Safari Debunked

THE NYLON SAFARI (276 pp.)--Rehna Cloete--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

The newest tropical disease is writing about Africa. The most recently infected is Rehna ("Tiny") Cloete (rhymes with booty), who caught the bug on a three-week safari after she and her author-husband Stuart Cloete had completed a ten-month cross-continent trek researching his recent book, The African Giant (TIME, Oct. 3). The tone of The Nylon Safari is prevailingly lighthearted, the pace is readably headlong, and there is notably little spilling of blood or guts. Indeed, the Hemingway-Ruark axis of hairy-chested literary Tarzans may be somewhat miffed at the casual kiss-off Tiny Cloete gives their favorite outdoor sport. The whole safari business, U.S.-born Author Cloete strongly suggests, is about as rugged nowadays as camping out with a Boy Scout troop. From the time the Cloetes outfit themselves in brand-new hunting togs in Nairobi, Tiny makes it amusingly plain that she is out to slay the myth of the strong, infallible White Hunter.

She swings as soon as she sees the White Hunter she calls Bill Buncher: "A powerful red-faced man with very pale blue eyes, slightly bloodshot from staring out over the vast open spaces he inhabited professionally, he bowed and sank into a chair. He went down massively, like a wounded elephant." Tiny is staggered by his fee--$1,800, which includes native servants, gear, a car and a truck. But since it is an anniversary present, her husband insists on their having a "luxury" safari.

The first luxury is rising at 5 a.m. Tiny has poetic visions of a rosy-fingered dawn, but ". . . this is a real dawn. The sky is a bitter dirty gray color to which drops of orange blood are slowly added . . . Human life is at its lowest ebb. This is the time most people die." Tiny wants to live, even though she finds that she is a portable blood bank for the dread tsetse and squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes.

The nights are biting cold; the days usually hot. The Cloetes are rationed to two meals a day, skipping either breakfast or lunch, but Bill frequently stops to stalk "some meat for the boys." It is against "the code of the White Hunter" to shoot game from the car, but at a distance of about 200 yards, "there was the usual bang."

White Hunter Buncher is scarcely a 20th century Natty Bumppo. When an accustomed signpost is missing along the well-rutted safari track, he gets lost and drives the party a whole day's journey off course into the veld. As drawn by Tiny, the White Hunter barely has brains enough to come in out of the rain. ("Bit of a mist, what?") With the constant physical discomforts and the incessant comic relief of The Nylon Safari, it sometimes seems that the grandeur and excitement of Africa itself rarely caught Tiny Cloete's eye. The Cloetes' closest brush with danger came when a young hippo lost track of his papa and mamma and charged at the rear of their car as a parental surrogate. "I hadn't realized their eyesight was that bad," says Tiny as they speed away.

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