In November 2010, I had the unfortunate task of packing up my uncle’s (John Harvey’s) house of 17 years in Watamu, Kenya. In doing so, I came across this most amazing story that he had never mentioned to any of us of the younger generation. I fear that there are very few people left who do remember the events that I shall attempt to recount using documents I found at the bottom of a dusty drawer. It certainly makes for a good story of those early days in East Africa.
Here begins the most amazing tale of which only movies are made!
My great-uncle, Bill Harvey, and family had arrived in Mombasa from England in the mid 1920’s. He ran a successful butchery but, in true colonial style, he tended to make his own rules – he always seemed to be in trouble with the meat inspectors, who did not approve of his deciding what was and what wasn’t fit for human consumption! Deliveries in the boot of his car did not detract from the meat’s quality, he maintained. It was just a matter of time before, like so many others of his time, he decided he too would find an elephant bull with a big enough pair of tusks to make his fortune. And so, in early 1937, he bought an elephant license.
The story goes that, as Uncle Bill set out for the Voi River near the Voi township, they came across tracker Galogalo Kafonde. He had recently discovered an...
