The Wildest of All Wild Places 
by Boyce Rensberger 
Sand Rivers, by Peter Matthiessen. 
The Viking Press , $19.95; 213 pp.. 
Ulus. 
The “real Africa” has probably al- 
ways been more a state of mind than 
a place. If you grew up in America 
or Europe, the very word itself, spoken 
in awe — Africa — was enough to evoke 
images of a deep and mysterious con- 
tinent, the wildest of all wild places. 
Whether the images were nurtured by 
Joseph Conrad or Ernest Hemingway 
or even Edgar Rice Burroughs, Africa 
was the farthest you could go from 
where you were. Africa was one of 
those places you hoped would always 
be there. 
If you grew up in Africa, as did 
Brian Nicholson, a crusty old game 
warden who is the central figure in 
Peter Matthiessen’s new book, your 
real Africa also lives in the mind. Not 
as a vicarious image but as a memory 
of the untrammeled natural spectacle 
that existed before Westernization 
pushed so far. It is the selective mem- 
ory of one’s youth mixed with the sus- 
picion that things really were better 
in the old days. Your real Africa isn’t 
there anymore. 
Sand Rivers is the true story of 
a quest to recapture one piece of the 
real Africa, the little-known Selous 
Game Reserve in southern Tanzania. 
The Selous (pronounced Se-loo) is con- 
sidered by some to be the greatest 
stronghold of large wild animals left 
on the earth. The book is a vivid and 
at times poetic diary of a foot safari, 
complete with ten barefoot porters, 
into a region where few have trod since 
the slavers and ivory caravans with- 
drew a century ago. The few Africans 
who lived there were evicted decades 
ago when colonial administrators es- 
tablished the reserve, and even then 
tsetse flies were keeping human num- 
bers low. 
Matthiessen’s expedition — his first 
literary return to Africa since The 
Tree Where Man Was Born — took 
place in late 1979. As roads and Land- 
Rovers swarm over practically every 
other part of East Africa, Matthiessen 
and Nicholson walk into the un- 
mapped wilderness. They take no com- 
pass but follow an old African game 
tracker named Goa, who probes the 
tall grass and miombo woodland with 
a drooping hand stretched ahead like 
a five-fingered dowsing rod. His yel- 
lowed eyes spot the dark elephant 
shadows moving in the distance, the 
lions prowling nearby, the startled 
rhino mother prepared to defend her 
calf. Bloody close calls in the past 
have taught Nicholson to carry a .458 
“elephant gun,” but Goa, wise in ani- 
mal ways, always leads the silent file 
around the edge of the beast’s per- 
ceived zone of safety. 
Some 100,000 elephants have been 
estimated to live in the Selous, more 
than in all the rest of East Africa. 
There are also about 650,000 other 
large animals, including East Africa’s 
largest populations of rhino, buffalo, 
hippo, crocodile, lion, and leopard, 
along with 350 species of birds and 
some 2,000 kinds of vascular plants. 
Although the Selous Game Reserve 
has had some form of official pro- 
tection for more than sixty years, it 
has been too remote from airports and 
tourist circuits to enjoy the fame or 
suffer the pressures of the kind ex- 
perienced by the Serengeti National 
Park, some 400 miles to the northwest, 
or by Kenya’s Amboseli, Tsavo, or 
Maasai Mara national parks. The Se- 
lous’s only “use” has been as a reserve 
for very strictly limited sport hunting, 
an activity that threatened no species 
but did, until it was banned in 1973, 
bring Tanzania appreciable revenues. 
The largest wildlife sanctuary in Af- 
rica, the Selous’s 22,000 square miles 
make it three times the size of the 
vast Tsavo National Park and nearly 
four times as big as the Serengeti. 
Unlike most other wildlife sanctuaries, 
it is well watered by a network of 
broad, sand-lined rivers. Unlike other 
African reserves, the Selous covers an 
entire ecological unit, three of them 
in fact. This means that all the wa- 
tersheds and migratory routes essen- 
tial to its ecosystems lie within its 
boundaries. 
And yet, as Matthiessen frequently 
intimates but never fully establishes, 
there are disturbing signs that the end 
may be near or, at least, the beginning 
of the end. 
Before he quit in disgust in 1973 
to become a charter pilot in Nairobi, 
Brian Nicholson had been in the Se- 
lous for twenty-three years, most of 
them as a game department warden. 
With the staff of crack game scouts 
that he trained, Nicholson watched 
carefully over the sanctuary he loved, 
battling poachers, working to expand 
the boundaries, and periodically burn- 
ing the dry grasslands to — at least as 
he saw it — encourage the new growth 
that would continue to attract and 
hold the vast herds. 
The Selous region had been made 
a game reserve as early as 1905 when 
the Germans were there. After World 
War I, when Tanganyika Territory, 
as it was called, passed into British 
hands, the reserve was maintained. In 
1922, it was formally named after 
Frederick Courtenay Selous, a legend- 
ary British elephant hunter and ex- 
plorer who once served as Theodore 
Roosevelt’s “white hunter.” In the 
1930s a colorful young game ranger 
named C.J.P. Ionides came to the re- 
gion and, with Selous as his hero, pri- 
vately made it his life’s work to protect 
and enlarge the reserve. With deter- 
mination and, at times brutality, Ion- 
ides forced Africans out of the area 
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