Zara's Tales. Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa.

Peter Beard
Zara's Tales. Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa.

Photographs: Peter Beard

Text: Peter Beard

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

176 pages

Pictures: 100

Year: 2004

ISBN: 9780679426592

Price: 30 €

Comments: Hardcover under illustrated dust jacket, 24 x 18 cm, b&w and color photographs. Second edition. In very good condition!

From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piper Peter Beard—eleven irresistible tales, told to his daughter in his tented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living, about Africa.

He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well over four decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless, bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s, still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of all stripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and local residents went to the movies in pajamas.

He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi so that he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bush called Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named for the families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populated with waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionally lion and buffalo.

In “Big Pig at Hog Ranch,” Beard tells the story of Thaka (translation from the Kikuyu: “handsome stud”), Hog Ranch’s number-one, fearsome, 300-pound warthog, who came into camp and dropped to the ground happy for a vigorous tummy rub, and who one night, “lying in his favorite position, munching on corn and barbeque chicken,” was encroached upon by a bristly haired, wild-looking boar hog. All three hundred pounds of Thaka exploded straight at the hairy intruder, the two brutish, bony heads crashing together thundering through the camp and Peter witnessed the unleashed power—the bullish strength—of the wild pig...

In “Roping Rhino,” Beard tells of his first job in Africa, rounding up and relocating rhinos for the Kenya Game Department with his cohort and neighbor, a weather-beaten native of Old Kenya who thrived on danger and refused to bathe—and of the enormous silver-backed rhino bull that became their Moby Dick . . . He writes of his quest to photograph overpopulated and habitat-destroying elephants for Life magazine on the eve of Kenya’s independence . . . of his close encounter with the legendary man-eating lions of “Starvo” (descendants of the famed beasts rumored to be immune to bullets, who in the late nineteenth century halted the construction of the Mombasa railroad, devouring railroad workers and snatching sleeping passengers from their Pullman berths in the dead of night to make a meal of them), who charged the author, “coming in slow motion, like a bullet train erupting out of a tunnel, soundless, like an ancient force.”

He tells of his round-the-clock adventure tracking and studying crocodiles with a game warden–biologist at Lake Rudolf, a tale that begins with one crewmember being grabbed from behind by a ten-foot crocodile and another doing battle with an almost prehistoric monster fish—a 200-pound Great Nile perch! . . . and he writes of the final wildlife encounter that ended his safari days, an incident that proved Karen Blixen’s motto: “Be bold, be bold . . . be not too bold.”

Zara’s Tales confirms to our constant surprise and delight that “nothing out of the ordinary happens. It’s just Africa, after all.”

Peter Beard's adventures in Africa began in Nairobi, Kenya, in the 1950s, and, over the course of 40 years, have become legendary.

Born in New York City and educated at Yale, his love affair with the continent began in earnest during those school years when "to get away, to grow up, to graduate from graduating" he went to Kenya and purchased 40 acres of Mbagathi Forest at the very edge of Karen Blixen's famous coffee plantation, naming it Hog Ranch. There he lived for 30 "fast-moving, explosive, dramatic, surprising, shocking, frustrating, exhilarating, primitive, satisfying, down-to-earth, animal-ridden" years.

Photography had been a creative medium for Beard since his youth, a way of exploring the world around him; in Africa, it became a means of processing his experiences. He fastidiously kept diaries over the years into which he pasted contact strips and prints, drawing and scribbling both alongside and on top of the photographs, often mixing mud or blood or any other element of his surroundings right onto the pages.

Beard was involved in numerous conservation programs ranging from the relocation of rhinos to the study of crocodiles at Lake Rudolf. Each of these episodes were documented, forming the basis for his classic titles. Zara' s Tales is a verbal recounting of some of his most memorable stories, ostensibly his daughter's favorite tales, told in the first person and amply illustrated.