Brooke's Editorial

I fell in love with my husband, PH Rudy Lubin, a year before I met him. Back then, my super-chic co-worker in the Paris advertising agency where I slaved away was the mistress of one of Rudy’s regular safari clients. But whereas I’d camped, survival-style, from Big Bend to the Straits of Labrador with my Captain-inthe- Green-Berets boyfriend and had a degree in natural sciences, this cigarette-puffi ng chick was off to Africa, lion-hunting with her lover!

African Hunting Shows in the 21st Century.

Whew! We made it. For the several hundred PHs, safari outfitters, and the team at AHG, who migrate each winter to the United States for the grueling “safari convention season,” this year’s marathon was even longer than usual. Between the Dallas Safari Club and the Safari Club International conventions, exhibitors’ bags were packed for five to six weeks.

Like all of us who live, breathe and dream of Africa, my bookshelves are bending under the weight of countless tomes. There’s everything an aficionado could want, from field guides like Dorst’s Larger Mammals of Africa and bird books from every publisher covering East, Southern and West Africa, to Viv Wilson’s humongous Duikers of Africa, not to mention old and new trophy record books from SCI and Rowland Ward and, of course, African Hunter, African Hunter II, and Taylor’s African Rifles and Cartridges.

If ever you travel to Brussels, you must visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa in the posh, easily accessible suburb of Tervuren. If the Henry Morton Stanley memorabilia doesn’t mesmerize you, hunters will be awed by its collection of elephant tusks: one like a corkscrew, another a complete circle, and the double set (or four tusks!) carried by one beast, among other unforgettable ivory. With only 1% of the museum’s collection on exposition, one can hardly imagine the treasures stored away in the basement.

Such visions periodically cast a spell on otherwise reasonable men. I still have the sticker from Uele Safaris in 1983, when Rudy and his then-partner, Daniel Henriot, signed onto Sauro Albertini’s dream of conducting elephant and bongo safaris in Zaire’s equatorial forests along the Ubangui River’s largest tributary. Henriot’s copious notes from his visit to the concession describe plenty of promising spoor, but habitat so impossible that he wondered whether PHs could produce enough reliable trophy results to satisfy overseas hunters.

We first noticed them in Namibia – a goods-laden truck making its rounds on a deadquiet Sunday in Tsumeb, the last big town before Etosha National Park, and another circling Tsumkwe, in former Bushmanland, although their storefront there was shut down. We’d been told that 30,000 were living in Windhoek, although you didn’t see them in the busy streets or shopping centers.

The next year in Botswana, our local photo safari guide sang the praises of their kitchenware and cellphones that he complained had previously been out of reach for most Africans.

I cannot keep my mouth shut on this matter. It has irked me and made me feel ashamed of being American. And that’s one thing I don’t like one bit.

While we were guests at a prestigious fishing and hunting camp on the Zambezi River in Tete Province, Mozambique, a group of six or so American students from an elite southern university debarked.