I remain amazed what one can find when one begins researching a book. I have been digging around, looking for the history of East Africa in the early Twentieth Century. Very early on in my studies, Teddy Roosevelt popped up. He traveled in Africa for nearly a year from April 1909 until March 1910. At the time he was fifty-one years old and had already served as President of the United States for seven and a half years, and he had a reputation as an author, naturalist, explorer, hunter, and soldier.
His African expedition began in Mombasa, in what was then called British East Africa. Here is a map of the places he explored:
He shot big game and mapped the terrain, documented the lives of the indigenous people, and took examples of the flora and fauna. He wrote an article for the National Geographic, made a report to the Museum of Natural History, and wrote a book about his experiences called African Game Trails. He even took a film crew with him. You can watch clips of the film here:
And you can find the book—both a PDF of the printed volume and, astonishingly, a facsimile of his handwritten manuscript if you follow this link:
From our twenty-first century perspective, going to Africa to kill animals was a brutal idea. But it was the norm in Teddy’s time for well-to-do adventurers to engage in that “sport.” Here’s a quote that shows his appreciation for the beauty of what he experienced.
The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which ever afterward remain fixed in his mind.... Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting. - Col. Theodore Roosevelt in Khartoum, March 15, 1910
If you remain unconvinced and prefer to dislike Teddy Roosevelt as a slaughterer of innocent animals, you might want to also consider that he won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War and shortly after taking over the Presidency following the assassination of McKinley—at the age of just 42—he delivered a 20,000 word address to Congress urging that they curb the power of corporations. I know where Teddy was in 1909-1910, but now I wish we knew where he is when we really need him. And you do realize that he was a Republican. But he was also a born and bred New Yorker!
Annamaria Alfieri
