Snake Man

I have just finished reading this book from my library of African books, the story of CJP Ionides, an Englishman of Greek family who, by joining the British army and getting himself posted to Kenya, ended up spending most of his life in East Africa.

Ionides had all the eccentricity and arrogance of an English public schoolboy along with a good dose of the prejudices of the colonial British. He treated the Africans who worked for him, and the many people he came across in the rural villages in his district, as if they were children, even to the extent that, with one village which particularly irritated him, he had the whole population beaten with hippo-hide whips.

He was a keen hunter who moved from poacher to game warden. His hobby was the collecting of rare specimens so, among others, he shot bongo, nyala, various lechwe, gorilla, okapi and the now functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros. In mitigation, most of his specimens went to the Coryndon museum in Nairobi.

However, after years as a game warden in Tanganyika, he finally found his calling in collecting snakes. Some went to zoos, many to medical facilities where they were milked of their venom which, mainly, went to making serum used when people were bitten. He also found many rare reptile species including the Liwali two-headed snake.

Many of the snakes he dealt with were very poisonous, including mambas, cobras, gaboon vipers and puff adders. He was bitten on numerous occasions, to the extent that he maintained he had developed an immunity to snake bite.

The book, published in 1960, is a product of its time but a fascinating window into what is now a much-vilified age.