Here is an interesting review of the a book I plan to read from the editors of the African Gazette

In the bush with Eric Balson: On Safari with Bwana Game
The opening chapters are On Safari with H.R.H. Prince Bernhard (of the Netherlands) who all together took eleven safaris with Balson between 1960 and 1973.
Then my imagination was caught by the men and times Eric writes about. I started reading.


Eric Balson with a fine Springbok.The enchantment here lies in the anecdotes and fates of a dozen or soreal-life characters smoking pipes and drinking well-deserved beers (with more than one drink lost prematurely, often in small aircraft).

The stories are peppered with natural history, insights into tribal culture and spirit, and observations on the political history of Africa and its affect on wildlife and conservation, i.e. poaching. Although the hunting itself mostly forms a background, there are plenty of compelling encounters with leopard, hippo, crocs and elephant in particular.


Balson’s CV includes being the Provincial Game Warden (1960-1968) in charge of the 100 000 square mile western and southern provinces of Tanzania, and Senior Game Warden appointed by Mwalimu – Dr. Julius Nyerere himself – in charge of anti-poaching (1969-1972).

The book relates many of Eric’s favourite safari “bleepers.†One anecdote concerns the Prince (“PB†as he is referred to throughout the book), Bwana Kingi as the African staff called him. PB slips down a slope at night behind the mess tent while relieving himself, and is found clinging to roots twenty feet down the bank over croc-infested water. Finally Balson lowers himself down for a rope-rescue of HRH, who takes it all in great stride. Another time a hippo became entangled in a tent and charged through the camp only to come head-on with a tree.

During the commotion, one pal ended up bottom-first in the latrine. It’s also great to read about a man, PB, who does not feel compelled to kill every record book animal he encounters, and lets many a top trophy, including the largest ivory Eric ever saw (in Rungwa Reserve, Tanzania), return to the bush to breed.Too often he seems content just to be in the presence of the animal, with camera and pipe, capturing each magic second – not only with the Big Five but with the smallest bird.

These are the kind of hunters of whom too few PHs have the chance to say that they “never had such good-hearted VIPS who enjoyed every minute of every day and never voiced any complaints.†There’s also a rare look into the hunting attitude and personage of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and his wife, Madame Broz, which offers many surprises and great photos of the kind surely not found anywhere else. And Guy Coheleach, who actually, in fact, owes his life as much to Balson as to his own mother; but you have to read the book to get the scoop on that
little bone-crushing story. It’s one helluva way to get yourself a great free Guy Coheleach painting, but one not to be repeated.

It was 4:00a.m. and I was wide-awake, counting the minutes until my first coffee. I reached again for On Safari with Bwana Game. There was the map of Tanzania with the safari dates and places: 1962/3 Katavi/Lake Rukwa; 1967 Ruaha/Rungwa (an area especially dear to my own heart); 1970 Mbarangandu/Selous Reserve; 1972 Loliondo. There are Balson’s years as a Wildlife Consultant to draw up a management plan for the Niassa Game Reserve in northern Mozambique; the time spent with Norman Carr in Zambia; ventures in Botswana, and finally with Axel Henniges’s on his fabulous ranch, Ohorongo, in Namibia.


H.R.H. Prince Bernhard with his fantastic Impala ram. He shot this animal to feed the
hungry lioness and her cubs. Loliondo,Tanzania, 1972.By dawn I was hooked, through Eric’s eyes, on those times in the bush. He tells his stories with the modesty and calm of a man who has sat around thousands of campfires in wild places, as did his and his wife’s parents, and their parents before them. If the sobriquet Bwana Hakuna Matata (Master without Troubles) was his nickname, it is due more to his attitude towards life than to how governments and international organizations tossed his and his family’s fate around the continent. Finally, in 1994 Eric and the lovely, capable Viva left for Canada. (From 1977 to 1981, Eric worked in Papua New Guinea under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a crocodile project to protect the saltwater species – this probably deserves a book of its own.) Later as a stockman for quarantine and genetic study institutes, the 73-year-old Eric was retired against his will, from Monsanto as their oldest employee.

No wonder he writes: “I despised all politicians, for they seemed to know only politics and nothing else.†When it comes to wildlife, he is openly displeased with the results of 40 years of African politics, how the loss of the qualified European-African game wardens of integrity has disastrously impacted on wildlife. Eric is a witness who writes: “I am one of the last oldtime game wardens – professional hunters still alive and kicking from the colonial era when the British were in charge of eastern Africa — Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. I am glad to read of the Myles Turners and John Owens and Brian Nicolsons who belong to that nearly extinct species of dedicated game Wardens, whose disappearance from the bush will probably never be recouped by the wildlife.

Where, by God, are the herds of 2 500 to 3 000 head of buffalo on the Katavai flood plains from August to October? The animals on the Athi Plains of Kenya?†In one story, Eric uncovers 286 rhino horns in a single shipment. And that’s in Arusha in 1966! If only 30 years ago he spotted 40 black rhino in a single day in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, today there are none. Ultimately, the portrait of Eric Balson, the man, is revealed through his stories about others, a remarkable read. His maternal grandparents trekked in 1899 from Pretoria, South Africa via northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to Mbeya, the capital of Tanzania’s Southern Highlands province.

His grandfather was a bad-tempered, sometimes irrational man, which led to two of his sons being pointlessly killed by the Masai. His wife, Viva’s paternal grandparents traveled from Germany to South Africa to Mombasa and finally to the Kenya Highlands – in 1906. The photos from this period of Viva’s father and uncles hunting on horseback, with beaters to chase lion and leopard; of his parent’s 1928 wedding day; of the invincible snake-bitten Alan Tarlton, Eric’s Uncle Blinkie who “adopted†the family at Eric’s father’s death in WWII (Eric was 10), all together immortalize these welldeserving figures whose contribution to Africa is generally subject to being overlooked in our era of “political correctness.†He admits that some of it sounds “idyllic†— killing his first elephant at 14 and all, but all Africa-hands know better.


Eric and game warden Ndolanga with four enormous tusks that were confiscated from
poachers who had shot elephants in the Selous Game Reserve.The taller pair weighed 168
and 167 pounds; the outer pair weighed 152 and 150 pounds respectively.Eric understands the inherently inexplicable contradiction between hunting and conservation, which he calls a “curious marriage.†He knows the up-and-down reality of combating poaching. If there are tense moments in his war, being led in the darkness to dark places, a typical example is when the two vehicles he was finally able to get donated by the Frankfurt Zoological Society were confiscated in Dar es Salaam because “he received them without authority†– hence their permanent disappearance to Dar. And this at a time when an estimated 30 000 head of game disappeared from Seregenti Park in a nine-month period in the 1960s! True, white man is not entirely innocent: he reminds us that settlers in South Africa nearly exterminated the springbok and black wildebeest.

His series of True Stories with Poachers is chilling, and Eric’s backbone is obvious. Finally, fitina (intrigue) forces him to move on. There’s plenty for everyone in this book: close calls with dangerous game, like the day with Prince Bernard when their vehicle was attacked first by a leopard and then by a huge crocodile that had been standing watch over a dead buffalo – luckily, only a tyre was killed. Without giving the details away, the story ends several charges later with Eric and the Prince towing both a hippo and a croc across in a lake in a shaky boat.

His childhood experience in the family snakevenom - collecting business makes for great reading, too, and he guesses that he’s probably saved ten people from death by snakebite. His is the broad and excellent knowledge of natural history that only the men of the bush know: that the evergreen Natal mahogany is his preferred tree for a fly camp, even if you have to take especial care with the snakes in its rich leafy canopy; that the honeyguide birds who harass many a safari with their noisy and pestering behaviour to push you to a bees’ nest, eat the beeswax and not the honey; that catfish (barbel) have rudimentary lungs to breathe “whereas all other species of fish depend entirely on water passing through their gills from which they extract oxygen,†which is why catfish can dig into the mud and seal themselves in with a small air hole during a drought; that the Thornicroft giraffe are found only in the Luangwa valley in Zambia; that it takes four to six hours for the gas in a dead hippo’s stomach to develop enough for the animal to float. That in some areas where the biting Stomyx fly infest buffalo herds, the lions are harassed into climbing trees. That the roundbeaked lovebirds and parrots depend especially on woodpeckers for boring their nest holes. And that the elephant carrying the largest-known tusks, weighing 226 and 222 pounds, was shot by a poacher on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro more than 100 years ago, and can be seen in the Museum of Natural History in London.

Although in chapters like Where Have All the Mighty Tuskers Gone? and Waging the Animal Wars, Eric forthrightly but never selfrighteously recounts the sad saga of poaching in Africa, His scholarship on the subject of conservation is woven throughout the book. Who could possibly imagine that already by the 1970s that Africa’s wildlife would change for the worse so dramatically and so fast, disappearing almost entirely in some places while the entire “civilized†world†looked on with indifference, except for the pitiful too-little-toolate efforts by NGOs.

The story of Selous and the Selous Game Reserve is tops, rich in delicious detail that then spins into the story of a lively safari with more charging crocs, some ballistics, a dose of natural history, insights into tribal thinking, behaviour and taboos, plus a bit of history. (Referring to the Rufigi delta along the Indian Ocean, WWI Commander Villiers wrote: “If in this world there is a worse place than the Rufiji delta, I hope I may never find it. The whole delta is gloomy, morose and depressing beyond endurance.â€) The Lion-Men of Singida and The Elephant Lady and the Hyena People are significant for the reader interested in the African spirit.

For any one who has put his feet down in East Africa and opened his ears not only to the music of the bush, but the lyrics of the Swahili language, Eric invites his readers to share his feelings for its rhythm and beat: Asante sana, Bwana Nyama, leo sisi tu lala mzuri (Thank you very much, Mr. Game, today we will sleep in peace.) Or: Bwana mkubwa ana hasira kabisa (The big boss is very angry.) Today, most children in the world know the word rafiki (friend) from the movie, The Lion King. On spending an hour on the phone recently with Eric, it was wonderful to learn that he had been a guest in the Netherlands of the now 93-year-old Bwana Kingi to present him with the copy number one of the limited edition of 1 000 of Bwana Game.


On Safari with Bwana Game by Eric BalsonFor several days they dined, and surely drank, and maybe smoked. But certainly they reviewed their remarkable times together. Their long and splendid history ended in a grand gesture when PB presented his set of golf clubs to Eric, saying that he just doesn’t get around to playing these days. The book closes with a photo of PB, glass raised and smiling: Salamu Sana! Kwaheri. Many good wishes and good-bye.

On Safari with Bwana Game by Eric Balson is published as a 8.5" x 11" First Edition limited to only 1 000 signed, numbered and slip-cased copies. It is Volume 46 in Safari Press’s Classics in African Hunting series. The cost is $75. Safari Press: Tel: 714 894 9080 Fax: 714 894 4949 E-mail: info@safaripress.com Brooke Chilvers Lubin is an American freelance writer living in Paris with her husband, Professional Hunter Rudy Lubin, who operates in the Central African Republic and Tanzania.