“Our teeming population is the strongest evidence: our numbers are burdensome to the world which can hardly supply us from its natural elements”
Tertullian 337 A.D. (Beard, 1988:57)
Beard’s book, first published in 1965, is prophetic of the current environmental situation. He was a neighbour of mine when I lived in Kenya many years ago and I was fortunate to meet him a few times, although I think I only began to appreciate the power of the work later. I have referred to it several times though my degree course, perhaps most directly during one of the earlier exercises: https://photography515050.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/exercises-3/ which contains an attempt to make work in the style of another artist – I chose to mimic Beard’s collage approach.
Beard came to Kenya in 1960, just in time to meet the last of the original big game hunters. The appropriately named J.A. Hunter, originally employed as a Game Control Officer in 1909 by the Mombassa railroad to protect the line, managed to record 996 rhino kills between Aug ’44 and Oct ’46. Beard felt like he was recording the end of an era, writing “Only 50 years ago man had to be protected from the beasts, today the beasts must somehow be protected from man” (Beard, 1988:21). The Game was generally accepted to be up.
But the book needed to be re-edited and expanded by 1988. Strict control of the Game resulted in an elephant population explosion at Tsavo East. The combination of drought and habitat destruction in the 1970s led to the terrible deaths of tens of thousands of elephants. An additional chapter records this, its plates laid out in black and white using a scientific grid style that from a photographic perspective could be related to the New Topographic but from a wildlife perspective is similar to the survey approach pioneered by my old landlord in Kenya, Mike Norton-Griffiths.
The final point, therefore, of The End of the Game was in fact that the Game, once started, cannot stop. Once the free movement of animals (and the indigenous people, who tended to be more nomadic) had been fenced off by humans, mankind bore a responsibility for the containment. “It can no longer be categorised as a wildlife book. It is a book about human behaviour” (Beard, 1998:36). The Anthropocene had begun.
Beard’s book may seem quite ahead of it’s time in proposing these ideas when it did. Dr. R.M. Watson, in a jacket quote for the book, called it “A metaphoric preview of human destiny” (Beard, 1998:jacket). But in fact Beard also quotes Theodore Roosevelt from 1905: “in order to preserve the wildlife of the wilderness at all, some middle ground must be found between brutal and senseless slaughter and the unhealthy sentimentalism which would just as surely defeat its own aim by bringing about the eventual total extinction of the game.” (Beard, 1998:197). And the quote at the head of this blog illustrates that this has been a perennial question for humankind.
I arrived in Nairobi shortly after the publication of the new edition to stories of how the wildlife was nothing like what it used to be. At the time the lion population in Africa stood at around 100,000 – half of the estimate from 1975 (ten years after the first edition) and down from approximately 1 million at the turn of the century. Now it has dropped to 20,000 (Gragau, 2019). Human behaviour has actually begun to change, but not sufficiently or rapidly enough.
Beard’s own style of writing and indeed African existence harked back to the Victorian era – he lived in a tented camp on land he named Hog Ranch and had a scrapbook collectors approach. This spilled over to his books, which were stuffed with photographs, history, data, and paintings. He told me that he had once, incongruously been asked to sign a copy of the End of the Game, which he saw more as a document making a cry for help than a work of art. Hence he marked the book with a red handprint – a work dripping blood. And bizarrely as these things sometimes work out, this turned out to be a key artistic development. His photographs, which became highly collectable in the last 20 years of his life, were illustrated by hand with marks, writing and other illustrations. The African artists I met at Hog Ranch, who somewhat eccentrically hand-painted the envelopes for his letters, decorated many of these – making each a unique art object. In The End of the Game many of the painted decorations are provided by Kamante Gatiwa, House Steward to Karen Blixen.
Yet Beard’s approach may be seen as having a much lower impact on the land, more reminiscent of the photograph in his book of Nairobi as a small collection of tents at a railhead in 1899 than the crowded metropolis of today. Although the book spends a fair amount of time on big game hunting, this was not what ended the Game. In fact many of the old hunters turned back long before the brink to support wildlife conservation, putting their knowledge to better use. “The damage inflicted on game by the early hunters was comparatively light, as Percival emphasised. What harm they did lay in their having showed the natives and Asian middlemen how to kill for a profit on a large scale” (Beard, 1988, 222). Nevertheless Beard also realises of course that the ‘manly’ approach to the bush is a problem – for obvious reasons most explorers land at the coast and attempt to head inland. On this interior he comments: “for what other reason did it exist, than to be penetrated” (Beard, 1998:40). Thus arose “the tragic paradox of the white man’s encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it” (Beard, 1998:112).
There have been many essays proposing a more “feminine” attitude, a key focus in land art by women. However this too is not without its clichés. Humans. of whatever gender, coexisting in harmony with their environment and other species must surely be the aim. Note that the health of these other species is a key marker of our success – and not looking good at the moment… “Should this species be allowed to find its own level in relentless competition with others for the world’s limited land and resources, or should this species be brought into balance with the environment and the other species that inhabit it? Today this species is elephant…” (Beard, 1998:Epilogue)
The implication for mankind is clear here. “Everything in evolution has its built-in demise. Populations expand, land does not. Nature has always favoured size and power. Size, however, can become a limiting factor – and when it does, it is extinction that is ensured in the long run.” (Beard, 1998:44). Of course the elephant has size and power but it was the size of its population in Tsavo. Power now rests with humankind and it is our population growth (we just hit 8 billion) that is the issue now, for the whole planet.
The explorer Krapf, on reaching Mount Kenya, commented: “It has only been seen by myself” (Beard, 1998:65), conveniently forgetting everyone else who actually lived there. They called the black and white mountain Ke’Nyaa, meaning cock ostrich in the Wakamba dialect. The Europeans renamed the country Kenya, defining its borders and taking possession of it in the process.
While eminently readable (if still somewhat colonial at times) the book is very well researched with an extensive bibliography. Among other things this makes it an excellent source of quotes that may be of use for my degree.
In particular “They had preserved a knowledge that was lost to us by our first parents; Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to your: that God and the Devil are one…” (Blixen in Out of Africa, quoted in Beard, 1998:34) – find source page for original quote. In looking at why we seem so relaxed in the face of the obvious deterioration in our planet, of course the politics of greed and their associated time frames play a role. But there could be a deeper explanation as well – that in the Anthropocene we cannot accept the responsibility of our role as the new “God”. This could be explored much further…
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Beard, P. (1976) 756 Elephants in Stressed-out Formation, Tsavo Park Border, Kenya (unique gelatin silver print with collage, printed later, signed, titled and annotated in ink (in the margin)). At: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5720908 (Accessed 16.1.2023)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Beard, P. (1988). The End of the Game. (Revised and updated edition). San Francisco: Chronicle Books
- Gragau, P. (2019). Lions in Kenya Threatened with Extinction. At: https://www.africanexponent.com/post/9910-kings-of-the-jungle-likely-to-be-wiped-out-within-20-years (Accessed 9.1.2023)
Level 3.1 Learning Log 
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