KWAHERI!
On the Spoor of Big Game in East Africa
by Robert von Reitnauer
2004 Long Beach, 322pp, b&w photos, 7x10, hardcover
Volume 48 in Safari Press's Classics in African Hunting Series.
1st edn, ltd to 1,000 signed, numbered, & slipcased copies
Robert von Reitnauer was born on Christmas Day in 1933 on a farm in Mufindi, in the Tukuyu Highlands of the British Territory of Tanganyika, formerly German East Africa. His father, a German who had fought in the East African campaign of World War I, returned to East Africa from Germany in 1926 to forge a life for his family in the splendor of that isolated wilderness. But the reverberations from the drumbeats of Hitler's war were soon felt even in the remote highlands of East Africa, and Robert and his family were caught up in the maelstrom of anti-German rage. Even though his parents were fervent in their anti-Hitler beliefs, they lost everything, suffering through eight years of diaspora. What remained a constant for Robert was his love of animals and hunting, and he had for a tutor an extraordinary man and an extraordinary hunter in his father. Robert started his career by hunting ivory, not necessarily on the right side of the law, and, on his own, with a loyal crew of ruffians, he shot elephants for himself that had ivory way over the 100-pound mark. Later, switching to the right side of the law, Robert became a professional hunter, guiding clients to some immense ivory as well as what is generally regarded as the biggest and heaviest leopard to ever come from Africa. Shot by Frank Hibben in 1969, this leopard measured 8 feet, 5 inches! The book is filled with fascinating personal anecdotes: including the time a Cape buffalo lay in wait for him and knocked him about so badly that he was in the hospital for months, or the time he pursued a cagey elephant with tusks weighing 125 and 127 pounds, and the time he participated in a tribal initiation test of the Watindiga bush people by planting a chalky handprint on the rear end of a rhino! This is the story of an immense land in the days before the truly big tuskers all but disappeared. A very good read.
