Book review: A wild life by Dick Pitman (The Horn, autumn 2007)

Dick is the former Director, and now Board member, of the Zambezi Society, whom I met in February 2006 after a visit to Matusadona National Park in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I feel I know Dick better now, having just read his immensely amusing autobiographical account of his life as an accidental conservationist. Dick first turned up in Rhodesia (as it then was) in 1977 and then progressed, in haphazard fashion, through careers as a journalist, military duty, magazine editor, National Parks office and safari guide, before ending up in charge of the Zambezi Society.

And there were just as many hazards as ‘haps.’ One early trip to Mana Pools, with Dick acting as film cameraman, saw tents trashed by eles as they searched for oranges. As Dick explains:

“Some bright tourist who had left his telephoto lens at home had recently rolled a couple of oranges at a passing elephant, to see if it could be tempted within range for a close-up portait... Unfortunately, the idea caught on, with both elephants and tourists. Every wannabee wildlife photographer had started doing it. The Mana campsite had begun to look like a psychedelic bowling green in a thunderstorm, with oranges rolling all over the place, elephants chasing after them like kittens after balls of wool, and a constant flicker of flashbulbs.“

Gerald Durrell’s widow Lee, writing in the foreword, likens Dick’s writing to Gerry’s. There’s the same obvious love of the landscape and of the creatures in it, a wry take on officialdom and bureaucracy, and he’s not shy about laughing at his own mistakes.

For the reader, who cannot but be aware of the decline of Zimbabwe’s National Parks, there’s an inevitable sadness. Reading about the numerous rhino that used to inhabit Mana Pools, where now there are none, makes me wish that I’d visited in those glory days. But Dick’s enough of an optimist to end the book not looking back, but forwards.

Dick Pitman: “A wild life: Adventures of an accidental conservationist in Africa.”
Paperback. Summersdale Publishers, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84024-571-4 RRP £7.99

Cathy Dean
Director