A Masai homestead near the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania.  The grass hut is perfect for the climate.

By Terry Wieland

A Good Night’s Sleep

Grass, mud, and (ugh!) corrugated iron

Fifty years ago, I found myself in the southern Sudan, in a small camp of Anyanya — the guerrillas who’d been battling Khartoum since the country’s independence in 1956.  The camp was sparse:  A dozen grass huts, a fire pit with some benches, and a communal table with more benches.

A friend and I had crossed illegally from Uganda after an odyssey, mostly on foot, that took us from the fleshpots of Kampala, to a refugee camp near the Mountains of the Moon, and then north across the Albert Nile to the tiny village of Lefori, west of Moyo.  We carried with us a letter of introduction — a piece of notepaper with a few lines in splotchy ink — from one of the Bari tribesmen we met in the refugee camp, to an uncle or cousin or friend or something who lived in Lefori.

The note asked him to get us across the border so we could meet with the Anyanya, and I could gather information for a newspaper article.  It would help the cause.

We were treated very well, very politely, although my camera was immediately confiscated.  They put us up in a grass hut with two beds, also made of grass, one on each side of a pile of ashes where, obviously, a fire was built.  It all began to make sense when, as the sun set, the temperature plunged.  At 4,000 feet up (1220 metres), the plateau reached 90 F. (32 C.) during the day, but dropped to the 40s (5 C.) at night.  As the communal fire burned low, the women who formed the camp staff took pails of coals into each of the grass huts, then dragged in some logs and set their ends on the coals, along with smaller branches.

I watched this with considerable trepidation, since in my experience nothing burns much better than dry grass, and the beds, walls, and roof were like tinder.  We retired to our beds, which were shaped much like a gondola made of grass sheaves, tied together.  The small branches caught and the flames leapt four feet in the air.  Lying there, looking up at the roof in the dancing firelight, I saw some house lizards who’d gathered to enjoy the warmth.  If they weren’t worried, why should I be?

We lived in that hut for the better part of two weeks, by which time we were so used to sleeping in a fire trap that we woke up in the night, groggily dragged the logs deeper into the flames, and went back to sleep without thinking.  The hut was reasonably cozy at night, comfortably cool if you wanted to lie down during the heat of the day, pleasantly bright from the sunlight filtering through, and altogether absolutely ideal for the climate.

This was a stark contrast to the European-style shed we’d lived in during our stay at the refugee camp at Ibuga.  It was the standard stucco-ed concrete with a tin roof, two iron bedsteads with bare springs, and a solid wooden door and shutters for the two windows.  Either it was open to the elements — not wonderful there under the Ruwenzoris, where it rained every day promptly at three, and the deluge routinely carried off mangos and pawpaws if the vendors in the market did not get them up off the floor in time.  So regular was the rain, there was an alarm that sounded at five minutes to three, to warn people.  It could go from clear sky to black clouds to pouring rain in minutes.

At any rate, our hut at Ibuga was less than comfortable — cold at night, hot during the day, and either pitch-black or soaking wet in the rainy afternoon.

I think of those times whenever I talk with a missionary or aid-agency do-gooder intent on moving, for example, the Masai out of their customary mud-walled huts.  I have also slept in a mud hut, and found it only slightly less delightful than my grass hut in the Sudan.  And the Masai huts that I have been invited to enter — a great honor by the way — have put most suburban American dwellings to shame for being neat and meticulously kept.  They have even included intriguing features like shelves around a pole, like a spiral staircase, made of a central pole and twigs to hold the mud together.  The mud is then smoothed to an almost wax-like polish.

Hence, I have trouble keeping my temper when the do-gooders refer to “squalor” in traditional African dwellings.  Granted, I‘ve seen some African townships outside the big cities, like Johannesburg or Nairobi, that were not everything a housing activist might desire, but that doesn’t mean they are all dreadful slums.

In 1992, I spent a couple of nights in a low-rent neighborhood on the edge of Francistown, in Botswana, in company with my Tswana professional hunter who parked me there while he visited one of the nine mistresses he kept stashed away around the country.  The building I was in was constructed on the pattern of European houses, but the windows were all gone — just gaping holes in the plaster — and we dragged a table across the door to keep the wildlife at bay.  A water tap on a pipe sticking up from the ground, two or three houses down, constituted the amenities.

In those days, I was known to take a drink now and then, and a bottle of Irish whiskey kept me company through the night.  When Patrick finally returned, looking rather haggard, around mid-morning, some new friends and I were passing the bottle and discussing world affairs.  I realized then that I could learn to live this way and be quite comfortable.

In fact, on reflection, all the memorably uncomfortable nights and days I’ve spent in Africa have been in conventional European houses, not in mud huts, grass huts, tents, lean-tos, or a sleeping bag under the stars.  Wait a minute:  The exceptions to that (it happened twice) involved a leaky tent on a mountainside in the rain with no bedding whatever, and the prospect of hunting Cape buffalo in the morning.  And if ever one needed a good night’s sleep…

But those were the exception.  In a past column, I wrote about tents and tented safaris in Africa, so I won’t repeat it here except to say that I’ve noticed a progression of ever-increasing discomfort as one moves farther and farther away from living the way our cave-dwelling ancestors did.

By “discomfort,” I don’t mean I would like to do without indoor toilets and running water, only that there is a psychological discomfort that comes from feeling closed in.

On various occasions, I’ve slept under the stars in Africa — in the Rift Valley, the Okavango, the Kalahari — and always found that when I moved back inside, even something as flimsy and open as a tent, it felt claustrophic and unnatural.  Of course, you quickly get used to it again, but it shows just what an unnatural way of life it is.

The same thing happens with socks.  I long ago abandoned long pants, socks, and boots in favour of shorts and bare feet in moccasins.  After a couple of weeks of that, putting socks on again for the trip home feels very confining.

At various times in my life, when I’ve had the privilege of living like a millionaire even though I’m not, I’ve stayed in some extraordinarily luxurious accommodation, including the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the old Piccadilly Hotel (circa 1906) in London.  The Norfolk in Nairobi’s no slouch, either.

While I have pleasant memories of those times, they don’t begin to compare with the nights I spent, looking up at the velvet sky above the Kalahari with the stars pressing close and getting bigger and closer the longer I looked at them.

Granted, such accommodation is not the best when the rains come, but for that I will happily take a grass hut like we had in the Sudan, lying by the fire on my bed of grass sheaves, and sipping hot water mixed, with scorched cane sugar, that we drank in place of tea.  A volume of Hemingway — any volume, but preferably A Moveable Feast — and what else do you need?

My favorite memory of sleeping under the stars, or in a grass hut, or a wide-open tent?  Feeling the breeze in the night.  Of this simple ancient pleasure has modern life and air conditioning deprived us.  It’s a memory to bring back from a safari that’s worth every bit as much as the finest set of horns.

***

Corbett’s .275 Rigby, and mementoes of his life and career, courtesy John Rigby & Co.

By Terry Wieland

Top of the Tree

Jim Corbett and the Queen

By a strange coincidence, I was in the midst of re-reading all of Jim Corbett’s books about India, the jungle, and his encounters with man-eating tigers and leopards, when the Queen died in early September.  Although seldom mentioned, Corbett and the Queen had a brief but important acquaintance in 1952.

On the night that King George VI died, and Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth, she and the Duke of Edinburgh were visiting Kenya.  They had traveled to Nyeri, and from there to the famous Treetops, where they were engaged in game-watching.  Their guide and guardian was Jim Corbett, already world-famous as an author and hunter of man-eaters.

Corbett was then 77 years old.  That night, while the Princess slept in the glorified treehouse, Corbett sat up on the balcony, his rifle across his knees, while a leopard played with the access rope that dangled to the ground and was used for hoisting up supplies.  It fell to Corbett in the morning to awake Her (now) Majesty and tell her the news of her father.

Later, in his last book, Treetops, he wrote that “for the first time in the history of the world, a girl climbed a tree as a Princess, and came down a Queen.”

***

Edward James Corbett, universally known as Jim, was born and grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the United Provinces of northern India.  He came from northern Irish stock, was one of a large—and far from rich—family, and became world famous late in life, with the publication, in 1944, of Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

Man-Eaters is one of the greatest books on hunting ever written, by anyone, anywhere.  Corbett, who was modest to a fault, did not have high hopes for it, and in fact wrote it to pass the time while he was recuperating from illness during the war.  Fortunately for us all, Lt. Col. Corbett was well connected, and his memoir was published by Oxford University Press, picked up in America as a Book of the Month, and became a world-wide best seller.  Its distinctive red and black rendering of a snarling tiger graced bookshelves everywhere, and this nightmarish image haunted my dreams from the first time I saw it at the age of seven.

Jim Corbett was born in 1875 and grew up in and around the hill station of Naini Tal.  When he was in his late teens, he took a contract working for the Bengal railroad, and stayed at it for the next 21 years.  He was, however, as much a child of the jungle as Mowgli and had been a hunter almost from birth.  In 1907, he was asked to hunt and kill the Champawat Man-Eater, a tiger that was terrorizing an area 

near Naini Tal.  Having succeeded where others failed, Corbett gained a reputation and was called upon many times in succeeding years to hunt man-eaters, both tigers and leopards.

It’s all the rage now to condemn the British Empire, root and branch, and deny that any good ever came of it anywhere.  Historians who dare to contradict this new “woke” gospel are shunned or dismissed as hopeless reactionaries, unworthy of either academic posts or publication of their work.  This is just as much a rewriting of history as occurred on a regular basis in Stalin’s Russia, where the history books were revised every time another member of the Politburo was railroaded in a show trial and went to the execution cellars.

Modern histories of India written by Indians, many with degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, or— like Mohindas Ghandi himself, University College London—emphasize everything bad that occurred in India during the 200 years of the British Raj, while dismissing or denying everything good.  In fact, there was a great deal that was good, and the life of Jim Corbett is a prime example.

Although he hunted man-eaters over the course of 30 years, Corbett stopped hunting non-man-eaters after 1911 and became a major voice calling for wildlife conservation, including the tigers he so admired.  In India today, Jim Corbett National Park, established for the purpose of providing a tiger sanctuary, gives some idea of the esteem in which he was held and, as far as I know, is still held, in the tiger country of the Himalayas.

Corbett never married, and he and his sister, Maggie, lived together throughout their lives.  They were astute business people, and made wise investments that allowed them to live comfortably.  In the 1920s, Corbett invested money in British East Africa and made regular trips there to oversee various projects.

When India became independent in 1947, Jim and Maggie left their home in Naini Tal and emigrated to Kenya.  The usual explanation for this is that Corbett may have been, by some definitions, an “Anglo-Indian” (he was born there, although he had no Indian blood), he was and always would be a British subject, unquestioningly loyal to the British Crown.

Undoubtedly, there was an element of this, although, ever since, Indians have gone out of their way to insist he would have been welcome to stay on.  This may be true, but it ignores the realities of the situation they faced.

The Corbett family went to India some years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and lived through that horror.  One of Jim’s uncles was captured by the mutineers at the siege of the Red Fort in Delhi, and was executed by being burnt alive; his brother witnessed this, and it became both family legend and family dread. 

It is common now to blame the British for the “rushed” exodus from India in 1947, and even to lay blame for partition itself on the British and not on the Muslim League that insisted on their own country (Pakistan).  It was such a complicated situation that trying to place ultimate blame is pointless.  The usual position is that, before the British, Hindus and Muslims coexisted quite happily, and it was only the British practice of “divide and rule” that caused enmity.

In My India, particularly, Corbett himself says that the people he lived among for 21 years, working on the Bengal railway, were Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, the odd Christian, and more than a few animists, and everyone got along fine.  When partition and independence loomed in 1947, however, violence broke out almost everywhere, with Muslims slaughtering Hindus here, and Hindus slaughtering Muslims over there.

Today, estimates of the dead run around two million, and much of this occurred on and around the railways.  Jim and Maggie Corbett were not worried about the people they knew in Naini Tal, but they were certainly worried about roving gangs, and there was no shortage of those.  As well, as Corbett himself wrote, in an independent India they would certainly become “second-class citizens.”  Serves them right, anti-colonialists would say, but when you are in your seventies and ailing, that is no comfort regardless of your own feelings.

Jim Corbett loved India, and Indians of all stripes, but he was a “sahib,” like it or not, and you do not easily shed the beliefs (and fears) of a lifetime.  In 1947, he foresaw “a second Mutiny,” and was determined to evade it.

As David Gilmour points out in his superb book, The British in India – A Social History of the Raj, many of the best British administrators of the Indian Civil Service stayed on after independence to aid the transition, and this was equally true down to lower levels.  There was not wholesale slaughter of Europeans, as many feared.  But that’s hindsight.

While Jim Corbett is remembered today mainly for his books, most of which were written between 1947, and his death in Kenya in 1955, he himself most valued his conservation work.  As an early investor in Safariland, the safari company, he promoted photographic safaris more than hunting.  He involved his many highly placed friends and acquaintances, such as Lord Wavell, in conservation efforts, and when he died his conservation work figured as prominently in the obituaries as did his killing of the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, which had at least 125 kills to its credit.

When the series The Crown was aired in 2016, I watched the early episodes to see how the producers would treat the events at Treetops in 1952.  Alas, Jim Corbett was not mentioned, even as a walk-on character, and the news of her father’s death was conveyed to the Queen by some functionary, I forget who.

For her part, the Queen never forgot Jim Corbett—she seemingly never forgot anyone—but he was conspicuously missing from her obituaries and the accounts of the events at Treetops in 1952 when she assumed the throne.

Sic transit gloria, as they say.  Still, there’s Jim Corbett National Park in India, and Man-Eaters of Kumaon still adorns bookshelves throughout the former British Empire.

Long live the King.

Leslie van der Merwe’s recipe book, “Everyday Venison,” was crowned the Best Game Meat Cook Book in the World at the esteemed Gourmand Awards Ceremony.

The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, an institution founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau, recognizes exceptional food and wine culture literature. This year’s competition assessed over 100,000 books and publications from 230 countries, for the 130 categories.

In response to the exponential growth in the popularity of game meat recipe books, the organizers introduced a new category this year, dedicated to honoring this burgeoning genre. “Everyday Venison” emerged victorious, triumphing over a competitive lineup that featured remarkable entries from France, Germany, and New Zealand.