CHANGING WORLD

South African hunter and safari guide to rich and famous

Harry Selby, one of the last of Africa’s renowned white hunters, who took rich and famous safari clients into the interiors of Kenya, Tanganyika and Botswana for half a century to shoot game, snap exotic wildlife and search for elusive adventure in the bush, died on Saturday at his home in Maun, Botswana. He was 92.

Selby grew up on a ranch astride the equator in Kenya, watching enormous herds of zebra and impala, sniffing for lion and Cape buffalo, listening to an elephant scream and hyenas giggling at sundown. In the burning heat he learned to track an animal over rocky ground, and to avoid the rhino laid up in the dusty shade of an acacia tree. He shot his first antelope at eight, his first elephant at 14.

Selby was a postwar protégé of the East Africa hunter Philip Hope Percival, who took Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway on safaris, and he became a professional hunter himself in the late 1940s. He took US author Robert Ruark on safari in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and with the 1953 publication of Ruark’s best-seller Horn of the Hunter, Selby became one of Africa’s most famous hunting guides.

Clients flocked from around the world to Selby safaris, which were booked years ahead with clients like the Maharajah of Jaipur, Prince Stanislaus Radziwill of Poland and Western tycoons, industrialists and chief executives seeking thrills.

In the Hollywood-inspired popular images of the 1950s, the great white hunter was a fearless Clark Gable or Stewart Granger, tall and deeply tanned, who brought down a charging rhino with a single shot while his arrogant client cowered behind him, and who later romanced the client’s neglected wife after saving her from a snarling lion.

The reality was Selby: short and stocky, mild and self-effacing, a man who seemed to listen with his eyes. He had curly hair, a boyishly shy smile and a wife and two children. He catered to men used to giving orders, not taking them, but did it with tact, avoiding upbraiding a client needlessly and almost never finding it necessary to save anyone. Neither he nor any client was ever seriously injured on a safari, though there were close calls.

It was not all shooting and campfire tales. A Selby safari required an army of bearers, cooks, skinners, porters, drivers and others; game licences and financial transactions; transportation arrangements, from trucks and horses to planes and boats; and a complex coordination of supplies and equipment: guns and ammunition, food, water, tents, beds, radios, medicines, maps, clothing and a thousand other necessities.

Without mobile phones or evacuation helicopters, Selby had to be the doctor, mechanic, chauffeur, gin-rummyand-drinking partner and universal guide, knowledgeable about mountain ranges, grassy plains, rivers, jungles, hunting laws, migratory patterns and the Bushmen, Masai, Samburu, Dinka and Zulu tribes. He spoke three dialects of Swahili.

He was no Gregory Peck, but had an easygoing personality that made for good company in the bush. He coped with emergencies, pulling a client clear of a stampede or a vehicle from a bog, treating snakebites or tracking a wounded lion in a thicket – his most dangerous game. He was lefthanded, but his favorite gun was a right-handed .416 Rigby, which can knock down an onrushing bull elephant or Cape buffalo in an instant.

Safaris changed dramatically in his time. In Kenya and Tanganyika in the late 1940s and ‘50s, Selby took parties hundreds of miles into trackless bush country by truck, pitched camps with comfortable though primitive amenities, drank gin by kerosene lamp, and pursued game by his own instincts. Safaris lasted two or three months. The showers were often cold, but the food was good and the game plentiful. In his later years in Botswana, safaris went out for just a few weeks and focused as much, if not more, on photography as on hunting – Selby preferred hunters. Photography buffs stayed in hotel-like lodges and went on day trips to scenic sites. More adventurous hunters and photographers were flown to rendezvous points and driven in Land Rovers to fixed camps elaborately equipped with electric power, fridges, flush toilets, hot showers, kitchens and table linen.

“Africa itself has changed out of all recognition, both physically and politically, and the old-time self-contained safari would have no place to go in today’s Africa,” Selby wrote for Sports Afield in 2010, when satellite phones, computers and helicopters made life easy for the busy executive on safari.

“There are hunters today,” he added, “who would prefer to have experienced the sense of freedom of an old-time safari, as I am sure there were those whowentonsafarimanyyears ago who would have preferred something along the lines of what is offered today. The two experiences are as different as night is from day; the only feature common to both is the name ... that magical word, ‘safari’.”

John Henry Selbywas born in Frankfort, South Africa, on 22 July 1925, the youngest of six children of Arthur and Myrtle Evelyn Randall Selby. When he was three, his family moved to a 40,000-acre cattle ranch near Mount Kenya.

Surrounded by a gamerich countryside, the boy was taught to hunt by an old Kikuyu tribesman. “He taught me to use my eyes and ears as well as my nose, and to be patient in order to remain motionless for long periods of time waiting for an animal to come within range,” Selby told The American Rifleman.

Selby attended local schools, travelling by ox cart, and later a boarding school in Nairobi. After the Second World War he worked for Percival, who recognised his potential as a hunter-guide, and in 1949 he joined East Africa’s foremost safari outfitter, Ker & Downey, based in Nairobi. In 1956, after Ruark’s book made him famous, he formed his own safari company, Selby & Holmberg.

In 1953, he wed Maria Elizabeth Clulow. They had two children, Mark and Gail. Selby is survived by his wife, daughter and grandchildren. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“Africa has changed, physically and politically. The oldtime, self-contained safari would have no place in today’s Africa”