Ionides

Several white hunters became famous wardens, and one of the most respected of these became the savior of the largest game reserve in the world, C. J. P. Ionides, whose Greek surname (pronounced eye-ou-eedees] belied a British upbringing. As a youth in England he had been enthralled when reading the hunting exploits of Frederick Courtney Selous. After army service in India, Ionides, known as Iodine in Africa, wangled a transfer to the 6th Battalion of the King's African Rifles. In 1926 he was posted to the British administrative capital of Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. At the time Dar es Salaam was a small, humid seaport boasting a British club, a couple of hotels, the best of which was the New Africa, along with half a dozen shady bars. Seeing no future in peacetime soldiering, Iodine resigned from the army to become a fulltime ivory hunter.

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At Dar Iodine ran into a white hunter named Ken McDougall, who talked Iodine into becoming a professional white hunter. Iodine writes:

I was immediately attracted by his diabolically criminal-looking face. He was drunk and had embarked upon a diatribe directed against his erstwhile trusted house servant, who apparently had deserted him the night before. McDougall's favorite African mistress was due to produce what he believed was his child. The baby arrived and McDougall had taken one look at it to realize why the trusted servant had left in such a hurry.

Aware McDougall was a hopeless drunk, Ionides still went into partnership with him in a safari venture based at the up-country town of Arusha, in the belief that outside of towns McDougall "was a very fine hunter, besides being a good naturalist." But booze also made McDougall fighting drunk, a trait that hardly sat well with safari clients. Inevitably the partnership ended.

Ionides - or "Iodine", as he came to be known throughout East Africa - has been called "the father of the Selous" by no less an authority then Brian Nicholson. A former British Army officer turned ivory hunter, he was briefly a white hunter working out of Arusha in the 1930, then joined the game department in southeastern Tanganyika in 1933. Although he continued his avid hunting, collecting rare species as far away as the Sudan and Abyssinia, Ionides was a precocious conservationist.

With the help of his friends Ionides became an assistant game ranger in 1933, beginning with the slim salary of "40 per month. During the 1930s the Tanganyika Game Department had just six European game rangers headed by chief game warden Philip Teare, and 120 African game scouts. This tiny staff was supposed to control all matters concerning wild game in Tanganyika Territory, which consisted of 362,688 square miles. As a new recruit Ionides was sent to Kilwa, a small but ancient coastal port 180 miles south of Dar es Salaam.

Iodine's old army friend, Jock Minnery, had became game ranger at Arusha, and another of his friends, Monty Moore, was warden of the Serengeti. Iodine badly wanted to join the Game Department, something that was not easy to do in those days. "Coming from an admitted poacher," Iodine wrote, "this may sound like an American gangster saying that what he really wanted to do was be a cop. But I had primarily gone into professional poaching to gain experience in hunting as well as to be able to survive as a hunter. Having learnt all the tricks I would be invaluable to the department, as indefatigable in the pursuit of poachers as I had been in the pursuit of poaching. Only a slight mental readjustment was required, of outlook and intention."

Safari Hunting in East Africa was forever changed by the masterly blueprint of Brian Nicholson, a former white hunter turned game warden. The disciple and successor of C.I. P. Ionides, the "Father of the Selous game reserve," Nicholson conceived a plan for administering Tanzania's expansive wildlife regions. In 1965 he changed most of the vast former controlled Hunting areas, or CHAs, into Hunting concessions that could be leased by outfitters from the government for two or more years at a time. Nicholson also demarcated the Selous game reserve's 20,000 square miles of uninhabited country into 47 separate concessions. Concessions were given a limited quota of each game species, and outfitters were expected to utilize quotas as fully as possible, but not exceed them.

Nicholson's plan gave outfitters exclusive rights over Hunting lands, providing powerful incentives for concession holders to police their areas, develop tracks, airfields, and camps, and, most importantly, preserve the wild game. When the system was put into effect, it was the larger outfitting organizations - safari outfitters who could muster the resources to bid and who had a clientele sufficient to fulfill the trophy quotas Nicholson had set (done in order to provide government revenue by way of fees for anti-poaching operations, development, and research) - that moved quickly to buy up the leases on the most desirable blocks of land. Smaller safari companies who could not compete on their own banded together and formed alliances so that they, too, could obtain Hunting territories.