Ian Manning Professional Hunter

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Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

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Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

Ian Manning grew up in Africa and was a game cropping ranger, a professional (then known as white) hunter and later a wildlife biologist. He is a bit of a combination of professional hunter and a man who enjoys hunting for himself for the sheer adventure. The good country through which he hunted, the countries from which the stories in this book emerge include Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Botswana and South Africa.

Manning’s wandering ways date back to his great grandfather, a Scottish black sheep who farmed on the Basutoland (Lesotho) border. His youth took place in the treeless, “tinder-dry grass” of the Orange Free State’s veld until his mother moved, after World War II, to the sleepy dorp of Bloemfontein, where household garbage was hauled away in carts pulled by Clydesdale or Percheron horses. Like many a hunter, he honed his aim with clay-ball wars against equally slingshot-skilled Afrikaner and village children. He graduated to a bird-busting BSA number 2 pellet gun, and killed his first antelope with an army issue Lee Enfield .303.

Many famous White Hunters were still alive when Manning was a boy, and he wrote to Harold Hill, Pat Ayre, Lado Enclave, elephant hunter Major Robert Foran and C.J.P. Ionides, who answered. Books like J.E. Hughes’s, Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu inspired his first hitchhiking adventure to Northern Rhodesia to see the swamps and Livingstone’s grave for himself, but violent change was in the air and “I felt we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

watermark.php

Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

After a bit of agricultural college, army, and working as an assistant tobacco planter in Northern Rhodesia’s Mkushi Block close to the secessionist war in Katanga, he realized the “slow and sedentary life of the farmer” was not for him, and headed to Bechuanaland in 1964. His description of pre-tourism Maun and its incipient safari industry makes good reading. Riley’s Hotel really was the only game in town, Willie Englebrecht had recently arrived from Tanganyika, and Safari South was a local operation run by Lionel Palmer and Bert Siebert. While working at Shakawe on the Angola border, Bechuanaland gained independence and became Botswana.

Manning’s hunting career really only began in Southern Rhodesia’s Gwaai Forest Reserve, where he developed his lungs and legs as an eland cropper for Peter Johnstone and Alan Savory, who’d transformed culling or game harvesting into a viable business. “Eland hunting calls for great staying power, followed by a burst of speed,” writes Manning who was paid $2.25 for a cow and $3.75 for a bull. Carrying his 9.3 x 57 rifles loaded with solids, he learned spooring with Matabele trackers.

Manning is good, very good, in his book at describing animals beyond the measurements of their horns, comparing the sweet aroma of buffalo to the sour scent of elephant. He paints word pictures of Livingstone’s eland, of “the russet and slate tints of the cows and calves, the grey of the subdominant bulls, the charcoal alpha bull with his black forepeak and heavy whorled horns, heavy of dewlap, imperious, animating the landscape” and “the fragile steinbok that came on porcelain legs… eyes shadowed by ears plucked from a kudu.” Unimaginable today, even sable were culled: “Many of the African antelope retain their beauty in death, but the sable is like a marlin, no sooner do you land it then the majestic color and bearing seeps from its body. A once proud and beautiful animal becomes a donkey with horns.”

watermark.php

Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

The rough road to future Zimbabwe, with its boycotts and embargos, pushed him to Zambia in 1966, his on-again, off-again home until forced exile to South Africa in 2008. In the Luangwa Valley he worked with that young American from Colorado, Rolf Rohwer, who trained him in darting elephant. At this time, “All over Africa it seemed people set out with paint brushes and paint, eggs filled with paint, plastic ear discs, ear tags, radio collars and so on, and slapped, painted and fixed them on parts of the elephant’s anatomy. Rarely were these animals ever followed, but the tagging was fun.”

Rolf taught him the anatomy behind brain-shooting elephant, dissecting the skull to demonstrate the position of the brain. Imagine a rod pushed through the ear holes; that’s the line to aim for, not two inches above the eyes. Manning also never forgot F.C. Selous’s advice to note the position of every elephant around you before firing a shot. If the six-year (1965–71) cropping program hardly made a dent in the habitat-damaging population of some 100,000 elephants, all too soon poaching would, taking the valley’s black rhino population with it.

Manning was called upon to track down cattle-killing lions in the Chisamba farming block west of the Luano Valley with its “dripping miombo forest and flooded dambos.” In the tension of the final approach, “I listened for the sound of a tail flicking against the earth, or for the pungent, never-to-be-forgotten odor. If luck was with us, we might even hear a lion snore.”

“The Luangwa Valley was a happy place then,” its river “a watery path paved with hippo and croc.” When the plug was pulled by ‘experts,’ whom Manning facetiously defines as “anyone coming from outside Africa,” he turned PH, working for Norman Carr when hunting licences allowed one elephant, lion, leopard, three buffalo, eland, kudu, four impala, two puku, two waterbuck, zebra and wildebeest to which one could add black rhino and an additional elephant. In his first season in 1969, his ivory averaged 74 lbs; his biggest ivory weighed 92 lbs. The record for the Valley was a single tusker carrying 136 lbs.

watermark.php

With a Gun in Good Country by Ian Manning.Insight into the life of a professional big game hunter in Zambia, Botswana, Congo and South Africa. The game and hunting legends plus the magic and memorable adventures, a few misspent years, and more in this dazzling series of stories about an almost unique period of time in Zambia and Africa's great gamelands.

Those of us who live the safari life relate to Manning’s savoring the hard work, but peace, before the clients arrive: “There can be no better feeling, no finer experience than to set out into the blue to discover a beautiful place on a pristine river where wildlife abounds, and there to construct a camp from the raw materials at hand.” There are simple pleasures in stacking supplies and working alongside the good people from tiny villages to repair hunting trails and river passages in that wonderful era before satellite phones and e-mail invaded the bush. How many of us have babied the blue flame of a paraffin fridge, “tending it as if it were a sick child” to assure ice cubes for the client?

In Zambia, one is either a ‘Luangwa Man,’ like Carr, or a ‘Kafue Man,’ enchanted by “exotic oxbow lagoons ringed with fever trees set against the blue lift of the Muchingas.” But Kafue is also a “hard taskmistress, withholding her favors, presenting a rather bleak and unsmiling face.” Manning’s professional-hunting tales are good, often amusing reads, but do not dominate either the book – or his life. They are enriched by his placing them within an historical, geo- and ethnographical context, for example, the political unrest that resulted in the 1950s from black prophetess Alice Lenshina and her Lumpa Church. He reflects how necessary but restrictive game laws caused the loss of power of local chiefs and ancestral customs, turning the naked, spear-hunting Mashukulumbwe into “rather lackluster cattle-keeping peasants.”

Manning became disillusioned when “the safari game became in thrall of the tape measure” rather than having its heart in the experience of the hunt itself, although he acknowledges that trophy measurements maintain standards and keep PHs from becoming lazy. He captures perfectly the tension when the trophies do not fall fast enough, of “stony silences and meal times having much in common with funerals of mass murderers… with no paddle large enough to extricate oneself.”

President Kenneth Kaunda proved disastrous for both whites and wildlife, although Manning was one of the last white African experts to be purged as the country fell under the spell of Big Man socialism and the nationalization of private industry. He compares Zambia’s eroding conditions to the State House gardens that took 10 years to fall into ruin, “inherited yet untended.”

Although there was much laughter and pranks among pals, “There is much suffering hidden behind those russet sunsets.” Friends and colleagues were killed by lion and elephant, in war in Biafra, and in simple road accidents.

Manning believes the future of wildlife lies with the hunter-conservationist working in collaboration with rural Africans, rather than with NGO preservationists from abroad, and the development of the private wildlife estate.
 
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Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

watermark.php

Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

Ian Manning grew up in Africa and was a game cropping ranger, a professional (then known as white) hunter and later a wildlife biologist. He is a bit of a combination of professional hunter and a man who enjoys hunting for himself for the sheer adventure. The good country through which he hunted, the countries from which the stories in this book emerge include Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Botswana and South Africa.

Manning’s wandering ways date back to his great grandfather, a Scottish black sheep who farmed on the Basutoland (Lesotho) border. His youth took place in the treeless, “tinder-dry grass” of the Orange Free State’s veld until his mother moved, after World War II, to the sleepy dorp of Bloemfontein, where household garbage was hauled away in carts pulled by Clydesdale or Percheron horses. Like many a hunter, he honed his aim with clay-ball wars against equally slingshot-skilled Afrikaner and village children. He graduated to a bird-busting BSA number 2 pellet gun, and killed his first antelope with an army issue Lee Enfield .303.

Many famous White Hunters were still alive when Manning was a boy, and he wrote to Harold Hill, Pat Ayre, Lado Enclave, elephant hunter Major Robert Foran and C.J.P. Ionides, who answered. Books like J.E. Hughes’s, Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu inspired his first hitchhiking adventure to Northern Rhodesia to see the swamps and Livingstone’s grave for himself, but violent change was in the air and “I felt we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

watermark.php

Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

After a bit of agricultural college, army, and working as an assistant tobacco planter in Northern Rhodesia’s Mkushi Block close to the secessionist war in Katanga, he realized the “slow and sedentary life of the farmer” was not for him, and headed to Bechuanaland in 1964. His description of pre-tourism Maun and its incipient safari industry makes good reading. Riley’s Hotel really was the only game in town, Willie Englebrecht had recently arrived from Tanganyika, and Safari South was a local operation run by Lionel Palmer and Bert Siebert. While working at Shakawe on the Angola border, Bechuanaland gained independence and became Botswana.

Manning’s hunting career really only began in Southern Rhodesia’s Gwaai Forest Reserve, where he developed his lungs and legs as an eland cropper for Peter Johnstone and Alan Savory, who’d transformed culling or game harvesting into a viable business. “Eland hunting calls for great staying power, followed by a burst of speed,” writes Manning who was paid $2.25 for a cow and $3.75 for a bull. Carrying his 9.3 x 57 rifles loaded with solids, he learned spooring with Matabele trackers.

Manning is good, very good, in his book at describing animals beyond the measurements of their horns, comparing the sweet aroma of buffalo to the sour scent of elephant. He paints word pictures of Livingstone’s eland, of “the russet and slate tints of the cows and calves, the grey of the subdominant bulls, the charcoal alpha bull with his black forepeak and heavy whorled horns, heavy of dewlap, imperious, animating the landscape” and “the fragile steinbok that came on porcelain legs… eyes shadowed by ears plucked from a kudu.” Unimaginable today, even sable were culled: “Many of the African antelope retain their beauty in death, but the sable is like a marlin, no sooner do you land it then the majestic color and bearing seeps from its body. A once proud and beautiful animal becomes a donkey with horns.”

watermark.php

Ian Manning, Professional Hunter

The rough road to future Zimbabwe, with its boycotts and embargos, pushed him to Zambia in 1966, his on-again, off-again home until forced exile to South Africa in 2008. In the Luangwa Valley he worked with that young American from Colorado, Rolf Rohwer, who trained him in darting elephant. At this time, “All over Africa it seemed people set out with paint brushes and paint, eggs filled with paint, plastic ear discs, ear tags, radio collars and so on, and slapped, painted and fixed them on parts of the elephant’s anatomy. Rarely were these animals ever followed, but the tagging was fun.”

Rolf taught him the anatomy behind brain-shooting elephant, dissecting the skull to demonstrate the position of the brain. Imagine a rod pushed through the ear holes; that’s the line to aim for, not two inches above the eyes. Manning also never forgot F.C. Selous’s advice to note the position of every elephant around you before firing a shot. If the six-year (1965–71) cropping program hardly made a dent in the habitat-damaging population of some 100,000 elephants, all too soon poaching would, taking the valley’s black rhino population with it.

Manning was called upon to track down cattle-killing lions in the Chisamba farming block west of the Luano Valley with its “dripping miombo forest and flooded dambos.” In the tension of the final approach, “I listened for the sound of a tail flicking against the earth, or for the pungent, never-to-be-forgotten odor. If luck was with us, we might even hear a lion snore.”

“The Luangwa Valley was a happy place then,” its river “a watery path paved with hippo and croc.” When the plug was pulled by ‘experts,’ whom Manning facetiously defines as “anyone coming from outside Africa,” he turned PH, working for Norman Carr when hunting licences allowed one elephant, lion, leopard, three buffalo, eland, kudu, four impala, two puku, two waterbuck, zebra and wildebeest to which one could add black rhino and an additional elephant. In his first season in 1969, his ivory averaged 74 lbs; his biggest ivory weighed 92 lbs. The record for the Valley was a single tusker carrying 136 lbs.

watermark.php

With a Gun in Good Country by Ian Manning.Insight into the life of a professional big game hunter in Zambia, Botswana, Congo and South Africa. The game and hunting legends plus the magic and memorable adventures, a few misspent years, and more in this dazzling series of stories about an almost unique period of time in Zambia and Africa's great gamelands.

Those of us who live the safari life relate to Manning’s savoring the hard work, but peace, before the clients arrive: “There can be no better feeling, no finer experience than to set out into the blue to discover a beautiful place on a pristine river where wildlife abounds, and there to construct a camp from the raw materials at hand.” There are simple pleasures in stacking supplies and working alongside the good people from tiny villages to repair hunting trails and river passages in that wonderful era before satellite phones and e-mail invaded the bush. How many of us have babied the blue flame of a paraffin fridge, “tending it as if it were a sick child” to assure ice cubes for the client?

In Zambia, one is either a ‘Luangwa Man,’ like Carr, or a ‘Kafue Man,’ enchanted by “exotic oxbow lagoons ringed with fever trees set against the blue lift of the Muchingas.” But Kafue is also a “hard taskmistress, withholding her favors, presenting a rather bleak and unsmiling face.” Manning’s professional-hunting tales are good, often amusing reads, but do not dominate either the book – or his life. They are enriched by his placing them within an historical, geo- and ethnographical context, for example, the political unrest that resulted in the 1950s from black prophetess Alice Lenshina and her Lumpa Church. He reflects how necessary but restrictive game laws caused the loss of power of local chiefs and ancestral customs, turning the naked, spear-hunting Mashukulumbwe into “rather lackluster cattle-keeping peasants.”

Manning became disillusioned when “the safari game became in thrall of the tape measure” rather than having its heart in the experience of the hunt itself, although he acknowledges that trophy measurements maintain standards and keep PHs from becoming lazy. He captures perfectly the tension when the trophies do not fall fast enough, of “stony silences and meal times having much in common with funerals of mass murderers… with no paddle large enough to extricate oneself.”

President Kenneth Kaunda proved disastrous for both whites and wildlife, although Manning was one of the last white African experts to be purged as the country fell under the spell of Big Man socialism and the nationalization of private industry. He compares Zambia’s eroding conditions to the State House gardens that took 10 years to fall into ruin, “inherited yet untended.”

Although there was much laughter and pranks among pals, “There is much suffering hidden behind those russet sunsets.” Friends and colleagues were killed by lion and elephant, in war in Biafra, and in simple road accidents.

Manning believes the future of wildlife lies with the hunter-conservationist working in collaboration with rural Africans, rather than with NGO preservationists from abroad, and the development of the private wildlife estate.
The full review was by Brooke Chilvers.
 
With a Gun small.png


Field & Stream Magazine, New York, 1996.​

There is very little of Africa he hasn’t seen. And sadly, much of what he has seen and written about here is gone forever. With a Gun is at once funny, scary, and memorable.
David Petzal, Editor.


Safari Bookshelf (Safari Times Africa, January 2001)​



Although Ian Manning, the author of With a Gun in Good Country, has ceased his professional hunting and fishing careers, he is still active in the conservation field and involved with the CITES implementation programme in South Africa.
Although everybody is qualified to write a book about his or her own experiences, Manning as a former professional hunter and fisherman and with experience in the field of conservation consulting and advising, is eminently qualified to not only write on these topics, but also to comment on them.
With a Gun in Good Country starts out without the customary introduction by some or other well-known person, just the preface by the author himself. I kind of liked it. Although introductions are wonderful tools in old books to provide the reader with details he would not otherwise have had any knowledge about, in modem books it has often degenerated into a lot of praise about the author, who everybody should know, is just another fallible human being like the rest of us.
With a Gun in Good Country starts out with the normal background about how the author ended up in the business he was writing a book about. Having had the privilege of meeting and dealing with the well-polished and gentlemanly Ian Manning a number of times, his adventurous streak and the rough and tumble of his early days came as quite a surprise.
Typically Manning, the 295-page book is written in an easygoing style. It is a joy to read. Appropriately spiced with humour where it needs it, it really is a book easily enjoyed. The account of Macleod and Savory’s horse being one such instance. Another that I enjoyed immensely was Manning’s account of him as captain abandoning his boat Fiji and then ending up ashore long after his boat. His statement to the awed crowd that a repeat performance would follow the next day at 10 a.m. is a real classic.
The book sports a lot of photos, amongst them many of the renowned and late Johnny Uys. The photos are inserted into the text.
Towards the end of the book Manning changed the emphasis from hunting accounts to events and facts that have a different slant. This part of the book conveys a message about hunting practices, African events and policies and a number of other issues affecting our continent and our sport. This is a tendency becoming increasingly apparent as authors like Manning and Pires have started to call a spade a spade and tell the truth rather than sweeping it under the carpet. It is hoped that this will serve our sport and conservation well.

Magnum Magazine, South Africa. 1995.​



In the 1960s there were two commercial game management organizations operating in Rhodesia, Wildlife Utilization Services, owned by Alan Savory and Robbie Robertson, and Eland Game Ranchers, owned by myself, both employing a number of hunters and each having the game rights over about a million acres.
The concept of sustained yield utilization of wildlife was still in its infancy then, and personnel from both operations frequently visited to find out what the other was doing and to pick up tips. One of the Wildlife Utilization Services hunters was a young fellow by the name of Ian Manning, whom I never met but heard about on a number of occasions, who always came across as a good hunter, something of a character, and something of a humourist. These attributes come through strongly in With a Gun in Good Country, his recently published book,
The text is of an unusual construction, which I found an added plus. Instead of being divided into a number of chapters, it is divided into the seven parts covering the seven major periods of the author’s hunting life, and these consist to a large degree of a number of cleverly labelled vignettes which tell of the highlights, the people, the animals and the incidents of the time in question, which are all very interesting and some very funny. Some of these vignettes are only a page in length, a couple even shorter, and none are more than two or three pages, which makes for easy reading and keep the moving at a comfortable clip.
The seven periods consist of the author’s first steps into the wilds, his days as a game cropper with W.U.S. in Rhodesia, his days as an elephant and buffalo cropping ranger with the Zambian Game Department, his days as a safari PH in the same country, his days as a biologist cum warden in the Bangweulu swamps after a rather late-in-the life spell at a Canadian University, then back to hunting, this time in Botswana, ending with his time as a commercial ski-boat fisherman on the South African coast. There are two more parts, an epilogue, about his time as a conservation and development consultant in Malawi and other places in Africa, and a postscript, telling of doing similar work in the Congo Republic.
The pages are liberally spread with well-known names to MAGNUM readers – Tudor Howard-Davies and Peter Capstick being but two – and hunters in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe will recognize many more. The book is illustrated with often amusingly captioned black & white photos from the author’s collection, showing animals in unusual poses, interesting scenes, incidents or people. Manning clearly found the humans he came in contact with as interesting as the animals, and he reveals an acute observation of both. But for me the book’s greatest charm is the author’s honesty in the telling. Inevitably there are mistakes, mix-ups and mess-ups in hunting, and perhaps even more so when running safaris and Manning tells these stories against himself with amusing candour
The book commences with a poem by Robert W. Service entitled, The Men That Don’t Fit In. The opening lines read:
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in
A race that can’t stay still
The race that can’t stay still have contributed considerable to the world’s library of non-fiction books, and With a Gun in Good Country is a worthy addition to it. I give this book ten out ten for a good writing style, a good choice of words, and good content.
Brian Marsh (1928-2014)


The African Hunter Magazine​

Some books are relevant for only a year or so after publication. Others can be enjoyed years, decades, even generations later. Ian Manning’s ‘old-fashioned bush memoir’ of his years as a cropping ranger, professional hunter, and wildlife biologist in Southern and Central Africa, published by Trophy Room Books in 1995, is one of the latter.
Shocked by an unflattering review (posted on the Internet in 2001) of this enjoyable and insightful book, my guess is the fellow is an armchair-traveller with a taste for the serial death throes and ballistics of hunting porn. If he’s a seasoned safari hunter, then he’s tuned out the birdsong symphony of African dawns and “the potpourri of aromas, both animal and plant, laid at nightfall.”
There’s nothing “fuzzy about the details” (as the reviewer writes) in Manning’s testimonials to the utter transformation his generation continues to witness in Africa – “the dismantling of Colonialism, changing the lives and destinies of millions of people and the status of wildlife from its greatest height to its greatest threat.” In fact, Manning gives voice to dozens of worthy individuals who, without this book, might have otherwise disappeared. He is acutely attuned and emotionally sensitive to having “inherited a way of life and seen much of it disappear.”
This covers everything from lion going from ‘vermin’ to CITES Appendix II, to the loss of the open road with its “pleasures of being a young man able to knock about from place to place with time and the bush in your eyes.”
Manning’s wandering ways date back to his great grandfather, a Scottish black sheep who farmed on the Basutoland (Lesotho) border. His youth took place in the treeless, “tinder-dry grass” of the Orange Free State’s veldt until his mother moved after World War II to the sleepy dorp of Bloemfontein, where household garbage was hauled away in carts pulled by Clydesdale or Percheron horses. Like many a hunter, he honed his aim with clay-ball wars against equally slingshot-skilled Afrikaner and village children. He graduated to a bird-busting BSA number 2 pellet gun, and killed his first antelope with an army-issue Lee Enfield .303.
Many famous White Hunters were still alive when Manning was a boy, and he wrote to Harold Hill, Pat Ayre, Lado Enclave elephant-hunter Major Robert Foran and C.J.P. Ionides, who answered back. Books like J.E. Hughes’s, Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu inspired his first hitchhiking adventure to Northern Rhodesia to see the swamps and Livingstone’s grave for himself, but violent change was in the air and “I felt we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
After a bit of agricultural college, army, and working as an assistant tobacco planter in Northern Rhodesia’s Mkushi Block close to the secessionist war in Katanga, he realized the “slow and sedentary life of the farmer” was not for him, and headed to Bechuanaland in 1964. His descriptions of pre-tourism Maun and its incipient safari industry makes good reading. Riley’s Hotel really was the only game in town, Willie Englebrecht had recently arrived from Tanganyika, and Safari South was a local operation run by Lionel Palmer and Bert Siebert. While working at Shakawe on the Angola border, Bechuanaland gained independence and became Botswana.
Manning’s hunting career really only began in Southern Rhodesia’s Gwaai Forest Reserve where he developed his lungs and legs as an eland cropper for Peter Johnstone and Alan Savory, who’d transformed culling or game harvesting into a viable business. “Eland hunting calls for great staying power, followed by a burst of speed,” writes Manning who was paid $2.25 for a cow and $3.75 for a bull. Carrying his 9.3 x 57 rifles loaded with solids, he learned spooring with Matabele trackers.
Manning is good, very good, at describing animals beyond the measurements of their horns, comparing the sweet aroma of buffalo to the sour scent of elephant. He paints word pictures of Livingstone’s eland, of “the russet and slate tints of the cows and calves, the grey of the subdominant bulls, the charcoal alpha bull with his black forepeak and heavy whorled horns, heavy of dewlap, imperious, animating the landscape” and “the fragile steinbok that came on porcelain legs… eyes shadowed by ears plucked from a kudu.” Unimaginable today, even sable were culled: “Many of the African antelope retain their beauty in death, but the sable is like a marlin, no sooner do you land it then the majestic color and bearing seeps from its body. A once proud and beautiful animal becomes a donkey with horns.”
The rough road to future Zimbabwe, with its boycotts and embargos, pushed him to Zambia in 1966, his on-again, off-again home until forced exile to South Africa in 2008. In the Luangwa Valley he worked with that young American from Colorado, Rolf Rohwer, who trained him in darting elephant: “All over Africa it seemed people set out with paint brushes and paint, eggs filled with paint, plastic ear discs, ear tags, radio collars and so on, and slapped, painted and fixed them on parts of the elephant’s anatomy. Rarely were these animals ever followed, but the tagging was fun.”
Rolf taught him the anatomy behind brain-shooting elephant, dissecting the skull to demonstrate the position of the brain. Imagine a rod pushed through the ear holes; that’s the line to aim for, not two inches above the eyes. Manning also never forgot F.C. Selous’s advice to note the position of every elephant around you before firing a shot. If the six-year (1965–71) cropping programme hardly made a dent in the habitat-damaging population of some 100,000 elephants, all too soon poaching would, taking the valley’s black rhino population with it.
Manning was called upon to track down cattle-killing lions in the Chisamba farming block west of the Luano Valley with its “dripping miombo forest and flooded dambos.” In the tension of the final approach, “I listened for the sound of a tail flicking against the earth, or for the pungent, never-to-be-forgotten odour. If luck was with us, we might even hear a lion snore.”
“The Luangwa Valley was a happy place then,” its river “a watery path paved with hippo and croc.” When the plug was pulled by ‘experts,’ whom Manning facetiously defines as “anyone coming from outside Africa,” he turned PH, working for Norman Carr when hunting licenses allowed one elephant, lion, leopard, three buffalo, eland, kudu, four impala, two puku, two waterbuck, zebra and wildebeest to which one could add black rhino and an additional elephant. Manning took two 90 pounders, the biggest weighing 93 lbs a side, and in that first season of 1969 his average tusk weight was 74 lbs. The record for Zambia is a single tusker of 136 lbs.
Those of us who live the safari life relate to Manning’s savouring the hard work, but peace, before the clients arrive: “There can be no better feeling, no finer experience than to set out into the blue to discover a beautiful place on a pristine river where wildlife abounds, and there to construct a camp from the raw materials at hand.” There are simple pleasures in stacking supplies and working alongside the good people from tiny villages to repair hunting trails and river passages in that wonderful era before satellite phones and e-mail invaded the bush. How many of us have babied the blue flame of a paraffin fridge, “tending it as if it were a sick child” to assure ice cubes for the client?
In Zambia, one is either a ‘Luangwa Man,’ like Carr, or a ‘Kafue Man,’ enchanted by “exotic oxbow lagoons ringed with fever trees set against the blue lift of the Muchingas.” But Kafue is also a “hard taskmistress, withholding her favors, presenting a rather bleak and unsmiling face.” Manning’s professional-hunting tales are good, often amusing reads, but do not dominate either the book – or his life. They are enriched by his placing them within an historical, geo- and ethnographical context, for example, the political unrest that resulted in the 1950s from black prophetess Alice Lenshina and her Lumpa Church. He reflects how necessary but restrictive game laws caused the loss of power of local chiefs and ancestral customs, turning the naked, spear-hunting Mashukulumbwe into “rather lackluster cattle-keeping peasants.”
Ultimately, Manning became disillusioned because “the safari game” became “in thrall of the tape measure” rather than having its heart in the experience of the hunt itself, although he acknowledges that trophy measurements maintain standards and keeps PHs from becoming lazy. He captures perfectly the tension when the trophies do not fall fast enough, of “stony silences and meal times having much in common with funerals of mass murderers… with no paddle large enough to extricate oneself.”
President Kenneth Kaunda proved disastrous for both whites and wildlife, although Manning was one of the last white African experts to be purged as the country fell under the spell of Big Man socialism and the nationalization of private industry. He compares Zambia’s eroding conditions to the State House gardens that took 10 years to fall into ruin, “inherited yet untended.”
Although there was much laughter and pranks among pals, “There is much suffering hidden behind those russet sunsets.” Friends and colleagues were killed by lion and elephant, in war in Biafra, and in simple road accidents. But his book makes them part of our collective memory of Africa.
Manning believes the future of wildlife lies with the hunter-conservationist working in collaboration with rural Africans, rather than with NGO preservationists from abroad, and the development of the private wildlife estate.
With a Gun reads like one remembers life – not with the coherent, unfolding storyline of a novel, but from the “nooks and crannies” of the mind. It is perfect for safari, to be read in snatches in the minutes before the generator shuts down or in the leopard blind before God dims the lights.

The book is in EPUB and is easily downloaded, just make sure you also download the free app.


And here is a good one, written by a villager who went from poacher to conservationist.
 

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autofire wrote on LIMPOPO NORTH SAFARIS's profile.
Do you have any cull hunts available? 7 days, daily rate plus per animal price?

#plainsgame #hunting #africahunting ##LimpopoNorthSafaris ##africa
Grz63 wrote on roklok's profile.
Hi Roklok
I read your post on Caprivi. Congratulations.
I plan to hunt there for buff in 2026 oct.
How was the land, very dry ? But à lot of buffs ?
Thank you / merci
Philippe
 
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