of the top tourist destinations for safari: Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Simmons explains that the safari is a “transcultural innovation that combined African and Arab travel methods with European notions of the hunt.” The word safari originated from Swahili and Arabic; both languages had words connoting voyage or discovery. Technological advances in transportation, including steamships and the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, enabled Europeans to travel from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, ending up in Mombasa, Kenya, where “clubs, a gymkhana (sports club), a well-appointed race course, luxury hotels, cricket and polo fields, and golf courses, all beautifully kept and frequented by white settlers” awaited them. From there they would embark on the next phase of their journey into the interior of the continent via the Uganda Railway, a controversial and expensive project that one critic called the “lunatic line.” From the train cars travelers saw a landscape “teeming” with wildlife. Simmons quotes Winston Churchill describing the railway as “a slender thread of scientific civilization, of order, authority, and arrangement, drawn from across the primeval chaos of the world.” The whole affair appealed to those who “were attracted by colonial fantasies, ideas about exotic Africa, nostalgia for the great past age of exploration and adventure, and admiration for what they regarded as the beneficent effects of the British colonial project in Africa.” Safari satisfied their desire for a “natural environment increasingly … seen as healthful, beautiful, and reinvigorating, a reprieve from the trauma of rapid industrialization and urbanization in the West.” (Before the creation of the railway, safaris relied on human porters to transport supplies, a truly hellish job considering the hazards of foot-based travel at the time, which included malaria and sleeping sickness, a disease spread from the tsetse fly .)

Safari tourism created an entire industry in the service of Europeans, including stores for supplies and clothing, taxidermists, travel agencies, and so forth. The foundation of the industry was the labor of Africans and Asians. Laborers from India were brought in to build the Uganda Railway . Africans were “guides, trackers, skinners, porters, cooks, guards, drivers, servants, camp attendants, and general assistants” and “professionals in the full sense of the word, working in the industry their entire lives” even as their people were “forcibly relocated” to create tourist areas. Their labor produced wealth that allowed the industry to become “a leading sector of the East African colonial economy.”

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the years corresponding to the Great Depression and the time between the two World Wars, technological developments helped the safari industry stay afloat: advances in optics (cameras and binoculars) and improvements in wildlife photography; filmmaking, which saw the rise of wildlife documentaries; and air travel. During this time, “royalty, celebrities, plutocrats, and big-spending filmmaking productions … provided invaluable publicity and shored up the profits of the safari industry.” American filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson , whose films achieved critical success, embarked on an “immense” undertaking in 1924, utilizing “six Willys-Knight cars with customized safari bodies, four lorries, five muledrawn wagons, four ox-carts, and some 230 porters” to transport, over 500 miles, “255 crates of supplies, including eighteen guns, twenty-one cameras, and large quantities of supplies, photographic equipment, camp furniture, tents, and food.” Just a decade prior, in 1909-10, Theodore Roosevelt had made his famed Smithsonian-Roosevelt African expedition , during which he and his son killed 512 animals (some brought back to American museums) at an estimated cost of the equivalent of $1.5-2 million in today’s dollars. Roosevelt’s crew also included professional photographers eager to demonstrate the advances of wildlife photography and filming. In 1926, George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak, went on a four-month safari. Ernest Hemingway wrote Green Hills of Africa based on his safari in Tanganyika (1933-34). “Hemingway relished the hunt. He killed three lions, a buffalo, a rhino, a kudu, and twenty-five other animals during seventy two days in Africa,” Simmons writes. Hemingway also suffered a dangerous bout of dysentery, or intestinal infection, from which he eventually recovered. He mentions it only briefly in the book. Simmons points out that this was “not the kind of story Hemingway wanted to tell.”

1940s safari

In Green Hills Hemingway portrayed himself in ways reminiscent of the “ gentleman hunter ” of the “leisure class.” He noted the following about the noble ethics of the kill: there was to be “no killing on the side, no ornamental killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted not to kill it.” He seems to have had a romantic idea about hunting, observing that it was like writing or painting, this essential thing you had to do as long as there was available game, the way one wrote or painted as long as one had pencil and paper or paint and canvas. He characterized the African landscape as “like an abandoned New England orchard to walk through.” (Of course, the area had likely been abandoned under more malignant circumstances. Hemingway noted seeing African people walking to escape famine. It turns out that periodic famines, as well as chronic undernourishment, were a feature of colonialism, as Rodney explained.) Hemingway clearly got enjoyment out of the horns of animals he’d killed, even though his jealousy comes through when describing the horns on a fellow hunter’s kill. The horns were “the biggest, widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine again; never, never.” He also described killing the creatures: “This new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the open and you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head, blasted him over.” He described the dead kudu bull: “He smelled sweet and lovely like the breath of cattle and the odor of thyme after rain.” He wrote that he was taking back horns for his “wealthiest friends.”

From Hemingway’s account, one understands that this kind of hunting was dangerous and time consuming.  Hemingway and his native guides needed tips and information from other native people in the area to know where to pursue the game. The party had to note which direction the wind was blowing to avoid being smelled by an animal, which could charge at the party before or after it was shot. They used a “blood spoor,” or bloodstain, to determine the animal’s whereabouts. The color, the wetness, and the quantity of blood all gave clues as to how briskly the animal was losing blood and in which direction it might have headed, and after how much time. After the hunt, which often left the party dehydrated and exhausted, they would sit around with food (canned fruits, meat from their kills), beer, and books—all transported by human porters—and eventually doze off under the shade of a tree. (Hemingway’s treatment of Africans, generally regarded as racist , swung wildly from friendly to mocking to homicidal. One “savage” he made fun of by calling the man “Garrick,” alluding to British actor and playwright David Garrick because the man pantomimed to communicate. Frustrated during a difficult hunt, Hemingway wrote, “If there had been no law I would have shot Garrick.” This is not even getting into the sexism toward his wife, who is referred to by her initials P.O.M. (“Poor Old Mama”) or as a little dog (“a little terrier”), or his offhand remarks about Muslim people. An updated edition of the book released in 2015 includes diary entries by Hemingway’s wife.)

The 1920s and ‘30s marked the beginning of national park formation on the continent. The oldest colonial national park in Africa, Virunga National Park, in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, was created by the Belgians in 1925. 2 Kruger National Park was formed at the turn of the century as the Sabi Game reserve and formally named Kruger (after Paul Kruger, the head of the South African Republic , which was an independent republic derived from descendants of Dutch-speaking inhabitants until 1902, when it was annexed by the British after the Second Boer War) in 1926, and is one of the continent’s largest national parks. Dlamini notes that in 2009, half of Kruger National Park was under a “land claim,” which means a dispute over the land by locals which has been verified by the government, a process legally created in 1994 at the end of apartheid (the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22). Then South African President Jacob Zuma issued, in 2009, an injunction that all land claims were to be compensated financially since Kruger was considered a “national icon” that had to be preserved. There are still Kruger land claims under review , although a number of them were settled financially in 2016 . It turns out that the game reserve I visited with my partner in 2019, Manyeleti, which is just outside Kruger National Park, is claimed by the Mnisi community, who settled there in 1922 for “ grazing and subsistence farming ” but were removed in 1964 “without their consent or compensation.” One academic report from the Netherlands notes the complexity of the claim on Manyeleti , specifically around who gets to be a claimant. It appears the claim is not fully resolved at least as of 2019, although the reserve’s web site notes that it is “ owned and managed by the local Mnisi tribe . They successfully claimed the land as they have been living in the area for many generations.”

In 1933, the British passed the “Convention for the Protection of the Flora and Fauna of Africa, which called for the creation of national parks in Africa,” writes Gardner. A string of national parks followed in Kenya in the 1940s. In Tanganyika (Tanzania), Serengeti National Park and the nearby Ngorongoro Conservation Area were created in 1959. Gardner’s Selling the Serengeti tells the story of Tanzania’s Maasai people, who are semi-nomadic pastoralists (a way of life that relies on livestock that must be moved around periodically to graze). They have struggled under colonial and postcolonial governments to maintain land rights and to maintain their lives on their ancestral land according to their traditional ways of life and in the face of state-sponsored and Western market-based ecotourism and conservation projects. Theirs is a story to which we will return.

Safaris That Don’t Involve Killing Things

Safaris for non-hunter tourists often appear on travel bucket lists and are expensive. (While the U.S. has a number of “ Safari Parks ” that feature exotic animals, the discussion here pertains to safaris in Africa.) One tour operator lists price ranges for the safari itself and they start at around $400 per person per night. A look at one award-winning “ super-high-end tour operator ” (price listed as “from $7,500 per person for a ten-day trip”) is instructive. They show you how you can follow in the footsteps of safari-going former presidents and Hollywood celebrities . What’s more, “ your safari will change a life ” via the company’s nonprofit that helps African school children’s education. This messaging sounds fairly standard for modern times, when, increasingly, consumption of products and experiences is transformed into social uplift or social justice . (For example, RED, which was co-founded by Bono in 2006, boasts a collection of products and experiences the proceeds from which go toward The Global Fund, a private financing group founded by Bill Gates and others that aims to “ defeat ” HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. You can purchase products like “earth rated” bags for doggie poop or a $3,250 gita robot that doubles as a walking buddy and a cargo carrier.) What Gardner writes to describe tourism in the Serengeti, we could apply to African safari generally: “It is a particular form of consumption in which the landscape is the commodity itself.”

Safaris are a form of ecotourism, which includes activities like visiting national parks, cultural heritage sites or monuments, or other natural areas of interest. One 1991 New York Times article noted the rise of ecotourism . “Born of the environmental movement, ecotourism promises the traveler an opportunity to help save the planet and get a suntan in the process.” According to The International Ecotourism Society, ecotourism is “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of the local people, and involves interpretation and education.” Gardner writes that “high-end safari companies attract tourists who are willing to pay extra for an exclusive experience that they believe has a positive impact on the environment and the local communities.” Safari is often billed as a boon for conservation . Now there is talk of regenerative travel , or “leaving a place better than you found it,” but this sounds like a marketing plan to revitalize the tourism industry, which has been “decimated by the pandemic,” a loss to the tune of $3.4 trillion. The New York Times reported in September of 2021 that “the loss of international tourism in Kenya and other East African nations, with little assistance from local governments or elsewhere, has decimated the livelihoods of thousands of travel and hospitality workers, who have had to take on odd jobs and borrow money to survive.” Travel bans around the Omicron variant of the coronavirus have affected South Africa particularly hard as well, where the pandemic is said to have “brought the hunting and ecotourism sector of South Africa to a complete standstill .”

Generally speaking, a safari’s main feature is the game drive. Two guides—a driver and a tracker (someone who looks out for the animals)—take a group of tourists out in a 4×4 for a few hours to see large game. The vehicles can get fairly close to the animals—within a few feet—which the guides say is safe because the animals have been desensitized to people (we got close to lions more than once, which is unnerving when you stop photographing the creature and actually think about the situation). The drivers are in communication by walkie-talkie, so they can alert each other to salient findings in the bush. In my personal experience, safari focused on Big 5 and other big game to the exclusion of much other wildlife. To say this is not to slight safari tour guides, who are certainly catering to tourist demand as defined by private tour operators. We had requested a bird guide on our safari. In order to accommodate our request, the guides separated us from the other riding groups. It was fairly obvious why: the search for birds would detract from prime Big 5 viewing experiences of the other tourists, which, certainly, was not going to be acceptable from a customer service standpoint. But this separation was slightly awkward because it made us seem like tourist-divas when in reality we wanted to see the big game, too. We just didn’t want to see Big 5 to the exclusion of, well, birds and everything else.

Consider this online customer testimonial taken from the web site of the private reserve in South Africa where my partner and I went on safari:

I saw the big five within two game drives. … Enough said right? Let’s just say I saw wild dogs mating, went on a hunt with a leopard and saw him pursue and kill a warthog, and a pride of lions?!?!?! Crazy right? … This is the place for people who like being out in nature but not having to rough it in any way! The food is three course and the guides make you feel at home. I didn’t suffer a single mosquito bite and was able to fall asleep to the sounds of nature (sometimes lions right near my tent… ) and then was awakened with the rising of the sun.

Manyeleti private game reserve, where we stayed, abuts Kruger National Park, an area which is said to be home to a great variety and number of species. One checklist from the South African parks department lists 296 species , a fascinating list that includes bats, mice, shrews, and bush babies ; a list of several notable tree species (I am partial to baobabs , of which there are several species, because of their unique oddly-shaped trunks that store water and because they stood out to me when I lived in Angola some years ago); and over 500 species of birds . To focus mostly on large game, for which popularity grew under colonialism, is to get a stunted and, well, colonial view of African wildlife and landscape. Would people pay as much for safari to learn about African shrews and trees? Probably not. In the cold calculus of market logic, getting a thorough understanding of African nature isn’t on the menu, likely because it hasn’t been made profitable and because tourists may come to the experience with a relatively limited view of the natural world in Africa. 3

If safari ecotourism—and, by extension, the conservation it claims to promote—focuses on a few species of African wildlife, the focus is even less on individual animals. As Abraham Rowe wrote for this publication last year, “Conservation as it exists today pays little attention to the actual interests or well-being of wild animals, like an individual toad, cricket, or giraffe, and instead places value in species. But species do not experience harms—individuals do.” Perhaps there is no better way to think about the lived experience—and suffering—of animals, as caused by humans, than by taking a look at trophy hunting, or “ killing wild animals for their body parts .”

Trophy Hunting Safaris

Just as the colonialists “shot out” their game, so do modern safari operators who cater to Big 5 hunters. You need to buy “new blood,” as one operator explains in the 2017 documentary Trophy . Replenishing the stock, especially for “ canned ” hunting—the (in my opinion, sadistic) practice of raising animals in captivity for the purpose of hunting in a controlled environment—is key, because eager trophy hunters await the opportunity for another kill. The film gives a glimpse into the trophy hunting industry, showing the Safari Club International (SCI is headquartered in the U.S.) hunting convention , “the largest hunting convention on the planet.” According to the SCI web site , their mission is to “protect the freedom to hunt and to promote wildlife conservation worldwide.” In the film, an SCI leader explains that auctioned hunts raise funds that “go back into conservation.” The film then cuts to a woman at the convention. “Crocodiles are really mean. So I don’t feel bad about killing one of those,” she says. Besides, she confesses, she wants a purse, boots, wallet, and belt made out of crocodile skins. The prized goal for some hunters is the Big 5 Grand Slam. The film shows hunt prices ranging from $50,000 (lion) to $350,000 (rhino). As one Times writer put it: “Big-game hunters operate in a separate world from weekend deer hunters in the United States.” It’s an “elite person” who can afford to purchase “plane tickets, specialized gear and weapons, safari guides and astronomical hunting fees determined by what kind of animal you want to kill.” “These are salt-of-the-earth people,” one tour operator says in the article. “They may be wealthy, but people who hunt consider themselves conservationists.” As the saying goes, “ if it pays it stays ,” referring to the argument that hunting promotes species conservation.

Trophy hunting is legal in over a dozen African countries , with the most popular destinations being South Africa, Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe. (Trophy hunting was banned in Kenya in 1977.) According to Gardner, a typical 21-day hunting safari in Tanzania, which offers seventy species to hunt, cost $50-150,000 in 2010. Once you take into account the various fees, “estimates suggest that a single visiting hunter brings in anywhere from fifty to one hundred times more revenue than a non hunting tourist.”

Notorious American Big 5 hunters include the Trump sons Don, Jr., and Eric as well as Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist who paid around $50,000 to kill a “celebrity lion ” named Cecil in 2015 in Zimbabwe (which sparked “ outrage around the world ,” but not so much , apparently, among local Africans ). The U.S. plays an outsize role in trophy hunting, as we “ import more animal trophies than any other country in the world ,” estimated at “ over 650,000 trophies in 2017 alone .” As noted in The Hill article:

When most people think of a hunting trophy, they imagine elephant heads and tusks, maned lion mounts and leopard skins. But U.S. trophy imports include everything from fish and birds to reptiles and lots of mammals. It can get bizarre: baboons stuffed with a hand held out to hold your keys, or 7-foot-tall giraffe neck-and-head mounts. Some of these ‘trophy’ species are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Roughly 640 foreign species are protected under the act (although many are not trophy hunted). While the Endangered Species Act does not stop U.S. citizens from killing these species in other countries, it generally prohibits imports of endangered species and allows for a prohibition on the import of trophies taken from threatened species. Yet, trophy hunters still bring in the bodies, heads, tails, legs and skins of threatened and endangered species all the time. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits these imports under an exception limited to activities that ‘enhance the species’ survival.

Furthermore, according to Trophy , 70 percent of hunters in the South African market, one of the largest, come from the U.S. and Canada. These statistics belie another reality: that fewer than a third of Americans surveyed in 2019 said they approved of trophy hunting (a much lower number than the approval ratings for hunting for other reasons).

In 2017, President Trump reversed an Obama-era ban on imports of elephant trophies (African elephants are endangered ) killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia and then qualified the reversal in 2018 by announcing a “ case-by-case ” review of the imports. Although President Biden had previously expressed a desire to limit hunting imports , the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced it would permit some trophy imports again. The UK has plans to ban the import of trophies , which Boris Johnson has called a “ disgusting trade .”

One idea explored in Trophy is that what used to be a “sport” is now “just killing,” as pointed out by American ecologist Craig Packer , who has studied lions in the Serengeti. The idea is that if the hunt is too easy—there’s no “fair chase”—then it could be objectionable. But the distinction between sport and just killing is meaningful only for the human involved. As pointed out by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ( PETA ):

Hunting is often called a sport as a way to pass off a cruel, needless killing spree as a socially acceptable, wholesome activity. However, sports involve competition between two consenting parties and the mediation of a referee. And no sport ends with the deliberate death of one unwilling participant.

The reality is that hunters nowadays, just like in the past, go out of their way to kill animals. Hunters book flights and safaris to private reserves on the other side of the world in order to stalk and kill a creature that has their name on it. Canning doesn’t make hunting less cruel; it makes it more calculating, which, in a sense, makes it worse. It says something unsettling about the human doing the killing. (This situation is reminiscent of arguments about the cruelty of the death penalty, in which someone’s death is pre-ordained and they suffer the anxiety of knowing this, which, it could be argued, is a form of torture or cruel and unusual punishment inflicted upon the person. The animal in question, of course, doesn’t know it has been ordained to die, but the cruelty of the hunter’s premeditated actions is still significant in this light.)

Ultimately, doesn’t the creature suffer whether it’s killed for sport or just killing ? In another scene in the film, a hunter from Texas has made his way to a reserve to hunt. He and the guide have identified an elephant that is too small to be a trophy. It will be killed and given to the local community as part of a “quota” arrangement with the safari company. After the initial shot, the elephant falls onto its side. The poor creature lies groaning, breathing heavily, eyes blinking. The men hover around it. The guide tells the hunter where to shoot. He shoots. Another groan, along with deep breaths, and then eventually the elephant goes still.

Hemingway’s companions described a wounded animal’s vocalizations in the following way: “It was wonderful when we heard him bellow. … It’s such a sad sound. It’s like hearing a horn in the woods,” Hemingway’s wife said. To which another man on the safari responded, “It sounded awfully jolly to me.” Hemingway also noted scenes of shot-and-dying animals: “Nothing could be more jolly than the hyena … who raced his tail in three narrowing, scampering circles until he died.” Or “the classic hyena, that, hit too far back while running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating them with relish.” Or the “deep, moaning sort of groan … like a blood-choked sigh” of a dying rhinoceros.

1940s safari

One of the quietly disturbing parts of Trophy is when they show the cosmetic touch ups performed on the dead animal to prepare it for a photo shoot. The guides pour bottled water over the gunshot wounds to wash away the blood; they kick dirt onto large droplets of blood (or flesh) that stain the dirt around the animal; they prop up the creature to position it just so. The hunter is photographed in a position of domination over the lifeless and sanitized creature.

Another way to cleanse the debate about hunting is to argue that it aids conservation. “Hunting is the most successful tool for maintaining incentives to conserve lions,” wrote two SCI leaders in a 2011 op-ed. They argue that hunting in Africa brings in $200 million annually and that this “gives wildlife value,” as if wildlife have no intrinsic value or other right to exist. If lions cannot be hunted, they argue, lions will not have value, and then people cannot pay to protect them, and so inevitable wildlife-people conflict will cause people to kill all the lions. Thus, hunters are “truly the greatest stewards of our wildlife.” 

Packer, the ecologist, counters this assertion in Trophy . About hunting in Africa, he says, “in many places, the economics don’t add up.” He also authored a 2011 paper which found that trophy hunting led to declines in lion populations in Tanzania due to “ poor ” management. The paper recommended a numerical limit on lions hunted. Even this kind of argument, though, reduces the issue to a calculation, similar to the SCI authors’ assumption that only a market price can impart value onto something or ought to guide our actions. This resembles “ economistic logic ,” which, as Nathan J. Robinson has written, “in the absence of a clear moral understanding of what creatures deserve, can lead you to justify the most horrifying things imaginable.” (For the creatures being hunted—or butchered, as I will explain below—such experience could very well be the animal equivalent of horrifying.)

But as Kevin Bixby writes in “ Why Hunting Isn’t Conservation, and Why it Matters ” (featured on “Rewildingearth,” a conservation website):

It is a question of equity. Everyone benefits from wildlife, everyone should share in the cost of protecting wildlife, and everyone deserves a say in determining how best to conserve wildlife. If hunters’ claim that they pay more than their share for wildlife conservation is true, the solution is not to exclude others from a seat at the table, but to find new, more equitable sources of funding to support the work.

While Bixby was specifically writing about the situation in the U.S., the logic applies to trophy hunting in Africa. Furthermore, he writes:

Hunters and their allies are quick to assert that wildlife management decisions should be dictated solely by science, not emotion, as if science could adjudicate among what are essentially value matters. Science can tell us, for example, how many mountain lions can be removed by hunters without causing an unsustainable decline in their numbers, but it can’t tell us whether we ought to be hunting mountain lions in the first place.

The idea of harming some creatures to save more of them is the same argument used in the effort around rhinoceros conservation, which is also explored in the film. John Hume , a famous rhino breeder in South Africa, says that dehorning rhinos every two years—a procedure involving sedating the creature and sawing off its horn—saves the creatures’ lives because they are not valuable to poachers without their horn. There is a lucrative market for rhino horns, which have been thought to possess medicinal properties in some forms of traditional medicine in Asia . Rhino horn, made of keratin (which makes up human fingernails), is “more expensive than gold or heroin by weight,” Hume says. He also insists: not one creature that people breed goes extinct. While this might be technically true, on grounds that something being bred continues to live, we have to ask under what conditions the animals are allowed to live. Hume insists dehorning is painless, but mutilating a creature on a scheduled basis does seem “ like a brutal process ”—because it probably is. The general idea in articles about rhino dehorning is that it is appears to be a “harmless” process, similar to trimming one’s nails , but this seems like a very anthropocentric interpretation—how do we know that drilling a thick rhino horn with a saw is experienced by the animal as inconsequentially as we experience the filing of our nails? Not to mention the animal has then been deprived of the use of its horn for social or behavioral or other purposes.

What about the harm to the individual animal in the calculus? To return to Rowe : ​​”It is a spectacular moral failure that we do not act to address the vast animal suffering occurring in the natural world, human-caused and otherwise, and instead focus only on increasing biodiversity and protecting wild spaces. While the current goals of conservation are important, they miss something fundamental: that wild animals are individuals with their own needs and concerns.”

Where proponents would consider the harm to the animals, it’s in comparison to poaching. Trophy observes that the yearly animal deaths by trophy hunters (1,100) constitute but a tiny fraction of the animal deaths caused by poachers (30,000). (Dehorning advocates note that the poacher has no economic incentive to kill the rhino if it has been dehorned.) But this argument is a form of lesser-evilism at work. Whenever we’re dealing with harmful behavior like poaching, which is presented as criminal, we need to ask: whose harmful behaviors are legal and whose are illegal? If killing an animal that we don’t have to kill causes it to suffer, and if suffering that can be avoided is therefore harmful and even undesirable, then why is it legal for a wealthy (often white) man to do it on a hunting safari but illegal for, say, an African poacher to do it, whether that person is part of a larger criminal network or just an individual looking for a way to make money ? I find it hard to see trophy hunting as noble and poaching as depraved.

Poaching is clearly a complex problem that people can reasonably agree needs to be addressed. It’s not hard to understand why people in economic need might turn to illegal activities to meet their needs ( poverty is indeed one reason people go into poaching). This is a basic observation abolitionists on the left make all the time in regard to what drives people to commit illegal acts that cause harm. At the very least, we need to focus on all aspects of the treatment of wildlife by people: how can harm be reduced? If we focus on reducing harm for all animals and people, we don’t have to trap ourselves in the we have to kill or harm to save mode of thinking.

Ultimately, despite the claim that hunting is so beneficial for conserving wildlife, the Big 5 are not doing so well at the species level. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species : the buffalo is threatened, the lion and leopard are vulnerable, the elephant is endangered, and the black rhinoceros is critically endangered.

Maasai Case Study: The Market ‘Solution’ to Dispossession

Gardner, an American professor of geography, spent nearly twenty years researching and living in Tanzania to write Selling the Serengeti. He studied how tourism affected the Maasai people in the Loliondo division, a tourist hotspot in the north of the country, located east of Serengeti National Park and near the border with Kenya. The story of the Maasai people is instructive because it illustrates many of the problems with Western ecotourism/conservation on the continent, as well as highlights African perspectives on the issues.

Gardner interviews a number of Maasai leaders, villagers, and activists. Some notable quotes give a sense of the thinking behind Maasai actions over the years:

  • “Conservation are the people who stole our land.” —a man Gardner shares a car ride with, 1992
  • “We don’t want tourist money. We want our land.” —Lucy Asioki, leader of a women’s organization in Loliondo, 2010, in response to Thomson Safari lease of Maasai land
  • “What we need are real private sector partnerships that empower us.”  —activist David Methau (a pseudonym), 2008

The Maasai are “ one of the world’s largest ethnic groups ,” and their population is spread over Tanzania and Kenya. They have “strict taboos against hunting and eating wild animals,” Gardner writes. They do, however, hunt lions on occasion. Since they practice a traditional way of life that requires them to access land throughout which their livestock can disperse (they also depend on some small-scale agriculture), they have resisted fortress conservation efforts over the years yet have cooperated with some private tourism projects in an effort to take advantage of contracts, which they believe will strengthen their claim to their land (and even earn them property ownership under the law). Just under 25 percent of Tanzania’s land is “under state protection and control as either a national park, a game reserve, a forest reserve, or a hunting concession.” Gardner writes:

Without Maasai stewardship … much of the current wildlife habitat in many of the country’s national parks, as well as in adjacent areas like Loliondo, would not exist. Once vilified as a destructive land use, since the late 1980s pastoralism has come to be understood as the livelihood system most compatible with wildlife. Unlike agriculturalists, who directly compete with wildlife habitat for productive land, pastoralists typically manage their rangelands in ways that support both wildlife and livestock.

The Maasai have essentially faced the threat of a “global land grab” from colonial times onward. Over the years, the government has enclosed their land and even evicted them, tried multiple times to convert their land to other uses in a series of failed projects (sometimes aided by the U.S.), and allowed neoliberal notions of private property and market value to be placed onto traditionally communally held land. The rise of modern conservation and neoliberal market policies and structural adjustment programs (SAPs) of the ‘80s led to increased foreign investment in the region, which ultimately led to the commodification of wildlife and landscape. Throughout this time, the Maasai have organized and demonstrated against initiatives that would hurt their access to land.

The area that would become the Serengeti National Park (SNP) and Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA, which is home to a large crater) was created by the colonial Game Ordinance of 1940. Although the colonial government said that the Maasai would be able to live there, they eventually placed restrictions on peoples’ movement and on burning and hunting, and they banned agriculture outright in 1954. Even though the government let up on some of these restrictions in later years, for people around Loliondo, the NCA “came to symbolize loss of pastoralist land and rights through state-led conservation.” Gardner discovered that Maasai often used the word “conservation” to refer to the government agency that manages the NCA.

Researchers from the Oakland Institute, a think tank that published a report about the Maasai’s plight in the region in 2018, interviewed villagers in the Ngorongoro district. One anonymous villager had this to say:

We are Tanzanians but the laws that govern the others do not apply to us. Instead, we are still governed by the colonial laws of the past. The Maasai, chased from the Serengeti, were tricked into believing that we will have Ngorongoro as compensation and that we will never be evacuated from here. We were even promised priority in a case of conflict. But today we cannot use the land for grazing or for cultivation—the end result is starvation of our families. The only use left for this land is to be our burial ground. … We were then promised food aid. But little assistance came and when it did, leaders sold it at exorbitant prices. So we live in dire poverty and face malnutrition. Families have sold cows to buy food. With cattle gone, nothing more is left. Men have been forced to look for jobs in urban areas. They work as night guards in South Sudan where several have been killed. Poverty, hunger, and illiteracy have increased. There is no money for education and those who go to school are still starving. In 2012-2013, close to 500 children from 30 villages, faced with malnutrition, were taken to the hospitals. … Hunger is a sensitive political matter in the village and we are not allowed to speak of it.

Tanzania gained independence from the British in 1961, and its first President, Julius Nyerere, a socialist, became leader in 1964. His main program was ujamaa (Swahili for family bond) socialism or “villagization,” in which the government attempted to unite different ethnic groups into villages in which democratically elected representatives could manage the interests of a diverse group and which could function as socialist agrarian collectives (Nyerere believed the country had to begin producing food crops to modernize). People were even pressured at gunpoint . The Indian Marxist historian Vijay Prashad has referred to Tanzanian socialism of the period as “typical of the ‘socialism in a hurry that became undemocratic and authoritarian.’” In Maasailand, villagization took place later than in the rest of the country, as government officials initially avoided efforts in places they saw as potentially noncompliant. Villagization was potentially incompatible with pastoralism, which required “dispersed” peoples to manage resources such as salt, water, and grass for livestock. Gardner notes that the government failed to understand the distinction between concentrating people for social services delivery and dispersing livestock to “safeguard the range land from the destructive power of large herds.”

Over the years, there were various failed projects in Maasailand—one to convert the Maasai into ranchers, and another to grow barley on the land in order to service the beer industry. The 1964 rancher project was largely an influence of USAID, created with the idea that the Maasai could produce meat for export to Europe and other countries. The project failed due to overgrazing and problematic water sourcing. When USAID got formally involved with the project in 1970, they shut down their efforts after ten years. The barley project was a state-run project from 1987-89. That, too, failed because of lack of adequate rainfall and the remote location making transportation difficult. After the government abandoned the land for the barley project in 1989, Maasai people in the area agreed to share use of the land for livestock grazing and watering—that is, until 2006, when the owners of Thomson Safaris , a popular American safari tourism company, announced they had acquired (via their organization Tanzania Conservation Limited, or TCL) a 96-year lease on the land, completely taking it away from Maasai use without their prior notice or consent. One man, Ole Pertese, said people with the safari company came to survey his family’s homestead, telling him, “You can no longer use this land. It is the land of a mzungu [Swahili for white person], not of Maasai.” The Thomson lease triggered fierce resistance from the Maasai over the eight-year period in which Gardner covered the story, what he calls a “remarkable political achievement,” given that at the time the book was published in 2016, the legal issues were still unresolved. As Garder notes, Thomson Safaris claimed their project “preserve[s] fragile ecosystems and protect[s] vulnerable wildlife populations,” promoting the idea that the Maasai were destroying the ecosystem. Thomson also pitted ethnic groups against each other by hiring certain ethnic minorities over others and portraying the conflict as one about ethnic tensions, the latter which Gardner found to be largely unsubstantiated. The Oakland Institute report noted that the conflict between the Maasai and Thomson “ rages on .” The report notes the “climate of fear” that has pervaded the area, as the Maasai have been subject to “violence, harassment, and arrest, at the hands of local police officers, who are called in by TCL for trespassing” on its nature reserve.

The neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) of the ‘80s , writes Gardner, aimed to “reduce the role of the public sector, prioritize balancing national budgets, promote foreign trade, privatize state-owned companies, and rationalize social service provision.” This encouraged privatization of the hunting industry (the socialist government banned sport hunting from 1970-78 and had intended to nationalize the industry but never did). In 1992, the Dubai based Ortello Business Corporation (OBC) trophy hunting company gained hunting rights in Loliondo. OBC was required to do development projects (involving water and the building of primary schools and medical clinics), as was the trend at the time, as part of the agreement. However, a decade after initiation, “very few of the development projects initially promised by the OBC had been realized.” For some years, however, the Maasai tolerated the hunting because the company only used the land certain times of year, and initially people were still able to graze their livestock on the land; besides, the Maasai weren’t particularly concerned about the hunting of game. Eventually, things came to a head in 2009, when a drought forced Maasai people to congregate in search of water outside their usual range. State police responded by evicting hundreds of people and thousands of cattle and jailing or harassing many people. It was an “unprecedented event in Loliondo.” Gardner notes that, “for many of the Maasai residents I interviewed, the OBC and the Thomson Safaris … land deals were considered a ‘government effort to complete the land grab started under colonial rule.’” (Gardner notes that “conservation refugees” exist all over the world; he cites one estimate that puts their number at “14 million in Africa alone.” One recent report by Minority Rights Group, a human rights NGO for Indigenous peoples’ rights, details the eviction of and violence against Indigenous groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and India.)

The Oakland report also details events of 2017, when government-inflicted fires struck Maasai homesteads (also called bomas ) around Loliondo and further worsened tensions between Maasai and OBC:

According to the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, the violent evictions began on August 10, 2017 and were set to last for two weeks. The Ministry’s press release notes that bomas were being burned under government orders, in order to preserve the ecosystems in the region and attract more tourists.

The same report noted that OBC’s license had been cancelled that year due to concerns of corruption, but a 2018 update noted that OBC was still active in the region. A 2019 document signed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the environment also noted that OBC maintained activity in the region.

In the ‘90s, direct contracts arose between villages and safari companies. This was seen by the villagers as a way to cement their own land rights, since under these agreements, they could still have access to the land. The Maasai thought they, not the government, should negotiate the terms of use of their land; the government they saw as a force that would only take away their land and livelihood. In 1991, Dorobo Safaris , owned by expatriates, started to contract directly with villages, essentially leasing their land for tourism use. The villages would receive direct payment, which they could use to build schools and meet other needs. Around this time, some villages around Loliondo got “legal title deeds for 99 years” for their traditional land, which was seen as a win. But in the early 2000’s, the government declared direct contracts with companies to be illegal; they started enforcing the policy some years later (although Gardner noted that not all companies “responded” to the enforcement). He writes that “a large number of Maasai leaders and citizens have embraced village-based tourism contracts despite such agreements’ uncertain and unfulfilled promises.”

So where is all the money going? To quote Rodney:

Under colonialism, the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed. … In other words, in the absence of direct political control, foreign investment insures [sic] that the natural resources and the labor of Africa produce economic value which is lost to the continent.

Putting together Gardner’s and Rodney’s analyses, we can clearly see that the economic extraction of conservation ecotourism has inflicted great harms upon the Maasai, who continue to protest government efforts to expand conservation areas.

Moving Past Bourgeois Tourism

Some years ago, I spent a year living and working in Luanda, Angola, a sub-Saharan city of over 2 million people (Angola was a major point of departure in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade ) as part of an international health program. The country had gained independence from the Portuguese in 1975 and then endured a 30 year civil war which ended in 2002. The countryside remains littered with landmines , which tend to leave people as amputees if they manage to survive their encounter with the deadly explosives. The inequality there was stark and visible. Nearly half of all Angolans lived on less than $2 a day in a city noted to be, at the time, one of the most expensive cities in the world for expatriates . I lived in a gritty urban midrise, probably a Cold War-era building, that had a busted elevator and stairs so worn they were depressed in the middle. Sometimes there was running water, but mostly not. Tin roof neighborhoods—settlements called musseques —abutted a $500 a night hotel a couple of blocks from where I lived. My neighbor was a Portuguese woman who had relocated from Lisbon to escape the unemployment and austerity of the eurozone crisis there . The hospital where I worked had a small library, where I went sometimes to read. Bookshelves held textbooks and some international medical journals. Outside the window I could see the reddish-colored dirt of the musseque , small people moving in the distance . All this knowledge, I thought, yet such extreme poverty and inequality. At the time, I became disillusioned with the Western NGO-private corporation approach to international health in the Global South.

Around that time, the then President’s daughter, Isabel dos Santos, became the continent’s first female billionaire . She was later caught up in a corruption scandal. Angola may not be a safari destination—indeed, Westerners need a visa and a good reason to be allowed in—but the country is impacted like others on the continent by the continued extraction of its wealth, often by its own leaders who are aided by the West , and by Western corporations ( oil and gas companies active in the country include Total, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and BP) that distribute this wealth in the form of compensation packages to expatriate employees in the country as well as to their shareholders. Colonialism may have formally ended, but now we have capitalism (fueled by extraction of natural resources, in Angola’s case—oil and diamonds ) and corruption to continue the tradition.

African nations generally suffer disproportionately from global wealth inequality and tax avoidance . Despite decades of international development goals, including the UN Sustainable Development goals , the #1 of which is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” with a 2030 timeline, poverty remains at persistently high levels, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa , and these levels are expected to worsen throughout the course of the pandemic (WHO reported that a mere 9 percent of all Africans had been fully vaccinated against COVID as of late 2021, in no small part due to wealthy countries hoarding vaccines). There’s also the “bottomless bottom-line cruelty” of the IMF and the World Bank , which keeps poor countries poor and in a state of debt servitude. Almost all of the world’s poorest countries are in Africa.

As French economist Thomas Piketty argues, we need to tax global wealth to tax billionaires out of existence . Beyond returning stolen art and artifacts to former colonies, the West owes Africa for what the imperial powers took from the continent and continue to extract today. This cannot be made up by bourgeois tourism, 4 particularly when safari companies and lodges tend to be foreign-owned or otherwise white-owned businesses.

According to a 2022 article in Condé Nast Traveler , “across the continent, black Africans have very little stake in the safari industry—most owners (and, in South Africa especially, managers and guides, too) are white. The African Travel and Tourism Association estimates that at most 15 percent of its 600-plus members are black owners.” Most companies on Travel + Leisure ’s top 10 safaris for 2021 list (notably, a survey-based list biased by its respondents’ experiences) appear to be owned by white people (whether from Africa or outside of Africa), and “the most profitable tour companies, lodges, and private game reserves surrounding the [Kruger National] park are owned and operated by whites,” according to a 2009 article in Slate.

Recently, I attended an online symposium by the Walter Rodney Foundation commemorating what would have been the 80th birthday of Rodney, who was assassinated in 1980 at the age of 38. At the symposium, Robin D. G. Kelley noted that Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , in detailing the extensive harms of European colonialism, presented a compelling case for reparations. The evidence in the book “exceeds” the UN standard for reparations, Kelley said. There ought to be more demands for reparations from the European colonial powers, such as happened recently when Prince William and Duchess Kate visited Jamaica on their Royal Caribbean Tour . They were received with demands from activists and leaders for reparations and an apology for slavery. The Prince gave a speech expressing his “profound sorrow” over slavery but, notably, did not apologize.

I have deeply ambivalent feelings about having been on a safari. I’d bought into something that was billed as a bucket experience to help save Africa for humanity but was the West’s idea of a commodified Africa. Safari ecotourism and trophy hunting, we’re told, will fund conservation for humanity and development for people in Africa in general. But did humanity vote on Western conservation? And what are Africans telling us in the West to conserve for humanity ? (I doubt the U.S. would care to ask or listen.) All we do in the U.S. is develop and destroy.

One argument is that the human species tends to destroy other species, as we have done by killing to extinction other megafauna throughout the world. If we don’t consciously save the megafauna, by sectioning them off in discrete reserves, the argument goes, humans will kill all the creatures that threaten humans. 5 Perhaps. But if killing is a constant (now and in the hypothetical scenario given), I cannot see how it is just or even fair to allow wealthy people to kill animals or to butcher them or to pay large sums to drive in cars to see animals so that we can say we’re saving other animals, meanwhile Africans, whose countries were held back from development by colonial powers for hundreds of years and who lost rights to their own land, work to provide these services to said wealthy people because development and conservation. You cannot fight the legacy of colonialism with neoliberalism, because they are cut from similar cloths.

The problem is not, as the enthusiasts of neoliberalism tell us, that nature has no value other than what the market will assign to it. The problem is that way of thinking and the growthism, excess of development, and anthropocentrism under global capitalism. You cannot realistically expect to conserve natural areas and wildlife by utilizing the same logic which has led to the destruction of nature. Recall that Kenya banned hunting in 1977, yet its wildlife habitat is under increasing threat from development and privatization of land, two tendencies that we see commonly in the West. (Banning trophy hunting is still good, in my opinion, but that act alone cannot stop the destruction of nature in other ways.)

The neoliberal choice forces us to accept the suffering and commodification of the vulnerable (people, animals, land) in order to supposedly save or uplift the same vulnerable living things. We have to kill some lions to save the rest. We have to butcher some of the rhinos to save the rest. We have to let Africans choose market schemes so that they can develop themselves out of poverty while mostly non-Africans (or white people) profit. We have to accept unsavory things because that’s how the world works—the lesser of two evils. But this is a false choice. It’s the same logic that says we should accept sweatshops because some job is better than nothing for the world’s poorest. It is also the same logic that says that the agents or institutions of harm will bring solutions to that harm. If colonialists inflicted destruction upon animals and the land (necessitating conservation in the first place) and underdeveloped a place, now their descendants (literal or figurative) will operate safaris to promote conservation and development. (Or, in the case of climate change, the fossil fuel companies will save us with their corporate responsibility.)

The subjugation of people and the commodification of land and living things is at least something we should agree is bad, and keeping African development tied to ecotourism and conservation certainly appears to keep Africans in a kind of colonial relationship with the West which is unacceptable. It’s one thing to support Indigenous people, such as the Maasai or the Mnisi tribe, in their decisions to contract directly with tour companies to sustain their livelihood. I would rather see the Maasai’s and the Mnisi’s material conditions improve than not. I would rather see the Maasai keep their land and way of life. But these kinds of market decisions, made under economic duress and without other alternatives, are compromises. They shouldn’t be seen as liberatory. (As a person from the U.S., I don’t claim to speak for Africans. Yet, as a concerned citizen of the world, I believe the evidence presented demonstrates that market conservation projects are not generally liberatory.) Our goal on the left ought to be the liberation of all peoples from economic, social, and political compromise under global capitalism.

Safaris, as conceived of and operated by Westerners, shouldn’t be a thing anymore. (Nor should “ safari chic ” as a fashion trend, a notable example of which was Melania Trump sporting a pith helmet on a 2018 visit to Kenya.) Trophy hunting (along with other forms of animal cruelty , like factory farming) needs to go, too. Safaris also shouldn’t be the things that fund conservation and development. I don’t think it’s anyone’s right to trophy hunt or go on safari. People don’t have the right to make other creatures suffer for no good reason other than their egos or some emotional rush. I don’t have any more right to see the last of the world’s great megafauna than Europe had in underdeveloping the continent of Africa to begin with. And as an anticapitalist, I am against peoples’ livelihoods and other living things’ existence depending on someone else’s profit, particularly when that profit extracts wealth from a continent that has endured centuries of exploitation.

If moving past a colonial and capitalist past and present requires learning different ways of relating to each other and to the natural world, we need to shed old practices, and that includes safari-going. We have to counter the colonial and imperialist tendencies alive in the world with a robust anticapitalist internationalism —the thing we need anyway if we want to have any hope of human survival on a warming planet. We need a different form of conservation. As Rowe put it: “Conservation could take a more transformative approach, and consider not only human interests, but the lives of all beings impacted by nature.” To do this, we need to center Indigenous people and knowledge . While Indigenous people do not embody a monolithic outlook (nor do they necessarily practice traditional ways of life), Indigenous communities tend not to destroy the environment the way capitalist societies do . In fact, although Indigenous knowledge and practices are routinely ignored in international conservation efforts , Indigenous people are the best conservationists . (The pastoralist Maasai in Tanzania were not destroying their land before the hunting and safari companies came to cash in on their resources. Other traditional African cultural practices may benefit ecosystems as well.)

On one of our last days on safari, we saw a memorable sunset on our evening game drive sundowner. The sky turned orange. We heard the strange horn-like sound of the Southern Ground-Hornbill , a bulky red and black bird. There was no sound pollution, nothing overhead, only sky and land in every direction. We drank dark amber-colored rooibos tea from tin cups. We looked around. The experience was nothing like happy hour.

Clarification 4/28/22: An earlier version of this article stated that OBC had lost its hunting license in Tanzania in 2017. It turns out that OBC has maintained activity in the region. The article was updated to reflect this information.

“Ivory” here is likely being used colloquially to refer to something valuable. Rhino horn is not made of ivory; it is made of keratin. Ivory refers to the substance that makes up the teeth and tusks of certain large animals such as elephants.  ↩

The ongoing conflict in and around the park, involving armed groups, militarized park rangers, local inhabitants, and oil exploration companies was explored in the 2014 documentary Virunga . Virunga is managed by a partnership between the Congolese National Parks Authority and an EU-owned NGO, the Virunga Foundation. The park website notes that 4 million people live in the region, which is home to endangered mountain gorillas and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  ↩

In his 1993 book The Age of Missing Information , Bill McKibben argued that television, particularly nature documentaries, does not give us very good information about the natural world because it obscures the reality of the limits of the natural world (an important thing to know if you want to do something about climate change, since unlimited natural resource extraction and consumption are incompatible with efforts to stop fossil fuel use) and focuses on drama and entertainment, instead of helping us to “understand that they’re [animals] marvelous for their own reasons, that they matter independently of us.”  ↩

As Gardner writes, in 1970, Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere convened a student inquiry at the University of Dar es Salaam into “the merits and limits of pursuing tourism as a strategy for socialist economic development.” The students criticized what was seen as an effort “geared towards producing tourist goods” such as “tapestry for the hotel room, a fan, water-heater, or a whisky.” They predicted tourism would “reinforce colonial relationships” and would “mainly benefit the elites or the ‘international bourgeoisie.’”  ↩

Human-wildlife conflict that results in human deaths or injury remains a problem, particularly in areas of habitat overlap.  ↩

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Safari

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1940 Directed by Edward H. Griffith

It's a Safari of Love! Burning sands . . . burning lips! It's night-time on the glamorous Nile!

Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure in her sudden love for Jim, ultimately forsaking her future with the Baron for the joys of true love.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Madeleine Carroll Tullio Carminati Muriel Angelus Lynne Overman Frederick Vogeding Clinton Rosemond Billy Gilbert Thomas Louden Fred Godoy Hans von Morhart Darby Jones Henry Rowland George Melford James Davis Al Duvall John B. Washington Ben Carter Hassan Said Sam Harris Jesse Graves Ernest Wilson Madame Sul-Te-Wan Ernest Whitman Jack Carr

Director Director

Edward H. Griffith

Producer Producer

Anthony Veiller

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

William LeBaron

Writer Writer

Delmer Daves

Editor Editor

Cinematography cinematography.

Ted Tetzlaff

Art Direction Art Direction

Hans Dreier Ernst Fegté

Composer Composer

Friedrich Hollaender

Costume Design Costume Design

Drama Romance Adventure

Releases by Date

14 jun 1940, releases by country.

  • Theatrical NR

80 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Karina Oliveira

Review by Karina Oliveira

"Eh, the lassie’s bonny enough to be Scottish."

"By late November 1939, it seemed to some as if the war would just peter out with a negotiated peace. Even I breathed somewhat easier as I began shooting Safari , a routine program picture wherein I (and not Colman this time) had lovely Madeleine Carroll for a leading lady, and Tullio Carminati, a good but somewhat sissified Italian actor, played the villain. It was a part he hated because, as he never ceased reminding us, he had been Eleanora Duse ’s leading man for some years. As I recall, I was the brave white hunter in Africa who foils Fascist plans to do some damn thing or other to impede Allied interests." -Douglas…

Dennis Nedry

Review by Dennis Nedry

I normally think that even rinky dink b-movies from 1940 are more interesting than most modern films, but there are exceptions. In this crap melodrama, Madeleine Carroll is about to marry an evil millionaire but has second thoughts when she meets jungle guide Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on vacation in Africa. The lackluster plot is truly thin and tacky, with a lot of scenes where actors interact with stock footage, laugh at Africans and shoot some animals here and there. Not everything used to be better.

Bad old b-movies

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PUNQ

Review by PUNQ ★½

Must be the most boring Safari (1940) I've been on. Unfortunately.

Evan Kendal

Review by Evan Kendal ★★

Dull African adventure.

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Safari (1940)

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Safari Jacket: Who wore it well?

  • Date April 2022
  • Author Freddie Anderson

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  • The 1940s: A World At War »

1940s Fashion: Clothing Styles & Trends

1940s-fashion

Fashion in the 1940s was a good mix of comfort and glamour. There were specific outfits that were meant for specific times of the day. Some of their designs look downright modern even by today’s standards.

Another thing women ALWAYS wore: gloves. Preferably a pair that matches your outfit. Fur was very popular, as were animal skins. Crocodile purses, wombat collars, lambskin lining, and leather sleeves — no animal was off limits.

Clothes in the 1940s were very bright and colorful. The brighter the better. Women’s shoes were often one of three popular color choices: red, white or blue.

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In-Depth 1940s Fashion Profiles

1940s fashion: women & girls », 1940s fashion for men & boys », 1940s dresses & skirts: styles, trends & pictures », 1940s wedding dresses & gowns: trends & styles », 1940s fur coats: trends, styles & pictures », type a-2 leather flying jacket, wwii bomber jacket », fashion in 1941.

Women’s Outfit in 1941 (Harper’s Bazaar)

For her easy hours she wanted a really beautiful gown — one that made her feel like Lynn Fontanne. A gown in star sapphire blue, purple or black, with swirls of gilt and coral at the deep slashed throat is a perfect example of something a woman would relax in in 1941.

If she breakfasted in bed, she wanted a bed-jacket to match her gown. Or she would wear a cozy quilted robe with a matching gown. Nosegay print in rayon crepe; white or blue with red ric-rac, maize with green — or pink with blue.

When she plays cards in the evening she wears a pure cashmere cardigan in maize, gray, blue, natural or purple.

If she likes jewelry she might wear a pin with an exquisite basketweave bowknot in gold plate with rhinestones. She would like earrings with golden swirls with ruby and rhinestone bands. He favorite bracelet is a rhinestone bracelet in a sunburst-and-knot design.

She will also need some Edelweiss doe-skin gloves, a smart umbrella and a handbag — soft one. One that is black suede or claf, gathered on a frame and for extra dash — she’ll want her name in golden script. And for her tweeds, nothing could be better than crocodile skins from the Argentine.

At ease, at home, the man relaxes with his pipe and the paper in a chevron-weave smoking jacket. It’s made of spun rayon and wool in darker, more subdued colors. At his feet his wore “Freelancers” — bootmaker finish moccasins.

In 1941 they called scarfs “mufflers” and everyone wore one. They were usually in soft Scotch cashmere with a plaid pattern. Garters were a hot items as well — keeping those wide-ribbed brushed wool socks up.

And speaking of keeping things up, he needed black trimmed rayon moire suspenders complete with monogram.

Back to the lady. When she goes out she wants to wear a honey-smooth dinner jacket, with it lapels and cuffs encrusted with glittering “jewels.”

But what did she smell like? She had all kinds of perfumes to choose from: Charbert’s Amber, Houbigant’s Chantilly, D-Orsay’s Le Dandy, Corday’s Jet, Bourjois’ Mais Oui, Suzanne’s Tout de Suite and Arden’s Blue Grass were just some of the popular perfumes at the time.

But if he’s in the mood to get really fancy, he would wear an opera hat, white chamois gloves, silk scarf (white and black with black fringe or all-white) that’s, of course, monogrammed.

How about a trip to the big game? It’s gonna be cold! He needs a waterproofed cotton gabardine coat, lined and collared in lamb. Waterproofed boots with a lining of warm electrified sheepskin.

Fur was very popular in 1941

For black tie nights, he wore a shirt with attached collar and French cuffs, with gold plated cufflinks, matched to its pique pleated bosom.

An eighteen year-old guy thinks his poplin jacket is pretty special. The pure wool alpaca lining zips out and makes a separate sleeveless vest. He also loved his ulster, complete with wombat fur lined collar and the sleeves are leather lined.

An eighteen year-old girl loved her figure cutting outfit with its bright red and green plaid skirt and matching stocking cap. And for her trim little sweater in jacquard knit, all pure wool.

The college girl wore a stocking cap made of hand-knit virgin wool with a roll-neck jerkin. She loved those goofy elbow mittens, to echo her knee-high hand-loomed socks. All cable-stitched in fireman red or white.

She wore those frisky boots called “Mounties” for her rustic roadwork and general campus traffic. Complete with a knapsack muff in safari or beaver brown mouton lamb. With purse space inside, the muff is a perfect spice for her off-campus visit.

Practically required equipment for the gal on the move was an imported Shetland wool sweater in pink, blue, yellow or white. And she has a HUGE collection of Argyle socks.

Fashion in 1943

Fashion in 1943 began to show momentum of its own, an honest freedom from the great tradition of Paris on which it had leaned so heavily, for so long. Clothes were at once less cautious and less tricky. Still marked by the simplicity that wartime fabric shortages and the wartime work and psychology of women demanded, the simplicity was tempered by inventiveness of cut, a genuine suppleness of line.

Two very distinct silhouettes emerged over the year. One was tubular, slim, reedy, exemplified in straight chemise dresses cinched in at the waist by belt, not fit; in knitted dresses that pulled on over the figure like knee-length sweaters.

Brooches were a common accessory in 1943

The other silhouette was chunky, bulky, giving the effect of fullness without gathers robust boxcoats in wool or fur, or wool lined in fur; wool dresses cut with the generosity of officers’ greatcoats, then decisively belted in.

With either silhouette, the look of the head was decidedly neat and small, the hair folded up off the ears and moored on top of the head, netted neatly at the back of the neck, or twisted in tight neat braids.

Hats fitted close to the skull were hot. Little felt caps, coifs bound tight around the hairline, wide bands of material (called “curvettes”) worn over the top of the head and tied under the hair in back with strings of felt or velvet ribbon. This curvette was the most popular headpiece (it could scarcely be called a hat) of the young. It was seen in every material: felt, fur, crocheted wool flecked with colored sequins for the evening. Many secured their hair in simple snoods of veiling anchored on the head by a band of ribbon.

Suits were still the most popular single fashion.

The straight, spare skirt was broken across the front by soft trouser pleats, and a new hike-back skirt appeared still straight in front, but hiked up slightly in back to make it swing out gracefully behind. The suit jacket grew shorter and niftier.

Three jackets in particular marked a development:

1.) the short, fitted jacket, nipped in snugly at the waist, slightly flared out over the hipbones; 2.) the bolero, fitted close to the lines of the figure after the authentic Spanish fashion; 3.) the box jacket, extremely young and casual, its squared-off lines accentuating the slimness of the skirt.

Long coats adapted from officers’ greatcoats, and short coats adapted from seamen’s jackets, were seen everywhere practical, dashing, adaptable; but it was the fur-lined coat, launched in the autumn, that became the big news of winter. Simple tweed reefers, loose box coats, slim mid-length tuxedo coats all wore fur linings.

Even the raincoat made a welcome fur-lined appearance, giving women an opportunity to be warm in any weather.

The younger generation made almost a uniform of the pinafore or jumper dress, perfect in cottons for summer; and in gray flannel, checked tweed, or bright wool jersey a wonderful campus costume worn with any of many shirts and blouses.

A few of the more daring began to couple the pinafore with an adaptation of the ballet dancer’s leotard: waist-length tights and a separate crew-neck shirt of striped or figured wool jersey. This basic outfit dispensed with stockings and most underclothing, and over it a pinafore or simple wrap-on skirt completed a whole costume.

Georgiana Frocks (1943)

After several years of covered-up necklines for both day and evening, decolletage came back in fashion. It was first seen during the summer in gingham beach dresses with shoulder-strap tops, and in printed silk town dresses with matching jackets to cover their backless, sleeveless nakedness on the street.

By winter, 1943, the covered-up, short-skirted dinner dress of 1942 had become a full-fledged, decollete evening dress: short black slipper satin dresses with ribbons of satin over bare shoulders; halter tops of white satin and sequins barbarically strapping naked backs above simple short black crepe skirts; short black crepe dresses with deep oval decolletage and tiny cap sleeves dangerously edged in black lace.

The deep oval decolletage with its little cap sleeves proved so becoming to so many women, and such a relief from high-neck, long-sleeve fashions that it spread to clothes of every description.

Both the oval and the halter neckline were uppermost also in a new genre of play dress for the south. A casual, feminine type of dress, made in coarse colorful cottons from Mexico and Guatemala, that threatened to supplant the shirtwaist dress, to banish the ubiquitous slacks from the beach forever.

Fashion in 1945

The Canadienne

U.S. fashion designers displayed remarkable creativity when using the limited amount of textiles allotted to them by the government. The rounded line replaced angles, which was the primary means of avoiding boring designs.

At the beginning of 1945, the roundness was first achieved by pulling the waist tight, emphasizing fullness above and below the waistline. Eventually the round look took every costume. Often the only tight parts of an outfits were at the neck, waist and wrists.

Suit jackets had round collars and round-cut hemlines, while suit skirts belled out in front. The Canadienne, a French twist on the coat of a Canadian soldier, was one of the year’s biggest fashion hits.

Evening dresses often came with farthingales to make hips seem larger and the waist thinner.

The cholo was hugely popular on beaches in 1945. It was worn over top of the swimsuit.

The trend of wearing “separates” continued to grow. Shirts were ready to wear, came in a wide variety of styles and mixed well with skirts.

Gold neckbands, African-inspired metal rings and gold chains were wrapped around the neck and wrists.Buttons were brassy and belt buckles shined like a cowboy’s saddle.

Due to the absolute necessity of belts in the wardrobe, manufactures began producing more inventive belt styles than had even been seen before. Some were wide burnished bands of leather and others were cut to fit the waistline.

Women were particularly fond of ballet slippers in 1945. They came in all colors: plaid, black, pink — you name it — and were worn with everything from skirts to dresses to dancing tights.

It’s hard to deny that as 1945 progressed, the fashion world took on a much more relaxed and peaceful tone. Like a huge sigh of relief. Colors lightened and fancy fabrics slowly came back. European designers didn’t have the worry of a war in their backyard and, with the end of World War II, people felt like it was OK to care about something as trivial as fashion again. It certainly had been a while.

Fashion in 1946

1940s Fashion

Femininity was in full swing in 1946, After long, wartorn years of wearing suits, women turned to dresses again.

The curves that were so popular in 1945 were replaced by a more natural look. The shoulders and bosom were much more exposed this year, but never in a flamboyant way.

Even though Paris was short on just about everything but talent, designers did their best to keep their position as the fashion capital of the world.

An asymmetrical look was important in 1946. Long evening skirts swayed to one side. Dinner dresses appeared with just one shoulder strap. It was a very flattering look to the female figure.

Two popular suits, the cutaway suit and the bellhop suit, were very successful for designers. While not overly feminine, they still had a distinct look from man-tailored suits, and were exactly what women were looking for.

The Kiltie, a short pleated skirt which came in varied lengths, was a vital part of the playtime wardrobe.

With the end of the war, designers were finally able to dip into their array of beautiful fabrics again. Fine Irish linens returned and were used for simple things like day dresses, or for extravagant lace.

Embroidery was seen in almost every form: passementerie, jet beading, silk tassels, ball-fringe and more. Colors were delicate, pale blues and pinks, pale yellows and violet, were common color combinations.

Hats were trimmed with fantastic feathers. The tricorne, bicorne and tiny pillbox were popular hat shapes.

The ankle-length evening dress eclipsed the picture-skirted ball gowns in importance. Shoulders were covered by tiny boleros. Flowing capes draped over day dresses and evening gowns alike. One extravagant wrap was a greatcoat cut like a cape, lined with seal.

The feminine look was certainly aided by the fact that women could buy nylon stockings again. Also, with the rising of the hemline came a new focus on shoes.

Shoes were designed with grace. Gentle arches, high heels and ankle straps all gave the foot a renewed appeal.

Fashion in 1948

The new look, which had blossomed, billowed and exploded the point of near absurdity, finally collapsed. Clothes were pared down to create a tight fitting, spare look. It was the total opposite of what had been worn for the last three years.

Jackets were short and rib-tight. Skirts were straight in the front and sides, with all fullness drawn to the back. The tent coat disappeared, replaced by the belted greatcoat or the fitted coat with small shoulder capes.

1948 fashion

Women who couldn’t afford to buy an entirely new wardrobe would pull their loose fitting clothing tighter or just cut them smaller.

The Belt of the Year in 1948 was the dog leash, a thin, rounded and made in a variety of colors and materials. Handbags shrank in size and the extravagant jewelry that had been so popular over the past few years was toned down to smaller pieces.

Gloves were wrist length, scarves were short and even the hats were small.

Oliver Twist waistcoats suddenly appeared in every material and color imaginable, but especially of suede and velvet. Stoles became popular again, made of tweed, wool, jersey, and fur.

A renewed focus on the “going away look” placed more importance on the back. As such, 1948 fashions are markedly more embellished in the back than 1947 designs.

The lampshade dress was perfected in 1948. The lampshade dress fit very tightly from shoulder to mid-thigh, where it flared out intensely. It was intended for late afternoon and evening wear.

Patent leather made a comeback in 1948 as well, especially in bags and belts.

Fashion in 1949

Spring of 1949 went down in fashion history as the flying panel period. In the previous autumn Balenciaga had shown a fitted suit with narrow skirt, and a wide separate back panel. This original method of achieving a slim look combined with becoming movement made such an impression that the Paris spring collections were full of developments of this flying panel theme.

There were side panels, back and front panels, all-round strip panels like maypole ribbons. Sometimes a three-step hem level was given by panels both longer and shorter than the skirt. The skirt itself was always skin-tight.

Rayon Dress in 1949

Another fashion detail which grew to such proportions as to affect the silhouette was the pocket. Breast-high pockets, funnel-shaped, had flaps pointed and stiffened like calla lily petals to stand up above shoulder level. In some evening dresses the entire bodice consisted of twin pockets. Pouch pockets and huge flap pockets, placed far to the side, widened the hips.

The spring and summer also saw a new low level in daytime necklines. Even simple day dresses had necklines which plunged narrowly almost to the waist. Late-day dresses were apt to have immensely wide deep necklines.

Coats grew collars which rose high at the back, then turned down in a sloping line to become miniature capes. There were some fitted, bell-skirted coats, but the pyramid coat, sloping out from neck to hem, was the prevailing line.

Urchin hair cut and petulant earrings a distinctive fashion style in 1949.

Christian Dior showed the first short-and-long evening dress, spiraling from above the knee to train length. This 1949 fashion trend is shown by a sheath evening dress in black wool, slit above knee at back and with grosgrain panels trailing to the ground and the three-step hem levels caused by varied length panels were the forerunners of a whole crop of uneven hems in the autumn collections.

The later the hour, the more skirt lengths wavered. By day the general level had risen again to 14 or 15 inches from the ground, sometimes rising further at a wrap-around point, or slit for walking freedom. Late-day and evening skirt lengths; however, were extremely erratic.

The floor-length crinoline skirts, were kept for debutante and ball dresses. A new evening dress line was widely draped at the hips, narrowed to the ankle and then considerably slit.

Newest of all for Europe (but already familiar to America) were the strapless evening dresses in rich fabrics with street-length skirts: a few full, but the majority slim sheaths the 1920’s all over again, except that these dresses were invariably belted, in contrast to the unbroken line of that earlier period.

Dior’s ultra-short sheath, with a huge hip-swathe trailing the floor, was the most dramatic of a whole range of models which achieved short-and-long hemlines by panels, wrap-around swathing or slanting overskirts.

Kerchief-pointed skirts, wavering between knee and ballet length, were another aspect of hem-line uncertainty and another reminder of the ’20s also recalled by the ever receding length of hair.

The short hair of late 1948 was still long enough to curl out like a drake’s tail at the nape but late 1949 saw actually shingled heads and that variant, the gamine hair cut, reputedly begun by mannequins fretting their short hair unevenly with razor blades but soon developed through more orthodox means by the hairdressers.

The last months of 1949 saw the beginning of several important trends. One was again due to Dior: a dropped, markedly extended shoulder line the first sign of an important shoulder treatment since the removal of square padding left shoulders naturally rounded.

These new shoulders were still sloped and unpadded but half-way between shoulder and elbow Dior attached a gathered flounce, often buttoned, sometimes lined with fur, so that it stood out.

Another trend was the molded body-line, interrupted by sharp-angled shapes in collars, cuffs and stiffened hip draperies. This contrast of soft and sharp was achieved by using soft fabrics and stiffening them with a crisp lining at strategic points.

Skirts in general narrowed as the year went on.

There was a marked tendency towards asymmetry in clothes of all types. One rever would be longer than the other; a peplum would spring from the hip at one side only; a line of buttons (and buttons were everywhere) would march down one side of a bodice or skirt; necklines were cut to one side; evening dresses had one shoulder strap.

Colors continued dark or neutral. A whole range of “charcoal” colors  as if black had been mixed with them, appeared. There was much beige and grey. Blue, petrol and thunder blue and royal blue, returned, especially with black.

Navy blue was chosen for winter and for evening, and other colors particularly favored were dark greens, many browns and clear geranium reds.

Long gloves went out to meet the three-quarter and elbow-length sleeves. In the evening they rose to shoulder level; were smartest in black glace kid. Leather belts pulled in every waist on suits, day dresses, evening dresses. Court shoes and naked sandals (with covered toes and heels) divided the honors.

Colored shoes were seen in shades of ivy leaf green, pewter, blonde, bronze and dark red. Yards of pearls circled necks and dropped into deep necklines. Huge chandelier earrings swung to the shoulders piquant contrast to the ragged gamine hair cut.

Nylon lingerie appeared in sufficient quantities to be on display instead of only under the counter. Corsets in deep blue and other unconventional colors were a welcome proof that better supplies were making fashion experiments possible.

Realistically to meet their customers’ shrinking budgets a number of couture houses in Paris and London launched or expanded boutiques, little shops selling accessories and more moderately priced simple clothes, ready-to-wear, or needing only one fitting.

Men’s Fashions

In the men’s fashion field, 1949 saw the death of the exaggerated drape jacket, which hung loosely from the shoulders with hardly any indentation at the waist-line. “Drape” was a style which originated in England at the end of the 19th century and gave an illusion of broader shoulders and deeper chest.

After World War II it returned to England from America in such exaggerated forms that the style leaders at last decided that it no longer had a place in men’s fashions.

1940s Fashion Pictures

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Safari (1940) dvd.

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Safari (1940)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. , Madeleine Carroll , Tullio Carminati

Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure in her sudden love for Jim, ultimately forsaking her future with the Baron for the joys of true love.

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Great move, obscure, hard to find!

Posted by Lucy on Mar 16th 2018

Thank you Zeus for having this great old movie with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. I really enjoyed it.

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IMAGES

  1. Safari (1940) with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

    1940s safari

  2. Jungle Drums Of Africa-1952-27x41-Republic Serial-Clayton Moore

    1940s safari

  3. 1940s Safari Explorer Adult Costume

    1940s safari

  4. british lion hunt

    1940s safari

  5. Safari 1940 Editorial Stock Photo

    1940s safari

  6. A Brief History of Safari Style

    1940s safari

VIDEO

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  2. SAFARI EN MALASIA (Película en Español)

  3. Vintage Willys Jeeps in Hunter Canyon, Easter Jeep Safari 2022

  4. INCREDIBLE HISTORIC PHOTOS YOU NEED TO SEE! Vol 2

  5. Dancing on London Palladium stage with Debbie Curtis Radio Big Band

  6. Вот это да, ТАКОГО от Даны мы не ОЖИДАЛИ

COMMENTS

  1. The African Safari Lifestyle: Then and Now

    Back in the golden age of the African safari, namely the 1920s and 1930s, safari jackets, multi-pocketed vests, helmets and khaki shorts were on everyone's packing list. Pith helmets protected travelers from sun and rain. Made from the lightweight spongy tissue of certain plants, they remain the symbol of classic safari fashion.

  2. Safari (1940)

    Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure...

  3. Safari (1940 film)

    Safari. (1940 film) Safari is a 1940 American adventure film directed by Edward H. Griffith and starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Madeleine Carroll and Tullio Carminati. [1] [2] The film's sets were designed by the art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté .

  4. Safari (1940)

    Safari: Directed by Edward H. Griffith. With Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Madeleine Carroll, Tullio Carminati, Lynne Overman. Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure in her sudden love for Jim, ultimately forsaking her future with the Baron for the joys of true love.

  5. The Changing Face of the African Safari

    Safari vehicles on the move in Masailand in the 1940s. The professional hunter was truly the "captain of the ship" and the success of the entire safari, its well-being, and even the lives of the group depended on his decisions. A competent professional hunter was of necessity knowledgeable and a pleasant companion, at times a diplomat, a ...

  6. The Most Iconic Rifles and Cartridges from African Safaris

    One surprise safari classic is the falling block single-shot. More than a few African hunters worked with the old Winchester M85 single-shot with its external hammer, but the most famous falling block is the Farquharson as built by Gibbs. Few were actually made, but Frederick Selous used one, and that accrued to its fame. ...

  7. 50 Movies Where the Action Happens in Africa

    Nelson Mandela is a South African lawyer who joins the African National Congress in the 1940s when the law under the Apartheid system's brutal tyranny proves useless for his people. ... Nina also lived in Tanzania for a while where she worked with safari company and knows safari business inside out. For Nina, people are the essence of travel ...

  8. Safari (1940) with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

    It's a Safari of Love! Burning sands . . . burning lips! It's night-time on the glamorous Nile! L et's back the truck up for a moment before looking at this week's picture, 1940's Safari with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Madeleine Carroll. It's again a good exercise to compare some of the marketing pitches against the actual film they are tied to.

  9. Safari (1940)

    After the death of her aviator lover, beautiful Linda Stewart (Madeleine Carroll) marries wealthy sportsman Baron de Courland (Tulio Carminati) on the rebound. When the Baron arrives in Africa for a hunting expedition, he secures the services of jungle guide Jim Logan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) Sure as shootin', Linda and Jim fall in love with one ...

  10. Safari (movie, 1940)

    Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure in her sudden love for Jim, ultimately forsaking her future with the Baron for the joys of true love.

  11. A Brief History of Safari Style

    October 8, 2013. Niday Picture Library / Alamy. The quintessential safari look that started 150 years ago in colonial Kenya still prevails. 1860—1900. First seen in the late nineteenth century ...

  12. Safari (1940)

    Darkness makes flying back unsafe and they spend the night in the jungle. Insanely jealous, the Baron goes hunting, wounds a leopard and sends an unharmed native boy to finish it. The boy is killed and Jim, on his return calls the Baron a murderer. The Baron is incensed and decides to do away with Jim. — Les Adams <[email protected]>.

  13. Style 101: The Safari Jacket

    Of very tough substance, practically untearable, yet soft and pliable. Has a smooth, suede-like finish. Excellent for lightweight, summer wear. Colour is sand khaki.'. It wasn't until the 1940s and '50s though that the safari jacket got its big break. Clearly attracted by the inherently rugged, masculine appeal of the jacket and its ...

  14. A Brief History of the Bourgeois Safari Current Affairs

    Safari is a popular form of ecotourism often billed as a benefit for conservation. But this colonial practice cannot make up for centuries of exploitation of Africa's people, wildlife, and lands. ... A string of national parks followed in Kenya in the 1940s. In Tanganyika (Tanzania), Serengeti National Park and the nearby Ngorongoro ...

  15. ‎Safari (1940) directed by Edward H. Griffith

    I normally think that even rinky dink b-movies from 1940 are more interesting than most modern films, but there are exceptions. In this crap melodrama, Madeleine Carroll is about to marry an evil millionaire but has second thoughts when she meets jungle guide Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on vacation in Africa.

  16. Safari (1940)

    5/10. A famous lady pilot was in this movie. a-campanella 9 January 2007. Beryl Markham, a prolific lady bush pilot of the 1930's was invited to be in this movie playing herself, flying the sorties used. Her father trained horses in Africa, where she learned the adventurous life.

  17. Safari Jacket: Who wore it well?

    Ernest and Mary Hemingway on safari in Africa, circa 1940s. Betty and François Catroux A flurry of films in the 1940s and '50s had maintained its position in the limelight, but it wasn't until 1968, when Yves Saint Laurent dropped his African collection, that the style was perpetually thrusted into the public consciousness. His muses Betty ...

  18. 1940s Fashion: Clothing Styles, Trends, Pictures & History

    Take a deeper look into 1940s fashion by looking at pictures and reading our yearly timeline below. Share your love for 1940s Fashion: Clothing Styles & Trends. QUICK REFERENCE LINKS ... Complete with a knapsack muff in safari or beaver brown mouton lamb. With purse space inside, the muff is a perfect spice for her off-campus visit. ...

  19. 1940s Safari Jacket

    Vintage Jacket 1970s does 1940s Tweed Safari Jacket with Original Leather Belt (243) $ 120.48. Add to Favorites 1940s V Neck Sweater Coat Button Front, Pockets - Knit pattern PDF 1304 (656) $ 3.75. Digital Download Add to Favorites Casual Corner/ Vintage Wool Suit/ 70's Wool Plaid Suit/ 70's Plaid Secetary Skirt Set/ 70's Safari Jacket/ 70's ...

  20. 1940s Safari Dress

    Check out our 1940s safari dress selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our dresses shops. ... 1940s Saks 5th Ave silk blouse shirt top 40s camp collar 50s 1950s 30s 1930s Fifth real silk antique xs s m extra small medium true vtg 12 (1.1k)

  21. Safari (1940) DVD

    Safari (1940) Director: Edward H. Griffith. Writers: Delmer Daves (screenplay), Paul Hervey Fox (based on a story by) Stars: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Madeleine Carroll, Tullio Carminati. Millionaire Baron de Courland and his fiancée Linda Stewart employ Jim Logan as a guide for their hunting trip in the jungle. Linda finds unplanned adventure in ...

  22. 1940s Safari

    Check out our 1940s safari selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our dresses shops.

  23. Sophisticated 1940s Safari Camp, Botswana

    Ten sophisticated 1940's safari, stylish canvas tents, 7 stylishly appointed twin tents and 3 double tents, all with en-suite bathrooms and indoor and outdoor showers (for those who want to feel the Kalahari breeze on their skin), have been fashioned in a classic style. Persian rugs underfoot and cool cotton sheets form a striking contrast ...

  24. Brian Robinson on Instagram: "Ernesto, Two Fisted Tales Sun Valley

    309 likes, 10 comments - cwoodcockandco on March 2, 2024: "Ernesto, Two Fisted Tales Sun Valley, Idaho October 1941 Capa photo The Hemi-sphere March 2. 2024 In this iconic photo, Ernie is captured at the beginning of mid-life and at the height of his powers. With the 1940 publishing of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", he could lay claim to the title "Most Famous Writer in the World".