English
"Before the Congo I was a mere animal"
Peter Beard: The End of the Game. The Last Word from Paradise. Excerpt from the new foreword by Paul Theroux
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Almost 50 years ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later - and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game, with its unforgettable images, gives a meaning to the word prescience; and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."
East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the Earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane. Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A Railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails (1910), playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of the southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number ..."
"Infinite" is the sort of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became - sprawling, dense with slums, so crime ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.
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Almost 50 years ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later - and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game, with its unforgettable images, gives a meaning to the word prescience; and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."
East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the Earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane. Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A Railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails (1910), playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of the southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number ..."
"Infinite" is the sort of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became - sprawling, dense with slums, so crime ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.
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The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise
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"Very few matters could move me as deeply as your epitaph or monument over the Old Africa which was so dear to my heart..."
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), author of Out of Africa
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), author of Out of Africa
Machine in the Garden, Tsavo, 1972-73
Photo (c) Peter Beard