Book review: Brian Jackson's walks on the wild side to risk life for conservation
West with the Light: My Life in Nature by Brian Jackman
As Africa bears the brunt of the Covid pandemic’s severe consequences for safari tourism, resulting in an explosion of poaching caused by the collapse of visitor revenue to support vital wildlife frontline defence, we can look back to a time when journalists and conservationists were putting their lives at risk to highlight the illegal ivory trade wiping out Africa’s elephant herds.
Brian Jackman is among those whose travel writing has entertained and educated myself and others smitten by Africa. Dispelling the myth that all travel writers do is go off on holidays at someone else’s expense, delivering public relations style prose, Jackman is a dedicated conservationist who helped to fire up some of the most important campaigns to save the African elephant from extinction.
Sent by The Sunday Times magazine to the killing fields of Kenya, where, by 1988 the poaching epidemic had transformed one of its iconic national parks Tsavo into an elephant graveyard, he performed a vital service. His investigations and reports from Kenya and later South Africa educated the world to the horror and also corruption, often from the top, that was fuelling greed and carnage, wiping out endangered creatures, and not just elephants.
West with the Light is his own story too — a memoir about a life richly lived, from growing up on the outermost frontier of the south London suburbs, the Blitz, post Second World War shortages, getting sacked from his first job selling advertising space before the move into copy writing. He was edging a little closer all the while to his dream of becoming a travel writer after joining a tour operator as a copywriter to deliver purple prose for holiday brochure, then joining the British Tourist Authority’s editorial department.
Jackman’s debut book on Africa, The Marsh Lions (written with Jonathan Scott and also published by Bradt) was to become a wildlife classic, followed by The Big Cat Diary and his equally acclaimed Savannah Diaries. Widely praised for its authentic insights into the African bush and the iconic creatures that roam the sub-Saharan dark continent, Jackman marries long experience with powerful observation — “the sun-dried hay meadow scent of the open savannah — the stable-yard whiff of elephants”.
Travelling in his footsteps the reader can share Jackman’s feelings, his love and respect for big cats, the adrenaline rush and wonder of getting up close to them and the extraordinary characters he has met who devoted their lives to conservation. George Adamson, senior game warden in a huge area of northern Kenya, husband of Joy Adamson of Born Free fame, was among the Africa experts who would become dear friends.
Back at home in Dorset whenever he watched the swallows departing at the end of summer his “heart went with them, missing Africa with an unbearable longing”.
“Hardly a day passed by without me thinking about the Luangwa river winding in immense silver coils through the Zambian bush or wondering if it was raining in the Serengeti. Having been so many times I found it all too easy to conjure up images from previous safaris.
“A sleeping leopard recumbent in a fig tree, all golden sunlight and dappled shadow. A cheetah with burning amber eyes crouching atop a termite mound. A pride of lions with bloody jowls padding through the dew-soaked grass in line astern after a night’s hunting on the plains.”
The veteran award-winning journalist and author, now in his eighties and happily retired in Dorset with his second wife Annabelle is a trustee of the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust, an ambassador of Tusk Trust, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
His travels have taken him from the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean to the Yukon to observe grizzly bears. Back home as a champion of ecotourism he was finding remaining remote corners to introduce in another of his books Wild About Britain.
But African wildlife safaris were his big love, living in the bush for long periods to perfect his knowledge, establishing himself as one of Africa’s keenest and most respected observers. West with the Light includes tales familiar from his previous books about Africa, given new vigour and relevance as he looks back over more than half a century in this charming memoir.
- West with the Light: My Life in Nature by Brian Jackman
- Bradt, ÂŁ9.99
