David Bristow’s Safari Tales David Bristow on Safari

David Bristow’s Safari Tales are about family, mythology, and wildlife. Wild and wonderful, he shares with us his safari tales.

In the great safari milieu of Southern Africa, few things get my monkey more than a know-it-all guide declaiming: “Did you know, hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal.” Apart from the shameful grammar, that well-trodden bush myth is as far from reality as Maun is from Malibu. And I should know, because I’ve narrowly escaped the ivoried jaws of an angry “river horse”.

When I was a city-slicking teenager a friend contrived to get me to the Okavango “swamps” on a camping trip – just three of us, a fishing rod and not much common sense. When I told my parents where we were headed they bade me have a good time. They had no idea, and neither did I. We found a river Bushman of the Bayei tribe, to punt us up the channel from Maun in his dugout mokoro, dump us on an island deep in the Delta, and return for us two weeks later. We had a Very Big Adventure.

When we returned to Maun the lodge manager where we fell in for pies and beers, asked where we’d been. Chitabe Island we replied. Oh, that’s interesting he mused, not many people go there these days – too many lions. You don’t say! And lots of other things too. I think it might have been the swamp water that did it for me, because ever since then the Okavango has become for me the Garden of Eden and I cannot get enough of it.

Although not strictly the first in Africa, the Kruger National Park set the standard for game reserves in Southern Africa, and were it not for its feisty first warden Major James Stevenson Hamilton, it’s possible there would be no national parks at all. I spent many happy childhood holidays there becoming bush wise and probably foolish too – certainly addicted. However, once I discovered the much wilder Okavango I developed a blasé attitude to Kruger. It was only when I became a parent I realised how blessed we are to have the Kruger Park, with all it’s old-world rest camps and family-friendly facilities.

I recall our first family trip there. Our very urbane father stopped just inside the Numbi Gate, where a herd of impalas was grazing along the road edge (all roads in the park were gravel then). “Take a good look kids, this might be the last time we’ll see these,” he insisted of the region’s most abundant antelope species. That became part of our family mythology.

Over the years, as I grabbed degrees like an elephant does marula fruits in spring, there would be long discussions between my scriptures-quoting pater and I. “Show me the intermediate species,” he would challenge. “Show me the missing link.” When I tried to explain that evolution didn’t quite work that way, but that you had to draw lines back to common ancestors, a sharp “pah!” was usually the best I’d get.

A smart thing to do would have been to pull out a chart of all the Southern African antelope. I could have recited, more or less from largest to smallest dik-dik (two species), suni, red duiker, blue duiker, common duiker, steenbok, grysbok, klipspringer, springbok, oribi, impala, bushbuck, lechwe, puku, kudu, nyala, sitatunga, rhebuck, reedbuck (two species), tsessebe, roan, eland … and that’s only the fawn coloured ones … but I didn’t. Had I pulled out two Aces, those bizarrely long-necked species from East Africa the gerenuk and the dibatag, I might just have won a hand. But again I did not think of it in the heat of the fray.

Sitting, or swinging, on the monkey branch of the Tree of Life there are 278 species in total, 119 of which occur in Africa. These, the so-called Old World monkeys, are divided into two main groups: the colobus monkeys and the pouch-cheeked monkeys (plus a small gang of great apes, like us).

What sets the two groups apart is, having once developed the ever-useful thumb, the careless colobus group went and lost theirs several million years ago. Their named derives from the Greek colob, or cripple (that no-thumb thing) and are sometimes referred to as branch runners.

The vervets are one of five so-called savanna types, one of the cheek-pouched family that comprises 53 species divided into nine groups, including baboons and guenons. Vervets are guenons along with swamp, mountain and gentle monkeys. What they have all mastered is, once their stomachs are full, to stuff fruit and grubs into their cheeks for a take-out dinner while contemplating yet another dazzling African sunset.

When it comes to smart monkeys few outshine a vervet. In places like the Moremi and Kruger Park game reserves you could be left sitting at a bare table while a gang of vervets munches its recently acquired delectables, right in front of you. You can try to outfox them, but inevitably you’ll be the one left with pie on your face. It leaves you wondering who indeed is the clever monkey and who’s the dumb ape.

I did once try to use the monkey gambit on my wily old man by throwing down my pack of monkey cards, all 119 of them including aces, jokers and a few jacks. He stared at me for a long while, like I was still just a foolish youth, and retorted:

“I’m pretty sure you must be a monkey on your mother’s side, my people were much more earth bound.”