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On Safari: The Story Of My Life
Even had he not already given such delight to millions with his films, Armand Denis with this book would place himself in the forefront of the observers of wild animal life. Probably no man has ever had a wider or more intimate knowledge of the strange creatures inhabiting the remoter parts of our planet. Driven by a passionate curiosity, and equipped with a biologist's training, he surmounted unimaginable difficulties and dangers in order to come to close quarters with various mammals and reptiles carrying on their prehistoric existence in the depths of Africa, Australasia and South America (where, incidentally, he met and married Michaela).
- GenresNonfictionBiography
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1963
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September 1, 2018
My low rating for this book perhaps needs some explanation. It is not a rating of the author’s writing skill, as Armand Denis has a lively, engaging style. Nor is it of the subject matter, per se. It is based both on the social perceptions regarding both zoology and anthropology in 1963, at the time of writing On Safari, and on some specific aspects of the book relating to this, which informed my overall judgement.
In the 1950s and 1960s most people in Great Britain only had a cursory knowledge of wildlife, and much of that was biased towards the indigenous wildlife in this country. There may have been rare visits to zoos, to see animals in cramped conditions and unnatural environments, but television programmes and films were thin on the ground, and often badly photographed. And popular books on the subject did not usually have photographs but only sketchy artwork.
A few husband and wife teams were set to change all that. Joy Adamson, and her husband George, the game warden of the Northern Frontier District, brought the wildlife of Kenya straight into the heart of people’s homes. Joy wrote a remarkable account of raising an orphaned lion cub, whom they named “Elsa”, eventually releasing her back into the wild. Two other books followed, which were also an instant success, as were the films, and the public’s interest in conservation and wildlife issues soared.
Hans and Lotte Hass were another couple who triggered the public’s interest in wildlife; this time of the underwater variety. Hans was an Austrian diver, and in the fifties he made over a hundred wildlife films with his second wife, Lotte. I well remember being glued to the television screen in the sixties for the repeats, watching their extraordinary discoveries. Black and white, low quality images they may have been, but their films from East Africa and South Asia were every bit as strange and fascinating as those from the African big game parks.
Another pioneer of wildlife photography, also on British television in the sixties and seventies, was Jacques Cousteau. After leaving the French navy, he had spent many years on his ship, and was one of the co-inventors of the aqua-lung, which is used in underwater diving.
This remarkable group of pioneering European wildlife enthusiasts, photographers and documentary makers, would not be complete without Armand and Michaela Denis. Armand Denis was a Belgian documentary filmmaker, who pioneered work on the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia. He was very well known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in the 1950s and 1960s, with his second wife Michaela, who also wrote two wildlife books.
Armand Denis had been born in Brussels; the son of a Catholic judge and educated by Jesuits. During the first World War, he spent a few weeks in an internment camp in Antwerp, from which he escaped to Britain, going on to read Chemistry at Oxford University. He spent six months in a Carthusian monastery, worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough on lubricating oils, and then in Belgium on coke oven technology, before moving to the USA as a radio engineer. There, in 1926, he invented the automatic volume control for radio. In On Safari he wrote, “I have had two great passions in my life - travel and animals”. The royalties he received from his invention allowed him to indulge this love of travel and film-making.
Armand Denis describes his early life, his passion for animals and the exotic animals he kept. He remembered watching wild life when at Oxford, collecting lizards in Belgium, and the snakes he kept too. Some of his pets were strictly illegal such as “Jake, the hot tortoise”, a 100 lb Galapagos tortoise. He even took his tortoise with him to Bali! After moving to Hollywood he worked as a cameraman, and began film-making with André Roosevelt, who was a first cousin once removed of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1928, Armand Denis and André Roosevelt travelled to Bali to make “Goona Goona”, a film involving authentic expedition footage and a fictional story about a romance between a Balinese prince and a servant girl. He describes the visit to Bali, with much affection, but does not mention in this autobiography that he had married Leila Roosevelt, André’s daughter. He uses the term “we” but is nonspecific as to whom he means.
The movie was successful, and started a craze for all things Balinese. In 1934 Armand and Leila travelled to what was then Belgian Congo, to record sound film material suitable for use in African movies. The couple recorded a wide variety of footage, including the first film of the music and dances of the Mangbetu and Tutsi (Watusi) peoples. There is a lively section on elephants on the Belgian Congo. The couple continued to work on short documentaries through the late 1930s, and in 1944 made a film, “Dangerous Journey” covering their travels in Africa, India and Burma.
Then in 1948, Armand Denis met Michaela Holdsworth, a glamorous British dress designer, in New York. They began an affair and, after he and Leila divorced, Armand and Michaela married in Bolivia, and the couple made their home in Nairobi, Kenya. Armand Denis published his autobiography, On Safari: The Story of My Life in 1963. He was also to write “At Home With Michaela” in 1965.
Although the wildlife work of Armand Denis had always been as part of a husband and wife team, this autobiography is a bit sketchy on the personal details during his early professional years (notwithstanding the fact that he had four children with his first wife!) and any personal details are not mentioned until chapter 21, with the introduction of Michaela.
In 1950, when they had been married for 2 years, the couple travelled to begin work on the feature film, “King Solomon’s Mines”, in order to finance their independent work. Armand was MGM’s technical adviser, and Michaela was to act as Deborah Kerr’s double. Parts of this were shocking:
“I discovered to my extreme annoyance that the script called for the shooting of a fully grown charging male elephant. It was exactly the sort of film scene that I disapprove of most strongly, but my opinions carried little weight against MGM’s, and the killing was arranged.
There was nothing I could do, so I kept well away. But I learned afterwards, that when the old bull was shot, two younger elephants out of the herd came forward and tried to lead him away. It must have been a very moving, very shaming sight for those film hunters, with their high velocity rifles. But incredible thought it seems, hardly anyone at MGM seemed to have realised that here was one authentic sequence that had never been filmed before. As far as I was concerned, this one scene would have been worth all the rest of the film put together.”
I will never view that “family adventure” film in quite the same light again, although perhaps instances like this were all too common.
The difficulties of reading this book from our modern perspective continue in the next chapter, “Camp of the Pygmies”, in which he visits Pat Putnam’s Camp, at Epulu, in the middle of the Ituri Rain Forest, in the Eastern Congo. Pat Putnam was an American anthropologist who was studying the pygmy people.
Historically, there has been much systematic discrimination against Pygmy peoples. There are at least a dozen Pygmy groups, some unrelated to each other. The best known are the “Mbenga”, of the western Congo basin, who speak Bantu and Ubangian languages; the “Twa” of the Great Lakes, who speak Bantu Rundi and Kiga, and those here, the “Mbuti” of the Ituri Rainforest, who speak Bantu and Central Sudanic languages.
They are diverse groups, yet pygmies have always been viewed as inferior by both colonial authorities and the village dwelling Bantu tribes. One early example is when the Belgian colonial authorities captured pygmy children and exported them to zoos throughout Europe, including the world’s fair in the United States in 1907!
Pygmies are still often evicted from their land and given the lowest paying jobs. They are not considered to be citizens by most African states, and are refused identity cards, deeds to land, health care and proper schooling. They are frequently forced out of their traditional homelands and into villages and cities where they often are marginalised, impoverished and abused by the dominant culture.
Armand Denis’s account is a sympathetic one. He clearly makes a great effort to get to know individual members of the tribe, and describes their customs with sensitivity, although they are so alien to Western eyes. On the tradition of hunting an elephant, he says, “the pygmy is first and foremost a hunter, getting all his food from the animal he kills”.
Later he witnesses one:
“It was extremely cruel and must have caused the elephant untold suffering before he died. But it called for such courage and stamina on the part of the hunter that I could not honestly find it in my heart to condemn it. For once the risks the hunter ran were far greater than those of his quarry, and for the pygmy - hunting was not a sport. It was the only way he knew to feed himself and his children.”
The description takes two pages and is detailed and gruelling. It involves locating one elephant as a target, living on the edge of the herd and covering himself with dung, until the herd accepts him as part of it. When he can get close enough to his identified animal, he thrusts his spear into the elephant’s underbelly. This is a mortal wound, but the elephant does not die until peritonitis has set in over several days. The hunter tracks the herd all the time, until the elephant finally dies. He then cuts off the tail, and brings his tribe back to perform their important ceremonies. Every single part of the elephant is used.
The issues are very complex. This pygmy society, where a belief in witchcraft is the norm, and women are regarded as chattels, is also set apart from our own. Yet for all his careful non-intrusion, I found one photograph very disturbing, with the author standing with two grandmothers. It had overtones of paternalism, white v. black, male v. female, awareness of the camera v. confusion. Why this stance? Why hold hands with these two grandmothers, as though they were children?
From now on I found the book deeply disturbing. In 1939, he took a Far East expedition to Burma, China and Tibet. A visit to Nepal, a country known at the time for its reluctance to admit visitors, was largely facilitated by a chance meeting with one of the Maharajah’s daughters. But seasonal rains made the journey very difficult. Meeting the Maharajah was described in an entertaining way, as it had been made into a grand state occasion. Unfortunately the Maharajah misunderstood Armand Denis’s motive for being there, and assumed the “shooting” was not of the film variety, but of game.
On seeing the walls of the palace lined with all the Maharajah’s trophies, the author tried to gently caution him, saying that if he carried on hunting to this extreme, there would be none of these endangered animals left. The Maharajah winked and said that he thought there would be just enough to last him out. One grisly feature of this episode was that the backs of every single trophy had carefully painted on them a reproduction of the exact appearance of all the bones and blood vessels etc., that had been severed. There were times in this book when it seemed to be overwhelmed with aspects of hunting, despite the author’s views. Many settlers, as well as indigenous peoples, seemed to be in Africa specifically for that reason.
Armand Denis had the idea of setting up a farm, or camp, for chimpanzees, hoping that he could get financial backing for it, so that he could enable both psychological and medical research, without cruelty. Many of the medical profession were sceptical, but he did establish his camp, and found that the chimpanzees, who always loved being the centre of attention, would rush to have their blood taken when they spied a doctor with a hypodermic. Probably the banana helped a bit too. What put paid to the camp was the advent of the Second World War.
There was a chance meeting in New York with someone from his past, an Argentian “prospector” who offered the author a gorilla for a highish price. Armand Denis knew that it must have been smuggled into the country, but his curiosity led to one of the author’s worst experiences. Rainez swore that there were many of these gorillas in Equatorial Africa, and a tribe there who hunted them. Armand Denis was sceptical, but had read enough about Paul Du Chaillu’s travels and discoveries, to be intrigued enough to find out for himself. The nearest village to the (unnamed) tribe was Okio, near the capital, Brazzaville.
“What was remarkable about the tribe was the way its entire existence centred round the gorillas. They had hunted them from time immemorial and the animals had not only become the source of meat for the villages, but also provided the tribe with its one industry, its main excitement in life and the inspiration for its dances.”
I cannot quite bring myself to describe the repeated hunts, the bloodlust and savagery. It involved chasing entire families with spears, harpoons, guns loaded with makeshift ammunition of random bits of sharp metal, and nets. And again there was terror and a slow death. Armand Denis himself had a crisis of conscience about this:
“All my sympathies were with them, and I held my breath, hoping that they would get away” and tells how “squeamish” the entire business made him feel, as someone who had such a passion for animals. Nevertheless, he reassured himself that:
“Even if I packed and left that night, the gorillas would still go on being hunted, and I had the knowledge that although seven gorillas had been killed that day, my presence on the hunt had saved nine young ones from slaughter.”
There are many photos relating to this, but the most extraordinary one to me, is the one showing one of Chief Bamboo’s wives breast-feeding one of the tiny gorilla orphans which had been carefully saved from being killed, as part of his quota. Armand Denis had permission to export thirty gorillas from the country.
There were yet more descriptions of diseased, terrified gorillas who had been captured. Then the journey back, in which all the gorillas died one by one from the unknown disease. Research scientists did not have the time to identify more than that it was a “virus”. Perhaps the only reason for documenting cultures and traditions which are disappearing, is so that we never lose the historical knowledge. The supreme irony of this chilling tale was that all the film footage was also lost, as the ship it was on sank.
There is not much respite from killing and capturing. In 1946, the author travelled to Mombasa, in Kenya. He hired a professional hunter, Al Klein, for a safari to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika, and spent 3 weeks filming lions. Four years later, he was back in the Congo to film gorillas again, and what was very rarely seen at the time, Okapi, a type of antelope. He captured giraffes with a lasso, and also rhinoceroses near Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro, aardvarks and a leopard. He filmed hippopotatmuses underwater at Mzima Springs, in Tsavo West.
With Michaela, he filmed in North Australia, the Great Barrier Reef and Papua New Guinea. There is mention of head-hunting, and how this is not to demonstrate physical prowess, but just about prestige, and the sheer numbers of people killed. A man would be quite happy to buy a child from a neighbouring village, and then send his son outside with an axe or a knife, to chop off the infant’s head, which would then be strung on his belt. Armand Denis commented:
“This sort of thing is mercifully dying out, but although I found it repellent, I could not bring myself to believe that the primitiveness of these people was any argument for trying suddenly to thrust them headlong into the twentieth century … I could think of no occasion when a white race had come into contact with a primitive one like this and the primitive one had really benefited … The white man’s drink, his politics, his diseases would infect the people. Instead of progressing they would degenerate, like the Red Indians of America and so many of the tribes of Africa, they could end up only as third class citizens of a world that had no real place for them.”
The public side of this part of his life were the films he made, “Savage Spendour” and with Michaela, “Under the Sahara”.
Perhaps the most upsetting episode in this book for me, came just after the Second World War. Arnold Denis had returned to Kenya, to find that most of the wildlife had gone. Even more worrying for the ecological survival of the area was that many of the trees had been felled, and the foliage destroyed. The reason for this wanton carnage and decimation was the returning soldiers from the Second World War. You couldn’t blame them, he was told. The game wardens were all away fighting in the war. If a troop of soldiers are armed with heavy duty rifles and ammunition, then it’s only natural for them to fire at random into a herd of zebras, or any other large game. It was basically a free for all, with rapid rounds of fire destroying a herd in minutes. Some of the animals were then fed to Italian prisoners of War, almost as an afterthought. He was told:
“There was quite a lot of machine-gunning of buck and zebra. You can do quite a lot of damage to a herd of zebra with one bren gun. Then there were the giraffe, of course. Anyone can get a giraffe with a service rifle and an ostrich too for that matter. The troops were here nearly four years and the game doesn’t last for ever.”
Armand Denis commented:
“For anyone with the instinct for really large-scale butchery, this offered the chance of a lifetime … the slaughter went on for many months until nothing but the remnants of East Africa’s game were left, and only those in the most inaccessible country … there was evidence of the most savage destruction of wild life. You may not be able to feed Italian prisoners on lion meat, but the sportsmen had come here with their rifles and blazed away at the lions for the fun of it. Until then the Serengeti lions had rarely been hunted, and they must have made sitting targets.”
Yes, these episodes are important to remember. And it is a lesson to be learned that this mass slaughter was not by the indigenous people, but by those from so-called “developed” countries - and within our own lifetime. Yes, we have a different attitude now to animal conservation and animal cruelty. Yes Armand Denis was doing important work. And yes, I think acquiring knowledge and experience is one of the key aspects of life. But I do question, however, whether reading this book has enhanced my life in any way whatsoever. I never want to see it again.
If you do decide to read this book, please bear in mind when it was written, and in full knowledge of what it contains, in all its explicit and grisly detail. I am sad to give this book such a low rating, but in all honesty “I did not like it”. I shall stick with my fond memories of Armand and Michaela Denis’s wonderful wildlife documentaries on television; Armand with his heavy accent and Michaela, with her enthusiasm and glamorous appeal dashing across the Serengeti National Park in their Land Rover. The thousands of zebras and wildebeest; an annual migration of huge herds of animals. The rush of wildebeest, as they attempted to cross the road before the approaching Land Rover. Memories like these are partly responsible for my lifelong love of wildlife.
In the 1950s and 1960s most people in Great Britain only had a cursory knowledge of wildlife, and much of that was biased towards the indigenous wildlife in this country. There may have been rare visits to zoos, to see animals in cramped conditions and unnatural environments, but television programmes and films were thin on the ground, and often badly photographed. And popular books on the subject did not usually have photographs but only sketchy artwork.
A few husband and wife teams were set to change all that. Joy Adamson, and her husband George, the game warden of the Northern Frontier District, brought the wildlife of Kenya straight into the heart of people’s homes. Joy wrote a remarkable account of raising an orphaned lion cub, whom they named “Elsa”, eventually releasing her back into the wild. Two other books followed, which were also an instant success, as were the films, and the public’s interest in conservation and wildlife issues soared.
Hans and Lotte Hass were another couple who triggered the public’s interest in wildlife; this time of the underwater variety. Hans was an Austrian diver, and in the fifties he made over a hundred wildlife films with his second wife, Lotte. I well remember being glued to the television screen in the sixties for the repeats, watching their extraordinary discoveries. Black and white, low quality images they may have been, but their films from East Africa and South Asia were every bit as strange and fascinating as those from the African big game parks.
Another pioneer of wildlife photography, also on British television in the sixties and seventies, was Jacques Cousteau. After leaving the French navy, he had spent many years on his ship, and was one of the co-inventors of the aqua-lung, which is used in underwater diving.
This remarkable group of pioneering European wildlife enthusiasts, photographers and documentary makers, would not be complete without Armand and Michaela Denis. Armand Denis was a Belgian documentary filmmaker, who pioneered work on the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia. He was very well known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in the 1950s and 1960s, with his second wife Michaela, who also wrote two wildlife books.
Armand Denis had been born in Brussels; the son of a Catholic judge and educated by Jesuits. During the first World War, he spent a few weeks in an internment camp in Antwerp, from which he escaped to Britain, going on to read Chemistry at Oxford University. He spent six months in a Carthusian monastery, worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough on lubricating oils, and then in Belgium on coke oven technology, before moving to the USA as a radio engineer. There, in 1926, he invented the automatic volume control for radio. In On Safari he wrote, “I have had two great passions in my life - travel and animals”. The royalties he received from his invention allowed him to indulge this love of travel and film-making.
Armand Denis describes his early life, his passion for animals and the exotic animals he kept. He remembered watching wild life when at Oxford, collecting lizards in Belgium, and the snakes he kept too. Some of his pets were strictly illegal such as “Jake, the hot tortoise”, a 100 lb Galapagos tortoise. He even took his tortoise with him to Bali! After moving to Hollywood he worked as a cameraman, and began film-making with André Roosevelt, who was a first cousin once removed of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1928, Armand Denis and André Roosevelt travelled to Bali to make “Goona Goona”, a film involving authentic expedition footage and a fictional story about a romance between a Balinese prince and a servant girl. He describes the visit to Bali, with much affection, but does not mention in this autobiography that he had married Leila Roosevelt, André’s daughter. He uses the term “we” but is nonspecific as to whom he means.
The movie was successful, and started a craze for all things Balinese. In 1934 Armand and Leila travelled to what was then Belgian Congo, to record sound film material suitable for use in African movies. The couple recorded a wide variety of footage, including the first film of the music and dances of the Mangbetu and Tutsi (Watusi) peoples. There is a lively section on elephants on the Belgian Congo. The couple continued to work on short documentaries through the late 1930s, and in 1944 made a film, “Dangerous Journey” covering their travels in Africa, India and Burma.
Then in 1948, Armand Denis met Michaela Holdsworth, a glamorous British dress designer, in New York. They began an affair and, after he and Leila divorced, Armand and Michaela married in Bolivia, and the couple made their home in Nairobi, Kenya. Armand Denis published his autobiography, On Safari: The Story of My Life in 1963. He was also to write “At Home With Michaela” in 1965.
Although the wildlife work of Armand Denis had always been as part of a husband and wife team, this autobiography is a bit sketchy on the personal details during his early professional years (notwithstanding the fact that he had four children with his first wife!) and any personal details are not mentioned until chapter 21, with the introduction of Michaela.
In 1950, when they had been married for 2 years, the couple travelled to begin work on the feature film, “King Solomon’s Mines”, in order to finance their independent work. Armand was MGM’s technical adviser, and Michaela was to act as Deborah Kerr’s double. Parts of this were shocking:
“I discovered to my extreme annoyance that the script called for the shooting of a fully grown charging male elephant. It was exactly the sort of film scene that I disapprove of most strongly, but my opinions carried little weight against MGM’s, and the killing was arranged.
There was nothing I could do, so I kept well away. But I learned afterwards, that when the old bull was shot, two younger elephants out of the herd came forward and tried to lead him away. It must have been a very moving, very shaming sight for those film hunters, with their high velocity rifles. But incredible thought it seems, hardly anyone at MGM seemed to have realised that here was one authentic sequence that had never been filmed before. As far as I was concerned, this one scene would have been worth all the rest of the film put together.”
I will never view that “family adventure” film in quite the same light again, although perhaps instances like this were all too common.
The difficulties of reading this book from our modern perspective continue in the next chapter, “Camp of the Pygmies”, in which he visits Pat Putnam’s Camp, at Epulu, in the middle of the Ituri Rain Forest, in the Eastern Congo. Pat Putnam was an American anthropologist who was studying the pygmy people.
Historically, there has been much systematic discrimination against Pygmy peoples. There are at least a dozen Pygmy groups, some unrelated to each other. The best known are the “Mbenga”, of the western Congo basin, who speak Bantu and Ubangian languages; the “Twa” of the Great Lakes, who speak Bantu Rundi and Kiga, and those here, the “Mbuti” of the Ituri Rainforest, who speak Bantu and Central Sudanic languages.
They are diverse groups, yet pygmies have always been viewed as inferior by both colonial authorities and the village dwelling Bantu tribes. One early example is when the Belgian colonial authorities captured pygmy children and exported them to zoos throughout Europe, including the world’s fair in the United States in 1907!
Pygmies are still often evicted from their land and given the lowest paying jobs. They are not considered to be citizens by most African states, and are refused identity cards, deeds to land, health care and proper schooling. They are frequently forced out of their traditional homelands and into villages and cities where they often are marginalised, impoverished and abused by the dominant culture.
Armand Denis’s account is a sympathetic one. He clearly makes a great effort to get to know individual members of the tribe, and describes their customs with sensitivity, although they are so alien to Western eyes. On the tradition of hunting an elephant, he says, “the pygmy is first and foremost a hunter, getting all his food from the animal he kills”.
Later he witnesses one:
“It was extremely cruel and must have caused the elephant untold suffering before he died. But it called for such courage and stamina on the part of the hunter that I could not honestly find it in my heart to condemn it. For once the risks the hunter ran were far greater than those of his quarry, and for the pygmy - hunting was not a sport. It was the only way he knew to feed himself and his children.”
The description takes two pages and is detailed and gruelling. It involves locating one elephant as a target, living on the edge of the herd and covering himself with dung, until the herd accepts him as part of it. When he can get close enough to his identified animal, he thrusts his spear into the elephant’s underbelly. This is a mortal wound, but the elephant does not die until peritonitis has set in over several days. The hunter tracks the herd all the time, until the elephant finally dies. He then cuts off the tail, and brings his tribe back to perform their important ceremonies. Every single part of the elephant is used.
The issues are very complex. This pygmy society, where a belief in witchcraft is the norm, and women are regarded as chattels, is also set apart from our own. Yet for all his careful non-intrusion, I found one photograph very disturbing, with the author standing with two grandmothers. It had overtones of paternalism, white v. black, male v. female, awareness of the camera v. confusion. Why this stance? Why hold hands with these two grandmothers, as though they were children?
From now on I found the book deeply disturbing. In 1939, he took a Far East expedition to Burma, China and Tibet. A visit to Nepal, a country known at the time for its reluctance to admit visitors, was largely facilitated by a chance meeting with one of the Maharajah’s daughters. But seasonal rains made the journey very difficult. Meeting the Maharajah was described in an entertaining way, as it had been made into a grand state occasion. Unfortunately the Maharajah misunderstood Armand Denis’s motive for being there, and assumed the “shooting” was not of the film variety, but of game.
On seeing the walls of the palace lined with all the Maharajah’s trophies, the author tried to gently caution him, saying that if he carried on hunting to this extreme, there would be none of these endangered animals left. The Maharajah winked and said that he thought there would be just enough to last him out. One grisly feature of this episode was that the backs of every single trophy had carefully painted on them a reproduction of the exact appearance of all the bones and blood vessels etc., that had been severed. There were times in this book when it seemed to be overwhelmed with aspects of hunting, despite the author’s views. Many settlers, as well as indigenous peoples, seemed to be in Africa specifically for that reason.
Armand Denis had the idea of setting up a farm, or camp, for chimpanzees, hoping that he could get financial backing for it, so that he could enable both psychological and medical research, without cruelty. Many of the medical profession were sceptical, but he did establish his camp, and found that the chimpanzees, who always loved being the centre of attention, would rush to have their blood taken when they spied a doctor with a hypodermic. Probably the banana helped a bit too. What put paid to the camp was the advent of the Second World War.
There was a chance meeting in New York with someone from his past, an Argentian “prospector” who offered the author a gorilla for a highish price. Armand Denis knew that it must have been smuggled into the country, but his curiosity led to one of the author’s worst experiences. Rainez swore that there were many of these gorillas in Equatorial Africa, and a tribe there who hunted them. Armand Denis was sceptical, but had read enough about Paul Du Chaillu’s travels and discoveries, to be intrigued enough to find out for himself. The nearest village to the (unnamed) tribe was Okio, near the capital, Brazzaville.
“What was remarkable about the tribe was the way its entire existence centred round the gorillas. They had hunted them from time immemorial and the animals had not only become the source of meat for the villages, but also provided the tribe with its one industry, its main excitement in life and the inspiration for its dances.”
I cannot quite bring myself to describe the repeated hunts, the bloodlust and savagery. It involved chasing entire families with spears, harpoons, guns loaded with makeshift ammunition of random bits of sharp metal, and nets. And again there was terror and a slow death. Armand Denis himself had a crisis of conscience about this:
“All my sympathies were with them, and I held my breath, hoping that they would get away” and tells how “squeamish” the entire business made him feel, as someone who had such a passion for animals. Nevertheless, he reassured himself that:
“Even if I packed and left that night, the gorillas would still go on being hunted, and I had the knowledge that although seven gorillas had been killed that day, my presence on the hunt had saved nine young ones from slaughter.”
There are many photos relating to this, but the most extraordinary one to me, is the one showing one of Chief Bamboo’s wives breast-feeding one of the tiny gorilla orphans which had been carefully saved from being killed, as part of his quota. Armand Denis had permission to export thirty gorillas from the country.
There were yet more descriptions of diseased, terrified gorillas who had been captured. Then the journey back, in which all the gorillas died one by one from the unknown disease. Research scientists did not have the time to identify more than that it was a “virus”. Perhaps the only reason for documenting cultures and traditions which are disappearing, is so that we never lose the historical knowledge. The supreme irony of this chilling tale was that all the film footage was also lost, as the ship it was on sank.
There is not much respite from killing and capturing. In 1946, the author travelled to Mombasa, in Kenya. He hired a professional hunter, Al Klein, for a safari to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika, and spent 3 weeks filming lions. Four years later, he was back in the Congo to film gorillas again, and what was very rarely seen at the time, Okapi, a type of antelope. He captured giraffes with a lasso, and also rhinoceroses near Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro, aardvarks and a leopard. He filmed hippopotatmuses underwater at Mzima Springs, in Tsavo West.
With Michaela, he filmed in North Australia, the Great Barrier Reef and Papua New Guinea. There is mention of head-hunting, and how this is not to demonstrate physical prowess, but just about prestige, and the sheer numbers of people killed. A man would be quite happy to buy a child from a neighbouring village, and then send his son outside with an axe or a knife, to chop off the infant’s head, which would then be strung on his belt. Armand Denis commented:
“This sort of thing is mercifully dying out, but although I found it repellent, I could not bring myself to believe that the primitiveness of these people was any argument for trying suddenly to thrust them headlong into the twentieth century … I could think of no occasion when a white race had come into contact with a primitive one like this and the primitive one had really benefited … The white man’s drink, his politics, his diseases would infect the people. Instead of progressing they would degenerate, like the Red Indians of America and so many of the tribes of Africa, they could end up only as third class citizens of a world that had no real place for them.”
The public side of this part of his life were the films he made, “Savage Spendour” and with Michaela, “Under the Sahara”.
Perhaps the most upsetting episode in this book for me, came just after the Second World War. Arnold Denis had returned to Kenya, to find that most of the wildlife had gone. Even more worrying for the ecological survival of the area was that many of the trees had been felled, and the foliage destroyed. The reason for this wanton carnage and decimation was the returning soldiers from the Second World War. You couldn’t blame them, he was told. The game wardens were all away fighting in the war. If a troop of soldiers are armed with heavy duty rifles and ammunition, then it’s only natural for them to fire at random into a herd of zebras, or any other large game. It was basically a free for all, with rapid rounds of fire destroying a herd in minutes. Some of the animals were then fed to Italian prisoners of War, almost as an afterthought. He was told:
“There was quite a lot of machine-gunning of buck and zebra. You can do quite a lot of damage to a herd of zebra with one bren gun. Then there were the giraffe, of course. Anyone can get a giraffe with a service rifle and an ostrich too for that matter. The troops were here nearly four years and the game doesn’t last for ever.”
Armand Denis commented:
“For anyone with the instinct for really large-scale butchery, this offered the chance of a lifetime … the slaughter went on for many months until nothing but the remnants of East Africa’s game were left, and only those in the most inaccessible country … there was evidence of the most savage destruction of wild life. You may not be able to feed Italian prisoners on lion meat, but the sportsmen had come here with their rifles and blazed away at the lions for the fun of it. Until then the Serengeti lions had rarely been hunted, and they must have made sitting targets.”
Yes, these episodes are important to remember. And it is a lesson to be learned that this mass slaughter was not by the indigenous people, but by those from so-called “developed” countries - and within our own lifetime. Yes, we have a different attitude now to animal conservation and animal cruelty. Yes Armand Denis was doing important work. And yes, I think acquiring knowledge and experience is one of the key aspects of life. But I do question, however, whether reading this book has enhanced my life in any way whatsoever. I never want to see it again.
If you do decide to read this book, please bear in mind when it was written, and in full knowledge of what it contains, in all its explicit and grisly detail. I am sad to give this book such a low rating, but in all honesty “I did not like it”. I shall stick with my fond memories of Armand and Michaela Denis’s wonderful wildlife documentaries on television; Armand with his heavy accent and Michaela, with her enthusiasm and glamorous appeal dashing across the Serengeti National Park in their Land Rover. The thousands of zebras and wildebeest; an annual migration of huge herds of animals. The rush of wildebeest, as they attempted to cross the road before the approaching Land Rover. Memories like these are partly responsible for my lifelong love of wildlife.
January 20, 2019
A somewhat brutal book. Gives a window into how casual people's regard for animals were earlier this century. Not a book I would recommend.
July 15, 2023
Lively writing about a unique and exciting life travelling the world pioneering the filming of wild life and indigenous peoples.
His ultimate love of animals and conservation shine through but in this day and age his passion to capture and tame wild animals to keep as pets would be unacceptable. A bit sketchy on his early travels as he makes no mention of his wife whilst his second wife features on every other page.
Prophetic book on the direction of the world and it’s most dangerous animal. Man
His ultimate love of animals and conservation shine through but in this day and age his passion to capture and tame wild animals to keep as pets would be unacceptable. A bit sketchy on his early travels as he makes no mention of his wife whilst his second wife features on every other page.
Prophetic book on the direction of the world and it’s most dangerous animal. Man
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