I would like to hear some of your favorite quotes on Africa. Pls quote the author.

2 of my favorites are used in my signature line...

"When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land.

"They said, 'Let us pray.'

"We closed our eyes.

"When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."

--Desmond Tutu

I guess the Zulu's gave the Shona spears instead of Bibles.

I hear that spears make for faster religious transformations.

"Put it on the top of his head" Scott Van Zyl

"For they were men of men, and their farthers were men before them. Compared to them, you matebele are as timid as girls."

Mjaan, Comander of the Kings armies paying tribute to the Shangani Patrol, when he and his regiments surrendered in Bulawayo in March 1894

"At one hundred yards, volley fire, PRESENT!!!!"

Lt. Gonville Bromhead's ("B" Company 24th Regiment of Foot) command upon the first charge of the Zulu Impis and Rorke's Drift, Natal, Wednesday, 22 January 1879. I was there...jorge

"You must cape a hippo with a chainsaw"

A tracker named Shakespear on my first safari.

“ All I wanted to do now was to get back to Africa. We had not left it yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.

Now looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky and white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet there is, not, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slowly starting. But you are not alone, because if you ever have really loved her happy and un-tragic, she loves you always, no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards it makes no difference.

#1 "Once a Cape Buffalo puts together a close charge, your options have been wounderfully simplified, you kill him, or he will kill you!"

Peter Hathaway Capstick

#2 "If I die today, I've had a life well spent, for I have been to see the elephant, and smelled the smoke of Africa!"

Yours truley! Mac 1982 in my hunting journal

"Ex Africa semper aliquid novi" attributed to Pliny the Elder but actually dates to the writings of Aristotle, and said to have been a Greek saying of the 4th Century BC. The original sense centered on the strange beasts from Africa...

Regards

Just sooo many that I enjoy - far too many to list all of them but here's just a few of my favourites:-

A brave man is always frightened three times by a lion. - When he first sees the track, when he first hears it roar and when he confronts him.

Somali proverb.

To be sure that your friend is a friend, you must go with him on a journey, travel with him day and night, go with him near and far.

Angolan proverb

And so, if you meet a hunter who has been to Africa, and he tells you what he has seen and done, watch his eyes as he talks. For they will not see you. They will see sunrises and sunsets such as you cannot imagine, and a land and a way of life that is fast vanishing. And always he will tell you how he plans to go back.

David Petzer

Round us was silence where only the winds played and cleanliness infinitely remote from the world of man.

Wilfred Theissinger

Written about India rather than Africa but equally relevant:-

The jungle is the place to test one's mettle and one's skill. It is a place for personal and individual adventure. To tackle the adversary on the ground of it's own choosing and to outwit it in it's own game of woodcraft is the real joy and thrill of hunting. Always remember that hunting is not just killing animals, it is much more than killing; Killing is the least important part of it.

Sher Jung. (Tryst with Tigers)

That's without going into the poetry of people such as C. Emily Dibb and Brian Brooke. - Both wonderful in their own right......

And in closing, here's one by Jack O Connor I found on another forum - but so very, very true! -

"There is something about an African safari that makes everyone who goes on one an expert on all things African from that time on -- climate, geology, politics, ethnology, anthropology, ecology, and natural history. And in particular everyone who has ever gone on safari is an expert on all African game and what rifles and cartridges should be used on it.

It is by no means unusual for these one-safari experts to sit down when they get home and and write books on the subject. Both Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark did so. I have seen several others. If you want all the answers about Africa and African hunting you'll find them there. These answers are absolutely pat because the minds of the authors were not all gummed up with surplus knowlege.

My wife, who completed her sixth safari in 1969, says it is a shame to go to Africa more than once because at the end of the first safari everyone knows everything and subsequent safaris simply puzzle and confuse the expert and make him doubt his own omnipotence. I agree with her. In 1953 I hunted for a couple of months from central Tanzania to the Northern Frontier District of Kenya. When I came back I knew not only about the countries where I had hunted but all about African countries where I had not hunted. Since then I have been on safaris in northern Tanzania, in southern Tanzania, Chad, Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, and Zambia. I have learned that Africa is a very large continent with different conditions, different climates, and a bewildering variety of people and animals. I should never have gone back after that first trip."

"Your bloody bulls got tits! "
Steve(Shakari)Robinson Tanzania 10/06


Spoken in mistaken frustration from the north end of a southbound defunct Dagga Boy that I had wounded and he, I and my best friend Bob had tracked through the long grass for two hours that ended in the Gunfight at the OK corral. The rear of his boss had so much mud on it that Steve thought it had no boss, and was therefore, a cow. From my central position, I had indisputable proof that he was, indeed, most definately, a bull! The range of looks on Steves face from beginning to realization were priceless!
That statement will stay with me the rest of my life! Lee.

"Africa is undoubtedly a most fascination wild mistress. She gets a tenacious hold on most persons; bewitching, magnetic, that is almost irresistible, and once experienced, is NEVER lulled into forgetfulness."
May French Sheldon 1891

Stamped on barrel, lightly
Was a Name and not much more.
A single word "Jeffery"
"Jeffery 404"
Rege Podraza (Where Elepants Go To Die)

Ah, but what a follow up, what a gunfight and what a bu, no, sorry, a co....NO a BULL!!!!..... damn, I'm never gonna live that one down!......



Actually, the entire hunt was fabulous......

For many hunters, a safari in Africa is the trip of a lifetime.

For others, regular hunting trips to Africa become a way of life.

Terry Wieland

" Come back soon"

"I speak of Africa and golden joys; the joy of wandering through lonely lands; the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary and the grim."
Theodore Roosevelt, Khartoum, March 15, 1910

"Out on the Safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished. I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense Native forest, where the sunlight is strewn down between the thick creepers in small spots and patches, pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world."

- Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

"Africa is a demanding mistresss. Once you have drank from her cup, she is never far from your thoughts." ~ George Hoffman

“These things can be told. But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.†Foreword in African Game Trails, Theodore Roosevelt

"I lurched up and looked at Mbogo, and Mbogo looked at me. He was 50 to 60 yards off, his head low, his eyes staring right down my soul. He looked at me as if he hated my guts. He looked as if I had despoiled his fiancé, murdered his mother and burned down his house. He looked at me as if I owed him money. I never saw such malevolence in the eyes of any animal or human being before or since. So I shot him." - Robert Ruark

"The generation to which I belong has seen Africa yield up her secrets. I have loved the chase not only for its own sake, but even more for where it has taken me. I possess memories I would not exchange for all the wealth and distinction the world can give. I love these years in Africa as I do the shade of palms and the sound of waters after the dust and toils of a desert march. You go out to Africa to see savages, and you find them only on your return."
-Sir Alfred Pease

"an odd feeling of ancestral murder running through the dark back of my brain" Peter Captstick in regard to a primate (baboon?).

My own revision:

The spell of Africa - it gets you worse than rum - you get away and you swear you'll stay - but she calls and back you come.

“We can do betterâ€

Johannes C Malulebe - After glassing the very big bull in a herd of Wildebeest. Just as I was un-slinging my rifle
WE DID
Doyle

"Oh sheeee-it!"

Anonymous hunters, mere seconds before a buffalo, lion, elepant, leopard, rhino, hippo (take your choice) reached out and touched them.

Bill Quimby

Hutty,

Por favor, who and what is the quote from? It about sums it up. Kudude

"he must have flown away"

An old sotho tracker when the spoor of an impala ram I'd wounded suddenly (and still unexplainably) just disappeared.

" I must humbly apologize to those hunters who delight in the chase I failed to understand. There is nothing in the world to equal it."

Karen Blixen, Letters from Africa

"I cannot think of a morning that I woke up in Africa and was not happy."

Ernest Hemmingway
(I think but not sure)

quote:

Originally posted by Tim Carney:
"Ex Africa semper aliquid novi" attributed to Pliny the Elder but actually dates to the writings of Aristotle, and said to have been a Greek saying of the 4th Century BC. The original sense centered on the strange beasts from Africa...

Regards

My favorite too. I did not know it had been attributed to Aristotle before Pliny the Elder. Thanks for the trivia.

Out of Accuratereloading, always something new.

"Not the way I expected it to go, but it's the best way to go."

PH on the abrupt end of our 2005 Leopard hunt in the Kalahari. Hopefully some day I'll be able to share the video here. Great African memories.

On my first day in Africa:

"Why didn't you shoot the jackel?"

"I left my Jane's Book of Jackels at home."

On our second safari to Zim , my wife was afraid of everything...When things did not go like one would expect...

I would respond "It's Africa!"

Mike

when my hunting buddy and his PH walked up on a Kudu he shot (after the PH told him "he's a good one -shoot him!), and the Kudu was obviously short in length____


my buddy said this, "DAMN! THAT IS SOME SERIOUS HORN SHRINKAGE THERE!!!!"

Kudude,
I believe that was Karen Blixen again....

Many great ones amongst the replies. Keep em coming

"We will not seize land from anyone who has a use for it. Farmers who are able to be productive and prove useful to society will find us co-operative."

Robert Mugabe
January 27, 1980

"Already I was beginning to fall into the African way of thinking: that if you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on the animal's terrain, if you im-prison in your mind all the wonder of the day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers- then you have not merely killed an animal. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could recapture the day....." Robert C. Ruark

"The hunter's horn sounds early for some. . .later for others. For some unfortunates, prisoned by city sidewalks and sentenced to a cement jungle more horrifying than anything to be found in Tanganyika, the horn of the hunter never winds at all. But deep in the guts of most men, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of his fathers, who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. How meek the man is of no importance; somewhere in the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter's heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood. . ." Robert Ruark, Use Enough Gun, pp. 47

Hutty's quote is pure Hemingway, and I've always liked that one too, because it's absolutely true.

Quotations from my bird boy on a game bird hunt in South Africa:

On making a good shot.

"Good shot, sir!"

On fluffing a shot.

"Too far!"

He earned a handsome tip on that trip.

Our PH on the same trip.

"Relax, you're on safari!" The most difficult advice of all.

The following is from the same PH and is not a quote as such, but it is possibly the best piece of hunting advice I have ever received.

"Reload!"

I simply love the African veldt and quote a favorite passage written by C Emily Dibb on the dust cover of her book: Ivory, Apes and Peacocks.
“….There is a magic, a poignancy, a sense of excitement about the bush….of this enchanted land………that is not only gripping, it is addictive. Once bitten by the ‘bush bug’; a person is infected for life……. Bush fever is a kind of madness that compels you to return and return – a longing which will seize you by the throat until you would gladly sell your soul for the sight of a thorn tree against an empty sky, a herd of wildebeest wheeling under their own dust, or the deep rasping ‘augh’ of a lion prowling in the night. The veld has a scent all of its own too, a combination of dust and dung and sunshine, a heady fragrance that fills the lungs and intoxicates the blood like strong wine.â€

This is a bit of the ‘poetry’ that shakari refers to in his posting.

In good hunting.

Andrew McLaren.

Two of my favourites:-

The Call of Africa
By C. Emily Dibb

When you’ve acquired a taste for dust,
The scent of our first rain,
You’re hooked for life on Africa,
And you’ll not be right again,
Till you can watch the setting moon,
And hear the jackals bark,
And know that they’re around you,
Waiting in the dark.

When you long to see the elephants,
Or hear the coucal’s song,
When the moonrise sets your blood on fire,
You’ve been away too long.
It’s time to cut the traces loose,
And let your heart go free,
Beyond that far horizon,
Where your spirit yearns to be.

Africa is waiting…….come!
Since you’ve touched the open sky,
And learned to love the rustling grass,
The wild fish eagle’s cry,
You’ll always hunger for the bush,
For the lion’s rasping roar,
To camp at last beneath the stars,
And to be at peace once more.



The Exile
By C. Emily Dibb

I miss the earth of Africa,
The hot dry stones, the sand,
The friendly feel of sun warmed rock,
Beneath my outspread hand.

I miss the smell of Africa,
The fragrance of the grass,
At dewfall in the evening,
In the glades where leopards pass.

I miss the light of Africa,
The glare that hurts the eyes,
The shock of blinding brilliance,
In noonday’s cloud massed skies.

I miss the sounds of Africa,
The barking of baboon,
And the thunder of the lion’s roar,
That greets the rising moon.

I miss the wind of Africa,
That blows before the rain,
The warm wet wind of heaven,
I must breathe it once again.

Oh I long to sleep in Africa,
Through a velvet summer night,
And there to dream of days gone by,
Until my soul takes flight.

Then should I wake in Africa,
I’ll hear the bulbul’s song,
And know that I am home at last,
Back home where I belong.

We all know this one on Cape Buff:

" He looks at you as if you owe him money"

Mrlexma and Kudude- The quote is Hemingway from the Green Hills of Africa.

He really nails Africa, hunting, fellow hunters, etc in that book. One of my all time favorites that I read everytime I fly across the pond.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."

"Africa is God's country, and he can have it."
Capt. Spaulding


"Look! You must see this. When The Kudu dies it sheds a tear. No other animal does this.
"Do you see the markings? When God created the Kudu it was his most beautiful creation. He held its chin in His hands and kissed him."
PH - after we retrieved my Kudu.

"If he kissed the kudu and left a mark, what did he do to the Waterbuck?" My Brother

"Malamulele Mortuary... Enjoy Coca-Cola!" - Painted on side of building in Malamulele (Venda)

"We must leave, we must leave NOW! Elephant Tracks! Very fresh!" (about 8pm in the wilderness outside of Krueger when our hunting party was lost in the dark - our asst PH and two trackers went off into the bush to try to find the road. After about 30 minutes we saw flashlights frantically waving towards us - they were running! )

"This morning I awoke to what sounded like hippos bellowing, and through the night strange gutteral sounds and unfamiliar 'barks' would interrupt my rest. I couldn't sleep
- I didn't care to sleep. I was in Africa!" My journal