'African Hunter'

Among the books I have from my childhood is 'African Hunter', a book I loved as it was all about the sort of Africa which I had never actually experienced but which I knew existed - an Africa in which white men hunted the innumerable species of game in the vast areas of bush up-country from Mombasa.

It was a young readers' edition and ideal for someone like me as....

....I was nine when I was given it. The date, 16th September 1954, means it was bought just before I flew back to school in England at the end of my summer holiday following my first two terms at Glengorse.

Perhaps it's significant that it came from my mother alone, perhaps it's just that my father always took Richard and I down to the Mombasa Bookshop in Kilindini Road just before we left and bought us a comic 'annual' each, easy reading on the long flight to England.

Hunter came to Kenya from southern Scotland as a young man in 1905 to farm, a profession in which he lasted just three months. He was on his way back home, defeated, when he took a job as a guard on the Mombasa-Nairobi railway. One day he stopped his train in the middle of nowhere, disembarked and, while the train waited, shot his first elephant, making £37 for the two tusks, more than he earned in two months on the railway.

His stories, and his wealth of knowledge about the bush, fascinated me. I learned that he considered leopard to be the most dangerous of the big game while many hunters most feared the wily buffalo. When he first started as a professional 'white' hunter, he earned his keep by shooting lions and selling each hide for a pound. Not that he under-rated the danger of hunting them. He wrote, "Lion hunting was a dangerous business. At that time there were about forty professional lion-hunters in the Nairobi area and at least half of them had been mauled."

It's amazing to think that there were enough lions in Kenya to keep forty hunters in business.

JA Hunter saw Africa at a time when game was as abundant as the snows that lay thick on the summit of Kilimanjaro. By the end of his time in Kenya, in 1950, he was leading photographic rather than killing safaris.