The Ivory Trail

'The Ivory Trail' is another book which dates back to my schooldays in England and my need to remember the African wilderness where I wished that I could be. Sadly, this isn't my original copy, which was lost upon the way, but one I bought while I lived in Scotland. It's a first edition, 1954, with its cover largely intact, and was rather expensive.

It's a biography of the hunter S C Barnard, known by the local people as Bvekenya, 'he who swaggers as he walks'. The son of a poor South African farmer, he took to the veld at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, to make his fortune from the illegal hunting of elephants, not only for their tusks but also for their hides, which he made into whips.

The area in which Bvekenya operated his poaching business was to the north and south of the Limpopo River, centred on a village called Crook's Corner, where three countries met: Southern Rhodesia, South Africa's Transvaal, and Portuguese East. This meant that, when police came looking for one of its residents from, say, Rhodesia, he could simply move camp a few yards and be safely in Portuguese East.

While much of the book is about hunting it also contains stories of the animals that inhabited this almost untouched bush country - like the day that Bvekenya observed a confrontation between an elephant and a honey badger, both of whom laid claim to a small waterhole: the honey badger won.

One of the joys of T V Bulpin's book is that it is illustrated with line drawings by C T Astley Maberley, several of them designed to fit around the text.

Another thing I like about the story is the development of Bvekenya's relationship with the local people, a tribe called the Shangane, who more than once saved his life. He, in return, ensured that, when he had shot an animal, the local people benefitted from the meat.

This did not prevent Bvekenya becoming a 'blackbirder', a recruiting agent for the South African mines. It was his job to persuade men to leave their village, for months and years at a time, to walk south to work in the gold and diamond mines.

Bvekenya's story is typical of the old white hunters. Having shot hundreds of elephants, enough to buy himself a farm in South Africa, he became so sickened by the killing that, when he finally tracked down Dhlulamithi, the greatest of all the elephants, despite his magnificent ivory, he found he could not shoot him.