The author and journalist Robert Ruark treated himself to a safari in 1951 and made subsequent return trips to hunt what was then British East Africa thereafter. In land that is Kenya and Tanzania today, he came to know many of the professional hunting guides. He hunted with the best, and he came to know the other kinds as well. The best had one defining principle in common: they graded their own performances for themselves alone.
At the time, an African safari was an extended car camping trip into the back of furthest beyond near the equator on the eastern side of the continent. Areas of wildest veldt unmarred by the hand of man drew hunters who came to camp and see and shoot. Hunters were required by law to engage local guides, partly as an economic development measure, partly to make sure the game department got paid and partly from plain and simple common sense.
These expeditions commonly lasted two to three months. Months. It was a tremendous investment in both funding and time. A full safari party of hunters and their companions, led by a professional guide, often extended to include dozens of support crew. They brought along trucks, draft animals and themselves for the labor living long term in the open would mean. Over the course of the excursion, those paying the bills and those deciding what to do could commonly land at odds with one another, hardly a surprise.
The best of the guides, Ruark would learn, required themselves to work hardest for the customers who treated them worst because the only standard to which such a guide could be held was the one to which he held himself. Professionals in most fields have the opportunity of peer comparison, but a guide’s real work only happens when he and his charges are near nothing but the ground. A guide who works hardest only for customers he likes is a fraud looking for a deep pocket to happen to so, in a realm where self respect was everything, the best required their own best for the worst. Though jarring, I think that’s a reliable standard we might apply for ourselves.
To understand the nature of the discontent, it’s important to appreciate the type of people who could afford such trips. Generally, safari customers were self-made people in their 50s or beyond. Typically they had achieved their success in a way that owed much to their own personality. They were active, avid, driven, Type-A people who had come by their current means through expecting, demanding and receiving dedicated performance from their employees. The hunters had high and prompt expectations, and no amount of advance counseling could really alter the destination of emotional pileup. It was much more than a matter of wanting to shoot something big tomorrow. The guide, known as the professional hunter or “PH”, was in charge of all aspects of daily life.
Hunting is hunting. Sometimes the critters cooperate and usually they don’t and that’s how it is no matter how much money you have. Over the course of weeks in rural equatorial East Africa, every other aspect of life was certain to eventually arise, though, as life is guaranteed to do. People got injured or sick. Vehicles broke down. Politics intervened. Aggravation accumulated and, eventually, feelings were thoroughly bruised.
As long as the PH knew he was delivering the best work any could do, though, each day’s trials could be conquered one at a time.
“Don’t be a stumbling block,” the Old Man often said, “but don’t be a door mat either. Just because you’re working on the ground doesn’t mean your value is low. If you have enough respect for what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, you’ll always have enough respect for yourself.”
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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