WILDLIFE CLASSICS
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
So starts the 1937 biographical workby Karen Blixen. Almost 50 years later, the book was turned into a Hollywood production starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The cinematography featuring the wildebeest of the Maasai Mara cemented Kenya as the home of safari. The 1985 movie was neither the first nor the last to showcase Africa’s wildlife to a global audience. In 1966, the enduring story of George and Joy Adamson, the couple that hand-reared and released Elsa the lioness back into the wild, was globally told through Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers’ movie,. The theme song by John Barry was used by Kenya Airways as planes approached Embakasi Airport, now Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. And what of the exploits of one of Africa’s most eccentric wildlife filmmakers, Alan Root, whose ‘near-misses’ with dangerous animals egged him on to ever-more-daring encounters? Filming at a waterhole, Root was mauled by.
