Kambaku!
By PH Harry Manners
Reviewed by Brooke Chilvers Lubin from African Hunting Gazette

Twenty years ago I arrived at Kruger National Park’s Skukuza airport for a symposium on black rhino. Little did I know that the no longer young khaki-uniformed gentleman pulling bags off the conveyor belt was none other than Harry Manners.


I wish I had a photo of Harry from that day; he died in Nelspruit in 1997. But at least his book Kambaku! (meaning old bull elephant), about his life as a heyday ivory hunter in Mozambique, lives on in a revised 1997 Rowland Ward re-issue of the 1986 Amwell Press edition. My own first copy of Kambaku! was published in the UK in 1981, and for many reasons, mostly sentimental, it remains my favourite.



Already in 1981, Harry wrote of “politics, new ambitions, new forms of government” that are “committed to changing all that I knew, all that I loved of the Africa of yesterday.” But until unlimited ivory hunting was closed in Mozambique in 1953, in 20 years he killed more than 1,000 elephant and survived 35 serious charges, not including serious brushes with buffalo and rhino.

One must remember these were those times, not our times, and although any number of his elephants were in the 20 to 30-kg per tusk range, many ‘unshootable’ elephants were taken in places too remote to recover the meat, which Harry accepted as a fact of ivory hunting. (He’d spill the guts to attract vultures in order to relocate far-flung kills.) Other times, it took 70 porters bearing 30-kg loads to carry out two tons of salted elephant meat.
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Harry’s English father, who had roamed the German Cameroons hunting and trading, managed a shipping company in Lourenço Marques. He’d been raised in Germany (where his father was the British Consul to Hamburg) and married a German girl, Harry’s mom, and moved first to Northern Rhodesia and later to Basutoland (now Lesotho).

Harry was schooled in South Africa, and shot his first elephant at age 17 with Wally Johnson, the two boys knowing no more than what they’d read in books. Wally carried a 9.3mm Brenecke, Harry a Mauser 10.75x68mm. Shooting simultaneously at the ear from 20 metres, they downed a bull with tusks weighing 36 kg each. Both men’s fates were sealed.

Harry moved to Portuguese Mozambique’s hinterlands in 1937 – a time of no hunting restrictions. But laws for thousands of contracted workers on tea, coffee, cotton and sisal plantations included rations of dried and salted game meat provided by hunters like the French-Swiss Joseph Gustav Guex, who killed over 7,000 buffalo in 12 years as the meat supplier for the Sena Sugar Estates. Although Harry worked as a meat hunter, when it came to elephant, the hides and ivory were his.

As a hunter his mentors were his trackers, and “the whole side expanse of bushland was my school.” He learned to use termite-proof ironwood trees for building poles and that eland fat makes poor gravy (it sticks to the mouth); how to brew the sap of the m’lala palm for yeast or a potent palm wine; to distill homebrew from the cassava root, and to relieve the itch of the “terrible buffalo bean” with coconut oil; how to find water and cook elephant feet (take the whole foot, skin included, wrap it in paw-paw leaves, and bury it in hot coals for three days), and all the skills of the “hard school of survival in a pitiless land.”

Harry was nicknamed Nwalibungu, the Red One, by a Shangaan chief, who told him: “For you I have no medicine, no magic – only counsel. Go well, hunt well – but always carefully.” So Harry went and hunted where no white man had preceded him, for example to the sparsely populated remote mountains of the Milange region, north of the Zambezi River, whose inhabitants still wore tree-bark loincloths, “softened by stretching and pounding on a log.”

Harry beautifully describes the “black, white, and in-between” territories he encountered, his eyes always looking to the land ahead. He traversed sandalwood forests, the semi-desert of the Sungutana region in the south, and the papyrus swamps of Marromeu, “where bull elephants were amphibians, living alongside hippos,” and witnessed buffalo in their hundreds of thousands on the open plains called tandus.

He passed from mopane country to the Banyine Plains where there was wildebeest, buffalo and gamebirds, but no elephant as they crossed the region in their “migratory stride.” He went to the Panda sandlands whose scattered forests and rolling bush had lakes filled with crocodile and tilapia, taking elephants whose tusks were “yellowed and browned by the sap of trees and the slime of mud wallows.”

With his Shangaan gunbearer Sayela, he learned that “time meant nothing, only success,” and he experienced his first grief when Sayela was killed by an elephant during a hunt.

Harry used a .375 H&H Winchester Model 70 and loaded it – five in the magazine and one in the chamber – with “full-patch” (slightly flattened at the point) solid bullets because “they doubled in width without disintegrating.” He never believed in ‘knock down’ power and rarely used soft-nosed bullets. Although American firearms arrived in Africa around 1945, ammunition did not, so he used British Kynoch. When .375 ammunition was suddenly unavailable, he resorted to a .30-06, but only killed 40 elephants with it, and only under the most certain conditions.

A perfectionist, Harry developed a passion for the speedy, clean kill, and carried his own slingless rifle until he had calluses on his shoulders. A scope made a rifle heavier so bear so he favoured an iron foresight with a wide V backsight because it gave instant alignment and a wider field of vision.

Harry shares his theories on elephant hunting, advising novices to aim for a broadside lung shot, or for a fracturing hip shot to make the elephant collapse, and then to finish off the beast with a brain shot through the top of the skull.

For professionals needing to down as many animals as possible without them scattering, he describes the ideal frontal brain shot, advising the hunter to always hold a mental picture of the brain –regardless of the angle presented. The shooting distance? Not more than 35 metres, and 25 is better.

In Mozambique a good elephant footprint measured 45 cm, but he found up to 58 cm. He discovered elephants sleeping on termite hills or on sloping ground, which they used as a pillow, also making it easier to rise. “These great beasts are wanderers by nature, knowing no frontiers, their stamina limitless, moving with the seasons, with the mating instinct, searching for water, searching for fruit in season, or just moving.” He estimated that for every tusker in the 40- to 45-kg range, he walked 160 km.

Once he saw a whole valley that “was a heaving mass of elephants, like shoals of fish under the waves” because its bamboo forests attracted huge numbers of elephants when the succulent shoots called “jungle asparagus” were in season. At this, the “ biggest gathering of elephants I had ever experienced,” he did not collect a single one.

Kambaku is filled with encounters with buffalo, rhino and elephant under the toughest of conditions, including stampedes surrounded by walls of dense vegetation. That Harry survived his close calls, dodging hell-bent tusking, “controlling my heaving breath as best I could,” is incredible. “Strangely enough,” he writes, “I clearly remember feeling no fear – just an almost forlorn urge to avoid dying this way.”

Harry is correct when he writes that no news is good news, for, “If there is trouble or disaster, at least one of us will get back to camp to report.”

He hunted in cane fields and the jungle-covered, rain-drenched Milange mountains, in flat, black-soil country, or while walking on the floating vegetation among the palm clusters and papyrus marshes of Marromeu. Sometimes, he and his trackers slept in pouring rain on the track a 10-day walk from his Willys Jeep.

Kambaku is also a love story about his half-American, half-Portuguese fiancée named Carmen (to whom the book is dedicated), whom he brings to the game-rich, tsetse fly-plagued place he named Shangri-La – meaning “a refuge, a haven of peace,” in the Molumbo mountains. It is a tale I will not retell, but even grown men will weep at its conclusion.

When Harry left his Shangri-La, he had 2.5 tons of ivory to sell in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), including – to his later great regret – his Monarch of Murripa. His best tusker, the ivory was as thick as a man’s waist at the bases, weighed 84 and 84.5 kg, and measured 2.4 metres beyond the skull.

When uncontrolled hunting stopped in Mozambique in 1953 and game laws for the government hunting concessions called coutadas were established, hunters were allowed only two elephant permits a year. Limits were set on kudu, sable, nyala and eland; and rhino, giraffe, crocodile, cheetah and roan antelope became fully protected. A new chapter of his career began when Harry joined Werner von Alvensleben’s Mocambique Safarilandia. Unfortunately, he never wrote a book about those years.

Yet I often think of Harry at sundown in Africa when “The daily task was over; the cares of tomorrow had yet to come.”
The 390-page Kambaku! includes many wonderful black and white photos. It is available from Rowland Ward for R515 / US$65.

Well, well worth reading and keeping in the bookcase for a 2nd, 3rd and 4th read. The only thing wrong with the book is that I would like to know of his life after the book ends.

Mr. Manners and I exchanged a couple of letters in the 1980s in my role as director of SCI's publications, but I never got to meet him.

Wish I'd saved his letters to keep with my signed first-edition UK copy of his book.

Bill Quimby

quote:

Wish I'd saved his letters to keep with my signed first-edition UK copy of his book.

Oh man... I'm lucky to have received the 'can't throw anything away' gene from my dad... prevents situations like this! :-)

This is a book I really want to read but haven't gotten to. Will renew my efforts to find a copy.