Robert Ruark - African Safari

African Safari

After enjoying some success as a writer, Ruark decided that it was time to fulfill a lifelong dream to go on safari to Africa, fueled by his doctor's advice to have a year's rest. Legendary Ker and Downey Safaris booked him with Harry Selby, and Ruark began a love affair with Africa. It is interesting to note that Ruark was booked with Selby because of a desire to use a tracker named Kidogo, who had once hunted with Ernest Hemingway. Ruark's pairing with Selby, though fortuitous, was pure chance. Kidogo was a member of Selby's crew.

As a result of this first safari, Ruark wrote a book called Horn of the Hunter, in which he detailed his hunt. Selby became an overnight legend and was subsequently booked for up to five years in advance by Americans wishing to duplicate Ruark's adventures. After the first safari, Selby and Ruark again went hunting, and this time they took cameras along. The result was a one hour documentary entitled Africa Adventure, released by RKO pictures. Though extremely difficult to find, a 16mm print of this movie was discovered in 2002, and a DVD copy was created and donated to the Robert Ruark Foundation in Southport, North Carolina.

In 1953, Ruark began writing a series for Field & Stream magazine entitled The Old Man and the Boy. Considered largely autobiographical (although technically fiction), this heartwarming series ran until late 1961. The stories were characterized by the philosophical musings of the Old Man, who was modeled after both of Ruark's grandfathers, but mostly on Captain Edward "Ned" Hall Adkins, Ruark's maternal grandfather. In the stories, young Bob Ruark grows up hunting and fishing in coastal North Carolina, always guided by the Old Man. However, the pain of his parents' difficult domestic life and his relatively few childhood friends (Ruark, something of a child prodigy in school, was a loner) are tellingly absent from the narratives. Many of the stories were collected into a book of the same name, followed shortly thereafter by a companion book entitled The Old Man's Boy Grows Older. Today these two books are probably his best remembered works. Twenty stories were also published in the book Robert Ruark's Africa.

Ruark's first bestselling novel was published in 1955. Entitled Something of Value, it describes the Mau Mau Uprising by Kenyan rebels against British rule. The novel drew from the author's personal knowledge and experiences on safari in Africa, and was adapted into a successful 1957 film, Something of Value. Uhuru, a novel with a similar theme, but not intended to be a sequel, was published in 1962. "Uhuru" is the Swahili word for freedom. He had intended to write a final chapter in the series with the working title of A Long View From a Tall Hill, but this never materialized.