After 24 hours of travelling, my camera crew and I arrive in the heart of the Great Karoo, a vast area of semi-arid desert that stretches across much of South Africa from the cape region eastwards. We have been driving for hours from Port Elizabeth into what is some of the most hostile and unforgiving territory on the planet, a red desert covered with razor-sharp ironstone, and it is now well into nightfall. We are here to make a film on the European legacy in this wilderness of South Africa.
On arrival at the farm where we will be staying for the next week, we are greeted by William Maitland-Makgill-Crichton, a man who belongs in a 19th century adventure novel, but whose high-standards approach to ethical hunting and wildlife management is, I soon learn, deadly serious. Will comes from an old Scottish military family and was himself an officer in the much-revered Scots Guards. Following his military career, he settled into a London life as a successful business developer. During that chapter, he would take off into the countryside at every opportunity to shoot gamebirds, fly fish, or stalk Highland red deer. As he puts it to me, “I was always trying to escape to the outdoors in order to suppress my general frustration, and then I realised I could no longer just intermittently vanish to do what I really love, but rather I had to make my love of the outdoors into a way of life.”
When Will met Niles, the woman who was to become his wife, the chance appeared to leave behind his glamorous London living for the wilds of Africa. Niles comes from a true family of the British Empire. Her family had moved as the fortunes of war and the Commonwealth ebbed and flowed: first to India (where a distant ancestor, John Lawrence, was Viceroy), then to Kenya where other branches of the family were already established, and finally to South Africa and Botswana when Jomo Kenyatta came to power in Kenya.
Through Niles’ family, the opportunity arose to restore and diversify a dilapidated farmstead, which first required addressing the farm’s degraded grasslands, a task Niles and Will set about undertaking together with Will’s new in-laws. They also integrated the farm into the Amandalhoogte Conservancy: 120,000 acres of like-minded neighbouring landowners who are determined to let wildlife thrive alongside livestock. Now, in the breath-taking, rusty-red landscape of the Great Karoo, Will and Niles graze their cattle herds and manage the wild animals that wander there. Over the following week, I spoke to farmers, hunters, lawyers, scientists, community leaders, and many other people who are making life possible on otherwise extremely challenging ground.
We unload our bags and sit down to a delicious cottage pie, South African style—which is to say, made with kudu rather than beef. Kudu are enormous antelope with corkscrew horns which in the Karoo can grow up to around 50 inches, but elsewhere in Africa can grow as long as six feet. For creatures that are so big and distinctive, they have an astonishing capacity to move undetected across the hills. And when they’re spotted, they can disappear as quickly as they are seen. Will, in describing them, compares them to ghosts.
Will is keen for me to know about kudu. There are several very large kudu bulls on the conservancy that are unable to ‘hold a herd’—that is, to serve the kudu females, called ‘cows,’ and bring about a good number of calves. Some of these old bulls are obstructing younger males from holding herds of their own, Will explains. Moreover, a harsh winter is on its way, and some of these sizeable bulls will soon be undernourished and risk becoming diseased, turning into a health risk for other kudu in the area. Given the scarcity of predators there—it being a desert—the older kudu are unlikely to be killed before they become sickly. We, Will tells me, must be the predators.
The Great Karoo is often thought to be flat and featureless, but here, deep in its heart, the landscape is rugged and mountainous. Will and other farmers daily observe the springbok, kudu, black wildebeest, mountain zebra, and other animals with great care, monitoring them to evaluate what must be done to keep them in the best condition, maintain numbers, and conserve or regenerate habitats. Impressive attempts are being made to restore the wild species—that once everywhere roamed the Karoo—to much healthier numbers, and here hunting is an essential aspect of good wildlife management.
Early the following morning, we set off. At this stage, I do not know that I have before me an eleven-hour hike across piercing ironstone with a rifle on my back. On departing, I’m under-slept and tired. Within a few minutes, we approach an electric cattle fence on the outskirts of the farmstead. Believing it to be turned off, I climb over the wire, promptly electrocuting my groin. I now feel fully awake.
By mid-afternoon, we position ourselves up on a cliffside overhanging a gorge. A ‘bachelor herd’ of kudu bulls makes its way through the valley below us; we grip the rocks as a gale pushes us about like scraps of paper. Dassies—large rodent-like creatures—leap about on the rocks beside us, squeaking and yapping. We make our way around the gorge, leaving Clive, one of the cameramen, on the cliff to get footage from across the canyon; Peter, the other cameraman, comes with Will and me. Clive soon finds himself the object of scorn among a horde of baboons who are screaming at him over the vale, clearly perturbed to see a Shropshire lad with a heavy lens in what they consider their territory.
Finally, perched atop a hillside bolder, Will gets me into position to take a very large bull that needs culling. I put my crosshairs on the animal only immediately to succumb to what is called ‘buck-fever.’ As I look through the rifle scope upon that massive creature with a crown of huge horns, as it in turn looks out across the hill on which we have alighted, I begin to convulse. My legs give way, the rifle quivers in my hands as if someone has grabbed the end of the barrel and started shaking it. Three times I return my cheek to the stock and attempt to settle back into the firearm, and each time the same thing happens. Then, I do the unforgivable: I take a shot whilst still uneasy. Everything I have been taught in my deerstalking training—remain steady, anchor my body, let my heart slow down, breathe out and hold, don’t rush—all the basics go out the window and I make a perfect dog’s breakfast of it. Thankfully, my folly is sufficient to ensure that I make a clear miss and do not injure the animal, and in the flash of an eye the bull is off and has cleared a vast amount of ground in seconds. As we descend, Will can see that I am punishing myself enough, and adds nothing except, “Don’t let it torment you; sometimes things like this happen.”
A wildebeest is divided up for local villagers; wild game protein is essential for food security in the Great Karoo.
The Great Karoo was not always a desert. In fact, it wasn’t a desert until relatively recently. Its present desiccated condition is largely due to humans. Once upon a time, the Karoo was a lush, green place full of wildlife. Chiefly two things scourged it: farming and hunting. ‘Market hunters’ pursued African animals recklessly for nothing beyond financial gain, killing everything they saw for hides and trophies: there are utterly tragic 19th century photographs of trains coming through the Karoo with tons of elephant tusks heaped up in carriages for the ivory trade. While market hunting was stripping the Karoo and many other parts of Africa of its unique wildlife, the habitats on which those creatures relied were being replaced by farmland for livestock. Hence, wild animals were being wiped out by a pincer-move of devastation.
With the carving up of the land for farming, fences were erected everywhere. This stopped the great migration of springbok in the hundreds of millions—once Africa’s largest wildlife migration—that used to come through the region every two to three years. Until around 1900, the springbok migration still took place. But with aggressive market hunting and farming, this natural phenomenon that had occurred since prehistory was destroyed in just a few decades. Consequently, all wildlife found itself under threat from rifles and farming, against which it had no chance.
It is important to grasp just how important the springbok migration was for the health of the Karoo. As the vast herd travelled through the region, covering the entire landscape, it would trample the foliage, creating a nutritious organic mush, softening the ground, and spreading seeds. As the springbok ate, they also manured the terrain, immeasurably enriching the topsoil. That topsoil was also kicked up and aired, and as the vegetative life increased, it could hold a great deal of water even through droughts. The hostile and largely uninhabitable Karoo of today testifies to man’s mismanagement of his earthly home and his mistreatment of the animals with which he shares it.
The author makes his way down to a plain where a herd of wildebeest are grazing.
The Karoo, though, is also a land of ironies. For whilst farming and hunting are largely to blame for wrecking the lush, natural wilderness that once flourished there, it is precisely farming and hunting that are now returning health to the land. Will and Niles are just one example of many farmers throughout the Great Karoo who are practising regenerative farming with their livestock, using their native breed cattle in such a way as to have them imitate large migratory mammals, with the cattle herds being frequently moved. In turn, thick foliage is returning to the area, and instead of having a rush of water come through after each rainfall—which only washes away the superficial level of nutrients and minerals in the topsoil—small rivers now constantly flow. The land is accordingly able to support ever-increasing wildlife. The days of market hunting are happily over, and as the numbers of various species of antelope grow, they are now managed with tremendous care by selective hunting based on optimising the health of the wildlife.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market. Fortunately, people pay large sums of money to travel into the Karoo in order to undertake the trial of hunting challenging quarry over extremely difficult terrain. But those hunted animals are selected for the hunter on the basis of good wildlife management; the money goes into the local economy and into expanding and protecting habitats; and the meat feeds local villagers, who are thereby incentivised to protect the animals from poachers.
To condemn ethical hunting because of the evils of market hunters is like condemning love-making because of the evils of rapists. The comparison may be crude, but it is fair; for, in one sense, it’s all just sex, yet the difference between the two is obvious to anyone. There are exploitative and negligent ways to hunt and to farm, and there are ways that incorporate the principles of conservation ethics and responsible stewardship. It is certainly a great irony that whilst hunting and farming once devastated the Great Karoo, alternative methods in hunting and farming are now healing it.
In places where hunting has been banned in Africa, no clear incentive has been offered to the human population to protect wildlife, and so the land has been turned over to the farming industry, resulting in habitat destruction. One example is that of Kenya, which, having outlawed hunting in 1977, has since seen a 70% reduction in its wildlife as a consequence. Conversely, up until the 1960s, there were almost no kudu or other wildlife left in the Karoo. Their return in impressive numbers is testament to better, cooperative land management and an understanding of the contribution—when managed carefully through ethical hunting—that wildlife makes to improving the landscape and paying its way in tourism. At least in the Great Karoo, the future of Africa’s unique and beautiful wildlife looks very positive.
William spots some male kudu antelope in a canyon.
In late modernity, we oscillate between two errors with regard to the natural world. The first error is that of exploiting the earth and subjecting it to the demands of the market at the expense not only of the natural world but of the future generations who will inherit it with all the chaos we’ve unleashed upon it. The second error is—in disgust at the evils entailed by the first error—that of herding man into urban pens and driving a wedge between him and the rest of nature in the hope he might then do no more harm. By this latter error, nature ceases to be a reality with which man is himself contiguous; it is instead reduced to ‘the environment’—the stuff out there with which he has no essential connection. Both errors are grave, but in general they comprise the only human relations with the natural world of which the modern mind can conceive.
In the Great Karoo, however, I observed a third way. This is the way of natural participation, in which we belong in the world as one of its animals, but the only one among all the world’s animals that can enjoy a moral relation with the world. This third way entails both that we do not cease to hunt and farm—for hunting and farming is natural to our species—and that we should do so in ways that respect the natural world and accept nature as a teacher. And I would add that, from a religious perspective, by this third way we take very seriously the place we hold in creation’s hierarchy, namely our role as stewards of creation, answerable to its Author for our sins against the world that He has made and which He has entrusted to us.
Midweek, we head up into the northern hills of the conservancy. Between two hilltops stretches a plain on which a herd of black wildebeest has settled. These handsome animals are territorial grazers doing serious damage to the soil, preventing the regenerative growth that the area’s farmers are together trying to nurture.
Over many hours, we stalk our way into position. First, up a mountainside to keep cover; then, along a valley through which runs sapphire-blue water, until we are situated on the plain and I am lying prone. “The hardest route is best,” Will assures me. He points out the wildebeest cow that I am to shoot. With my crosshairs on her chest, I take my time, and then gently squeeze the trigger. The animal stumbles a short distance and collapses dead as the herd stampedes away onto a distant hillside.
As dusk falls and the moon rises, we cross the plain in silence. Approaching the motionless creature—a great minotaur of a beast—Will draws back and tells me to go ahead and spend some time alone with my quarry. I kneel down beside the fallen animal; I stroke her beautiful, dense coat; I bless her lifeless body in gratitude and praise her Maker to whom her life has returned. Later that evening, sitting by the open fire, Will comments, “The hunter should take a moment properly to honour the animal and its sacrifice, if only to compensate for the ensuing desecration of the gralloch.”
It deeply impressed me that Will fully comprehended—and indeed insisted upon—what I will loosely call ‘the spirituality of the hunt.’ There were no high-fives or backslaps. The immense solemnity of the kill was wholly respected. Here was this retired army officer, a gentleman of the old school, who had left behind our Island Nation to live as the British Commonwealth’s last swashbuckler. That is probably the best way to describe Will, for in this modern world where everything must be pre-booked, or the app downloaded, or the QR code scanned—that is, this suffocating, technologised world in which it is so difficult to taste genuine freedom—Will proved to me that it is still possible to enjoy that experience which I thought had been eradicated from our world: an adventure.
Nearly all the conservationists and community leaders that I met in the Great Karoo were either Europeans or the descendants of European settlers. Indeed, many of South Africa’s heartening success stories are by no means due to Europeans or their descendants alone, but such successes are inextricably connected to their presence in the country. From its rugby to its booming wine trade, from its conservationism to its unequalled archaeological and paleontological findings, South Africa’s successes are inseparable from its European legacy. And if the politicians who wish to foment racial tensions and advance land-appropriation campaigns get their way, it will be terrible for everyone in the country. The recent history of Zimbabwe should be a cautionary tale for South Africa, which has become a refuge for millions of displaced Zimbabweans from all of that country’s ethnic groups.
The ancestors of the Afrikaners, for example, arrived in what became South Africa at around the same time as did the Xhosa (the second largest ethnic group in the country) and more than two centuries before the Zulus (the largest ethnic group) arrived from further north in the continent. And in fact, both the Xhosa and the Zulu peoples did not purchase the land, but simply persecuted and expelled the San and Khoekhoeto peoples who were indigenous to the area. Hence, to argue that Afrikaners and the descendants of other European settlers, on account of being ‘white,’ have no moral claim to call South Africa their home, is to argue a case for excluding peoples on no other grounds than skin pigment, which strikes one as simply racist. As one Afrikaner, a lawyer, said to me: “We are Africans; we are just one of the tribes of South Africa, one of the ‘white tribes.’”
Among the many undeserved joys that I’ve received during my life are my various travels in Africa. I’ve trekked through Kenya, rafted down the Zambezi, and I’ve been to almost every part of South Africa. The magic of its earth is woven into Africa—perhaps it is the enchantment of the Kalahari bushmen who have left traces of their own hunting adventures in the ancient rock art found throughout the Great Karoo. Africa captures the heart and causes us to fall in love with it. On entering the rhythm of the savannah, strange things happen. The language of the bush becomes our own vernacular; the yells of the baboons, the barks of the kudu, and the various calls of each animal unveil their own inner intelligibility. It is not long before we begin to understand what the creatures are saying to one another, and what they’re saying about us. Africa, because of its utter rawness, frees us from the phoney virtual world to which we’ve retreated in search of a sanitary, sterile happiness—and where we’ve only found anxiety and trauma—and Africa plunges us into the holy cycle of death and rejuvenation that is reality. I knew that a part of returning to Africa would be taking life, and paradoxically I have returned never feeling more alive.
This essay appears in the Fall/Autumn 2024 issue of The European Conservative, Number 32:24-29.
Stay tuned: The three-part documentary film, “The White Tribes,” on the political instability, race relations, conservationism, and hunting industry of South Africa is coming soon to our YouTube channel.
