The First Safari

Book excerpt: The First Safari tells how, for a quarter of a century, Ian Glenn searched for Francois Levaillant's notebooks and the fate of his collection and tried to solve puzzles and mysteries of Levaillant's life and times. Levaillant was the first and greatest South African birder, noted ornithologist, explorer, naturalist, zoological collector and anthropologist of the Cape. He collected thousands of specimens of birds and subsequently published the six-volume Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux d'Afrique between 1799 and 1808. His contribution to ornithology in Africa was immeasurable, and some of his specimens still exist in museums in Europe. Through his travels, he also shaped a range of media genres: the hunting narrative; the safari; the anthropological field record; the illustrated and mapped first-person account of travel we associate with National Geographic stories; the colonial adventure story with a well-armed hero; the erotic exotic; the investigative report on colonial brutality.