Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler Page A

fabled Aberdare Salient, Lake Baringo in the Great Rift Valley, and the Masai Mara Game Reserve. Lions, leopards, elephants, zebras, antelopes, and gazelles. Florence and I took to studying Ker and Downey Tented Safari brochures in bed. Our insect-proof tents, we were assured, would include bedside lamps, washbasins, and adjoining shower and toilet tents. African crew would do our laundry overnight, except for women’s lingerie, a task they took to be humiliating. Our group was to consist of three couples. All old friends, all new to Africa. Remember, a thrilling covering letter enjoined us, to bring two pairs of sunglasses. “It’s one thing to drop them from a Land Rover; another, in murky, crocodile-infested waters.”
    A week before we left, my arm rendered leaden by a cholera shot, I repaired to my favourite downtown bar. How about one for the road, a crony asked. “Certainly,” I replied.
“But first,”
I added in a voicecalculated to boom across the bar, “I
must take my malaria pill.”
    We landed in Nairobi (fifty-five hundred feet above sea level, population 135,000) early in the morning, flying overnight from London. A testing time, this, for at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport we were to meet the two guides with whom we would trek through the reserves for the next eleven days. If the chemistry weren’t right, we all agreed, the trip could be a washout. Happily, our apprehensions were for nothing. David Mead, forty-three, and Alan Binks, thirty-eight, turned out to be affable, cultured fellows, both of them fluent in Swahili. Truly good companions.
    Mead, a Sandhurst graduate, had been in Africa since 1968, a professional white hunter until it was ruled illegal in 1977. Binks, a naturalist and photographer, immigrated to Africa in 1967 and was now a Kenyan citizen. “In England,” he said, “the horizon meant the next garden hedge. Here, the space is immense.” But, he allowed, there were problems in Kenya. “We have no oil, no natural resources. Just coffee, tea, and tourism.”
    The Norfolk, where we were to stay overnight, is possibly the most legendary hotel in East Africa, built in 1904 by Maj. C. G. R. Ringer. Its guest list since then would seem to include just about everybody accounted for in
Burke’s Peerage,
as well as Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of the classic
Out of Africa,
Winston Churchill, and, of course, Mr. Hemingway. Abraham Brock, who arrived from South Africa in 1903, when the lands of the Great Rift Valley were proposed as a projected colony for Jewishsettlement—a new Canaan that was just not to be—bought the hotel in 1927. It was now part of the Brock chain, which included Treetops, the Lake Baringo Club, and seven other hotels and lodges. Brock was reported to have played a crucial role in the celebrated Israeli raid on Entebbe airport, in 1976, which liberated Israeli captives who had been on a plane hijacked by the PLO. It was said that he was the one who negotiated refuelling rights in Kenya for the Israeli special forces, en route to Uganda.
    There was no need, incidentally, to fret about safari suits. Once installed at the Norfolk, we hurried over to Colpro, a shop on Kimathi Street run by enterprising Indians, where we were equipped with the appropriate cotton safari suits, very reasonably priced, and altered within a couple of hours.
    The churning streets of downtown Nairobi teem with persistent hawkers of ugly, factory-made souvenirs. Shoeshine boys lie in wait everywhere. Possibly the only place where you can safely buy authentic indigenous jewellery and artifacts is at the government-run African Heritage, a handsome shop. We paused there so that Florence could select some things for our children. Her modest purchases in hand, she was boorishly thrust aside from the cash-register counter by burly American secret service men, as then vice-president George Bush laid out his collection of spears and shields and masks. The elegant