The words ‘great white hunter’ may call to mind a square-jawed male, rifle and ammo slung across his back, khaki shorts, boxy knees, piston calves, a shock of sun-bleached hair and a large, dead animal at his feet. Whatever the mental picture, chances are that Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1917) had something to do with it. Lauded as the man no elephant could kill, admired for his devotion to the Crown, at 21 Selous left London for southern Africa. At 30, the Victorian press dubbed him ‘the mighty Nimrod’, referencing the first hunter of the Bible’s Genesis. His hunting books were best-sellers; other authors penned adventure novels with Selous-style doppelgangers as their protagonists.

His trajectory from butterfly-collecting boy and teen poacher, to elephant hunter and ivory trader, to colonial apparatchik and respected naturalist reveals the conflicting Industrial Age attitudes towards nature that took form while Queen Victoria sat on her throne like a broody hen, hatching unintended eggs. A trailblazing force in British expansionism, Fred was among the well-born hunters appointed as representatives of museums devoted to natural history, whose mission was the naming and ordering of the wild. Recast as wilderness savant and specimen collector, devoted to the advancement of science and game conservation, Selous was absolved of the bloodshed of the unfortunate mammals, humans included, that crossed his path.

Growing up by London’s then quasi-rural Regent’s Park, Fred was fascinated with nature, as was his younger brother Edmund, thanks to their mother Ann Sherborn, ‘a vivid and vital being’, wrote Edmund, ‘[with] a deep, inborn love of the beauties of nature’. Edmund was a delicate youth; Frederick inherited his father’s hearty constitution. Frederick Selous Sr wrote that at age seven he ‘was so strong and so hungry that I frequently carried some of the biggest boys around the playground… for an extra slice of bread and butter’.A self-made man of Huguenot lineage and modest means, Fred Sr boasted of learning to read at three-and-a-half, reciting from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and crying at Nelson’s funerary procession in 1806, when he was four. As his own children grew up (three girls, Florence, Annie and Sybil, in addition to Fred and Ed), Fred Sr rose in the ranks of the London Stock Exchange to become its chairman. One of his brothers was a painter, the other a playwright; he played chess and clarinet, was witty in several languages, and, despite his physique, disdained all the sports at which his eldest son soon excelled.

Fred Jr’s first weapon was a butterfly net, but at ten he was thinking big, sleeping on the floor at boarding school with the window open, telling schoolmates he was ‘going to be a hunter in Africa’ and ‘hardening’ himself for nights out on the veld. Books set his life’s course, including Stanley Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Research in South Africa (1857), with its illustration of the author trapped beneath a roaring lion, his composed, defiant face in the foreground, as a white hunter aimed his rifle and scantily-clad natives gesticulated ineffectually with their spears. According to Fred’s friend and hagiographer, the hunter and naturalist J.G. Millais, the book that ‘sent him to Africa’ was William Charles Baldwin’s African Hunting and Adventure from Natal to the Zambesi (1863). Baldwin stalked elephant on horseback throughout what was once southern Africa’s Zulu Kingdom between 1852 and 1860. He, too, had the distinction of surviving a lion attack when one leapt onto his terrified horse’s hindquarters, as illustrated in a plate entitled ‘Narrow Escape’.

Training for future exploits, adolescent Fred trapped and skinned water rats and other small animals, and fired his pea rifle at fish, which, he wrote, ‘was sufficient to stun them and cause them to float helpless for a short time belly upwards… from which they could be retrieved with a long stick’. At 15 he passed the Greek exam required to enter Rugby, one of England’s most celebrated public schools and birthplace of the eponymous sport, which Fred described as ‘a brutal game’ that nonetheless ‘made the boys strong and hardy’. He played well, was a great swimmer and fast runner, not tall but sturdy and spry, with pale, blue-grey eyes. In a letter to his mother in January 1866, he mentioned reading Livingstone’s latest (The Zambesi and its Tributaries, 1865). ‘It is very interesting and is about the discovery of two large lakes. Send me two catapults [slingshots].’

One wonders what Ann Sherborn made of her firstborn’s tender bloodlust. According to Edmund, she had ‘a great feeling for and interest in both plant and animal life. I underline that word… because killing was quite another thing for her, and her whole soul shrank from it’. So did Ed’s, who became a very different kind of naturalist from his hunter brother, a champion bird-watcher whose books argued that studying an animal’s behaviour while alive was more instructive than examining their corpses. Whatever her misgivings, Ann Sherborn answered Fred’s queries as to the state of trophies he’d left home for safekeeping. ‘I am sorry to hear the rat skins are eaten’, Fred replied to her report, ‘but very glad that the stoat’s has not met with the same fate.’

Fred’s first brush with death, in the winter of 1867, must have shaken the whole family. He was skating on Regent’s Park pond when the ice collapsed, plunging some 200 skaters into deadly cold water in which 41 of them drowned. Amid the panic Fred stayed calm, crawling from one ice block to another to reach solid ground. He later remarked that until he read about it in the next day’s Times he ‘had no idea that the disaster was so serious as it really was’.

Specimen collection provided the perfect outlet for Fred’s energies and interests, and in 1867 (Rugby’s tercentennial) he helped found the school’s Natural History Society. He collected eggs, an idiosyncratic Victorian pursuit that involves monitoring their laying and snatching them at an opportune moment from the nest. The American and British Museums of Natural History funded egg-collecting expeditions, part of the push for classification of flora and fauna. That finders of a new species could name it was one of the perks. Naming implied dominion, a kind of ownership. For Fred the attraction of egg collecting was the need to climb trees. Writing about his schooldays for a boy’s magazine towards the end of his life, he thinly disguised himself as ‘John Leroux’, saying ‘he was by far the best and most venturesome climber in the whole school’, but that he gave most of his eggs away to ‘less athletic or adventurous collectors’, which seems a bit like rubbing it in.

At schools such as Rugby, athleticism was celebrated alongside whatever competitive mischief it entailed. The setting for Thomas Hughes’s novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Rugby was famous for its rough and ready spirit and Fred had much in common with its protagonist. He revelled in physicality as a means of self-expression, preferable to intellectual or cultural pursuits deemed ‘effeminate’ in his milieu. Fred’s love of poaching and run-ins with game-keepers on adjacent properties, his ‘bathing in forbidden places’ (i.e. trespassing), were more admired than disapproved by peers and school masters. When he swam naked across a freezing lake to steal heron eggs from an adjacent heronry, he was brought before the Natural History Society committee, who made him return the eggs and handwrite 500 lines of Virgil as punishment. Skilled at ingratiating himself to authorities, he was quick to anger when they opposed him, and the one time he did get thrashed (for tipping a sleeping Australian classmate out of his bed), in a show of bravado he thanked his punisher for every blow, saying ‘it’s doing me good’.

Fred’s classmates and housemasters, like two of his three biographers, portrayed him as a bold adventurer as opposed to an attention-seeking bully. ‘He knew no fear and was loved by everybody’, one classmate wrote. Far from intransigent, he was just a boy being a daring imperial boy, possessing all the qualities vaunted in the juvenile hunting literature of his day. RM Ballantyne, the Stephen King of Victorian boy fiction, churned out titles such as The Gorilla Hunters (1861), Away in the Wilderness (1863), Fighting the Whales (1863) and Hunting the Lions (1869), publishing an average of two books per year between 1848 and 1895. Likewise, Thomas Mayne Reid penned 75 boy’s adventure novels between 1850-1890, including The Hunter’s Feast (1851), The Bush Boys (1856) and, for tamer readers, The Plant Hunters, Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains (1858).

In books like The Scalp Hunters, published in 1851, Reid and others drew inspiration from the American West, adapting themes canonised by James Fenimore Cooper’s novels The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), with their woodsman hero, Natty Bumppo.

Given Britain’s reach across Canada, India, Australia, and Africa, the imperial frontiersman needed a more refined, unflappable self-assurance, such as that displayed by British officers Richard Burton and John Speke, who sought the Nile’s source in 1857. Exploring involved hunting; both demanded courage, stamina, sportsmanship, horsemanship, marksmanship, and above all, making sense of unfamiliar environments and their inhabitants to better press them into service. Juvenile fiction starring Victorian superheroes, hunters who could track a bullet’s flight with their bare eyes and stare down wild animals and savages, incentivised young readers to venture to far-flung lands.

Fred had all the necessary capabilities for his chosen career, but his father wanted him to study medicine, a daunting prospect that would put at least five years between him and Africa. He went to a Swiss school in 1868, figuring he’d learn whatever might be useful when someone was mauled or trampled by a wild animal. It didn’t last, and for reasons now unclear he switched to a school in the quiet spa town of Wiesbaden. Writing to his sister Florence in the spring of 1869 he voiced his resolve to go to Africa, apparently in response to her attempt to dissuade him: ‘Thanks for your spiritual letter which almost tempts me to commit suicide; if I can’t get good shooting and fishing in this world I’ll have it in the next.’ He knew he had to make money, but ‘not by scribbling away on a three-legged stool in a dingy office in London’ (as his father had once done). Everyone told him he had ‘qualifications for getting on in one of our colonies, viz. perseverance, energy and a wonderfully good constitution’. He met people from Natal, who described it as ‘a perfect paradise.’

In Wiesbaden, Fred hunted duck on the Rhine and enjoyed the social life, mentioning officers shot dead in duels and people losing their fortune gambling. He had a crush on an English girl whose brother, Charles, became his poaching companion. Fred disliked Prussian authoritarianism, especially after a run-in with the law in 1870. When an old woodsman caught him and Charles raiding a buzzard’s nest, Fred punched him in the nose. Charged with assault, he fled to Salzburg rather than accepting punishment, as Charles had done and his father wished him to do.

In a letter to his mother, Fred accused his father of a ‘Prussian attitude’ but she surprised him with a reprimand. By way of appeasement, he wrote to her of his violin studies (which he hated) and she soon relented, sending money and agreeing to host Charles, fresh out of jail, at their country estate in Wargrave-on-Thames, perhaps swayed by Fred’s remark that he would be ‘a capital companion’ for Edmund, a rare mention of his younger brother. She soon convinced her then 70-year-old husband (Ann was 45 at the time) of the wisdom of letting their son test his mettle in Africa.

Fred Selous was nineteen when he landed in Port Elizabeth on 4 September 1871 after a 37-day passage, packing 150 kilos of baggage, including guns, Thackeray novels, and a £400 loan from his father. To reach the interior, he had first to travel from the coast to Kimberly, ‘the New Eldorado’, where diamonds had been discovered the previous year and placed under Crown protection. Perhaps reminded of the toy ox and wagon he’d played with as a child, he hired a transport rider, someone with a real ox-drawn cart who knew the way. The Diamond Fields lie 700 kilometres due north across the Great Karoo, a semi-arid plateau scattered with conical peaks, its stony matrix packed with the fossils of 300 million-year-old life forms. They travelled at night, to spare themselves and their oxen the debilitating heat, and though he didn’t say so, Fred must have been struck by the immensity of this longed-for Africa that now enveloped him with supreme indifference. He dismissed the nearly two-month long stretch of ‘hard walking’ as ‘uninteresting’ as there was little game along the way, though he did shoot twelve antelope, which he ‘carried on my own shoulders to the wagon.’

The day he arrived at Kimberly, a boom town teeming with opportunists, his expensive double breech-loading rifle was stolen, leaving him a ‘muzzle-loading rifle by Vaughn, a very inferior weapon’. In Kimberly, Fred ran into a fellow passenger from England who was about to depart with an interpreter and a guide on a trading excursion along the Vaal and Orange Rivers. Since his trip to the interior had to wait until winter, Fred bought a horse and joined them.

Like everything in Africa, he soon learned, trading required patience. It was ‘a very tedious work’, Fred complained, as ‘[the natives] talked a great deal about every article they inspected before buying anything’. They reached the banks of the River Orange on the Winter Solstice, having visited numerous villages and acquired sheep, goats and oxen, but no game. ‘One might as well look for game in Hyde Park,’ Fred quipped, noting the weather was ‘intensely hot… even at midnight with the moon shining gloriously’.

In his encounters with Africans, Fred was prone to snap appraisals of the condition of their homes, the presence of tea cups and the style of their clothes. Those wearing European dress were favourably judged. Combing the Orange banks for guinea fowl, he ‘came upon a Bushman’s lair… a few boughs woven together’ and, noting its occupants’ ‘rude-looking bows’ and reed arrows, their language of ‘clicks and clucks’, concluded they were ‘very few steps removed from brute creation’. Further west, he met Bechuana people, whose farming he deemed ‘industrious’ and whose sheepskin cloaks (kaross) were ‘sewn with great neatness.’ He nonetheless called them ‘the stingiest, most begging, grasping and disagreeable set of people that it is possible to imagine’, because they refused to supply thirsty white men with free milk and were always asking for tobacco.

Fred was back in Kimberly in March, splitting the meagre proceeds of £100 from the livestock and ostrich feathers he and his friend had acquired. At last, in April 1872 with another former shipmate, he set out for the interior and the ‘free and easy gipsy sort of life’ he’d read about in hunting books. The first leg of the trip, 235 kilometres from Kimberly across the Vaal and north to Kuruman, took almost a month. During the next 20-day haul the landscape changed, becoming as ‘thickly wooded… [as] an English park’ though water remained scarce. One night at camp, while Fred filled his gunpowder sack, his pipe-smoking companion dropped a burning ash, causing an explosion that severely burned them both. This was stoically treated with a mixture of oil and salt ‘rubbed into our skinless faces… not a pleasant process’.

A more harrowing ordeal awaited Fred when he was separated from his companions while hunting giraffe on horseback; he was thrown, hurt his leg, and spent four days and nights lost, without food, drink and ammunition, and alone, after his horse deserted him. The nights were freezing; he slept with his saddle on his chest for warmth and when that failed, got up and ran around in the dark, as ‘a couple of hyenas passed close to me, enlivening the silence with their dismal howling’. According to Sir Alfred Pease, a friend of Fred’s who was once lost for just five hours: ‘anyone who has been truly lost alone knows what true terror is; there is no other kind of fear like it’. As Fred tells it, he took it all in his stride, but on the fourth day his thirst was near intolerable. He spotted several African hunters who he followed back to their hamlet where a Bushman sat with a ‘giraffe’s intestine full of the precious liquid’ beneath his arm. When Fred asked for a drink, ‘the accursed old heathen, the ingenuous child of nature’ said ‘buy it’. He was prepared to drag himself the additional 200 metres to a hut, ‘sooner than being taken advantage of’ when a boy passed by with a gourd full of milk that he wisely decided to trade for one of his knives.

Getting lost was not the worst thing that might have happened on Fred’s first journey; it cut him at least temporarily down to size, a new sensation, perhaps the one at the heart of his love for Africa and a feeling he sought endlessly, if unwittingly, to replicate. A few weeks later, in August 1872, Fred saw his ‘first lion out of a cage… a magnificent old fellow’ who stood watching him, less than 80 metres away, ‘a magnificent shot’ that Fred, equally transfixed, failed to take in time. The winding wagon road took him to the River Shashani, and beyond it, the ‘open park-like plateau of the Matabele country’. In September, Fred met Lobengula, king of the Ndebele and ‘lord of the interior’, whose permission was required for hunting across much of what is now north-eastern Botswana and south-western Zimbabwe, a territory claimed around 1830 by Lobengula’s father, Mzilikazi, former general to the legendary Zulu king, Shaka.

‘He is a man standing about 5 feet 10 or 11, strongly and stoutly built,’ Fred wrote of Lobengula, ‘dressed in a greasy shirt and dirty pair of trousers’, though he usually wore native dress, ‘in which he looks what he is – the chief of a savage and barbarous people’. Surrounded by his impi (warrior guard), Fred recorded how, when the king came and went, they cried out ‘“how! how!” in a tone of intense surprise, as if some lovely apparition had burst upon their view’, calling him ‘prince of princes’, ‘calf of the black cow’ and ‘black elephant’. Young Fred’s declaration that he’d come to hunt elephant prompted the king to laugh, and ask if he was sure he hadn’t meant steinbucks (a small antelope). But he gave Fred leave to hunt as he wished, perhaps figuring that such a lad would do little harm and, as an apparently well-off Englishman, might turn out to be useful. Lobengula already had dealings with white hunters and ivory traders who kept homes in Buluwayo, his main residence.

Now Fred could hunt in places that according to the books of earlier hunters were teeming with game. He planned to kill elephant for ivory, ‘white gold’, but he could scarcely find any. In response to intensive hunting by westerners, locals and Boer settlers, elephant herds had fled deeper into the interior, north of the River Zambezi, denser country where hunting on horseback was not an option, and malaria and sleeping sickness posed lethal threats.

Fred’s first elephant seemed indestructible; it took 35 rounds from his ‘two-grooved rifle’, and 40 more from his ‘Dutch six-pounder’ before the animal began ‘to evince signs of a dilapidated constitution.’ He and his native cohort, the indispensible bearers and trackers, hacked out the tusks, one 26kg, the other 27kg. That night they feasted on elephant’s heart, a great delicacy, roasted on a forked stick above the campfire. Fred killed 11 more elephants in his first season, in one instance bagging a group of three in one go. His first season’s take amounted to 182 kilos of ivory. He bought another 580 from native traders and sold it all, clearing £300, not quite enough to cover his father’s investment, but he was not yet 21.

Over his first three seasons (1872-74), Fred bagged 78 elephants while hunting largely on foot. This was nothing compared to his predecessors, including a Cape Colony hunter who killed 95 elephants in just two months in 1868, taking 5,000 lbs of ivory. Writing to his mother in 1874, after a brief visit home, he was sorry he hadn’t returned sooner.

Nothing has gone right with me since I left England nor do I think it ever will again. I was born under an unlucky star, for even if I do not suffer from personal or particular bad fortune, I seem just to hit off the particular year and particular part of the country when and where everything has gone to rack and ruin.

If Fred sounds petulant, it may be that navigating Africa’s vastness had shown him how insignificant he was, no matter the size of his guns, but if so, it did nothing to deter him.

He travelled thousands of kilometres, keeping to the rivers and lakes where big game watered, moving east along the Zambezi to Tete, now Mozambique, and north to Lake Nyasa in modern Tanzania, covering uncharted ground, absorbing information about the land, animals and people, narrowly escaping death from charging elephant, rampaging lion, and a curved-horned African buffalo, which gored the horse out from under him. He loved the hunting life, though he sometimes longed for the company of his (white) peers, as opposed to his (native) posse.

Selous was constantly in motion, setting up camp and trekking for months in the surrounding bush accompanied by bearers. They travelled light, with water, rice, corn meal, tea and only blankets for sleeping. At night, he played zither by the campfire, where quantities of fresh meats were roasted. He tasted lion: ‘very palatable, being white like veal, and quite free from any smell or taste… [no one] could possibly guess… it was the flesh of a very indiscriminate feeding carnivorous animal’.

Game hunting was a life-support system for imperial omnivores: it fed them and was traded for other commodities, used as a wage substitute for bearers, and as a lure for indoctrination. Meat made many converts, with one Christian missionary relating that, in the 1860s, locals sat patiently through his sermons before demanding that he shoot some food for them. Fred Selous’s career bag of the most sought-after game (31 lions and 106 elephants) was a trifle compared to previous hunters, like the Boer, Piet Jacobson, who is credited with 110 lions and 750 elephants. But hundreds of other animals fell to Fred’s guns; between 1877 and 1880 alone he counted 548, including hippos, rhinos, zebra, warthog, giraffe, and a variety of antelope. Even his adoring biographer, J.G. Millais, found his claim that he shot game largely for meat disingenuous, considering the ‘enormous waste on some days’ when multiple animals were killed. Selous later remarked that Africans killed more elephants than white hunters, ignoring the fact that they were hunting on their own land, and that much of this was done on commission for traders/hunters, who provided the guns, to furnish a foreign market with ivory for billiard balls, piano keys and Victorian bric-a-brac.

After eight years of nearly non-stop roving with hardly a shilling to show for it, Fred had to admit the ivory era was over. Obliged to reinvent himself, he wrote to his mother (March, 1880) that he was planning a book:

… for which I may get but little money. I know that people have got good sums for writing bad books on Africa, full of lies, though I do not know if a true book will sell well. My book at any rate will command a large sale out here, as I am so well known, and have a reputation for speaking nothing but the truth.

Published in London, A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881) was a best-seller, though some critics took issue with the ‘wholesale senseless slaughter’ it recounted. Offering cursory descriptions of people and places, with somewhat more detail about animals and very little self-reflection, Selous focused instead on the action, portraying himself as an indefatigable explorer and relentless hunter.

In his preface, Selous staked his claim as a pioneering naturalist, writing that his chosen life suited him, owing to his ‘inborn love of all branches of Natural History, and that desire so common amongst our countrymen of penetrating to regions where no one else had been’. He acknowledged the inspirational books by earlier hunters that ‘had done much to determine me to adopt a life of ever-varying scenes and constant excitement, which I have never since regretted’. But he could not have imagined the impact his eight books would have on readers, colouring perceptions of Africa and its people while idealising the hunter and his imperial mission.

Fred’s publishing debut secured his reputation and fresh income sources as a celebrity lecturer, collector of specimens for natural history museums, and guide for wealthy men who hunted for entertainment and social status. These included Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (1858-1919), who began corresponding with Fred after reading A Hunter’s Wanderings, well before his presidency. Roosevelt had many hunter friends but Selous was perhaps the one whose image he most identified with, and therefore most admired, though they didn’t meet until 1909 when Selous helped organise Roosevelt’s first hunting expedition in Africa, in what is now Kenya and Uganda.

The son of one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt nurtured a childhood fascination with nature, collecting insects and small animals. Like Fred, he admired David Livingstone. At 42, Roosevelt became the youngest person to occupy the Oval Office (1901-09). A rancher, soldier and avid hunter, he was ‘a political expression of the American pioneering and hunting stereotype’ as portrayed in the many books he authored, where he lauded the frontiersman as possessing ‘the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation’. The hunters’ signature preoccupation with who bagged the biggest lion or the buck with the longest horns (the subject of trophy record books produced by Selous’s publisher Rowland Ward) says it all: hunting is an expression of virility.

During his first term as president, Roosevelt established five National Parks, later adding 150 National Forests, 51 federal bird reservations and four national game reserves, cementing his reputation as a conservationist, even while remaining a devout hunter, for whom bag limits in game reserves did not apply. Hunting connected man to his deepest origins, ‘matters primitive and elemental’, according to Roosevelt, who saw the self-sufficient hunter as ‘the archetype of freedom’. By imposing his will on nature, whether to preserve or take life, the hunter set himself above and apart from the beast. Men like Livingstone and Selous exemplified Roosevelt’s view of the hunter-frontiersman as a force for civilisation.

During his 18 years in Africa, Selous gathered and reported information that influenced both Colonial Office calculations and public sentiment. Lionised as much for his derring-do as for contributions to geography and natural history, he risked life and limb to advance and protect British interests. He produced maps, assisting colonial expansion by plotting roads for further settlement, and acquiring mining concessions from the African kings he’d befriended and invariably sold short, especially when the scarcity of ivory reduced their bargaining power. Weary of ivory and dissatisfied with diamonds, the imperial enterprise, now with men such as Cecil Rhodes at the helm, wanted land and gold.  

Although Rhodes had come to Africa as a sickly, relatively penniless youth of 18 at the same time as Selous, he founded the De Beer diamond mining company in 1880 and was a wealthy man by 1890, when Selous started working for him. That year, Fred was awarded the prestigious Royal Geographical Society medal for mapping the River Umfuli, though he’d only done so thanks to a Mashonaland chieftain who’d shown him that it was a tributary of the Sanyati, not the Zambezi as previously mapped. ‘The mighty Nimrod’ knew the lay of the land but was still broke, ambitious, and poised to be Rhodes’s tool. Negotiating concessions on behalf of the British South Africa Company (BSAC, formed by Rhodes in 1889), Fred was soon involved in the conflicts between agents of the Crown, Boer settlers trying to secure independent territories and African peoples fighting to both ward off the influx of invaders and annex the land of weaker neighbours.

In 1890 Selous guided several hundred British settlers under armed BSAC protection through Matabeleland into Mashonaland to establish Fort Salisbury (now Harare). Lobengula, whose impis conducted raids and forced the Shona to pay tribute, tried to prevent his young warriors from antagonising the white settlers, but they were tiring of his weak diplomacy. Acting under the royal charter obtained by Rhodes, the British intended to administer all the land between the Limpopo and Zambezi, infringing on Lobengula’s domain. In November 1893 a column of 700 BSAC police advanced on Bulawayo. Selous was one of the scouts who arrived just as Lobengula exploded his stock of ammunition rather than surrender it to the invaders. The resulting fire levelled the town as the king and his warriors fled north across the Zambezi. A few months later, in January 1894, Lobengula allegedly died of smallpox, though some say he was poisoned. The BSAC started brokering plots in Matabeleland and rebuilding Bulawayo, which became the capital of the newly appropriated ‘Rhodesia’ in May 1895. Rhodes named Selous as ‘the man above all others to whom we owe Rhodesia to the British Crown’.

Throughout his career, Selous successfully promoted his truth-telling, sharp-shooting image of himself, but so did other writers, notably H. Rider Haggard, a British colonial official in Transvaal in the late 1870s. Haggard’s first book, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was written in six weeks on a bet that he couldn’t produce an adventure fiction faster than Robert Louis Stevenson, and Fred’s A Hunter’s Wanderings clearly expedited the process. The fictional Kukuanaland bears a striking resemblance to Matabeleland; the fictional king Twala, to Lobengula; and the protagonist, Alain Quartermain, to Selous. Fred and Quartermain had a lot in common. They liked cold, weak tea, had a bearer torn into three pieces by a marauding elephant, and were themselves nearly mangled by a charging buffalo. Both found the sable antelope ‘the handsomest animal in the world’. Both witnessed the Matabele inxwala (‘first fruits ceremony’; Selous saw it in 1873) and were impressed by the thousands of warriors in full feather pounding their spears to honour their king, ‘calf of black cow’. King Solomon’s Mines created a sensation; re-issued four times within three months of publication, it is still in print and occasionally resurrected in film, radio and comic book renditions.

Quartermain remained the protagonist of Haggard’s subsequent books, in which Selous was ever-present. Like Selous, Quartermain remarked that lion flesh tastes like veal, both maintained that a hungry lion is the most dangerous kind, and, in eviscerating its prey, a ‘neat butcher’. Both hunted wearing only a shirt, hat, shoes and presumably their underwear, what Fred called, ‘nice light running order’. More significantly, both Fred and Quartermain declared themselves straight-talkers devoid of literary pretentions. In the preface to A Hunter’s Wanderings Selous managed to inject a supercilious note into his disclaimer, writing: ‘I have done my best to express myself in plain intelligible English, and if I have not succeeded… I trust my shortcomings will be leniently judged when it is remembered that the last nine years of my life have been passed among savages, during which time I have not undergone the best training for a literary effort.’ Likewise, in King Solomon’s Mines, Quartermain says he won’t apologise ‘for my blunt way of writing. I can only say in excuse for it that I am more accustomed to handling a rifle than a pen’.

Selous and Haggard were contemporaries; they met at least once, and Fred knew that Quartermain was modelled after him, to the extent that he seems to have conflated himself with the fictional character in his later books, at times borrowing from Haggard the same way Haggard borrowed from him. In King Solomon’s Mines, Quartermain tricks purportedly gullible tribesman into thinking he had the power to kill with sound alone by shooting something at a distance. In 1893, Fred wrote of locals who received him with respect and kindness because they were afraid, and had ‘a superstitious dread of the white stranger who, with his breech-loaded rifle, killed game afar off’. He knew the locals were familiar with firearms, even those who’d never handled one, but was apparently carried away by his own myth.

Historians of pre-colonial and early colonial Zimbabwe accepted Selous’s word as gospel, although he often falsified the record. In Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia (1896), Selous gave his version of the Ndebele uprising – a valiant year-long struggle to oust the BSAC from Matabeleland in which Selous participated but which, all too predictably, failed owing to the Africans’ inferior firepower. Selous writes that his account may ‘be received as a simple and unadorned statement of fact’, and so it was, despite its self-interested, imperialist skew. He unselfconsciously told of shooting unarmed and fleeing Ndebele, remarking he wished he’d killed more. ‘I cannot dispute the horror of the picture,’ admits Selous, ‘But I must confess that had I been with Captain Grey that day [when the cavalry drove Ndebele to retreat], I should have done my utmost to kill as many Kafirs as possible.’

Selous’s purported honesty was grafted onto his legend, not least by white Rhodesians, ‘who desperately needed historical heroes to consolidate their sense of national identity and racial superiority’. His obituaries would praise him as ‘the man who never told a lie’, whose ‘courage, his skill, and his generosity and manifest honesty were the talk and the pride of what was then known as the Far Interior’. But Selous did not tell the truth and he wasn’t generous, especially to Africans. At best, he was a pawn, the stuff of imperial mythmaking.

In 1908, Selous published African Nature Notes and Reminiscences (1908), with a foreword by Teddy Roosevelt. Both men influenced a far more momentous book published that year – Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys. A British army officer, Baden-Powell shared Roosevelt’s ideas about the virtues of pioneering hunters and was Selous’s comrade in arms, having served as his commander during the Ndebele uprising of 1896. Baden Powell’s rabid account, The Matabele Campaign (1897), makes Selous sound like a civil rights activist. ‘The longest march seems short’, he wrote, ‘when one is hunting game… lion or leopard, boar or buck, n****r or nothing.’ Baden-Powell’s second book on the Matabele conflict, Sport in War (1900), co-authored with a fellow officer, plainly equated hunting big game with hunting rebellious Africans. ‘The military operation,’ he wrote, ‘was sufficiently sporting in itself to fill a good measure of enjoyment, coupled with the excitement incidental to contending against wild beasts of the human kind.’ Such was the man who kick-started the Boy Scout’s movement in England with a handbook admonishing young readers to ‘learn how to shoot and to obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman’.

Widely translated, Scouting for Boys has sold at least 100 million copies, and while subsequent editions (most recently, 2017) were greatly revised, sections of the original were replicated until at least 1981, including a passage celebrating the frontiersmen ‘in all parts of our Empire’. These included trappers in Canada, drovers in Australia, missionaries in Asia, and hunters in Africa, all ‘accustomed to take their lives in their hand and to fling them down without hesitation if they can help their country by doing so’. With sections on tracking (humans and animals), wilderness survival and the requisite courage and discipline of a good scout, Baden-Powell’s handbook ‘set about transforming frontier ideals into a complete system of juvenile training for an industrial society’. Hunting was both a preparation for war and its fringe benefit, though killing, wrote Baden-Powell, was but ‘a very small part of the fun’. The real fun was ‘the adventurous life in the jungle… the chance… of the animal hunting you instead of you hunting the animal, the interest of tracking him, stalking him and watching all that he does’.

The great white hunter found a powerful, more recent publicist in author Wilbur Smith (1933-2021). Born in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), raised on his father’s 25,000-acre ranch, Smith’s grandfather fought for the British in the Zulu War of 1879. Smith started out as an accountant but went on to publish 49 brick-sized books, mostly about white African settler-adventurers, that were widely translated and sold more than 140 million copies. In novels tracking the fictional Courtney family against a background of Rhodesian history, Smith drew on both Selous’s writing and that of his biographer, Millais, for his hero, Sean Courtney. He also introduced Selous as one of several historical characters to bolster his narratives’ verisimilitude. In Rage (1987), one of the Courtney men regales his sons with stories of the great elephant hunters of yore, including Fred Selous, ‘tough men, all of them, incredible shots and natural athletes’ .The heroes of Men of Men (1981), Zouga Ballantyne and his son Ralph, are coloured in shades of Selous. When young Ralph asked Lobengula if he could hunt in his land, he replied ‘the elephant will be in so little danger from you, Little Hawk, that you may go where you wish’. Both Zouga and Fred had a cheek scarred from an elephant gun’s recoil. Like Selous, Zouga wrote a book about his adventures, had drawn maps, guided wealthy hunters, including Teddy Roosevelt, and worked for Rhodes.

Books by, about or tinged with Fred Selous conspired to enshrine the alpha male ideal, but with a modern twist: the hunter as champion of (white/western) science and civilisation. Yet Fred’s contributions to natural history were unimpressive, especially compared to his brother Edmund’s, whose books and papers based on meticulous, long-term field studies of avian behaviour lent strong, if unpopular, support to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Fred named a mountain after Darwin and identified a species of mongoose and a subspecies of antelope that were named after himself. He criticised theories regarding the effects of environment on animals’ protective colouration as lacking first-hand observation, but his own observations were sketchy. Roosevelt nonetheless applauded Selous’s perspicacity in his foreword to Selous’s African Nature Notes and Reminiscences (1908), a book dedicated to Roosevelt that was published with his assistance by the American Museum of Natural History.

Selous relates, for example, how he once mistook elephant rumps for boulders in a place where many boulders were found, but saw no need for elephants to have acquired their shape and colour as camouflage, since they had little to fear from predators. Likewise, although some naturalists theorised that the giraffe’s long neck had evolved to resemble tree trunks, so as to hide among them, Fred pointed out that when giraffes are killed by lions, ‘they are in all probability followed by scent and killed in the dark’. Yet he also thought that the environment affected giraffes’ colouring, since it ‘assimilates very well with the dull and monotonous shades of the trees and bushes in the parched and waterless districts [giraffes] usually frequent’. This, he notes, is ‘a strong argument in favour of there being a law which, working through the ages, tends to bring the colours of organic beings into harmony with their surroundings, irrespective of any special [protective] benefit’.

Fred Selous was celebrated as a naturalist and a conservationist for his role in helping establish game reserves for elite white hunters; a plaque with his rifle-bearing likeness is mounted beside the larger-than-life marble statue of Darwin on the stairway in the grand hall of London’s Museum of Natural History. In contrast, Fred’s peace-loving brother’s achievements in ornithology went unrecognised in his lifetime. Edmund Selous was marginalised for his proofs of female choice in the mating process, an uncomfortable premise in a male-dominated society, and for his insistence on field study at a time when most zoological work took place in laboratories of museums he called ‘morgues’. A sickly, introspective youth, Ed had escaped the cult of athleticism of which Fred was a proud adherent and the two were apparently never close. Although Ed visited Fred in Africa in 1882, neither seems to have written about their shared experience. Their differences surrounding the objects of their desires would soon result in a clean break. They both wooed the same woman, but Ed won. They both loved nature – in Fred’s case, to death.

Edmund’s exacting yet exalted prose conveys wonderment as he looked beneath the surface for patterns in bird behaviour and their motivations, whether organic, environmental or social. His prescient conclusion, that anatomy and behaviour are equally important evolutionary markers, formed the basis of the discipline of ethology that coalesced in the decades following his death. Fred, on the other hand, was no deep thinker, yet his prose occasionally betrayed the awe he must have felt in places where the human presence had as yet been so lightly drawn. He believed the bontebok antelope was related to the blesbok, based on similar physiognomy and their blazing white tails and snouts. But the bontebok was more richly coloured, with a flush of pale, almost iridescent lilac across its back. Fred surmised that this was because the blander blesbok branch of the family had moved north to the open, arid plains north of the River Orange, whereas the bontebok remained:

along the shore of a deep blue sea, the ground beneath their feet is at certain seasons of the years carpeted with wild flowers, which grow in such profusion that they give a distinct colour to the landscape, whilst above them rises a range of mountains of considerable altitude, the upper parts of which are covered in a mantle of pure white snow.

Fred’s speculation that the bontebok’s colouration reflected its bedazzling environment reveals a sensibility he rarely expressed.

In a posthumous tribute to Fred Selous, Roosevelt wrote: ‘I greatly valued his friendship; I mourn his loss; yet I feel that in death, as in life, he was to be envied.’ Selous was shot in the head aged 64, while soldiering by the banks of the Rufiji (Tanzania) during First World War skirmishes between German and British colonialists. In terms of legacy, a bolt-action rifle made by German firearms manufacturer Blaser carries his name (the Selous R8) as does the Italian Perugini & Visini ‘Selous’ Side-Lock Ejector Double Rifle. In the 1950s and early-1960s a unit of the Central African Federation army, comprised largely of white Rhodesians, called itself the Selous Scouts. A decade later, the name was adopted by an integrated army militia during the Bush Wars, a conflict between the white-minority Rhodesian government and black nationalists. In 2018, the Selous Scouts found new life online, with websites and Instagram accounts promoting Selous Scout memorabilia, including a Rhodesian Army recruitment poster reading ‘be a man among men’, and T-shirts that say ‘slot floppies’ (slang for ‘kill black Africans’).

The archetype of the hunter is just that – very old; ever since humans started drawing on rocks, spear-throwing males held the spotlight. The most compassionate reading of Fred Selous’s life is that he sacrificed himself, trapped in an archetype he helped perpetuate.