A Lord of Eden: In The Footsteps of Stewart Edward White

Perhaps the best way to experience the African wild is to camp simply, under the stars, with the sounds of the night lulling you into dreams that cannot compare with the reality of your waking hours out on the trail. Up at 5am, breakfast before dawn, out of camp by 6. Back into camp at sunset, dinner, download the day’s reference photos, make notes in journal, off to bed.

Sleep on safari, at least for me, is just a necessary passing of the hours before sunrise. With dawn, the sweetest dream–encompassing a world of wild creatures at every turn– begins anew.

Moving the camp around as desired is a practical way to experience the best that each East African ecosystem has to offer. One of my favorite places–Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park–embraces a spectacular array of different landscapes: golden endless plains, fascinating kopje rock castles, rugged hills, and meandering rivers cloaked in woodlands. All there waiting to be explored…

I journeyed to the northern Serengeti’s Bologonja region (not far from the Kenya border) in order to retrace the steps of Stewart Edward White, an American hunter who wrote the first detailed account of the Serengeti in his book The Rediscovered Country, published in 1913.

Of this area of the Serengeti, White wrote:” Never have I seen anything like that game. It covered every hill, standing in the openings, strolling in and out among the groves, feeding on the bottom lands, singly, or in little groups. It did not matter in which direction I looked, there it was; as abundant one place as another. Nor did it matter how far I went, over how many hills I walked, how many wide prospects I examined, it was always the same. During my stay at the next two camps I looked over fifty square miles. One day I counted 4,628 head! And suddenly I realized again that in this beautiful, wide, populous country, no sportsman’s rifle has ever been fired. It is a virgin game country, and I have been the last man who will ever discover one for the sportsmen of the world. There is no other available possibility for such a game field in Africa unexplored. I moved among those hordes of unsophisticated beasts as a lord of Eden would have moved.”

Stewart Edward White (right) & R J Cuninghame (left)

Lord of Eden! As my Tanzania driver-guide Edward and I made our way along the front lines of the Great Migration 100 years later at Bologonja, I knew exactly how White must have felt. The dust, the tumult of tens of thousands of mammals on the move, the cacophony of grunting wildebeest and braying zebras: experiencing a glimpse of the still-living Pleistocene will rock your world forever.Incidentally, many more wildebeest are alive today than in White’s era. The great herds had been decimated by rinderpest in the 1890’s and were only just beginning to recover by 1913. Now is perhaps the greatest time in history to wander among the migration– so get there, if you possibly can! As for White’s assertion that he moved among hordes of “unsophisticated beasts” while in the Serengeti, I can only say that he must not have been well acquainted with elephants! But those were the times that he lived in…

I never saw another vehicle in the vicinity of these remote Serengeti camps. And wildlife was everywhere in astonishing profusion. Lanterns are set about the perimeter of camp by night in order to discourage nocturnal predators.

Chegge, cook at my mobile Serengeti bush campa, excelled at whipping up excellent meals under the most basic conditions. Food somehow tastes better cooked in the open.

My land rover doubled at night as a digital photography studio, the all-important space where I downloaded the day’s photo reference to my laptop–all powered by the cigarette lighter. It is important to make sure that your land rover has a working lighter…

Edward was quite a proper gentleman, but had a keen sense of humor and an endless array of funny stories. Few people on earth know the African bush as well as he. Without his keen eyes and decades of experience, getting good shots of hard to see animals– such as leopards–would have been a very different prospect indeed. I learned so much about the bush from Edward. Here he’s enjoying his morning tea. I love a mug of tea as prepared in camp: the water is boiled with milk over an open fire, tea is added, then strained. Add raw sugar to taste.

Edward has been going on safari for 30 years– and had never camped at Bologonja before we went there. Here he is putting the sign back up at the campsite. The site was so remote and little-used that the sign had fallen down in disrepair.

• ” I can’t believe we are camping here!” he shouted wryly as I snapped his photo. ” Next time, Ndutu Lodge!!”

Lioness Reflection Completed/Featured In Wildlife Art Journal

The completed Lioness Reflection painting recently appeared in a Serengeti Day  installment of Wildlife Art Journal protesting the proposed commercial highway through the Serengeti National Park. My accompanying statement:

“I observed this lioness one afternoon close to my small campsite in the northern reaches of the Serengeti, near Bologonja. She had just made a careful, but ultimately failed attempt to ambush a young wildebeest that had strayed from the edge of the Great Migration. Lions fail far more often than they kill, but something about her posture–an attitude that I worked to convey in my painting–tells me just how much of a survivor she is. She may fail time and again, but she’ll keep trying until she provides for herself, her cubs, her pride. That’s just one of the things about lions that I find so inspiring.

Painting this lioness in the studio day to day transported me back to the Serengeti– and to the emotions that I experienced when I was immersed in one of the few places where one can get a clear idea of what the earth must have been like during the Golden Age of Mammals. I divide my field work these days between two Serengetis: East Africa’s–the last great stronghold of the world’s megafauna– and the lost ecosystem of the American Great Plains, where bison once roamed in herds that were perhaps the greatest ever known to man. I recently stood on a hilltop in the midst of the western Kansas prairie, looking across a landscape completely empty of the vast numbers of large mammals that had roamed there until the mid-nineteenth century, just a moment ago in geologic time.

The proposed Serengeti Highway threatens to reduce the great plains of East Africa to a land just as empty and just as haunted by what might have been. America’s vast herds were lost before they could even be studied and understood, destroyed by men who did not appreciate the value of the natural world beyond their own blind and momentary greed. Today, we know better. This lioness cannot pause to reflect upon the future of her world– she can only work to feed herself. It is up to us to ensure that short-sighted greed will not prevail again. We must stand together to protect the Serengeti for present and future generations– and for the wild creatures that still call its majestic horizons home. ”

This piece is now in the collection of Mrs. Jackie West Cowden.

First Flight

Monitoring a flight’s progress over the vastness of the Sahara, final destination: Arusha, Tanzania.

This was a momentous day in my life– a first sunrise over Africa, witnessed from the window of a plane: a first glimpse of the continent that had captured my imagination since early childhood. I’ve never gotten over my sense of the true miracle of being lifted into the sky and propelled across the globe, taking only hours to cover distances that once consumed whole lifetimes in the days of early exploration.

Though it was years ago now and I’ve since returned to Africa for more safaris, this particular morning has never faded from my memory: glimpses of the desert far below with its strange and lonely rock formations; the play of light on cloud fields–African clouds now–as the sun flooded the sky with color; the realization that each passing moment was carrying me closer to places with names out of books: Kilimanjaro, Serengeti, Manyara, Ngorongoro. I arrived with expectations– and discovered that I had set the bar too low. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to experience.

Moru Kopje Camp, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Cook Chegge, camp assistant Jeffrey, and my driver-guide Edward discuss the lions and hyenas that had stormed through our small campsite at Moru Kopjes, Serengeti National Park. At two in the afternoon, several lionesses, one with a cub in her mouth, had dashed past the cook tent, followed by many hyenas whooping and giggling. General chaos ensued as Chegge scrambled out of harm’s way. We found him badly shaken when we returned to camp that evening. Fortunately, he was not hurt– but as you can see, every day in Serengeti leaves the human visitor in this wild and beautiful domain, stronghold of the Great Migration, with many stories to tell…