THE WINDS OF HAVOC

The anguished recollections of a former African big game hunter mourning the loss of his world.

Pires, who emigrated to Mozambique from Portugal in 1936 and has lived and worked in Africa since then, wrote this memoir with the aid of the widow of Peter Hathaway Capstick, a promoter of African hunting whose taped interviews with Pires are its basis. After a swift-paced opening in which an elderly Pires is abducted and held prisoner by the Tanzanian secret police, the scene shifts to his sunlit boyhood years in the African bush. Hunting man-eating lions with his father and learning about firearms, wildlife, and the tribal people were lessons that served him well as an adult in the hunting-safari industry. When the African independence movement and the guerrilla warfare that accompanied it reached Mozambique, it became clear to him that the safari business there was finished and he began his search for new hunting grounds. The risks of escorting the rich and famous on safaris pale beside those of doing business in dictatorships flooded with guerrilla bands armed with AK-47s, and Pires’s determination to stay in business is remarkable. He repeatedly picked himself up, dusted himself off, and started all over again in new territories. After leaving Mozambique in 1974, he plied his trade in Angola, Rhodesia, Kenya, the Central African Empire (later the Central African Republic), the Sudan, and Tanzania. The last straw was his abduction in 1984, when he was held captive under brutal conditions for more than five months. Now retired in South Africa, the author (who is aware that his occupation has its critics) argues repeatedly that well-regulated hunting supports conservation, whereas runaway poaching, abetted by high-level corruption, has decimated African wildlife. The loss of its wildlife especially saddens him, but he writes knowingly of its other woes—political tyranny, hunger, illiteracy, poverty, and disease.

A mostly cheerless account presenting a bleak view of the Dark Continent’s present and future. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)