Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
may take you a couple of hours. Yes, they seem to have done pretty well.”
On the trip from Johannesburg to Bulawayo we met Mike F, one of the well respected and
fathers of both hunting and game management at the reserves in Zimbabwe. He is now working
for an organization in Mozambique. I asked if he had had any close calls with the Big 5 and he
said that once he was following up on an injured leopard and the leopard charged him at such a
close distance that and he didn't have time to swing his rifle into position. He placed the rifle
across his chest and as the leopard leaped at him he blocked it with his rifle and flipped it
over his head. Unfortunately the leopard landed on his tracker who was immediately behind
him. The tracker never forgave him since the he thought it was deliberate. Mike carried a scar
on his face from that attack. He was also once stabbed in the leg by an elephant but nothing
more serious than that.
Early in the morning we took off from Oliver Tambo Airport and headed slightly east of
north towards Bulawayo for the two and half hour flight covering some 500 miles. We pass
just west of the Mapungubwe and K2 civilization ruins, over the Limpopo and Shaste rivers,
past the Matopos hills in Matobo Park and down to Bulawayo. At the Shaste- Limpopo River
junction gold was mined in about 900 AD. In the caves of Matopos are old Bambata pottery,
some of the oldest pottery, and one of most prolific ancient archaeological sites for both San
Bushmen and earlier biped's tools. The pottery dates back to at least 300 BC and the thicker
decorated variety was probably made in the late Stone Age by San Bushmen. It is also the site
of the cave in which Frederick Russell Burnham hid and claimed to have shot Mlimo, the
Oracle of Njele in 1896 and the shaman leader of the Ndebele (known under the British as
Matabele), that fought against Rhodes who was attempting to take over their land in the
Matabele campaign. Ingram his brother in law was not as certain. The current Oracle is a
descendent of Lombengula. Burnham, born among the Plains Indians, was a bison hunter but
later became a prominent conservationist together with his friend President Teddy Roosevelt.
Burnham was later involved, together with Robert Baden-Powell, who was also at Matopos,
in forming the Boy Scouts after finding how useful boys were at running messages at the
Bulawayo Laager. He also was involved with Boone & Crockett Club and what became the
Wildlife Conservation Union. Burnham also helped Rhodes obtain control of Northern
Rhodesia after he found copper there and this country later became Zambia.
The history of white men in central sub Saharan Africa is actually fairly recent. Other than
the seafarers that circumvented Africa and traded at the ports the first central African European
explorers were hunter-adventurers or missionaries. In 1842 Ludwig Krapf had been working
in the vicinity of Mombasa with little success and in 1846 colleague Johannes Rebmann
arrived and moved further inland looking for new areas to prosthelitize, and, eventually in May
1848 seeing for the first time by a European the snowcapped mountain of Kilimanjaro. In the
same year, Krapf also saw Mount Kenya for the first time. Later in 1857, the British explorers
and misfits Richard Burton and John Speke showed up at Rebmann's mission station in the
hopes of finding the source of the Nile. They eventually ended up together at Tabora despite
continually feuding. Speke suggested they check north for a large lake they were told existed,
but Burton only to keen to get rid of him, decided not to go. They had already been to the
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